It was rare that his verbal exchanges with Baron Tourment involved any humor. Even grim humor. But after he had made his initial report, the baron had looked at the state of his beloved suit.

"It looks to me, Mephisto, like you got yourself elected out there."

He'd replied, "No, baron, but I surely got nominated real good."

His lips curled into a smile at the memory. The deaths of the men had creased Tourment's heavy brow, but the news that two women were bound and unconscious in the basement had brought a flash of white from his excellent teeth.

Now Mephisto waited for his lord and master to arrive to inspect the prisoners.

The rooms had two tables; the tops were scored and scarred, even scorched in places. The floor was bloodstained. Being questioned by Baron Tourment was not a gentle experience.

One table held the blonde. A tasty dish for the baron. She was very tall Ч close to six feet was Mephisto's guess. Her long hair was the color of summer corn in the old vids, and her red skirt, topped by a red blouse, showed most of the smooth thighs. Boots in crimson leather reached way over her knees, with high heels that must have added five or six inches to her stature. The boots had tiny silver spurs that made a delicate tinkling sound as the girl struggled with her bonds, moaning and clawing her way back toward consciousness.

"Delicious," whispered the sec boss. But the other woman was even more amazing.

Though an inch or two shorter than the blonde, she was beautifully built, with firm thighs and fine, proud breasts. Mephisto glanced toward the door, wondering whether he dared risk being caught stripping either of the women for his own pleasure; he decided immediately that he didn't dare. This girl wore coveralls streaked with drying blood from when she'd taken the neck out of one of the sec men who tried to close in on her before they used the stun grens. She still had on the most amazing pair of boots that the sec boss had ever set eyes on. But it was the hair...

Hair that was brighter than any fire. Redder than a chem cloud sunset across the bayous. Long and thick tresses, clotted with mud, tumbled over the girl's shoulders. Mephisto moved closer, extended a hand tentatively to touch the hair.

"'Lord Jesus!"

He spun on his-heels, his eyes wide with panic, face pale with terror, afraid that his forbidden Christian oath might have been overheard. If it had, then he was a dead man. Although standing up and breathing, he'd be as dead as a pair of gator-skin boots.

But the hair. It had movedunder his fingers. Moved and tangled itself around his palm with an infinitely gentle-slowness. The silken hairs had actually responded to his touch. Mephisto again looked over his shoulder and hastily crossed himself, whispering the words "Sweet Jesus."

These strangers weren't ordinary mercies, hired from some frontier ville farther west in Tex-Mex. They weren't drunken outlander pistoleers who'd slit a throat for a handful of jack and a gaudy whore. Then who were they?

Behind him the door swung silently open on its oiled hinges. Mephisto heard the creaking of the baron's leg-supports. His ears caught the rhythmic chunking of one of the ice-making machines out in the kitchen units beyond. "Are they awake, Mephisto?"

"Coming around."

"And we know nothing of them?"

"Nothing. Fine clothes and boots."

"Weapons?"

"Yeller hair had only a small pearl-handled PPK. Slut's blaster, .22. Nothing else."

"Red hair?"

"Pistol. But a man's gun. Real stopper. Name on it's Heckler & Koch. Real handsome pistol. Silvered finish. Holds thirteen rounds of nine mil."

"The fat man who clipped you?" Tourment loomed over the helpless women, his giant shadow stretching across the floor and onto the far wall of the underground chamber. He leaned forward, stumbling, steadying himself on the shoulder of his sec boss; he winced at the frightening power of the pincering hand.

"He... he had a sub, firing triple bursts. I guess a big handblaster as well. He was good. Most of the dead were on his sheet. But both of the women also blasted men forever into the dark night."

"The big, big question, Mephisto, is: who are they? And where do they come from? Are they friends come to aid our snow wolf? That most of all. Six was the word from the village?"

"One was shot. Six left."

"Where, then, are the other three?"

"In hiding. I figure that they're with the West Lowellton gangs."

Tourment laid a hand on the thigh of Lori Quint, just above the top of her high boots. She stirred but still didn't come round.

"I should have known, Mephisto, When my men didn't return... I should have known that this was bad."

"Shall I stay, while?.." He hesitated, knowing what slippery ground this was.

"While I talk with these two little peaches? No. Go now. Wait, and I'll call you when I'm done, and you can come back and..." The sentence drifted away into a menacing silence. The sec boss left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him, glad of the chance to go to get washed and changed. He knew that Tourment wouldn't be wanting him for some time.

Krysty was regaining consciousness. From the long years; of her mother's training, she knew how to control her body: keeping still, maintaining a steady breathing, keeping her eyelids from fluttering. Giving no clue at all that she was reawakening.

It had been clear almost as soon as the swampwags came thundering in from every quarter that the three of them were in deep trouble. The fight had been short-lived, ending with the gray stun-grens sailing toward them. Now her wrists and ankles were tied, her body strained into a cross. Her hearing and sense of smell were extremely acute, and she lay very still, listening, trying to work out where she was and who was there.

Lori had a distinctive smell, just as Ryan did, and Doc. Krysty knew that she was there, close by. Finn carried the characteristic smell of a fat man who sweated a lot. He wasn't in the room with them, but that didn't mean that he was safe. Maybe the baron's sec men had him somewhere else; maybe he was dead.

There was a strange creaking sound, like metal and leather under stress. And another smell. Sweat. But it was hardly human. A sour, feral scent like an animal's, overlaid with some sort of perfume. Heavy breathing, like that of a ponderous old man laboring to climb steps.

Krysty cautiously opened her eyes. She saw a giant black man who supported his bulk with a metal frame, leaning over the sleeping Lori at a table only a few feet away.

The man wore a fine midnight-blue suit, clearly hand-sewn. A wide leather-and-silver belt around his stomach supported twin holsters, the flaps buttoned down; she couldn't tell if he were carrying blasters. His back was half turned, so all she could see was his short neatly-trimmed curly hair.

The chamber was underground. All her wakening senses told her that; besides, it had no windows. There were white strips of light in the ceiling, and serpentine protrusions of different-colored pipes. The room was about forty feet square, Krysty judged. She closed her eyes again as she suddenly, overwhelmingly, caught the stench of fear that permeated the cellar. There was blood there, as well.

Her heart sank.

Precisely at the moment that Krysty was recovering from the effects of the stun grens, Ryan Cawdor, J. B. Dix, Doc Tanner and Finnegan were staring at the peculiar apparition that suddenly stood before them, leaning against the frame of the door.

"We ought talk."

Ryan, like the others, had immediately swung his gun toward the stranger, who showed no awareness of his own vulnerability.

He was the strangest person that Ryan had ever seen, even in ten years of traveling through the Deathlands, with its many nuke-ravaged muties.