The wormhead electrocuted the snow sled with its tentacles and tore at the seats like a rabid beast before turning its eyeless face in Max’s direction. With his free hand, Max reloaded the Uzis and pointed one at the creature’s head.
“Open up and say ahhh.”
“Vraaahhh!” the wormhead screamed—just what Max needed.
He riddled the open mouth with bullets, taking extreme joy in the tortured howl and the black ichor that spurted from the dozens of tiny wounds. The wormhead staggered and fell to one knee, and Max reloaded. He aimed the gun at the prone monster, trying to think of a catchphrase that Stefan would be proud of.
“Your momma picked the wrong planet,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
Click!
Max glanced at the jammed gun, cursing his luck. The wormhead acted quickly, launching itself at Max, arms spread wide and long claws gleaming. Max pulled back his sword, ready to impale the beast right through the mouth.
Suddenly, a snow sled slammed into the wormhead, taking out its legs and sending it careening off to the side. The sled turned and rolled, launching its driver off at more than forty miles an hour. He recognized Valentine and rushed to her aid, but a low growl stopped him in his tracks.
The wormhead was lying on its stomach, its legs mangled and broken and dragging behind it as it clawed its way across the ice. Max pulled the clip out of the jammed gun and slapped it into the other Uzi, slowly stalking toward the prone monster. He unloaded the clip in its face before tossing the gun to the side and brandishing his sword once more. He moved in for the kill, staring at the twitching, bleeding creature with not one ounce of sympathy. The tentacles zapped the snow and ice, dancing wildly atop the head.
Max raised the sword over his head and brought it down with all his might. But the scales were thick, and the sword only sunk a few inches. Furious, tired, scared, and thoroughly pissed off, Max hacked at the worm-like neck until his blade found ice.
Chapter 20
A Well-Earned Reprieve
Valentine had broken her arm during her daredevil crash into the wormhead, and seven of the militiamen had fallen in battle. The bodies were gathered, and the wormheads and queen were doused with gas and burned.
The mood was glum when they reached town, but Rory made good on his promise, and Max, John, and Valentine were given leave. It was late when they got back to the police station, nearly three in the morning, and Max didn’t think he had it in him to head out again that night. John and Valentine were swamped as well, and not only that, there was food cooking that made Max’s stomach want to scream.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a full meal.
“You’re welcome to stay here for the night, or as many nights as you need,” said Rory. His attitude toward them had changed dramatically, and Max didn’t know if it was because he and his friends had proven themselves, or because Rory was so shaken by the loss of life. Whatever the reason, Max happily accepted the invitation, along with a steaming bowl of stew.
“How you holding up?” he asked Valentine as a woman bandaged her freshly set arm.
“Like I ran over a wormhead and shot off a Ski-Doo at forty miles an hour,” said Valentine.
“You did great,” said Max, looking from her to John. “Both of you.”
John shook his head. “Does it even matter? You saw that queen. How many of those bitches are out there?”
Max had been wondering the same thing, and though he didn’t know the answer, he knew it wasn’t a good one.
“Not to mention those friggin’ wormheads,” said Valentine. “If the queens keep laying eggs like that, we’re all screwed. And not just us, the entire world.”
“I think the world was screwed as of Saturday night,” said Max. He meant it as a joke, albeit a bad one.
It got no laughs.
“Seriously, Max, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, Val. If we can get to Fort Drum, then we’ve got a shot at least.”
“Not us,” she said. “Humans.”
Max let out a slow sigh. “I don’t know. Let’s take it one day at a time. Alright, kiddo?”
She nodded, wiping her eyes and suddenly laughing. “I’m fucking falling apart. Look at me.”
“No shame in that,” said Max. “Eat some food and get some rest. You’ll feel better in the morning, I guarantee it.”
He told John and Valentine that he needed some air, but in truth, he was beginning to feel like he was losing his shit as well. He found Rory standing in the falling snow and wiped his eyes, cursing to himself.
Rory held up a cigarette without looking back, and Max happily took it. The young warrior extended a lit Zippo, and Max offered his thanks. He took a drag and blew it out through his nose, enjoying the way it burned.
“I’m sorry about your fallen brothers and sisters,” Max said, knowing that if he glanced over at Rory, he would see tears dancing in the man’s eyes.
“Me too,” Rory whispered.
They stood there in the falling snow and smoked in silence. The quiet was unsettling. There were no distant growls, no snarls or howls, no screams of the dying. Only the wind made a sound, sending the steadily falling snow swirling erratically here and there.
At length, Rory cleared his throat and spoke. “Mother Laughing says that there is yet hope.”
Max finally glanced over, and Rory’s eyes were dry.
“Hope for who?”
“All of us. But she says that we must leave our home.”
“I was thinking the same thing. I know this is your land, but if there are as many queens out there as I think there are, the whole country is going to be overrun by wormheads in less than a week. You and the others should come with us to Fort Drum. They have secure vaults and shit. You know, doomsday bunkers.”
“I didn’t mean we Mohawks would have to leave our homes,” said Rory, meeting Max’s gaze. “I meant humans.”
“Leave our home? What, leave the planet? Mother Laughing said that?”
Rory nodded.
Max gave a quick laugh that surprised even him. “Sorry, friend, but we don’t have that kind of technology yet. I mean, we’ve been to the moon, but sending a large number of people into space? Out of the question. Shit, man, where would we go anyway?”
“Mother says that humans live on other planets. Says we must find them.”
“Tell you what, Rory. I think I’d like some of whatever your Mother Laughing is smoking. Nah, the only way off this planet is dead. But hey, nobody gets out of here alive anyway, right?”
“I believe what Mother says is true,” said Rory, squaring on him. “That is why I have decided that we will go with you to Fort Drum.”
“Whatever the reason, brother, I’m glad you’ve decided to come. I mean, hey, we all might be able to live long happy lives underground. Maybe we’ll become like mole people.”
“Mole people?” Rory shook his head and flicked his cigarette into the snowbank. “That’s a little out there, don’t you think?”
“Hah! Coming from the guy who believes Mother Laughing’s going to be an astronaut?”
Rory shrugged and opened the door. “Stranger things have happened.” He went inside, and Max laughed to himself and stared out at the falling snow. It glowed bright in the floodlights.
Max thought of Piper then, wondering where she was, what she was doing, and if she was being treated well by the army. If he hadn’t run into Pike, he would be with her now.
A scream echoed in the distance, miles away, and Max recognized it as the cry of a queen.
He took a final drag of his cigarette, too tired to be afraid, and went back into the police station to sleep. Tomorrow he would see Piper, and sleep was the fastest way to get to that moment.
The Doomsday Sheriff
Day 3
Michael James Ploof
Chapter 1
The Dawn of Terror
The morning came like a landlord pissed about the late rent. Max’s ever
y muscle throbbed and ached. His neck felt like someone had tried to rip it off, and his body protested as he tried to sit up in the cot. He wasn’t twenty anymore, and his old bones made sure he knew it.
“Morning Sheriff.” It was Rory.
Max glanced up and squinted through the sandman’s latest deposit.
“Morning,” he said, rubbing eyes.
“Coffee?”
“We still have that? Hell yeah.”
Rory had anticipated the answer and handed him a steaming mug.
“Thanks,” Max took a drink. It wasn’t French press with three heaping spoonful’s like he enjoyed, but it was coffee nonetheless. He put the coffee on the desk beside him and got up to stretch. His elbows and shoulders popped, and he let out a satisfied sigh.
A glance around the police station showed him that he was the last to wake up, which didn’t make for the best impression. But hey, most of the men and women in the militia were ten years younger than him, and he assumed they hadn’t all been through the same shit he had the last few days.
There were four other cots in the building, and Max guessed that they had been set up for the people guarding the screamers. Now that the screamers had been cured, however, he didn’t know why anyone had slept in the police station.
John and Valentine came through the door, and to Max’s surprise, they were laughing.
“Oh, hey Sheriff,” said John, his cheeks suddenly flush.
“Bout time you got your old ass out of bed,” said Valentine, giving him a mischievous grin.
“I might sleep hard, but I play harder,” said Max.
Valentine rolled her eyes. Rory gave the slightest of grins, but John seemed to appreciate Max’s early morning wit, and offered him a high-five.
“Fuck yeah you do,” John proclaimed. “I can’t believe you even got out of bed the way you got tossed around yesterday.”
“That makes two of us,” said Max. He felt the coffee working its magic on his bowels and glanced around for the restroom. “Hey Rory…”
“In the back. On the left.”
After Max finished his morning business he ate a couple egg sandwiches that had been brought by one of the militiamen. The food did him a world of good, and he felt some of his strength returning. A good hot shower would have really topped things off, and a change of clothes, but that was a luxury that he could ill afford at the moment.
He had heard a queen out in the woods the night before, and it was time for everyone to get a move on.
The hummer was waiting outside when he went out to smoke with Rory, and to Max’s surprise, a long train of trucks and SUV’s had gathered on each side of the road. There had to be at least two-hundred survivors gathered in and around the cars. They eyed Max with unreadable faces, stoic as they were.
Max noticed children among the survivors and he smiled to himself. The only way a child could have survived the fateful night was to have alcohol in their system, or else be cured as a screamers. He hadn’t noticed the night before, but there must have been children in the cell with the other screamers, for now here they were, clinging to mother or fighting with siblings.
“They’ve been returned to us thanks to you,” said Rory, following Max’s gaze.
Max wiped an eye, overwhelmed with emotion.
“I guess some good came out of Pike wanting to kill me.”
Ten minutes later Rory gave the signal, and everyone piled into their vehicles. Rory had told Max that Pike and his men had turned back and left the night before, and Max breathed a sigh of relief. It would be enough getting past the wormheads that were sure to be haunting the land, let alone a bunch of rednecks hopped up on pills.
Max, John, and Valentine piled into the hummer and pulled out behind Rory, who in turn followed two big county snowplows. The plows cleared the roads of the newly fallen snow, which had really begun to pile up over the last few days. The convoy of survivors headed west, driving the few miles out of the rez. They passed a border patrol station on their right that would lead them across the Cornwall Bridge and into Canada. There were no signs of life that Max could see, just a long line of cars that looked to have all piled up in a grand crash. Max imagined the late-night drivers turning into screamers as they drove and smashing into one another, no longer able to muster the motor skills necessary to operate a vehicle.
The plows busted through the snow at sixty miles an hour, easily blasting through, and soon they were driving into the town of Massena. To the left was a mall that had been as dead as the world now was for years.
Suddenly, the plows braked, and the entire cavalcade came to a halt.
“We’ve got a problem,” came the voice of a man over the CB, most likely one of the plow drivers.
“What is it?” said Rory.
“Looks like those rednecks that were after the Sheriff went around the Rez. They’re up ahead, blocking both sides of the road.”
“How many?”
A pause, and then, “At least a dozen trucks. They’re armed to the teeth.”
Max glanced in the rearview and seeing the dozens of vehicles packed with survivors planted a seed of apprehension in his gut that soon blossomed into guilt.
“Stay here,” he told John and Valentine, and got out of the truck to speak with Rory. He wasn’t about to let anyone else get hurt because of him.
Rory got out and together they walked between the big trucks and took cover behind the plows. The roadblock was about three hundred years away, and a quick sweep with his eyes confirmed the plow driver’s assessment of the situation—Pike and his boys were armed to the teeth. There were big military guns mounted on top of more than one truck. Where the hell the rednecks had gotten them was beyond Max’s comprehension, but he had spent enough years in the military to know that those cannons carried 50-millimeter rounds that could turn the natives’ vehicles into swiss cheese.
“They’re after me,” said Max. “I’m not letting anyone get hurt for my sake, you should just hand me over and—”
“Not an option, Sheriff,” said Rory, peering through his binoculars.
“Rory, they’ve got s out gunned.”
“No,” he said with a grin, “They don’t.”
Max remembered the rocket launcher that he had wielded the night before, but even if the playing field was even, a lot of innocent people would get killed in the showdown.
“Pike isn’t going to back down this time,” said Max. “The safest bet it so just let me—”
The otherworldly cry of a queen ripped through the tense silence, followed by the answering war cry of more wormheads than Max wanted to imagine. Rory glanced around and stopped, his gaze locked in the direction of the old mall.
Max followed his gaze and his heart leapt into his throat—charging from the parking lot of the mall were dozens of wormheads.
Chapter 2
The Caravan
Rory leapt up and pounded on the truck doors, yelling to the drivers, “Go, go, go!”
Max raced back to the hummer and peeled out after Rory, who followed close behind the snowplows. Gunfire erupted in the distance, and Max guessed it was Pike and his men opening fire on the plows. They hadn’t seen the wormheads yet, Max guessed, for there was a building obscuring their view of the parking lot.
The wormheads were quickly descending on the caravan, which was just beginning to pick up speed behind the lumbering plows. With any luck they would get up to speed by the time they reached the roadblock.
In the trucks and SUV’s behind them, the men and women of the mohawk militia were opening fire out their side windows in an attempt to kill the wormheads, but the bullets either missed or were harmlessly deflected by the monsters’ thick scaled hides. Max watched helplessly as three of the monsters slammed into the side of an SUV. Their weight was so great that the SUV lurched to the side and came up on two wheels, but the driver regained control and slid back onto the road. The wormheads had bounced off the vehicle and were turning to chase after it when a big jacked-up
white Chevy bowled over them.
Up ahead, Pike’s barricade came into view. The plows took the brunt of the gunfire, and one of them suddenly veered to the right and hit a lightpole, ripping it out of the ground and jumping the barrier.
“Lance!” came Rory’s urgent voice over the CB.
The driver of the plow didn’t answer, and Max watched it dip down into an alcove and come to a sudden stop as the plow wedged deep into the ground from the impact. The sand in the back of the plow exploded out and covered the vehicle.
Bullets tore a long line of holes in the windshield of the Hummer, and Max veered right, putting Rory and the remaining plow between him and the gunmen. A quick glance in the rearview made Max’s heart sink. Dozens of wormheads clung to the sides of SUV’s, or rode inside truck beds and tore at the roofs. He saw one man get pulled right out of the driver seat and tossed aside like a ragdoll, and like ravenous dogs the wormheads tore into him, tearing him apart limb from limb and fighting over the meatier chunks.
Max felt the bile rise in his throat and choked it down with a grimace.
“Die you fuckers!” John yelled out the window, unloading a machine gun clip into the advancing horde.
To Max’s surprise, one of the wormheads went down in a spray of dark blood. He glanced back at John, “Armor piercing rounds?”
“Must be,” he said, reloading and popping off shots more selectively this time.
Max got on the CB. “Use armor piercing rounds, they seem to be the only ones to get through. If you don’t have them, aim for the mouths instead.” Up ahead, the remaining plow was about to collide with the blockade. If Max and the militia had tried to bust through it five minutes ago, they would have been destroyed, but now Pike’s men were scrambling to get back in their trucks as the caravan led the horde of Wormheads right to them.
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