End Program

by James Axler

  Denim vest alight, the biker’s pawlike hand reached out for the first survivor, the one who had fallen badly and twisted or broken his ankle. Mildred and Ricky blasted without hesitation, sending a volley of shots at the shambling figure—but he came on, grabbing the fire survivor, who was still recovering.

  Alert to everything, Krysty’s gaze fixed on the biker like a laser sight, and she was pushing past one of the victims of the blaze before anyone saw her. Still charged with the power of the Earth Mother, Krysty sprinted the ten steps to where the biker was reaching for the survivor, flames licking up and down his arms, metal visible beneath. Krysty grabbed him by the short hairs at his nape, yanking him back with such swiftness that he fell off his feet and crashed to the ground.

  Krysty’s foot was on the man’s throat in an instant, driving the heel of her cowboy boot into his windpipe with the force of a jackhammer. Flames burned all around, sparks spit across the dirt like scurrying insects, and the biker cried out just once. Then his neck snapped and he was just a burning corpse. The metal parts replacing sections of his body were now just lifeless metal once more.

  Standing over the corpse, Krysty dipped her head heavily, as though she had run out of energy. The truth was—she had. The power ebbed away in a flash, disappearing as quickly as it had been called on, leaving Krysty as weak as a kitten and struggling to stay upright.

  Ryan saw all that in a moment, and he ran across the space between them and held his hands out for Krysty even as she began to sink to the ground. He caught her, swept her up in his arms and carried her away from the burning biker and the flames dotted all around.

  “You can tell me what happened later,” he told her in a whisper.

  They had to keep moving before that fire spread any farther.

  * * *

  J.B. HAD GAINED the nickname of the Armorer because of his incredible knowledge of weapons. He lived up to that name by carrying an enviable wealth of ordnance and supplies in the pockets of his jacket and in his satchel. The satchel held various grades of ammunition, including some that would fit none of the companions’ weapons but which the companions could still use for trade when they came upon a ville—bullets being one form of precious currency in the post-nukecaust world. J.B. also carried a cleaning kit suitable for most blaster types, and he took meticulous care in maintaining his mini arsenal as well as the weapons of his companions. “A healthy blaster will see you through longer than a healthy body,” he once remarked when Ricky had asked if running wasn’t a better option than standing and fighting.

  Besides all of that, J.B. also carried explosives when he could find them—big, small, even tiny charges that were just barely powerful enough to blow a padlock—whatever he count get his hands on and carry away. Among those charges, he had a whole host of incendiaries that he had taken from a deep storage unit they had recently found.

  J.B. was in the process of planting six of the incendiary devices on the machinery that lined the walls of the barn. He had handed Doc two more, which the old man was securing to the double doors that opened onto the road. He had asked J.B. about that, worried that they were about to blow up their only exit, but the Armorer had dismissed his concerns. “We’ll be out of here long before these things go off,” he assured him, but Doc saw that devilish twinkle in J.B.’s eye that meant he was pushing their luck as far as it would go.

  It took two minutes to place the charges. The last two J.B. had simply tossed underhand high into the rafters, watching with grim satisfaction as they landed in the upper eaves of the building. That left twenty seconds to exit the hot zone before the charges ignited. Then, with Doc watching the bikers approach through the gap in the doors, J.B. gave the signal for the old man to start running.

  Doc slipped out between the doors and began running, not bothering to look back. He ran up the road, past the burning crops in the direction of the farmhouse. Behind him, he could hear the drone of motorcycle engines, hear too the whoops and taunts of the bikers as they spotted him, their prey.

  Fifteen seconds.

  J.B. was still in the barn, hurrying across the open space between robot arms, making his way toward the doors. As he reached them, he saw the bikers bearing down on him, twenty yards away, closer than he had estimated. Their engines were loud and reeked of alcohol fuel, so rich that J.B. could smell it even this far away.

  Ten seconds.

  J.B. stood at the open doors and peppered the road with bullets from his mini-Uzi, sending a steady stream of 9 mm slugs up the road and cutting down the lead bikers as they roared toward the barn. He used the door for a shield, but in five seconds he knew that door would not be there—it would be nothing but dust as an explosion ripped through it.

  Three of the five lead bikes went crashing to the ground, their riders caught by J.B.’s stream of bullets, their blood smearing the air in red clouds.

  Five seconds.

  J.B. sprinted from the barn doors, arms pumping as they cut the air. He had five seconds to get clear, five seconds to do the impossible. The howls and taunts of the bikers cut the air to his left, the growl of their engines forming a terrible drone like approaching thunder.

  Three seconds.

  J.B. was across the road in an instant, dislodged dirt skipping away beneath his toes. Up ahead, the tall stalks of corn waited like a fence, impossibly thin struts that somehow stood against whatever nature threw at them. Thirty feet away, the right-most ones were on fire, dark smoke wafting across the road as J.B. raced into the brush.

  One second.

  J.B. dived to the ground, arms outstretched, holding the mini-Uzi far from his body in his right hand. The bikes were close now, roaring past the barn building in a cacophony of straining engines.

  Zero.

  The barn went up like a rocket, the interior expanding in a series of massive explosions, one immediately after another, erupting and building in an instant until it looked like a miniature sun had been thrown down to Earth beside the dirt track by some tempestuous titan.

  Doc half dropped, half fell as the explosion hit, crashing to the ground at the edge of the dirt road. Even facing away from the explosion, even with his back to it and his eyes closed, he saw that explosion like a sudden burst of sunlight rushing across his eyelids, the flare lighting the fields where even the fire had not.

  The light was accompanied by sound that seemed for all the world like the cough of some vengeful god, casting final judgment on a world that had failed him.

  The doors blew, blasting outward like missiles, lopping off the heads of two bikers as they roared past on their mechanical steeds. Hunks of metal flew through the air, the ruined parts of what had resided within the barn, great slices of metal rotating through the air in deadly arcs, cutting down crops and people without distinction. A half dozen riders were impaled or chopped by that flying debris, several lost limbs in less time than it took them to realize that something had exploded.

  The rest of the crew was caught by the shock wave, a force like a tidal wave of air blasting through the fields, knocking down everything in its path.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There were nine survivors from the house fire, including three babies. It was too few. Everyone had suffered from smoke inhalation, and several now struggled to breathe without coughing.

  Ryan gathered the group together, ordering his companions to stay alert. Close by, the angry growl of motorcycle engines buzzed in the air. Too close by.

  “We can’t stay here,” Ryan said, scanning the nearby dirt track and beyond, toward the horizon. His artificial eye magnified whatever he looked at, bringing distant sights closer, breaking them down into identifiable components. “More bikers will come.”

  Ryan scanned the horizon. The barn was a burning tower of flame now, and the ground all around it had been scorched by the explosion and lay burning in its aftermath. T
here were bikes there, splayed across the ground like a child’s discarded toys, but a few had evaded the explosion and they were rallying around to check on the survivors. Ryan turned his attention to a second track that wound through the burning fields. The air was curtained with smoke in the immediate space behind the farmhouse, but farther back he could see the crops swaying in the breeze, heat haze making them waver. There, amid the crops, nine figures were moving, just visible over the heads of the corn. Ryan focused his new eye, closing the other one to better concentrate. They were bikers, momentarily paused by the explosion across the farmlands, trying to see what had happened. As Ryan watched, they began to pick up their speed again, following the dirt track toward the farmhouse.

  “How close?” Mildred asked, glancing up from the ground where she crouched beside Krysty, tending to the red-haired woman, who struggled to stay conscious.

  “They’re already on their way,” Ryan replied, before switching off the magnified view and turning to face his allies and the other survivors of the farm inferno. “We need to move now. If any of you have any idea of which way we go, or know of a place to hide, get us there.”

  The survivors were hacking and coughing from smoke inhalation. Some looked up at Ryan, but their expressions showed fear mixed with hopelessness. “There ain’t nowhere around here,” one of them said regretfully. The man had ginger hair and beard, and his pale skin had turned red with the heat from the inferno. “Not left no more, anyway.”

  Ryan nodded, slipping his Steyr from his back. “I’ll cover our retreat then,” he stated.

  “Jak? Ricky? Either of you think you’re in a condition to find us a way out of here?”

  Black with smoke, Jak was struggling to catch his breath, but Ricky spoke up. “I’ll find somewhere,” he said.

  With that, Ricky parted a section of crop that had yet to catch light and urged the others to follow. A moment later they were gone.

  Alone now, Ryan kneeled and adjusted the Steyr Scout against his right shoulder, pushing it there in a familiar move of muscles until it sat snug against him. Then, watching the dirt road through the sight, Ryan waited.

  * * *

  DOC’S EARS WERE RINGING. He woke up lying facedown in a field of tall maize, not really sure that he had been asleep, but disoriented enough to know something was up. He started as something rocketed nearby above him. It was uncomfortably close and brought with it a trail of heat he could feel through the material of his coat.

  “By the Three Kennedys,” Doc muttered as he rolled over on the ground. The rocketing thing was a great chunk of jagged metal, fifteen feet across and as sharp as a knife, and it spun through the sky above him leaving a flaming trail in its wake. Doc followed its passage for a moment until it disappeared behind the tall rows of cereal crops, landing with the impact of an earthquake, throwing up an expanding cloud of fire.

  The barn was burning—the one where J.B. had set the ambush. It couldn’t really even be called a barn now, it was just a shell, a few struts poking up in the air at crazy angles while everything around it burned.

  “John Barrymore Dix,” Doc said, shaking his head, “what did you do?”

  Mention of the name was enough to bring Doc back to full alert. He scanned the nearby field, searching for J.B.. The crop here was tall, and it had escaped the fires that had begun around the farmhouse, though parts of the field were now aflame thanks to the barn explosion. It took Doc a few seconds to locate the Armorer, who had landed on the ground about a dozen steps away from the road. He was hidden by a wall of crops from the recovering bikers who had been caught up in the explosion. Doc scrambled toward him in a crouched run, keeping below the height of the maize, keeping his LeMat level and remaining alert.

  “John Barrymore,” he whispered urgently. “Get up.”

  J.B. didn’t respond and he didn’t move. Doc realized he had been so close to the explosion that his hearing had to have been effected. Maybe like Doc he had blacked out, too. But there was no time for that now—they had to get out of here before the bikers came looking for their fallen comrades, and found the source of their woes instead.

  “John Barrymore,” Doc said again, shaking the Armorer by his shoulders. “Come on, we must keep moving.”

  J.B. grumbled something nonsensical, then he stirred and after a moment he was looking up at Doc. His glasses had become dislodged, and he wore a bewildered expression. “Doc? That you?”

  “It most assuredly is,” Doc told him, looking around the immediate area until he spotted J.B.’s glasses. He picked them up and looked them over—one arm looked a little bent maybe, but they seemed to be okay. “We have to get out of here. Swiftly.”

  J.B. nodded, pulling himself up into a low crouch to ensure he would not be seen from the road. “What happened?” he asked, taking his glasses back from Doc.

  “You blew up a barn,” Doc explained. “You must have been caught up in the shock wave. Do you remember?”

  J.B. put the heel of one hand to his ear and rubbed at it, wincing. “Can’t hear shit,” he told Doc.

  With Doc’s ears ringing and evidence that J.B. couldn’t hear, it probably meant the bikers were suffering some degree of temporary deafness, too. That was something in their favor anyway, so long as they could move swiftly. Doc eyed the burning barn and its surrounds anxiously for a moment, peering through the tall stalks of maize to see if anyone was coming. Right now, no one was—the bikers he could see were still sprawled out on the ground like so much driftwood washed ashore.

  “Let’s move,” Doc said, pointing to the field.

  J.B. nodded, and together the two men made a path deeper into the tall crop.

  * * *

  RYAN KNELT BESIDE the corn, watching the dirt track through the scope of his longblaster and the magnification capacity of his new eye. The heat emanating from the burning farmhouse pressed against his side like a physical object, but he pushed it from his mind, concentrating on the view of the bikers through the scope. There were ten of them in total, not nine as he had first counted—one was riding low to the saddle, his head not high enough to crest the rows of corn. Two riders shared a bike, twin exhausts pointing high and billowing a snake of dark smoke into the air.

  They were heading this way, passing some burned-out farm machinery that Ryan didn’t recognize.

  Ryan settled his breathing, waiting for the targets to reach the kill zone. The first of them—a dark-skinned man with a bare chest and some kind of military helmet on his head, came roaring around the corner, keeping his bike steady. As he did, Ryan squeezed the trigger. In the longblaster’s sights, the biker dropped backward as his face exploded in a bloody burst of red.

  Ryan shifted target immediately, popped off another shot that took out the driver of the coupled bike. He didn’t wait to check what happened to the bike and its passenger. His third shot took a rider in the chest, and he slumped over the handlebars with a cry of pain.

  Ryan shifted to his next target. In five seconds their numbers had been cut by a third and they were becoming more wary now, wise to the fact they were in a sniper’s sights. Stroking the Steyr’s trigger, Ryan sent another shot on its way, and he watched grimly as the passenger in a sidecar on one of the bikes slumped in his seat, dropping the automatic longblaster he had been wielding.

  For a moment, the bikes disappeared behind a clutch of trees as they came around a shallow curve in the track. Ryan shifted his aim, anticipating where and when they would show. He commanded his artificial eye to focus in, studying the upcoming landscape for possible hiding places where the bike gang might fight back. As he did, something rushed across his vision, a blur of movement, dark redness like fresh blood.

  “What th—?” Ryan muttered, pulling himself out of the crouch and checking around him. It had been something close, he was sure of that.

  Ryan swung the longblaster around,
bringing it lower to his body as he checked the immediate vicinity. A stupe position to hold a rifle, he knew, but he didn’t have time to change weapons. But there was no one there—even his companions had gone now. It was just him.

  Ryan turned his attention back to the road, using the magnification lens in the artificial eye once more to find his targets. In the scant few seconds he had been distracted, they had gotten much closer, goosing more speed from their engines, taking risks on the rough terrain as they tried to outpace the sniper.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan growled. He pulled himself up, hefting the longblaster with him and slinging it over his shoulder on the strap. The bikers were too close to pick off now—he might get one or two but the others would reach him and he had no way to defend himself; not here.

  He ran, scrambling into the fields where the corn grew high as a mutie-phant’s eye, as the old poem had it, chasing after Ricky and the others, and hoping to outrun the trail of fire that was sweeping across the land.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ricky and the others scrambled through the wheat field where the crop was at its thickest. Ricky ran ahead, encouraging the others to keep up. It was hard going. Krysty was propped up between Mildred and Jak, who was in not much better shape than she was after the struggle in the burning farmhouse. Jak pushed on without complaint though, adrenaline keeping him going.

  Behind them, the roar of bike engines filled the air like a backbeat, getting gradually louder, gradually closer.

  How many of these people are there? Ricky wondered. A whole army?

  He dodged left and right, keeping one eye on the expanding fire that was sweeping through the fields around the farm. It wouldn’t do to get too close to that. Fire was unpredictable and once you got caught in it there wasn’t much you could do to get out again.