End Program

by James Axler

  * * *

  RICKY AND KRYSTY were just a few feet away from Ryan, and they had their own targets in their sights. Two more bikers roared down the ville’s main street, firing blasters and a weird hand-cannon attachment at anyone who got in their way.

  Krysty winced as one of the bikes slammed into a brave sec man, knocking him off his feet as he tried to take a shot at the rider. Behind the rider, his passenger—a slender woman with a swishing ponytail floating out behind her—wielded a Mossberg shotgun one-handed, sending lethal bursts of shot at everything that moved.

  “We have to do something,” Ricky said, watching in horror as the other biker used the hand-cannon molded into his arm to blast a child and mother cowering in a doorway. Both child and mother collapsed to the ground, a blast of buckshot peppering the door where they had stood before.

  “You’re right,” Krysty agreed, steadying her two-handed grip on her Smith & Wesson .38. A moment later, she fired at the biker who had rammed the sec man—but her target was traveling too fast, and Krysty’s shot missed. “Dammit.”

  The rider and his ponytailed passenger sped off toward the tents that had been set up in the ville square.

  Before Ricky could ask, Krysty emerged from cover and began to give chase, her legs and arms pumping as she ran across the street after the retreating bike. She ran past the burning blacksmith’s shop, feeling the heat wash against her side in a fierce wave.

  “Krysty, look out!” Ricky screamed, as he spotted the other biker turn his handlebars and begin bearing down on her. It was no good—Krysty could not hear him over the roar of the engines.

  Ricky moved, an automatic response to seeing his beautiful ally in danger. He was out from the cover of the cart in a flash, his Webley firing once, twice, a third time, sending three shots at the rider with the metal arm.

  Ricky’s first shot missed, while the second struck the bike’s chassis and ricocheted away in a flash of sparks. The third shot, however, struck the rider in the fleshy part of his thigh, generating a spurt of blood. It was a minor wound, not much more than a flesh wound, but it was enough to make the biker lose control momentarily. He pulled at the handlebars in flinch reaction, swerving to the right away from the direction that Ricky’s bullet had come from. Ricky watched as bike and rider bumped over a tangle of blankets that had been left out close to the temporary medical center, and in a moment one of the blankets had caught in the bike’s back wheel, forcing it to spin out of control. The bike slipped over, skidding across the street with its rider still clinging to it, before striking the wall of a burning building in a shower of sparks.

  Ricky ran after the bike, the Webley thrust before him, his eyes fixed on the fallen rider. He had seen these people get up from worse than that back at the farmhouse, so he was taking no chances here.

  * * *

  IN AN ALLEY between buildings, Jak processed what he saw in a fraction of a second. The biker woman was running at him, her raven tresses flowing out behind her like a black shroud, her expression fixed in a hideous, inhuman grin. He could see the flesh hanging from her arm where she had struck the wall, a long gash crossing from her shoulder right up to the side of her face. And beneath it, there was metal lined by torn skin and blood, as if she was some kind of robot. Jak wondered briefly about that, but there was no time to think.

  The woman ran at Jak with incredible speed, a broken pipe from the crashed motorcycle dropping away from her side as it slipped from her body. Her right arm snapped out in a vicious punch. Jak ducked, squeezing the longblaster’s trigger three times in rapid succession. The discharges sounded loud in the confines of the alley, as if someone was drumming against his skull.

  The woman’s punch missed Jak by a fraction, and her fist drove instead against the building behind him. Against...and into! Jak’s bullets raked across her body at the same time, hacking tiny chunks of her torso away in a stutter of flesh, blood and metal. The woman didn’t seem to notice, or if she did she didn’t care. Instead, she was concentrating on following up her attack, bringing her knee up to strike Jak in the groin with a powerful blow.

  Jak shifted the longblaster in his hands, bringing it down even as the woman’s knee knifed toward him, deflecting her attack as he struck the top of her leg.

  The biker followed through with a left jab at Jak’s face, and he rolled with the punch, ducking and staggering as it glanced against him. The woman was already attacking again, her left leg whipping up in a high kick that struck the barrel of the Heckler & Koch as Jak tried to bring it around to shoot her. The blaster’s barrel shifted upward, sending the round skyward as Jak pulled the trigger.

  Then the woman was on him again, her right arm powering forward, her balled fist striking Jak in the chest like a thrown hammer.

  The albino stumbled back until his heels met the wall behind him. The woman flew at him like an unleashed rocket, her arms and legs flailing at him, almost faster than his eyes could follow. His bullets had had no effect, and nor had the bike’s collision with the wall. Jak saw metal beneath her flesh, hidden there where the skin had been torn away. Metal meant machine, so whatever she looked like, however she acted, Jak figured she was just another damn machine.

  The woman brought her arms out in preparation to slap Jak on both sides of his head. As she did so, Jak squeezed the trigger of the longblaster again, working the trigger over and over to send a half dozen rounds into the woman’s foot. The 7.62 mm bullets shredded the leather of her boot and tore her flesh and bone to a bloody pulp. The woman cried out, howling like a wolf in pain, and in that moment her attack on Jak was forgotten.

  So she’s got flesh, Jak thought. Real flesh. Flesh that could be hurt.

  Raising his weapon, Jak turned it on the woman’s torso sending shot after shot into her gut as she stumbled before him, searching for the soft human parts that remained in her otherwise artificial body.

  The biker woman shook before him, stumbling like a drunk as the bullets strafed her body. Jak saw the spot he wanted then, and he eased his finger from the trigger, letting the longblaster hang on its strap. Before him, the woman was still stumbling, blood and sheared metal showing through her clothes where the bullets had torn them.

  Jak moved his wrist in a practiced gesture, freeing the leaf-bladed throwing knife he kept hidden in a sheath in his sleeve. The blade dropped neatly into his hand even as he drew his arm across his body. An instant later, Jak’s arm whipped out in a graceful arc, sending the knife hurtling through the air until it met his attacker front and center, between the second and third ribs on her left side. The blade pierced the woman’s heart, her still-human heart, and Jak watched as she sagged to her knees, the unvoiced cry of agony stuck in her throat.

  “Machines in human parts,” Jak muttered with a shake of his head. He didn’t know what that meant yet, but he was sure it was bad for Heartsville.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE VILLE, bullets cut through the air with the cacophonous drumbeat of death as the bikers fought with the war wags. Twin rockets blazed from the rear of the converted security truck as it hurtled past the exterior wall, throwing bikers from their machines and forcing others to take evasive action as the antitank missiles struck.

  The bikers regrouped swiftly, turning their maneuverability to their advantage as they bore down on the war wags. Three bikers came at the war wag from either side, tossing grens at the high-sided vehicle as its weapons crew hurried to reload the rocket launcher. Grens struck both sides, rocking the war wag as it roared over the uneven dirt outside the ville.

  Inside the cab, driver and passengers were shaken by the impacts. The driver clung tightly to his steering wheel, fought to keep the vehicle on course as his body strained against the binding of his safety belt. Beside him, the codriver who operated the forward blasters fell forward, his head striking the dashboard, pulling back with a bloodied nose.

&nb
sp; In the truck’s rear, the two-man crew was thrown from their posts. The man on the blaster turret tumbled from his seat and slammed into the back wall, while the rocket operator jabbed his leg out against a side wall to stop himself from toppling over while still holding a primed rocket.

  One biker, who rode a bike with a sidecar that carried all manner of tools, weaved in close to the smaller war wag and tossed a lit Molotov cocktail at it. The bomb struck, sending a fiery burst of flames streaking up the driver’s door and across the armored windshield.

  The flaming war wag swerved, tires churning up dry dirt, bull bars knocking a cactus flat as the driver tried to hold his course. Then the driver hitched the wheel hard to his left and the heavy war wag came barreling toward bomber and his bike, nudging against the sidecar in a squeal of metal against metal.

  The biker steered into the impact, locking his bike against the war wag and throwing a second Molotov cocktail at the vehicle’s side.

  For a moment the old sec truck was lost in a blinding stream of flames. Then the driver’s door opened—fire racing up its side—and a hand reached out, jabbing a blaster in the biker’s face. The old man’s skull exploded in a red blush of blood, flesh and bone.

  * * *

  CLOSE BY, THE converted camper van had circled a third of the way around the ville, all blasters blazing as the crew tried to herd the bikers away from the gates. Three bikers went down in a hail of bullets, two of them dropping almost simultaneously as they tried to steer away from a pillbox outcropping in the ville’s side that was also spitting bullets in their direction.

  The camper came level with another bike, a straggler whose companions had outpaced him. The driver swerved, bringing the war wag closer to the walls as they continued to chase around the moonlit, dusty terrain. Beside the wag, the biker found himself with an ever-decreasing corridor to drive along, the high and irregular wall of the ville to his left, the high-sided war wag to his right. He struggled to free his shotgun from its holster behind his saddle, whipping it up and pulling the trigger even as the war wag nudged closer.

  The shotgun boomed, a brief burst of propellant lighting up both vehicles as they came closer to one another in a roar of straining engines. Then, with a sudden turn of the wheels, the war wag nudged against the remaining biker and pushed him the final few feet until he struck the ville wall. The bike’s handlebar caught the wall first and its rider suddenly found himself unable to steer. Then the bike was sandwiched against the wall, and a shriek of metal and human misery rent the air as both bike and rider were crushed against the unyielding wall.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Doc spun at the sound of the engine. He was working in a bivouac-style tent, a single sheet of canvas propped up at an angle using two posts, utilizing the edge of a building as its other wall. At some point during the attack, he and Mildred had been enlisted to help in the makeshift medical tents that dominated the center of the ville. He was tending to a sec man whose face, chest and shoulders had been horribly burned by one of the jerrican grens when the snarl of a bike’s engine came suddenly close.

  Turning, Doc saw the motorcycle race through one of the other tents in the compound, a shotgun in the passenger’s hand blasting away, wheels running over two patients who had been stretched out to recover from other wounds.

  Doc winced at the violence, feeling helpless as the bike slammed into another patient before bumping out of the tent. Doc had been a man of learning once, but time and circumstance had transformed him into a man of action. He turned his attention from his patient and reached for his LeMat blaster, which he had left on the floor at his side, whipping it up and targeting the approaching bike. Doc fired at the approaching bike, the shot unleashing a noise that sounded like a thunderclap.

  The bike swerved, and the LeMat’s lethal issue missed the bike’s driver entirely, punching a hole instead through the shotgun-wielding passenger riding pillion. The woman was knocked off the bike, and she tumbled over and over as she struck the ground at speed.

  The effect of suddenly losing his passenger saw the bike’s driver struggling to retain his balance; the bike bucked and weaved beneath him as he tried to keep it upright.

  Doc watched with irritation as the bike disappeared under the cover of another bivouac tent, riding roughshod over the legs of a burn victim. He tracked its path with his blaster, his teeth gritted.

  * * *

  STANDING ON THE street by the blacksmith’s, Krysty watched the bike disappear into another of the tents that had been set around the compound, and she bit back a curse. His rider had fallen but she couldn’t catch the man, not from this distance, nor could she hope to shoot him with the way he was weaving.

  “Gaia!” Krysty spoke the word through gritted teeth, drawing once more on the power of the Earth Mother to grant her a surge of strength that she might use to stop these maniacs. “Great mother of all, creator of the Universe, hear me in my hour of need.” She felt the power course through her veins, igniting her muscles. The change was like the difference between being asleep and awake, as if without the power given to her by Gaia she was sleepwalking through the waking world.

  As the power charged through Krysty’s body, she ducked into the school bus that served as a blacksmith’s shop. The roof was on fire and the smith’s unmanned forge was rapidly raging into a full-blown inferno.

  Krysty’s eyes pierced the smoke, searching for something she could use. There. The poker used to stoke the fire was just what she needed. Krysty grabbed it, feeling the heat of the handle where the fire had played too close to it.

  Then she was running—indeed she had never stopped—and she emerged into the street just as the bike reappeared on the far side of the canvas cover, Doc’s bullets following it. Krysty drew back her arm, aimed, then launched the poker like a javelin, not at where the bike was but at where it would be in four seconds.

  * * *

  THE BIKE WAS through the tent and out the other side now, zipping across the ville square, its rider laughing grimly despite losing his passenger. Chilling frenzy had taken over him. The laughter echoed around the square, but was abruptly cut short as Krysty’s missile landed between the spokes of the bike’s back wheel. In an instant, the rear of the bike came to an abrupt halt while the front wheel continued forward, resulting in the bike flipping entirely. Bike and rider flew off the ground for a heartbeat before crashing to earth. The rider landed first, the bike landing on top of him where he still clung to the handlebars. He howled in terrific pain as the white-hot poker scored against his chest.

  * * *

  DOC DIDN’T HAVE time to figure out what had happened; he was too busy running toward the fallen passenger, the LeMat thrust out before him, ready to blow out her brains. The LeMat blasted the moment he saw the woman, struggling to get up from where she had fallen. Her head exploded like a ripe melon beneath a hammer blow. A moment later he found the rider struggling to raise a weapon and executed him in the same fashion, cutting short his screams of white-hot pain.

  * * *

  THE BIKER WAS six feet tall and heavily tattooed, and right now he was sailing through the air as the motorcycle beneath him exploded in a fireball where Ryan’s perfectly placed bullet had pierced the gas tank. The bikes didn’t run on gasoline, of course—they used a refined alcohol-based solution that powered the converted engines and made the exhaust eye-watering in its stink. Ryan had tracked the biker as he sped through a flaming gap in the exterior wall, waiting until he was sure that no one would be caught up in the blast before shooting out the gas tank. The bike went up in a red-orange burst of exploding fuel, sending its rider twenty feet in the air until he crashed to earth in the ville square. Ryan watched the man disappear as his flailing body tore through the canvas covering of one of those swiftly erected tents, and he hurried to follow.

  Inside, Mildred was patching up a pregnant woman when
the biker crashed through roof of the tent. She leaped aside, dragging her patient with her as the biker dropped to the ground and shattered the lamp she had been working by, casting the tent in sudden darkness.

  With a growl of irritation, the biker rolled over and drew a revolver from his vest. He reeled off a shot, delivering a bullet into the forehead of an elderly cobbler who had already been caught up in an explosion in the initial attack.

  Mildred reached for the pancake holster she wore at her hip, pulling the ZKR pistol from its hiding place there. As she did so, a figure appeared silhouetted in the doorway of the tent, broad-shouldered and familiar.

  “Ryan, look out!” Mildred cried in warning, recognizing her companion as he hurried through the doorway.

  Ryan ducked as the biker shot at him, and the bullet went wide, zipping over his head and disappearing into the night.

  * * *

  THE SEC-TRUCK-TURNED-WAR-WAG powered toward twin bikers who had handled the ramp mechanism. The war wag looked to be in pretty bad shape now. The driver’s door was buckled inward and both sides and the rear showed evidence of grenades and fire damage, with a great hole showing across the back edge close to where the rocket launcher was located. The rocket launcher itself was out of commission now. A well-placed gren had been shoved in its barrel during the frantic battle, leaving it looking like a fountain frozen in ice.

  The top blasters blazed however, twin barrels spitting heavy caliber bullets at the retreating bikers as they left the ramp mechanism and made a dash for safety. The driver smiled grimly as he watched them race toward Heartsville’s wall across from the main gate. He had them now.

  Then the bikers skidded to a halt, locking their handlebars and pulling out in unison so as to create a space between them. The war wag hurtled on, bouncing over the rough terrain, its top blasters and side barrels still firing. Without warning a curtain of fire came to life before the wag as the two bikers used an accelerant on the ground to create a line of flames. Then, on command, one of the bikers blew up, exploding before the war wag in an impressive display of bones and flesh and metal. The burning debris slapped against the war wag’s windshield, feeding the fire even further.