by James Axler
Through his scope Ryan actually saw blood from the driver splash the inside of the windshield. Another rider, with eagle feathers waving from a spiked Mohawk, took the shot Ryan fired at the chieftain.
The blaster wag slowed, slewed violently and ran into the ditch to the south. Ryan grunted as he saw Mildred thrown clear of the bed. Whooping Stones circled it, waving their feather- and scalp-strung spears and firing shots in the air in celebration.
Ryan shot a biker who closed in on Mildred’s supine, motionless form out of the saddle. Then to his surprise the Browning bellowed again, its terrible voice subduing all other sound.
The knot of Stones following the one Ryan had shot was blasted to gleaming, spurting, flaming parts. Dezzy had taken up the grips of the M-2 and was trying to support her comrade.
A bike came from the west. Ryan instantly recognized the whipcord shape of Olympia in her tan uniform-looking jacket, pulling up alongside Mildred. While Dezzy blasted any enemy bikers who tried to close in on them, she coolly dropped the kickstand, which like most Stone Nation bikes had an outsize pad to slow it sinking into dirt, dismounted and half dragged, half helped Mildred to her feet.
Ryan heard J.B. utter a single grunt from the front nest, then he went back to triggering single shots from his Uzi, though the range was too long to have much chance of hitting anything. In between bursts from the Browning, Ryan heard Jak’s Python cracking off from the north side of the road.
Olympia manhandled Mildred onto the back of her bike, then got it going and turned it to ride for the convoy. Ricky was shouting and waving his arms at Dezzy to make a break. Ryan willed the boy to shut up and shoot.
But it wouldn’t make any difference. The slim young sec woman blasted apart a swarm of bikes that formed to pursue Olympia and her rescuee.
Ryan shot a biker rolling in behind Dezzy. The bullet hit her in her left arm but had enough impact to knock her off her ride. Jak was closing in on Dezzy, waving his blaster in the air and shouting. Ryan had no chance of hearing him over the roar of bikes and blasters and the majestic intermittent roar of Ma Deuce. But he knew the albino was trying to get Dezzy to bail and jump on behind him.
Instead Ryan saw her stiffen, saw the silver glint off the steel of the thrown hatchet that had buried itself between her shoulder blades.
Pit Bull rode past the stalled-out blaster wag, down the blacktop, pumping both fists in the air at his triumph. Jak pointed his handblaster at him and pulled the trigger.
The hammer fell on a spent casing. The cylinder was empty.
Ryan’s shot at Pit Bull’s garish skull-strip missed as he wheeled his bike abruptly to the right. Stones were swarming over the blaster wag now. Ryan hoped the hatchet had chilled Dezzy fast.
On the chuck wag, the blond sec man named Solo was holding Ricky in a bear hug from behind with his skinny arms to keep the kid from jumping off the still rolling wag in a futile attempt to help his friend.
A pack of Stones gave chase to Jak. While they were more experienced motorcyclists and knew the ground, the albino was as cunning as an old coyote. He was now an experienced dirt bike rider. He knew that no matter how skillful they were, those vast and massive motorcycles could never keep up with the scout cycle on any kind of bad surface.
He rode after the convoy right along the slope from the ridge caps. Where the Stone Nation machines slogged through the loosely packed soil, he seemed to skim over it. The fact that he was smaller than most of the bikers—who tended to be tall even when they weren’t as beefy as Pit Bull—helped him leave them in his dust.
Olympia rode past with a seemingly unconscious Mildred slumped against her back. She made brief eye contact with Ryan through her goggles as she flashed by.
He gave her a nod; she rode on. Turning his head, he saw her pull up alongside Croom’s armored wag. Not for the first time, Ryan felt a surge of respect for the master merchant’s skill in keeping the powerful wag moving no faster than the less wieldy trucks could travel. Its engine was burly enough to leave them all in the dust despite the added weight of improvised armor plate it carried.
He also had to admire Croom’s balls in not doing so. He could have saved his ass—and his precious younger brother’s—by simply clearing out and abandoning the others to their fate. For all his faults and flaws, that wasn’t something Bass Croom would do.
It would possibly get him chilled with Ryan and his companions and his own employees, but at least he’d die a man.
He saw the passenger door of the Land Cruiser fly open just as Olympia pulled alongside. Somebody reached out and with a bit of help from Olympia’s left arm—she was still driving the bike at speed down the uneven highway—dragged Mildred into the lead wag.
And that’s one for that little bastard Morty, Ryan thought. As far as he knew the blond-haired young man was the only other occupant of Bass Croom’s wag. He had his suspicions about the boss’s younger brother, and they were ugly ones. But he put himself way out to help a helpless Mildred.
That put Ryan in his debt, and he wouldn’t forget.
As for whatever injuries Mildred had sustained getting thrown from the blaster wag—well, she’d get over them, or she wouldn’t. Just as she’d get the chance to, or she wouldn’t. She had risked her life and damn near lost it to cover the others’ escape. All Ryan or anyone outside of the command wag could do was their best to save her sacrifice from being futile.
“Here they come!” he heard J.B. shout.
* * *
“I’M ALL RIGHT!” Ricky shouted to Solo. “You can let go now.”
The death grip around his chest relaxed.
The wrecked blaster wag was shrinking rapidly with distance. Just at the edge of visual detail Ricky saw a nomad—he couldn’t tell the sex at this range—stand spraddle-legged atop the cab of the pickup, brandishing a round, dark and light object overhead. He shuddered and closed his freely streaming eyes and hoped that wasn’t Dezzy’s head.
Then he opened to eyes to see the hornet swarm buzzing in pursuit of the convoy. He jumped as he felt a hard grip on his shoulder. He turned to look into Solo’s face.
“Sorry, kid,” the spiky-haired sec man said with just the slightest hitch in his voice. “Don’t zone. Right now we’ve got troubles of our own.”
Ricky looked around. The Stones were coming fast in pursuit now, up the road and on both sides. They began to speed past the last cargo wag and the chuck wag. Ricky ducked as one rider loosed a shot at him from a stretched-out, low-slung bike. But it wasn’t aimed and came nowhere near.
As they had a moment before, when they took down the dangerous .50-caliber blaster wag, the Stones were concentrating on one target at a time, and this time it was the tanker.
Settling back down among the strapped-down sandbags, Ricky raised his DeLisle longblaster to his shoulder and took aim. It wouldn’t be enough, he knew. They were doomed.
But he’d die doing what he could. It was all he could do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Things are heating up,” J.B. said.
The Armorer could smell the sulfur in the air, like a razor cutting through the road dust and engine fumes. The smoke pall from the volcano to the northwest covered the whole western horizon. It was the sort of thing he noted because details mattered. Not because it mattered now. As serious as an eruption was, it wasn’t their actual problem at the moment.
J.B. wasn’t in the habit of wasting words hammering down the obvious. The comment to Ryan was his notion of a joke.
That seemed to him as practical a response to certain death as anything, along with chilling as many of the enemy as he could before they chilled him. But that was a given.
Ryan laughed. He rocked back as his Scout longblaster roared. A bare-chested Stone Nation biker with black chevron marks covering his face, riding up the left side of the t
anker, threw up his hands and fell off his ride sideways.
Ryan ducked as shots cracked at him from a Mini-14 held by the rider right behind the man he’d shot. J.B. pointed his Uzi at the shooter and squeezed off a 3-round burst. The rider uttered a raven croak of pain and dropped out of sight beneath the silvery swell of the fuel tank.
“Just keeping our heads down,” J.B. called out over the crackling of blaster fire on all sides, and the different crack of bullets passing overhead at a speed faster than sound. He and Ryan had swapped nests again, so that J.B. was in the rear and Ryan’s longblaster could support the front end of the convoy. “These boys and girls like to play face to face.”
“Yeah,” Ryan called back to his friend.
That was the rep the Stone Nation carried. They used blasters when they had to, but they preferred fighting foes hand-to-hand, where they could look into their enemies’ eyes and feel their blood spurt hot over their knuckles. If it got them chilled, well, who left this world alive?
That wasn’t Ryan’s way of fighting. He fought to win; he fought only to win, to gain survival for himself and his friends, which were the stakes he was likely playing for now.
He wasn’t interested in debating combat philosophy with the Stones or anybody else. That wouldn’t load him any blasters. But he knew it was key to know how his opponents liked to fight.
He was momentarily out of targets on the left side of the tanker. He didn’t like the implications, but he took advantage of the opportunity to take quick stock of the situation ahead of the fuel wag.
A half dozen or more nomad bikes buzzed around Bass Croom’s lead wag. They might have shot out the tires—or tried, since the makeshift armored car had run flats—but they preferred playing it this way. In fact Ryan sensed they were mainly keeping Bass—and the other convoy blasters—busy while they focused on their prime target: the tons of gasoline riding in the big fat steel bladder beneath J.B.’s and Ryan’s asses.
Still riding her Stone Nation bike, Olympia was right behind the armored wag, going knee to knee down the heaved pavement with Morning Glory, Speaker’s giant shadow. The Plains woman was swinging what looked like a samurai sword, of all things. Olympia battled her with her telescoping metal staff held one-handed. She seemed to be holding her own.
Meanwhile Ryan saw Jak duck beneath a hatchet swipe of a Stone Nation rider as they rode down the ditch head-on. His white hair swirled as he twisted in the saddle of his dirt bike. Apparently he had a blade in his hand; Ryan actually saw red spurt from the nomad’s weapon-arm as Jak gashed him in passing.
Frantic movement took Ryan’s eye back where it always longed to go—to the cargo wag ahead atop which Krysty and Doc rode in a double-size sandbag nest. Doc had his outsize LeMat broken open and was stuffing in fresh .44 Remington cartridges. Krysty was making the motion that had captured his attention: waving madly at the left side of the fuel tanker.
Still holding the Scout in his right hand, Ryan let go of its fore end with his left hand. Turning, he drew his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster and extended his arm. Over the three-dot front sight he saw a very surprised-looking face that had just appeared above the edge of the metal tank to the left of his nest.
He fired once. A hole appeared over the left eye, wide, staring and blue. The head fell away without a sound escaping the man’s mouth.
Feeling a warning sensation prickle down his spine, Ryan kept twisting in his seated position. A biker who had scrambled up the rear access ladder loomed above J.B. with an ax handle upraised to flatten the little man’s fedora and smash his helpless skull. Ryan gave him a double tap right through the elk-bone gorget that hung in front of his breastbone. He spun and fell away off the rear of the tank.
Letting his Uzi fall to dangle from a long sling over his left shoulder, J.B. grabbed the pistol grip of his M-4000 scattergun, which was slung from his right side to the level of his short ribs, just above the dubious protection of the sandbag rampart. He blasted a biker who was lunging up the rungs welded to the right rear side of the tank, so close Ryan could see the yellow muzzle-flash lick against the black-painted upper half of the shouting face before the charge of double-00 shot smashed into it and the shaved skull above.
Ryan sensed movement to his right. A Stone Nation warrior popping up on that side actually grabbed the barrel of his Scout and yanked at it, ignoring the fact the barrel was hot enough from the shooting to burn his flesh. The one-eyed man smelled cooking skin.
He didn’t fight the tug. Instead he turned, helping the biker swing the longblaster toward his own face before triggering it. The 7.62 mm bullet smashed into the man’s lower jaw. The craggy black face, twisted with lunatic glee, started to deform from muzzle-blast as well as impact. Then the face went away as the owner fell off the tanker.
Anticipating as much as sensing an attack from the left, Ryan wheeled back that way, driving with his left heel against the inside of the sandbag wall. He smashed the butt of his handblaster against the nose of the biker who was lunging for him with a needle-slim commando dagger.
The man reeled back. Ryan was about to jam the SIG-Sauer back in its holster when a weight landed on his shoulders from behind. He was crushed onto the sandbags by a mass of bodies. The person on top of him was a woman. Her face was painted green, the irises staring from wide white eyeballs were bright green, and he could feel the heft of the breasts bound in by a cloth band crushed against his own chest. She held a big knife icepick-fashion that she was driving toward Ryan’s eye.
He jammed the muzzle of his SIG-Sauer against her side and blasted twice. Her body jerked, and her eyes turned to glazed green marbles.
The tip of the knife sliced his right cheek as he turned his face away. It buried itself to the hilt in the sandbag beneath his head.
There were at least two more bikers in the dog pile, who were for a brief interval unable to get at Ryan for the quiescent body of their late sister. The one-eyed man jammed the handblaster into the waistband of his jeans, ignoring the way its metal scorched the tender flesh beneath.
He managed to worm the panga out left-handed and ram its steel butt into the nearest person’s face. Teeth splintered. Cursing, the biker rolled away.
Another bare arm was poised overhead. A tomahawk-style hatchet with feathers tied beneath its steel head was silhouetted against high thin clouds. Ryan sliced his adversary’s biceps with a drawing cut of the panga blade. The man screamed. The ax fell from his hands to bounce off the top of the wag with an oddly musical ring.
Using the deadweight pressing down on the weapon as well as his body, Ryan quickly worked the bolt action of his Scout. Then, with his body already twisted clockwise, Ryan shoved his right leg free, swinging it up and to the right to clear both the chilled Stone Nation woman and the man whose arm was spraying blood on his face, so hot it felt scalding. He tasted the copper in his mouth.
Then he was clear. Ryan jumped up, panga in left hand, Steyr in the right.
Hopelessly entangled with the dead woman, the man whose arm Ryan had sliced rolled with her off the east side of the tank and out of sight. Ryan wheeled back to his left.
The man whose mouth he had shattered with his panga butt had managed not to fall off to his likely doom. He was on his knees and cursing from a mouth that spilled blood like lava. He hacked wildly at Ryan with a Bowie knife.
The one-eyed man used the momentum of his turn to slash him across the face with his panga. Blood shot out of a crimson slash in his face. He fell back and off the tanker.
Shrieking a cry of rage the Stone Nation biker whose nose he’d broken with the SIG-Sauer flew at him from the middle of the tanker, where he’d apparently been recovering his self-control after the sudden shock and pain. He had his slender double-sided knife held point-down from his upraised fist.
Ryan shot him with the Scout one-handed. He spun away, the knife falling from his hand. He la
nded on his face, his body slanted across the fuel tank’s center line. He didn’t roll off, but he didn’t seem likely to move again.
Beyond him Ryan saw J.B. surrounded by a mass of flailing bodies and flashing steel.
As Ryan shifted weight to charge back to the rescue, a desperate cry rang out from one of the wags still following the big rig.
“Ryan! Behind you!”
* * *
RICKY CURSED himself.
Both his beloved mentor and his adored and feared leader were in immediate chilling danger, and he was holding two empty blasters—the most useless items in the entire known universe. He had nobody to blame but himself.
He’d fired the last cartridge from the DeLisle’s 10-round box just as Stones began to scramble onto the chuck wag with him and Bert. Proper practice, as drilled into him by his lost Uncle Benito for years, and then by both J.B. and Ryan since he had joined his new family, held that you reloaded an empty blaster the instant you emptied it, no matter what.
Both their teaching and the sheer press of necessity said a person also did what he or she had to to survive. He just hadn’t had time, but had been forced to let the carbine fall on its sling, whip out his Webley and gut-shoot a burly bear-shaped warrior before the man split his head with a machete. Then it had been a mix of clubbing attackers with the heavy handblaster—something else he hated to do—and blasting them with it until the hammer clicked empty when he tried to shoot one of the nomads swarming J.B.
Ricky was still numb from seeing Dezzy die. The prospect of losing J.B. made sour puke fill his mouth. He could only watch helplessly and do nothing.
He heard a gargling dry sound from behind, then a blaster went off almost in his ear.
A figure pitched forward across the sandbag to his left, the wag’s west side, as he’d turned forward to see the awful scene on the tanker. As it flopped on its side away from him, onto the flat top of the wag’s box, he saw it was a young woman—Indian—by her features. She was no older than Dezzy had been. A trench knife was held in place by her outflung hand as it relaxed into death.
