Storm Breakers

by James Axler

  J.B. slowed to wave Mildred past him. She gave him a hard look in passing.

  The slavers were firing on the run, usually piss-poor practice in J.B.’s opinion. While there were exceptions, the Armorer always figured that when the time was to shoot, you shot, and when the time was to move, you moved; you didn’t divide your intent and action mixing up the two. Also, they were probably afraid of hitting the women.

  He started to run again, his boots sinking out of sight at every step. The Armorer could feel the cold wetness the snow-pack left on his trouser legs where they were bloused into the boot-tops. The snow made it hard to run—not as bad as slogging through soft sand, but bad enough.

  Then a big yellow muzzle-flash blossomed from the pine woods to the north. A heartbeat later, a slam of sound hit J.B.’s ears that was even harder and sharper than the coldheart longblasters.

  He grinned as the new pack of pursuers faltered and called out to each other in dismay.

  Another fire-bloom. This time, a figure and the weapon he held dropped out of sight in the ground-cloud of snow. The coldhearts either threw themselves down or backpedaled to the safety of the trees.

  Jak Lauren, the last member of the party, had circled around to cover his friends from concealment.

  His .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver wasn’t exactly a longblaster, but in the hands of a steady marksman it could chill people at surprising range. But the young former bayou-guerrilla, who’d earned the nickname White Wolf while barely into his teens, wasn’t exactly that. He was a knife man by nature, as befit a stealth hunter.

  The slavers had reckoned that the ambush was all wrapped up with a pretty red bow from the get-go, and that made the shock of the sudden turnaround hit hard.

  It didn’t matter that Jak only hit one coldheart by luck—ace for him, less so for the slaver. Nor that Jak was only one lone shooter. As far as they—or their bladders and bowels, suddenly letting go in sheer fear—knew, a whole nuke-sucking army was about to land on them like an avalanche.

  Ryan raced into the trees without breaking stride. The risk of running into another ambush weighed less in his judgment than the certainty that their pursuers would chill them unless they got clear fast. Same in J.B.’s reckoning—although, as always, he’d follow where his best friend led. As skillful and many-skilled, and as smart, seasoned and steady in a fight as J. B. Dix was, he wasn’t the leader type.

  Ryan Cawdor was, so J.B. followed his old friend—and tried to keep him from getting too deep in hot rad waste.

  The rest of the companions joined him. J.B. got in between two firs and turned to cover their backtrail. No more shots came from that direction. He reckoned the slavers were holding a hasty palaver, the subject of which would most likely be Plan B.

  Jak raced toward the trees, seeming to fly across the snow, his elbows pumping. The vented rib down the barrel of his chromed handblaster managed to cast a few dull glints in the semidarkness. His white hair snapped behind him like a pennant. His ruby eyes were wide and glaring.

  “Run!” he yelled when he saw J.B. standing to cover him. “More come!”

  A sledgehammer hit J.B. in the chest. The impact whirled him helplessly clockwise.

  And down into blackness.

  Chapter Two

  “J.B.’s down!”

  Mildred’s racing heart stumbled in her chest at Jak’s cry.

  She was already a good forty yards up the road between close-crowding, snow-clad trees. She might have been short and stocky, but her powerful legs could carry her at a brisk clip when the situation demanded.

  Without waiting for orders from Ryan, she wheeled around and raced back to where Jak knelt protectively over his friend’s body. J.B. lay slantwise off the north verge of the road, his face buried in the deeper snow. His Uzi lay near his outflung hand. Red stained the snow around his upper chest.

  Not the heart, she prayed silently. Dear God, please don’t let it be the heart! Jak’s big handgun spat bright yellow fire, followed immediately by a thunderclap report that seemed to slap Mildred in the face. One of the shadow-figures moving through the thickening snow and gloom flopped forward to the ground. Others shot back with winking muzzle-flares.

  Mildred snapped out her right arm in full-extension. In violation of all her training and instincts as an Olympic-qualified target-pistol shooter, she got a flash picture of a pale oval blur of face over the square-topped front sight post and squeezed the trigger. The revolver roared and kicked her hand.

  She’d aimed for the center of the nearest slaver’s face. She missed. Instead, she saw his right eye explode out of his head in a black spray. His head snapped back in his fur-lined parka and he folded.

  Jak’s Magnum blaster ran dry. He had speedloaders for the Python, but the coldhearts were closing fast. Instead, as bullets kicked up tiny fountains of snow around him, he dived for the fallen Uzi. Somehow the young albino managed to free the strap from J.B.’s prone form as he rolled into the snowbank, which was so deep he disappeared almost completely.

  As Mildred sprinted forward, dropped to her knees and skidded the last ten feet to J.B.’s side on the snow-covered road, Jak reared up, shedding snow chunks and powder like some vengeful spirit of ice, and blazed away vigorously with the blaster.

  She fired again, across J.B.’s body. This time she had a more stable platform, but all the pursuers in sight were already throwing themselves down in the face of the impressive amount of fire and noise the Uzi was producing. Bullets continued to crack overhead as Mildred jammed her ZKR into her belt and rolled J.B. onto his back.

  If the bullet clipped his vertebrae I could be paralyzing him, she thought. But if he suffocates, that doesn’t mean much, does it?

  Apparently the slavers’ blind shots were going wide in another direction, too. She heard a voice, oddly muffled by the snow, shout, “Hey, you triple-stupe assholes, cease fire! You’re hitting us.”

  From the corner of her eye she was vaguely aware that the Uzi’s slide had locked the back, meaning Jak had fired it dry. He tossed the blaster into the snow next to J.B.

  John’s breathing, Mildred thought. It was shallow and labored. But happening.

  And from the pink froth bubbling from his nostrils and a corner of his mouth, she knew just why his breathing came so hard. He had a sucking chest wound!

  * * *

  J.B. WAS COLD, colder than he remembered being in his whole life, and he hurt bad.

  He was short of breath, and when he breathed in, it felt like somebody was stabbing him in the chest with a big Bowie knife.

  “His eyelids are moving!” he heard Mildred say. She had to have shouted it, he reckoned, but the words sounded as if she was speaking down a well.

  He began to remember where they were, what they were doing: they were being ambushed, shooting their way clear.

  The Armorer managed to crank his eyelids open. At that point, the knife-pain in the right side of his chest actually helped. Once he started coming to, it all but kicked him back to full awareness.

  His vision took a moment to sharpen vague moving blurs and a whole lot of white to clarity. The first thing he saw was Mildred’s face, turned down, chin to chest, knotted in frustration as she tore at some kind of cracked plastic packaging. He realized in a vague sort of way she’d opened the front of his scuffed leather jacket and torn open his shirt beneath. The cold wind and snow felt like fire and embers on his exposed skin.

  He tried to sit up.

  “Lie down!” he heard Ryan’s voice rap from somewhere hard to the left. “Are you trying to get hit again?”

  He heard the bang of Ryan’s longblaster. The Scout carbine was chambered in 7.62 mm, a serious round, but the length of its barrel made it even louder. He felt the sting of the vibrations more than he actually heard them, though.

  “You—” He stopped, literally choking on the words. Fluid clogged his throat.

  He coughed, turned his head and spit in the snow. What came out was a pink spray. He knew what it was
: lung blood.

  “You got to leave me,” he said as clearly as he could. It came out in a thin gurgling wheeze. He couldn’t seem to get enough air. “I can—still trigger a blaster. I can rig a booby-trap on me triple-fast, fight till I can’t, then let the bastards send me and themselves off in style.”

  Mildred’s strong blunt fingers finally tore the wrapping apart. Letting the dressing spill down on her thighs, she pressed the blue plastic onto J.B.’s chest and leaned on it.

  The Armorer set his jaw. The pressure made him feel like he was being shot all over again.

  “Here.” It was Krysty, kneeling by his other side. Her red hair had tightened into a cap against her skull. If she hadn’t been Ryan’s life-mate, body and soul, he might have been more than a little impressed by her bust hanging right over his face—not that his own partner, Mildred, was any slouch in that department. He wasn’t a man much given to matters of the flesh. But he was still a man.

  Get your mind back on business, he told himself as Krysty unreeled a long gray strip from a roll of duct tape.

  With Mildred’s help, Krysty lifted his upper torso and started taking long, tight turns around his chest, clothes and all, to hold the patch over the hole.

  For a fact, he did feel better. Less like he was leaking.

  “Where are they all coming from?” he heard Ricky Morales ask. His English was as good as anybody’s—he’d grown up speaking the lingo, after all—but heavily flavored with what sounded like a Spanish accent. It was, in fact, from his Caribbean home—a place that he knew as Puerto Rico and everybody else knew as Monster Island.

  J.B. heard the metal clacking that told him the youth had opened the top-breaking British handblaster to shuck the empties and slam in a fresh moon-clip loaded with .45 ACP cartridges.

  “There’re too many to be trying to take a group as small as we are.”

  The shattering blast of Jak’s Colt Python made J.B.’s eyes water.

  “Must be near their base,” the Armorer said.

  “Don’t talk,” Mildred gritted.

  “Better than having nothing to do but think about how triple-good I don’t feel,” he said.

  “Got it,” Krysty stated. “What are they doing?”

  She had to have meant the coldhearts.

  “The blackguards have stopped shooting for the moment,” J.B. heard Doc say. He had only a vague sense of where people were. There was no cover to speak of anywhere near—nothing that would stop a bullet. He just hoped his friends had found some concealment.

  At least nobody else seemed to have gotten winged yet.

  “Perhaps we have discouraged them at last?” Doc suggested.

  “Not a chance,” Ryan said. “If we’re near their camp, they’re likely just waiting on reinforcements.”

  “But that means this road—” Ricky began.

  “Is still the only one we got,” Ryan said. “So are we good to go?”

  Mildred winced as if she’d taken a round. “No,” she gritted. “But we can.”

  “Then let’s get rolling.”

  Krysty looked across J.B. at Mildred. “Ready?”

  Mildred nodded. J.B. felt himself gripped by both upper arms. The two women got their boot soles beneath them, then stood up as one—deadlifting him to his feet. They were both strong women. He came right up.

  He knew right away he wasn’t going to remain standing in his condition.

  He also knew better than to argue any more about what they ought to do with him. It warmed him inside, despite the cold and pain, to know that his friends refused to leave him behind. But he still felt a cold certainty they were being triple-stupe not to.

  “Doc, get J.B.’s Uzi and what extra mags you can find triple-fast,” Ryan ordered.

  “Indeed!”

  “Jak, grab the shotgun and take point.”

  J.B. heard the thump of Ricky’s hand-modified longblaster. A scream answered it, still filtered through falling snow and J.B.’s own hazy consciousness.

  “One stuck his head up just as visibility broke,” the youth reported. J.B. heard him jacking the action. Good boy, he thought. Good habits. Makes a body proud.

  “I’ll hang here and give them something to think about other than your shapely ass, Krysty,” Ryan said. “I’ll give you a head start.”

  “Ryan—” the redhead said.

  “Do you think I’m going to throw my life away when we got at least a stretch of clear road in front of us and trees we can try to get lost in if we need to?

  “Now, go! Double-time!”

  They started running. J.B. did his best to help, but his boots seemed to keep getting tangled up in the snow packed over the road-ruts, harder than the new stuff, but not enough that they didn’t sink in.

  “Knock it off,” Mildred snarled. “It’s easier just to drag you.”

  He let them. The jarring was like sheets of glass getting busted up inside him.

  The run was a nightmare. He was aware of his friends as fuzzy shapes in front and to the sides—and not just because the snow was still coming down hard and the dusk had settled in for serious now. He heard the labor of their breathing, the crunch and thud of their steps.

  From behind he heard the flat crack of Ryan’s Steyr longblaster: once, twice. He glanced aside at Krysty. Her face was white and perfect, and as hard as a marble statue’s. But she showed no sign of extra concern.

  He’d lost his time sense pretty much completely. At some point he heard Ryan’s rasping cry from not far behind.

  “I’m up with you, but they’re coming now. I just made them cautious.”

  J.B. concentrated on trying to get enough air. Even though Mildred had patched the leak in his chest, however temporarily, the rad-blasted thing wasn’t working well. Mebbe his lung had collapsed by now.

  It sure didn’t hurt any less. He concentrated on fighting through the pain to suck down as much air as he could.

  Unconsciousness tried to pull him down like the soft yet strong arms of a woman—like Mildred’s. He yearned for it as much as he’d ever yearned for her sweet flesh. But he didn’t give in to its seduction. He fought to stay awake.

  He’d been born a fighter. That was the only way a sawed-off runt like him ever survived past being a pup.

  Then he heard the unmistakable voice of his own M-4000 blaster speak from up ahead. Bullets cracked overhead.

  Then Jak roared, “More!”

  J.B. was slammed back out of consciousness at last as Krysty and Mildred, carrying him, crashed into the snowbank beside the road.

  * * *

  “WHAT NOW, RYAN?” Doc asked.

  Ryan knelt by the reddish bole of a spruce as he fed a fresh magazine into the well of his Scout Tactical rifle. They were getting low on ammo, but that was the least of their worries.

  They had discouraged both the pursuit from behind and the blocking force ahead. For the moment. Miraculously, they still hadn’t taken any more hits, though a slug had ripped through the upper left corner of Krysty’s backpack—fortunately missing her shoulder.

  They were saved because the snow and increasing gloom made it hard to see and shoot, and they could use the densely packed trees for cover north and south of the road. And they’d put out a brisk enough volume of fire to make the slavers uncertain just how many enemies they faced.

  Occasionally shots cracked out from up ahead and behind. Ricky was pulling tail-end Charlie with his DeLisle; Ryan now had point. Their longblasters had the best range and accuracy when targets presented themselves.

  The poor visibility cloaked both sides.

  “The brutes are most persistent,” Doc said, kneeling on the far side of the trail with J.B.’s Uzi at the ready. He didn’t look comfortable with the short, thick, heavy blaster. But it was more useful in a fight of this scale than his heavy LeMat commemorative blaster.

  “They must not want us to get away,” Krysty said. She and Mildred had J.B. under some kind of spiky-leafed bush by the road, and knelt protectively ove
r him. “Not just for our sale price. I think they don’t want us spreading the word where they are.”

  “Could be,” Ryan agreed.

  He drew in a deep breath and let it slide out through cold-chapped lips.

  “Right. Here’s how we play it. Krysty, you lead the rest and make a break south. The coast’s that way. Once you get up over the ridges there you should be clear.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the rest’?” she asked.

  “Jak, Ricky, Doc, Mildred. Go fast, don’t look back. J.B., you still feel up to rigging a booby? We’ll take a stand.”

  The Armorer was propped up with his head shielded by his hat among the prickly lower branches of the bush, with his backpack keeping his upper body mostly out of the snow.

  He held up a right thumb in a gesture of affirmation and even managed a feeble grimace that looked something like a grin. His thumb was more blue than pink from cold.

  At least it’s not white yet, Ryan thought. Not like that matters now.

  “Not going leave you two,” Jak said. He was hunkered with Ryan up front, on the south side of the trail to Ryan’s north.

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “Me, neither,” Mildred said. “You either both come or we all stay.”

  “Mildred,” J.B. croaked. “That doesn’t make any sense—”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “I’m with Mildred,” Krysty stated. “I won’t leave you and J.B.”

  “I fear I am with the others,” Doc said.

  Ryan heard Ricky swallow loudly. “Me, too. Lo siento—sorry.”

  “Don’t be triple-stupes!” Ryan snapped. “We’re caught between fires here. There’s no point in everybody getting chilled together!”