by James Axler
Marcus cried out a warning. J.B. judged the distance and leaped.
There were two possible handholds. The fifty’s barrel would be so hot from firing that it would melt the skin of J.B.’s palms.
That left the projecting top of the casemate, a sort of armor box fixed to the back of the war wag, with the machine gun mounted on a pintle inside and sticking out through a narrow slot. The gunner had a little polycarbonate window right above to sight out of. It really was a wizard design, J.B. noticed, as he caught the top edge with both hands. And the workmanship was just what you’d expect from Trader’s techs: exquisite.
Fortunately he had a fast eye. He didn’t have time to hang around. He scrambled up onto the casemate like a monkey.
The roof of War Wag One’s three sections was armored like the rest. It wasn’t as heavily armored as the sides, front and rear; not even the specially rebuilt, massive engines that drove the vehicle had infinite capacity to haul mass. But in an age when functioning aircraft were rarer than good mouthfuls of teeth, and the most common danger from above came from the carnivorous mutie fliers called screamwings and much smaller chillers called stingwings, there was no need to armor the top heavily. The relatively thin plating was plenty sturdy enough to resist the spears and even the biggest rocks the muties were chucking at it.
That was also why Trader only bothered mounting the one machine gun in a hardpoint welded to the top of the wag. He didn’t usually need much top cover for his rolling HQ.
But unlike screamwings and stingwings, scalies had hands with opposable thumbs. They could drop down to the roofs of the three segments and find their devilish ways inside to work havoc among the crew.
And there were a dozen or so between J.B. and the quiescent blaster mount.
He ran forward. One mutie turned and opened its mouth to screech a warning to its fellows as it raised a spear. Its tongue was long, shockingly red and forked like a sidewinder’s. The creature carried a weapon that was a tree branch with a head that looked as if it was made out of a hammered tin can.
J.B. blasted the monster from the hip. The steel-jacketed 7.62 mm Russian bullet didn’t have the raw smashing power that Marcus’s Italian-made 12-gauge did, but it punched a big hole through the mutie’s sunken sternum and blasted through its skinny body to smash the forearm of the mutie standing behind it.
The shot mutie toppled off the armored roof. The huge war wag’s three joined segments had heavy suspensions and its sheer mass absorbed a certain amount of road impact. And the relatively soft sand of the dry river bottom didn’t give a rough ride. But the big machine was hauling mass, and the ride wasn’t silky-smooth, either.
The mutie who’d been hit by the blow-through round had its left hand flopping loose on the end of its arm. It was a human-looking hand, except for the fact that it had but three fingers, instead of four, along with a thumb. And the black, curving, needle-tipped talons, of course.
But the mutie had a projecting lizardlike muzzle filled with double rows of razor teeth. It showed them to J.B., opening its jaws to snap his face off.
Instead, he smashed it across the open jaws with the buttplate of his SKS. The blow knocked the mutie off the war wag, trailing blood and a couple of teeth as it turned over and over in the air.
J.B. was halfway down the rear segment. The machine-gun nest was in the middle of the central one. He heard single shots from that way—handblaster shots. Its crew was apparently fending off the muties with sidearms. And that was a problem. If he shot straight ahead he might hit one of his own guys.
But J.B. was still in machine mode; it was the way he got when he had a problem to solve, something to fix.
The reptilian muties were merely preliminary problems to his smoothly clicking mind. As for the blaster crew, they weren’t his pals. He wasn’t concerned if he blasted one by accident. It was easier to get forgiveness, he reckoned, than permission. And he reckoned that for Trader to get pissed at him for incidentally blasting one of his personnel, J.B. would have to survive this goatscrew.
Trader, too, for that matter.
But J.B. was going to need to spend some quality time head-down in the guts of the broken M-60 to get it churning and burning again. That meant he couldn’t constantly be swatting off the muties. That meant he needed the blaster crew to clear his back while he worked the magic that he knew in his bones he could do.
Problem defined. Problem solved. He just waded into the muties, jabbing with the muzzle and bashing with the butt, as if the longblaster was a truncheon. The semiautomatic SKS wasn’t really a close relative of its better-known successor, the famous AK-47 assault rifle. But it was designed and built to the same philosophy: to be maintainable and operable by conscript troops who were shit-scared, half-trained and less literate, and to fire every time the trigger was pulled with a round chambered, in the absolute worst conditions available anywhere on planet Earth.
Which, not altogether incidentally, meant that unlike most blasters you could just bash the hell out of people, or muties, all day without it malfunctioning on you.
The muties were fast little bastards, but then, so was J.B. They weren’t strong, either in muscle or frame. For his size, J.B. was.
And he was on a mission, which meant he was a machine.
A killing machine. Even though a few more muties dropped down from above, and he had to dodge the odd rock or spear hurled down at him, he waded through them at scarcely less speed than if he’d been running unimpeded on flat ground.
He reached the gap between segments, then leaped. A mutie barred his way with upraised spear and bared fangs. He knocked the spear aside with his blaster butt and put a shoulder into the mutie as he landed. Fangs tore his shirt and the skin beneath, but the mutie went down caterwauling on its back with its spear haft broken in two.
J.B. pointed the longblaster and fired a shot, aiming to the side to minimize danger to the gunners just ahead. The bullet drilled through the creature’s belly and bounced off the armor-plated roof, ricocheting to punch a couple of bloody yellow ribs out of its sternum, tear off its lower jaw and go whining away. J.B. vaulted the body and kept going.
He found a woman, squatting in the blaster pit alone, hefting two handblasters. She had pushed her goggles up onto her brush of short brown hair. The lack of road grit around her hazel eyes gave her a photonegative raccoon-mask appearance that accented their near-panicky wideness.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded, as J.B., with a buttstroke from behind, stove in the skull of a mutie that had hopped up on the rearward armor shield.
Since that wasn’t essential information, he didn’t bother to answer. “What’s wrong?” he asked, dropping into the emplacement beside her.
The M-60’s feed-tray cover was open. It and the weapon’s receiver were mint-shiny black, meaning Ace DeGuello or his armorers had re-blued it relatively recently. J.B. had to admit the Trader’s weapons master was triple-ace at his job,
Which didn’t mean J.B. wasn’t going to replace the man.
But that concern was as distant from his mind as the back side of the moon right now. His mind narrowed to laser focus on the machine gun’s open receiver.
“Bastard’s jammed up jelly-tight,” the gunner said. “Tore the head right off a spent casing. We’re fucked.”
A shadow fell across the receiver. The sun was an hour or so past the zenith.
The gunner stuck the short-barreled revolver in her left hand—a Colt Trooper .38, J.B. reckoned—into the mutie’s midsection and blasted it as it raised a steel tomahawk over its head.
“Where’s your partner?” J.B. asked, reminded of the question’s relevance.
“Chilled. Poor bastard panicked and ran when the blaster jammed and the muties started droppin’ down. He didn’t make it fifteen feet before they swarmed him. All biting like piranhas and shit. Never stood a chance.”
“Got a mitt?” he asked.
She blinked at him a moment. Had he not been so razor-sharp in focus
he would’ve flashed into anger at her useless delay. But in this mode he didn’t have any feelings at all. Except utter certainty that he would finish the task at hand.
And more importantly, could.
She nodded. He slung the SKS. “Asbestos?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Though it had been about two minutes since the M-60 had fired, he could feel the heat beating off the receiver and barrel assembly. M-60s had originally been issued with asbestos mitts so that barrels could be swapped out when they overheated in combat. As expected, what he pulled out of a little niche under the ring mount was an improvised article. But it would keep the skin on his palm.
“Keep the fuckers off my back,” he said. He pulled the spare barrel assembly from its clamps inside the emplacement.
“But it’s fucked, plain as day,” she said. “You—you can fix it? Here? Now?”
He flicked a look at her over the tops of his glasses, then he bent to work.
Chapter Thirteen
The mutie who had grabbed him from behind squalled shrilly.
Jak’s grin widened.
The hand came off Jak’s shoulder as if it was red hot. The creature had discovered the razor-sharp bits of metal sewn into the collar of camo-colored vest.
Jak spun. The monster had reared up on its short, bowed rear legs, standing taller than the albino youth did. Not that that was hard; you could call Jak Lauren many things, and many had, but none of them was tall.
He plunged the two-edged blade into the belly of the beast, which was pale and thin. The knife sank in all the way to the knuckle-duster grip. Jak yanked up and twisted.
The frog shrieked in intolerable agony as the knife shredded its guts.
Jak pulled the knife free. Another frog was attacking him from the left, more hopping than running on its strong, bowed back legs. He shot it in the face. The bullet smashed its toothy lantern jaw and drove like an out-of-control semi into the chest cavity behind.
He heard the hefty thump of his friend’s suppressed weapon. His fighting smile widened for a brief instant.
Ricky would cover their friends, and Jak would cover him. It was how things should be.
Another frog mutie sprang at him. He met it with spikes of brass.
* * *
RYAN GROUND HIS teeth in fury and frustration. Krysty was trapped, and the horde of hopping, slithering muties had surrounded her, blocking rescue by him, and by Mildred and Doc from the other direction.
He quickly found out that even though the frogs had their humped backs to him, his horse wouldn’t charge in among them, no matter how hard he slammed his heels into its flanks and cursed. He fired his magazine dry to little visible effect. The 9 mm hardball bullets did nothing when fired into the creatures’ thick torsos. And the thrust-forward skulls were hard to hit—and just plain hard. He shot one in the back of the head only to see a bloodred groove appear on the bare scalp where the slug had simply skipped off the bone.
He heard a roar and glanced back. Alysa and her horse had pulled to a few feet behind them. The blonde girl was keeping the monsters off Ryan’s back while he tried to rescue Krysty.
But he couldn’t. He roared in frustrated fury and prepared to throw himself out of the saddle right onto those broad, bent, spine-knobbed mutie backs.
And then great, kicking frog mutie bodies erupted in front of him like a fountain of twisted evil.
* * *
MILDRED YELPED IN startled pain as a frog-mutant dug black talons through the faded but still-tough denim of her right pants leg.
Out of ammo, she slammed the butt of her ZKR target pistol into the monster’s snout. Bone crunched, then the mutie squealed and let go.
She grabbed a speed-loader from a pocket of her parka and fervently wished she had some kind of melee weapon. Preferably an oversize knife like Ryan’s panga—or better yet, the Stormbreak girl’s full-on cavalry saber. But she’d settle for an ax handle, a ball bat, or even a stout tree branch right now.
What she had was her heavy boots, with which she kicked furiously in both directions, and her chunky, cranky mule, whose ill nature was helping keep her alive. It was kicking muties and biting chunks from them.
But they were tough and took a packet of chilling, and they kept coming.
With the heavy timber snapped off the bridge rail blocking her way, she couldn’t get to her helpless friend Krysty as the hopping, croaking monsters swarmed her.
Mildred heard a furious chanting, then moments later frogs were flung away from the fallen mare and trapped redhead like abandoned baby dolls. Krysty stood. Her sentient hair waved around her head in angry scarlet tentacles. She had yanked her leg out from under her mount and engaged in a counterattack.
The broken beam had to weigh a good two hundred pounds or more. A tall woman, and strong, Krysty still should have been able to do no more than deadlift it, using both hands and driving with her long, powerful legs.
Instead she picked it up in the middle and started spinning with it.
Mildred actually winced when she saw the raw broken beam-end crunch into a mutie’s face sideways. The creature dropped as if its skeleton had dissolved, its skull crushed and neck fractured.
The timber hardly slowed. It caught another frog full in the chest and bent it double. Black blood geysered out of its mouth.
Krysty stood over the body of her mare and whipped the beam the other way. Frog muties were knocked in all directions like bottles off a gaudy’s bar by an unruly drunk.
No normal woman could have swung the bar like that. Or any normal man. But Krysty was no longer normal. The red-haired woman had the ability to channel her tutelary spirit, Gaia the Earth Mother, deriving incredible strength. Calling on Gaia for strength took a terrible toll on Krysty.
Whirling the massive beam like a broomstick, Krysty cleared muties off the north end of the bridge. She flung the timber away from her, spinning like a propeller, to take down a quartet of frogs between her and Ryan. Then, stooping, she grabbed her dead mare by a foreleg and dragged the inert 750-pound horse from where it blocked the exit from the bridge.
The corpse slid down the bank toward the ice that edged the river. Krysty’s emerald eyes rolled up in her head. With a groan she sank to her knees.
Ryan was beside her. He bent from the saddle, caught her under the arms and, with a near-superhuman heave of his own, flung her up to a sideways position behind his saddle.
“Come on!” he bellowed. “Power over here!”
Mildred needed no second urging. She booted the mule hard. It bunched its haunches and lit out like a jackrabbit, almost losing her over the cantle of the Western-style saddle.
* * *
STILL HALF-TURNED in his saddle, holding Krysty behind him with his blaster hand, Ryan rode hell for leather off the bridge and past him into the clearing, followed closely by Mildred and Doc. Jak and Ricky had already remounted and were riding toward the bridge.
Nothing barred their way. The frog muties, it seemed, had had enough.
Ryan felt Krysty’s arms go around his waist. Although she was spent and half-conscious, she locked hand on wrist, securing herself.
He glanced back. She rallied, raised her beautiful but more-than-usually pale face and kissed him on the lips.
“I knew you’d get me, lover,” she murmured. Then her head fell against his back.
He released her and turned in his saddle. The muties had melted back from the clearing on the north side of the bridge. Alysa headed her horse toward where the road ran in among the tunnel of snowy tree branches.
Almost instantly she wheeled back. “Frogs!” she cried. “They’re blocking the way!”
Ryan turned his pinto west, the way the nameless stream ran as it wound its way to the sea.
“Follow me!” he shouted.
“But I’ll get lost!” Alysa complained. “These are bad woods, and I only know the roads!”
“I’d rather be lost and alive than knowing where I am when I’m staring u
p at the stars,” Ryan shouted back. “Wouldn’t you?”
She shook her head, making her long blond hair fly out to one side and then the other. But apparently it was a gesture of despair, not negation. She joined the others lining out after Ryan as he booted his gelding into a gallop.
Branches splintered and sprayed his face with powdery snow. He blinked his eye clear. With the light nearly gone it hardly mattered. He couldn’t see where they were going anyway.
The only thing that mattered this instant was that they were racing away from the frog-mutants.
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, long slowed to a walk, Ryan admitted to himself they were well and truly lost. In his desire to avoid plunging accidentally into icy water he had quickly led his little party away from the stream. Now they followed a narrow game trail—with utterly no idea where it led.
The sky was overcast. Inside the dense forest it was next to coal-mine-shaft black. It was all Ryan could do to fend off the occasional branch hanging at head-level, to avoid having it slap him in the face. Or Krysty, now sitting astride behind him with arms draped over his shoulders, snoring softly into the back of his neck.
Because of the game trail’s narrowness, they had to go single file. Ryan’s pinto had its pink-and-white nose almost pressed to the black tail of Alysa’s horse. Ryan was a skilled enough horseman to know it was an ace on the line the two were herd mates that got along. Otherwise, that sort of poky intimacy would have been an open invitation to a faceful of hooves.
The blood bay stopped abruptly as its rider, slim despite her bulky coat, raised a hand. Ryan raised his own hand to pass the signal back along the line.
His gelding squealed, flattened his ears, and cocked a hindleg for a kick as Mildred’s mule walked right into the horse’s butt. She had probably been dozing in the saddle. Ryan couldn’t rightly blame her.
The mule backed off on its own initiative, with a snort that let the world know it wasn’t giving in to a mere horse.
Alysa pointed a gloved finger ahead, once, twice.
Ryan saw it now; a warm yellow gleam from ahead. Just enough to reveal, as he looked closer, the outline of a not very regular but sturdy-looking pitched-roof house of stone and timber, with smoke trailing out a stone chimney, darker gray against the low overcast sky. He smelled the smoke now, a piney tang that made him suddenly feel the chill he’d been ignoring all the way down through his marrow, and his stomach rumbled with suppressed, unacknowledged hunger.
