Storm Breakers

by James Axler

  The stout woman plunked the bowl on the table between Jak and Doc. Jak’s head jerked up from where he was assiduously trying to clean the last possible dribs and morsels of food from his plate without licking it—something Krysty had sternly warned him not to do in public. He frowned, his ruby eyes looking momentarily distant.

  “My special bread pudding for dessert!” Mama Bear warbled.

  As she began to ladle out portions, Doc’s head snapped up. He looked wildly around, blinking his pale blue eyes. Past him, Ryan saw Alysa go stiff, as if in outrage. Then she looked at Jak, who nodded once, crisply.

  A few heartbeats later, Ryan felt Mildred squeeze his hand.

  He nodded. Message received.

  * * *

  RICKY MORALES’S SKULL felt as if its insides were anvils, and half a dozen ’smiths were pounding out glowing-hot iron ingots on it. He realized he was awake by the gurgling of nausea in his belly and the peculiar taste like copper in his mouth.

  His eyes seemed gummed shut.

  Just before he forced them wide open, he heard a strange voice say, “Can we eat this one, Pa?”

  Ricky froze. The voice was strange, so slurred he could barely understand it.

  I’m dreaming, he told himself without much conviction.

  “Nope.” His hope that it was a dream died. That voice he knew: there was no mistaking Papa Bear’s subterranean growl.

  “But he’s plump and juicy!”

  “He’s young and strong. He can work. Plus he’s got a purty mouth and kind of an apple butt. That might bring double jack when One-Eyed Willy and his bunch come by this morning.”

  The answer was an inarticulate growl. It came with a gust of breath that almost made Ricky betray the fact he was awake by gagging. It was like the stink of a big predator’s mouth, full of teeth with shreds of rotting meat stuck between.

  Santa María, Madre de Dios, he thought, what is happening to us?

  Chapter Fifteen

  J.B. stood in the middle of the road located between the steep banks of a natural cut that led down the gray karst cliffs of the Cumberland Plateau to the Nashville Basin of what had been Tennessee. A cheroot like the ones Rance Weeden smoked was stuck in his mouth, and a smile spread out to either side of it.

  Down that narrow gulch, straight toward J.B., came a pair of Trader’s wags, throwing up bow waves of dust, rolling as if seven devils were on their trail.

  As indeed they were. The Seven Devils Motorcycle Club was a long-established coldheart gang originally operating out of the ruins of Nashville. The Seven Devils, so J.B. had heard tell, were nominally ethnic Chinese. Like most such groups they had been diluted considerably since the Megacull. Now they were made up of all kinds of people, largely of Asian descent but some of everybody. The bosses, though, tended to be the ones with the most claims on Chinese heritage.

  This was information J.B. remembered only because he’d heard it recently, as part of his mission briefing. It wasn’t the sort of stuff he cared about enough to retain.

  Trader had sent a fast cargo and a blaster wag Toyota Tacoma to snatch some prize item of scavvy. It was a raid, pure and simple: high-reward, high-risk. Because the important fact about the Seven Devils club was that it was extremely proprietary about its turf, and everything above, on, or beneath it. The odds were good, or bad, that they’d be spotted and perhaps be zeroed out.

  That was why only volunteers went along, led by one of Trader’s most able, and daring, lieutenants.

  The cargo wag, a Dodge panel truck, slewed and skidded to a halt with its front bumper less than a yard from the slight, skinny kid standing in the middle of the road. The driver, a dark-skinned woman named Joanie, gaped at him as if he’d landed from a flying saucer right before her wide eyes.

  An instant later the blaster wag crunched and squealed to a stop next to it, its right side scraping bushes. A head with a long topknot sprouting from it like a horse’s tail appeared over the roll bar at the back of the cab.

  “What the nuking fuck?” Abe demanded. “Why are you standing in our way, you feeb? You could of got run over.”

  “But I didn’t,” J.B. said, not trying not to smirk.

  Joanie stuck her head out the window. “Move!” she shouted. “We gotta go! They’re right on our asses!”

  “I reckoned.”

  “Where’s the rest of your bunch?” Abe demanded. His eyes practically popped from his weather-beaten, lushly mustached face as he scanned the weeds to either side for signs of the promised blocking force.

  “Sent ’em home.”

  “You did what?”

  “You dark-dusted spawn of a gutter slut and a stickie, what in the name of glowing nuke shit made you do a triple-stupe thing like that? You’re gonna get us all chilled.”

  “Nope.”

  “Here they come, boss,” shouted the gunner from behind Abe, facing backward over the tailgate with the butt of an M-240 machine gun mounted on a pedestal bolted to the bed of the truck. It was a 7.62 mm general-purpose machine gun like the M-60, made by FN in old Belgium. To J.B.’s critical mind it was a much superior weapon to the M-60 made in America back in the day.

  “Fuck!” Abe shouted. “We gotta roll. Move out the way. Better yet—Joanie, run this feeb the fuck over!”

  “Got it boss,” the short-haired woman said.

  Even as she ducked her kerchief-wrapped head back inside the cab and reached for the steering-column-mounted shifter to run over J.B., a similar blaster wag came rolling out of the cut not fifty yards behind. It was full of men and women dressed in black, most sporting topknots like Abe’s, yelling like mating cats and brandishing an assortment of blasters and cutting weapons.

  And right behind them, dust suddenly boiled from both sides of the cut, like curtains drawn across the road.

  Everybody turned to look—and turned to stone. Seeing something odd in her wing mirror, Joanie stuck her head out the window. Abe’s topknot whipped out to the side. The Devils’ wag actually panic-braked to a dead halt, slewing fifteen degrees to its left.

  A rippling crackle split the afternoon air. A blast wave rolling out of the gully rocked the Seven Devils wag forward on its suspension, then washed forward to whip Abe’s topknot from his shoulder where it had only just settled. The rolling overpressure hit J.B.’s face like a giant blowing on him.

  All hell broke loose behind the coldheart vehicle. Boiling clouds of gray dust completely obscured the passage from the height. Chunks of limestone started to fall back into the cloud from high above.

  “Sent my bunch home,” J.B. called, taking the cheroot from his mouth, “because I reckoned I didn’t need ’em. If your gunner knows his job, that is.”

  “Light ’em up!” Abe yelled.

  The Tacoma rocked forward again as the M-240 cut loose. The 7.62 mm weapon was a powerful beast, though nothing to compare with the lordly .50-caliber Browning M-2. Ma Deuce was J.B.’s personal favorite, and along with everything else he was eternally grateful to Trader—and Rance and Ace—for allowing him the opportunity to get hands-on and work with some for the first time in his young life.

  But it was enough to do the job on a target as soft-skinned as a mere pick-’em-up truck. To say nothing of the occupants. The horizontal sleet of 150-grain full-metal-jacketed slugs poked right through the grille and the radiator, sending up a cloud of white steam, and were still moving plenty fast enough to bust the engine block to shit.

  They ripped through the faded blue cab of the Dodge Ram, taking no more notice of the bodies of the driver and the Devil riding shotgun than they had of the steam they had passed through to get them. The eight or ten coldhearts packed improbably tight in the truck bed around their own pintle-mounted M-60 danced as if somebody’d tossed a hornet’s nest in with them.

  Briefly. Gas from a ruptured fuel line, or the tank itself, blossomed into yellow flame that enveloped the whole wag.

  A few bailed out. Only one got caught in the fire-flare, and that one had sense enough t
o roll in the dirt and douse the flames on his black shirt and loose trousers.

  Meaning that that coldheart lived a heartbeat or maybe two longer than his or her companions who’d jumped, because Abe’s machine gunner enthusiastically pumped bullet sprays left and right of the blazing wag.

  Joanie turned back to look at J.B. from her window. If her dark eyes had been wide before, when they saw J.B. standing right in the way of a few tons of hurtling metal death, now they were like saucers.

  “Booby?” she asked.

  “You got it,” he said, stuffing his smoke back between his lips.

  Abe’s head snapped back and forth several times between the burning wreck and the now-blocked road down from the Cumberland Plateau becoming visible behind it as some of the dust settled. J.B. laughed. It was funny to watch.

  “Trader let you walk away with enough plas-ex to blow up the whole nuking patrol?” Abe demanded. “We must’ve had, like, twenty bikes behind us.”

  “Oh, dark night, no,” J.B. said around the cigar. He didn’t like the taste of the long, skinny black smokes, truth to tell. But they looked cool when Rance smoked them. He did like that.

  “But I did sweet-talk Ace into letting me have a few blocks of C-4 plus detonaters.”

  He could see Abe’s shoulders rise as he sucked in a deep breath.

  His lips pooched out under his mustache as he let loose a long, gusty sigh. “You’re that crazy, kid,” he said, “but you’re really that good.”

  J.B. laughed. “Yeah. Get the goods?”

  “Yeah.” Abe’s gyros were still so tumbled by the unexpected break of recent events he didn’t even take offense at being grilled by the youth.

  “Then what’re we waiting for? Give me a lift and let’s roll.”

  * * *

  “NOW, YOU GET away from there, Bunky Boy,” Ricky heard Mama Bear said in tones of stern reproof. “You done heard your papa.”

  “Yessum, Aunt Mama.”

  The hot, wet, stench-laden breath went away. With all his might Ricky willed one eye to open just a crack, the one away from the voices of Mama and Papa Bear.

  He saw a room, dark but for starlight pouring in a window half-covered by frost, and a spill of mustard-colored gleam from a fish-oil lantern burning through the open door that led to the kitchen. That was enough for him to make out several beds with still, blanket-covered forms in them. He recognized the room as the large dorm-style one in its own annex that they’d been shown before dinner. He had no memory of getting there.

  Shapes moved between the beds. Still mentally fogged for some reason, Ricky couldn’t quite make out how many there were in the darkness. Several. There seemed something...not right about them.

  “We save the women, too. Got that, you little simps?”

  “Now, Papa Bear,” Mama Bear said. “You got no call being mean to our young’uns.”

  “The blonde and redhead are beautiful. They’ll fetch double-high prices for that. The black one’s pretty enough, sturdy and can work.”

  A short, stooped shape moved in between Ricky and the next bed. From the long white hair on the rolled-up frock coat that served as a pillow, Ricky saw that its occupant was Doc. Bracing overlong arms on the plank floor, the figure leaned a muzzlelike face in close and sniffed at the upturned right ear.

  Then it swiveled its head to stare back at Ricky with a horrible parody of a human face, one drawn out into something more like a dog’s snout that grinned at him with horrible sharpened teeth.

  Ricky steeled himself not to move or cry out. This can’t be happening! he thought.

  The air in the room was almost unbearably thick with the stench of filth, stale piss, sweat and decay.

  “Well, who can we eat, Pa?” asked another horribly slurred voice from Ricky’s left.

  He opened that eye by less than the length of the lashes. Another figure stood there, this one tall and gangly, a skeletal figure loosely hung with tattered, partially patched overalls with one shoulder-strap dangling before a sunken, flannel-clad chest. The face seemed oddly asymmetrical, one eye markedly lower than the other, and smaller, as well. The mouth was a loose-lipped, lopsided gape—also full of pointy teeth.

  Ricky realized what had happened. They’d all been drugged, and now they were helpless in the hands of a clan of inbreds. Cannie inbreds.

  “Eat the albino and the oldie,” Papa Bear directed.

  “Aww, Pa,” said a third misshapen son from the far side of the bed to Ricky’s left. Where, he now saw from another head of white hair, Jak lay with red eyes closed and mouth hanging open. A trickle of drool ran down onto the stained covering of his straw-tick mattress.

  The inbred next to Jak’s bed was like a shorter version of his father—almost as wide as he was tall, with a hugely oversize forehead and almost invisible lower jaw. His upper jaw showed plenty of filed teeth, though.

  “Don’t wanna eat no taint meat,” the fat inbred whined.

  “And the oldie’s stringy,” complained the doglike son on Ricky’s other side.

  “Don’t whine, now, boys,” Mama Bear said from the foot of Ricky’s bed. “Slavers’ll bring some nice tasty culls for us. You’ll see.”

  “Whabbout the one-eye?” asked the gaunt one.

  “He’s a nice, strong one,” Mama Bear said. “And so handsome. Got a lot of work in him, I bet.”

  Standing by the door to the main house, Papa Bear scratched his chin through his beard. “But a fighter. You can tell just to look at him. Mebbe more trouble than he’s worth. Lemme calculate.”

  He emitted a gravelly chuckle. “Funny how they all fell for the doped dessert trick. Even the tough ones allus go for that.”

  Just in time Ricky stopped himself from groaning aloud. He could hardly believe that he and his companions would be brought to an end by this tribe of inbred half-wits.

  He steeled himself for what he knew now he would have to do. There was no hope he could save himself, much less his drugged-out friends. But dying fighting was preferable to whatever they wound up doing to him.

  “You’re a genius, Pa,” a fourth son said, reaching an inhumanly long hand down to stroke the unconscious Krysty’s hair almost shyly. Like the first inbred Ricky had seen, this one was small, scarcely larger than a ten-year-old norm, and with long arms and semi-quadrupedal posture, seemingly more animal than man.

  He looked over at his father. His face showed a less pronounced snout than his brother’s.

  “Can we play with the women first, Pa? Please?”

  Papa Bear frowned. “Slavers don’t like paying for spoiled merch, Leon.”

  “Aww, come on,” Lee whined. “We never have any fun.”

  “Let the boys enjoy themselves, Papa Bear,” Mama Bear said. “What the slavers don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “Well,” Papa Bear growled. “Not the blonde. She’s prolly a virgin. They’ll pay triple for that.”

  “Yay!” the fat son flapped blubbery hands together and teetered in a circle in place for joy. “Dibs on the redhead bitch!”

  “Your fat ass, Chad,” Lee hissed.

  “Don’t fight, now, boys,” Mama Bear said with an indulgent chuckle. “Plenty to go around—and meat, too. You’ll see. As for me—”

  Ricky’s belly turned over and his scrotum shrank as she looked down at him. He reflected briefly just how little he’d gotten to use that latter assembly in his too-brief life.

  “—I reckon your pa won’t mind too much if I play some with this chubby little one.”

  She leaned down toward him, her massive breasts making oceanic movements beneath her heavy sweater.

  “He’s so sweet,” she said as her horrible round face came close to his. “I could just take a big ol’ bite out of him. In fact—”

  Just inches from his cheek, she opened her mouth wide. Her teeth, too, were filed wicked-sharp.

  Ricky couldn’t hold his terror in any more. He opened his mouth to scream.

  A strange, wet, ripping sound stopped
him.

  Mama Bear’s pig eyes had gone circular. Her mouth opened farther, but it did so obviously out of shocked surprise.

  Ricky turned his face up, opened his eyes wide and saw six inches of narrow red steel sticking at an angle out of the right side of Mama Bear’s thick neck. On the other side, his own right, he saw a slim glinting blade going in.

  Astonished as he was, he knew weapons, and that was Doc’s sword, which meant—

  Mama Bear screamed. Blood sprayed Ricky’s face. As the blade slid back out of her neck with a squelching sound, she threw her fat hands to her throat and tottered backward, blood spurting from both sides and from her wide-open fanged mouth.

  “You old bastard!” shrieked the inbred to Ricky’s right. “You chilled my ma!”

  He reared back to lunge at Doc, who had leaned out of bed to stab Mama Bear with his left hand and was still in a vulnerable position.

  Ricky launched himself onto the stooped back. Squealing with rage, the inbred tried to turn his muzzle to snap at Ricky’s face. To save himself, Ricky, his arms around the narrow chest, had to press his face into the back on the creature’s neck.

  This close, the smell of corruption acted almost like a mix of tear gas and nausea gas.

  Ricky puked down the inbred’s right arm as the kid clawed and waled on him with his overlong hands. He got his legs locked around the inbred’s waist and stuck his right arm, clotted and sopping with his own vomit, around the horror’s throat. Fortunately the attenuation of the face made it fairly easy to do so without getting bitten.

  Ricky reached out his left hand to grab his right wrist and squeezed, hoping to choke the raging inbred to unconsciousness before talons or fists did serious damage to his shoulders and back.

  Around him the dark room erupted into furious action.

  The cannie threw himself on his back on top of Ricky. Though he didn’t weigh much, his unexpected maneuver knocked the air out of Ricky.

  He felt his grip slacken. The inbred squealed in vindictive glee. It began to twist around to bite a chunk from Ricky’s unguarded face.