Storm Breakers

by James Axler

  The she added, “Eyes front, kid.”

  Glancing briefly back Ryan saw the boy was walking backward, obviously staring back at the brightening yellow glow.

  “Did you set fire to the hotel?” Ricky asked, reluctantly facing forward again.

  “No,” Ryan said. He already had his face swiveling again, his lone eye skinned, scoping the buildings on either side for signs of danger. “I found a warehouse full of cloth, a couple blocks down. I poured the cask of fish oil I happened to have along all over the stuff, left a lit cigarette I rolled out of the tobacco and paper we carry to trade on a crate beside it, so it’d fall down in the oil when it burned down to a butt.”

  Behind them a bell began to ring with frantic urgency. Ryan allowed himself another glance back. The yellow fire-glow had just gotten visibly brighter.

  “And now the hotel’s on fire,” Ryan said with just a flash of satisfaction.

  “The old church retains its steeple bell,” Doc said musingly, “despite the profane purposes to which it has been turned.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Well, we best power out of here now. If we’re lucky, the frogs’ll reckon we’re heading for the docks to steal a boat, instead of taking the long, slow way out of this ville.”

  He led them into an easy lope. Until they had evidence of direct pursuit he saw no reason to blow everybody’s wind running full-tilt. Plus a fast pace would make it hard to spot incidental danger.

  As it turned out they were going too fast anyway. Or not fast enough.

  They were within a couple of blocks of where the street played out into the weeds of the salt marsh, which were ghost-pale in the starlight. The moon had set about half an hour before. The light of the fires behind them was spray-painting a sullen burnt-orange glow on the underbellies of storm clouds rolling in low off the sea as if in pursuit of the fugitives.

  Over the clip-clopping of their boot-soles on the uneven cobblestones, Ryan heard Alysa scream.

  He stopped and spun, raising his SIG-Sauer handblaster.

  At least a half dozen dark, shambling shadows surrounded the young woman. Ryan saw one reel back with its face spurting black from a slash of the girl’s curved sword.

  “Run!” she shrieked after her companions. “Save Milya!”

  A frog hopped at her with arms wide to clutch. She ran it through the chest. It uttered a dismal croak and fell flopping. But the blade was caught in its sternum. Its weight wrenched the hilt from her hand.

  Another grabbed her from behind and picked her up off the pavement.

  Other frogs were emerging from a side street—what had been Alysa’s right, with the main drag two blocks to their left. Apparently a whole passel of the muties had been making for the main street in answer to the church-bell alarm and had spotted the fleeing group at just the wrong instant.

  Another frog went down. Facing the mutie mob, Ricky worked the action of his DeLisle to chamber another round. And short-shucked it, jamming the empty in the breech before the ejector had a chance to kick it free.

  Mildred grabbed his collar from behind. “Come on, kid!” she yelled. “We can’t help her!”

  With a deep hollow tolling like a parody of the perverted church’s bell, a manhole cover was pulled open by the frogs. They clustered around the thrashing captive. Ryan could see her blond hair flying as she battled them.

  But it was hopeless, as were the shots Krysty, Doc and even Mildred sent into the growing mutie pack as some turned to chase the others.

  “We can’t just let them take her!” howled Ricky. He didn’t even flinch as Mildred’s ZKR blasted off right by his ear a second time, though unburned propellants from muzzle and cylinder had to have stung his face and the muzzle-flare scorched his hair. “I know what they’ll do to her!”

  A louder blaster shot cracked between the buildings. With her body halfway down the manhole Alysa’s blonde head snapped back. A black spray hung briefly in the air above her and her stooped captors.

  By reflex Ryan worked the bolt of his Steyr Scout carbine as he brought it back down on target. The echoes of his shot were still rattling up the multi-story buildings that seemed to lean above them.

  Alysa Korn’s body, now lifeless, vanished into the depths beneath the ville.

  Most of the muties had already gone down the hole, or followed the sad, slim chill some of them still clutched. A half dozen hopped in pursuit of the others. But their short, bent legs, powerful though they were, weren’t meant for speed. At least on land. Three more went down to blasterfire, two of them to Ryan’s big 7.62 mm slugs. The rest melted back into the doorways of the dark buildings to either side.

  “Now run,” Ryan shouted.

  * * *

  THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN stood by the entrance to the guard-shack. He held what looked like a single-shot shotgun in his hands and swiveled his head as he stared toward the flames that shot into the sky above the town square. For some reason, the shack showed no lights. In the improvised tin-roofed stable nearby, horses stamped and whickered in agitation at all the noise.

  And, thought Ricky, crouched at a shadowed corner a block to the side of the bridge entrance, from the smell of smoke that was now strong in his nostrils.

  Overhead the storm clouds slid across the stars like a black curtain being pulled by God’s own hand.

  By the barrier that blocked this end of the highway bridge that connected Tavern Bay to the causeway through the marshes, a skinny boy at least two years younger than Ricky stood clutching what looked to the Puerto Rican youth like a Ruger 10/22 carbine. The guards were the same pair who had passed Ryan’s party into the ville in the last hours of the day.

  As he switched his view over his carbine’s iron sights back to the man, Ricky thought they looked more piteous than anything. He felt bad for what was about to happen, in spite of everything he’d just seen.

  He covered the older sentry just in time to see a pallid blur appear behind his forward-slumped left shoulder. A ghost-white hand grabbed him by the forehead from behind, yanking the balding head backward.

  Blood gushed like a black river from a throat slashed open to the neckbones by the hunting knife expertly wielded by Jak Lauren.

  Ricky aimed his stocky longblaster back at the boy. Don’t do it, he willed the kid. Don’t make me—

  But the youth raised his blaster. Even from fifty yards away Ricky could see it quiver as he drew a fast, deep breath and let half of it out.

  The metal plate sheathing the DeLisle’s wooden butt punched his shoulder. This time he worked the short bolt action with his customary smooth skill as the weapon recovered from the mild recoil.

  He had already seen the dark blood-brain spray in the air in front of the young sentry. When he collapsed bonelessly to the cracked asphalt, Ricky knew he wasn’t faking.

  A horse neighed in alarm, then it settled down. Ricky knew Krysty had gotten into the stable and was soothing the nervous animals.

  He flinched, then, as Doc, who’d guarded his back, slapped his shoulder from behind.

  “Time to be on our way, lad,” he said. “Though our escape was seen, it seems our hosts have better things to do than chase after us. Perhaps they are glad enough to see the last of us for the nonce.”

  Ricky cast what he hoped was his last glance ever back over Tavern Bay. The fires Ryan had lit as a diversion blazed brighter than ever.

  Then he followed the oldie’s flying coattails in a mad dash for the horses and freedom.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  J.B. crouched in blackness as complete as any he’d ever known. His heart hammered at his ribs as if trying to break free of them.

  He actually felt it more than the pounding at the back of his head. At least his balance had come back, and the strength in his legs. His nausea had subsided to a low slogging unease that wasn’t hard to ignore.

  The enclosed space and the sense of tons of earth and concrete right on top of him, ready to trap and crush, had aroused his mild claustrophobia, too. That,
at least, he kept in check. There was just too much else to get upset about.

  He saw light. It just didn’t illuminate where he was. The trouble was, it came from two directions.

  One led off to the left. From the ochre glow he could tell it went downward. The other went straight ahead, and widened into a pretty big chamber. Air flowed from both—and in both cases smelled of salt water, and nasty sea muck, like the whole bastard ville.

  That had to be under the town hall, he reckoned. By counting his paces he knew he’d made it at least to below the entrance.

  He had already passed a wide tunnel that led off left—to the old boarded-up church he’d noticed when Trader led them to the hotel, apparently. But just beyond its opening another chunk of cheroot was lying in the main tunnel heading toward the town hall and the waterfront beyond. That showed him the way the frogs had taken Rance and the other captives.

  Somehow his boss had managed to get hold of one of her smokes and break off bits to drop to mark their trail. That was just like her, cool and resourceful, even at a time like this. That would’ve made him love—

  Nuke that, he told himself savagely. Feelings got me into this mess with her. Feelings got my head half-busted.

  Fuck feelings.

  He didn’t need emotions to drive him. He had a job to do. And really, that was all Johnny B. Dix had ever needed.

  He turned left.

  At the bottom the tunnel went off at an angle. Still toward the bay, he figured, but perhaps toward the north end of the waterfront.

  It curved. He thought he could make out the faintest glimmerings of light along the outside wall. Not enough to see by, but he was reluctant to make any light right now. He sensed, amid the residual turmoil in his belly, that he was getting close to his destination.

  He knew well that any light illuminated its source even more surely than whatever it shone on, which, he’d noted, a power of other people tended to forget.

  Hanging his flywheel hand-lantern off his belt, hefting the shotgun by the grip in his right hand, J.B. forged on. He navigated by trailing his outstretched left fingers along the stone.

  The urgency to find and save his friends—not to mention get the nuke out of this reeking death trap—filled and shook his skinny body like electricity.

  The walls grew smoother and clammier to the touch. Condensed moisture started trickling down the back of his hand. The tunnel here seemed to be bored through rock, not stone-reinforced the way the ones under the hotel and the town square were.

  The glow brightened. There was a lot of light coming from somewhere ahead, which meant there was no need to run his hand along the wall anymore. With relief he shook the water off and gripped the pump-action 12-gauge with both hands.

  Ahead the passage opened into a huge chamber. Though the curved ceiling was well lit by what were probably a boatload of lanterns, burning fish oil by the smell, he could see that the floor area was illuminated only in patches. The crates and plastic barrels stored to both sides of a path that led on to open space were especially shadowed.

  Where the tunnel began to widen, a set of steel rungs led down the wall. Glancing up, J.B. saw a circular shaft. It was too black to see up inside it.

  He shrugged and crept forward. He saw no sign of activity. It occurred to him that if he had to fire the blaster, its roar would bring all the muties stuffed into what he realized was a natural cavern system right down on his head.

  Again, he acknowledged the fact and stuck it back out of his consciousness. He wasn’t getting caught, that was triple-sure. He didn’t know what the muties wanted with human captives, though their webbed talons and long curving fangs raised unpleasant possibilities. He blasted-well sure wasn’t letting it happen to him. If that meant he died fighting, so be it.

  But he was determined not to do that. Not because he was so attached to life—which, frankly, kind of sucked, both in general and specific. At least, not only that. What really made him steel his jaw and firm up the grip on the shotgun he hoped not to have to use was that dying, fighting or otherwise, would mean he’d failed.

  He would have once more let down Trader—and Rance. He refused to let that happen.

  Hunched over the shotgun, J.B. advanced cautiously toward the boxes.

  The blaster was snatched right out of his hands. A strong hand clamped over his mouth. Another caught the collar of his jacket and yanked him into the shadows.

  * * *

  RYAN’S PINTO GELDING reared. Just beyond its elevated hooves the flat ground, tan grass wind-blasted free of snow, fell abruptly three hundred feet or more toward an unseen roar of surf.

  He leaned forward, patting its neck and doing his best to speak soothingly to it. He wasn’t sure what had spooked the animal.

  Ryan knew what had excited him. If not exactly spooked him.

  They’d found the slaver base. It lay spread out to the south of them in a sort of broad, squared-off U demarcated by granite cliffs. The one on the far side fell sheer, as this one seemed to. The cliffs behind the level grassland and gravel beaches, at least a quarter-mile high, were less precipitous, although they still didn’t make it easy to approach from the landward side.

  He got the horse pulled back from the edge and settled down.

  Overhead the sky was blue, spotted with clouds. The storm that’d helped blow them on their way out of the mutie-controlled ville of Tavern Bay had passed before morning. Fortunately it dropped snow rather than rain, which would have made an already uncomfortable night worse.

  But another storm was blowing in across the Lantic. From the black rampart of clouds piling up higher and higher in the eastern sky it was going to be a bastard.

  “You think they saw you, lover?” Krysty asked anxiously. She rode her gray mare close, but not too close, evidently out of concern for provoking Ryan’s horse into more risky behavior. Like dancing around on its hind legs right next to a cliff.

  Ryan shook his head. “Doubt it. Anyway, I’m not sure that it makes much difference. People must wander by all the time.”

  The redhead didn’t look convinced. Ryan, for once, felt unsympathetic to her concern. It wasn’t as if they were going to raid the rad-blasted slaver base without running any risks. Why should that be any different from the rest of life?

  “I know,” she said. “I’m starting to feel more and more anxious about J.B., too. And the girl.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “You amaze me sometimes.”

  Her smile was sweet—and promised more than that. “Only sometimes?”

  “Look out there!”

  It was Ricky, bouncing up and down on the back of his palomino pony, which had long since learned to take his antics calmly.

  Ricky was pointing out to sea, where a ship was standing in to shore from the north. It was a big battered freighter, riding high in the water, with white superstructure towers rising at bow and stern.

  “Good timing, Ryan,” Mildred said.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well. It’s time we hit a little luck. Let’s shift out of here to a different scenic overlook, people. Just in case the slavers do send a patrol up here to check.”

  * * *

  A STRONG FEMALE hand clamped over his mouth, J.B. noticed. It felt familiar, too. And he could smell the tobacco still pretty fresh on the fingers that had crumbled it.

  “Rance?” he said. Although it came out, “Mnnss?” with the palm on his mouth and all.

  “What took ya so long, kid?” she asked.

  And there, standing in a small open space between wooden crates stacked higher than his head, holding J.B.’s scattergun and grinning wickedly through his beard, stood the Trader his own bad self.

  “What?” the Trader said. “You thought they’d take me? There’s a reason I’m called the man who was never taken, boy. That isn’t just advertising.”

  “Rmmph?”

  Trader nodded past him. “Turn him loose, Rance. If he didn’t have sense not to squall right here and now, he wouldn’t have
made it this far.”

  The hand came off. He spun and threw his arms around her neck and hugged her tight.

  After a moment she hugged him back. It made him warm to feel again just how strong her arms were.

  After a moment he noticed just how warm she was. Maybe it was just the sea-cave chill made her seem so. But still...

  She kissed him hard. Her tongue probed against his teeth. Almost of their own volition they parted. Her tongue darted into his mouth, caressed his once, then it withdrew and she broke away.

  “You still let your damn temper get the best of you, John Barrymore Dix,” she said. “But good job anyway, you sawed-off little fucker.”

  “You’re naked?”

  Actually she wasn’t. She had on the heavy red plaid wool shirt she’d been wearing to sleep in the cold hotel room. Of course, the temperature wasn’t the only reason they all slept in their clothes.

  But the shirt hung open to reveal the smooth, pale skin right down the inner swells of her boobs to her trim brown bush. She twitched it shut and paid no mind when it promptly fell open again.

  “Buttons all got torn off when the frogs stripped me,” she said. “Clawed off my jeans and scratched my damn legs like a bastard, too. Seems like boy frogs like human girls. And also have parts like human boys. But bigger.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed, Weeden,” Trader said. He handed J.B. the shotgun.

  She laughed quietly. It reminded J.B. of somebody. Somebody male, with a face the color of fresh snow on Pike’s Peak in midwinter. But I don’t know him yet, flashed through his mind.

  Before he could process that, Rance snapped his attention back to the terrible present.

  “Turns out the muties react the same as human men do when you give them a hard shin in the balls. They dragged me off down a side passage to some kind of workshop. Tried to rape me on a worktable, can you imagine that? The two holding on to my arms were so surprised when I busted their pal in the nuts I broke loose and got my hands on a nice four-foot length of bar stock. After that it was all over but the brainpan smashing. Bastards.”