by James Axler
As the door cracked open, the black barrel of a longblaster poked right through it. Blue eyes went wide in the old man’s weather-seamed and reddened face, crossing slightly as they stared down the muzzle.
“Not today, Pops,” Ryan said.
Krysty yanked her hand free of the driver’s now-slack grasp.
Colten goggled, then turned to yank open his own door, apparently looking to dive out. He froze as he found himself staring through the mud-streaked glass of his own window down the two barrels of Doc’s absurdly huge LeMat handblaster.
“Just keep coming out, lad,” Doc instructed him. “Only nice and easy, like.”
“You’re talking like a character from a B movie,” said Mildred, emerging from behind a cluster of rocks on the passenger side of the road. Jak came with her. “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it, you old coot?”
“Allow a fellow chronic traveler his indulgences,” Doc said.
“Don’t look at our faces,” Ryan commanded sharply as the two piled out of the truck. Go stand by the ditch, facing away. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
He gestured with his Steyr toward the passenger side of the vehicle. As Krysty stepped back, the older man got out and shuffled around the hood of his wag. He was a big guy, heavyset. He wore canvas overalls over a wool shirt. His son had a mottled tan linsey-woolsey shirt and canvas pants cinched by a rope.
With Mildred and Jak covering the pair with their handblasters, Doc backed around to peer into the shaded bed of the truck.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “I do believe they’re carrying kegs of beer!”
“Shame we can’t crack one open,” Ryan said. “I’ve worked up a thirst, I’ll tell you.”
Holding their hands up by their heads, father and son obediently went and stood by the ditch, looking resolutely away. The rising wind made their baggy clothing snap and flap. The day was getting black, and not just because the sun was already sinking into the heavy hardwood forest to the west. The storm was coming, hard and fast.
As Ricky emerged from his own cover on the driver’s side, holding down on the pair with his big Webley revolver, Ryan slung his Scout carbine.
Then he drew his SIG-Sauer handblaster. Two fast shots cracked out. Colten and his white-haired father flopped face-first in the ditch with 9 mm holes drilled in the back of their skulls.
“¡Nuestra Señora!” Ricky yelped.
“Ryan, did you have to?” Krysty asked quietly, though she already knew the answer.
“Bastards had it coming,” Mildred said, tucking her ZKR 551 handblaster back in its holder. “Bottom line, they were feeding slavers.”
“I didn’t chill them on account of their character flaws,” Ryan said, putting his own semiauto handblaster away. “I did it because it’s the only way to make sure they wouldn’t rat us out.”
Without being asked, Jak dragged the bodies out of the ditch and behind some brush. Ryan nodded.
“Right. Everybody got what they need? Packs all cached? Ace on the line. Pile into the back. Ricky, hand off that novelty longblaster of yours to the people riding in back, and haul your ass into the cab.”
The youth’s brown eyes shone. “Can I drive?”
“No.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
J.B. stepped out from behind a pile of crates. The Remington scattergun bucked hard against his hip bone and roared like a bastard.
A frog mutie, running triple-fast despite its short bandy legs, threw up its webbed and taloned hands as the charge of double-0 buckshot caught it square in the keel bone. It toppled backward and lay kicking its clawed hind feet on the stone floor of the entrance to the cavern system.
Then the youth’s eyes got big. “Dark night!” he yelped. “There’s dozens of them!”
Trader ran past J.B. between the piles of crates. He had his stainless-steel 625 in his right hand. His other supported Marsh Folsom, who was dragging his right leg as if it didn’t work anymore. The leg of his jeans was dark. Despite the fact they were running a three-legged race, the two made good time.
Right behind came Rance Weeden, still bare-ass beneath her hat and shirt, turning back to loose shots at the hopping, croaking horde from her .40-caliber handblaster. Trader had passed her supplies and she’d buckled a web belt with magazine carrier around her waist.
Next came Stang, the burly cargo handler, who was cranking out shots from a lever-gun. A .30-30, J.B. made it by the sound. Bringing up the rear were the two blasters who’d gone with Trader and his top aide, Sciabarra and Morrison.
As J.B. watched, the black, broad-shouldered Sciabarra turned to fire back at the frogs with a handblaster. He kept walking backward as he did so.
He put his heel on a round piece of debris. It and his boot shot out from under him, and the man went down hard on his tailbone.
Worse by far, the frogs swarmed him instantly. One knocked his blaster flying from his hand. Then he spun Sciabarra’s head sideways on his bull neck with a backhand swipe. The muties surrounded the man as he fell back supine on the stone.
“No!” Morrison shouted. He ran toward his comrade, yanking shots off furiously from his Browning Hi-Power blaster at the shambling horrors that blotted Sciabarra completely from view.
“Leave him,” shouted Trader, who had stopped just back of where J.B. stood with his 870. “He’s done for!”
Long arms glistening with fine scales were swung high, flinging sprays of blood from the talons. The fallen man wasn’t making a sound. His slide locked back on an empty mag, Morrison turned and ran to join the others. His bearded face was twisted with grief and helpless rage.
“Let me down, Trader,” Marsh said. “I can shoot.”
Trader shot, too, then they all did. A quick barrage of blasterfire dropped six of the muties, leaving them thrashing on the cavern floor. The rest turned and hopped back out of the line of fire behind a bend.
“I didn’t know they were smart enough to run away,” J.B. said.
“Now we know,” Rance replied, slapping him on the shoulder.
He looked at her. She gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. That made him go warm in the cheeks, the pit of his belly and parts south.
Among the fallen frog muties lay Sciabarra. Even from twenty yards off could tell there remained no life behind the eyes staring unblinking at the ceiling.
“I hate like glowing nuke shit to leave a man,” Trader said, “but I won’t spend blood to buy a chill. You finished here, Dix?”
“Almost,” J.B. said simply, not defensively. Because he didn’t feel defensive. He had done what he could as fast as he could—and Trader himself had told him that doing a proper job was the most important thing of all.
J.B. hadn’t been thrilled at being told to stay behind while Trader and Rance went off to save their friends and zero out the Sov warhead. But he had done it. In part because it was Trader who told him to. In part because he knew it was the right thing.
It didn’t mean he liked it. But that didn’t much matter. From now on, he was resolved to give mind only to the job at hand and nuke what he was feeling.
“Good,” Trader said. He had the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson open. Ejecting the moon clip that held the six empties, he replaced it with another full of fat, round-nosed .45 ACP cartridges.
Slamming the cylinder decisively shut, he said, “Rance, you go watch our way out. Make sure none of the bastards catch us from behind. Rest of you make sure you’re all loaded up. Those frog muties won’t hold off a heartbeat longer than it takes to take reinforcements.”
“Frogs got no blasters?” J.B asked. He was concerned about the ammo they’d just burned through, much less how long they could put up a firefight against a concerted attack. But given that he’d made up his mind to keep his trap shut except for asking necessary questions or giving necessary info, he held off from asking Trader about the ammunition situation. Having done so, he realized Trader was at least as aware of the problem as he was, and that woul
d be a stupe question.
The one he’d asked wasn’t, though.
“Muties don’t use them, that we’ve seen,” Trader said. “But the humans working with them do, which is why we have a couple extras, and some more ammo. Not enough to get frisky with, though. I reckon the frogs are waiting for more humans to turn up and tell them what to do.”
J.B. got back to the job of inserting blasting caps in the plas-ex charges he’d been placing as high on the walls as he could climb on the crates. The claylike Composition 4 blocks, caps and coils of fuse made up most of what he’d stuffed into his backpack back in the room, before setting out to find his friends.
“We’re gonna need a Plan B,” Trader said, moving to cover behind the crates.
“Didn’t disable the bomb?” J.B. asked, crimping red fuse to a cap.
“Never got close enough to look,” Trader said. “Rance and I found the storeroom where they had our buddies stashed double-fast and chilled the frogs guarding them. But not quietly. They landed on us pretty quick—a dozen or so of the hopping fuckers, led by Cosgrove, the slick bottom-dealer I was here to trade with, and one of his pals named Spode. We all had blasters by then, and we gave them a worse surprise than they gave us.
“But Gonzalez, who I brought along hoping he’d be able to work out a way to futz the nuke’s initiator or otherwise make sure nobody was gonna be setting that rad-blasted thing off anytime soon, he got his head popped like a zit by a mutie. Poor bastard. Zap got it, too. You ’bout done up there, Dix? I’m starting to see signs of movement down the way.”
“Got it,” J.B. said. He turned and started to clamber down the crates.
From the darkened place where the cavern narrowed to tunnel landward came a startled cry. Then a thump, and a wet and ripping noise.
Rance Weeden screamed. Though it vibrated with sheer agony, it rang mostly with fury and frustration.
“Rance!” J.B. yelled.
Like a feeb he’d left his shotgun propped against a crate beside Trader. He had no other blaster or access to one.
Not in time to do Rance any good.
He launched himself off the boxes. He hit hard and banged one knee. But mere pain never did deter J.B. much. He launched himself at the hunched, ridged back he glimpsed in the shadows where Rance was.
The frog-mutie sensed the skinny youth’s headlong approach. It spun with surprising speed for its bulk, lashing out with its talons. The rising blow caught J.B. on his chin, laid it open to the bone and knocked him skidding backward on his backside.
Muttering to itself in its weird half-human voice, the monster turned back to its victim, only to be silhouetted by a bright yellow flash that briefly illuminated the whole mouth of the tunnel. The eye nearer J.B. blew out in a spray of gore and ichor.
The monster dropped on its face. J.B. scrambled up once more and darted for Rance even as he heard Trader shout, “Here they come!”
“Rance,” he yelled. “I’ll save you!”
The woman was mostly obscured by shadow. She stood funny, with hips cocked sideways and knees together. The hand that held the handblaster she’d chilled the mutie with hung by her bare leg.
Her left hand was splayed against her middle. It was drenched in blood. To his utter horror Johnny saw the gleam of entrails she was trying to hold into her torn-open belly.
“You can’t,” she said, in a voice taut with pain.
“Rance?” Trader yelled. Blasterfire cracked out behind Johnny’s back.
He didn’t turn. He could only tear his eyes off Rance’s gut wound to look into her pain-filled eyes.
What he saw was steel-hard determination—yet also softness of a sort.
“Trader, I’m done,” she said. “Leave me some blasters. I’ll stand the fuckers off while you get Marsh and the rest clear.”
“But you can’t—” J.B. began, then he shut his trap.
What she couldn’t do was survive that wound. Not here, not now. He saw there was no point in talking nonsense.
She nodded. “Ace,” she said through gritted teeth. “You’re finally learning to think, not just react. Keep...at it.”
She looked around. Blood was pouring down the fronts of her bare legs.
She found her fedora lying nearby and kicked it toward J.B. with the blood-free side of one foot. She gasped at the pain.
The hat flew up at J.B. He caught it and stared down at it as if he didn’t know what it was.
“Something to remember me by,” she said, shuffling toward the boxes and the light.
J.B. stood as if rooted to the stone of the underwater cavern floor, polished smooth by unknown hands and an unimaginable number of feet.
As she made her tortured way past him, she clapped him briefly on the shoulder with the hand that held her blaster.
“We sure had us some times. Take care of yourself, John Barrymore.”
He frowned. The scene was blurring out around him. His mortally wounded former lover was starting to recede from him.
“Go, you rad-blasted fool,” she said. And her face as it dwindled was the most achingly lovely sight he had ever seen. “Go now. Your friends need you—”
* * *
“YOUR FRIENDS NEED you, Mr. Dix,” a feminine voice said. “You have to wake up now.”
J. B. Dix found himself in a world of hurt. His chest felt as if it had been worked over with a cold chisel and sledgehammers.
That’s not exactly how it happened. The words ran through his brain. But she did trigger the charges, dropped the cave ceiling and half the bay on those bastard muties. Of course, Trader and me and the others came within a hair of being sucked back down when the water came surging up the tunnel all around us....
He opened eyes that were older, sadder and infinitely wiser than the ones he’d been seeing through—in his mind’s eye.
A woman’s face hovered over his. After a moment his eyes focused on it; he didn’t need his specs to see this close up.
It was a beautiful face, with huge luminous dark blue eyes framed by black hair sparsely threaded with silver. Yet it was also haggard, with oddly exaggerated cheekbones and jaw.
“What happened to me?” J.B. asked.
“You have been healed of your wound and the attendant infection,” she said. “I am Katerina Frost, wife of Baron Ivan Frost of Stormbreak. Our healer, Lindy Rao, operated on you, saved your life and brought you to the path of healing. We have kept you sedated, longer than she thought was wise, in order to allow the healing process to begin. We know you are an active man. Your friends told us. We feared you wouldn’t stay put long enough to start to heal properly if we let you waken.”
“Where are my friends?”
He looked around. He was in a room with walls painted stark white, packed with tables of medical-looking gear. He smelled the astringencies of alcohol and other disinfectants.
“In danger,” she said.
“Gotta get to them,” he said. He tried to sit up. It felt as if that same sledgehammer that had generally pounded him whacked him right in the middle of the chest, below the sternum.
He lay back down. “Right,” he said. “Not a good idea.”
He rolled his eyes toward her.
“Reckon that’s another reason you had this Rao keep me under so long,” he said. “To keep me from busting out and going after them.”
“This is also true,” she said, straightening. “Nor are you healed yet. Far from it. But—enough. You are a hardy and resilient man. The scars your body already bears prove that. And now your friends need you more than you need rest.”
He managed to struggle up to his elbows on the bed. It hurt like nuke fire. But this time he was prepared for it.
He sat up, gasped, swayed, but held himself upright.
So that was all an anesthetic dream, he thought. It was me, but it wasn’t me. I was never so bold or mouthy. And Trader put me right to work on blasters. I never was a wrench, but there was a Rance in my past. Part real, part dream.
He felt his chest, tentatively. Just because he could handle pain didn’t mean he was eager to handle more of it. His torso was well-wrapped in bandages. Otherwise his skin was bare. The room was just on the edge of cool. He realized by the feel of the air and the smell he was underground.
“Well,” he said out loud, his thoughts still refusing to come into their usual razor-edge focus, “half memory, half hallucination.”
“Fortunately,” the baroness said, “your incisions are healed. They will not break open under exertion. At least the external ones. So Healer Rao tells me, and I trust her skill.”
She glanced aside. For the first time J.B. realized she was dressed to go outside into the sort of brutal Northeast winter night that was the last thing he remembered with any clarity before starting on his drug-fueled voyage to the past. She had a tall black curly-wool hat on her head and wore a long, heavy coat with a collar of what looked like the same stuff.
“Sadly, I had to have her locked away long enough to allow us to leave. She was unwilling to release you from her care. Nor can I risk having her alert my husband.”
“Dark night, why? What’s going on?”
“The change,” she said, which hid more than it revealed, and not just because his thoughts were still socked-in by anesthesia fog. “It comes. And I feel it coming fast.” She shook her head. “I will explain later. Now we must go quickly.”
“Where?”
“To help your friends, as I told you. They are in terrible danger.”
“I can believe that,” he said.
“Can you walk?”
“I got to,” he said without hesitation. “So I can.”
“Lady Katerina,” a calm, masculine voice said. “All is in readiness.”
“Excellent, Caine,” the woman said. “Thank you.”
J.B. glanced toward where the voice came from. A tall, thin, distinguished-looking man with silver hair stood there. He was also dressed for outside, in a bulky parka with the fur-lined hood thrown back.
“Mr. Dix,” the baroness said, “I have had your gear and weapons taken to the motor launch. Now you must dress. And as quickly as you can. We have no more time.”
