by James Axler
“Close that nuking hatch!” Ryan roared, twisting the steering wheel to try to fishtail the massive machine. The plan was to throw off the stickies, but the shock absorbers and springs of the predark military wag did their job too damn well, and the UCV only gently swayed, maintaining an even keel.
Aiming upward, J.B. put a long burst from the Uzi into the open hatch, and an aced stickie fell inside to land sprawling on top of the headless corpse. But there also came the terrible sound of a ricochet, and a 9 mm round zinged wildly inside the transport to finally slam into the driver’s seat.
Jerking forward, Ryan braced for the onslaught of pain, but he only felt something smooth and mildly uncomfortable pressing against his spine. Son of a mutie bitch, even the fragging inside of the UCV was armored!
Hooting curiously, two stickies appeared in the open hatchway and started easing bonelessly inside. Shooting upward, Krysty and Mildred cleared the opening, while Doc and Jak rigged more rope and hauled the hatch back into place. But almost immediately, it started jerking and moving, as the stickies tried once more to get it open.
“If you got any clever ideas, old buddy, now would be the time!” J.B. called, keeping the Uzi pointed at the shaking hatch. There was no way to ace the stickies on the roof without exposing the people inside, and sooner or later the muties would rip open the hatch again.
“Working on it!” Ryan shot back, shifting gears as the wag raced along the main street of the predark ruins. He was virtually driving blind by now, there were so many stickies covering the windshield. Every time Ryan shifted position, they did, too, always looking directly into his good eye and flapping their mouths in endless hooting.
Reaching an intersection, Ryan saw the drugstore flick past, and sharply banked the wag onto the next street. He had only seen the thing briefly in passing, but if he was right…
And there it was! A skyscraper of some kind, the entire outside composed of shiny glass windows.
“Hold on!” Ryan bellowed, giving juice to the roaring engine. “I’m going get rid of the damn stickies right fragging now!”
Quickly figuring out what was coming, the companions scrambled for the jumpseats, pulled down the bodybars and those who believed in a higher power said a little prayer.
Engaging the second engine, Ryan threw the UCV into high gear and charged straight for the skyscraper at maximum speed. In the beams of the halogen headlights, the Deathlands warrior could see the reflection of the onrushing war wag, the stickies and himself hunched over the wheel in the towering wall of predark glass. Then he plowed into the ground-floor window with a noise louder than the end of the world.
Chapter Eight
Huffing slightly, Thunder and Lightning sat alongside each other in the middle of an open field, the low grass stirred by a gentle wind. The bulky machines stood over fifteen feet tall, the double row of truck tires inches deep in the soft ground from the tremendous weight of the armored behemoths. Attached to the rear of each massive engine were three long trailers, the sides covered with thick wood planks, the tops bristling with broken glass and barbed wire.
Sitting on a folding canvas chair, Olivia Parker was getting her curly hair trimmed by the new healer, who was going as slow as possible to make sure he did a good job. Nearby, a fat cook was frying sausages over a small campfire while her assistant was cutting up wild turnips.
A short distance away, several muscular crewmen without shirts were industriously chopping wood, their axes rising and falling with dull monotony, and another group knee-deep in a stream was drawing water with plastic buckets, then filtering it to remove as many impurities as possible. The predark steam engines were tougher than boiled hate, but the delicate brass valves that regulated the internal pressure were persnickety little bastards, Olivia thought, and absolutely demanded clean water. Back at her home base in Topeka, the trader had a full installation for turning out endless gallons of chem-free water, the stuff so fragging pure you could literally drink it like shine. But out here in the wilds, bedsheets would have to do for a while.
That was the best thing about the colossal machines, Olivia mentally noted with swelling pride as the shearing continued. Thunder and Lightning ran on wood and water. Not juice or shine. Just plain wood and water, available damn near anywhere! Well, except for the Great Salt, but there was nobody there worth trading with, and nothing worth looting.
Recovered from a railroad museum, it had taken Olivia close to a full year to get the antique steam engines running again, and then another to mount them on truck tires. The axles had been the hard part, as the metal kept bending under the colossal weight of the railroad engines. That problem had been solved by simply adding more tires, and then even more tires. But now the armored, thirty-six-wheel steam trucks were unstoppable juggernauts, fully capable of crossing the worst sections of the Deathlands at staggering speeds of over sixty miles per day. Sixty! It was incredible, but true.
Leaving the mudhole where she had been born, the former bartender had slowly built up her business, first by hauling logs to make new walls for damaged villes, then by carrying pilgrims through hostile mutie territory, and then by actually trading goods. Jerked fish from the West drew a high price in jack from landlocked villes, many of whom had never even seen a fish before, and steel recovered from predark ruins was as valuable as brass in a blaster. Veggies for shine, shine for lead, lead for seed corn, corn for black powder, black powder for veggies. Round and round, on and on, season after season, the circle of commerce never stopped for anybody smart enough to get a wag rolling and tough enough to not be aced.
So far, this had been a particularly good season for the lady trader, but now with the discovery of Cascade, it promised to be the best ever. An untouched predark ville! She could not even begin to imagine what they had to trade!
“Chief?” a crewman asked, ambling over. “Hey, Chief!”
Olivia raised a hand to stop the cutting. “Anything wrong?” she demanded.
“Can’t really say,” the fellow said hesitantly, shifting the longblaster slung over his shoulder. “But there’s something funny going on at the top of a tree to the south of here.”
Feeling her hackles rise, Olivia frowned. “Define ‘funny.’”
“Little flashes of light. Kind of on and off. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Show me,” the trader commanded, yanking the towel from her neck.
Dutifully, the crewman passed over a pair of binocs.
Adjusting the focus on the binocs, Olivia scanned the south side of the field and easily spotted the tree in question on the other side of a ravine. There was somebody nestled in the upper branches, doing something with a reflective piece of glass or metal. Mebbe a mirror? Could be. But whatever the fellow was doing, it was no threat to her trucks. The tree was a good quarter of a mile away, and no blaster in existence could shoot that far. Even if the feeb was trying to summon stickies—unlikely, but possible—it would take the muties hours to cross the ravine. Stickies were rather similar to her former bedpartner, fast at the start, kind of sloppy and slow to finish.
“Excuse me, Chief,” the healer said. “But I think that’s Morse code.”
The flashes were a code? “Can you read it?” Olivia asked curtly.
“A little, yes, ma’am.”
Olivia passed over the binocs. “Show me.”
“That’s strange,” the healer muttered. “This is just a string of letters, but they don’t spell anything.”
“Show me.”
“S…t…m…e…n…g…d…w…n…a…t…t…k…n…w,” he said. “Then it repeats. Nope, now it stopped.”
“Sounds like gibberish,” the crewman said with a sniff. “Just some kid playing with a piece of glass.”
“In a tree?” Olivia asked with a scowl.
He shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
“On the other hand, it might just possibly be words spelled by somebody who is not very well educated,” the healer stated.
Brus
hing some loose hair off her cheek, Olivia scowled. She didn’t like the sound of this. Was it badly spelled words or actually a code within the code? Starting to get uneasy, the lady trader repeated the letters to herself, then tried to pronounce them as words. “Sta…me…nug…dew…won…at…tick…nawa.” At tick…attic? She tried again. “Stame nug dew…dune. Dune attic nawa.” Or was that new? “Dune attic new.” That almost sounded like attack now…
Suddenly the letters rearranged themselves in her mind, and she read the coded message in growing horror. Steam engines down, attack now.
“Red alert!” Olivia bellowed, pelting for the steam trucks. “Coldhearts on the way! Get the blasters! We’re going to be jacked!”
But even as she said the words, a pair of contrails appeared high in the azure sky, the white streaks tipped with fiery little arrows. Knowing it was already too late, Olivia grimly pulled her blaster and started blowing lead at the sky, as the missiles crested an arch, then came hurtling straight down for the motionless steam trucks.
A few seconds later the missiles hit and a terrible light violently filled the universe, throwing Olivia backward into a pool of inky blackness that seemed to have no bottom.
THE UNIVERSE EXPLODED into sparkling chaos, and the stickies were horribly sliced to ribbons, their mottled forms brutally grated off the speeding UCV. Crashing onto the marble floor of the lobby, Ryan held on for dear life as the armored transport slammed into a reception desk, plastic plants and little name badges flying in every direction. Careening off a marble pillar, the war wag rammed through another set of glass doors, removing the last of the stickies, then it steamrolled over row after row of work desks, a blizzard of ancient documents and dust exploding around the unstoppable urban combat vehicle.
Cubicle partitions were smashed aside, the particleboard violently returning to its original components. Skeletons in suits and dresses crunched under the military tires, and a large copier erupted into electrical wiring and a strange black dust. Using all of his strength, Ryan managed to just avoid a head-on collision with another marble pillar, scraped past an elevator bank, cleaved some kind of an art exhibit in two, and hurtled into another glass wall.
Landing on the sidewalk with a bone-jarring impact, Ryan crushed a mailbox and destroyed a newsstand before speeding across an empty parking lot. The stickies were gone from the windshield, but their bodily fluids still coated the Lexan plastic to murky levels, and Ryan only spotted the group of startled people sitting around the small campfire just in time to avoid smashing them to pieces. However, the horses tethered nearby were not so lucky, their death screams and red blood filling the night air.
“Dark night!” J.B. cursed furiously.
“If any of the stickies follow after us…” Krysty didn’t finish the sentence.
The pilgrims would be at the mercy of the enraged muties, Ryan realized in grim certainty. For one long moment the one-eyed man seriously debated just to keep driving. The outlanders in the parking lot were not kith nor kin. He owed them nothing. Except that I aced their bastard horses, and that’s the same thing as chilling them myself. The decision made, Ryan worked the gas and the brakes while shifting gears and twisting the steering wheel.
“Get ready!” he bellowed, cutting off one of the engines. “We’re going back!”
But as Ryan turned the huge transport around, the headlights illuminated a scene of horror. A mob of hooting stickies had followed after their vehicle and was attacking the pilgrims. Still reeling from the arrival of the war wag, the norms offered no organized resistance and were brutally slaughtered as they tried to draw blasters and load crossbows.
Even before the last norm fell, the muties started eating, gobbling and hooting in delight as they ripped off chunks of warm flesh, a few of the fallen norms still weakly trying to flee.
A cold anger filled his mind at the sight, and Ryan flipped a switch to lower the bomb scoop, the steel forks leveling a couple of yards off the ground. Stomping on the gas, he engaged the second engine, and the UCV roared with barely controlled power as it plowed into the feasting stickies, their hands and mouths full of steaming gobbets of flesh. There was scarcely a jar as the megaton machine rammed through, leaving behind bloody ruination.
Circling once around the chilling field, Ryan could not see any more stickies, and angrily tromped on the brakes, bringing the huge transport to a rocking stop.
“All right, recce for any survivors!” he commanded, pulling out the SIG-Sauer. “J.B. is the anchor. I’ll stay at the wheel.”
“My dear sir, do you honestly think any of these poor people are still alive?” Doc asked, sheathing his sword with a click. The parking lot was strewed with body parts and intestines, norms and horses mixed together indiscriminately. Apparently the stickies preferred internal organs over arms and legs.
“Somebody may have escaped into the ruins,” Ryan offered hesitantly, feeling the swell of rage begin to fade.
“Not likely.” J.B. sighed, tilting back his fedora. “But we gotta take a look. I wouldn’t leave a cannie at the mercy of the stickies.”
“No need,” Jak stated, his face pressed against the dirty window. “There six saddles, six horses, six men.”
“Which means there are no survivors,” Krysty added gently.
“Damn,” Mildred whispered, the word preternaturally loud inside the armored war wag.
For a long moment nobody spoke, and there was only the soft rumble of the powerful engines in the moonlit night.
“All right, spot anything we can scavenge?” Ryan asked without any emotion. There was nothing he could do to help the aced outlanders, so his job now was staying alive.
“Not really,” J.B. said, studying the corpses. “We’re wearing better boots, and their blasters are crap, old stuff held together with iron wire.”
“Lots of horsemeat,” Jak drawled. “But it covered with stickie blood.”
“I’d rather starve,” Doc intoned, his hands busy purging the LeMat. He was using a brass brush to clean out each firing chamber, the spent powder sprinkling to the floor like black snow.
“Then let’s get out of here,” Ryan relented, shifting the war wag into gear once more. “We’ll try for the redoubt to the north, and see how far we can get before running out of juice.”
As the urban combat vehicle started to pull away, Mildred muttered something in the weird language she called Latin, and Krysty said a brief prayer to Gaia.
“Ashes to ashes,” Doc added out loud. “Dust to dust…”
Suddenly the radar gave a soft ping, closely followed by another, then the tones started coming fast, and down the block a side street was filled with the harsh glare of electric lights. Incredibly, three war wags turned the corner. Two of the vehicles were converted Mack trucks, probably just cargo carriers. But the third was a monster, covered with armor and blasters, and easily ten times the size of the urban combat vehicle.
“I know that wag,” Ryan said in astonishment. “It’s War Wag One!”
“Impossible, sir!” Doc retorted. “That vehicle was destroyed by Gaza in the Great Salt! So unless…Oh my dear God…” His face flushed, then went deathly pale.
“Theophilus, we have not traveled back in time,” Mildred said clearly, trying to reassure the trembling man. “This is just a similar war wag, nothing more.”
“Are you sure?” he asked in a ghostly voice, hugging the LeMat to his chest.
“Absolutely.”
Nodding, the man visibly relaxed and concentrated on reloading his black powder blaster as if it were the most important thing to do in the world.
“Sorry, Millie, you’re wrong.”
Mildred turned. “John?” she asked.
“That thing is not similar to War Wag One,” J.B. stated firmly. “It’s exactly the same. I remember the details of wags and blasters, and this is the same damn machine that fought the Scorpion God. Same size, same color. Dark night, it even has a chem laser on the roof!”
“Then who are
they?” Krysty asked, leaning forward, a hand resting on her blaster. “Hopefully not kin of the deceased, or else we’re in for a hell of a fight.”
Angling off the street, the three war wags stopped at the far end of the parking lot. The drivers did nothing for a while. Then arc lamps slowly brightened in power, the spotlights sweeping the parking lot, looking over the bodies, the UCV and the predark office building behind.
“Get ready to run,” Ryan said, slipping the gears into reverse. The other wags were big, but that much armor would make them slow, while the UCV was lightning fast. Their own armor would offer some protection against the machine guns and the rockets from the others, but that laser—if it worked—would cut them down in a heartbeat with the UCV’s huge windows.
Just then, the radio crackled with static, and the ceiling speaker came to life with a squeal as it automatically matched frequencies.
“Big Joe to Scorpion,” a man said. “Any idea who the frag these assholes are?”
“Tiger Lily to Scorpion,” a woman added. “What in nuking hell are they driving? I’ve seen a lot of weird-ass wags in my life, but that thing has more glass in it than a greenhouse!”
In the gunnery seat, J.B. looked meaningfully at Ryan, and the one-eyed man nodded in agreement. Scorpion—as in the Scorpion God. Yeah, he knew who they were dealing with now. That was both good and really bad.
“Mebbe it’s a converted schoolbus,” Big Joe growled. “No, wait, look at the building behind them. They drove that thing straight through!”
“Then those windows aren’t made of glass, or Plexiglas,” Tiger Lily said thoughtfully. “Or any damn thing else I’ve ever heard of.”
“It could be Lexan plastic,” a new voice commented. “If we have to ace these outlanders, try not to damage the windows. We could really use that stuff.”
Lifting the mike from the dashboard, Ryan thumbed the transmit switch. “Weird-ass wag to Scorpion, unless you’ve got lots of spare diamonds, you’re going to have a triple bitch of a time taking us down with that iron pig.”
