Sins of Honor

by James Axler

  “I think it is the other way around,” Sweet Willow stated. “The outlanders are trying to trick the mountain men into following them into the Forbidden City.”

  “Blood for blood?” Iron Fist whispered thoughtfully. “Then perhaps we can help make that happen.”

  “Why should we assist the outlanders to do anything?” Shadow Cliff asked in confusion.

  “To fill our bellies with revenge,” Iron Fist snarled, pulling a knife. Going to a smooth section of the cave wall, he began to scratch a diagram on the hard rock. “But first, we will need a crowbar to open the rusted gate, and torches for the long dark tunnel....”

  * * ** * *

  A THIN HIGH-PITCHED whining filled the world, and Ryan forced his eye open with a groan.

  As expected the man felt sore all over from the concussion of the staggering explosion, and in the distance, the mushroom cloud was still rising and expanding. There was a small patch of clear blue sky directly above the cloud, and the polluted clouds surrounding the area crackled with lightning as if trying to cauterize a wound.

  “Any...anyb-body chilled?” Ryan croaked, the voice barely human.

  “Not y-yet,” J.B. mumbled, slowly extracting himself from around the motorcycle.

  Straightening his glasses, the man blinked the world into focus. Everybody seemed alive and relatively undamaged, just kind of slack in the face as if extremely drunk. Incredibly, the forest looked...well, ragged, as if it had lost a bar fight with some bigger and tougher forest. Most of the branches were bare, the ground covered in a thick carpet of nettles and leaves.

  Scattered randomly around were numerous birds and squirrels, feebly twitching their tiny legs. Then the man saw a stickie sprawled across an elderberry bush. Its chest rose and fell normally, but its arms dangled impotently over the bush, its sucker-tipped hands swaying a few inches off the ground.

  “Stalicky,” J.B. slurred, dragging around the Uzi and clumsily trying to work the arming bolt.

  But before the man could fire, a gunshot rang out and the stickie jerked then slumped completely, pale blood dribbling from the neat hole in its head.

  “Any others?” Krysty asked, glancing around, the S&W hammerless blaster in her fist smoking slightly.

  “Just...the...one,” Ryan observed.

  “Something wrong, lover?” Krysty asked, shaking some leaves from her flexing hair.

  “Not a bastard thing,” Ryan said, forcing himself to stand. The universe swirled around him for a moment, then everything settled back into place and he took a deep breath.

  “Who’s dead?” Mildred slurred, craning her head over the lumpy saddlebags of a motorcycle. A small line of blood trickled from her nose, but otherwise the woman appeared fine.

  “Incredibly...none of us has expired...dear lady,” Doc wheezed, rising stiffly. “Although I...have no way...to account for...such a phenomenon.”

  “B-blind luck?” Betty wheezed.

  “As good a...hypothesis as any.”

  Removing the bits of cloth from his ears, Ricky shook himself like a dog coming out of the rain. “Damn,” he panted. “I’ve never seen anything like that!”

  “Nuke?” Jak asked, opening a canteen to take a long drink.

  “Just a lot more guncotton in the hold than we expected,” Ryan said weakly, pouring some water from his own canteen into a palm, then rubbing his face.

  “Okay, let’s go back,” Fife said, standing tall. “Gotta make sure Angstrom is aced.”

  “You think she lived through that?” a sec man asked.

  “No,” Fife said, pulling the AK-47 from the gunboot of his motorcycle. Deftly, he attached the bayonet. “But I gotta see her corpse before I report it to the baron.”

  “Sure thing, Chief,” another sec man groaned, then gave a ragged laugh. “Hey, mebbe she’s aced, but the APC is still working. Be nice to drive home in that!”

  “Let’s go find out,” Fife said, checking the magazine in his assault rifle.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan snarled, swinging up the SIG-Sauer and firing a fast three times.

  The hard coughs of the silenced weapon startled everybody for a moment, then they were shocked wide awake at a soft hoot coming from within the bedraggled forest.

  As the people clawed for weapons, a stickie stumbled into view, bleeding profusely from a chest wound. It feebly wiggled an injured arm, then eased down to the ground and went very still.

  “I know the triple-stupe bastards love fire and explosions,” Fife growled, hefting the AK-47. “But you don’t think that big blast—”

  He was interrupted by a series of soft hoots coming from the forest, inhuman shapes shuffling in and out of sight behind the bare trees.

  “Get on your bikes!” Ryan commanded, grabbing the handlebars and muscling the machine back onto both tires.

  Rushing forward, J.B. helped Mildred while Doc did the same for Ricky.

  “On the double, people!” Fife said in a normal tone of voice, the assault rifle clenched tightly in his hands. “Ryan, six o’clock.”

  Turning, Ryan scowled at a stickie coming out from behind a birch tree and fired from the hip. The 9 mm Parabellum rounds punched an escape route for life through the misshapen head of the mutie, and it sat with a thump, grayish brains oozing out of the two holes.

  Spotting another stickie, Doc aimed the LeMat, then paused. The telltale boom of the .44 round would draw more stickies. The companions were up and moving, but far from their normal selves, and a pitched battle with an unknown number of stickies would be ill advised.

  Holstering the blaster, Doc pulled the sword inside his ebony swordstick, when there came a hard cough, much louder than the SIG-Sauer, but nowhere near as loud as a regular handblaster.

  The lumbering stickie violently jerked backward as most of its head was blow away by the incoming .45 soft-lead bullet from Ricky’s DeLisle carbine.

  Saluting the marksmanship with a wave of the sword, Doc saw the boy scowl and quickly raise the carbine, then withhold fire.

  With a hideous scream, Betty was dragged into the trees. Red blood gushed as the stickie yanked off big gobbets of flesh from her arm and face, and she fired a flintlock handblaster into its belly at point-blank range.

  Hooting loudly, the stickie flew backward into a pile of nettles, the smoky discharge of the .66 handcannon seeming to repeat endlessly across the vast barren forest.

  Instantly other hoots seemed to come from everywhere, more and more of them every second.

  Grimly, Fife fired a single round from his assault rifle into the dying woman, then shouldered the weapon to climb onto his Harley-Davidson.

  “No need to be quiet anymore,” he snarled, twisting the throttle to rev the engine. Black and gray smoke spewed from the duct-tape-wrapped exhaust pipes, and the flathead engine faltered, then came back strong.

  “Head back toward the battleship!” Ryan commanded, taking off with a roar. “That’s the one direction the bastards won’t be coming from!”

  “But that’s where they’re all heading,” a sec man snapped back. “We’ll be surrounded!”

  “Just stay on my flank!” Ryan snarled.

  As the companions quickly made a triangle-formation, two of the Concord sec men looked at each other, nodded, then turned their bikes around to speed away into the forest.

  “You nuke-sucking cowards!” Fife snarled, drawing the shotgun holstered at his side. He fired both barrels, but the range was too great, and the spray of double-00 went wide, only rattling the bushes and tree limbs.

  Then a piercing shrike came, and one of the sec men raced back into view, blood splattered across the windshield.

  “They got Frank!” he shouted, his face distorted with fear. “Ripped his entire face right off and ate it. Ate it right fragging there!”

 
Still holding on to the throttle, Fife said nothing, his gun hand twitching slightly. The he abruptly holstered the weapon. “We’re heading for the battleship.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, sir!” the sec man replied with a hasty salute. “Lead the way!”

  “You first, Private,” Fife countered, a hand resting on the worn wooden grip of the sawed-off shotgun.

  Casting a forlorn glance at the colonel rings on his sleeve, the sec man shrugged and followed the departing companions.

  “Trouble?” Doc asked, dropping back a little to ride alongside the colonel.

  “Nothing serious,” Fife said, then sharply veered his bike as a group of hooting stickies came out of the woods.

  Their arms waving, the stickies were dressed in rotting strips of cloth taken from their many victims, the mismatched layers only serving to highlight the many differences between them and gene-pure norms. Their eyes never seemed to blink, they had no lips, and their mouths were small, as if they were nearly invisible.

  As the two men shot past the stickies, one of them nearly tagged Doc’s shirt.

  “Wretched monstrosity!” Doc raged, triggering the LeMat.

  The big-bore handcannon boomed, and the stickie fell, pale blood gushing high from the severed artery in its neck. Unfortunately the smell of blood only seemed to excite the others, and more stickies surged toward the two men, trying desperately to reach the tasty man-flesh.

  Unable to reload the sawed-off Remington with one hand, Fife hauled out the AK-47 and put a long burst from the assault rifle into the stickies. The 7.62 mm hardball rounds stitched a line of holes across the creatures, but the bullet holes in their bodies closed after only yielding a few drops of watery blood.

  Swinging the assault rifle like a scythe, Fife used the bayonet to slash open the throat of the stickie, with equally poor results.

  “Head shots, Colonel!” Doc yelled, firing the LeMat six more times. Two stickies dropped dead, and three staggered away, badly wounded.

  Coming to a ragged halt, Fife hastily yanked out the spent magazine and slammed in a fresh one as three more stickies converged on him. Using both hands, he put short controlled bursts into each face, and the creatures fell gushing life. But as he revved the engine, one of the dying stickies grabbed a fender. As Fife started driving, the bike veered to the left. That was when he saw the corpse still firmly clinging to the fender by a sucker-covered hand.

  Fighting to control the bike, Fife hauled out the AK-47 and used the bayonet to hack at the corpse even as several more stickies advanced.

  Firing from the hip, Doc got two, and then two more with the shotgun attached under the main barrel of his LeMat.

  With a sputter, the Harley’s engine started to choke from the blood fouling the intake. Dropping the bayonet, Fife twisted the throttle, trying to blast the engine clear, and it stalled.

  Muttering curses, he frantically tried to get the engine going again, as Doc circled him, firing single rounds from the M-16 assault rifle.

  “Get off and climb behind me!” Doc shouted.

  “I’d only slow you down!” Fife snarled, trying once more to kick the big bike alive. “Leave me!”

  “That is not going to happen, sir!”

  “Go! That’s an order!”

  Suddenly there came the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle, and the head of a stickie exploded, then another, and a third.

  “Get your ass moving!” Ryan bellowed from a small clearing.

  Surrounding him, the rest of the companions, and the last few Concord sec men were now steadily firing their weapons, chilling stickies in every direction. However, every booming discharge served only to attract more of the creatures.

  Working the throttle, Fife tried again, slower this time, gambling his life. In a throaty roar, the engine rumbled with power, and he shot away, almost popping a wheelie in the nettles.

  “Well done, Cam!” Doc laughed in triumph, gunning his own engine.

  “Thanks for saving my life!”

  “Anything for a friend, dear fellow.”

  Staying alongside each other, the two men joined the rest of the group, and everybody streaked away, toward the fading mushroom cloud.

  Curving past the smashed hillock, Ryan saw a lot of the massive chunks of the battleship strewed around, along with several pulped bodies. But there were very few motorcycles, and there was no sign of the APC whatsoever.

  “Looks like Angstrom escaped!” Krysty shouted, darting past a stickie messily consuming a ruined human brain. An eye was still attached, the orb swinging freely from the end of a long white ganglia.

  “Somebody survived!” Ryan shot back, blowing the head off a stickie ripping open the chest of a corpse. “I just hope they don’t know how to operate that laser!”

  “Cows and gasoline, lover!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Ryan growled, angling sharply away from the epicenter of the explosion.

  “Guess this means we better check those ruins,” Fife returned, wheeling his mount around. “Your rad counters better work, or we’ll all be chilled by dawn!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Groggily, Queen Angstrom awoke in total darkness.

  For a moment the woman wasn’t sure if she was awake or not, the blackness was so complete. Blackness and absolute silence. There was only the sound of her own breathing.

  “I’m buried alive,” Angstrom whispered, terrified of getting either a confirmation or a denial. But there was no response, only a dense imposing silence and unrelenting pressure on every inch of her body.

  Dimly, the woman recalled seeing a bright light just before she heard the loudest noise she had ever heard. Then every blasterport and air vent slammed shut, and weird balloons exploded from the walls and ceilings, crushing her helplessly to the command chair.

  Everything after that was total chaos: tumbling, turning and twisting sensations as if she was rapidly spinning, difficulty breathing, monstrous heat, more indescribable noises, and a deep penetrating vibration that threatened to tear her apart. Overwhelmed, Angstrom had finally passed out, absolutely positive that she was on the last train west.

  “But here I am,” she said softly, struggling to move with no success. “Sergeant, are you alive?” There was no response from the rear of the APC.

  Unexpectedly there came a flicker of light. It came and went so fast Angstrom wasn’t sure it had actually happened. It happened again, rippling brightly across every control panel in the APC. The balloons holding her prisoner softened a bit, then collapsed completely.

  Shoving them aside, Angstrom sat upright in the command chair, both hands pressed hard against the smooth armrests.

  “What in nuking hell is going on?” she demanded loudly. The woman was furious, but unable to keep the sound of fear out of her voice.

  Bizarrely, one of the ancient video monitors set into the main control board began to pulse with a soft greenish light, and a single word scrolled across the screen. “Rebooting.”

  Her heart stopped beating for a second. “Hello?” Angstrom called, a hand going to one of the handblasters on her gunbelt.

  “Online, Commander,” the monitor scrolled, and the interior of the APC was flooded with light coming from the main control board, the curved bank set into the ceiling and all of the different size monitors.

  Muttering curses, Angstrom shielded her face with a raised hand. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.

  As more of the controls illuminated, the monitor scrolled, “Unit Designation Unknown.”

  “All right, what are you?”

  “U.S. Army Experimental Prototype LAV-99.”

  The ancient whitecoat words sent an icy spear of fear through her bowels, and Angstrom struggled to breathe. A comp, she was talking to a comp, and it thought she was the former command
er. Desperately she struggled to remember everything the ville whitecoat had told her about predark machines

  “The...the plate on the door says LAV-25,” she said carefully. “You look like a Piranha-class LAV!”

  “Camouflage, Commander. This is an NBC-Class transport, Model 25, generation 99.”

  “Which means?” she snapped impatiently.

  “Experimental armor transport is resistant to nuclear, bacteriological and chemical attacks.”

  “Is that what happened?” Angstrom asked. “Was I nuked?”

  “Checking...negative, sir. Sensors indicate a purely conventional chemical explosion.”

  “Conventional it says!” Angstrom laughed, looking for the sergeant again. This time she found him. The techie was aced. Apparently there were no balloons in the rear of the APC, and he was partially merged with the Harley.

  “Who is going to fix this thing now?” Angstrom muttered furiously.

  “Do you wish to activate auto repair?”

  Listening to her own breathing, Angstrom said nothing, thinking furiously.

  “Sensors indicate damage to all primary and secondary systems.” There was a pause. “No response from the Pentagon or Cheyenne Mountain. Do you wish to activate auto repair?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” she said in a small voice. “Fix everything.”

  Tiny hatches opened all over the interior of the machine and out scampered small machines that resembled black spiders. Scurrying everywhere, some of the spiders swarmed over the corpse in the back, while others popped open the control board and disappeared into the maze of colored wiring. There came ting flashes of light, followed by the familiar stink of hot metal.

  “How long will this take?” Angstrom asked breathlessly, finally holstering her blaster.

  An empty progress bar appeared on a monitor.

  “Six hours, forty-three minutes,” a masculine voice replied.

  “You’re a man?”

  “No. The onboard simulation is gender neutral,” the man said, then it switched to a soft female voice. “Or is this better?”

  “Much,” Angstrom said, settling back into the chair. Whole banks of previously dark screens were now illuminated, words and numbers scrolling by in a speeding blur. “Is that eating a lot of...how much fuel do we have remaining in the tanks?”