by James Axler
Higher pitched.
Much, much louder.
With a stunning flash and gut-rattling boom, fire blossomed high in a tall tree. As steel shrapnel whistled past, Jak and Mildred pressed harder in the dirt. The legless torso of the Cajun sniper thudded to earth, along with a pile of shattered branches. Then came another earsplitting explosion, and another.
The cannies were tree-topping with RPGs, taking out the sniper hides one by one. The edge of the clearing was lit by burning, shattered pecan and elm. At the same time, the flesheaters put up intense covering fire for their advancing brethren, raining bullets on the cave entrance. More than once Mildred wondered where the cannies got their firepower. More than likely a trader convoy had been overrun.
Fighters from the barricaded opening returned fire. The din of pitched combat became a steady, clattering roar.
From the dark forest, more shadowy figures moved low and fast. Autofire from a hidden position swept over the invaders. Mildred couldn’t see well enough to count them, but there were many. A second later the ground shook under her stomach as a gren explosion took out the Cajun bunker. The acrid smoke was still drifting over her when she heard the cannies pulling the bodies out of the hole.
Harvest time.
Mildred and Jak saw the same opportunity in the same instant. They crawled through the leaves until they reached a wide tree trunk. Peering around it, Mildred saw the cannies bathed in weak starlight, bent over the still-smoldering corpses. They were doing something to the feet, trussing them together, she guessed.
When she ducked back to cover, Jak was nose to nose with her. He nodded, then they both rounded the trunk with blasters up. Mildred, the last ever Olympic pistol shooting silver medalist, had, after her cryosleep thawing, quickly picked up the knack of hitting moving flesh and blood targets. It was a matter of anticipation, of seeing a fraction of a second into the future, of seeing where the bull’s-eye was going to be. No target could move faster than she could aim and fire. When she and Jak jumped out from behind the tree, the cannies weren’t running.
The Czech-made target pistol bucked in her two-handed grip. Her first bullet smacked a kneeling cannie in the side of the head. As he dropped, she swung her sights on the flesheater standing over him and fired again. It was too dark and there were too many enemies for precision work. Her slug hit the cannie under the point of his breastbone, he staggered backward, clutching his chest with both hands. She was aware of Jak’s big Colt popping off, but that awareness was compartmentalized, back-brained; her focus was on acquiring fresh targets. The rest of the cannies abandoned their prey and took to their heels. Mildred swung her sights through the running targets, firing at will. She scored torso hit after torso hit, punctuated by cannies crashing to earth. Then her pistol’s firing pin snapped on a spent primer.
As she turned back around the cover of the thick trunk, Jak touched off his last shot. The Python’s boom echoed through the woods. A fraction of a second later, somewhere off in the humid darkness, a flesheater screamed high and shrill like a baby.
While the cannie survivors poured slugs their way, chipping at the far side of the tree trunk with full-autofire, Mildred and Jak dumped their empties and used speed-loaders to reload. They had taken down six each, but they had no way of knowing how many had gotten away or how many more had moved up to join them. One thing was clear—for Mildred and Jak to jump out again and return fire would be suicide. And it was only a matter of seconds before the attackers flanked their position or one of the cannies chucked a gren their way.
“We go,” Jak said in her ear. “Now!”
Again, Mildred followed the albino youth. As they sprinted away from the tree, near misses skimmed above their heads, slapping into the trunks and limbs ahead of them. Jak turned hard left, heading back for the hillside. It was the only solid, defensible cover they had. Mildred ran for all she was worth, but the albino was too quick. He pulled away from her. Ten feet. Fifteen feet.
As he left Mildred in the dust, a cannie slipping out from the woods blundered right into his path. Jak didn’t slow a step and he didn’t change course. He shoved his revolver into the flesheater’s chest. The Python roared in his fist and the contact wound blew the hapless cannie off his feet and sent him crashing onto his back in the leaves.
Between them and the hillside more RPGs detonated in the treetops, the bright flashes lit up the sky, followed by HE thunderclaps. The smoke from burning cordite hung under the tree limbs like caustic fog. Jak continued to move away from her. He couldn’t help it. Because he could see better and run faster, he had trouble holding himself in check. As he turned, looking over his shoulder to check on her position, a rocket screamed overhead.
With a tremendous whump and a blinding flash, the tree next to Jak exploded, its forked trunk shattered in two. The two halves crashed to the forest floor, and Jak went down under the fall of heavy branches.
Mildred closed the distance. Lunging into the dropped limbs, she pulled the albino teen out by an arm. “Jak! Jak!” she said as she turned him on his back.
His eyes were closed, and blood oozed from a shallow wound on top of his head. She felt at his throat for a pulse and was relieved to find a strong heartbeat.
From deeper in the woods, more cannies were coming. Mildred could have picked Jak up in a fireman’s carry, but she couldn’t have made the hillside with him on her back. She couldn’t leave him, unconscious and helpless for the cannies, even if it meant her own life. She scooped up the albino’s big Colt in her left hand.
As flesheaters burst through the trees, she fired her ZKR 551. The cannies shot back, but they were firing on the run and their slugs went wide. Hers, on the other hand, went exactly where she aimed. She chilled another six in rapid succession, then switched the Python to her strong hand. The Magnum blaster bucked hard in her fist, but she had braced herself for the increased recoil. Like bowling pins, she knocked down five more in rapid succession, sending them sprawling to the leafy carpet. Unlike those hit with the .38, these cannies dropped as if their strings had been cut and didn’t stir after they hit the ground.
Then the shooting abruptly stopped.
She had no doubt that the battle for the clearing had been lost.
Through the trees to her right, Mildred saw about twenty-five cannies rushing for the cave mouth, some carried RPGs. To her left, more cannies charged from cover, heading right at her. With no time to reload, Mildred whipped out her knife, straddling her fallen comrade like a mother wolf protecting its young.
Before she could blink, she and Jak were surrounded by lunging, taunting cannies. She slashed out with her knife, wheeling, keeping them at arm’s length. She knew she didn’t have a chance, but she was determined to send at least one more of the bastards to hell.
“If we all jump her at once, we can git her,” said a lanky, long-haired flesheater.
He should have stepped back before he opened his mouth.
Mildred plunged the point of her blade into his throat, driving it in to the hilt, then ripping it out. As blood spurted from between his grimy fingers and jetted from between his clenched teeth, she was struck in the side of the neck by a club.
The blow wasn’t hard enough to knock her out, but it staggered her and she lowered her knife point. The cannies had their opening and jumped her en masse.
She fought back, stabbing, kicking, punching and elbowing. Every time she drove one of the bastards back, or dropped one to his knees, another leaped forward to take his place. There were too many of them. When her strength finally faltered, the sheer weight of their bodies drove her to the ground and pinned her there. Cannies jerked her hands behind her back and tied them tightly, wrist to wrist. They tied her ankles together, too, but left a couple of feet of slack between them, which kept her from running, but not from walking.
After they dragged her off Jak, one of them snatched hold of his white hair and jerked up his head. The albino groaned and opened his ruby eyes.
“White
meat’s still kicking,” the cannie said with glee.
Before Jak could do anything, they rolled him onto his belly, pinned him and trussed him up the same way they had Mildred.
When the cannies stepped away from them, Mildred saw a familiar, scar-faced bastard bend and pick up her ZKR 551 and Jak’s Colt Python. Junior Tibideau admired the blasters briefly before tucking them into the waistband of his trousers. So, Mildred thought bitterly, leaving him to run at large in the swamp was a grand error.
The fight inside the cave was still raging. There was no way to tell who was winning.
Mildred and Jak were hoisted to their feet as a tall man in a long duster stepped from the trees. He carried a Galil assault rifle, a folding stock, in decent condition. Hanging around his neck on a lanyard was a single-shot, exposed hammer, centerfire shotgun. The rear stock had been sawed off right behind the pistol grip and the barrel cut even with the foregrip.
When the other cannies stepped aside to let the tall one pass, Mildred looked at him closely. Such deference was usually shown only to a feared commander. A gray stubble covered his jaws and scalp; his high forehead was streaked with sweaty grime. Around his throat, hanging down in dozens of coils like a breast-plate, was a necklace made of drilled and strung human teeth. There were hundreds of them.
“Don’t just stand there,” he snarled at the others, peeling back his lips to display a set of strong teeth. “Get this meat moving.”
The cannies shoved Mildred and Jak forward, forcing them deeper into the woods. In a small clearing hidden in the trees, the flesheaters had gathered the living and the dead. Ten battered and wounded Cajun men and women stood to one side, trussed hand and ankle. In a pile on the ground in the middle of the open space were the newly chilled of both sides. Some of the Cajun snipers were in pieces.
A group of cannies labored over the bodies; when they saw their leader emerge from the trees, they doubled their efforts.
Mildred thought she had steeled herself for the worst. She was wrong. She looked on the doings in horror and shock. These debased creatures weren’t just well-organized, they had reduced the handling of large numbers of cadavers to industrial, mass production simplicity. They worked in squads of three. One cannie held a corpse’s ankles stacked one on top of the other. A second flesheater positioned a foot-long iron spike against the top ankle. A third drove the spike through both sets of bones and into the ground with a single slam of a sledgehammer. Long traces for dragging the body were looped around the protruding ends of the spike. They repeated the process with speed and precision, until all the corpses were ready for transport. The loose body parts were then tossed into net bags, which were like-wise rigged for dragging. Nothing edible went to waste.
Mildred looked at Jak. Although she couldn’t read his eyes, she could read the tendons jumping like cables in his neck and forearms. The wild child didn’t like being tied up, and he purely hated cannies. The blood on his scalp had clotted into a dark mass.
“Hurt?” she asked him softly.
The albino shook his head.
Muffled blasterfire continued to roll from the direction of the cave.
“Ryan’s still alive,” Mildred told him. “He has to be.”
The head cannie waved his Galil in the air. “Let’s get out of here,” he ordered his packmates.
Some of the flesheaters slipped their arms through the loops of the tow ropes and headed off into the forest at a trot, dragging the bodies by the ankles, face up, heads bouncing on the ground, arms trailing limply behind.
The other cannies shoved the survivors into a single-file line and herded them forward with rifle butts. Walking was difficult with the short traces on their ankles.
It surprised Mildred that the bastards wouldn’t help their brethren finish the job in the cave. Perhaps they figured that chilling was in the bag, too. Perhaps they were following an already agreed-on plan to split up. Or perhaps they were skipping out with the goods while they still could, in anticipation of a furious Cajun counterattack?
After they had traveled a hundred yards or so, the cannies doing the towing lighted a dozen lanterns. Rings of white light danced and spun through the trees ahead. The cannies were less worried about being seen than in moving as fast as possible.
Even with the lanterns, finding their way through the woods was problematic. Mildred puzzled over this until she walked past a luminous, pale green glow stick on the ground. When she looked over her shoulder she expected one of the cannies behind to pick up the light stick and erase the trail. When that didn’t happen, Mildred felt a faint spark of hope. The trail markers were being left behind for the cave cannies; without the markers, they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to the swamp, let alone the road. If the cave cannies lost the fight, those markers would lead the Cajuns and the companions right to them.
When the cannies reached the swamp, the draggers hauled the bodies in behind them. They actually made better time because the corpses floated and there was less resistance. The dozen captives and their captors plunged into the lukewarm, stagnant water, following the bobbing lanterns. Walking was difficult because they couldn’t raise their feet very far with just a couple feet of rope between their ankles. The cannies in the lead followed a trail marked by widely spaced light sticks tied to the mangroves.
They hadn’t gone very far when Junior Tibideau sloshed up beside Mildred. “Smell that blood in the water, Lambchop?” he asked. “Feeling peckish?”
“Cut my hands free and I’ll show you,” she said.
“Nah, I don’t think so. Not until the oozies come on strong. Then I’m going to turn you loose on your friend White Meat, here. Let you get your hands all messy.”
Jak glared in contempt at the scar-faced cannie.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” Junior demanded. “You think you’re hot shit because you sucker-punched me? I think it’s time for a little payback.”
With that, Tibideau jumped on Jak from behind, driving him headfirst into the water. The cannie held him under the surface, easily controlling his bound limbs. Though Jak struggled, he couldn’t break free.
Mildred rammed her shoulder into the cannie’s ribs, trying to knock him off. She couldn’t get any traction in the mud and the ankle bindings prevented her from using the power of her legs.
After a minute or so of three-way struggle, the pack leader rushed forward and broke up the attempted drowning. He grabbed hold of the back of Junior’s neck, pulled him off, then hurled him into the mangrove roots.
“You’re slowing us down with this bullshit,” he told the grinning cannie. “We’re still in Cajun territory. They could be coming up on us from behind.”
Chapter Seventeen
Cheetah Luis stared down at the dead Cajun fighter as Ryan slowly rose to his feet.
The one-eyed man could sense the headman’s sputtering fury; it came off him in almost tangible waves. He was like a frag gren about to blow. Because of all the pain, all the loss he’d witnessed and suffered, Cheetah Luis was a couple hundred miles around the bend of sanity. But the Cajun didn’t explode. He’d learned to use the power of his rage, to shape it, to wield it like a splitting maul, which didn’t make him any less dangerous, or any less crazy.
“I want a head count,” he told Lyla, his chunky female lieutenant. He spoke with the extinguished ganja stick clenched between his teeth. “I want to know exactly who’s here and who’s gone.”
As she moved to do his bidding, Cheetah Luis flicked away his cigarette. His eyes were unfocused, his expression fixed with abject hatred. He was lost in a waking dream of blood and death, sorrow and guilt.
This, Ryan told himself, was the downside to staking a claim in Deathlands, to putting down roots in anticipation of some kind of an unfolding future. Roots by their nature limited action and mobility. Offense automatically became defense. And in the end, if you were committed to die for a piece of dirt, not even a hundred seasoned fighters could ensure success, short or lo
ng term. The hellscape was wicked devious, it unleashed wave after wave of constantly shifting attacks until it found or created a soft spot.
Lyla returned a few minutes later, her weathered face pale with shock. “It’s worse than we thought,” she told Cheetah Luis. “Close to half our folks are missing.”
“What?” the head Cajun snarled. “You’re sure?”
“I counted twice.” Then she began to recite the names of the lost.
The other Cajuns listened to her in dead silence. These were people accustomed to grief, to chilling, but not to a defeat like this. They looked gutshot.
“We have to cut off the head,” Ryan told Cheetah Luis after the woman finished listing the missing. “No matter what it costs. None of us stands a chance if we don’t chill that cannie queen. Whether the stuff about the power of her blood is true or not, she’s the one in charge. She organized all this shit.”
“Fucking freezie.” The headman spit.
“Face it, Cajun,” Ryan said, “this La Golondrina hit the ground running. Who knows who or what she was before the Apocalypse. But she knew what she wanted when she got here, and she knew damn well how to make it happen. No other cannie before her has done what she’s done. No other cannie will do it after she’s dead. If we take her out, the flesheaters will fall back to their old ways, hunting in small packs, dog-eat-dog, making their living by picking off the weak and the stupid. That’s something we can deal with, just like we always have.”
Cheetah Luis stared at him for a moment then said, “I’ve worked hard to keep it together here. To keep the fighters focused. Keep them on the offensive. That’s what we Cajuns do best. You push, we push back harder. It’s in our nature. What happened tonight is my fault. I should’ve planned better. I should’ve seen it coming. I thought we had it covered.”
“You can’t plan for everything,” Ryan told him. “In war, shit always happens.”
“Time to get some shit on the other end of the stick,” the Cajun said.
