Black Harvest

by James Axler

  But how could he call off the search, without his sec force questioning his motives?

  The answer came from the outlanders themselves.

  “Wag pool’s on fire!” someone shouted from the other end of the building.

  Robards ran down the hall to the north stairwell and looked through one of the smashed-out windows.

  The wag pool was on fire, and couldn’t be saved, but he could see that several people had managed to move out a few wags from inside the burning building. The wags were smoldering now, but hopefully a couple of them had been gotten out early enough to be saved.

  “Let’s get over there,” Baron Robards said. “That’s where the outlanders are.”

  The sec men headed down the stairs.

  BARON SCHINI lingered at the window, watching the big barn go up in flames.

  She’d been wondering how she might send a proper signal to her sec force, lying in wait outside of the ville. They’d brought a flare gun with them, but that might not be enough depending on how far her force was from the ville. Now she didn’t have to do a thing.

  The plume of black smoke rose a hundred feet or more over the ville and would be visible for miles around, catching the attention of her sec force, and anyone else who might be in the area.

  The baron smiled.

  It was all unfolding for her much more easily than she had a right to expect.

  But she wasn’t complaining.

  She was quite happy to let the outlanders take care of the ville’s sec force for her. And if they got away, well, the life of her son would be a small price to pay for a ville that made more jack in a year than she’d done in the last ten.

  And all she had to do was watch it unfold.

  J.B. SLOWED for instructions. They had been close to the wall several times and a few spots looked weak enough to break through with the giant wag, but there was no telling how far they’d get once they’d smashed down a wall of hulking steel wrecks.

  “Straight down this road,” Eleander instructed. “Once you pass the baron’s residence, the gate is at the end of the road that forks to the left.”

  J.B. nodded and got the wag moving again.

  “I want everyone to keep low,” Ryan ordered. “The baron’s residence is three stories tall, and there may be sec men on the roof with a clear shot into the box.”

  Mildred nodded in Jak’s direction.

  Ryan shook his head. “We’ve got to leave him there. Too risky to move him now.”

  The friends looked at Jak, his chest heaving as he struggled against the demons the drug had unleashed inside his body. “Not worry…for me,” he said. “Get out ville…be fine.”

  Ryan turned away from the youth without another word. Then he picked up the scattergun that had belonged to the sec man.

  “Going somewhere, lover?” Krysty asked, scooping up shells for the gun that were rolling around the bottom of the box and handing them to Ryan.

  “J.B. needs some cover.”

  “I believe the term is ‘riding shotgun,’ is it not?” Doc asked.

  “Something like that.”

  Ryan peeked over the top of the box. The baron’s mansion was still a block away, and the streets still looked fairly clear. If Ryan was going to get by J.B.’s side, now was the time to do it.

  Shouldering the scattergun and the rest of his weapons, Ryan climbed onto the heavy metal plate that extended forward from the box to protect the driver inside the cab. He moved to the right edge of the plate, then lay on his stomach so that his feet hung over the edge, and then down next to the passenger-side door.

  J.B. kept the wag running steadily, allowing Ryan the chance to find the open window with his boots, then grab hold of the bars holding the rearview mirror in place, and then finally slip into the cab through the window.

  “Just dropping in?” the Armorer asked.

  J.B. had his Uzi on the seat next to him, but Ryan knew he was running short on ammo.

  “Thought you’d need some help.”

  “Thought right.”

  “Any sign of sec men on the roofs?”

  J.B. shook his head. “Not on the roof, on the road.”

  Ryan looked down the road and saw a dozen or more sec men spilling out of the baron’s residence and onto the street.

  “You think you can turn around?” Ryan asked.

  “Nope. Street’s too narrow. Wag’s too big.”

  “Got to go through, then.”

  J.B. said nothing. Instead he pushed harder on the wag’s accelerator. The giant vehicle slowly picked up speed.

  “I REMEMBER this gaudy slut in a place called Marksville.” Sec man Sherman shook his head. “She was something else.”

  “Good at what she did, eh?”

  “Good’s not the word. My sec squad fended off this mutie attack and saved the ville from being overrun, and the baron, Markus Shields, he says the whole squad could have an afternoon in the gaudy house on him.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah, but see, this gaudy house was nothing special and on the day we went there was just a single slut working.”

  “And how many in the squad?”

  “Twelve of us, but two of them didn’t like women so they drank all afternoon and went off to a room together. That left ten of us and just this one slut.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “What do you think? She took us all on.”

  “One at a time?”

  “Hell no. She set herself up in the middle of the big room and we all had at her, one after another, two at a time, you name it.”

  “Bet she was sore after that.”

  “Mebbe, but if she was she wasn’t lettin’on. To tell the truth, she looked like she was enjoying it. At least that was the impression I got each time I stepped up for a poke.”

  “Both times?”

  “It was six…”

  The two men laughed, until Roy glanced in the direction of the ville and saw the plume of black smoke beginning to rise up over the center of it.

  Roy tapped Sherman in the arm. “You think that’s the signal?”

  Sherman gave him a sarcastic look. “You think?”

  “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”

  “Yeah, it’s the signal.”

  “So what now?”

  “We let the sec chief know that it’s time to move in.”

  BARON ROBARDS RAN out into the street, only to stop in his tracks.

  Just up the road the ville’s best construction wag was rumbling down on him, smoke billowing out of the exhaust stack and two men inside the cab.

  Outlanders.

  Not only had they torched the wag pool, they’d stolen one of the ville’s most valuable vehicles.

  Any thought of letting the bastards go vanished from Robards’s mind. If he let them, they would destroy the ville and leave it a smoldering wreck.

  He’d become baron, but it would mean nothing if he had to lord over a ruin and contend with angry ville residents who would look to him to lead them back onto the path of prosperity. The outlanders had to be stopped.

  Wiped out.

  “Take cover,” Robards shouted. “And take aim. Chill the outlanders, but save the wag.”

  Finding parts for the vehicle would be tough enough, but if any of the wag’s tires were blown out in the fight, they would be almost impossible to replace.

  The sec men scattered, taking up positions behind buildings, and the scattered chunks of concrete and steel that littered the sides of the street.

  “Hold your fire until you can see the bastards behind the wheel!” Robards shouted.

  The giant wag picked up speed.

  Chapter Twenty

  By the time sec men Sherman and Roy found Sec chief Viviani and the rest of Baron Schini’s sec force, they were already packed up and in their wags, waiting for the two men to return from their forward-area recon.

  “Baron sent the signal,” Sherman said, reporting in to the sec chief.

&nb
sp; “You mean that huge column of black smoke rising up from inside the ville?”

  Sherman turned around. Although this position was several miles away, the smoke could still clearly be seen.

  “That’s the one.”

  The sec chief looked disgusted. “Take your position. We’re rolling in five minutes.”

  RYAN LEANED OUT the open window as far as he dared and shouted to the rest of the friends up in the box.

  “They’re all out on the street,” he said. “We’re going to need cover fire to get through this.”

  “Copy that,” Krysty replied.

  J.B. had taken his Uzi from the seat and now had it in his right hand. It was resting against the door as he pointed it out the open window on his left. When the shooting started he would have to slide down in the seat, shooting and driving almost blindly, just to keep the sec men back and behind cover. At long range the wag’s big engine and front end provided J.B. and Ryan with some protection, but they’d both be vulnerable to fire for a few seconds as they passed the sec men, and for that they just had to hope that their ticket for the last train west had yet to be punched. Once they were through the line of sec men the wag’s huge rear end and steel box would provide them with more than adequate protection for the rest of the run to the gate.

  Ryan pointed the scattergun out the broken front windshield of the wag so that the spray of lead from the blaster could clear the road of any obstacles. He put his SIG-Sauer out the open side window and took a quick look at several potential targets.

  There was a sec man taking cover behind a rusted-out garbage bin who looked to be carrying a badly remade longblaster. It was taped together in two places, and the butt and barrel had been fastened together at odd angles making the thing look broken. The sec man clearly wasn’t a threat, but he was in a position that was clearly visible to all the other nearby sec men. If Ryan could chill that one first, the others would think twice about sticking their necks out to get a clear shot at the wag.

  “You ready?” J.B. asked.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be. You?”

  “Not really, but how can you prepare for something like this?”

  “Exactly.”

  In moments the firefight would begin.

  “PICK YOUR TARGETS carefully,” Krysty told the others.

  She had taken a look over the top of the box and saw that more than a dozen sec men lined the street, and driving through their ranks would be running a gauntlet of blasterfire.

  The best course of action would seem to be holding their fire until the sec men made themselves visible in the attempt to take a shot at the wag. If they could keep them behind cover, their aim would be compromised and they’d have a better chance at getting through.

  Krysty climbed up on the steel plate over the cab, which would give her good protection from below and a great view of all targets in front of the wag. Mildred climbed up next to her, but remained slightly behind, covering the left side of the wag.

  Inside the box, Doc had to forego his LeMat for lack of ammunition and was forced to use Jak’s Colt Python. Compared to the LeMat, the Colt felt almost light in the time traveler’s hands. And while Jak was in no condition to care, Doc knew that the young man wouldn’t appreciate him using his weapon. “Forgive me Master Lauren, but circumstances have rendered my own blaster useless, so I am pressed into using your beloved Colt. I assure you I will treat it with the utmost care and once we are through this predicament I will return it to your person in better condition than in which I took it.”

  “Use it,” Jak struggled to say. “Chill bastards did this…”

  A shot rang out somewhere in front of the wag, immediately followed by another.

  And another.

  The friends held their fire for several more seconds.

  Jak suddenly screamed in agony as the demons writhing through his body took control.

  J.B.’s Uzi crackled from inside the wag’s cab. And then all hell broke loose.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ryan crouched in his seat. The first shot from the sec men had hit the steel step just below the door and deflected off the big steel box behind him. A second shot hit the door, but it had to have been a small-caliber bullet from a poorly maintained remade blaster, because the round failed to punch through the sheet metal.

  Ryan squeezed off a round of his own in the general direction of the sec man he’d targeted earlier. He heard a scream, but couldn’t be sure if he’d hit his target or not. Blasterfire erupted from all over now, including the back of the wag.

  And people were screaming.

  J.B. squeezed off a few rounds from his Uzi, trying to keep the left side of the road clear.

  Ryan glanced out the front window over the engine cowl and saw a sec man standing in the middle of the road. He had his blaster aimed directly at J.B. and was waving his other arm as if he were trying to flag them down.

  He was obviously on jolt or dreem, or some other drug, because what he was doing was the same as committing suicide.

  “Stupe sec man!” J.B. muttered, never once lifting his foot off the accelerator. He kept the wag going in a straight line, headed straight for their drug-crazed enemy.

  As they neared the sec man, he squeezed off a few rounds.

  Ryan could hear the bullets zip through the cab, shattering the small window at the back of the cab and hitting the heavy gauge steel of the box behind them.

  Just before the wag impacted with the sec man, a shot came from above their heads, most likely Mildred’s ZKR target pistol. The bullet struck the sec man in the forehead just above the right eye. His head snapped back as a large chunk of his skull came away from his head. The corpse wavered a moment on two dead legs, then was plowed into the ground by the oncoming wag.

  The wag bumped and jostled as the right-side wheels bounced over the body.

  Heavy fire came from all sides, and from all manner of weapons, small arms, longblasters and scatterguns. The friends in the box were safe from most of it, but Ryan and J.B. were still quite vulnerable.

  Ryan decided to use the last of his ammo as cover fire. If they could keep the sec men down for just a few seconds more, they’d be through the fire zone.

  He peered over the bottom of the open window, picked out the locations of several sec men and began to fire.

  KRYSTY AND MILDRED were doing their best to lay down cover fire, but there were too many sec men for them to handle all at once.

  They’d chilled four of them when the firefight started, but the rest were too well covered to pick off and were managing to get shots off at the wag’s cab.

  And they were running low on ammo.

  “Bomb!” Doc shouted.

  Krysty turned to see Doc moving quickly to the center of the box where a glass jar was rolling from side to side across the floor with its oil-soaked rag burning brightly from the top end.

  J.B. had called such things Molotov cocktails and had explained that they had been devised by rebel fighters during a pre-Dark war in a place called Spain. It was basically a glass bottle containing gas or some sort of fuel with an oil-soaked rag or something similar around the neck. The rag is lit before the weapon is thrown at a target and when the bottle breaks on impact, the liquid inside the bottle ignites, starting a fire.

  That was the way it was supposed to work, but this bottle had hit Jak at the back of the box and had failed to break when it landed on the floor. Now it was rolling around inside the box with its wick burning. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but there were four cans of fuel inside the box, and if the flame reached the outsides of the cans the whole box could go up in a fireball.

  Doc was struggling to keep the rolling bottle away from the fuel cans and every once in a while he’d attempt to pick it up, only to be thwarted by the burning rag.

  Krysty jumped down off the top of the cab and came to Doc’s aid.

  Seeing the titian-haired beauty with him inside the box, Doc stopped the rolling bottle by putting his
boot on it. That gave Krysty a chance to pick up the bottle—which at some point in its history had contained an amount of Watkins Liniment—at the thick end farthest from the burning rag.

  But even though the flame was at the other end of the bomb, the whole thing was very hot and she wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for more than a few seconds.

  “Get down!” she said.

  Doc and Eleander crouched low in the box.

  Jak didn’t move. He stared blankly at Krysty with a pair of wild red eyes.

  She threw the bottle as hard as she could at the side of the baron’s residence and hit some brickwork over a window on the second floor.

  The bottle shattered and the fuel inside ignited, raining sparks and flame onto the sec men on the street below.

  There were screams of pain and shouts of confusion, and suddenly all blasterfire coming from that side of the street stopped.

  “That’s giving them a taste of their own foul medicine,” Doc quipped.

  A few more seconds and they’d be through the gauntlet.

  BARON ROBARDS TURNED his head and put up an arm to shield his eyes from the flames.

  To his left, one of his sec men was on fire and screaming in agony as the flames lapped at his twisting body.

  There were sec men and a couple of residents of the ville who looked as if they wanted to put the fire out, but the man was moving too wildly for them, crying out in pain as the flames ate away at his hair and flesh.

  There was some activity on the road as a few of the sec men continued the fight against the outlanders in the wag, but most of the men were entranced by the sight of their fellow sec man burning, oblivious to the sounds of his screams. But then one of the sec men finally stepped forward and pushed the burning man to the ground, rolling him around in the dirt to smother the flames.

  The sec man was no longer on fire, but his flesh continued to smolder and the pain would go on forever, if he managed to survive.