Each of the four rotary autocannons consisted of six barrels that spun like a Gatling-gun on ecstasy. All four firing at once could hurl 24,000 rounds of high-explosive carnage per minute.
The Vulcan buzz saw did more than just kill things or blow them apart. The kinetic energy of those 20mm cannon rounds could chew through light armored vehicles and even steel-reinforced concrete walls at a mile’s distance. Which, unknown to Logan, was Andy’s plan B if the alley wasn’t as safe as it appeared.
Andy reached up to the aircraft cockpit like overhead console and selected “TRCHLT,” short for Torch-Light. The powerful light bars wrapping around the top of the truck packed as much of a punch as the autocannons. Besides illuminating the way and spooking DEVO’s, the infrared spotlight lit up distanct threats without showing any visible light to the naked eye. Plus, due to the DEVO’s quirky genes, the ultraviolet mode drove their primitive eyes and brains mad.
As a final touch, the IR wavelength of the Torch-Light system could be ramped up to microwave level and cook anything within ten meters of the light bars. The so-called Death Ray mode lasted for mere seconds before draining the JLTV’s powerplant, but they could always go out in a literal blaze of glory, if need be.
And as too many that went before them had. Andy shuddered, remembering back when the virus first hit. When the beings started acting crazed before de-evolution was complete. Then the DEVO’s still had the mindset and ability to operate weapon systems and equipment before the sickness ate into their brains and further mutated. The vicious war gave the crazed, weapon-wielding wild animals an early edge over the professional military forces honoring the antiquated Geneva Conventions. Despite the hi-tech weapons, the desperate fighting could only be described as medieval. Andy closed his eyes, the faces of the injured, shrieking civilians and soldiers alike still seared into retina. In those hectic, pre-vaccine days, the wounded weren’t even given the courtesy of lethal injection. Just executed on the spot by the graves details and their bodies chucked on the burn mountains.
Andy cringed at the crashed VTAL in the street behind him, glad that the progression of the infection had degraded the DEVO’s brains and dexterity to the point they were incapable of bringing to bear the kind of powerful weaponry that sat on top of his rig. Something in the mutation made them unable to stand the vibration of any form of machinery. In fact, they were hyper-sensitive to any electrical field, even the minor ones around anything with circuitry that normal humans never noticed let alone felt.
Still, they were dangerous, if not skillful in their mass attacks. Their love of fire and flammable objects still presented dangers, as did the spears and arrows from some of the more proficient mutant forms. Worst of all, the demons didn’t go down quickly. Not even a bullet to the brain was enough, like some simple old zombie. No, you had to destroy the body completely; any functional part of one would continue to attack on pure muscle memory. Much like an extra lethal snake with the head cut off. Explosive rounds were the most effective tool. But those cartridges, larger and heavier than a rifle round, limited how much ammo one could carry, evidenced by Andy’s overloaded JLTV.
Shaking off the flashbacks, Andy turned his focus back to the situation at hand. He flipped on all the Torch-Lights. The alley and area all around the rig lit up. A person, more a creature now, jumped from behind a dumpster about a half block down. It scurried into an open door screeching the whole way, deranged by the lights of the JLTV.
Andy barked into his headset. “Logan, systems up?”
Strapped into his seat in the turret, Logan tested the fire control system. The screens blinked, illuminating him in a red glow and flashing green icons all around the targeting reticle.
“Locked, cocked and ready to rock!”
“Let’s roll then.” Andy put the truck in gear and selected the tractor-mode. It limited him to about thirty-five-miles an hour but ensured the rig would claw up and over anything pushed in its way, thanks to the powered roller-grab wheel just under the front bumper.
The whine of the Vulcan cannons spinning to a stop after completing their self-checks filled the interior of the rig as Andy sighed and hit the gas pedal.
Chapter Two
No more than fifty meters down the alley, a creature flew from the fire escape ladder off to the left side, landing just in front of the truck. Andy locked eyes with the thing—tattered pants, no shirt, hairless and as pale as a corpse—but couldn’t muster any sympathy. Like most DEVO’s, it was now just a mindless animal, all it’s thinking done by an elusive leadership class of mutants. Whether from natural selection or by the vagaries of the infection process, a tiny fraction of DEVO’s were slightly less de-evolved. Not much, but that slight cognitive edge made them Napoleons in an army of cavemen. The creature brought up a flaming Molotov cocktail. Bathed in the intense UV light, it screamed in agony and shattered the burning weapon at its feet.
Andy stayed the course and mowed down the flaming thing, which unsurprisingly got up on its remaining leg after being dragged part of the way down the alleyway. It hopped in circles in the alleyway behind the JLTV until the flames smoldered out and the DEVO returned to its single-minded mission. It started after Andy and Logan, trailing smoke as it bounced after the JLTV.
Logan, snug in the turret seat, angled the Vulcans up by tilting the black trigger handle back. When the sight centered on the first ambush site, Logan selected “LCKTGT” and purred as the red brackets on each side of the aiming sight flashed. The Vulcans would stay locked to the marked target with no need to adjust the angle as the JLTV moved down the alley.
Also built into the small turret were several portholes with thick transparent armor. However, Logan primarily viewed the outside environment through a series of high definition monitors. The targeting reticle floated around the screen, depending on where the barrels were placed. All the barrels moved as a unit but could be selected to fire independently. A butterfly trigger, two independently moving paddles when depressed by the gunner’s thumbs, fired the weapons. The left paddle was currently set to fire the top two cannons, the right the bottom two. Depressing both fired all four at once. The cannons had a relatively decent field of fire independent of the turret, adjusted by the position of the trigger handle. Pedals under the gunner’s feet spun the turret either to the left or right, depending on which pedal was pushed. The deeper the push, the faster the turret rotated.
At the prescribed location in the alley, Logan confirmed that the barrels in his sight were centered and depressed both triggers. The Vulcans spun to life for a quarter second as they poured steel rain into the fuel barrels.
Andy slammed on the gas. The rig rocketed past the first alley, going airborne a tad as it drove over an upturned concrete bus stop bench, and coming back to the pavement just before passing the second alleyway. The inferno that ignited above and around them was massive. There must have been more drums tucked away out of sight.
Andy felt the heat as the orange plume licked the windshield and the shockwave tipped them a good 20 degrees to the side… but the blast from the other ambush point as Logan shifted aim steadied them out.
“Hold—” Logan ducked down as Andy wrestled the steering wheel with both hands to control the jackknifing. The whole street bathed in a sea of flames as fuel geysered in every direction. The truck shot through an endless wall of fire just as the walls of the decrepit, five-story apartment complexes on each side of the road buckled and gave up the ghost.
Logan climbed back up in the turret and spun it around, taking a quick look at their six. Dozens of the creatures had fallen to the alleyway with the burning barrels. None got more than a few scorching feet before a hundred tons of concrete and steel avalanched onto the street.
Logan spun back forward just as the rig cleared the cross street. The ash and dust cloud spraying out in every direction smothered the flames outside, but cut visibility so much they couldn’t even see the front bumper. They raced blind through the cross street and next block before the
smoke cleared enough to see a few meters ahead.
Andy didn’t even have time to take his foot of the gas before they plowed into dozens of thick steel cables strung across the road. The mass and momentum of the JLTV bundled the cables together. The V-shaped cutters on the grill caught the cables and cut them fast.
But not fast enough.
Andy and Logan gasped against their seatbelts as the truck hit an invisible wall. The uncut cables, anchored to a string of dumpsters clearly filled with concrete, gave way and launched the metal boxes at the JLTV. Two lighter dumpsters flew their way much quicker than the rest and slammed together a few feet from the rear fender. On impact, some type of flare ignited the fuel inside, engulfing the back hatch of the JLTV in flames as the vehicle screeched to a halt.
“Andy, get us out of here! If they get some of that homemade napalm under us, they’ll melt the tires in seconds!”
“Working on it, bro...” Andy rocked back and forth, screaming as loud as the squealing suspension while using the roller wheel to climb up and over the suspended cables.
Andy wasn’t too concerned with the things in front of him, despite the Molotov cocktails some of them carried. He was more worried about getting his rig loose from the flaming dumpsters and taught cables now hooking the truck from under the grill. The horde of chattering mutants dancing around prevented them from abandoning the vehicle. Not that it mattered anyway. They couldn’t carry enough ammo to dispatch those numbers if they had to get out and hoof it.
With the front wheels in the air, Andy slammed the vehicle into reverse and knocked the flaming dumpsters back a tad. The front cables slackened a smidgen while his rear wheels found something to push against.
“We’re stuck!” Logan yelped and reached for the guns. Andy just roared.
“Finally! Spin the guns to the rear and give me a burst when I say. Every little bit helps.”
He kept shotgunning the JLTV forwards and backwards until the rear wheels climbed up the bent dumpster’s side and slightly higher than the hanging front fender.
The DEVO’s hovering all around chucked a pair of Molotov cocktails under the truck. The fire melted what little rubber was left on the cracked, run-flat tires.
“Now!”
Logan ripped off a long burst of cathartic fire at a line of mutants behind them, the heavy recoil kicking the truck forward as Andy made one more charge ahead.
For a brief second, all four wheels spun helplessly in the air… until the front axle tipped down and gripped some pavement.
The remaining cables slipped under the chassis and slid across the V-shaped hull while the JLTV roared ahead on its bald, smoking tires.
Logan spun the Vulcans forward and stuck his nose in the fire control tablet.
“Check fire! You don’t know what’s inside those things.”
There at the other end of the alley, the DEVO’s pushed and a derelict cement truck into the alleyway. Another team of inhumanely strong DEVO’s shoved a second truck into a perpendicular position to the first truck, making escape impossible.
Andy was always impressed if not frightened by the sheer strength of the creatures, at least in short bursts when they worked themselves into a crazed frenzy. And nothing crazed them more than the idea of fresh meat. Andy and Logan were far more nutritious than the cats, dogs, rodents, birds and occasional deer they fed on.
Assuming the DEVO’s were just looking for a meal. You never could tell until too late, since the virus that drove them was itself a living thing that constantly hunted for new hosts. A hundred of them ripped off some eerie rebel yell and swarmed the JLTV as soon as they slowed.
While Logan spun the gun in tight circles, blasting DEVO’s to shreds by the baker’s dozen, cinder blocks and chunky pieces of iron bounced off the top of the rig.
The lights went off, plunging the truck in the nearly pure darkness of the alley punctuated only by the muzzle flashes of the Vulcans.
“Shit!” Andy flipped on his under-powered, old fashioned headlights. “Swing the turret left and blast through that wall.”
“It might bring the whole thing down on us, man!”
“If you got a better idea, I’m all ears!”
Logan just cursed and depressed the butterfly triggers. On full auto, the Vulcan carved a giant cave through the steel-reinforced cement wall, just meters in front of it. Dust, cement, bricks and steel exploded in front of him.
While Logan poured the fire on, Andy maneuvered the JLTV so that it pointed towards the widening hole the Vulcan drilled as Logan shifted the trigger handles left and right and up and down. Dust reduced the visibility to zero as parts of the wall fell onto the hood. Shrapnel from both the DEVO’s and the exploding rounds pelted the vehicle.
“It’s now or never. Keep the fire pumping. I’m gonna push through!”
“Copy that.”
Andy, still in tractor mode, slammed on the gas. The JLTV nosed through the hole that was still smaller than the vehicle, breaking off cement chunks as well as bending the rebar. Once past that initial threshold, the vehicle accelerated away from the death trap in the alley. Andy had to slow as he tried to negotiate his way through the dark building. He aimed for doorways or other openings that offered less resistance as the rig shoved desks, chairs and miscellaneous office equipment with the cattle guard and crashed through interior walls when no opening was convenient. Creatures jumped out at them, some clinging to the hood and punching the armored glass until bones peeked out of their bloody fists, but he ignored them.
Logan killed the Vulcan and folded the assembly into transport mode. Even then, the high guns kept tearing out ceiling panels every time the truck bounced up a few inches. Andy checked the rounds remaining. They had gone through nearly fifteen percent between the alley and blasting through the concrete and steel wall. At that rate, they would be out in just a few more skirmishes.
He checked the timer yet again and whistled. D minus 17:12. Andy knew there would be more than a few more skirmishes before the night arrived and the real danger started. If they remained unsheltered, the monsters would keep coming until they were out of ammo, then they were as good as dead. If they were lucky.
Worse than dead, if they were taken by the ghoulish things.
Andy roared down a hallway with offices on either side. The rig ripping away whole sections of walls as it ground past. A copy machine exploded in a fog of black, yellow, blue and pinkish red powder as it bounced off the front of the truck. Andy took a left at the first opening he could identify, smashing through a doorway before plowing into a semicircular receptionist’s desk, splintering pieces of wood before him as he raced across the shiny marble of the lobby floor.
The JTLV blasted through a large plate glass window before shattering a brick flower bed on the sidewalk. Andy shot through in a plume of dirt and made a hard-right turn, the rig nearly going up onto its left wheels as it screeched away.
“Talk about luck. We must have found the only plate glass window still standing down here at street level.”
Logan hugged himself. “You call this luck? You psycho son of a—”
Their team radio crackled for the first time in far too long. “Andy, is that you rocking the bad guys?”
“Roger that, Keith. You guys still with the downed truck?”
“Yeah, we’re in the open, right in the middle of the street. It was good when the sunlight was overhead, but now we’re getting probed; it’s gonna get loud here soon, bro!”
“Roger that. Be advised that we’re approaching from the south, less than a half click out. Don’t go loud on us, man!”
“Gotcha. I see your lights! Back up on our rear as soon as you get here. I’ve got a cable out already. Tow us out of this sinkhole and we can still drive.”
Andy rolled his eyes and clicked his throat mike. “No time for that nonsense. You and David need to jump in here, then we’ll extract hot.”
“I’m not leaving my trophies. As my sponsor, you get a big cut. Believe me, you�
�ll want what I’ve got!”
“Eh, and what’s that?” Andy couldn’t help but lick his lips.
“The mother lode, man!”
Chapter Three
Keith and David’s preferred rig was a militarized version of the Mercedes G550 AMG, smaller and far less armored than the JLTV, but it could haul a lot more treasure. The little flitter also only mounted an old-fashioned .50 Cal machine gun with high-explosive rounds. A pop gun, by Andy’s standards.
He closed in on the wrecked SUV, hardly slowing. The G550 was nosed down at a steep angle and caught up in the broken pavement and sand. The machine gun couldn’t depress enough to hit the creatures huddle in the shadows from what was a large luxury hotel. With every minute of waning daylight, the humming mob edged closer.
Logan strummed his fingers on the dash. “What were they thinking, driving that light duty SUV this far in?”
“I dunno, but if you could remove the DEVO’s on the left side, that would help.” Andy needed Logan’s mind back in the game.
“On it.”
With a few swipes of his fingers, the quad Vulcans whirled to life. In a single sweeping spray, the hail of cannon fire laid waste to scores of DEVO’s and the first and second floors of what had been an upscale hotel. Despite the slaughter, a buzzing chatter rose up over the guns.
Logan spun the turret to the right. Depressing the butterfly triggers remotely, he shredded hundreds of creatures pouring out of another giant skyscraper nearby. Neither man cheered at the slaughter.
Countless thousands more DEVO’s lay in wait deep in other buildings, just waiting for the sun to dip below the horizon. The hideous things would not have to wait long.
The counter read D minus 6:40.
Andy pulled the JLTV right up to the back bumper of the smaller SUV. “Cover me. I’m going outside!”
METAVERSE GAMES: OMNIBUS Page 2
