by James Axler
“They’re gonna be sorry they ever started this,” Leeloo said angrily. “Everybody in the ville knows just what to do, even the kids too young to carry blasters. We train all the time to drive off chillers and robbers. Sometimes we drill in the middle of the night. We use real bullets, too. Whenever that bell rings, everybody is ready to fight.”
“How many rousties did we get?” Ryan asked J.B., his voice cracking and hoarse.
“Six or eight.”
“Plenty left, then.” He hawked and spit to clear his throat.
“’Fraid so,” J.B. answered.
“The Magus is behind this whole operation,” Ryan said. “And he’s here. He was watching the show, sitting there like a big fat spider, waiting for the gas to be released.”
“You saw him?” Krysty asked.
“Just for a second. I had a shot at him, but I couldn’t make it. He got away.”
“The Magus isn’t gonna let us quietly slip away after what we just did to his plans,” J.B. commented. “He never lets things like this slide.”
“The carny chillers are going to regroup and come after us, that’s for sure,” Krysty said.
“We can’t count on the ville folks for any help, either,” Mildred quickly added.
“They don’t understand what happened in the tent. All they saw was us shooting first, without provocation. They don’t know what we saved them from. And there’s no way to tell them now. They’re going to be as eager to blast us to pieces as the roustabouts.”
“In a situation like this, as far as the locals are concerned, every outlander has a target on his or her back,” Ryan said.
At that moment, blasterfire barked at them from the top of the berm. Well-concealed and well-protected shooters lying prone along its ridge sent a volley of bullets smacking into the sides of the tent, forcing the companions to scramble for cover.
There was no telling to which side the attackers belonged.
And under the circumstances, it didn’t matter a nukin’ damn.
J.B. and Jak put up covering fire, spraying the face of the berm with buckshot and Magnum slugs as they all ducked inside the protection of the tent entrance.
“Is it okay for us to be in here?” Krysty asked Mildred. “Aren’t we going to get poisoned?”
“Very little of the gas got loose,” the black woman said. “And what was released has been diluted by the volume of air in here. It shouldn’t hurt us, except for maybe minor skin rashes and burning eyes.”
“It might be safe to breathe in here, but we can’t stay,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to make our break, and we’ve got to make it now, before the other sides get themselves organized.”
“Mebbe they are already organized,” J.B. speculated. “Could be those shooters along the berm out there are set up to herd us into an ambush.”
“That’s a chance we’ve got to take,” Ryan said. “We’ve lost the element of surprise, and that was our only advantage. We’re way outnumbered and way outgunned. The folks who live here can defend themselves against the looters. But all we can do at this point is beat a fighting retreat. We’ve got to get out of this ville.”
“And we sure can’t do it on foot,” J.B. added. “The rousties will run us down in minutes with their wags.”
“Our only hope is to steal a fast one and roll out of here in it,” Ryan agreed.
“If we can, we’d better find a way to disable the other wags before we take off,” J.B. added. “Otherwise, all we’re doing is changing the location of our funerals.”
Ryan drew a broad circle in the dirt with his fingertip. “Tent,” he said, marking the entrance with a slash. “The shortest route to the wags is to the right, past the rows of sideshow trailers, over here.”
“If I was planning an ambush,” Mildred said, “that’s right where I’d set it up. With hard cover for my shooters from the berm and the trailers, and the targets caught out in open ground between.”
“Sounds like we’ve got to go the other way, then,” Krysty said. “The long way.”
“That puts us in plain sight of the ville and whatever’s happening there,” J.B. said.
“From the sound of it,” Ryan said, “everybody in Bullard is pretty well occupied. Let’s just hope they stay that way.”
“What about Leeloo?” Dean asked his father.
The little girl stood beside Dean, her back straight, her eyes unblinking, her crown of daisies slightly tilted.
“He’s right, Ryan,” Krysty said. “We can’t just leave her here with all these chillers on the loose.”
“We’ll find a way to get her safely back to her people,” Ryan said. “But first, we’ve got to deal with the shooters from the top of the berm so we can circle around the other side of the tent.”
“I draw fire other way,” Jak said, already moving in a blur.
“Jak, wait!” Ryan cried, reaching for him.
Too late.
The albino slipped out of the tent, his Colt Python raised in his fist. No sooner had he vanished than a torrent of slugs slapped the wall of the tent in the direction he had fled. The direction of the mutie menagerie.
“Move!” Ryan shouted to the others. “Move, now!”
J.B. burst out the exit first, his scattergun thundering at his hip, dragging the zombielike Doc behind him.
JAK COULD RUN like the wind.
Something in his genes had given him coiled steel springs for legs, with just the right balance of muscle to bone, just the right kind of muscle. As he ran, sucking air all the way down into his boot tops, bullets flew at his head like angry wasps and whacked the side of the tent, raising puffs of dust. He ignored them. The curve of the tent loomed before him; the curve was cover if he got far enough, fast enough.
From behind him came rocking, consecutive blasts of J.B.’s scattergun. For an instant, the blasterfire aimed at him stopped. An instant was all he needed. He rounded the perimeter of the tent, out of the line of pursuing fire.
If there were more shooters along the berm in front of him—and from the way his scalp and neck were prickling, Jak felt sure that there were—they were keeping their heads and blasters down. He figured they were holding fire, waiting for the rest of the companions to blunder into the killzone.
As the rows of trailered cages came into view, the lion roared. Joy exploded in Jak’s chest.
Joy shared.
The lion knew he was coming.
Jak sprinted to close the gap between them. The great cat awaited him, pacing wildly back and forth in its cage. He holstered the Colt and used the hub of a wheel to scramble onto the trailer’s bed.
Freedom. The thought exploded in the albino’s mind like a frag gren. And then a wave of tremendous emotion swept through him—gratitude to the nth power.
He unbolted the cage door and pushed it wide open. The mutie mountain lion jumped out, landing softly on the dirt despite its tremendous weight. When Jak hopped down from the trailer, the cat gave him a swat with a huge, soft paw. The blow drove Jak hard to his knees. Then a hot, scratchy tongue slathered his face and neck.
There are others, close, Little Brother. They lie in wait.
Jak could almost sense their terrible confusion and panic. It had never occurred to the chillers hiding on top of the berm that upon reaching safety the first act of their adversaries’ pointman would be the release of a half-ton of man-eater. They didn’t know whether to open fire to protect their comrades concealed among the trailers from the lion, or to wait for the rest of the designated targets to appear, according to the plan. It was a problem they had no time to consider, let alone solve.
Jak felt the rage building in the great cat’s body, the rage and the raw power, unquenchable and bottomless. The carny master’s words of warning about the true nature of this superintelligent, supercunning predator beast flooded back to him.
And through him to the mind of the lion.
Don’t be afraid of me. I will never hurt you.
Not afraid.
Good. Now we hunt.
The lion ducked under the trailer that supported its cage, out of the line of sight of the berm shooters. It pulled itself forward with its front legs and claws, belly dragging on the ground. Jak followed on his knees, the Colt Python in his hand. On the far side of the trailer’s undercarriage, in the aisle between the first and second rows of cages, Jak could see legs. Seven sets of legs. Five belonged to men and two to women. Seven pairs of feet shifted anxiously. Jak ducked his face lower and got a glimpse of the semiauto handblasters the ambush crew held. High-capacity stick mags jutted from the blue-steel weapons’ receivers. Big-time firepower—210 rounds versus his six.
Me first, Little Brother.
The thought came to him in the same instant the lion moved.
Jak lost the cat in a cloud of dust as it sprang out from under the trailer. The albino thrust himself forward, the cocked .357 Magnum blaster in front, seeking targets.
Before he could do that, staccato blasterfire roared, as the roustabouts and snake charmers, caught standing practically shoulder to shoulder, tried to put bullets into a tornado of fang and claw moving way too fast to track. The beige blur, five feet tall at the shoulder, slipped between them, wound around them, brushing them electric with the tips of its soft fur and its black-tasseled tail. The ambushers’ volleys of wild shots banged into cages and trailers and set the trapped sideshow muties screaming. Jak saw Baldoona the scalie throw himself into a corner and cover both his heads with his arms as slugs sparked off of and rattled the bars of his cage.
Jak held his own fire. There was no need for him to shoot. The lion hadn’t even scratched the carny chillers, and their ship was already sinking. Mebbe they had seen what the lion had done when it had gotten loose before, he thought. Or mebbe just the idea of what the beast was capable of made them crazy with terror. Bottom line: semiauto, high-capacity weapons, blind panic and no clear firing lanes were a recipe for self-inflicted disaster.
One of the rousties, his eyes bulging with fear, squeezed the trigger of his KG-99 over and over as he whirled, spraying a tight string of single shots through the chest of the man standing flatfooted and helpless in front of him. The multiple, close-range impacts lifted the guy off his feet and set him down four feet away, a look of astonished horror on his face. As his knees buckled and his shirtfront bloomed red, he managed to return fire. His two shots went wide of the guy who’d accidentally blasted him, but they hit one of the leggy women in the hip and thigh. She twisted away and dropped, unable to stand with a shattered pelvis. She writhed in the yellow dirt, her face ashen with shock, her mouth open, screaming.
The lion still didn’t chill. Ignoring the blaze of blasterfire, it played with the surviving five like a housecat with a brood of very stupid, very slow mice. One by one, it swept their legs out from under them, or batted them on the back of the head just hard enough to stagger them. It let them run a few yards toward cover, then hooked a single cruel claw in the back of their waistbands and dragged them back into the middle of the aisle. With dismissive, precise blows of its paw, it flattened them, one after another, facedown on the ground. The battering went on for several minutes until finally, all five chillers were on their hands and knees, unable to rise. Having lost their weapons, they gasped and sobbed, tears streaming down their cheeks.
Jak could see it in their eyes: they knew they lived or died at the whim of something far more terrible, far more merciless than they. Theirs were the faces of people lost at sea, floating far from shore.
Doomed.
But the lion didn’t take their lives. It stood over them for a moment, panting softly, its long tail lashing, then it sat back on its haunches and began to clean itself. It wet the top of its huge paw with its tongue and rubbed it against its cheek and brow. As it did this, the idling-wag-engine sound rumbled up from its throat.
After a few seconds, one of the rousties began to stir. Jak drew a bead on the slowly moving man with the Python, but held his fire. He could see the chiller was unarmed and had no fight left. Head down, the roustie crawled over to Baldoona’s trailer and meekly climbed into the cage. After he pulled the door shut, he threw himself belly down in the semisolid piles of scalie shit on the floor and tried his best to become invisible.
The four who were left on the ground were playing possum. Seeing one of their number make it to safety, realizing that this was their last opportunity to escape, they struggled to their feet and staggered away. Jak and the lion followed them around the end of the trailer. They watched the beaten quartet limp across the compound. As the chillers neared the foot of the berm, they started yelling at their comrades hidden along its ridge. They yelled for them not to shoot, then started clawing their way over the rubble to the top.
Jak raised the big Colt in a two-handed grip, bracing himself to take out targets of opportunity as the other group of ambushers laid down covering fire for their friends. Heads and weapons popped up, all right, but there was no shooting.
Wait.
Jak had already let off pressure on the wide combat trigger. He sensed that none of the rousties on the berm wanted to fight the lion. They didn’t even consider taking cover and massing their fire because they knew they couldn’t defend themselves. All they wanted was to get as far away as they could, as fast as they could. The berm-top shooters abandoned their hide and set out across the plain on a dead run, with their injured companions trailing behind.
I can’t talk to them the way I can talk to you, Little Brother. That’s the problem. I can’t explain to anyone else what I am. I can only use this physical form to dominate. A weak form of communication, at best.
The lion smiled. But things could be worse, I suppose. If I were a daisy, I couldn’t communicate at all.
A baleful moan from the trailers behind them made Jak pivot, weapon up and ready. He looked at the roustie cowering on the nasty floor of Baldoona’s cage. The man was alone in the enclosure; the sideshow mutie was nowhere to be seen.
What happened to scalie? the albino thought as he stepped closer.
Then he saw the door standing slightly ajar and the spawl of a bullet impact—a bright splash of lead where the cage’s locking bolt had been.
Chapter Seventeen
Ryan raced out of the tent after the Armorer and Doc. As J.B. sidestepped, squaring his shoulders to the target, scattering fléchettes across the top of the berm, Ryan ran past him, turning left around the candy-striped tent’s perimeter, taking the point.
The sounds of concentrated small-weapons fire rolled over him in waves. As he rounded the curve of the big top, clouds of black-powder gun smoke interspersed with sickly yellow muzzle-flashes obscured his view of the ville. Bullets whined across the compound, ricocheting and kicking up dirt.
Ryan could make out three carny wags parked in the ancient road that ran between the first of the rows of raised, awning-covered plant beds and the building that had once housed Burger Stravaganza. The wags were predark RVs, Winnebagos refitted for the hazards of Deathlands. Rousties fired from behind the steel-armored wheel wells and from around the massive I-beams that were replacement bumpers, front and rear. The carny chillers were absorbing fire from a small group of ville folk strung out along and shooting from the low cover of the plant beds. The ville folks had their backs turned to the tent, and to the companions.
Even though he was running full tilt, Ryan could see dead and wounded rousties on the ground around the wags. The loot they’d been carrying when they were hit lay in the dirt beside them. Caught with both hands in the Bullard ville cookie jar. The ville had dead, as well, some of them shot to pieces.
Other rousties, blocked from most of the sec force’s fire by the wags, were still moving booty from the jumble of cabins and shacks built alongside the prenukecaust fast-food restaurant, and hurriedly loading it into the rear of the Winnebagos.
At first glance it was hard to say which side was winning the war. One thing was for sure, though—the looters were concentrating all their at
tention on the ville people, and vice versa.
There was no safety for the companions along the tent perimeter; the stakes that held up the guy wires were the only cover, and they were useless. If the ville sec men caught them trying to sneak past in plain view, it was going to be instant chilling. Ryan broke away from the tent wall, leading the others across the stretch of open ground to the far side of the first row of raised plant beds. They bellied down behind the protective berm.
Two rows over, through the lower branches of overgrown tomato plants, Ryan could see a small portion of the ville sec crew systematically popping away at the looters with handblasters. From the care they were taking with their shot placement, and the number of bodies already strewed around the wags, they were no doubt the most skilled marksmen in Bullard.
Ryan and the others ducked as a wave of return fire from the rousties behind the wags trimmed clumps of leaves and stems and exploded ripe tomatoes above their heads.
Crawling to the end of the bed, Ryan saw where the rest of the ville sec force was headed. With covering fire from their sharpshooting pals, they were carefully filtering through the rows of beds at the far end of the compound. From there, they were crossing the ville’s main street and the leaders of the pack were already circling the other fast-food buildings to outflank the looters and attack them from behind.
As Leeloo said, they knew what they were doing.
The fighting force of Bullard ville advanced like a seasoned army, leapfrogging with precision from hard cover to hard cover. The younger kids carrying black-powder blasters were keeping well to the rear, in a position to put up shielding fire if the folks forward had to suddenly pull back.
Ryan glanced along the row they were in. Right off he could see the companions needed to move to two beds down, as that would block the sec men’s line of sight of their only route to the convoy of parked wags, and escape.
Ryan led Dean, Leeloo and Krysty across the five-foot gap between the beds. They made it without a problem. When J.B., Mildred and Doc followed, all hell broke loose.
