by James Axler
One of the sec men shouted over the din of the shooting, “It’s the other ones! They’re tryin’ to get behind us!”
As J.B. shoved Doc facedown in the dirt, withering fire poured onto the front of the bed. The range was only about forty feet. In the hail of bullets, half the sheet-metal awning ripped loose and tumbled onto Dean and Leeloo. Ryan kicked it aside. He and Krysty could only fire blindly over the top of the bed; they didn’t dare raise themselves up to take proper aim. Slugs from the opposition were chewing great hunks of wood out of the top edge of the frame inches over their heads. Ryan stopped firing and pulled back the SIG P-226. Down the row, J.B., Mildred and Doc were likewise pinned. In the space of a few seconds, everything had gone to shit.
“Ryan, what are we going to do?” Krysty shouted as she jammed a speed loader into her Smith & Wesson’s open cylinder. “These people want our heads.”
“The sec force is about to flank the looters,” he told her. “Once they close in and lower the hammer, the carny chillers are dead meat. And when that happens, we’re going to have a whole bunch more pissed-off folks waving blasters in our faces. I’d say we’ve got four or five minutes, tops, before that happens.”
“But what are we going to do?” Krysty repeated.
By way of an answer, Ryan turned to his son and said, “Dean, make a break for the circled wags. Take the little girl with you. We can’t leave her here. She’d be cut to pieces. Find Jak. He’s there somewhere. Go with him, get out of the ville. Even if you have to go on foot. We’ll track you down and meet up later.”
The last part was very unlikely, given the circumstances. The boy’s face dropped.
“But, Dad…” he began.
“No argument, son. When we commit ourselves, it’s going to be all out, everything on the line to get you to the wags. You’ve got to take Leeloo and run. Don’t stop for anything. You wait for my signal, and then you go. You understand?”
With great reluctance, unable to conceal his hurt, Dean answered, “Yes, Dad.”
“Good boy.”
Ryan reached over and gave his son’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. Then he signaled to J.B., pointing at Dean and the girl, then behind them in the direction of the tent and the parked wags. J.B. got the picture at once, and nodded in agreement. He spoke to Mildred, who looked at Ryan and also nodded. The Armorer then took out his Tekna knife and with a single swipe cut himself free of Doc. The old man was down on his hands and knees, swaying back and forth, mouth in constant motion, seemingly unaware of the hellstorm that surrounded them.
That J.B. and Ryan would attack the ville shooters from opposite directions went without saying. It was their standard skirmish procedure since the days with Trader. The intent was to divide the opposition’s fire, to come from unexpected angles, to startle and confuse them.
There was no time for goodbyes.
Ryan and Krysty shared a look that only lasted an instant, but said everything that needed to be said.
The one-eyed man held up his hand so J.B. could see it. Five fingers extended. Then four, then three. On none, he rolled to his right and came up running.
“Now, Dean!” he cried, rounding the end of the bed.
Krysty was right on his heels as he charged into the wide aisle that separated the rows.
The ville shooters hiding behind the bed in the next row gave up their cover to get a clear shot at the rapidly closing targets. As they popped up over the greenery, they had expressions of righteous fury on their faces. Nobody was going to steal from them; nobody was going to bushwhack them; nobody was going to trick them.
If Ryan felt sympathy for the people of Bullard ville, he had to crush it, to bury it under the weight of his own determination to survive. This wasn’t the fight he had wanted, not the fight he had intended. But survival was on the line for him and the companions. If he ended up chilling the very folks he’d come to help, it was because he was left no choice in the matter.
Crossing the strip of open ground, Ryan wondered why the Bullard ville sec force hadn’t kept to its cover. There was such a thing as being too confident; there was such a thing as mistaking dumb luck for skill, letting a few successes go to your head. And there was such a thing as liking the heat of battle way too much. No matter how you spun it, jumping up to shoot was a bonehead move.
As the sharpshooters’ blasters blazed, so did Ryan’s. He ignored the hot lead roaring past his ears. The SIG in his fist bucked and cycled, bucked and cycled as he pulled the trigger as fast as he could. It was impossible to shoot fine and tight while sprinting for your life. The best he could do was to lob slugs at the sec force. A 9 mm slug from his handblaster ripped a big chunk out of a tall man’s upper arm. For a split second, a mist of red hung in the air around his shoulder. The tall man stopped firing and twisted away, clutching at himself, his hand on the wounded side dangling uselessly at his hip. Ryan’s next shot hit him in the right cheek, just below the eye. The decompression shock as the back of his head blew away popped the eyeball from its socket.
A fraction of a second later, a guy in patched bib-front overalls standing next to him absorbed a center body hit, doubling over around the bullet impact, clutching at his stomach and showing Ryan the bald top of his head. The one-eyed man was already tightening down on a follow-up shot as the man started to bend over. He put the second round in almost the same place relative to the ground, but because the man had moved while the bullet was in flight, it crashed through his skull instead of his midsection. As the bib-front guy toppled backward, a torrent of blood rushed from his nose and mouth, and it geysered high and red out the top of his head.
Two strides later, Ryan was vaulting the still kicking bodies and cutting around the end of the bed. As he did so, Krysty’s .38 barked in rapid fire.
Six hollowpoint slugs clipped through the greenery—two sailed on, high and wide, but four made solid thwacks as they hit flesh and bone.
The flesh and bone belonged to the whoremaster of Bullard ville and two of his best gaudy sluts. The women were all dressed up for the carny show in long, shiny ball gowns, their bosoms bare to the nipples, their faces feverishly rouged, lips thickly painted. Suddenly single, small, round beauty spots appeared near the centers of each of their foreheads, and big cratering holes in the backs of their skulls where the mushrooming hollowpoints exited. The sluts dropped their battle-scarred Walther PPKs and made stiff, awkward curtseys as their knees buckled. Their bottoms struck the ground at almost the same instant, dead before they hit the dirt.
The whoremaster O’Neil was slammed twice in the chest, .38 slugs coring both lungs. As he fell, he discharged his mini-Uzi into his own boots, pinning the trigger on full-auto, sending up flurry of yellow dust mixed with blood and bone chips.
Ryan rounded the end of the bed. As he did so, Melchior and two other ville bigwigs, having stood up to confront their attackers, were now backing up at top speed, trying to retreat to the cover of the next row, firing wildly as they went. Melchior’s ponderous bulk lurched to the side as a blast from J.B.’s scattergun caught him in the torso, under the left arm. The Armorer had loaded the weapon with lead pellet rounds, and the impact made the flab of the headman’s face shudder. He lost his grip on his Ruger revolver, and it went flying, end over end. A smaller man would have gone flying along with it.
Before Melchior could recover his balance, he was struck again, this time at the knees. Clutching at his ruined legs, he went down, the scattergun’s roar drowning his cries.
As J.B. advanced, he worked the M-4000’s butter-smooth slide. Holding the trigger pinned, he hammered the other two bigwigs, sending one pinwheeling into the plant bed headfirst, and blowing the other off his feet with a center chest hit.
Kneeling at the corner of the bed, Mildred followed up on three more retreating figures—an extremely heavyset woman in a shapeless gunnysack of a faded, calf-length, print dress, and two lanky boys in their late teens. The heavy woman was packing a .32 Beretta blaster. One of the teenagers ca
rried a Government Colt remake, the other a .38 Smith & Wesson with a five-inch barrel. As the trio backed up, they fired without aiming, hoping to somehow hit J.B., Ryan, Krysty and Mildred with lucky shots.
Mildred, on the other hand, took very careful aim. She fired three quick rounds from her ZKR 551. The first hit the heavyset woman high in the flabby forearm of her gun hand. The little .32 tumbled from fingers numb with shock. Mildred hadn’t been trying to hit bone, but bone had been hit. And shattered. The second round passed through the Government Colt boy’s bicep. The third clipped the shoulder of the other teenager. Two more gun-hand hits. Both boys managed to hold on to their weapons, but neither could raise them to return more fire.
Realizing they were helpless to defend themselves, all three turned and ran.
Mildred was pleased to see them able to run.
The other companions drew beads on their retreating backs, easy shots to make, given the distance, but no one fired. It was obvious that these three were no longer in the contest.
Ryan glanced over his shoulder at the tent and was relieved that Dean and Leeloo were nowhere in sight. Whatever else happened, at least they had made it safely to the circled wags.
As he turned back to the action, blasterfire erupted from beside the looter wags. Dirt puffed up all around the fleeing woman and two boys as they tried to cross the ville’s main street and rejoin their people. They went down in a tangled heap in the middle of the road, the heavy woman crashing on top of the teenagers.
“Shit!” Mildred cried, returning fire.
Krysty joined in, as well.
As J.B. scrambled back to retrieve Doc, Ryan unslung the Steyr longblaster and flipped up the lens protectors on its telescope. With the forestock braced against the frame of the plant bed, he swung the sight post over the nearest looter wag. A roustie peeked around the front bumper, KG-99 in hand, looking for something else to chill. Ryan held the top of the post way low to adjust for the short distance to target, and squeezed off a shot.
The man kneeling behind the bumper jerked upright as if flicked by a giant, invisible finger. Arms flying wide, he did a midair half twist and hit the ground hard. He wasn’t dead. Back arching, he kicked his legs and thrashed his arms.
Nobody rushed out to help him.
Ryan was searching the line of wags for a second target when he saw bullet impacts from the opposite direction kicking up dust. The ville folks’ flanking attack had begun. The carny chillers were about to get themselves sandwiched. He flipped down the lens caps on his scope. He didn’t need ten-power magnification to see what was going on downrange.
The ant line of looters moving between the cabins and the wags disintegrated as small-weapons fire swept over it. From the hard cover of Taco Town, the ville sec force sent volleys of lead down the narrow lanes between the low shacks, through the walls of the shacks themselves. The blasting was indiscriminate; the folk of Bullard were in an outraged frenzy at having their personal belongings taken. The looters caught flatfooted by the barrage dropped where they stood, hit by dozens of rounds at once. Arms heaped with clothing, tools, utensils opened and spilled what they held. Other rousties managed to dump their booty and run, only to be cut down after taking a few steps. The only chillers who had half a chance were the ones closest to the wags. At least they could dive into the wags for cover.
Bullets rained down on the three Winnebagos.
“These folks aren’t going to be satisfied until they’ve chilled every outlander,” Krysty said to the others. “They’re going to grind up the rest of the rousties and then they’re going to roll over us.”
“Time for us to try and pull back, Ryan,” Mildred said. “While we still have a prayer of making it.”
“It’s now or never,” J.B. agreed.
Before Ryan could speak, the engine of the second Winnebago roared to life, and an instant later, with spinning rear wheels, it swerved out of line. It accelerated, fishtailing wildly.
“Fireblast!” Ryan growled as the driver regained control and the looter wag shot across the road.
As if it was locked on a target, the RV barreled down on them.
Chapter Eighteen
Baldoona’s adult head peeked out from the shadows between a pair of trailers. The boy and girl had stopped running, but were still moving its way. If they continued on their current course, they would pass within a yard of its hiding place. The adult head ducked back, out of sight.
The baby head was drooling and chuckling. It had been drooling and chuckling like that for more than forty years. It had always been a baby head. The adult head had started out that way, but it had matured along with the rest of the body.
For more than forty years, Baldoona had lived in a cage. Even among scalies, the birth of a huge, two-headed infant was altogether too frightening and bizarre.
When Gert Wolfram’s scouts had spotted the young scalie, they’d attacked and captured the freak of nature. None of the pack had tried to defend the youngster against its kidnappers.
Despite the adult head’s whining complaints about the unsanitary accommodations and rough treatment, despite the fact that it was momentarily free of its cage, it had no intention of ever escaping from the carny. The adult head wasn’t smart by any stretch of the imagination, but it was smart enough to understand that freedom for Baldoona the Two-Headed Scalie meant a slow death by starvation. Baldoona had never made its own way in the world. Chow came to it regularly, instead of it having to chase down the chow, which because of its weight it could never catch unless said chow was staked and tethered, or blindsided. The two tender young morsels walking his way were a case of the latter. If it could surprise and stun them, it could have them. As Baldoona’s adult head drew even deeper into the shadows, it considered the moist, succulent flesh, the sweet blood, the crisp bones. It wiped the drool from its chin, then from the baby chin.
Contemplating at extreme close range the ruddy, contorted face of its shouldermate, the puffy eyelids, the ever-wet-from-snot upper lip, the perpetual puke breath, the adult head allowed itself to admit the real reason that it hadn’t somehow arranged to have the ugly, messy knob chopped off decades ago. The baby head, whatever else it was or wasn’t, was the adult head’s only friend in the world. Even though it couldn’t talk, even though it woke him up four times a night, even though it crapped in what the adult head considered its pants, even though it regularly barfed all over the adult head’s shirtfront, without the baby head Baldoona would have had to actively make its own living in the world. It would have been just another big, fat, dumb scalie.
The adult head could hear the footfalls of its quarry drawing nearer; it could hear the children whispering to each other as they approached. It prepared itself to spring.
As it continued to slobber a bubbling waterfall, the baby head started making a funny noise. A kind of soft, rhythmic chirping from deep in its throat. It was the same noise it made whenever they got their hands on a live pig or a goat.
“Quiet,” the adult head warned its counterpart, nose to nose. “If we do this right, we can eat them both.”
“Goo,” whispered the baby head.
Chapter Nineteen
The Magnificent Crecca hurried down the command wag’s narrow corridor. In his arms was a bundle of ghastly, cold limbs. A violently twitching bundle of limbs. A head too heavy for its size leaned against his shoulder. The rest of the Magus’s body was as light as a feather, this a product of hollow stainless-steel replacement bones and Teflon joints. Having to actually touch the creature he so feared, to feel its cold metal and its feverish flesh, made his skin crawl. In order to keep from vomiting at the smell, Crecca had to make a conscious effort to suck in every breath through his mouth.
Sounds of blasterfire raging outside accompanied them to the salon-workroom. The Magus, who was fully awake as Crecca deposited him on the autopsy table, paid no attention to the battle, or what it portended for the future of this incarnation of Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. His
only concern was ending his own pain and insuring his own immediate survival, which was in jeopardy.
The steel-eyed monster hadn’t completely escaped the dozen or so steel-jacketed handblaster rounds that had imploded his private viewing box’s mirror. Momentarily frozen in his recliner chair, he had been caught in the hail of lead. Through the glittering whoosh of shattered glass, Crecca had seen the sparks fly and heard the ricochets whine from bullet strikes on the creature’s tempered metal parts. In the midst of the surprise barrage, the Magus had managed to turn and bail from the chair. He had hit the floor with a dull thud, barely able to crawl hand over hand, and spurting vile-smelling internal fluids of various colors and densities.
Because of his boss’s unnatural, composite physiology, as Crecca had looked back from the doorway, he couldn’t tell whether any of the wounds were fatal. If the carny master had been sure, he would have left the Magus to die alone on the floor of the box. Even now, Crecca would have chilled the monster himself if he could have been certain of pulling off the deed. Though the Magus was obviously seriously injured, there was no way to judge his ability to defend himself. It was widely rumored among carny folk that once his metal jaws clamped shut on something they could never be pried loose; they would hold on like grim death until the second coming of skydark. In the end, what stayed Crecca’s hand was his fear of failure and its consequences, which were too terrible to imagine.
“Roll the tool cabinet over here,” the Magus commanded, his voice unusually high-pitched, like a tape recording played too fast.
Crecca unlocked the wheels of the tall, red, multi-drawer toolbox and quickly pushed it to the side of the table. As he did so, he saw that the Magus was using both hands to compress one of the prominent, artificial veins that festooned his chest. Between his fingers, the steel flex-piping oozed what looked like dirty transmission fluid.
