by James Axler
Everyone had taken hard cover.
There were no clear targets for Furlong out the gunport, so he held his fire. It appeared that only a few of the ville folk were attacking them. Less than a dozen shooters were hidden behind the beds. He was relieved at that. He couldn’t see out the windshield more than ten feet because of the wag parked in front of him. He had no way of knowing that the driver of the lead wag hadn’t gotten his steel shades down quickly enough, and had been hit several times in the face and neck by high-powered slugs, and was unconscious and rapidly bleeding out on the floor of the driver’s compartment. Because the lead wag completely blocked Furlong’s view of the main road ahead, he couldn’t see all the armed, angry folks slipping across it, then filtering between the predark buildings in order to circle behind him.
How a few of the dirt farmers could’ve escaped the death tent puzzled the head roustie, but it didn’t worry him much. Once the other carny folk had figured out what happened, they would close in from the rear and wipe out the stragglers.
The looters weren’t all that worried, either. The two guys in the back slipped off to resume their robbing. Because the carny chillers were partially protected by the three parked wags, blocked from the view and aim of the shooters, the flow of stolen goods from the huts continued to trickle into the rear bins. If anything, the rousties worked a bit faster because of the threat of being hit by random fire.
Gradually the shooting from the beds and the thunk of bullets rattling through the wag’s rear compartment slowed to a steady trickle.
Then the potshots stopped altogether.
When Furlong first saw the ville folks breaking from cover and firing the other way, he thought for sure the carny side had finally launched an overdue counterattack. Several dirt farmers dropped in their tracks and three others sprinted away, two boys and a fat woman in a baggy dress.
“Now you’re gonna get it!” he shouted over the roar of looter blasterfire that had already begun. He angled the muzzle of the Llama toward the fleeing trio suddenly caught in the middle of a cloud of yellow, bullet-raised dust.
Furlong aimed at the fat woman and fired four quick shots. What with the flying dirt and all the other bullet strikes, he couldn’t tell if he’d hit her. Not that it really mattered. In the space of a heartbeat, all three lay in a dead heap in the middle of the road.
The shooting from both sides stopped.
The head roustie expected the counterattackers to show themselves then, to stand up and wave the all-clear. When that didn’t happen, he was again at a loss to explain it.
Then three things happened almost simultaneously: a hollow thunk came from the left front bumper, a mist of red sprayed through the Winnebago’s windshield louvers and a heavy-caliber roar erupted from the far side of the plant beds.
Furlong jerked back from the gun port, choking on the coppery smell of blood mixed with cordite. When he glanced down at himself, the gunshot still echoing through the compound, he saw the dense black hairs on his forearm were beaded with tiny drops of blood.
Not his.
Longblaster, Furlong thought at once. From the sound of it, a 7.62 mm. Firing from the cover of the beds, the rifle had picked off one of his guys with surgical precision, which meant there had been no carny counterattack on the dirt farmers. Furlong could remember seeing only one rifle like that in Bullard ville, and it had belonged to Ryan Cawdor. Only someone who’d practiced long and hard with a scoped longblaster could put the first slug in the ten ring. Furlong knew instinctively, deep in his guts that the one-eyed man wasn’t only alive, but had also caused the disaster that was unfolding.
Even as that realization hit him, bullets started slamming into his wag from the other direction. Furlong hopped into the passenger chair to look out the louvers on that side. Whatever slim hope he still had of things working out evaporated in that instant.
There had to be a hundred ville shooters. They had the wags completely flanked and were massing their fire from the hard cover of the Taco Town building. Meanwhile, Furlong’s crews were dumping their booty and returning wild fire as they ran for their lives.
Bullets rained down on his rousties in a hellstorm. They had no chance against so many blasters. Those caught out in the narrow lanes between the huts were hit by dozens of slugs. Those ducking into the huts in search of cover found none. The dirt farmers shot through the flimsy walls of their own cabins, nailing the looters crouching there. The Bullard ville sec men knew exactly what they were doing. Under the barrage of blasterfire, they pushed forward to the edge of the rows of shanties and the back side of the Burger Stravaganza.
As far as Furlong was concerned, the handwriting was on the wall. The opposition was too strong, and they were too well armed and trained. As he flipped up the driver’s ob port and cranked over the engine, a pair of ashen-faced rousties jumped in the back of the RV. He didn’t wait for them to shut the rear doors. Revving the engine, he cut the steering wheel hard over, then dropped it into gear. With a roar, the Winnebago lurched around the end of the wag in front. There was a jolting hop on the right side as the big wag’s front wheel crunched over a fallen man, then Furlong accelerated, heading for the tent and the circled wags.
The first row of plant beds came up in a hurry.
Through louvered shade’s ob port, Furlong caught a blur of movement to his right as people standing there scattered. He glimpsed the scoped longblaster first, then the black eye patch and dark curly hair. At the very last instant, he swerved the Winnebago at Ryan Cawdor, who was caught flatfooted in the open, with nowhere to run.
The look on the about-to-be-dead-man’s face burned into Furlong’s brain. There was no fear in it. No panic.
Nothing but calm.
The head roustie didn’t give a damn how Cawdor took being squashed to a pulp.
“You’re mine now!” he cried, pinning the gas pedal to the floor. “You one-eyed, fucking bastard!”
WHEN RYAN SAW the middle wag pull out of line and start heading their way, he knew it was a golden opportunity, and that it might be their last. It all depended on the driver seeing a way to rack up an easy last chill while he beat feet. “Spread out and take cover!” he ordered to the others.
“Here!” he shouted to J.B., as he tossed the Steyr longblaster to him.
With the companions scattering out of the way and the RV bearing down, Ryan just stood there like a mutie jackrabbit frozen in headlights.
He couldn’t see the driver because of the armored screen that completely covered the windshield. Of course, that meant the driver couldn’t see him that well, either, trying to steer while peeping out of the narrow ob port. At a glance, from the size and position of the slit, Ryan figured it had to have a blind spot to objects up close. At least that was what he was hoping for.
When the RV was ten feet away, he dived to his right, beyond the reach of the front bumper, rolling and coming up in a crouch. As the Winnebago rushed straight past him, he leaped for the driver’s-side mirror strut. His left hand closed on the steel tubing, and the Winnebago’s momentum whipped him around. His body weight broke the grip of the adjustment nut and the entire mirror assembly swung back, slamming him so hard into the outside of the driver’s door that he concaved it.
Somehow he held on.
As the wag picked up speed, Ryan managed to get a toehold on the narrow step below the bottom of the door frame. In the middle of the louvers over the side window was a round hole, about two inches across. He yanked the SIG-Sauer P-226 from its holster and rammed its blunt nose through the blaster-port. As fast as he could pull the trigger, Ryan fired into the driver’s compartment, swinging the weapon’s muzzle in a narrow arc. The driver started to swerve wildly back and forth to try to throw him off.
Ryan held on and kept shooting.
Because of the angle of the louvers he couldn’t see if he was hitting anything. He could hear the sickly whine of ricochets zigzagging inside the armored box. The RV suddenly swung even more crazily, first t
o the left, then the right. It glanced off the end of a plant bed, tearing away twenty feet of corrugated chem rain awning and tipping over onto two wheels for an instant before slamming back down.
The impact almost threw Ryan off the door. It forced him to stop firing. Before he could resume, the Winnebago started to slow down, as if the driver had taken his foot off the gas.
After ten yards, the heavy RV was barely crawling along, which allowed the companions to catch up to it. It was still rolling as they rushed the open rear door. There was no hesitation on their part. They knew it was all or nothing, that the wag was their only hope of getting out of Bullard ville alive.
As the furious, close-range shootout raged at the back of the RV, Ryan tried to get the driver’s door open, but it was locked from the inside.
He heard J.B.’s scattergun boom, and the sharp reports of Mildred’s and Krysty’s handblasters. The trapped rousties returned fire with their autopistols. With blasterfire pouring in through the open door, the steel plate that lined the box was a big negative. Buckshot and .38-caliber slugs cat’s-cradled back and forth between the side walls.
After mebbe fifteen seconds, the shooting stopped.
“We got ’em,” J.B. shouted to Ryan from inside the driver’s compartment. The one-eyed man hopped down from the door’s step.
After a moment, the driver’s door opened and Ryan stared up at the Armorer’s sweaty face and smeared glasses.
He climbed into the RV, and he and his old friend dragged the driver out from between the seats. The head roustie was paralyzed but alive, his spine shattered, the wounds in his hairy back leaking red. They dragged him out of the Winnebago like a roll of old carpet and dumped him on the ground, leaving him there to stare up at the sky, his mouth moving and the weakest of sounds coming out.
If Furlong had some famous last words, nobody was interested in hearing them.
Ryan climbed behind the steering wheel, which was no longer circular, having been almost half blown off by a load of buckshot, it was more a U shape. He glanced to the rear to see that everyone was okay. Mildred and Krysty nodded to him. Doc sat with his back against the crudely welded, quarter-inch steel plate that lined the lower third of the interior wall. His chin sagged to his chest, his eyes were closed, but he was breathing. Above Doc, the wall of the RV had so many bullet holes in it, it looked like a cheese grater. The wag had been completely stripped on the inside to make room for stolen cargo. The rear door was another crude bit of customizing; it was wide enough to get really big things inside. From the looks of things, the built-in bins contained more dead carny chillers than Bullard ville loot.
“Dump those bodies,” Ryan said as he quickly eyeballed the controls of the RV.
“What about the loot the bastards collected?” Krysty asked him. “What should we do with it?”
“Keep the food and the ammo,” he replied. “Everything else, shove out the back.” He put his foot down on hard the gas pedal, heading for the big tent and Dean, Jak and Leeloo.
As Krysty and Mildred heaved the last of the three corpses over the back bumper, the sec men who had moved up to Burger Stravaganza finally found the range, and bullets started spanging into the rear door.
Chapter Twenty-One
At his father’s command, Dean grabbed Leeloo’s hand and they broke from cover on a dead run. Blasterfire blazed behind them as they sprinted across the stretch of open ground between the plant beds and the red-and-white-striped tent. Dean followed his dad’s orders to the letter and didn’t look back, no matter how much he wanted to. This wasn’t the first time he’d been sent away from danger because of his age and his lack of experience. Usually, there was never anyone to look after but himself. This time his feelings of helplessness over leaving his dad and his friends to their fate and allowing them to sacrifice themselves were made easier to swallow by the responsibility he had been given. It was his job to get Leeloo Bunny to safety.
He took some comfort from the knowledge that the companions had always managed to beat the odds before. Someday, he thought, his father wouldn’t make him go when things looked blackest. Some day, there’d be no question of letting him stand and fight with the others.
Dean ran hard and Leeloo ran stride for stride beside him. She was fast and strong for a person of her age. As they neared the side of the tent, slugs whined low overhead. He slowed and ushered her in front of him, shielding her from bullets with his own body.
The blaze of shooting wasn’t the only ruckus going on.
The clatter of the pitched gunbattle had sent the mutie zoo creatures into a panic. The Wazl birds shrieked like shattering plate glass. The Worm hissed and shook its rattles. The naked stickies mewled in a terrified chorus. The swampie jugglers yelled for help, begging at the tops of their lungs to be released from their dung-encrusted cage. The entire Wolfram menagerie seemed to sense, and rightly so, that there would be no justice and no mercy if they were abandoned to the care of the revenge-seeking Bullard ville norms.
Dean was relieved to hear the din they made. The way the muties were all carrying on at once, no way could they sound an alarm over the presence of him and Leeloo. How many armed carny folk were still lurking among the wags? The boy had no clue. His plan was simple: slip under the trailers. He figured he and Leeloo could crawl below the rows of cages and stay out of sight until they found Jak.
As Dean and Leeloo raced past the first trailer, a great, flabby arm lunged out from the shadows, and before they could duck or dodge, it clotheslined them both. Dean ended up flat on his butt, with the muzzle of his Hi-Power blaster rammed deep in the soft yellow dirt. The impact of bone against bone, of forearm against chin made him see stars. He shook his head to clear it, looked over between the trailers, and his blood froze.
Baldoona, the two-headed scalie, its massive bulk seated on the ground, held Leeloo Bunny at arm’s length, snatched up by a handful of hair, like a plaything. An unhappy plaything. The little girl was fighting like a demon, but her nails couldn’t scratch the glittering, reptilian skin, and her kicks were futile against the creature’s well-padded exterior.
Dean jerked up his handblaster, giving its slide a quick, hard thump with the heel of his hand to clear the barrel of dirt. Then he dropped the safety and put his finger inside the trigger guard, and drew a careful bead on the adult head. “Let her go!” he shouted.
By way of answer, the mutie soundly backhanded the wildly struggling child once across the face. It was a hard blow. Leeloo went instantly limp, a ragdoll held off the ground by sixteen inches of light brown hair.
“Bastard!” Dean snarled, thumbing back the blaster’s hammer and jumping to his feet. “I said, let her go, you sack of shit!”
The two-headed scalie did nothing of the kind. Instead, it gathered up the unconscious girl in both hands, holding her by the wrists and ankles, and raised her to its mismatched mouths like an ear of roasted corn.
“Try to bite her and you’re dead meat!” Dean warned.
“Do you really think you can chill me before I chill her?” Baldoona’s adult head asked him with a smirk. From the way the baby head was lopsidedly grinning, it, too, was amused at the idea.
Dean said nothing. His finger tightened on the trigger, taking up the slack to the break point. The cap was about to snap.
“Think you can stop me with just one shot?” the adult head went on. “Because that’s all you’re going to get. And it won’t be enough. In case you forgot, I’ve got two brains, Bed Wetter.”
Dean grimaced, sighting the Browning first at one nasty drooling head, then the other. From the only shot angle he had, he couldn’t hit both with a single 9 mm slug, through one head and into the other, which was the only hope he had of taking out the scalie before it could hurt the girl. He racked his brain, trying to think of what his father would have done in the situation, and came up with a gigantic blank. There were no options as long as the monster had hold of Leeloo.
Baldoona’s adult head licked the uncons
cious girl’s cheek and ear, tasting her skin, and then smacked its lips appreciatively. “Cinnamon spice, very nice,” it said.
The baby head gibbered and chattered excitedly, puckering its mouth, stretching its neck to the limit, trying to get its lips and then its tiny teeth wrapped around one of the little girl’s bare feet, her sun-browned toes, which were just out of its reach.
“No, don’t!” Dean cried, lowering his weapon. “Don’t!”
“‘Don’t’?” the adult head said, giving him an irritated look. “I’m about to eat this tender little morsel’s face off, and you think I’m interested in your ‘Don’t’?”
“Let her go and take me instead,” Dean told the monster. “You can eat me. I’m bigger than she is. There’s more meat. I won’t fight you, I promise. Just let her go.”
“Yeah, sure…” the adult head said dubiously, opening its mouth, moistening its lips as it prepared to take the first bite.
“Look,” Dean said, “I’ll prove it. I’ll put down my blaster.” He carefully placed the weapon in the dirt at his feet. Parting with the Browning under these circumstances was one of the hardest things the boy had ever had to do. But the memory of what the scalie’s two heads had done to the live pig in the big top was still very fresh in his mind. Dean couldn’t bear to witness it doing that to Leeloo. He needed the scalie to put the girl down. That was step one.
Baldoona smiled with both its wet mouths. “You got yourself a deal, Piss Pants,” the adult head said. The scalie then gently set the still unconscious Leeloo on the ground, smoothing her faded dress, then securely trapping her there by laying its grotesquely fat thigh across the small of her back. It extended both its arms to Dean, then snapped its fingers impatiently at him. “Chow time for Baldoona,” it said.
