by James Axler
There had never been a doubt in the boy’s mind that Baldoona would try to double-cross him, that it would eat them both, if it could.
Dean’s plan was born of desperation. Get in close enough and use his legs and feet. Get inside the creature’s guard and kick for the heads. Boot the adult head first, then the baby head. Boot them until they were knocked out.
But before he could plant his back foot and get off a kick, the scalie had him fast by the scruff of the neck. It was much quicker than it looked. And much, much stronger. As the fingers vise-gripped his neck, Dean realized the monster could break his spine with a sudden twist, like a dog with a rat. And when Baldoona squeezed a little harder, cutting off the blood flow to Dean’s brain, all the strength went out of his legs.
The baby head started to coo as its suddenly helpless, living meal was drawn tantalizingly closer.
Dean smelled the mutie’s huge, and hugely soiled, underpants as Baldoona grabbed his right hand by the wrist and raised to its adult head. The jaws opened wide, exposing short, wear-blunted fangs and a mossy, vaguely reptilian tongue. Dean tried to draw back his hand, but the scalie increased the pressure on his neck, and his arm went dead in the creature’s grasp.
In the near distance, over the sounds of the shooting, Dean heard the engine of a big wag starting up, then getting louder and louder as it rumbled his way. Something hot and wet slithered between and around his fingers. The scalie was licking him. Dean cringed, anticipating the horrible pain to follow.
But Baldoona didn’t start crunching on his fingers. The scalie’s grip suddenly slackened on Dean’s neck. Below him, Leeloo had regained consciousness, and was trying to claw her way out from under the weight of the mutie’s thigh. It snagged Leeloo’s slender shoulder, dragged her back under its leg and sat on her.
“Get out of here!” Baldoona’s adult head bawled. “This is mine! All mine!” Dean turned his head and glimpsed a huge beige shape poised, as still as a statue, not five feet away.
The mountain lion, uncaged.
Its stare was locked on the scalie, and the stare was having its desired effect.
Dean saw that Baldoona was paralyzed. Both heads knew it couldn’t run and hope to escape from the lion. Both heads knew it couldn’t fight the lion and win. But neither head wanted to give up the food it had captured. The monster’s four eyes glittered with fear. With gluttony. With anger.
Given its show-stopping big-top act, the scalie had had considerable practice in eating live prey against the clock.
In a flash it made up its minds.
But before it chomp down on either of its captives, the lion sprang. A beige blur rushed past Dean. Its front paws landed high on the scalie’s sagging chest, knocking the air from its lungs and bowling it over onto its back. Dean was slammed to the ground but rolled free as Baldoona lurched up to defend itself from the attack of the giant cat.
Defense was futile, comical, even, and certainly brief.
As big as the scalie was, as quick as it was, it was no match for this adversary. Baldoona lunged for the lion’s horned throat, and its fingers closed on air. Dean blinked in amazement. The big cat was standing behind the scalie, whose hands were clenched together, strangling nothing. With a single blow of its paw, the lion sent Baldoona crashing onto its hands and knees.
Dean had witnessed mountain lion kills before, but always at a distance, through the telescopic sight on his father’s longblaster. Dog style was the position lions preferred for chilling man or beast.
It offered access to the prey’s throat. In this case, it had a choice of throats.
Dean had no idea how big the lion’s mouth was until it opened wide. It was so big that it could wedge the scalie’s adult neck between its back teeth. As the lion squeezed down its jaws, cutting off air and blood and shrill cries of terror, the adult head turned a deep plum purple, eyes bulging out of their sockets, quasireptilian tongue protruding obscenely. The baby head, stabbed by the cat’s stiff whiskers, began squealing, not unlike the live pig it had so recently consumed.
The lion didn’t use its prodigious fangs on Baldoona. It used its back molars and started sawing, grinding away with them, twisting its thousand pounds of muscle and bone, digging into the dirt with its claws for added leverage, this while the scalie frantically bucked and jerked.
Dean grabbed Leeloo by the arm and pulled her away from the struggle. As they stood, Jak appeared from between the trailers, his Colt Python raised in a two-handed grip. The albino lowered the .357 blaster at once; it wasn’t needed.
The power of the big cat’s bite was in those back teeth, where the muscles of its jaws and neck could apply the most pressure. The vertebrae of the adult head’s neck made a crunching sound as they shattered, and Baldoona’s body went rigid, as if touched by a high-voltage wire. A thick spurt of blood escaped from the corner of the cat’s mouth. The lion then turned its head slightly and with slitted eyes kept chewing, angling the points of its molars to shear the sinew and gristle that was all that was holding the head to the body. The severed adult head of Baldoona dropped to the dirt between its feet.
The baby head, suddenly all alone in the world, and facing at close range a nightmare of gory saber fangs, squealed even more shrilly. Six inches from the tip of its button nose, blood from the neck stump, a rude knob of red meat and bone, sprayed in a superfine mist, sprayed in time to the pounding of its no longer shared heart. The terrible crushing power of the lion’s jaws had at least temporarily sealed off the clusters of severed arteries and veins.
The mutie cat made no move to bite off the little head on the big body. It stood there, watching, as the great, flabby scalie lurched to its feet and tried to run. Baldoona took a single step before falling to the ground. It lurched up again, the baby head grimacing from the effort.
And fell again.
“Look!” Leeloo said. “The baby head doesn’t know how to walk.”
It was true.
Baldoona struggled up again, its monumental bulk teetering horribly for a second, arms flailing for balance, then it crashed to its knees and started to crawl. The exertion and the repeated impacts broke open the compression-sealed vessels in its neck stump. As the baby head tried to pull itself away from danger, a gusher of gore spewed forth, bathing the side of its face, splattering into the dirt before it. The blood loss was massive. Baldoona managed to crawl only a few more feet before collapsing in a heap.
The lion burped, licked its paw, then scrubbed at the side of its face where blood had spurted, seemingly oblivious to the armor-shuttered Winnebago coming full speed around the curve of the tent.
As the RV bore down on them, Dean pivoted and swung up the Hi-Power, preparing to fire.
“Not shoot,” Jak said, clamping his hand over the blaster’s slide and pushing it away, “Ryan. See him take wag.”
The albino wasn’t the only one who’d seen it. Bullard ville sec men charged out from the cover of the plant beds, firing wildly at the RV as they ran. The Winnebago skidded to a sideways stop ten feet from Dean and the others, shielding them from the bullets. The rear door opened at once. Krysty waved everyone in from the back bumper. She didn’t have to tell them to hurry.
Dean followed Leeloo into the wag. The girl, uncharacteristically it seemed to him, immediately sought shelter in Mildred’s open arms. Mebbe her close call with Baldoona had really scared her? he thought. She was tough, but she was still just a little girl.
The mountain lion hopped in last. Even though it did so almost silently, on its huge soft pads, the wag’s springs and shocks creaked and the entire cargo box shifted from the additional half ton of weight. If any of the companions objected to its presence, no one said a word.
As the wag began to move, Dean climbed forward to the driver’s compartment and braced himself between the driver’s and front-passenger chairs. His father accelerated past the doomed menagerie, cutting around the perimeter of the circled wags. A flurry of bullets sparked and zinged off the steel shutter t
hat protected the windshield. Blasterfire from the rousties still scrambling about, Dean presumed.
“How many of the carny wags did you wreck?” J.B. asked Jak from the shotgun seat.
“Cut tires on eight,” Jak said.
“That’s all?”
“No time more.”
“Shit,” J.B. said.
“We have to let the girl off before we bail on this place,” Mildred said.
“She’s right, Ryan,” Krysty said from beside the rear door. “Leeloo needs to stay here with her own people. We can’t take her with us.”
“We can put her out on the other side of the tent, near the entrance,” Mildred stated. “She should be safe there.”
“Come over here now,” Krysty said to the girl. “We aren’t going to be able to stop for long. You’re going to have to jump out quick.”
Dean and Leeloo shared a look as she stood up. He smiled at her and nodded; she nodded back. Then Leeloo moved beside the rear door with Krysty.
As Ryan slowed to stop near the tent entrance, Krysty opened the door. She held Leeloo’s arm as the girl prepared to jump off the back bumper. Before she could do that, once again bullets sang all around them. The ville sec men had anticipated their exit route and circled around the far side of the tent. They were lined up in a double row, massing their fire to catch the RV as it came around the curve of the tent, and before it could head for the break in the berm wall.
“No!” Dean cried.
But Krysty had already pulled Leeloo back inside.
“Everybody on the floor back there!” Ryan shouted over the clatter, stomping the gas pedal. “Get behind the armor!”
Bullets rattled the sides of the stripped Winnebago, howling as they passed through and through overhead, slamming into the tempered-steel plate with solid whacks.
Ryan steered for the berm entrance as the RV picked up speed. The Winnebago vibrated over the rough ground as if it was going to come unriveted, unscrewed and unglued.
“Fireblast!” Ryan swore as the break in the perimeter wall came into view of the ob port.
No further explanation was necessary.
Bullets rained down on the armored shutters. The ville sec men had already manned the top of the berm wall on either side of the only exit, and now they were cutting loose with everything they had. The shooters’ angle of fire meant that their slugs cut through high in the walls and roof, and sliced into the middle of the cargo box’s deck. The companions pressed their backs hard against the armor to keep from being cut to pieces.
Ryan didn’t give the sec men time to correct their aim. When he passed through the gap and the choking pall of black-powder smoke, he was going seventy-five miles per hour.
For a full thirty seconds, as Ryan made for the ruined interstate, bullets whined at them. Then the shooting suddenly stopped. The range from the berm was better than a half mile and growing, and the sec men had realized they were just wasting bullets.
As Dean released his pent-up breath, Ryan and J.B. raised the armored shutters, letting in the glare of bright sunlight. The rutted highway stretched ruler straight for miles ahead. Over the engine and road noise, there was a crackle of small-arms fire from the ville behind them.
“Suppose they’re finishing off the last of the rousties,” J.B. speculated. “Mebbe the sideshow freaks, too.”
“So much for Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show,” Krysty said.
“Good riddance,” Mildred added.
Ryan reached over and tapped the twin fuel gauges with a fingernail. Dean noted that one was dead empty, the other jiggling above the one-third-full mark. His father eased off the gas. Dean knew he was trying to conserve as much fuel as possible, and put the maximum distance between them and Bullard ville before the tank ran dry.
“What are we going to do about the girl now?” Mildred asked.
“We can’t take her with us,” Krysty said. “She’s too young. She’s got to go back to her ville.”
There was no argument from the other companions. Not even from Dean. “I can’t just stay?” Leeloo asked him.
Dean shook his head. She was much safer inside the berm.
The little girl heaved a sigh.
“Trouble is,” J.B. said, “how do we get her back to Bullard without getting ourselves all shot to hell?”
“We can wait until the smoke clears,” Ryan said. “Let everybody back there settle down. She can stay with us for a week or two, then we’ll sneak her back.”
Leeloo looked pleased at the idea.
“Uh-oh, Ryan,” J.B. said as he glanced into his side mirror. “We got company.”
Dean peered over his shoulder into the dirty glass, past the dust cloud they were raising. About a half mile behind them was a second dust cloud, and in the middle of it was an RV just like the one they were riding in.
“I count four carny wags chasing us,” the Armorer stated, “including the biggest wag in their convoy.”
“Who’s driving them?” Mildred said. “Did the carny folk manage to escape, too?”
“Can’t see,” J.B. told her. “They’re still too far back to tell. Probably got their armor down, anyway.”
“Rousties or sec men,” Ryan said, “it doesn’t make much difference. You can bet they’re after our hides.” He pressed the accelerator to the floorboard and held it there.
Even so, the trailing wags were closing distance. Dean could see that.
Ryan was unable to make the RV go faster than seventy-eight miles per hour. The front end started to shimmy and shake. It didn’t like going that fast, particularly on a chem-rain-etched roadway. The Winnebago sounded as if it was about to come apart. The engine noise was tremendous, as was the whistling of the wind through hundreds of bullet holes.
“Start looking for a place to make a stand,” Ryan shouted to J.B.
The flat plain offered little in the way of defensive prospects. With the river gone underground, there were no trees or even bushes. They had to keep going. Soon the lead wag was close enough to try to shoot at them. Dean could hear muffled blasterfire, but the bullets weren’t making contact.
Yet.
“We got trouble ahead, Ryan!” J.B. cried.
Dean could see it. A pile of big chunks of concrete rubble stretched completely across the four-lane road. And was coming up fast.
Too fast.
His father cursed and slammed on the brakes. The Winnebago skidded on the rotted tarmac, its rear end fishtailing to the left.
Dean held on to the seatback with both hands as the world slewed sickeningly and clouds of dust boiled through the holed-out walls.
The RV hit the rubble barrier sideways, and in what seemed like slow motion, bounced off and came down with a jarring crash beside the crude arrow sign. Ryan punched the gas pedal, and the wag roared off the roadway. He had no choice.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed when he saw the narrow track before them.
Which matched Dean’s thoughts exactly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The rutted lane was just wide enough for the RV. It ran flat and perpendicular to the interstate for thirty yards or so, then it started to climb up the steep slope. The series of switchbacks had been hacked out of beige sandstone bedrock.
“Got to be what’s left of a predark road,” J.B. said.
Ryan grunted in agreement. There was no road-grading machinery in operation postskydark. Highway departments worldwide had gone spinning down the toilet along with everything else. And as far as Ryan knew, in Deathlands there was no army of slave laborers large enough to carve even this crude one-lane track.
“Could have been some kind of service road,” Mildred suggested. “For firefighters. Or power line crews.” She pointed at the blue dark forest and mountains towering above them. “Had to have been National Forest up there. Could have been part of that.”
Whatever its original purpose, the detour was an endurance course for the aged and now shot-up Winnebago. The hairpins were tight
and the grade in some places was forty-five degrees, which forced the companions to brace themselves against floor and walls, or end up in a pile of tangled arms and legs in front of the rear door.
Negotiating the zigzags took some very careful driving on Ryan’s part. Keeping the wag’s momentum going with an automatic tranny was tough, and if he gained too much speed and lost control, there was no margin for error—he’d drop a wheel off the edge of the road. The unpaved track was badly rilled out in spots. The weight of the RV caused these parts to crumble, and the spinning rear tires cut deeper potholes and ruts. The lion sitting over the back wheels helped big time as far as traction was concerned.
As the Winnebago climbed, Ryan and the others could hear a chorus of engines below, roaring ominously as they lumbered up the track after them. They couldn’t see the wags, though. They were about a quarter mile behind. Any hope of the pursuit giving up once they saw the grade and the narrow road had long since evaporated.
“Whoever they are,” Krysty said, “they sure got a giant bug in their butts over us.”
“If they were ville folk,” Mildred said, “you’d think they would have turned back long before this. After all, they won the fight, even though a few of them got chilled in the process. Seemed like they would write it off as part of the cost of doing business…and building their reputation as a big-time, take-no-shit ville.”
“Makes me think it’s got to be the Magus who’s after us,” Ryan said. “We caused him a good bit more trouble than we did the farmers. We didn’t just upset his plans for Bullard ville—we put an end to his carny operation. Mebbe forever.”
“And Magus doesn’t give up until he’s dead square even,” J.B. added. “That’s a proven fact.”
As the grade continued to steepen, the RV lost so much speed that they probably could have outpaced it on foot, but abandoning their wheels at this point was out of the question. If they did that, once the ground flattened out, or turned downhill, the pursuers in wags could run them down. Nor was there any discussion of some of the companions getting out and trying to slow down or stop the miniconvoy with small arms or hastily rigged deadfalls. They were already outnumbered and outgunned. To have split up their force would have been suicidal.
