by James Axler
As Ryan dropped to his knees, something heavy landed on the backs of his calves. He looked over his shoulder to see the canvas satchel of high explosives. About thirty pounds worth, he figured. He didn’t try to throw it back out again. If the strap got hung up on the machine gun, or if the officer was still outside, throwing it wouldn’t do any good. Throwing it would just eat up precious seconds. He didn’t waste them cursing, either.
“Move!” he yelled at Mildred and J.B. “Move!” Then he crawled over the slimy gore like a madman, hurling himself into the narrow culvert. He couldn’t fault the officer’s strategy, even if he was about to be made a victim of it. It made perfect sense to set a charge in a tunnel under the wall. Get a much bigger hole that way.
Ryan slid out of the open end of the pipe and hit the ground running.
J.B. and Mildred were moving toward the nearest cover, ignorant of what was coming. There was no time to fill in the pertinent details. “Hurry!” Ryan cried. “Faster!”
A split second before the explosion, they ducked behind a rusting cabover camper propped up on concrete blocks.
Too close to the SUV as it turned out.
Way too close.
The boom was tremendous. It made the previous gren blasts seem like firecrackers. The pressure wave alone knocked the camper off its blocks and it tipped over, almost landing on top of them. A heartbeat later came a flash of intense heat, then boiling clouds of dust and smoke. Big rocks and chunks of concrete sailed down through the obscuring smoke, thudding to earth all around them.
The satchel charge had blown the Suburban apart and taken out a pie-shaped wedge of berm. As the smoke lifted, Malosh fighters poured through the gap.
Only to be met by ravening waves of automatic weapons fire from the Haldane defenders.
Bullets slammed into the roof of the overturned camper, slicing ragged holes in the sheet aluminum. Ryan, J.B., and Mildred whirled to face the fresh attack. Some seventy-five yards away, Haldane soldiers crouched next to the culvert opening of the gateside gunpost, firing assault rifles.
Ryan swung the SIG up in a two-handed grip, punching out a tight string of single shots.
KRYSTY AND JAK WERE waiting on the path halfway up the cliffside when the satchel charge detonated with a sudden flash of light and a rolling boom. The concussion shook loose dirt and scads of small rocks, causing minor avalanches all along the slope. Krysty had to put a hand out to steady herself.
Then it started raining.
Boulders and chunks of concrete blown sky-high bounced down the cliff face, as did the gun post’s front axle and V-8 engine block. The norms closer to the summit were swept off the path by falling heavy debris. Screaming, cartwheeling bodies flew past. Along the base of the cliff, a rubbish heap of rock, metal and torn flesh accumulated.
Krysty thanked Gaia that she hadn’t seen Ryan in free fall. That didn’t mean he or the others were okay, though. The explosion was much more powerful than she’d expected, and that worried her.
Someone shouted down from the cliff top. “They’ve broken through the berm. Let’s go! Everyone up!”
Krysty and Jak advanced behind the last of the norm fighters. Behind them came the swampies and their highly excited dogs. The hellhounds could smell the blood and the fear in the air. Krysty could smell it, too. The drooling animals scrambled up the path, half dragging their stumpy handlers.
As Krysty climbed toward Sunspot ville, the small-arms fire above intensified. Haldane defenders were trying to turn back the spear point of the assault.
With Jak at her side, she jumped onto the summit, her Smith & Wesson 640 in her hand. The first thing she saw was the smoking ruin where the SUV gunpost had been. The satchel charge had blown a twelve-foot gap in the berm. Nothing of the wag remained. Ryan, Mildred and J.B. were nowhere in sight. Heavy blaster-fire sawed back and forth inside the berm as they ran through the litter of bodies and body parts. The corpses closest to the explosion were burning like guttering candles.
Jak led Krysty into the breach. The norm fighters were jammed up on the far side, pinned by blasterfire from the maze of wags and semitrailers, and from the sides of the Welcome Center and the garden behind.
“Follow me!” Korb shouted to their backs, turning left along the inside of the berm wall.
There was no time to locate their companions. To stand still was suicide. Krysty and the albino melded into the mutie force, sprinting across Sunspot’s hammered ground with the swampies and their slathering dogs. The norm fighters put up a wall of covering fire, allowing most of their genetically challenged comrades to safely slip into the northernmost edge of the wag-and-trailer shantytown.
Korb led the forty-five-mutie unit into a narrow, rutted path between rusting vehicular hovels, the tallest of which was about fifteen feet high. The back streets of Sunspot weren’t laid out in anything that remotely resembled a gridwork. The tracks between structures wound back and forth, and the bends concealed what lay just beyond them. Empty clotheslines sagged across the lanes. No ville folk were in evidence. They either were hiding under their mattresses or they’d taken cover elsewhere. The norm contingent was drawing the defenders’ full attention. For the first time, Krysty heard grens detonating inside the berm. There was no way of telling whose grens they were.
They had only traveled about fifty feet into the maze when blasterfire barked at them from the rear corner of a semitrailer dead ahead. With bullets whining around their heads, the mutie fighters ducked into the crudely hacked doorways and between the junkyard wags. The shooting abruptly stopped.
“Let the dogs have ’em!” Meconium shouted to his fellow swampies.
Krysty and Jak watched as the hellhounds were unchained and released to do their worst.
The pack took off down the path like greyhounds after jackrabbits. Gleefully baying, they disappeared around the bend.
A fraction of a second later the muties heard snarls, screams and bursts of blasterfire.
“Forward!” Korb cried, waving his 12-gauge pump.
The muties advanced to the bend; clubs, machetes and axes ready for the mopping up.
When Krysty and Jak reached that vantage point, she raised her .38 and he aimed his Colt Python, but neither of them fired.
Four of the swampie hell mutts had a Haldane trooper trapped in front of a shambles of a Winnebago Brave. When he looked away, one of the beasts coiled and sprang at him, stretched out full length. The trooper pivoted and fired his AK from the hip. The close-range, full-auto burst blew through the dog’s torso, blowing its ribs out its side in a spray of bloody splinters. The hound twisted in midair and crashed lifeless to the ground behind him. The other dogs celebrated the death of their packmate by seizing the man’s arms and shoulder in their jaws and dragging him down. As he fired the AK’s last rounds in the air, a combined 450 pounds of dog tore at his flesh.
With sharp fangs and shaking heads they pulled clumps of flesh from his arms. The dogs gulped their prizes and went back for more. One of the animals jumped on his chest, knocking aside the muzzle of the AK, and bit into his face, from cheek to cheek. The hellhound threw its body from side to side, using the weight and the leverage to tear away the tender flesh.
Without being ordered to, one of the swampies jumped from a doorway and joined the dog-bites-man melee. He had a thin, red-orange beard and large-lobed ears; he wore faded denim bibfronts. Extra-wide, extra-short bibfronts. Facing his swampie pals with a grin on his face, he swung an iron pipe down on the trooper’s skull, shattering it like a raw egg. The bastard didn’t give a damn about ending the man’s suffering; he just wanted to get in some free licks.
Amid the din of the raging battle, an assault rifle barked once. From the loud report, it was very close. The club-wielding swampie jerked forward, waving his short arms to keep his balance. As he opened his mouth and screamed he was struck by another single shot. Again, the mutie jerked like a puppet on a string; this time he fell to a knee. Shot twice in the buttocks with full-metal ja
cket 7.62 mm rounds, he somehow managed to get to his feet. As he tried to run stiff-legged, clutching his behind in both hands, he was hit a third time. The bullet impact twisted him sideways.
The seat of his bibfronts was gone, his double-wide rear end shot to hamburger.
His fellow swampies yelled for him to take cover.
Before he could do so, a fourth rifle shot caught him in the back of the neck and came out under his chin, parting his wispy red beard. Blood from the horrendous throat wound poured down his chest and gushed from his mouth. He dropped to both knees.
As he toppled in slow mo onto his face, two of the dogs jumped on his back. They worked as a team, dragging his limp body into the shadows under a semitrailer. It didn’t take a doomie to know what was going to happen next.
There was no calling off the dogs. Loosed from their chains, they were independent purveyors of mayhem.
“Forget him,” Korb said. “We’ve got to cut off Haldane’s men, take out as many as we can before they hole up in the Welcome Center.”
Korb waved his muties forward, his 12-gauge pump braced against his hip, its muzzle sweeping the line of predark wrecks. When he neared the spot where the swampie had been shot, he flattened himself against the side of a cargo container. He thought he was well out of the line of sniper fire.
He was wrong.
The ass-shooter had either moved to get a better angle, or it was somebody else potshotting.
Another rifleshot cracked and Korb’s baseball cap whipped off his head. His skull slammed into the steel wall, and he slumped for a second, then he gathered himself and straightened up.
He looked all right.
Like the shot had just ripped off the hat. A near miss.
Then he turned his head.
A high-power military round had caught him square in the eggplant-colored, balloonlike mass that covered the right side of his face. A growth whose blood supply had grown even more tangled and elaborate, thanks to his earlier, unsuccessful attempt to remove it. Gore geysered from the grievous, fist-size wound, pouring over his shoulder from half a dozen severed vessels. He tried to squeeze off the flow, frantically digging the fingers of both hands into the mess of exploded purple tumor.
He couldn’t stop the hemorrhaging. He couldn’t even slow it.
He bled out before help could reach him. Not that there was anything that anyone could have done.
With their leader’s death, with blasterfire and grens blasts on all sides, all illusion of unit cohesion evaporated. It was every mutie bastard for him-or herself. Like the hellhounds, the swampies and the variously malformed immediately beat feet, disappearing through gaps in the rows of wags and trailers.
Krysty had had no bone to pick with Baron Haldane or his troops. No blood grudge to settle. No matter of unpaid debts or stolen property. Neither had Jak. All they wanted was to locate their companions and depart, leaving the fighting to those who gave a shit, or had no choice. Then a rifle round screamed past her head, close enough to feel the breeze. Her prehensile red hair pulled into even tighter coils.
And all bets were off.
Jak grabbed her arm, and they dashed across the narrow path to the side of a derelict truck. By crossing the road in the sniper’s direction, they had cut off his narrow shooting angle, which ran between the parked wags and trailers.
Jak and Krysty rounded the rear of the vehicle, moving into the next lane. As they stepped out from cover, a figure to their right ducked around the bend in the otherwise deserted path. The sniper had been trying to reposition to get off another clean chillshot. Realizing that pursuit was after him, he was beating a hasty retreat, presumably toward the Welcome Center.
The Welcome Center was the key.
None of the combatants on either side wore uniforms or insignia. Indeed, Malosh was the only fighter recognizable at a distance. Once the berm wall had been breached, after preliminary defenses were overrun, attackers scattered by counterattack, it was almost impossible to tell friend from foe. In the narrow, shadowy lanes, and across the stretches of open ground, whoever shot at you was the enemy.
Haldane’s men did have a strategic advantage, though. They could keep from accidentally chilling one another by withdrawing to the Welcome Center. It was a fort within a fort. They could hold out behind its concrete block walls for a long time, perhaps until reinforcements arrived from Nuevaville.
Jak dashed after the escaping sniper. Krysty had longer legs than he did, but she couldn’t match his acceleration. By the time she reached the bend in the lane, he already had his Colt Python up and aimed. The blaster barked and bucked in his outstretched fist.
Forty feet away, the .357 Magnum slug found its running target. The sniper stumbled forward, struck beneath his right shoulder blade. Caught in midstride, the bullet impact bowled him over. He landed spread-eagled on his back in the middle of the path. His Kalashnikov flew from his grasp, sliding beneath the undercarriage of an ancient motor home. The sniper flopped around in the dirt, unable to draw breath. From the size and position of the exit wound in the front of his chest, the 158-grain hunk of lead had taken out most of his right lung. Shock trauma had probably collapsed the other one.
As the shooter was no longer a threat, Krysty and Jak hurried past him without a backward look. Neither was willing expend a live round to send him west. They left him to die at his own pace.
Krysty and Jak leapfrogged each other from bend to bend, running between the scabrous huts and wrecked wags. They glanced into the crudely sawn doorways and windows, but there was no sign of the ville folk. When the end of the lane came into view ahead, they could see fighters moving across the mouth, from left to right, in the direction of the Welcome Center. They couldn’t tell whether the fighters belonged to Malosh or Haldane.
In the pauses between volleys of blasterfire and the whumps of grens, Krysty could hear dogs baying and barking from the other side of the ville. The noise seemed concentrated in that area. It sounded like the hellhounds had formed into a hunting pack, which was bad news for anyone they happened to come across.
When Krysty and Jak reached the end of the path, which was framed by a refrigerator semitrailer and a Trailways bus, they stole a cautious look around the corner. They had a clear view of the ville’s gardens and the Welcome Center beyond. The rows of crops—staked tomato plants, waist-high corn, pole beans and peppers—ran east and west, perpendicular to their point of view. Haldane’s men were holding off attackers from the behind the building’s pillars and concrete planters, allowing their comrades to withdraw to the center’s front doors. A fighting retreat.
There were only a few Haldane troopers left on the berm’s southern ridge. The roar of machine-gun fire had fallen off markedly. It sounded like just two of the heavy guns were firing into the gorge.
The ville folk appeared to have vanished.
It occurred to Krysty that they’d all been herded into the Welcome Center so they could be used as hostages.
Protected from blasterfire by the garden’s row of concrete block compost bins, hellhounds fought over something in a snarling, snapping mass. Swampies hiding inside the bins shouted encouragement to their pets’ bristling backs.
“Look!” Jak exclaimed, pointing to the left with his Python.
Krysty had already seen it. Behind a row of four-foot-tall tomato plants a head bobbed along at high speed. It was wearing a red stocking cap.
Meconium.
His hand swung up and silver flashed.
The hatchet.
Ahead of him, something else was moving at high speed, something even more vertically challenged. At first Krysty thought it was just more swampies, perhaps a pair of females. On closer inspection, the runners were way too short to be swampies.
Two towheaded boys dashed out of the tomatoes into the stands of corn. They ran as if their lives depended on it. And from the looks of things, they did. With the hatchet-waving swampie gaining on them, the children abruptly turned left, bursting through the c
ornstalks side by side, heading straight for Krysty and Jak.
As the children exited the garden, the smaller of the two tripped on the top of a row and landed hard on his stomach.
Before he could get up, Meconium was astride him with his stout legs, raising the hatchet high overhead. There was blood smeared on the razor-sharp blade. And the blood and gobs of brain matter in the swampie’s beard weren’t his own.
Jak snap-fired the Python as Meconium reared back to strike the boy. The movement shifted his blockhead just far enough to save his life. The Magnum bullet missed his skull, but only by a hairbreadth. It whizzed between hatchet and head. Meconium let out a yelp and clutched his ear with the hatchet hand.
The other blond boy skidded to a stop, taking cover behind Krysty’s long legs.
“You wanna lower that chopper,” she told Meconium, taking two-handed aim at his forehead with her revolver.
Meconium obeyed, dropping his hatchet arm, thick blood leaking from his ear hole.
While Krysty held the rad bastard covered, Jak grabbed the kid by the shirt collar and dragged him out from between the swampie’s legs.
Meconium’s eyes glittered with malice. He turned his head toward the compost bins, sucked down a deep breath, stuck two grimy fingers between his lips and whistled. The single, shrill note stretched on for about twenty seconds. It was so piercing they could hear it between bursts of blasterfire.
When the swampie faced them again, he smiled. “You’re in for it now, Not Mutie,” he promised.
Over his shoulder, the tops of the plants whipped back and forth, stirred not by wind, but by dogs as they bounded across the rows.
Not all of the hounds had responded to Meconium’s summons.
Just the ones still hungry for blood.
