by James Axler
Before she could recover, Jak calmly shot her through the face.
The Magnum round jerked her head back and sent her long hair flying forward. A glistening puff of red burst from the rear of her skull. Cranial shrap and blenderized brains scattered behind her, and she flopped onto her back, a bag of cooling flesh.
Her sister swampie somehow managed to find her own blaster’s selector switch. Squinting down the AK’s sights, she fired a single shot at Krysty. The rifle’s recoil jolted her upper body backward. She shot again before the recoil wave subsided.
And again.
The slugs banged into the corrugated steel wall of a cargo container. Each one higher and wider of their target.
Krysty aimed and fired her revolver twice, hitting the swampie in the chest and stomach, doubling her over. The swampie dropped the AK and, holding in her guts with one hand, whipped out a nick-bladed filleting knife with the other. “I’m gonna stick you good with this,” she promised, wheezing with pain. “Then I’m gonna twist it around.”
Boom!
Jak’s Magnum blaster knocked the swampie ragdoll sideways, cartwheeled her and slammed her into the ground. In the process, her long skirts were thrown up over her head.
“Now there’s an unhappy sight,” Krysty said.
Jak frowned and pointedly looked away.
The dead swampie female shunned underwear.
The two boys were riveted by the splayed, dimpled thighs and vast buttocks. With that central plume of porcupine-stiff hair, it was something out of a carny show.
Krysty grabbed them by the shoulders and shook them to break the terrible spell.
“We have to keep moving, or we’re all gonna get chilled,” she told them. “Is there some place safe we can leave you?”
The boys stared at each other, gravely weighing whether they should give up such an important secret to virtual strangers. In this case, the strangers had saved their lives more than once.
“This way,” one of them said.
Krysty and Jak followed as they took off up the lane. The boys stopped at a rust-orange cargo container and pushed open a crookedly hanging door, which was nothing more than a rectangle of metal cut from the wall and hinged with concentric loops of baling wire.
Inside, the light came from a series of holes hacked high in the back wall and a torch burning in a crude stanchion. The pallets on floor were jammed edge to edge. There was no telling how many people slept in the enclosure. It smelled of torch smoke and layers of unwashed humanity.
A curtain of black plastic covered part of one end of the narrow metal room. The children headed straight for it. Pulling back the plastic, they revealed what looked like an indoor toilet. A three-holer seat made of a wooden plank formed the top of the holding box below. A plastic bucket hanging from the wall was half filled with corn cobs.
The boys gripped either end of the plank seat and started to lift it to one side.
“Wait!” Krysty said. “What are you doing?”
“It’s okay,” one of the boys assured her. “It’s not real.”
Jak snatched the torch off the wall. Leaning forward, he sniffed the air above the three holer. “Not shitter,” was his assessment.
“What’s down there, then?” Krysty asked the boys.
“It’s an entrance to the tunnels.”
“Tunnels?”
“Well, there’re more like caves, really,” the boy said. “They’re natural. We didn’t dig them out. They run all under the ground of the ville. There must be miles and miles of them all down through the ridge. That’s where everybody from the ville is hiding. It’s where we always go when the coldhearts come. When the fighting’s over we come out.”
“You two can come down with us, too,” other boy said. “It’s okay. You’ll be safe there.”
“We can’t do that,” Krysty said. “We’re looking for a friend.”
Jak swept the torch back over the commode. “Ha!” he exclaimed, his ruby eyes glittering in the light.
“You found him, my dear,” said a soft, disembodied voice.
She peered down into the crapper and saw a familiar face framed by the center seat hole. His LeMat in hand, Doc Tanner smiled up at her with his excellent teeth.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ryan, Mildred and J.B. joined the throng storming the windowless flank of the Welcome Center. From the ground to fifteen feet up its sides, it was pocked with overlaid bullet craters. The corners of the building had been gnawed into saw teeth by slugs and grens. The bigger holes had been crudely patched with mortar.
Inside the berm, fighting had virtually ceased, although here and there isolated and terrified Haldane men were being chased down and slaughtered by dogs and swampies.
All of Haldane’s other survivors had withdrawn through the Welcome Center’s locked and blocked front entrance. Heavy, four-by-eight steel plates covered the inside of the double entry doors. The facing windows were all blocked, as well, either by more steel plates or by plywood baffles. There were no gunports cut for the defenders to shoot through. Perhaps because such ports were used to fire in as well as out. Perhaps because the game plan of Haldane’s troopers was to withstand a siege.
As there was no immediate threat from the trapped enemy, Baron Malosh let his own fighters have a bit of a rest. The norms sat in the shade of the building, drinking water, nursing minor wounds and sprains, and attending to their weapons. Some of the swampies caught and leashed their remaining dogs, others moved around the compound, robbing valuables and weapons from the dead.
During the lull, Ryan, Mildred and J.B. looked for their missing companions among the crowd.
“Don’t see them,” Mildred said.
“Me, neither,” J.B. said.
Ryan glanced back at the bodies strewed on the ground, the tendons in his jaws flexing.
“Don’t go there, Ryan,” Mildred said.
“Yeah, but mebbe they’re wounded,” he told her. “Or trapped. Anything’s possible. We’ve got to search every stinkin’ trailer.”
Ryan set off for the nearest row of shacks. His friends had to hurry to keep up.
“Where are the ville folk?” Mildred said.
“Probably under their mattresses, pissing themselves,” J.B. said.
A burst of blasterfire at their backs made them stop and turn, weapons in hand. Baron Malosh had fired one of his AKs in the air. Now he was pointing both weapons at them.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the Impaler said.
“We got missing people,” Ryan told him.
“Take another step and you’ll be missing, too. Nobody leaves the battlefield until I say so. There’s still work to do.”
Mildred and J.B. knew what to do if Ryan made a move on the baron. They’d used the same technique before with success, and they practiced it to keep their skills honed. As he dropped into a shooting crouch, they would dive away from him in opposite directions, tuck, roll and come up firing. The diverging, rapid movement would leave Malosh hunting targets for the split second that Ryan needed to put a slug in his head, with follow-ups from Mildred and J.B. stitching his chest. But before Ryan could act the muzzles of Malosh’s officers’ autorifles bracketed them, as well. And there were too many opposing blasters for the strategy to work.
“Fine,” Ryan said. Although fine it was not.
As they walked past him, Baron Malosh turned to his officers, “Blow the plates on the front doors,” he told them. “Use grens. I don’t want to destroy the building unless I have to.”
Ryan understood that control of the ville had passed back and forth several times, and that the defenders and attackers had had plenty of opportunities to try different strategies on each other. Both armies knew every inch of the ground, had fought over it, and lost soldiers and treasure in the process. The result was a gradual destruction of the site over time. Increased fortification demanded more aggressive attacks, which brought on changes in the defenses. This constant modification and testing
of same had only served to create a more efficient meat grinder.
Why was the building still standing? he asked himself.
The answer was simple. It was too valuable to both sides for either to completely raze it.
While the officers organized the task their baron had set for them, the three companions conferred.
“What are we going to do about finding Krysty, Jak and Doc?” Mildred asked.
“Can’t fight the whole nukin’ army,” J.B. said. “Old Malosh has got his eye on us now. He’s not going to let us slip away before he takes the Welcome Center.”
“I only see one way out,” Ryan said. “We have to get the battle won. Once that’s done, we can locate Krysty and Jak. They’ve got be inside the berm. We’ll split up and search the place as fast as we can.”
“What about Doc?” Mildred asked.
“We don’t even know if Doc is here,” Ryan said. “Mebbe he never made it this far. If he isn’t here, he’s out on the interstate somewhere. After we regroup, we’ll head out through the west gate and backtrack his route.”
“And if we don’t find him there?” Mildred said.
“We’ll find him,” Ryan assured her.
The discussion ended when the officers came barreling out of the entryway shouting, “Take cover!” Everyone scurried to duck around the corner of the building.
All four grens blew.
The force of the blast surged outward and upward, bringing down the doorway’s lintel and a section of the covered walkway. Pieces of concrete sailed through the air and slammed against the side of the berm.
Though flashburned, the steel doors still stood. They had held up to the assault.
“Not enough C-4,” was J.B.’s evaluation.
Baron Malosh agreed with the Armorer. “Use satchels!” he snarled at his officers. “Get those doors open!”
The men disappeared into the lingering smoke carrying canvas bags of explosive charges. They reappeared moments later without the charges and running for their lives.
Determined to succeed the second time around, they had gone a bit too far. The explosion blew the steel reinforcing plates loose from their moorings, all right; but with an earsplitting thundercrack and a mass of expelled smoke and dust, it also took out the rest of the covered walkway and shook the whole building to its foundation. Zigzagging cracks appeared in the lines of concrete blocks. The force of the explosion caved in the building’s entrance all the way to the roof, twisting apart the join of the steel barriers like a giant can opener.
If Malosh was unhappy about the collateral damage, his nose-to-chin leather mask kept it hidden. “Clear the rubble, pull those plates out of the way,” he ordered the assembled fodder.
At the direction of their one-armed captain, the oldies and the cripples moved to the piles of tumbled-down and fractured concrete blocks and started shifting them to the sides of the ruined entrance.
As they opened a path to the gap in the plates a flurry of gunshots rang out. The bullets dropped four of the fodder at once, blowing them off their feet and onto their backs on the heaps of broken blocks. They wailed and writhed while their fellow bullet sponges dived for cover.
“Put up some fire,” Baron Malosh said, impatiently waving his armed norms forward.
Ryan, J.B. and Mildred moved ahead with the others, taking up shooting positions behind piles of rubble. Bullets zipped out of the three-foot gap in the plates, slapping into the concrete debris in front of them.
The intense incoming fire forced the companions to keep their heads down. Even if they could have raised their heads, they couldn’t have seen the shooters. Trapped smoke and dust, residue from the satchel charge explosions, poured out from between the plates.
Unable to take aim, the companions shot over and around the rubble, laying down random return fire. The other norms did the same. Their bullets spanked and sparked off the steel plates, flying between them into the bowels of building.
They put up enough covering fire for one of the officers to reach the protection of the left-hand plate. He primed a gren and chucked it through the gap. Four seconds later a hollow blast echoed through the building and brought down more of the facade.
Malosh signaled for more grens.
The officer chucked in another two. After the concussions faded, there was no more shooting from inside the Welcome Center.
The Impaler’s force sent up a cheer.
“We’ve got ’em, now!” Malosh shouted. “Follow me.” With AKs poised in either hand, he charged through the narrow gap, running low and fast. His officers shoved the norm fighters after him.
Ryan and the others swung in behind them, into the mass of acrid smoke and hot dust. Coughing hard, their eyes streaming tears, they crouched inside the hallway, blasters up with nothing to shoot at.
Gradually the smoke lifted and the dust dropped out of the air, revealing a reception area packed with cardboard mattresses, some feebly burning. Scorch marks blackened the walls. About half the torches in the room were still lit; the rest had been blown out. There were three dead Haldane fighters on the far side of the garrison’s communal bedroom. Caught from behind by the gren blasts, they all lay facing a hallway that led deeper into the building.
Malosh stopped in front of the bullet-riddled information desk. He gestured toward the deserted hallway. It was about twelve feet wide, and there were three closed doors on each side. In the dim torchlight Ryan could see there was another door facing them at the end of the corridor.
“Clear every room in the hall,” the baron told his officers.
Instead of doing the job themselves, the officers pushed some of the norms in front of them. The conscripted clearing team included Ryan, Mildred and J.B.
Ryan noted the hinges were on the hallway side, so the doors opened out. Turning the first knob and finding the door unlocked, he pulled it wide open. J.B. darted into the room, his Uzi ready to rip. Mildred entered after him. The windowless room was empty. From the shelves that lined the walls, it had once been used for storage. Some of the shelves had been tipped over onto the floor by the explosions.
The companions moved back into the hallway. The second door on their side hid a utility closet, also bare to the walls. Either the garrison had no supplies, which was unlikely, or they had moved them all somewhere else in the Welcome Center.
The three norms checking the other side of the corridor weren’t working so efficiently. They were a door behind as Ryan, Mildred and J.B. cleared their last room.
When the Malosh fighter opened the door, he and the man who lunged over the threshold with his assault rifle got a big surprise.
A final surprise.
The hallway rocked with a deafening blast. Two men were hurled away from the doorway in a flash of light. They slammed into and bounced off the opposite wall. One of them was nearly cut in two, a three-inch-wide seam whipsawed through his midsection. The other lost his right arm to the shoulder and his torso was laid open from armpit to hip.
Above the crumpled men, a line of ball bearings studded the bloody sheet rock.
“Claymore mine,” J.B. said. “The bastards booby trapped the rad-blasted hall.”
As he spoke, fifteen feet away, the door at the end of the corridor swung inward. Mildred, who was covering it with her wheelgun, opened fire at once. Ryan pivoted and cut loose with the SIG. J.B. added some Uzi full-auto chatter to the mix.
Under the horrendous, close-range fusillade, the bottom half of the hollow-core door turned to splinters. It continued to swing open for another twenty degrees of arc, then stopped abruptly.
Ryan could see at least two prostrate bodies on the other side. He booted it all the way open. There were actually three, heaped on a landing at the top of a flight of stairs leading down.
After the last door in the corridor had been checked, the baron advanced to the end of the hall. “Out of the way,” he said.
Ryan stepped clear, letting the masked man move onto the landing.
&nbs
p; “Drag these bodies out of here,” Malosh said.
Ryan and J.B. bent, grabbed limp arms and pulled the corpses into the nearest room.
By the time they were done, the officers had moved the entire norm force into the hallway.
“Haldane’s men are holed up in the basement,” Malosh told them. “We’ve got to clean them out.”
The fearless baron was the first down the stairs.
Ryan was fourth; J.B. and Mildred were the fifth and sixth, respectively.
In the flickering torchlight, Ryan counted ten metal-edged steps before they came to another landing, then the stairs turned at a right angle and descended again.
The ceiling of the Welcome Center’s basement was covered with pipes and ducts of all sizes, strung with cobwebs. A polished concrete floor reflected the light of dozens of wall-mounted torches. The wide room was furnished with machines inoperative since nukeday—electric power, water pumps, air conditioning, furnace—some obviously plundered for scrap. All the torches hung along the right-hand concrete block wall. The row of lights pointed the way to another corridor entrance; at its end were two doors. Like the ground-floor entrance, both were sheathed in heavy steel plate.
Only these had gun ports at waist height.
Ryan could see a blaster muzzle poking from each, leaving little doubt where the bulk of the Haldane force lay.
“Put out the torches,” Malosh said as his conscripts scattered out of the line of fire.
As the lights in their part of the room were extinguished, the baron ordered the last of his fodder to come forward.
“I want you to douse the torches in that hallway up there,” he told the one-armed captain of the doomed. “Make it to those doors and push grens through the firing ports.”
The fodder captain didn’t argue about the feasibility of the mission. In the weak light, he accepted some grens from an officer, then addressed his motley crew. “It’s up to us to finish this,” he told the twenty-five or so cripples and ville idiots still sucking air. “First, we’re going to put out the rest of the torches. If they can’t see us, they can’t hit us.” He showed them the cluster of frag grens. “Then we knock the bastards out.”
