by James Axler
“We’ve got to move back,” Ryan said as J.B. returned to the fray with his reloaded Uzi.
The air was no longer fresh. It was thick with gunsmoke and the stench of aerosolized scagworm.
The creatures were falling at J.B.’s feet when his machine pistol ran out of bullets.
Before Ryan could take up the chilling slack, a single scagworm raced along the wall past J.B.’s head. It jumped to the floor behind him and scampered on.
Doc promptly skewered the tip of its ass to the ground with the rapier blade of his swordstick. Hissing and snapping its jaws, the agile worm tried to turn and bite off his leg.
Jak put the muzzle of his Python to its eyeless head and fired. Problem solved.
Ryan still had six rounds in his SIG when the worm wave suddenly faltered and stopped.
“Looks like we won,” J.B. said, peering through spectacles coated with white spray.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “Watch your step.”
They trotted downhill, crunching and sliding on the spilled pudding and slick-armored backs. On the far side of the patch of dead, the footing was better. They made quick time to the circle of light at the end of the tunnel.
After Jak and Ryan made sure there were no worms lurking just outside, the companions left the cave and headed upwind as fast as they could run, moving west of the ville, away from the spear point of the insectoid invasion, parallel to Interstate 10. The way west was free from human coldhearts, as well, because all of Malosh’s fighters were up in Sunspot.
There was still no HE thunder from above.
No blasterfire anymore, either.
Ryan didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.
Baron Haldane wouldn’t have called off the bombardment after locking in the range. And he wouldn’t have laid down a bunch of smoke rounds just for the hell of it.
Mebbe the worms got them all? he thought as he ran.
What had actually happened was something much, much worse.
When the companions were far enough from ridge to get a view of the summit, they could see thick plumes of yellow-green smoke angling upward, stretching five or six hundred feet in the air.
They stopped to catch their breath and to stare.
“That’s not from a ranging round,” J.B. said.
“What is it, then?” Krysty said.
High above the ville, a sparse flock of buzzards descended, spiraling down to the feast. Long before they reached the top of the column of sickly smoke, they crumpled in midair, every one of them, and fell like stones from the sky.
“Good God!” Mildred said.
Chapter Thirty-One
As the third and final sarin round whistled away toward the distant hilltop, Magus slapped the arms of his throne chair and smiled.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Only one side of his mouth turned up, and it locked there, twitching as guy wire spools slipped and caught, slipped and caught.
Baron Haldane tapped the Hummer’s side window and Cuzo started the engine. As he popped it into gear and swerved out of the wag circle, Haldane ran low and out of sight on the passenger side.
Cuzo shifted into second and flattened the accelerator against the firewall, taking dead aim at the captain’s chair and the half-human thing that sat on it.
As Magus turned in his chair to look, his alert bodyguards stepped right into the Humvee’s path, opening fire with their machine pistols. Baron Haldane was already sprinting away from the wag, making a beeline for the booby-trapped pet carrier.
Cuzo ducked below the dash as 9 mm slugs stitched across front window, blowing glass shards over his back. He plowed into one of the sec men, flipping his body up and over the SUV’s roof. The other bodyguard barely managed to scramble out of the way, on all fours. Before he could recover and resume shooting, Cuzo tapped his brakes, stuck his AK out the driver window and put thirty holes in his road trash ass.
In the meantime Magus was backing up around his captain’s chair, all herky-jerky, and calling for help from the rest of his crew. He still had the detonator clutched in his hand, but he wasn’t looking over at the pet carrier. He was too occupied by the startling, seemingly suicidal, vehicular assault.
Haldane dashed across the death circle, knelt in front of the carrier and ripped the explosive package off the door. He snap-tossed it as far away as he could.
Magus realized what was happening and jammed his thumb down on the trigger, but it was too late.
The bomb exploded harmlessly in the air.
Cuzo cranked the steering wheel hard over and floored the gas pedal again. Fishtailing the wag, he took aim at Haldane and the carrier. As he did so, two other stolen Humvees roared out of the circle, catching broadside blasterfire as they passed the road trash. From the back seats of the Humvees, two of Haldane’s men returned fire but were overwhelmed and undone by hundreds of incoming slugs. Magus’s full-auto firing squad blew in the side windows and chewed up the sheet-metal doors on the drivers’ sides. One of the Humvees immediately coasted to a stop, the inside of its surviving windows tinted red from cranial back splatter. The other Humvee kept going, but no one was driving. It ran head-on into a sandy bluff.
The road trash turned their fire on the rear of Cuzo’s Humvee, then suddenly directed their aim down at the ground in front of them.
Two-foot-long critters were popping up from the soil all around them, even from between their boots, like black maggots squirming out of a long-dead, hollowed-out rat. They swarmed from the shadows under the parked wags, turning the ground black and shiny.
It was as though somebody had rung the dinner bell.
There was only one item on the menu. It was road trash, and it was going fast.
Attacked from all sides at once, Magus’s sec men stood back to back and fired full-auto. Even at 500 rounds a minute, they couldn’t keep up with the worms. There were too many of them popping up, and they moved too quickly and too erratically over open ground. When they paused to reload, one by one the road trash were overwhelmed. Ebony jaws snapping, the worms ran up their legs and ripped into them. Literally. The worms tore holes in the living torsos and wriggled inside the tropical warmth and humidity. The plundered men screamed like little girls. Around the broken circle, wag doors slammed as the luckier ones ducked behind solid cover.
The worms were coming for Haldane, too. He held his fire and blew them apart at close range, defending his caged son with double-aught buck.
Cuzo drove over dozens of the mutie insects, crushing them. He skidded the Humvee to a stop in front of Haldane. The baron hoisted the pet carrier by its top handle and swung it onto the back seat. Over the wag’s roof he saw Magus momentarily holding his own while five or six black worms bit into the metal struts on his legs. Steel Eyes held worms in his bare hands. His half-mechanical fingers crushed their domed heads like raw eggs.
Cuzo had the Humvee rolling again before the baron could get both feet in the cab.
Haldane saw the blood all over the wag’s interior. The steering wheel was slick with it. “Are you hit?”
“Shit, yes. Look at the floorboards.”
“Let me drive.”
“No time to make a switch. We’ve got to put some distance between us and them.” Cuzo shifted into a higher gear and the wag surged faster, bounding over low boulders and shallow ruts. The wind shrieked through the bullet holes in the windshield.
“You’re going the wrong way,” the baron told him. “Nuevaville is behind us.”
“I’m gonna cut around to the northwest,” Cuzo said. “Swing wide of the Sunspot ridge and miss those nasty black critters.”
Haldane stuck his head out of the passenger-side window and looked behind them. It was hard to see because of the way the Humvee was bouncing around. When he pulled back inside he said, “Don’t think anyone is coming after us yet. No dust clouds but ours. You want me to drive so you can see to that wound you got?”
“I think it’s stopped blee
ding some,” Cuzo said. “Hurts like a mutie bitch, though. I’ll give you the wheel after we cross old Interstate 10. I can see it about three miles ahead. We should be well in the clear by then.”
Haldane twisted around to the back seat. He rattled the padlock on the pet carrier door. It seemed plenty solid; it had a case-hardened frame. Even if he’d had the proper tools, he’d have had a tough time getting it open with the lurching, bucking motion of the wag.
“I’m sorry, I can’t get the door open for you, son,” he said to the small face behind the steel grate. “It’s going to have to wait until we stop for a minute. Then I’ll shoot the damn lock off, I promise.”
“I’m okay, Dad,” Thorne said bravely. “Don’t worry about me. I can wait all day if I have to.”
“It’s not far,” the baron assured him.
Through the dusty, cracked windshield, Interstate 10 became an ever more distinct ribbon across their path.
Cuzo kept the pedal to the metal, even as they neared the edge of the ruined roadway. The desert ahead looked fairly flat, except for occasional hidden dips that made Haldane’s skull bump into the headliner and his backside crash into the seat cushion. Without warning, a huge creature popped up from one of those depressions, popped up right in front of them. Its hairy jointed legs looked like tree trunks.
When Cuzo swerved to avoid a fatal collision with the thing, the Humvee went airborne. It seemed to float for sickening seconds before it crashed nose-first into a shallow gully.
The impact slammed Thorne into the door of his cage. He blacked out, for how long he couldn’t tell. When he awoke, he had a bad headache and there was blood in his mouth. Through the bars, he could see the two front seats and they were both empty. The windshield was gone, except for a sawtooth edge along the bottom of the channel.
“Dad? Dad?” the boy cried.
Then he heard wet, crunching sounds.
Very close.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Why would Haldane fire poison gas on his own troops?” J.B. asked as the companions walked away from the smoking ridgetop, heading toward the ruined highway.
“The price of final victory is steep,” Ryan replied. “He managed to chill his arch rival and his whole army.”
“Not only that,” Mildred said. “The bastard slaughtered every living soul in Sunspot. Chem gas is heavy. It seeps underground. The ville folk are all dead, too. You can bet on that.”
“If she had only listened to me…” Doc muttered, leaning heavily on his swordstick.
“You couldn’t have forced her to come with us,” Krysty said. “She made her choice. It was the wrong one.”
“That absolves me of nothing,” Doc said miserably. “I failed her by not making a better case. And I failed myself.”
“You’re not responsible for what happened to her,” Krysty said. “Baron Haldane is responsible.”
“Why does that not make me feel better?”
“Because you really cared, that’s why.”
“Haldane didn’t have to use gas to win the war,” Mildred said. “The invading scagworms would have finished off Malosh and his army. If the worms take root here, this strip of land isn’t going to be habitable for a long, long time. Maybe not ever again.”
“So he bloodied his hands for nothing,” Ryan said.
“Looks like,” Mildred said.
“Wags,” Jak announced over his shoulder. He pointed at the horizon. “There…”
The morning sun illuminated beige clouds of dust. Big wags, daisy-chaining. The multivehicle convoy was moving slowly south, away from Sunspot.
“Haldane is making his getaway,” Krysty said.
“Nuevaville is the other direction,” Ryan said.
“Another wag,” Jak said, pointing west and slightly south.
“I don’t see anything,” Mildred said.
“If he says there’s a wag, there’s a wag,” Ryan said. “Let’s go check it out.”
“Follow,” the albino said.
The companions smelled the wreck long before they saw it. Spilled antifreeze, cloyingly sweet, rode on the eastward breeze. After they had crossed the interstate and climbed over hump of shoulder, the Humvee’s uptilted rear end came into view.
Spreading out, they advanced on the wag.
The Humvee had taken a header into the bottom of the gully. The front windshield was broken out, the hood popped and buckled. Steam billowed up from the engine compartment. There were no signs of life. But plenty of signs of death. The hood was streaked and smeared with fresh blood.
“Dad?” a child’s voice said desperately.
The companions quickly circled the wag.
When Ryan looked in the back seat, he saw the plastic box. It was just big enough to hold a small child. He wrenched open the side door and turned the carrier on the seat. “Damn,” he said when the little face looked back at him from behind the bars.
He swung the carrier out of the Humvee and put it on the ground. “Cover your ears and turn your head away from the bars,” he told the boy. Then he put the muzzle of the SIG against the lock and fired a single shot. The hasp snapped open. Ryan tossed the broken lock aside.
Mildred bent and helped the child out of the cage. He was shaking all over, wringing wet, and there was blood on his bruised chin.
“Where’s my dad?” the boy said.
“Who’s your dad?” Mildred asked.
“Baron Haldane. I’m Thorne Haldane.”
“He was with you?” Ryan said.
“He was in the front seat, with Cuzo. We crashed and I got knocked out.”
Mildred tried to give him a sip of water from her canteen. He shook his head and waved her off. “Where’s my dad?” he said. “Is he chilled?” Then he started to cry.
Ryan looked at the gore smeared on the hood and all the churned-up dirt in the gully bottom. Lots of feet had been moving around the wreck. Heavy ones. Cawdor knew what had made the tracks. He and the companions had seen the beast from the battlements of Sunspot, fleeing from a pack of scagworms. It had to be the grave digger.
“Don’t worry, Thorne,” Ryan said. “We’ll see you get home safe.”
“It took my dad, didn’t it?” the boy said, gulping air between sobs. “Didn’t it? The mutie thing. I saw it right before we crashed. I heard it outside when I woke up.”
“I’m sorry, there’s no sign of your father, Thorne,” Ryan said. “No sign of the other man, either.”
J.B. stepped forward, “All that’s left is this…”
“That’s my dad’s!” the boy cried.
Ryan took the sawed-off Remington 1100 from J.B. He jacked out the live rounds and handed the weapon to the boy.
Thorne cradled the blaster hard against his chest, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“We’ve got some heavy walking ahead of us,” Ryan told him. “If you get tired, you let me know. I’ll carry your blaster for you until you get home.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-1018-3
SUNSPOT
Copyright © 2007 by Worldwide Library.
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James Axler, Sunspot
