by James Axler
Sensing the target was disorientated, the basilisk fell upon the man, covering him completely. Surrounded by purplish jelly, the hunter fired both blasters, the lead rounds tearing through the translucent material and hitting the nearby rocks to ricochet away into the canyon.
In response, the basilisk started to tighten around the man, its acidic flesh dissolving his outer layer of clothing and hair. Holding his breath inside the hardening ooze, the hunter fired again and again at the twinkling lights set into the flexible skeleton running through the creature. Then he abruptly stopped as his eyesight vanished, the orbs in his sizzling head gone completely white. Opening his mouth to scream, the man felt the ooze fill his mouth and force itself down his throat. A horrible burning sensation filled his world, and the blasters spoke one last time, the pitted muzzles pressed tight against the man’s heaving chest.
Moving back behind the bushes, the basilisk-class guardian settled down to digest the meal.
Abandoned on the rocky ledge, the haunch of deer soon became covered with black ants, the horde of busy insects effectively doing to the piece of deer the exact same thing that the basilisk was doing to the man in its belly.
On the nameless bridge, the cold winds moaned softly, as a small vid cam hidden in the bushes recording everything and transmitting the encoded signal into the overcast sky.
IN BROKE NECK VILLE, Baron Harmond sat bolt upright in his bed and screamed. “Traitor!” the boy cried, clutching his throbbing temples. Blood trickled from his nose. “Guards! Sound the alarm! Guards!”
Instantly, the heavy door to the bedroom was thrown open by several sec men waving blasters.
“What is it, Baron?” one asked, looking around for any sign of an attacker. But the books and the room seemed normal and undisturbed.
“Too late.” The boy sighed, covering his face with both hands. Tears started rolling down his cheeks. “It’s too late. It’s already here.”
“Who is, my lord?”
Raising his anguished face to the window, Baron Harmond looked down upon the ville for the last time. “Death,” he replied simply, the word seeming to fill the room.
THE COMPANIONS WERE finishing their meal when the screen door to the tavern slammed open and a sec man staggered inside. He went directly to the counter and grabbed on to the planks as if he were drowning at sea.
“This could be trouble,” Ryan said, laying aside his knife.
Wiping his hubcap clean with a piece of corn bread, Jak stuffed the morsel into his mouth. “Ain’t bleeding,” he mumbled. “Blood on boots.”
“So somebody else is aced,” Mildred said with a frown.
“Looks like, yeah.”
Under the table, J.B. moved his hands and racked the bolt on his Uzi machine pistol. “Mebbe our coldhearts got tired of waiting and have come hunting for us.”
“Good,” Ryan growled, wiping the blade clean before tucking it away. “Let them come. We’ll settle this in lead.”
“Be careful what you wish for, my dear friend,” Doc rumbled. “You may get it.”
“Hi, Dave, what’ll it be?” Cougar said, his friendly greeting fading as he studied the guard.
“Shine,” Dave gasped, then shouted, “I said shine, ya nuking feeb!”
Startled by the outburst, Cougar laid down his rag and took a full bottle off a shelf, along with a cracked shotglass.
“Shitfire, what’s the matter with you?” the bartender asked, placing both items on the counter.
Grabbing the bottle, the sec man smacked the glass away. It tumbled off the counter and went flying to shatter on the floor. Biting out the cork on top, Dave chugged the bottle’s contents until his face began to turn red for lack of air, then he slammed it down so hard the glasses behind the counter rattled.
“Harry is chilled,” he gasped. “I—I was on recce outside the wall when I found him…it…him. Blind norad, there he was tied spread-eagle to a boulder, his hands and feet lashed behind the rock, leaving him helpless as a blind kitten.”
“Is he…”
The sec man nodded.
“Was it cannies?” the bartender asked, taking the guard by the shoulder. “Or was it muties? Talk, man! What happened to Harry?”
“Everything,” David whispered, shuddering. “He was taken apart like you was cleaning a blaster, each…piece…was sitting in a bowl of blood, some of them still…attached…”
As the guard took another long drink from the bottle, everybody in the tavern rushed closer to hear more of the grisly details.
“Okay, it’s them, all right,” Ryan declared, pulling out the SIG-Sauer to rack the slide. “Let’s go.”
Pushing away their chairs, the companions moved through the tavern and into the bright sunlight.
“How could any human being do such things to another?” Krysty muttered. Then the woman realized that she had just answered her own question. When coldhearts acted like this, they weren’t normal people anymore, just beasts drunk on human blood.
An alarm bell started to ring, and the companions could see sec men running along the top of the wall, loading longblasters, waving crossbows and shouting orders.
“Something wrong about this,” Mildred said, pulling out the clip from her MP-5 rapidfire to check the load, then slapping it back in again. “These assholes usually only do nightcreeps.”
“Change how do, means dif goal,” Jak stated, shrugging his jacket into a more comfortable position.
“Which means they know we are here,” Doc concluded, pulling out the Ruger and LeMat.
“Let’s try to save one for questioning,” J.B. suggested.
“No promises,” Krysty said, yanking the bolt on her MP-5. The rapidfire was down to its last clip, but she flipped the selector to full-auto. The woman wasn’t going to take any chances with these coldhearts. There was a strange feeling in her mind, a growing sense of unease. She wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, and that worried her a great deal.
Clenching his fists, Ryan felt a stab of pain from the bandaged wound in his right forearm. Damn, not fully healed yet. He had been afraid of that.
Holstering the blaster, Ryan whistled sharply and held out a hand. J.B. released the Uzi, letting it hang from the canvas strap as he took the scattergun from behind his back and tossed it to his friend.
Deftly, Ryan made the catch with his left hand, then worked the pump-action and started to remove 12-gauge cartridges from the loops on the sling and stuffing them into the belly port.
“Okay, let’s get the horses,” Ryan declared, resting the scattergun on a shoulder and heading for the stables.
As the armed companions started along the sunny street, a muffled explosion came from the direction of the front gate. Swiftly changing course, the companions broke into a run. As they got close, a sec man on the wall above the gate snarled a curse and aimed his longblaster at something outside the ville.
But before he could shoot, there came the sound of a hundred blasters banging away in tight unison. The sec man was torn apart by the fusillade, his riddled body flying off the top of the trailer to sail into the ville and fall onto the hard ground with a sickening crunch of breaking bones.
“Rapidfires!” Ryan cursed, swinging up the shotgun to brace it with both hands. “That has to be them!”
Suddenly, a muffled thump sounded from beyond the gate. The telltale noise sent chills down the spines of the companions.
“Down!” J.B. yelled, diving for the ground.
The rest of the group did the same, and a few ticks later the roof of a nearby building loudly erupted in fiery explosion. The sides of the structure cracked apart, and in ragged stages the building broke into pieces and collapsed into the street, screaming people and broken masonry tumbling down to mix together in a hellish avalanche.
“Gren launcher!” Jak snarled, rising to his knees. The alarm bell was still ringing, but scattered shots could now be heard from all over the ville. The dull roar of the black powder weapons punctuated by the sharp ratt
le of the predark rapidfires.
“Worse than that,” J.B. corrected, “I’d say it was a combo.”
“A working combo?” Krysty demanded, her hair flexing wildly in every direction.
“Gotta be,” Ryan said calmly, twisting his grip on the scattergun. A combo—the Trader used to have one of those mil blasters, but only one, and he’d saved it for triple-bad emergencies. The damn thing was the deadly mix of an M-16 rapidfire with a big-ass 40 mm gren launcher slung underneath. The Deathlands warrior had faced a lot of iron in his travels, but those were the worst. It was no wonder that they had been the standard wep of the predark army.
“Okay, the coldhearts found a functioning M-16/M-203,” Mildred said, staying in a crouch. “But there’s no way they have more than a couple grens.”
Over the clanging of the bell, and the assorted yelling, there came four muffled thumps, evenly spaced apart. The companions took cover again, and several more adobe buildings were blown apart. Screaming people filled the smoky air. Only now, reddish flames started rising from the smashed masonry, huge volumes of thick black smoke rising into the sky to blot out the blazing sun.
“Willie peter?” Jak asked, blinking from the acrid fumes.
“That was thermite,” J.B. corrected, swallowing with some difficulty. “Dark night, even I don’t have one of those anymore!”
“Stables?” Krysty asked, putting a wealth of urgency into the word.
“Not yet,” Ryan snapped, reaching out to grab a sec man running past.
“Where’s the mill?” he demanded, shaking the guard.
“The what?” the terrified sec man asked, struggling to get loose. “Let go ya idiot! We need everybody on the wall! Coldhearts are attacking!”
“Mill!” Ryan repeated, tightening his grip. “Where’s the bastard powder mill? The secret place that Bateman makes his gunpowder?”
“I don’t know where it is,” the sec man lied, flicking his eyes to the right for only a heartbeat.
But Ryan caught the motion and released the man. So the gunpowder mill was hidden at the south side of the ville, eh? Good. With any luck, that might just be far enough away from the front gate to not be hit.
The multiple combos chattered again outside the ville, and more guards tumbled from the wall. As the screaming and shouting grew louder, J.B. frowned in concentration. The combos didn’t sound exactly the same as they had the last time they fired. Altered somehow.
“Hot pipe, how many coldhearts are there?” the sec man gasped, working the bolt on his longblaster with shaking hands.
“Go see for yourself,” Ryan barked, giving him a shove. “Get moving! Protect the baron!”
The sec man seemed confused at first, then he took off at a run, starting for the front gate, then curving away to sprint for the barracks.
“They’re using different ammo,” J.B. stated. “Not soft lead or hardball rounds anymore. Mebbe armor-piercing.”
“My guts tell me that this is just a diversion,” Ryan stated with conviction. “I’m betting that they’ll hit the mill next. That will blow half the ville to hell. In the smoke and confusion, they can easily break inside, and there will be nobody to stop them.”
“Except us,” Doc said, thumbing back the hammers on both of his big-bore handblasters.
“Attack a ville with only four blasters?” J.B. snorted, hunching his shoulders as a cloud of smoke moved along the ground, hiding him for a moment. “Even with combos, that’s crazy talk!”
“We did once,” Jak reminded as there came a flash of light brighter than the sun from the south side of the ville.
Frantically, the companions dived to the dirt again and covered their ears. A split second later the deafening concussion of the exploding gunpowder mill rolled along the streets, blowing out glass windows and ripping off roof tiles. Sec men sailed off the wall to fly out of sight, their death screams lost in the strident blast.
Groaning as if in pain, several of the trailers shook, then came free from their moorings and fell sideways to start rolling across into the croplands, leaving huge gaps in the ville perimeter. The ground shook, horses screamed, a column of fire rose from somewhere to the north, and then a dense cloud of black smoke rolled across the ville, turning the afternoon into midnight.
Moving quickly, the companions took cover under a stone archway just as the expected rain of debris arrived. An assortment of objects dropped from the murky sky—broken bits of machinery, smoking sand bags, a bucket, a shoe and countless body parts.
“Gaia!” Krysty coughed, waving away the smoke and dust. “They’re blowing the whole ville apart!”
Just then, four black shapes appeared from out of the billowing fumes, the figures moving slowly.
“Bikes!” J.B. cursed, swinging up the Uzi. “Ace them!”
The companions cut loose with their blasters, sending out a hellstorm of lead. But the shapes kept moving past them without slowing or deviating from the course. As the two-wheelers came closer, Ryan cursed at the sight of the four riderless bikes rolling along, the black frames marked with ricochets but otherwise unharmed. Tricked!
“Everybody, head for the stables!” Ryan bellowed. “We have to get those horses!”
Taking off in the opposite direction, Mildred glanced backward to see two men step into the street from an alleyway, each holding the unmistakable outline of an M-16/M-203 combination rapidfire.
Mildred opened her mouth to shout a warning when somebody dressed in rags and holding a raised knife charged out of a doorway.
“Die, rist!” Lucinda screamed, rushing forward.
The two men turned at the cry and cut loose with their weps, the converging barrage of hot lead cutting Lucinda down before she could take another step.
Time seemed to slow as Mildred stared in shock at the still body of the woman who had just saved her life by trying to end it. No words came to mind, but in a rush of emotion, the physician braced her MP-5 against a hip just as the rest of the companions spun, leveling their blasters and started firing.
The yammering fusillade knocked down the two outlanders, but they incredibly got back up and took refuge behind a pile of rubble.
“Sons of bitches are wearing body armor!” J.B. cursed, unfolding the wire stock of the Uzi and tucking it under an arm. “Aim for their heads!”
But even before the others could react, there was a motion in the air and something large fluttered down from the smoky sky.
With the instincts honed in a thousand battles, Ryan dived to the side and hit the ground rolling. Jak and J.B. were only a split second behind the man, and the descending net only draped over Mildred, Krysty and Doc.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc snarled, swatting at the strands with his handblasters. He fired twice into the air, but couldn’t aim the blasters at the sticky net. The ebony walking stick was thrust into his belt, but the net made it impossible for him to holster the weps to reach it.
Burping the Heckler & Koch MP-5, Mildred tried to shoot the net, but the vibrating rapidfire wasn’t designed for precision aiming, and she only hit a nearby wall, a spray of stone chips from the impacting lead striking her in the face. As the rapidfire ran out of ammo, she let it drop and fought to reach her Czech-made ZKR target pistol. Radio-controlled, electric motorcycles, rapidfires, bulletproof body armor, maybe these attackers really were agents of Operation Chronos like Doc had suggested! It was a chilling thought, and the physician redoubled her efforts to reach the revolver.
The two outlanders popped up from behind the rubble and sent short bursts of autofire at Ryan and J.B, while Jak whipped out a knife and slid it across the ground to the trapped people. Krysty grabbed the blade and started slashing at the restraining net. But then a second net fluttered down on top of the three captives, closely followed by a third that knocked the knife from her grip.
The heavy weight of the multiple nets was making it difficult for the three companions to move, and with the clouds of smoke drifting along the street it was now
impossible for them to get a clear view of what was happening. Trapped, but still armed, the men couldn’t risk shooting any more for fear of acing their own people.
The Uzi cut loose with a blast, followed by the roar of the scattergun, then the telltale boom of Jak’s big .357 Magnum Colt. Those were answered by the chatter of an M-16, the sound of the rounds hitting, and the wild ricochets mixing with the musical ringing of the spent brass hitting the cobblestone road to bounce around.
“Mother Gaia, help me now!” Krysty intoned in a desperate prayer, and cold strength flowed into the woman like silver waters.
Standing easily, the redhead grasped the net and started to pull apart the resilient black nylon cord as if it were sewing thread. Squirming sideways, Mildred got an arm loose and started to bang away at the outlanders down the street. Warily, she also tried to keep a watch above for any more nets. Although what the physician would do if one appeared, she had no idea.
The combo rapidfires spoke again in unison. Somewhere a man cried out in pain, followed by a woman’s scream. The weapons of the companions answered, but farther away this time.
Suddenly in motion, Doc was alongside Krysty and together they started to widen the rip in the nets. With a curse, Mildred lowered her empty blaster just as a familiar-looking canister came bouncing along the ground, spewing thick trails of green smoke.
“Grenade!” Mildred cried, frantically throwing the revolver. The ZKR hit the canister, and it rolled back toward the pile of rubble.
But then a second canister hit the ground directly in front of them and a fourth net fluttered from the sky.
As the oily green fumes flowed over them, Mildred fought to reach the gren as Doc and Krysty continued to try to get free. But at the first whiff, the physician became dizzy and a rush of relaxing warmth spread through her body. What the…that wasn’t a smoke gren, but sleep gas!
“Cover your mouths!” Mildred shouted in warning as the fumes swirled thick around them. “Breath through a sleeve!”
