by James Axler
He opened his eye and could see a dim light in the heart of the swirling fog.
They had arrived. Somewhere.
As he crawled toward the brightness, he felt as if he had been run over by a convoy of wags. His skin crackled strangely, as if tissue paper had been stuffed under it. The others were moving on all fours, also apparently unable to stand. He counted the dark shapes on either side of him—all were accounted for.
“Triple red,” he said, or tried to say. His voice came out as a hoarse and almost inaudible croak.
None of them, himself included, had the strength to do more than drag their blasters along.
The edges of the porthole doorway were obscured by the dense, low-hanging fog. As he advanced hand over hand toward the center of the light, the hard glass turned into something softer under his palms and then his knees.
The gray mist began to lift from the floor. The door stood open.
He saw a pair of bare feet in front of him—small, pale, female feet, with red-painted toenails. As the fog dissipated, the woman came into full view. She was young and dressed as no Deathlander he’d ever seen—not even a baron’s wife. Her clothes looked new and were of a strange style: a jacket tailored at the waist and a knee-length skirt snugged around the hips, both cut from the same shiny gray cloth. In her ears, there were sparkling jewel studs, what Ryan thought to be diamonds from pics he had seen. Her shoulder-length hair was brown with red highlights, her small nose freckled.
But what commanded his attention was the enormous gold handblaster she held pointed at them, hammer cocked back to fire. The hole in the business end looked as big as a sewer pipe. The slide and frame were black striped, like the pelt of a tiger. From her stance he could tell she knew what she was doing, and the yawning muzzle stayed rock steady. Her fingernail color matched that of her toes.
“This isn’t happening,” she said, a look of horror in her eyes. Then it passed and she said, “Don’t move, any of you!”
Ryan tried to speak and couldn’t make his throat muscles obey. A faint, wheezing noise escaped his lips.
To his right, Ricky was still retching, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. He had already vomited all down the front of his T-shirt. It was on his cheeks, his neck and in his hair, too. The youth’s tan face looked deadly pale as he struggled to control the spasms.
The others seemed to have better weathered the storm—at least they weren’t still puking. Some of the decorative beads in Mildred’s plaits had broken, and the braids were undone. Jak had a shallow, bleeding, horizontal cut on his chin. Doc looked dazed, but no more than unusual.
The room where they had materialized was small and cramped. Ryan had never seen so much predark stuff concentrated in one place, but it lay in scattered, broken heaps on the Oriental carpet. A steady grinding noise was coming from the other side of the tall windows—it sounded like hundreds of wag engines all revving at once, interspersed with occasional horn blasts. When he glanced behind them, the open entrance to the chamber they had exited peeked in and out of gray mist.
“Where are we?” Krysty asked, glowering up at their captor. “What ville is this?”
“‘Ville’?” the woman said. “It’s Greenwich Village. Who the hell are you? And where in hell did you come from?”
“Look at this place, Ryan,” Mildred said. “They must have just passed through here. They have to be close.”
He stared down at a broken, framed photo on the floor. A woman in fatigues and a boonie hat was standing behind the corpse of an immense wild boar—at least five hundred pounds, he guessed. She had a bloody spear in one hand and a bloody combat knife in the other and was smiling through her camo face paint.
It was the same woman who was holding them at blasterpoint.
“Who is ‘they’?” the woman demanded. “Do you mean the bastards who wrecked my apartment?”
“The bastards we’re chasing,” Ryan said, his power of speech recovered. “Which way did they go?”
Before she could answer, a whooping, rhythmic siren erupted from outside.
Figuring that if the woman was really going to open fire on them, she would have already done so, Ryan rushed to the bank of windows, and the others followed.
As Mildred looked down on the street she said, “Well, that makes a nice change.”
The enforcers’ elephantine wedding tackle was no longer on display; they had put on pants. Even so, the width and heft of their bodies was unmistakable as were the blocky shapes of their heads inside tight purple hoods. And they were still barefoot.
The lone siren quickly became a deafening chorus. The enforcers rampaged along the sidewalk below, breaking into the small wags jammed end to end—strangely enough, the row of wags looked almost new. The muties rammed their fists through driver windows, ripped the doors from their hinges and tossed them over their shoulders. The wags sagged heavily to one side when enforcers jumped in and began tearing wires from under dashboards, presumably trying to start the engines without keys.
Magus was nowhere in sight.
The woman with the big blaster joined them at the window. “I am definitely losing it,” she said, her weapon now pointed at the floor. “Those things aren’t human.”
A doorway across the street burst open, and a tall man in a robe ran down the stairs. He crossed the street, carrying a yard of polished wooden club, fat at one end, a knurled knob at the other. With the club cocked over his shoulder, he yelled over the din of alarms for an enforcer to get away from his shiny personal wag. Snapping the driver’s door free of the hinge, the creature spun at the waist, flinging it sideways like a gigantic buzz saw. It struck bathrobe man amidships and nearly cut him in two. The impact left him sprawled facedown on the pavement, in the middle of a spreading puddle of gore.
Try as they might, the enforcers couldn’t seem to get the commandeered wags running. In frustration, holes were punched through the roofs, steering wheels snapped off and windshields kicked out onto hoods.
“Is it just me,” Doc said, “or does this all seem a bit chaotic for old Steel Eyes? It hardly reflects the usual high level of advanced planning...” The old man was confused by what he saw outside.
“The clockwork man likes things to go like clockwork,” Ryan agreed.
“Mebbe his brain’s stripped a gear?” J.B. said, without tearing his eyes from the escalating destruction below, wondering how all of the wags had survived looting and scavenging, where the gas had come from.
“Ryan, if we don’t get Magus now...” Krysty said.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Keep the incendies ready. We’re going to have to get in close to maximize the effect.”
As they moved for the door, the woman once more raised her blaster. “Who are you?”
“No time for introductions,” Ryan told her. “Shoot us in the back if you want, but we’re going after them.”
Jak led them out the apartment door and down the marble stairs.
“Toss the grens inside the wags if you can,” Ryan said as they crouched in the foyer. “Locate Magus.”
They burst through the building’s front door two abreast, but had descended only the first few steps when autofire rattled from the far side of the street. A rain of bullets spanged the concrete treads and wrought-iron railings and crashed through the glass in the entry behind them.
With hard cover more than thirty feet out of reach, Ryan had no choice. He turned and pushed the others back through the doorway. Otherwise they were going to be cut to pieces.
Inside the foyer, Mildred said, “Enforcers were doing the shooting, I saw them.”
“That’s a new wrinkle,” J.B. said. “They never touched blasters on the island.”
“They were firing AKS-74Us one-handed,” Mildred continued, “waving them around like garden hoses.”
More high-velocity slugs zipped through the door’s broken glass, cutting tracks down the wall plaster and knocking chips out of the staircase.
“Why are they u
sing blasters now?” Ricky said. “We can’t chill them with bullets. Why do they need blasters?”
“To make us keep our distance and hold our fire,” Ryan said. “Magus is part human and can be hurt with bullets. Did anyone see the bastard?”
Heads shook no.
Another sustained burst of autofire raked the building’s entrance, forcing them to press their backs against the wall. The opposition’s ammo supply seemed endless.
“They’re going to get away, Ryan,” Krysty said after the shooting stopped. “Gaia, they’re all going to get away.”
* * *
AFTER THE SCRUFFY strangers trooped out, Veronica stood amid the ruins of her living room, unable to take her eyes off the gray cloud and the dark, ovoid shape lurking behind it.
If it was real, she reasoned, then everything that had just happened was real.
With the Eagle raised to fire, she looked inside the chamber, saw that it was empty. She gingerly touched the edge of the doorway with a fingertip and got a powerful static shock that made her jerk back her hand. There was actually a little flash and an audible crackle.
It was not a dream.
The creatures outside were real. Mr. Crawford’s body in the street was real. Eye-patch man and the others weren’t lifted from some low-budget ’80s John Carpenter film—they were real, too.
Automatic gunfire clattered in the street. What with that and all the car alarms going off at once, it sounded like video clips of Beirut. Then bullets smashed through her street-facing windows, angling up and digging ugly holes in the plaster overhead. The original 1850s ceiling medallion took the worst of it.
As if she wasn’t pissed enough.
“Hosers!” she shouted.
Avoiding the broken glass underfoot, she ran back into her bedroom. From the closet, she pulled out a pair of running shoes and slipped them on. Then she took the cross-draw, leather chest holster from its hook on the wall behind her clothes, inserted the Desert Eagle and strapped it across her suit jacket. Its twin pouches held 8-round magazines of .44 Magnum bullets.
The weight of the fully loaded harness felt good.
A DIY curriculum of advanced combat and weapons training had not only helped her keep her job, it had taught her that, unlike the authors she wet-nursed and contrary to her own expectations—and the expectations of those who thought they knew her—she was absolutely fearless. It turned out danger flipped her secret switch. Where others feared to tread, Veronica Currant jumped in with both feet.
Born to raise hell and take scalps.
And now, out of the blue, she had been given the chance to fight monsters. Not monsters in lamentable purple prose. Not in a mindless video game. But in the flesh. It felt as if her whole life had been leading up to this moment.
The cats were still hiding wide-eyed under the bed and wouldn’t come when she called and made kissing sounds. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
She yanked the Eagle from its sheath. Kicking the debris from her path, she exited the apartment. As she looked over the hallway rail, more bullets crashed through the front door, a story below.
The strangers were out of the line of fire, squatting along the walls of the foyer, clearly pinned down. Eyepatch, the albino, the black woman, the guy with glasses and fedora, the brown kid, the statuesque redhead, the senior citizen with walking stick—they were variations, permutations of the series’ characters she lived with on a daily basis. Prototypical crusty, hard-bitten badasses, a melange of signature guns and knives in abundance, dressed like homeless people.
And of course, they had suddenly and remarkably come to life.
“This way!” she shouted as she rounded the foot of the staircase. She led them down the hallway to the back of the building and out a rear entry. She turned to the left and descended another short set of steps to the backdoor landing of the building’s below-ground apartment. The door looked solid, but for someone who had mastered violent-entry techniques, it wasn’t. Expelling a grunt, she executed a front kick, planting her foot in precisely the right spot. With a crunch, the door splintered away from the deadbolt and lock plate and swung slowly inward.
“There’s nobody here. Don’t worry,” she said as she stepped through the entrance. “Owner’s still at work. Go on through to the front. We can come up from below street level, get cover from the parked cars.”
The leggy redhead raised an eyebrow at the word we, her expression undisguisedly suspicious and hostile, but the Latino kid with vomit on his shirt and the old man beamed at her. They all seemed taken aback at the apartment’s furnishings.
The fedora-and-glasses guy pointed at the calendar on the kitchen wall. “Wow, that’s an old one,” he said.
Veronica thought the remark was odd since it was the current Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and the model in question—blonde, tanned, microbikini, zero body fat, draped over the stern of a vintage speedboat—was all of twenty.
“Don’t put your eyes out staring,” the black woman said, giving him a hard shove from behind.
Taking them through to the living room, Veronica opened the front door, which led up to the street.
Eyepatch put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her from taking point. “This is as far as you go, lady,” he said. “Trust me, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
He held up a red canister. She recognized it at once from her extensive research. Thermite. Four-to five-second delay fuse. Undo safety clip, pull pin, release safety lever. Throwing range, twenty-five meters.
“Let’s clear a path, Jak,” Eyepatch said to the albino. “Right through the windows, into their laps.”
The albino pulled out his own thermite grenade. Veronica thought that the canister’s color was a disturbingly close match to his eyes.
They pushed past her and climbed to the top of the short flight of steps. The others hung back, just below the level of the street. Safety levers plinked off. The two men chucked hissing grenades.
Eyepatch and the albino didn’t appear ready for what happened next—because they didn’t duck.
Massive overlapping explosions rocked the ground, sending them flying backward, arms and legs flailing. As they crashed down on top of their equally astonished friends, the concussion blast emptied window frames up and down the street. A wave of blistering heat washed over the stairwell, then car alarms a block away started wailing.
“Dark night,” the man in the fedora said as he regained his feet. “What was in those wags?”
“Let’s do this before they recover,” Eyepatch said, unslinging his Steyr Scout. Then he scrambled back up the steps, with the others close behind.
Despite the warning for her to stay put, Veronica brought up the rear, Eagle at the ready. The pall of greasy black smoke that hung over the sidewalk made it hard to breathe. Inside the towering, twin fireballs at the curb, there was nothing left but twisted car frames and axles. The spindly sidewalk trees were burning furiously, as if they’d been doused with gasoline, and the cars fore and aft of the thermite strikes were on fire, too. Monsters in purple hoodies had given up trying to jumpstart a ride. They lumbered across the street and disappeared behind the parked cars. She followed the strangers as they took cover away from the heat and smoke, next to a pair of cars farther up the block. As she ducked beside the rear passenger door, autofire rattled at them from the opposite sidewalk. The driver side of the sedan absorbed a torrent of bullets. The left-hand tires both blew out, glass shattered and the car quivered on its suspension. Just above her head, slugs zipped through the front compartment and sparked on the concrete steps behind them.
She had gone through live-fire drills in a Georgia backwoods training camp. This was no drill; these shooters weren’t trying to miss. No way could she get off a shot from her position without putting her head in the ten-ring.
Then Eyepatch, the Latino kid, the black woman and the redhead jumped up from the ends of vehicles and returned fire.
The albino was a
lready in motion, scampering like a white spider between car bumpers. With an underhanded, bowling-ball pitch, he skipped a sputtering red can across the street and under the car the shooters were firing from behind. Then he dived back over the front hood amid a flurry of bullets. He landed with a shoulder roll and came up crouched on the balls of his feet, grinning madly.
An instant later a tremendous boom shook the street. The jolt dropped Veronica hard onto both knees. As she caught herself, she thought she saw a shadowy blur of car door and hood sailing high overhead, then a wave of withering heat made her whimper.
Grenades of that type didn’t explode, she knew. The car’s gas tank hadn’t exploded, either. Not enough time had elapsed for the heat to reach combustion point. The monsters themselves had exploded, like they had five pounds of short-fused C-4 stuffed up their butts.
She peered over the windowsill and saw the surviving monsters break cover and take off down the sidewalk in the direction of Washington Square Park. Their blocky heads and wide shoulders bobbed over the tops of the cars. The monster in front held the one she’d thought was Bob Dylan, carrying the form as if it were a small child—or a ventriloquist’s dummy—legs bouncing up and down at the knees.
When the strangers popped up from behind cover, so did she. Taking stable holds against the vehicles and trees, they all opened fire at once. Eyepatch worked the Steyr’s bolt like a machine, punching out shot after scope-aimed shot. She could see his bullets striking the backs and heads of the retreating monsters, plucking at the fabric, the impacts staggering them as they ran.
Veronica knew her ballistics. For some reason, what should have been certain kill shots with 7.62 mm NATO rounds wasn’t.
She tracked the moving targets over the sights of the Eagle but held fire—without a clear shot, no way was she going to send .44 Magnum slugs sailing down her own street.
The opposition seemed to have a destination in mind.
As they disappeared around the corner, Veronica’s new friends leaped from between the cars to give pursuit. Eyepatch waved for her to stay put.
“No, lover,” said the redhead, a strange glint in her eyes, “let her come along if she wants to.”
