by James Axler
He idolized J.B., but he wasn’t happy about the teasing he’d suffered in the redoubt, undermining his machismo and maturity in front of everyone. He didn’t like that Mildred, who he deeply respected as a fighter, had felt the need to step in and defend him. He couldn’t help freezing up in front of that elevator, though. He had never seen a creature, couldn’t even imagine a creature, so strong that that many bullets wouldn’t slow it down.
They moved quickly down the corridor, with Jak on point about thirty feet ahead, ducking in and out of rooms on the right and left. The companions advanced like a well-oiled machine. A killing machine.
The beautiful Vee fit right in, as if she’d been part of their crew for years. She didn’t need to be told anything; she already knew what was expected of her. She glided along like a cat, light and fast on her feet. Not a kitty cat, though. Kitty cats didn’t carry massive gold blasters like that. Marked with stripes like el tigre de Bengala, the .44 Magnum weapon she held braced in both hands shouted predator.
Eat you alive.
He could see Vee was not afraid of anything that ran, flew, slithered or swam. She trusted her blaster and her skill with it. Ricky found that very, very sexy. This woman from the past was no shy mamacita. She was a natural-born killer.
She was also one of the most gorgeous women he had ever seen. Her beauty went far deeper than her features and body, although they were very attractive to him. What he found even more magnetic was her self-confidence and sense of humor, even as they hurried toward the yawning gates of hell. If Ricky could have made up the perfect woman in his mind—and he had spent considerable time trying to do just that—that woman was Veronica Currant.
Doc hovered around her as they leapfrogged down the hall, speaking in low tones almost nonstop. It looked as if he was running interference, as if he was trying to be a noble knight—a long-legged, scarecrow-skinny knight. Vee didn’t need a protector; everything about her said she could take care of herself and then some. Doc was openly hitting on her.
What could an old guy like Doc offer a gloriously vibrant young woman such as Vee? Boring talk and strange manners? An ancient blaster and an even older sword stick? And what about the crazy times when he rambled, talking to dead people and making no sense? The times when Doc acted like a jolt head on a two-week binge?
His teeth were his most attractive feature; he did have an impressive set. As far as Ricky could see, they were his only attractive feature. Doc couldn’t offer Vee youth and vitality. He couldn’t give her babies or a lifetime of companionship.
Whether he realized it or not, at that moment, a plan was already taking shape in Ricky’s mind.
As if turned on by a switch, automatic blasterfire exploded from the floor directly below them. A surge of adrenaline made Ricky’s face burn and his fingers tingle. He couldn’t tell how many blasters were touching off. From the volume, there could easily have been twenty or more, all firing at once.
What they were firing at was no mystery.
“This way!” Jak shouted back at them.
The sound of their boots slapping the linoleum were lost in the wall of noise coming up through the floor. It shook the walls.
Jak found a stairwell, and they triple-timed down it. The sounds of pitched battle grew louder and louder. When they hit the next level and burst through the doorway, the sustained clatter was earsplitting. A dead white hand waved them onward.
What with running and the bodies blocking his view, it was difficult for Ricky to make out what was ahead of them. What they were doing seemed loco—charging to meet horrible deaths—but strangely enough, it was also incredibly exhilarating. A terrible, private moment loomed for each of them, and yet they were embracing it with open arms and eyes wide open
By the time they reached the far corner of the basement floor, the full-auto, multiweapon, blastershot overlap had begun to peter out. Like a wag running out of fuel and sputtering haltingly to a dead stop, the clatter dwindled from twenty blasters to five, then one.
The screeches of terror and pain started well before the last blaster fired its last shot.
The albino took them down yet another flight of steps at the end of the hall. Below them was a short landing, and a thick steel door stood ajar. Blaster smoke boiled out of the opening. Painted on the wall above it was the word armory.
Armería, Ricky thought. The place where blasters were stored.
The screaming from the doorway made his skin crawl and his fingers tighten on the De Lisle’s grip. It sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a very deep well.
J.B. signaled for them to move down the stairs in pairs.
With Mildred on his right, Ricky stepped over the threshold, into the caustic cloud, which burned his eyes, the inside of his nose and the back of his throat. The fluorescent lights overhead were dim and flickering. Most had been shot out by flying ricochets. He couldn’t see the back of the room for the roiling smoke, but there was a second staircase on this side; he could make out the doorway and first few steps. It was a mirror image of the one they had used and ran perpendicular to it.
Through tearing eyes, he could just make out a row of wide figures in purple hoodies. They were hunched with their backs to the door, and their arms were moving in a frenzy. Over what, he couldn’t quite see. If one of the creatures had very nearly killed them all, how many were they facing now? Six? Seven?
When he first heard the grinding rumble and felt it vibrate deep in his gut, he thought it was enforcers growling in a chorus. But it didn’t sound like any noise an animal could make, not even a double-wide. It was sharper, more mechanical, metallic, like a shovelful of rocks tossed in the world’s biggest spinning gearbox. Tiny shooting stars passed before his eyes, and his view of the enforcers became even more blurred. The shifting curtain of view, the grinding noise and breathing the dense smoke made him dizzy, as if he was simultaneously suffocating and about to lose his balance.
When the grinding stopped, Ricky wiped his eyes with his free hand. Where was Magus, the one they had put their lives on the line to kill? He searched the smoke for a sign of the half man/half machine, but the enforcers’ bulk blocked his view of the room’s interior.
When he glanced over at Vee, she had a shoulder braced against the wall and was looking down the sights of her weapon.
Then, cutting through the human screams, from behind the bodies of the monsters came a peal of grating, metal-on-metal laughter. Magus was enjoying the show, watching front-row center as the victims were dismembered.
The few defenders still alive were valiantly swinging their emptied M-16s like clubs. All they were doing was fanning the smoke.
Ricky took aim with the De Lisle, uncertain what else to do.
J.B. put his hand on the barrel and firmly forced it down. “No,” he said softly.
“But...” Ricky protested.
J.B. shook his head.
Ricky saw the fury in the eyes behind the smeared lenses. He knew what that meant. It was too late. There was no way to save the men in black. Not with the enforcers positioned between them. The plan was to burn up the monsters with the red grens. That was the only way they could be chilled, the only way the companions would survive this fight. Everything else in the windowless, smoke-filled room was going to perish, one way or another.
Was being torn apart by powerful hands a cleaner death than being burned alive? Who was to say?
And ten seconds after the fact, did it really matter to anyone involved?
The youth thought he had seen some triple-hard things in the hellscape, but watching fellow humans torn limb from limb and being unable to do anything to stop it was by far the worst experience of his young life. Worse than losing his beloved sister, Yami, to the slavers.
Most of the victims were past caring, their parts cast aside like garbage; and the creatures pulling them to pieces were so engrossed in the fun they didn’t seem to notice that they had acquired a speechless audience.
Everything around h
im began to blur and grind again. Spots of light fell through his field of vision, then vanished like tiny meteorites burning up in the atmosphere. His stomach lurched. The screams of the still-living victims being murdered not thirty feet away seemed distorted by great distance and depth, as if they were welling up from the bowels of earth.
After a few seconds, the disturbing sensations passed.
“Hey! You stinking lizard butts!” Krysty yelled.
The shout resounded in the small room.
The enforcers didn’t look up from their butchering, didn’t turn; they paid no attention. It was as if they had all gone deaf.
Krysty waved her arms overhead and stamped her foot, then shouted the same epithet a second time.
One of the creatures dropped a severed arm and appeared to look their way but didn’t react to their presence. As if it had gone blind as well as deaf.
“What the nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed.
“Why don’t they see us?” Mildred asked.
“Why don’t they hear us?” Doc said.
“What we have here,” Vee said, “is a failure to communicate.”
The grinding, the blurring, the shooting stars returned with a vengeance. Ricky tasted vomit in the back of his throat.
With no warning, Vee touched off the Desert Eagle. Three feet of yellow flame erupted from the muzzle, with a tremendous, rocking boom. Ricky watched as she rode the recoil wave like a sec man shooting a 9 mm blaster. Only it wasn’t a 9 mm blaster. With her double grip, Vee strangled the muzzle climb of the big blaster; it rose less than four inches. The cycling action spit the spent hull high in the air.
But the 660 grain bullet she had fired seemed to go nowhere. It had no effect on targets downrange. As if she was shooting blanks.
“Son of a bi—” Ricky began.
Then the screen of pretty sparks fell from his eyes. The grinding and nausea stopped. His vision snapped back into sharp focus, and the screams of the dying men were suddenly louder and more distinct.
Across the room the enforcers whirled, blinking their eyes in surprise as if they had just been startled out of a lizard nap.
In the next instant Ricky saw something smaller dashing behind the shoulder-to-shoulder wall of knobby bodies, beelining for the perpendicular staircase with a pair of enforcers on either side. As the trio hit the stairs, he glimpsed something shiny on the treads, a silver shoe?
No, it was a metal foot.
“Don’t let the bucket of bolts get away!” J.B. shouted.
The problem was, there were four unhappy enforcers between them and their quarry.
“Gren!” Krysty shouted as she rolled a sputtering thermite explosive across the floor.
On cue, the companions turned tail. They hit the doorway, running full tilt, and took the steps three at a time. Ricky slowed just enough to let Krysty and Vee shoot past him.
At his back he heard the whoosh of the red gren igniting. Before he could suck in another breath, the staircase rocked and a concussion wave and fireball slammed him face-first onto the top step. A blinding white light exploded inside his head, then everything went black. He came to as he was being dragged through the doorway by the back collar of his coat.
“You okay Ricky?” Vee said as she gently rolled him over.
“Santa mierda! Chica, eres estupenda!” he said.
The beautiful Vee had just saved his life.
* * *
EVEN TOPPLING BACKWARD and off balance, with one hand the enforcer had the strength to lift Ryan off his feet and vault him through the air. As he cleared the window frame, Ryan was sure he was going to fall into the blaze below, but the power of the jerk and the snap at the end of it cost the enforcer its grip on his wrist and whiplashed Ryan high over the flames. He rode his forward momentum until the last possible second, then cut a slow somersault. He landed on the balls of his feet three yards past the edge of the lake of burning fuel. When he touched down, he tucked his head and shoulder rolled, which lessened the sting of impact. Behind him, three hundred pounds of dead, falling enforcer crashed through the already weakened top of the burning van. Ryan knew what was going to happen next. Coming to his feet, he cleared the SIG-Sauer from its holster and high-kicked for cover across the street.
He never made it to the other side.
The blast from the enforcer’s explosive combustion sent him sliding belly down on the asphalt and the blaster skidding away on the wet street into the gutter. Flaming wag wreckage went flying in a wide ring, smashing all the precinct’s ground-floor windows. The surge of heat ignited the building’s interior.
It took a couple of seconds for Ryan to realize he was on fire, too. He rolled in the street until he had snuffed out the flames on the back of his shirt.
He was still on the ground when something deep inside the building blew up. The explosion was muffled by the surrounding structure, but the street rippled from the shock wave, and the glass in the facing windows in the top three stories shattered and cascaded to the sidewalk.
His companions were still inside, he thought. Fireblast, they’re all still inside!
As he pushed to his feet, three figures raced out of the building’s left-hand street entrance, two large, one small.
Not the companions.
They were hooded in purple satin. The big ones were enforcers for sure. Nothing else was that wide. What the small one was, he couldn’t tell. In a dead sprint, the trio dashed past the burning wreckage. They were headed straight for him.
Ryan looked back for his handblaster. The SIG lay twenty-five feet away, resting up against the curb.
Nuke me, he thought. This is it, this is the last train west.
Unarmed except for his panga, he was facing not one but two enforcers. He didn’t have a chance in hell.
He half turned to shield what he was doing from the oncoming monsters, then drew the long sharp blade from its sheath, holding it out of sight, alongside his thigh. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, an edged weapon would do to that knobby hide, but he was going down swinging.
The trio quickly closed the distance. He just stood there and let them come to him. Their racing footfalls beat a strange, two-toned rhythm on the street. Slap, slap, slap, clank, slap, clank.
When they were five yards away, the enforcers peeled away from the little guy to bracket him.
Ryan relaxed for a second, then, to the soles of his feet, he coiled his body to strike. He knew his first blow might be his last.
“No!” a grating metallic voice said. “No time for that!”
The enforcers changed course at once, veering away from him.
As the little guy ran past, Ryan saw his face in the glow of the bonfire; likewise it saw his. The interaction between them lasted no more than a fraction of a second, and the recognition was Ryan’s alone. It was Magus under the purple hood, of that he had no doubt, only Magus with more flesh and less stainless-steel on its face. One of Magus’s eyes was brown and looked human; it was made of tissue not metal—it could have even been original equipment. The cyborg didn’t stop, didn’t turn to look back. It kept on running, as if Ryan was a stranger not worth the trouble of chilling.
Running.
Magus was running.
Ryan cranked his head around to watch the trio race toward the streetlight-illuminated line of tall, dark trees a couple of blocks away. No hitch in its stride, Magus was keeping pace with his three-hundred-pound playmates.
The one-eyed man stood there dumbstruck by what he was seeing, and by what just hadn’t happened. Magus had gone from a familiar, limping wreck to a lithe sprinter. Had it been refitted with a new set of legs? A new tranny? When and where had the startling improvements been made? And what about the face? The normal human eye? Until that startling moment Steel Eyes’s physical condition had always seemed to be going the other direction: from bad to worse.
Just as puzzling to Ryan was Magus seeing but not recognizing him. In the recent past they had faced off in Bullard ville at the c
arny of death and again on Magus’s gladiator island. Ryan was sure he and the companions had made an impression in both encounters because they had turned the tables and spoiled Steel Eyes’s grotesque fun. Then they’d had the audacity to hunt it down and had come close to chilling it. No one in Deathlands had challenged Magus like that and lived—except them. There was no doubt the cyborg knew Cawdor on sight and wished him to die in the most agonizing way possible.
The sound of running feet made him look back over his shoulder at the precinct. When he saw his companions coming toward him, a wave of relief swept over him. All of them had survived the enforcers and the explosion, and the newcomer Vee had made it through, as well.
Krysty threw her arms around his neck and gave him a powerful hug. J.B. held out his Steyr.
“I think this belongs to you,” J.B. said. “You need to be more careful where you leave it.”
“Funny man,” Ryan replied as he accepted the weapon.
“We took out the enforcers, but Magus got away,” Mildred told him.
“Yeah, I figured that when it ran by me.”
“Where corpse?” Jak asked, scanning the street.
Ryan stepped over to the curb and picked up his SIG. “Had no blaster,” he said as he examined the weapon for damage and found none. “Long story, but I couldn’t take the shot. Magus and two enforcers ran in that direction, heading for that line of trees.”
“That’s Central Park,” Vee told him.
“They’ve got a good lead on us already,” Ryan said. “We’ll never catch up to them on foot.”
“If Magus only has two bodyguards at present,” Doc said, “this may be the only chance we have to do what has to be done.”
“Let’s roll, then,” Vee suggested.
They ran back to the EMT truck and piled in, front and rear. Vee dropped the wag into gear and stomped the accelerator, spinning the heavy rig’s back wheels. As the tires bit in, the truck shot forward with a sickening lurch. Ryan had to grab a handhold overhead or be thrown backward, head over heels, all the way to the rear doors.
