by James Axler
She spun around on the landing above, the Desert Eagle in both hands. He took three steps in a single bound, then saw the expression on her face. Before he could flatten, she fired twice. The muzzle-blasts numbed the right side of his face and made that ear go dead.
As he scrambled up beside her, she took her first step down. The powerful handblaster roared again and again. Ryan looked back to see her shoot point-blank into an enforcer’s face. Another of the creatures was already on fire from the chin up, whirling in panic. With a flash of light and heat, the second enforcer’s head simultaneously jolted and ignited. When the two blind bastards collided, they locked arms around each other like long-lost friends. They maintained their balance and the embrace for a fraction of a second before toppling head first down the stairs in a double fireball.
Again they were granted precious time.
They still had a lead when they burst through the door to the redoubt’s ground floor, but it was only about a hundred feet. There still weren’t enough enforcers in the stairwell to merit using one the last thermite grens. Either most of them had died in the mat-trans anteroom or there weren’t that many to begin with.
The question was, could they beat the enforcers to the redoubt entrance before the enforcers pulled them apart?
By the time they closed distance on the first trap, the one that blocked access to the redoubt proper just inside the vanadium door, the answer was no. On flat ground and a straightaway the enforcers could outrun them. And were doing so. One hundred feet had become seventy-five, and there was still another hundred to go. If they didn’t do something, they’d be caught just inside the redoubt’s entrance.
Ryan racked his brain to remember the details of what he’d seen in the automated machine-blaster post. The blasters were disconnected from the cams that automatically operated them, but that didn’t mean the weapons themselves were decommissioned. He recalled seeing the belts of 7.62 mm ammo, because he had thought about scavenging some of it for his Steyr. Were the belts of linked ammo still hooked up to the feedway and ready to fire?
He made another hard decision. He decided it didn’t matter because the result would be the same. The enforcers would be distracted long enough for the rest of the companions to get away. Trouble was, he couldn’t do the job by himself—there were too many enforcers behind him.
“J.B.!” he shouted at his friend’s back as they ran. “M-60 post coming up! You and me!”
He didn’t need to say anything else. J.B. gave him a thumbs-up.
“Krysty!” he yelled. “I’m going to pin them down in the trap. You turn back and fry them! Everyone else, keep running!”
As J.B. fell back beside him, the others snaked through the steel-barred sec gate at the near end of the guard-post kill zone. He and J.B. didn’t go that far. The access door to the bowed-out blaster turret stood open. They ducked inside the cramped space. There wasn’t time for a discussion of who was supposed to do what. Ryan knelt behind the M-60 on the far left; J.B. took the one on the right. Ryan could feel the tramp of heavy feet through the concrete. He checked the feedway and found the belt correctly connected. Two flicks of the charging handle advanced a new but tarnished 7.62 mm round into firing position.
J.B. finished brief seconds before him. He just had time to thumb his glasses up the bridge of his nose before the enforcers appeared at the sec gate.
There was no way to aim through the horizontal firing slot—there wasn’t enough room behind the blasters. But aiming was optional. The machine blasters were set up to cut human-size targets in two. All that mattered was Ryan timing his burst so the first one in line was hit before it cleared the maximum arc of fire.
Holding his head low, he tracked the movement in the corridor through the firing slot. Instead of leading his target, swinging the sights through it, he veered the blaster into the target with the trigger pinned. The M-60 roared, spewing lead at five hundred rounds a minute. Smoking hulls streamed from the ejection port. The first bastard was going nowhere. J.B. joined him in the onslaught, working on the other end of the line of enforcers, doubling the roar and the rounds per minute.
On the other side of the turret, Ryan visualized the enforcers, trapped between blazing blaster barrels, pinned against the backstop by an unbroken torrent of lead. They’d be unhurt but unable to move forward or back.
Dammit, hurry, Krysty! he thought.
Ryan didn’t hear the soft whoosh of a thermite gren’s ignition. He couldn’t hear anything for the clatter of the machine blasters in the narrow space, not even the blaring Klaxon horn. Then a searing blast of heat and light shot through the firing port, and he knew Krysty had done her part. He let go of the M-60’s pistol grip and shoved J.B. toward the access door.
They hit the deck as the fireball behind them bloomed larger and the stacked canisters of M-60 belted ammo began to cook off.
Ryan and J.B. lay on their bellies on the floor with their fingers in their ears until the ammo stopped exploding and the ricochets stopped flying.
“We did it,” Ryan said as he sat up.
“Black dust, we sure did!”
The others were waiting for them outside. From the height of the sun and the heat, it appeared to be midafternoon. The loss or gain in time that had happened in transit seemed unimportant as the companions joyously reunited. It was as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. The backslaps and congratulations were interrupted by the sound of wag engines starting up; everyone stopped what they were doing and dug for their blasters.
Ryan was looking over the scope of his Steyr as a big Winnie lurched into view above the rim of an arroyo and then sped toward the dirt access road they’d come in on. He didn’t have a clear shot on the driver because of the sun reflecting off the windshield. It made a brilliant starburst right in front of the steering wheel. The Winnie was followed by two pickups.
As the wags sped past, Ryan saw a figure behind one of the rear windows. It motioned with a hand.
“Is that who I think it is?” Doc asked.
“No, that’s what you think it is,” Mildred said.
Ryan shouldered the Steyr and touched off a shot, but the already-falling, bulletproof window shutter blocked it at the last second. The round sparked on the steel and zinged off across the desert.
They watched helplessly as the Winnie and other wags zoomed away in a cloud of red dust.
“Did Magus just give us the finger?” Mildred asked.
“The steel finger,” Doc corrected her.
“Nukin’ hell,” J.B. said.
* * *
SINCE MAGUS HAD left behind the camp of circled wags, Ryan suggested they spend the night in comfort instead of on the ground. They would pick up their dirt bikes early in the morning, when it was still cool outside. There were no objections to that, or to stealing Steel Eyes’s wag fuel, or eating the food and drinking the water still in the wags. Before they settled in, he had Ricky rig a boobie inside the redoubt entrance using the remaining thermite grens. That was in case any surviving enforcers decided to come pay them a visit after dark.
As the sun dipped below the western mountain, they were all seated around the camp’s fire pit, enjoying the dancing flames and full bellies. The desert air smelled sweet and clean. In the distance a coyote yipped; it was answered a few seconds later by another series of yips.
They were hunting something, Ryan knew, maybe a mated pair working in tandem, giving each other directions from either side of the arroyo. He found that thought deeply satisfying. And the sounds, too. He knew he was really home.
“So, how did Magus come back to life?” J.B. said. “Anybody care to speculate? I think we can all agree on the fact we saw that broken corpse in 2001.”
“Guess what we saw was just one of the many,” Mildred said.
“We’re never going to figure it out,” Krysty added. “Not enough information. The important things are we all made it back safe and the time hole is closed. Magus won’t ever be able to use it again.”<
br />
There were grunts of agreement around the campfire.
Then Doc spoke up. “It is all over by now,” he said disconsolately.
“What’s over?” Mildred said.
“In 2001 it’s already well past noon. Vee’s gone.”
“Doc, what are you talking about?” Mildred said. “‘Well past noon’? That happened more than a hundred years ago.”
“It does not seem that way to me,” he said. “Seems like I just said goodbye to her.”
“Me, too,” Ricky chimed in. The youth looked as gut shot as Doc.
“But you didn’t just say goodbye to her,” Mildred told them. “You said it a century ago. We all did.”
“You can’t change what’s past, Doc,” Krysty said gently.
“That does not mean that it is painless,” he said. “I still dream about Emily and the children.” The old man sniffed.
Then he rose to his feet, walked over to Ricky and extended his open hand. “No hard feelings,” he said. “We both lost something precious—whether it was today, a hundred years ago is immaterial.”
Ricky got up and grabbed Doc’s hand. As he shook it he said, “We’ll never forget her, Doc.”
“Never, my dear boy.”
Epilogue
Vee slowed the Subaru station wagon as she approached the international-border crossing. A Mexican immigration officer in a gray-and-brown uniform, hat and mirrored sunglasses stood beside what looked like a miniature traffic light. Green. Yellow. Red. She slowed the Subaru to a crawl, keeping her eyes on the light. The light was green and it stayed green. There would be no spot check, no pulling over into the adjoining parking lot for a vehicle search and document inspection. A wave of relief passed over her. As she rolled by the officer, she smiled at him. His eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses, but the mouth below the pencil mustache smiled back.
The road ahead was open. Four lanes of freedom lay ahead.
Nukeday had never come to pass.
Not in her universe anyway.
After Doc had explained the Armageddon scenario that had created Deathlands, she had become more and more convinced that a different script was being written by the chaos of overlapping time lines, a script that didn’t include an all-out missile exchange.
In the days after January 20, 2001, the media had broken an amazing story about a frantic, three-way, red-telephone conversation—Russian premier, one soon to be ex-President, one President to be—that had temporarily overridden all contingency plans for nuke first strikes and counterattacks. Clearly, outside forces, extra-governmental forces, were at work in Manhattan.
As nervous about terrorists as his American counterparts, the premier had offered whatever aid and assistance he and his nation could provide. Long story short, the worst disaster in the history of humankind had turned into a “Kumbaya” moment.
Vee understood, though, that in some alternative universe, she had died that day, that the world had been nuked, and that a one-eyed leader and his crew were caught in a future fighting to survive.
It was too terrible to imagine.
When her world didn’t end as promised, Vee found herself left holding a big bag of brown. And there was no going back to her former life. Not unless she wanted to spend the next twenty years in prison first.
Vee had never thought of herself as a surrendering kind of person.
Luckily she had an option. She’d dyed her hair platinum blonde and got some blue contact lenses. She’d have to get used to a new name on her passport. Her freedom depended on it.
Turned out her cat-loving neighbor Mrs. Blair had taken in Talu, Petey and Lucy for safekeeping after the first terrorist attack.
The five of them—Vee, the three cats and a striped, replacement Desert Eagle—were en route to a little fishing village on Banderas Bay, north of Puerto Vallarta, where there were no high-rises and her savings would last them a good while.
And she had an idea for a new series of books.
* * * * *
ISBN: 978-1-474-02893-6
END DAY
© 2015 Worldwide Library
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Alan Philipson for his contribution to this work.
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Harlequin (UK) Limited
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