by James Axler
As the trooper crashed down, he let go of the pulse rifle.
Ryan hit the helmet release and, fighting off the trooper's hands, unscrewed it.
J.B. put the muzzle of the tribarrel against the guy's forehead and dropped the safety.
"Dark night, look at his face!"
That was exactly what Ryan was doing. He couldn't help himself.
The trooper's face was covered with a hideous, weeping red patch. His nostrils were crusted over with scabs, and his left eye was cemented shut. On his cheeks, striated flesh was exposed; it looked like naked muscle.
The guy's hand shot up to his throat mike. His mouth opened.
"Stop him," Ryan said.
J.B. pulled the trigger. The pulse rifle hummed, and a fraction of an instant later a smoking slot appeared in the middle of the man's forehead. His jaws slammed shut and he grimaced, showing all his teeth. Then the trooper's hand slowly fell away from his throat and his eyes glazed over. The wound was through and through. Through the backside of his skull and into the floor. The smell of flash-cooked brains and melted plastic filled the room.
"Damn, that's nasty!" J.B. said as he stepped back.
Ryan knelt down and checked the cube. Whatever it was, it wasn't a comp. "Come on, we're wasting time here," he said.
Taking the laser rifle with them, they exited the room and moved down the tubular hallway, following the directions of the first trooper.
After taking the left-hand fork, they heard the tramping of many pairs of boots. A squad of troopers appeared around a turn ahead. Ryan and J.B. ducked into an open room to avoid them.
They surprised four men who were working over a long table. They were dressed in charcoal-gray fatigues, splattered with blood and bodily fluids. One of them was cramming what looked like a deer haunch into a monstrous pulverizing or liquefying machine. The whirring blades turned the red meat into red paste. The blades stopped whirring. The other men held cleavers and long knives. They stopped what they were doing, too.
Ryan and J.B. had stumbled into the invaders' kitchen. It was impossible to tell from the butchers' faces if they realized the intruders were impostors. With armed men bearing down on them, there was no room for error.
J.B. shot one of them immediately, pinning the trigger and slashing the light beam across the man's head. Due to the steeply angled cut, the top of the man's skull slid off, along with most of his right ear. The butcher fell to the floor behind the table with a loud thud.
"Don't move!" Ryan told the others as the tramp of boot falls in the hall grew louder. "Don't make a sound!"
The butchers obeyed and the squad of troopers passed the doorway without looking in or stopping.
"Dark night, what's that stink?" J.B. asked.
Ryan could smell it, too, right through his helmet.
Because they had come from a world stripped of its native species, protein on the hoof was a new territory for them. The table in front of the butchers was heaped with animal carcasses and offal. All of them had been killed with lasers; most were missing one or more essential parts. Plucked songbirds sat pink and naked in a big pile of feathers. A pair of buzzards lay likewise stripped and gutted. There were lizards of all sizes, some in their skins and some without.
Ryan recognized the jumbled parts of gophers, prairie dogs, jackrabbits and antelope.
There were bugs, too. Honking big Deathlands bugs. Eight-inch-long cockroaches. Scorpions as big as Chihuahuas. Spiders the size of basketballs. One of the butchers had been feeding shovelfuls of these insects into a huge pulverizing unit, along with leaves and branches of shrubs and bushes.
The contents of the pulverizers went directly into a row of twenty-gallon pots that sat on propane burners.
It wasn't the animal carcasses that stank so badly. It was the beige, glutinous slop simmering in the pots.
"What we had to eat at Ground Zero suddenly doesn't seem quite so bad," J.B. commented.
"Looks to me like these guys are packing themselves a big picnic lunch," Ryan said. He pointed at the ten-gallon plastic jugs lined up along the wall. Some were already sealed with lids; others had funnels poked down their mouths. There was beige slop inside all of them, and it was spilled down their sides and onto the floor.
"Where are you going?" J.B. asked them.
"How are you getting there?" Ryan said.
One of the butchers answered by throwing his meat cleaver. His right hand moved in a blur. Before Ryan could dodge or duck, the cleaver struck him in the middle of the visor. The point of the blade penetrated the armor by about half an inch.
J.B. cut loose on the guy at once, drawing a smoking line from his chin to his crotch. The bloodless wound gaped so wide that J.B. could see the wall on the other side through it. With his innards neatly divided, and ninety-five percent of his spine vaporized, the butcher slumped across the table, then slowly melted to the floor.
The other butchers were moving, in opposite directions, at high speed behind the cover of the table. J.B. sawed the legs out from under one side of it, dropping the top, and dumping the collection of dead things onto the floor. Then he sliced the overturned tabletop in half lengthwise. Behind it, one of the surviving men was also cut in two.
The third ran for the open door, screaming.
J.B. kept the trigger pinned and swung the muzzle up his track, in the process cutting through the bubbling pots, spilling seventy gallons of slop, shattering the assembled beakers and electronic toxicity analyzers and chopping machines. The laser crossed the man's midsection, and he stopped screaming. The top half of his body fell backward as his legs fell forward; both sections crashed to the floor.
"Let's get out of here quick," Ryan said, heading for the door.
Outside, the hallway was clear. They left the kitchen and continued on until J.B. noticed the gasketed door, which was shut. "This could be it, Ryan," he said.
As the one-eyed man reached for the door's locking wheel, he heard the sounds of violent struggle on the other side. Landed blows. Scuffling feet. Then a woman's voice, howling a curse.
A familiar voice. And a familiar curse.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In the lee of the boiling water tank, Jak held up his fingers for Mildred to see and counted them down to zero. Words weren't necessary between the teenaged albino and the cryogenically preserved black woman. Based on the situation, based on their past experience, they knew exactly what had to be done.
Jak coiled himself and sprang for the water tank's twisted ladder. Though the tank was tipped over, the ladder offered a protected route to the top side. The rear of the crumpled cylinder was hidden from the view of the troopers massed on the flatland, but not from the heat of their concentrated laser fire, Showers of white-hot sparks rained on him, and the ladder rungs scalded his hands as he climbed.
On the other side of the compound, Mildred was likewise trying to gain some elevation on their targets. Avoiding the puddles of molten glass around the wheels, she climbed the side of the ore truck's cab.
As Jak reached the top side of the tank, the steam billowing up from its ruptured belly partially hid him from the enemy. Standing on the side of the corkscrewed ladder, Jak raised himself up, shouldered his pulse rifle and sent a green beam screaming across the compound. He didn't aim at the kneeling black figures. He aimed instead at the glass beneath and around them.
He only got off a short blast of energy before the answering fire ripped back at him. He ducked as a fountain of sparks erupted from the shoulder of the tank and a stunning wall of heat hit him.
By then, Mildred was on the roof of the wag, firing at the battlesuited troopers. And drawing fire in return.
As soon as the energy blasts from the flatland shifted her way, Jak popped up again and poured more green light onto the glass. It didn't take much to soften the material. A few seconds and the surface turned wet and shiny.
As the five troopers began to shift their aim points again, chunks of glass started arcing down onto the
m. The slaves had picked up the fight, which made the troopers shift their aim points yet again.
There were too many threats to deal with at once.
While the troopers were trying to keep Doc and Dean and the others from stoning them to death, Jak's and Mildred's laser beams turned the glass under their boots to gel. Whether they could sense the heat through their battlesuits or not, the troopers didn't move.
It was a mistake.
The entire section of glass, which was a continuation of the already partially collapsed roof of the tunnel, caved in on itself, dropping four of the five troopers twenty-five feet to the mine floor. The fifth trooper sank to his armpits in a much smaller hole in the glass, but stopped himself from falling through by extending his arms. To do this, he had to drop his weapon.
Another mistake.
Before he could drag himself out of the hole, the molten glass cooled and resolidified around him, sealing him in place like a cork in a bottle.
By the time Jak and Mildred jumped from their shooting platforms and crossed the compound, the slaves had closed in on the hapless trooper. They had taken off the guy's helmet and were using his head as a kicking-punching bag. Because he couldn't twist or turn his torso, he couldn't use his arms to block or defend himself from blows from behind. He couldn't fall over, either, because the battlesuit was holding him up. A stationary target.
Jak stepped to the larger hole he and Mildred had cut and looked over the edge. The other troopers lay on the ground below. It was impossible to tell whether they had broken limbs as a result of the fall or whether the melted glass had hardened; either way, they weren't getting up under their own power. Some of the slaves started tumbling big glass blocks on top of them, but they were called off by their comrades, who had other ideas about vengeance.
Most of the slaves rushed down to the ruined mine entrance and swarmed onto the fallen troopers. They took away their weapons, then removed their helmets so their heads could be summarily bashed in. The slaves used the butts of the captured pulse rifles, as well as chunks of rock to accomplish these feats.
It was ugly work, but in Jak's opinion it needed doing. No reason to be squeamish over the fates of coldheart chillers. While the companions didn't take part in the animalistic bloodletting, they didn't try to stop it, either.
When it was over, Jak walked over to the water tank and clanged on its side with his rifle butt to attract the mob's attention.
"Everyone with laser rifle, come," he said. He waved the armed slaves after him to the mine entrances. "Seal up," he told them. "Nobody down there again."
They formed into a firing line. The crisscrossing green beams collapsed the entrances, turning them into waterfalls of molten glass, which buried the battered remains of the troopers.
When this was done to his satisfaction, Jak said, "Everybody in the back truck. Take wounded."
The slaves did a dimple-by-dimple search. They carried the injured to the truck. Only about fifty were left alive.
Mildred, Dean, Doc and Jak piled into the bench seat in the ore wag's cab. The front and side windshields were blacked out. There was a dashboard, but no driver controls, no features at all except for a series of buttons arranged in a geometric shape. The only light came from a red bulb in the middle of the head-liner.
"Maybe this thing has to be driven from a battle-suit," Mildred said. "That plug there could be some kind of coupling."
"May I suggest that you try that red button in the center?" Doc said. "Red usually indicates something important."
Mildred pushed it.
Instantly, the wag's nuke-fueled turbine howled to life. And as that happened, a compartment opened up in front of Mildred's seat and a joystick popped out.
"That's great," Mildred said, "but we're still driving blind. Looks like the inside of a steel-belted radial in here."
"Move the stick a little," Dean suggested.
Mildred reached out for it. As soon as her fingers closed on the knurled plastisteel lever, the windshields cleared. She figured the rest out in a hurry. The button on top of the stick was the engine-speed control. Push the stick left or right for steering. Pull it back for reverse. Push the stick straight forward for brakes.
"We're outta here," Mildred said. With a jolt, she pulled away from the ruin of Ground Zero to cheers and whistles from the cargo box.
"Back across the River Styx, back to the world of the living," Doc said. "A miracle of resurrection. We who are about to be reborn, salute you, Dear ferry-person."
"Shut up, Doc," Mildred said, "I'm trying to keep this lurching death trap on the road."
Even though she had the whole road to herself, it wasn't easy. It was difficult to pick out the shoulders what with the glare from the glass. Mildred showed a definite tendency to bounce off one side of the road and veer to the other. A case of overcompensation multiplied. Before things got completely out of control, she had to take her thumb off the speed button and let the uphill grade slow the wag.
The consequences of any error on her part would have been grave. If the wag left the road proper, it would cost everyone on board their hands and feet. And that didn't take into account the whirlpools of frozen glass that loomed just off the shoulders. These whirlpools were fifty yards across with spiraling black centers that dropped thousands of feet into emptiness. If she tipped over into one of those great, slick funnels, it would have meant a much more complete disaster. The kind no one survived.
As Mildred rounded the edge of a particularly scary pinwheel of a chasm, she and the others saw something stopped on the road dead ahead.
Something big and black.
"It's another ore wag," Dean said.
"Why is it stopped like that, do you suppose?" Doc said.
"It mebbe wait," Jak replied. "Block the road so we not get past."
"I don't see anybody around it," Mildred said, reducing her speed to a crawl.
"Mebbe ambush," Jak said, scanning the surrounding glass with his keen red eyes.
A pencil-thin green beam squealed over the wasteland, hitting the wag's cargo box. The slaves back there started yelling their heads off. They yelled louder still when a second beam from the other side of the road zeroed in on them.
One of the shooters was firing from behind a jumbled row of ten-foot-high glass spikes. The other lay atop a small knoll above a gigantic whirlpool. Triangulated fire.
"They've got us pinned," Mildred said.
Some of the slaves in the cargo box attempted to return fire. To do that they had to stick their heads up. Two of the captured rifles fell from the top of the box, followed by arms and heads of the men who'd tried to use them.
"They want to hold us here until reinforcements arrive," Jak said.
"They happen to be doing an excellent job of it, too," Doc stated.
"Not let do that," Jak finished.
"It's gonna be tough taking them out," Mildred said. "We can't leave the road because of the manacles. We can't go forward because of the other wag. And they've got the high ground."
"Why didn't they just cut the road if they wanted to trap us?" Dean said. "Wouldn't that have been the easiest thing?"
"I think Dean has something there," Mildred said. "All their shots have been at the top of the cargo box. They don't want to risk melting the road. Especially not here where it slides off so steeply. They want to keep the road to the mine open. We can use that."
"How, pray tell?" Doc said.
"It means they're not going to fire at the wheels," Mildred said.
"Hide behind wheels," Jak said, snatching up his laser rifle from the floorboards.
"And fire as I creep this wag forward," Mildred said. "When they see that I intend to push their truck off the frigging road, you and Doc might get clear shots."
"What about me?" Dean asked.
"I'm holding you in reserve," Mildred said. "In case I need you when we get to the other wag."
"Move fast, Doc," Jak said. "Under wag quick."
"I
understand the strategy, dear lad," Doc said. "Lead the way."
Jak popped open the passenger-side door and hit the road running. He took five steps, then dived beneath the undercarriage, thrusting the laser rifle out in front of him. Doc followed a second later.
"Mildred right," Jak said. "Drew no fire. Not want to hit the road."
"Insightful woman, our Dr. Wyeth," Doc said. "I shall take the left side, if you do not mind."
Jak nodded and moved to the inside of the opposite wheel.
With Mildred at the controls, the wag began to inch forward on its seven-foot-wide tires.
Jak and Doc watched their targets, holding their fire. They crawled along with the wag, keeping hidden behind the wheels. The shooters angled downward fire without changing their positions, zapping the sides of the cargo box again and again, but they could only do so up to a point. Once the rebel ore wag had moved far enough up the road, their only target was the wag's rear gate. As the slaves were now staying well down, out of their line of fire, hitting the gate served no purpose.
When Mildred was within thirty feet of the other wag, her intentions were obvious. As were the shortcomings of the troopers' ambush plan.
"Mine's moving," Doc said, swinging the alien weapon to his shoulder and lining up the sights.
The trooper on top of the knoll scrambled to his feet and started running downhill.
Doc led him and squeezed the trigger. The resulting hum surprised him. As did the lack of any recoil. His first shot went low and wide. Pinning the trigger, he painted the slope with the laser beam.
Doc's blast cut the glass out from under the man's feet. He lost his balance and slid face first, leaving his rifle behind. The old man watched over his sights as the trooper tried to slow or stop himself by putting out both gauntleted hands, palms forward, and digging in the toes of his boots. But the incline was too steep and the glass too slick.
