Prodigal's Return

by James Axler

  Closing the breech of the M-203 gren launcher with a hard snap, Krysty aimed at the onrushing steam truck just as it began to angle away and turn sideways. Suspecting the ugly truth, she quickly switched targets and fired in a single smooth motion.

  The 40 mm shell slammed into the tinder carriage behind the steam truck just as a brace of blasterports opened and the familiar barrels of AK-47 rapidfires were thrust through. The strident blast brutally ripped the weapons from the grasp of the coldhearts inside, taking along most of their fingers. As the coldhearts howled in agony, two fresh rapidfires were thrust through the charred blasterports and began spitting lead.

  Putting a burst into the front opening, Ryan heard a man scream, and the rapidfire fell back inside. Doing the same thing to the rear port, J.B. fired until the Uzi cycled empty. With no more loaded magazines, he released the weapon to swing behind him on its strap, and unlimbered the S&W M-4000 scattergun.

  Resting the barrel of the Winchester on the hood of the sedan, Mildred began to snipe at the coldhearts and sec men, blowing out the tires on the sandhogs or crippling their horses. Then she saw a cougar leap on Dewitt from behind. Instantly, she put lead in the head on the beast. As the healer shoved aside the twitching body, he looked about for his unknown benefactor. Spotting her, he nodded in thanks, then slit the throat of the cougar and rejoined the battle.

  Unexpectedly, there was a tug in Mildred’s hair and something incredibly hot brushed along her scalp. Diving to the side, she rolled away to take refuge behind a telephone pole, and came up with the longblaster firing. Across the street, a coldheart kneeling in a pothole jerked as the soft lead smacked into his throat. Gushing a crimson fountain, he dropped out of sight.

  Taking cover inside a pothole larger than a bathtub, Ryan tried again for the coldheart driving the steam engine, but the bars were too close. Unless he fired directly into the window, his lead always ricocheted off harmlessly. Watching the titanic machine barreling into the parking lot of a small strip mall, smashing aside a fiberglass sign announcing the grand opening of a yogurt store, he suddenly got a wild idea.

  “Krysty, shell!” Ryan commanded, holding out a hand.

  Although she had no idea what he wanted it for, Krysty pulled a spare 40 mm shell from her pocket and tossed it over. Ryan made the catch, and immediately lobbed it high over the kinetic fighting to land squarely at the feet of a very startled Doc Tanner.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Gren! Run for your lives!” Library yelled, throwing herself upon the shell.

  Instantly, every coldheart and sec men in the area dived for cover. Rolling along the uneven ground, she went behind a cinder-block wall, and came up with her crossbow at the ready, the undamaged shell shining in the dark loam.

  “Very clever, madam.” Doc chuckled, joining her a moment later.

  “The most dangerous thing in the world is the human brain,” she muttered, releasing an arrow into fight. “Forget who said that!” The shaft slammed through the fiberglass door of a sleek civilian sedan. A sec man crouching inside screamed in pain, his rapidfire chewing up the roof, then he went silent.

  “Anybody who ever met you!” Doc stated, snatching up the gren, and shoving it into the breech of the launcher attached underneath his M-16 rapidfire. “How’s your belly?”

  “Just a flesh wound,” she grunted, notching in a fresh arrow.

  Spotting a movement on top of a building across the street, Ryan fired twice, and a sec man fell off the roof of a ruined bank to land on a jagged slab of sidewalk. His spine audibly cracked from the impact, and the coldheart lay there, still alive, but unable to move or speak.

  Another flight of arrows arched into the sky, then came down fast, acing several coldhearts and a couple of sec men. But then the rest responded in a volley, the hammering barrage ripping off the wooden slats of a wag to expose the people inside. As they scrambled for cover, the coldhearts fired again, wounding everybody.

  “Sons of bitches are trying to take us prisoner!” Alan raged, working the arming bolt of the Springfield to eject a jammed round.

  “Never gonna happen!” Cordelia snarled, the Mauser spitting high-velocity death. Throwing their arms high, two sec men cried out as they fell away, their blasters discharging impotently at the rumbling storm clouds.

  “Try this, ya one-eyed bastard!” a coldheart snarled, pulling out a stick of dynamite covered with rusty nails and jagged pieces of broken glass.

  Caught in the act of reloading the Galil, Ryan simply dropped the rapidfire to draw the SIG-Sauer, and fired twice.

  The waxy stick jerked at the second bullet, and the coldheart vanished inside a cloud of black smoke and assorted body parts. A head shot past Ryan wearing an expression of total surprise. As the roiling fumes cleared, there was only a pair of tattered boots standing amid a field of steaming scraps of flesh and some tattered cloth.

  Her twin blasters banging away steadily, Ralhoun blew a crimson path through the fight, slaying anybody who got in the way. Twice she caught glimpses of Ryan sniping at the coldhearts from behind some wreckage, only to reappear yards away to repeat the attack. In spite of her intense hatred of the outlander, she had to admit he was good at chilling.

  “But then, so am I!” she shouted, shooting out a second-floor window. As the glass came down, a traveler covered with cuts staggered into view and she blew out his heart.

  Tossing a pipe bomb, J.B. mentally counted to ten, then braced for the explosion. The blast thundered, then with a creaking groan a brick wall slowly eased away from an office building to fall on a group of coldhearts who had started to assemble an antique, hand-cranked Gatling gun.

  Crawling under a wag whose horses had broken loose, a coldheart tried to sneak a peek inside through a blasterport when a knife was rammed into his eye, and another stabbed him in the throat. Gushing blood, the coldheart feebly struggled to get away, but the people within refused to relinquish their hold, while other hands reached out to snatch away the dying man’s weapons. When the coldheart finally ceased moving, he was released, and the travelers burst out the rear door, firing their new weapons in every direction.

  As his M-16 cycled dry, Jak tossed away the useless 5.56 mm rapidfire and drew the Colt Python. He targeted a nearby coldheart and fired. The heavy .357 Magnum round smacked into the wood armor with an explosion of splinters, then came out the man’s back along with small pieces of major organs.

  “Nuking hellfire, we’re gonna beat these gleebs!” Cordelia shouted. Then an arrow took her in the chest, and she fell back, a crimson stain spreading fast across her shirt.

  Quick-firing the Winchester, Mildred fought her way to the fallen woman and immediately started battlefield repairs on the ghastly wound.

  Moving out from the safety of the wall, Doc easily located the steam truck as it plowed through a stand of withered trees, the ground beneath littered with the corpses of birds and squirrels. Unfortunately, the angle was wrong, so he took off in a run, hopping over a white picket fence that had somehow survived the thermonuclear doomsday.

  Running up to a wag, a snarling Ralhoun shoved her weapons in through a blasterport and randomly shot around the interior. Travelers cried out in pain, and she promptly moved to the next wag. Her goal was to cripple these people, not chill them. Where was the profit in that? Ryan was the only person she wanted aced on sight. Seeking refuge behind a mailbox, she began reloading, until a coldheart appeared and fired a huge handblaster straight at her. She felt the wind of the ammo’s passage, then heard a grunt of pain from behind. Turning, she saw a traveler fall to the cracked pavement, clutching his bleeding chest.

  Nodding her thanks to the coldheart, Ralhoun moved onward.

  Hannigan holstered the blaster to loot a Browning .32 and spare brass from the warm corpse.

  Triggering the M-16 combo in short bursts to conserve ammo, Krysty then fired another 40 mm shell. It hit a sandhog, and the vehicle was blown backward to tumble madly along the street, crushing a dozen coldhearts
on horses before coming to rest against a burned-out bookstore.

  Darting across the ville commons, Doc finally caught up to the swiftly moving steam truck. Kneeling in the gravel to steady his aim, he fired a burst from the M-16 purely as a diversion, then triggered the gren launcher. The 40 mm warhead slammed into the coupling between the engine and the tinder carriage. The protective sandbags were blown clear, but the resilient steel linkage held firm, not even dented by the high-grade military explosive.

  As it thundered by, Dean and Althea rose from a pothole to hammer the window with hot lead. When the MAC-10 cycled empty, he gave cover fire with the Enfield as she tossed aside the rapidfire and switched back to the Ruger.

  Riding a wounded horse at breakneck speed, Alan moved in close to the steam truck, firing the Springfield. Using his good hand, a grinning Latimer shot him in the back.

  Tumbling out of the saddle, Alan nearly went under the double row of spinning military tires. Uncaring of the pain it caused his broken ankle, he rolled away from the war wag, then threw a knife from the ground, winging the coldheart in the shoulder. But as Latimer recovered from the minor injury, a boomerang came out of nowhere to slam him in the side of the head, so hard that his eyeballs popped out of their sockets. Still connected, they dangled down his face at the end of glistening white ganglia.

  Shrieking in agony, Latimer tried to find his eyes with fumbling hands, and walked straight into a pothole filled with slightly diluted acid rain.

  Crawling painfully erect, Alan looked at the thrashing coldheart for a long moment, then merely grunted and limped away to search for the dropped Springfield longblaster.

  Revving the engine, a coldheart on a sandhog came barreling straight for Dean and Althea. Diving apart, they got out of the way just in time. Racing around a wag, the sandhog charged at Althea this time. Quickly, she fired the Ruger twice, but both rounds went wild and hit nothing. Forcing herself to remain calm, she took a deep breath, and instead of jerking the trigger, gently squeezed it as if she were trying to get juice out of a fruit. The Ruger smoothly fired, and the coldheart jerked back with a black hole in his forehead.

  Streaking past her, the sandhog crashed into a brick wall and burst into flames. Shrapnel peppered her hard, but she moved on anyway, determined to regroup with Dean. Spotting an aced coldheart lying in the street, she hurried over and yanked off his lumpy canvas jacket, draping it across her shoulders for some added protection.

  Standing up from behind a pile of rubble, Library sent an arrow into the fray and a sec man screamed, his hand pinned to the chest of a coldheart.

  “Two with one shot,” Doc muttered, taking them both out with the LeMat. “Well done, miss!”

  “Needs must when the devil drives,” she responded, clumsily notching in another arrow with her bandaged hand.

  Shouting obscenities, a sec man charged around the corner of a partially collapsed building to race straight at Krysty. Still shooting the M-16, she drew the pepperbox and fired at point-blank range. Black smoke and flame vomited from the multiple barrels to engulf her attacker’s head. Thrown backward, the body landed in a sprawl, dark fluids gushing from the ragged neck stump.

  While gunning down a sec man struggling to kick a stalled sandhog alive, Dean got hit by an arrow from behind. Staggering from the impact, he turned at the waist and shot back with the Browning Hi-Power. Standing behind a stripped SUV, a sec woman loading a crossbow took the .38 copper-jacketed round directly between her breasts. With a guttural sigh, she fell.

  Just then a horn blared, and a flurry of crossbow arrows went straight up from the roof hatches of four different wags. Gracefully curving back down again, the arrows fell across the huffing steam truck, the wooden shafts harmlessly shattering upon the iron chassis.

  “Ramming speed!” Camarillo roared, as the Atomsmasher pulped a team of galloping horses, then crashed through another wooden wag. Briefly, he could see the tumbling bodies of the family, their broken belongings a whirlwind of destruction hurtling past the stout iron bars of his window. Then the steam truck was back into the clear, entrails and red blood streaming off the hot exterior of the death machine.

  Aiming carefully, Ryan sent a full magazine from the Galil into the window, but failed to achieve penetration. From across the street, Krysty put another 40 mm shell into the machine, but the explosion only cleared away the grisly human remains from the heavily armored chassis.

  “All right, enough of this shit!” J.B. snarled, tilting back his fedora. Kneeling, he nimbly tied a length of fuse around the neck of the Molotov he held, then stood and swung it around faster and faster, building speed and momentum.

  When the steam truck came into view, he waited a few precious seconds even as several coldhearts started shooting in his direction. An arrow grazed his cheek, and a bullet scored a bloody path along his side, but he stayed still, gauging the wind, then let go. Gracefully, the unlit firebomb sailed through the smoky air to loudly crash on the thick iron bars of the control room window.

  Drenched with raw shine, Camarillo instinctively backed away from the window, wiping the stinging fluid from his eyes. Then he realized the horrible truth, a split second before the blazing hot door of the nearby hearth under the steam truck ignited the highly flammable alcohol. As his hands burst into flames, he cursed and tried to jam them into a bucket of damp sand kept in the control room for just this sort of emergency. But unable to see clearly yet, he only smashed his burning hands into the iron wall, shattering both wrists. As the hungry fire danced up his sleeves, he waved his arms about. But that only fanned the flames, and soon they went underneath his iron shirt, then upward to his face and alcohol-soaked hair.

  Blind from the searing pain, Camarillo ran about the locked room of the Atomsmasher, crashing into the controls and metal walls. The AK-47 slung across his back discharged a single round, then violently detonated, the full magazine igniting from the heat of the flames. Now inhabited by only a smoldering corpse, the undamaged war wag continued on its last course, steaming down a side street and away from the ruins toward the distant jungle on the horizon.

  At the sight of the Atomsmasher departing, the coldhearts and sec men slowed in their attack, defiance leaving their faces like windblown leaves. Reining their horses about, some headed after the chugging steam truck, while others simply took off randomly, to abandon the fight.

  “Come back here, you filthy cowards!” Ralhoun bellowed, shooting several coldhearts in the back. But that only seemed to spur the rest on to greater speeds.

  Noticing a sandhog with an aced sec man draped across the handlebars, Ralhoun started that way, then saw Ryan walking across the street. Even as she swung around her blasters, the one-eyed man spotted her and triggered the SIG-Sauer, firing from the hip.

  The reports of the three blasters combined into a single noise, and both Ryan and Ralhoun buckled, almost toppling over. But after a moment, he slowly stood, clutching his bloody rib cage, while she continued on down to the pavement, blood pouring from the gaping hole in her throat.

  As Ralhoun collapsed onto the ground, Ryan ruthlessly shot her in the temple just to make sure, then staggered off into the smoke-filled streets, looking for the other companions. Especially Mildred, or at the very least, that Dewitt fellow. Ryan had been in enough gun-fights to know he was running presently on borrowed time. Ralhoun had come too bastard close to blowing him away, and he’d soon pass out from blood loss. Even with most of the coldhearts on the run, that would be tantamount to a death sentence.

  WITH THE LOSS of the war wag, Natters realized defeat was coming to the Angels hard and fast, which meant it was time to make his move. Slapping his chest as if shot, he tumbled into the gutter, then rapidly crawled through the mud until reaching a storm drain. Glancing about to make sure nobody was watching, he wiggled into the drain and dropped out of sight.

  DESPERATELY REACHING for the reins of a galloping horse, Hannigan cursed vehemently when he missed, so simply started running along a buckled side
walk. But then his scowl converted into a wide grin as he saw Dean staggering along the smoke-filled street with an arrow jutting from his leg.

  Quickly drawing his Webley revolver, Hannigan aimed the massive blaster in a two-handed grip to try to control the powerful recoil. “Goodbye, Mud Puppy,” he said with a chuckle, thumbing back the hammer.

  But before he could fire, Althea appeared, her Ruger spitting flame. “Dean, behind you!” she screamed.

  Riddled with holes, Hannigan fell over and the Webley discharged into the street, blowing off a chunk of the cracked pavement.

  Hearing somebody shout the name of his son, a galvanized Ryan glanced around and saw a woman running through the smoke. She was wearing the lumpy canvas jacket of a coldheart and carrying a Ruger. Then the gray clouds briefly parted, and Ryan saw that she was heading directly for a wounded Dean, who was facing in the wrong direction.

  Cold adrenaline flooding his body, Ryan started to shout a warning, then realized he would never be heard from this far away, and quickly fired the SIG-Sauer from the hip.

  Chapter Twenty

  At the distant glimmer of light, Natters threw away the raw rat he had been gnawing, and eagerly scampered forward, almost giddy in relief. Sunlight! He had found the way out at last!

  Crawling out of the storm drain, Natters saw that he was still in the ruins, near a collapsed building with a weird domed roof. Flicking a butane lighter alive, he stared into the darkness to see if there was anything useful he could scav to help him dig up the dead later. Travelers often buried their kin with their boots on, and such, sometimes even with knifes and blasters. He could use all that to help him reach a ville and start a new life. Barons always needed trained sec men, and he was one of the best.

  A hot breath on the back of his neck was the first sign that he wasn’t alone. Clawing for his blaster, he turned around fast, firing into the darkness. In the bright muzzle-flash, he briefly saw the mutie, one with too many eyes and way too many teeth. Then writhing tentacles wrapped tightly around his body, pinning his arms to his sides. He was stuffed into the mutie’s flexible mouth and swallowed whole.