by James Axler
“Just run!” Ryan croaked.
The sec men, and whatever regular army members remained nearby, instead of falling back in some order for the tents to the west, or just lighting out for the hills like sensible folk, suddenly forgot all about the rewards on Ryan and his crew. Instead they were finding ways of dealing with the difficult realization that the stalkers of their childhood nightmares—the dread albino ghouls called the coamers—were absolutely real. And that “dealing with” consisted either of fighting furiously with blaster, farm implement, big rock, boots and bare fists, or dying noisily—and not infrequently both.
J.B.’s Uzi ripped out an unusually long burst. The Armorer wasn’t concerned about overheating his weapon, clearly. You had to live longer than seemed likely for that to matter much. Men and women in the path of his copper-jacketed slugs screamed and fled, screamed and fell, screamed and limped or tried to crawl away. Ryan didn’t know whether any of them were sec men, or had even been offering resistance. They were in the way. The Armorer was sweeping them out of it. Nothing personal.
As Ryan vaulted a writhing woman with a cloud of pale frizzy hair, he saw a cannie leap at Mildred from the right, claws and jaws spread wide. She shot him through the upper jaw. The bullet punched through the roof of his mouth, out the top of his snout and rammed into his skull right between the blood-hued eyes. The right one popped from its socket.
A weight landed on Ryan’s back, or rather, his pack—they were all carrying their gear. They didn’t plan to stick around the Pennyrile any longer, one way or another.
He heard frustrated subhuman snarling, felt hot breath on the left side of his face, smelled the knee-loosening stench of rotting human flesh. He felt the creature wiggle on his back, trying to bring its canine jaws within biting range of Ryan’s flesh.
Ryan stuck his P226 back over his shoulder and fired blind. The weight and the stink abruptly left him.
The coamers seemed as though they’d lost their laser focus on the surface-dwellers who had chilled their queen and so many of their inbred kin. They hadn’t gotten over their rage. They now seemed content to take it out on anyone.
For their part the locals were focused on running away. The ones who had held back to stand and fight were presumably all cannie snacks, for now or later. The ones who retained presence of mind, and weren’t just locked in the flight part of flight-fight-freeze mode, were making the best speed possible for the defensive phalanx that had formed before the densely packed tents pitched along the northwestern edge of the open campground. Ryan and company steered a course due west, and a little south, to avoid running into any lines of blasterfire.
At least the cannies behind them had gotten tangled up with locals. Over it all, Ryan realized Conn was still raving over his megaphone. Insanely, it was against them. “Don’t let the stonehearts get away!” he shrieked. “They’re the ones to blame for all of this! Chill them!”
A quick glance showed that no one paid attention to him. Not even the score or so sec men standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the dais, blasters leveled straight ahead, who looked glumly determined to chill anyone or anything who got close to their master. Apparently they were still, after all of this, more afraid of their monstrous sec boss than an endless swarm of raging cannies.
Suddenly the still mostly human stream of running figures parted ahead of Ryan and his friends, to flow around a single gigantic figure standing as immovable as Mother McComb’s throne rock.
“Not so fast, you cannie-lovers!” the sec boss boomed. “I’ve got you now!”
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “Can’t you give it up?”
“You and me, One-Eye!” the giant bellowed, beating his chest with fists that looked as large as Ryan’s head. “One-on-one. Mana y mana. Like men.”
“It’s mano a mano, dickhead,” Ryan said. He raised the SIG and fired twice.
With breathtaking speed Potar snatched the two random figures running closest to him. One was a coamer female, and the other was a beanpole man about Ryan’s own height. As if they were dolls, the sec boss clapped them together in front of his bulk to take the bullets instead of him.
“Blasters are for pussies!” he said, with a gust of laughter. “Bare hands, or I’ll crush you with these losers.”
“Fuck that.”
Ryan was carrying his Steyr slung muzzle-down for rapid access, the way he usually did when they were headed into known danger. Stuffing his SIG back in its holster beneath his left armpit, he reached back, grabbed the longblaster by its fore-end, whipped it up past his own waist, then let it go. Reaching back, his hand found the rear grip with practiced ease. He fired from the hip.
Against black-powder blasters, even double-potent ones, Potar would have been safe as houses behind his human shields, one limp, one still writhing with some vigor. And Ryan was not inclined to rely even on the renowned penetration of his 9 mm ball handblaster bullets.
But a sharp-nosed, 147-grain, M80, full-metal-jacket round, traveling at upwards of 2700 feet per second, blasted right through the torso of the motionless full-human beanpole without appreciably slowing down.
Big bully Potar Baggart didn’t understand about blow-through, but he learned as the bullet lanced right into his capacious belly and introduced him to a whole new world of pain.
He groaned and bent over, but he stayed on his feet and kept the bodies he held in his massive fists up, still shielding him. To the extent they did.
Going against an entire lifetime of training and experience, Ryan let the longblaster fall to hang by its sling without immediately jacking a fresh cartridge into the chamber from its 10-round detachable box magazine. He could not remember a time when he had done that.
But there was no way even he could throw the bolt one-handed now, not without stopping, and he was severely disinclined to so much as break stride. He couldn’t currently feel a cannie actually breathing down his neck, and he sure as glowing rad death didn’t want to.
Instead he yanked out the SIG and stuck it out ahead of him. He aimed to try to race past the wounded but still-full-of-fight man-mountain and leave him in his dust. If not, he was willing to take any shot he could get.
He could see flashes of the man’s enormous face, red-flushed and sweat-sheened in the compound firelight, grinning at him past his victims. But the big man was smarter than Ryan reckoned as well as faster. He kept weaving them before him, spoiling any shot Ryan could hope to take, in no pattern the one-eyed man could figure out in the handful of heartbeats remaining.
The big man was about to toss one or both bodies at him. Ryan planned to dive left and hopefully clear. If one of them took him down, he was dead meat. He’d try to get a shoulder down, roll and come up blasting. Or die trying.
White hair flying behind it like a cavalry pennon, a short, slight figure raced by him at inhuman-seeming speed. But instead of showing nothing but snow-white coamer hide, it was sheathed from the neck down in dark.
Jak Lauren leaped like a monkey, grabbing hold of each of Potar’s captive shields. As fast as he was, the giant had no time to react as Jak brought up his sneaker-clad feet, then sprang upward over Potar’s sloping left shoulder. As he did, Ryan saw the glimmer of one of his favored balisong knives whip open in his left hand. It darted down and was planted at a forty-five-degree angle in Potar’s swollen trapezius muscle. Using that as an anchor, Jak whipped his body around somehow to land astride of his adversary’s shoulders.
The sec boss dropped his captives to grab frantically at the white-faced attacker on his back. Jak’s other butterfly knife whirled open in his right palm. He yanked its mate free, then he plunged both with points toward each other into the sides of Potar’s massive neck, just in front of his neck bones.
Then the lithe albino pushed them both forward, instantly severing both carotid arteries and both jugular veins. Black fans of blood shot up like wings to either side of the sec boss’s pain- and rage-distorted face.
His knees gave way beneath h
im. Plucking his knives free, Jak threw himself into a perfect backward somersault off his victim.
The flab covering the massive muscles of Potar Baggart’s chest and belly shook like a bowlful of jelly as Ryan and all his friends fired on him. It was a waste of ammo; the giant’s brain, instantly starved of oxygen, had already closed up shop for good. But none of them felt like taking anything for granted.
As Potar hit the ground like a falling skyscraper, the companions split to either side to race around him.
“Trouble!” Ryan heard Ricky call.
Having sheathed his panga to ram a new mag into his SIG, Ryan let himself risk an over-the-shoulder look. Scores of bodies wrestled in the hellish firelight. Others, many others, lay sprawled, some motionless, some not. Demonic white figures squatted over many of them, tearing at them with gore-dripping muzzles.
A dozen or more of the cannies, though, still ran in hot pursuit of the companions. They were no more than twenty yards back and closing fast on Ryan’s exhausted band.
J.B. whipped smartly around. “Black dust, don’t you know when you’re beat?” he asked in an almost conversational tone.
He whipped the Uzi up to his waist and raked a sustained burst back and forth across the charging pack. Coamers shrieked and fell, spurting blood.
Half of them went down, their bones and internal organs ripped by his merciless slugs. The survivors, at long last, turned their naked backs to their prey and fled back the way they had come.
There was a lot more meat that way, anyway, and much of it was free for the taking.
Wearily, the companions dragged themselves in among the now unoccupied tents along the southeast side of the campground’s perimeter. As they did, Ryan realized Conn was still on his platform, and still hollering. And this time, his wails of rage were directed at them.
“Cawdor!” he heard him screech. “You cannot escape our justice! I will follow you wherever you go, to the ends of the Earth and beyond. And then I— Wait! Stop! What are you doin’? Get away from me! You can’t do this—this is my destin-EEEEEEEEEE!”
Panting hard, Ryan turned and looked. Conn’s sec men were all buried beneath a pyramid of coamers—the ones who hadn’t gotten smart and run away, anyway. As Ryan watched, the cannies swarmed over Conn. The former gaudy owner had been so wound up he never even took the megaphone away from his face when he abruptly found himself confronted on his own bully pulpit by a pack of rabid, dog-faced horrors.
The horn went cartwheeling away from a wildly flailing hand. But Mathus Conn didn’t need it anymore.
His screams as those inhumanly long muzzles ripped mouthfuls out of his face and flesh could likely be heard clear to Sinkhole, Ryan reckoned.
“Your destiny, huh?” Ryan said grimly. “Truest thing you said all day.”
He turned to his friends, all of whom were drinking air in the biggest gulps they could. Mildred and Ricky were sitting on the ground. He saw no reason to do anything other than let them—for a moment.
“Anybody see any reason why we should stick around this hellhole any longer?” he asked.
A ragged, weary, but fervent chorus of “noes” answered him.
Krysty stepped up to him. She raised her face and planted a kiss on his cheek, despite the stubble, and the coating of sweat, blood, cannie spittle and dirt that covered it.
“No reason at all, lover,” she said. “Let’s leave this place before the cannies figure out there’s more fresh meat.”
After a quick backward glance, they started to jog to the west.
* * * * *
ISBN: 978-1-474-02899-8
FORBIDDEN TRESPASS
© 2015 Worldwide Library
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Victor Milan for his contribution to this work.
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Harlequin (UK) Limited
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ®are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
