Bloodfire

by James Axler

  The woman nodded urgently, and splayed both hands twice.

  That many were approaching? Although, the man could see nothing, the doomie was rarely wrong on such matters. She only got rare glimpses of the future, but could smell an enemy over the horizon.

  Going to the rear doors, Gaza accepted an AK-47 assault rifle from Kathleen, who had another in her hand and a LAW slung across her back. At the front of the wag, Della was starting to turn over the big diesels, while Shala was checking the huge steel box full of linked ammo for the 25 mm cannon. The former member of the Core was wearing norm clothing now, and although the girl seemed frightened by machines of any kind, she was much more terrified of Gaza and his horrible wives and would do anything she was told, just not willingly. Not yet, anyway.

  Just then the sound of engines came on the wind, and was gone, only to return again stronger and louder. Machines of some sort. Could be strip-downs, cars reduced to bare frames to max their fuel, a favorite of the coldhearts who raided the villes beyond the desert. Grimly, Gaza worked the arming bolt on the rapid-fire. These sounded more like motorcycles. As always, the baron went with his gut feeling on such matters. Better to prepare for the worst than to have it happen to you.

  “Bikes, coming our way!” the baron shouted, grabbing a few grens from the wall bins and dropping them into the pockets of his new tan jacket. “Let’s close her tight!”

  The diesel roared into life as the man headed for the front of the wag, Kathleen closing and locking the heavy rear doors. The baron knew the riders might only be the Blue Devils, not exactly allies, but mercies who ran a stretch of villes and brothels to the west of the Great Salt. Hard boys with a taste for pain, the group was tough and fast, with a secret source of shine to fuel their bikes and an unhealthy appetite for long-pig. These were people Gaza could understand, and he wanted them as his new sec men. The first recruits for his conquering army.

  Taking over the controls, Gaza moved the APC away from the cliff where the ground was weak and a single gren could send them hurtling over the side. Better to play it safe.

  Charging out of the thick smoke blowing across the desert, the six bikes came into view, leaving eddies swirling in the dark fumes behind. At the sight of the APC, the riders’ faces became shocked, and they all drew blasters, boxy rapid-fires, and one guy on front hauling out a sawed-off double-barrel.

  There were no decorations of any kind on the two-wheelers, no human skulls, no flaps of scalped enemies, no necklaces of teeth. That was suspicious enough, but their clothing was in good shape, and they had extra ammo in the loops of their gun belts. Mebbe they jacked the bikes and blasters from the Devils, but nobody had clothing like that except for barons and that blond bitch. Baron Gaza had no fragging idea who these assholes were, but it sure as shit wasn’t the Blue Devils.

  “Outriders!” the baron cursed, in sudden understanding. “They’re fucking sec men for the Trader! Take ’em down!”

  As his wives started firing through the blasterports, the bikers gunned their engines and separated quickly, only taking a few wild shots at the APC in passing. But as they converged behind the LAV 25, the .50-cal in the turret exploded into action, the heavy rounds ripping through the riders and machines, throwing sparks and blood to the desert sands.

  The two flank men dropped, their bikes toppling over to pin them helpless on the sand. Then another motorcycle detonated as its fuel tank was ruptured, the fireball engulfing two other riders. The screaming human torches continued riding their bikes blindly over the cliff and out of sight.

  Revving the engine, Gaza started for the others when something hard bounced on top of the APC and then hit the ground, exploding with deafening force and throwing a hellstorm of sand and shrapnel against the armored side. The shrapnel from the antipers gren sounded like hard-driven hail for a long moment, and then was gone.

  “Missed! That all you got?” Gaza sneered, throwing the transmission into high gear. “Aim for the bikes! I want one of those bastards for questioning!”

  Sitting alongside the man, Kathleen nodded and started to fire short bursts from her new AK-47 out the blasterports.

  More weapons boomed outside, closely followed by another gren bouncing loudly off the chassis. It landed in plain sight directly before the ob port of the driver, only inches from Gaza’s face. The man locked the left four tires and gave full power to the right four. The APC heaved into a sharp turn, the gren tumbling away to detonate a split second later somewhere to the side. With a pounding heart, Gaza slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and the mammoth machine lurched forward, catching a man pinned under his crippled bike, his screams cut off almost before they started.

  The fifty stuttered once more, and Kathleen let loose a long spray of lead when the roaring diesel of the APC suddenly cut off and interior light winked out.

  Out of power, the war wag rolled on for a few yards, the bikers hammering it from every side. Throwing a switch, Gaza flooded the interior with emergency lights, and there by the rear doors stood Shala, still holding a fistful of wires as she fumbled with the lock.

  “Fucking traitor!” Gaza screamed, clawing for his handcannon.

  But Kathleen moved first. Firing from the hip, the slim redhead put a full burst into the busty teenager, stitching her from knees to neck, just as the doors opened and she fell outside.

  “We got ’em!” a biker shouted, and started racing for the open rear of the APC, his sawed-off blowing thunder at the startled people trapped inside the dead war wag.

  IN WAR WAG ONE, the ceiling speakers crackled with static, then came back loud and clear.

  “We found Gaza!” Blackjack cried. “His wag is busted, and we’re going in…” His voice faded away.

  “Get him back,” Kate directed sternly, hunched forward in her chair.

  “Working on it, Chief,” Eric said, and suddenly the ceiling speakers rushed with a background hum of full power.

  “…trap,” Roberto coughed, his voice distorted from pain. “Repeat…fucking trap. He’s got a 25…blew us to hell. Forget us…Use the—” Static took away the transmission of the hand comm, and there was only crackling silence.

  “Shitfire, Gaza and Hawk have joined forces,” Kate raged, slamming a fist onto the arm of her chair. “That APC armed with a 25 mm cannon would chew us to pieces!”

  “Want to send a rescue team?” Jake asked, turning from the control board. “We can send Two east, and we go west, and catch him between us? Mebbe save our guys?”

  “They’re already chilled,” Jessica stated. “No sense wasting more lives to rescue deaders.”

  Frowning at that, Trader started to speak when the radio crackled with power, mumbled words barely discernible over the atmospheric hash. Then the distortion lifted and the signal came in loud and clear.

  “Hello, is anybody there?” A new voice chuckled over the ceiling speakers.

  The control room crew stopped moving, and Kate felt her skin crawl as memory flared at the sound of Baron Gaza’s voice coming over one of their own hand comms.

  “Your sec men are dead, bitch.” Gaza laughed, then there came the sound of a blaster shot. “Correction, now they’re all dead. Let’s end this today, slut. Right here and now. Come get me! I’m staying right fucking here!”

  There was a crackle of static that blocked the next words, and Kate made a slashing motion. The techs cut off the speakers, but the Trader waited until the indicator lights of the transponder had gone dark before she spoke.

  “Ready a missile!” she ordered. “If the radar can find that APC, then the missile should blow him to hell!”

  “On it,” Jake replied, both hands busy.

  A few seconds later there grew a loud rustling from above, and then thunder shook the war wag as flame raced by overhead, flying straight into the heart of the smoke above the preDark city. Long moments passed before the radar screen blossomed with a patch of white. Seconds later a low rumble rolled in from the distance.

  “Got him!” Jess
ica cried, raising a fist.

  “Well, we hit something at least,” Red Jack muttered, watching the screen clear back to normal. Then he frowned. “Black dust, the goddamn APC is still there!”

  Straining to see something through the rising smoke of the city, Jake scowled. “We missed?”

  “Must have hit a sand dune,” Kate gritted through clenched teeth. “The range is too far, especially with all this shit in the air blocking the warhead. We gotta get closer.”

  Then the radar screen gave a single loud beep, closely followed by another, and then a mounting series.

  “Holy shit!” Red Jack shouted from the increasing noise. “We got incoming!”

  Snapping her attention in that direction, Kate couldn’t believe her eyes and ears for a moment. Was their own fucking missile now coming back for them? No, wait, the heat sig was wrong—too small a wash and way too fast. Gaza had to have launched a missile of his own and it was coming faster than jackshit right down their fragging throats!

  “No time to dodge. Eric, fire all guns!’ she commanded. “Bring it down!”

  The lights dimmed as the comp drew unlimited power from the electrical system. Now the servomotors on the front .50-cals whined into life, the comp linking the weapons onto the signal of the radar screen and filling the air ahead of the rocket with hot lead.

  The noise was deafening. This was why they had a comp and Eric to nurse it. To give them an edge like this. But was it enough? Would it work? There had never been a chance to try their missile defense system before, and now it was all or nothing. Aces or diamonds, as the river folks liked to say. Life or death.

  Unexpectedly, the machine guns stopped firing, and in the ringing silence the beeping of the radar could still be heard, but different, slower and less urgent.

  “The missile is starting to descend,” Red Jack reported in disbelief. “Look at her drop! Nukeshit, the damn thing didn’t have the range to reach us this far away! Must have just been a LAW or HAFLA or mebbe something he cobbled together.”

  Just a man-portable rocket, not a real missile like War Wag One was packing, Kate realized, easing the tension in her shoulders. Shitfire, she couldn’t lock on to Gaza from this distance, and he couldn’t reach her. Stalemate.

  “We could use the L-Gun,” Jake stated.

  Kate cut him off. “Not with all this smoke,” she replied sternly. “That cuts its power by half. I wanna ace the bastard, not merely piss him off.

  “Okay, we have no choice,” she continued. “We go in as a group, the wags keep close and chill everything in sight. Send a runner to Two about not using the standard radio channels.”

  “Roger that, Chief!”

  “Switch to channel four and use the scramblers,” Eric said over the speakers. “No way the baron can hear us then.”

  She grunted at that. “Good. Red Jack, stay glued to that radar. You get a blip, don’t waste the breath to tell me. Give the info straight to Eric. The closer we get, the less time we have to shoot down one of his rockets.”

  “Then we give him missiles up the ass,” Jessica spit hatefully.

  “Damn straight,” Kate ordered. “We’re going in nose to nose with that bastard, and end this now!”

  The control room crew scrambled at their posts, sending messages throughout the wag over the phone lines while a runner hit the salty ground and started racing for the other wags.

  As the tandem engines started revving to full power, the lights of the war wag brightened to full strength and the rig began to roll along, staying a good distance from the crumbling cliff.

  “Here we come,” Kate muttered softly, looking across the swirling smoke at their invisible enemy.

  AS GAZA AND HIS WIVES fired another rocket into the billowing smoke clouds, left unnoticed on the ground Shala forced herself to painfully crawl for the safety of the nearby desert. She could see the wide open plains of salted ground only a dozen yards away. She was close, so very close….

  But every motion brought racking pain to her chest, the salt stinging like acid in her terrible wounds, and Shala could see the blood dripping off her arms as she tried to claw another foot forward, just one more inch toward the blessed sands of time.

  Rising from the shifting sands, the women of the Core started for their girl only to see her tremble and die, a single gory finger resting on the clean sand of the true desert outside the forbidden zone. A crimson trail of her blood marked a direct path backward to the machine and the top-walkers near the cliff. Raising a spear, a woman started forward but others held her back. There was no courage in dying. The spears and mindkillers of the men had sadly proved the superiority of the brutal norms.

  Gathering the still child in holy strips of tan cloth, the women brought the little one deep into the heart of the earth where she would lie forever safe and warm. And lying on the ground at that spot was a large leather bag removed from the ruins to the north, the outlanders’ water bag. But the polluted contents had been washed out and replaced with mineral water from a clean spring, then laced with enough undetectable jinkaja to cause instant madness, violent seizures and eventually agonizing death.

  It was a hard truth that the Core couldn’t match the mighty machines of the norms, but the desert always found a way to balance the scales of death.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A fiery dagger came out of the billowing plume of smoke and streaked past the APC to slam into the dune behind. The sandy hill heaved and blew apart, a roiling column of fire rising into the rumbling sky.

  Kneeling over the exposed engine, Gaza still flinched as the concussion rumbled over the dead war wag. Okay, that bitch had the range, but not him. Not him! Feverishly, the baron worked on the diesel, trying to remove pieces of the dead comm system to replace the missing parts and getting nowhere. Damn that girl! The APC engine had been too often repaired and was far too easy to wreck. He had been a fool trying to recruit the girl. But when those rags came off and he saw the pale trembling figure, reason and logic had fled as blind lust took over. Now he was paying the price.

  Standing in the open turret, Allison triggered a long sweeping blast from the 25 mm cannon, angling the barrel ever higher in wide circles. She knew the shells didn’t have the true range to reach the Trader, but she would gain valuable distance by shooting high and allowing the shells to arc downward. However, there was no way to see through the smoke of the city, and she was guiding her shots purely on the feelings she was receiving of approaching death. That had to be the Trader. Who else could possibly challenge her husband?

  Going to the rear doors, Kathleen extended a LAW tube and started to open the lock. Rushing close, Gaza slapped the weapon from her hand and it hit the metal floor in a clatter.

  “Stop that! Save ammo!” the baron ordered brusquely, towering over the startled woman. “They’re too far away for the rockets. Even the fifty can’t reach them.”

  Against the wall, Kathleen raised two fingers and quickly brought them toward each other.

  “Yes, I know that!” he raged, clenching both fists, the greasy wires from the engine still dangling impotently in his grip. “She’s coming fast, and with everything they got on the trips.”

  Reaching out to touch the tangle of wires, the woman asked her husband an urgent question with her eyes.

  “Useless!” Gaza cursed, throwing aside a fistful of assorted wires. “Without the proper parts, the same damn parts, we’re not going anywhere in this tin box.”

  Stomping her boot, Allison got everyone’s attention and pointed around at the LAV 25, then raised two fingers and pointed one into the fiery ruins.

  The landscape shook once more as Gaza raked stiff fingers through his hair, but was forced to agree. Their only hope of surviving was to be mobile, use the greater speed of the APC to outmaneuver the Trader’s lumbering war wags and strike from the dunes. A night creep in broad daylight. Hit and git. Which left him no options at all. He would have to go after the wiring in the second APC below the cliff.

&n
bsp; “Stop firing! Mebbe they’ll think we’ve moved!” Gaza ordered, going to a rack and grabbing an M-16 recovered from the convoy in the park. He worked the bolt, chambering a round, and slung the blaster over a shoulder. “Kathleen, you’re coming with me. Allison, prepare the land mines. Lay ’em out in a diamond pattern around the wag. That may buy us some time. Don’t bother to bury them. The damn things may not work, but at least it’ll scare the Trader into going slow if she sends more bikes.”

  Closing the top hatch of the war wag, the doomie waved both hands in a mime of driving a Harley to ask about the motorcycles outside.

  “After you’re done with the mines, try and find three that work,” he decided, stuffing his pockets with spare clips and grens. “If I can’t find what we need in the other APC, then we’ll ride out of here and mine the war wag to blow.”

  Ducking under the empty framework of a radar unit long gone, the baron grabbed some canvas gloves with a box and tossed Kathleen a pair.

  “Stay razor,” Gaza ordered, stuffing the other set of gloves into his gun belt. “Allison will be busy up here, so we’ll be on our own down there.”

  Sliding on the gloves, the slim redhead nodded, and collapsed the tube on the LAW rocket, making the sights retract. Expertly, she hung it across her back and grabbed an AK-47 from the ville armory. It was her preferred blaster and most of the ammo was hand loaded by her, or the other wives. She considered homemade ammo much more dependable than the preDark stuff, no matter how well it was preserved inside sealed plastic boxes.

  Stepping to the turret, Gaza grabbed his first wife by the scruff of the neck and pulled her close for a hard kiss.

  “Don’t you fucking die on me,” he muttered softly. “Worse happens, set the ammo bins of the wag to blow and slide down the cable to join us below. This is far from being over.”

  Brushing some loose hair from his face, Allison nodded at her husband, then turned to do the same to her sister standing by the aft doors. The women shared a moment of understanding, wishing the other goodbye. In spite of what their beloved husband said, the chances of this working were virtually zero, but they would stand by him to the end.