by James Axler
Doc groaned from the effort, his long legs driving, boot soles sliding under him. He yanked on the rope with one hand and with the other clutched his ebony walking stick.
Autofire clattered briefly from below, but no bullets spanged into the rock. The shooting was aimed elsewhere. They kept climbing, rounding the switchbacks, moving ever upward.
Two hundred feet above the beach, Kirby glanced over the sheer edge and saw a pair of enforcers running full-tilt from the pier.
“They’re on to us!” Kirby shouted.
A second after he spoke, a rain of bullets clipped the rock face above them, shattering, sparking and puffing granite dust.
“Shit! Shit!” Bell cried, still going for broke. With no cover and no place to hide, they had no choice.
After a pause, more autofire hammered the cliff face, pelting them with rock shards. The uniforms were aiming at the path above them, trying to turn them back or make them stop.
“We’ve got to get higher,” Kirby gasped. “Higher!”
At a certain point the elevation would start to work in their favor. Unless the shooters jumped into boats and rowed offshore, they could only back up as far as the end of the short pier; after that they would lose their shot angle. The outer edge of the path would shield their targets from direct fire.
Bullets were not the only problem, though.
From the path below came the sound of rhythmic baritone grunting and heavy, scrambling feet.
The rope jerked back hard through Kirby’s hand, snapping taut against the stanchion rings. The trainers were already catching up and the cloud bank that concealed the mountaintop was still far above them.
“Gotta stop them!” the mathematician cried. “Keep going! Keep going!” Kneeling at the point of a switchback, he flipped the M-16’s fire select to full-auto. He didn’t have to wait long.
The first of the two trainers rampaged up the grade toward him, pulling on the rope with both hands. Kirby put the sights on center chest and let it rip. The autorifle’s butt surged against his shoulder as he poured half a mag of tumblers into his target.
Every bullet hit the ten-ring but the mutie didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down.
Doc stepped behind Kirby, put a steadying hand on his shoulder, then cut loose with the LeMat’s blue whistler barrel, aiming for the head. A split second before he pulled the trigger, the creature turned away, averting and thus protecting its eyes. The heavy pistol boomed and flashed, loosing its load of hot metal scrap. The trainer lunged through the plume of black-powder smoke, one side of its face torn to shreds, the skin scraped off to the bone.
“Sweet Jesus!” Kirby moaned, then he shoved Doc ahead of him, up the grade.
They ran past Bell who had already unsheathed his blade and stood with one hand gripping the rope.
The rail jerked taut, singing from the strain as six hundred pounds pulled on it.
“Go on! Do it!” the black man cried. “Do it!”
When the rope snapped tight again, Bell struck and the heavy blade parted it cleanly, in a single slash. With a hiss, the severed rail shot back through the stanchion rings and vanished around the turn below. They heard the sound of massive bodies sliding, scrabbling. Then silence.
There was no time to make sure what had happened. At once the uniforms opened fire again, and a delaying action was no longer on their agenda. They were shooting to kill this time. With slugs sparking all around them, the trio struggled upward, through the maelstrom. Just when doom seemed inevitable, the howl of autofire dwindled to a few intermittent pot shots. Glancing over the side of the cliff, they could see the uniforms retreating on a dead run to the pier to try to flatten out their sight angle.
It was all the break Kirby, Bell and Doc needed.
Pushing even harder, they drove themselves up the slick grade, around the last two switchbacks and into the impenetrable cloud bank. The swirling gray mist was ice cold and there was so much water vapor it was difficult to breathe. It was so dark they couldn’t see four feet in front of their faces.
Chapter Sixteen
Ryan Cawdor leaned back against a beach log, his arms crossed, the heavy barrel of the scoped Steyr resting in the notch of a stripped branch within inches of his hand. He was relieved to see that Doc seemed to have recovered his senses. He was no longer babbling to himself or making emphatic gestures in the air. The black and white mutie hunters were hovering around him in a way that did concern him, though. They had definitely taken a keen interest in the old man, for unknown reasons.
As he watched the hunters speaking earnestly to Doc, Ryan caught a rush of movement out of the corner of his eye. Working as a strike team, the trainers and uniforms confronted and isolated a small group of recruits standing nearer to the cliff.
The uniforms demanded the men give up their blasters.
An immediate shouting match ensued.
From what Ryan gathered, it was the beginning of a blaster by blaster confiscation campaign. Every recruit on the beach was to be disarmed before the first phase of training started. The initial bunch of surrenderees had no choice in the matter; the uniforms had the drop on them. They handed over their weapons while glaring into the flash-hiders of a dozen shouldered assault rifles.
Everyone else in the camp was forewarned by this, and blasters came out all around.
Ryan stood, SIG in fist, with the others.
The odds were tilted in the favor of the recruits, who numbered about seventy in all, versus thirty uniforms and now eight trainers—a couple more of the sweating muties had popped out of the woodwork when their backs were turned.
With their blasters at the ready, the recruits grimly faced down the uniforms and the trainers. They weren’t going to give up their weapons without a fight.
The uniform captain stepped forward and assured everyone the confiscation was only temporary. That as soon as the hand-to-hand training was completed, they could have their blasters back. He said everyone could keep their blades.
Of course he didn’t make a single sale.
The standoff continued.
“Everybody has to play by the rules here,” the officer told the crowd. “And the rules say the blasters stay behind this afternoon.”
“Nobody takes my piece,” crowed a grizzled ex-mercie. His long, tattered black overcoat flapping around his shins, he waved a worn Soviet TT33 Tokarev in the air like it was Excalibur.
It wasn’t a gun worth dying for in Ryan’s opinion. The Soviet ammo was nuking hard to find in Deathlands. And even if the blaster had been converted to the widely available 9 mm, it still had clumsy feel in the hand, not to mention the problem of the barrel bushing wearing out.
“You want to eat again?” the captain demanded of the mercie. “Or do you want to starve?”
The grizzled man never got a chance to answer.
Ryan missed the officer’s hand signal, but there had to have been one because five of the uniforms opened fire simultaneously. The full-auto impacts lifted the guy off his feet and sat him down five feet away, his chest so riddled with holes it looked like a cheese grater. The uniforms didn’t stop there. This was supposed to be an object lesson. They kept on firing, hosing down the men who’d been unlucky enough to be standing close. Three other recruits got caught in the ravening onslaught. Chopped down before they could return fire, they followed the grizzled guy on the last train west.
The trainers surged forward and seemingly without effort, batted random ex-sec men and mercies off their feet. The muties loomed over their fallen victims, amber talons exposed, ready for gutting. But they stopped without drawing blood.
Because the attacks were so tightly focused on a few and over so quickly, the recruits didn’t respond with answering fire. Instead, most moved to whatever cover they could find.
Ryan had his SIG pointed at the captain’s head as the man spoke again.
“Get this straight,” he shouted. “Neither you nor your blasters are going anywhere. You’re stuck on this pile of r
ock in the middle of hell. If you want to get off, if you want to get back to the world still breathing, you’ve got to play by the rules.”
Although the recruits grumbled and cursed, there was no denying what he said made sense. Taking over the camp, even if they could do it, wasn’t the answer. Most would never survive the battle, let alone make it off the island. If the ship’s crew died in the fight, they’d be stuck here without food.
It wasn’t trust in the wisdom and honor of the uniform captain that made the recruits relent and start giving up their precious blasters. It was submission to circumstance, a situation temporarily out of their control. Things could always change.
Intent on keeping his blasters as long as possible, Ryan slung the Steyr and slipped to the back of the pack, near the waterline. The other companions did the same. J.B. looked over at him and shook his head, the barrel of his M-4000 shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. It was a bad scene. Risk piled on risk.
Like it or not, they couldn’t make their move—yet. A major gunbattle would spook Magus for sure. They had to get close, inside his guard, before they showed their cards.
It was a typical Magus production. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. And by then it was too late to retreat. As Ryan watched the uniforms take the recruits’ weapons, his scalp began to crawl and prickle. He sensed an impending, out-of-control crescendo. He felt the companions’ vulnerability and his own.
The trap’s jaws were already snapping shut.
Like a wet dog, he shook off the doubt and the nameless, faceless dread. Seize the small moment and forget everything else—that was the one sure path to victory. The companions were as skilled with edged weapons as they were with blasters. Losing their blasters was a setback, but not a fatal one.
At blasterpoint, the recruits lined up and yielded their sidearms to a couple of uniforms who carried them to one of the barracks’ rooms. Another pair of uniforms frisked their clothes to make sure they weren’t hiding anything. Disarmament was moving right along when a sudden shout brought things to a halt.
As Ryan turned toward the noise, the uniforms sent a clattering volley of autofire at the cliff above. Sparks and puffs of dust erupted along the rope-railed path, thirty-five feet above the heads of three sprinting men. Ryan was shocked to see Doc among the deserters. He was running at top speed between the two mutie hunters, up the steep grade.
And it didn’t look like Doc was being kidnapped. He was moving under his own power. There wasn’t a blaster stuck in his back. It looked like he was ducking out, bailing on the companions, which was the last thing Ryan ever expected.
To Ryan’s left, Jak reacted instinctively. That the uniforms’ bullets were landing laughingly wide of the mark didn’t have time to penetrate his consciousness. All he knew was that his friend was in jeopardy. He swung up his .357 Magnum Colt Python, prepared to put an end to the uniforms’ turkey shoot, but was shoved from behind by a trainer before he could fire. The albino’s feet left the ground and he went flying headfirst into the barracks’ stone wall.
The uniforms abruptly stopped firing as two trainers started hauling themselves up the cliff path in pursuit of the deserters. The smoking muzzles of the assault rifles were aimed at Jak as he pushed up from his knees, blood smearing his teeth and chin.
Jak gave up his sidearm, butt first, but the look in his red eyes said murder.
The trainers could really move. Using both hands on the rope and driving with their massive legs, they rapidly closed on their quarry.
Realizing he was about to be overrun from behind, the black mutie hunter knelt and opened fire with his M-16. The range was no more than forty feet. He couldn’t have missed if he’d tried. Then Doc followed up with a blast from the LeMat’s scattergun barrel. The combined bullets and shrap had no effect. The trainers absorbed the punishment and kept on coming.
Doc and the black man turned and ran, rounding the uphill bend and slipping past the white mutie hunter who stood poised with knife in hand.
Ryan could see the way the rope jerked every time the trainers yanked on it. They were pulling with their full weight. It didn’t surprise him when the mutie hunter cut the rope. It was exactly what he would have done.
Still holding on to the slack and useless rope, the trainers lost their footing and fell backward, off the edge of the path. They tumbled down the cliff, like two very ugly, very large rag dolls. One trainer managed to grab the lip of the trail as he flew past. He clung to it with a taloned hand, swinging and kicking his legs, trying to get a grip on the rock with the other hand.
The recruits on the beach sent up a cheer as the other trainer cartwheeled to earth. It landed on its back on the rocks with an awful thud. Immediately, it began to stir its legs and arms which put an end to the celebration.
Cheers were replaced by gasps of astonishment and dismay. The straight drop had been almost two hundred feet. If trainers could survive that kind of fall, they were virtually unkillable.
Quivering from head to foot, blood pouring from its open maw, the trainer managed to get to its feet. It took one step then staggered and pitched forward onto its face, stone dead.
Ryan unslung the Steyr and flipped up the scope caps. As he shouldered the longblaster, he dropped the safety. Cheek pressed against stock’s rest, he acquired the target, then compensated for the up-angle bullet rise by holding a good foot and a half low.
From behind someone shouted at him to stop. Before anyone could intervene Ryan touched off a round. The rifle barked and bucked.
He already knew where the creature’s weak point wasn’t, so he hadn’t aimed for the head or chest.
Riding the recoil wave, Ryan reacquired sight picture in time to see the trainer’s lone supporting hand blur in a puff of red gore and gray rock dust.
Maybe he couldn’t chill it with a single bullet, but he could sure as hell make it let go.
Grip broken, the trainer dropped. It was a thirty-foot straight fall to next level of path. The creature landed with its feet half on, half off the trail. It flailed its arms, but it couldn’t keep its balance. The trainer fell over backward, falling down the cliff face. It landed square on its head, which promptly disappeared between its shoulderblades, skull and neck pounded into its torso by three hundred pounds of pile driver.
That one didn’t get up.
The uniforms immediately poured a torrent of lead on the escapees, trying to cut them down before they reached the cover of the cloud bank. Their firing angle was getting close to vertical; their targets barely visible along the edge of the path.
A hand gripped the Steyr’s barrel and jerked the weapon to the side. Ryan stared nose to nose with the uniform captain.
“I’ll take the longblaster,” the officer said.
“Sure you will,” Ryan said. “You probably want this one, too.”
The captain glanced down and saw the SIG’s muzzle aimed at his heart. Then he looked up at the one-eyed man’s fierce smile. Ryan had to give the guy credit, he hardly flinched.
As Ryan relinquished his blasters, the firing squad broke ranks and started running for the pier. They had lost their shooting angle and were trying to get it back before the AWOL recruits escaped into the clouds.
Meanwhile, another trainer had started up the treacherous cliff path. Without the rope to pull on, its progress was slow and intermittent. It slipped and scrambled on the slope of wet rock, falling to its knees, getting up, falling again.
After a couple of minutes of steady clatter, the autofire from the pier stopped. From the sour expressions on the uniforms’ faces, Tanner and the other two deserters had gotten away.
Ryan was relieved that Doc had made it. He had no idea what was going on in that scrambled brain, whether the old bastard had gone delusional as he had on other notable occasions, thinking he was back in Victorian times, addressing his peers in the Royal Academy of Science, or some such crap. It was also possible that with the help of the mutie hunters Doc had come up wit
h a plan to flush out and chill Magus.
Shit, anything was possible.
The uniforms started sweeping the beach, herding the recruits at blasterpoint back onto the pier and into eight waiting rowboats. The boats were crewed by the recruits and commanded by the trainers. As Ryan stepped into his boat, he looked at the faces of the other conscripted rowers. Haggard, dirty, exhausted. But above all, afraid. Every step they had taken since leaving Morro Bay was a step farther from safety, and deeper into a bottomless pit. Only the islanders held their heads high. There was no fear in their eyes, just cold seething anger.
Mildred, Krysty and J.B. weren’t afraid, either. But they were disconcerted and even hurt by Doc’s abandoning them, as he was. As Ryan took a seat beside Jak on the thwart, he could see that the albino was troubled over the loss, too.
The trainer stamped his foot on the gunwhale and made a motion with both arms. Universal sign language: get rowing.
As they pulled away from the pier, uniforms in four other boats tagged alongside, keeping guard.
“Doc gone,” Jak said in a hushed tone. His lip was split and swollen from the slamming he’d taken. “Two mutie hunters followed from Vegas pie shop to coast.”
Ryan gave him a hard look. “But that means—”
Jak didn’t let him finish. “Yeah, means used same gateway we did. Been after Doc long time.”
“You’re right. I saw they way they were hanging around him. Doc’s been a popular guy lately. Question is, what do these guys want?”
“And why he go along?”
The two men rowed in silence for a while, falling into the rhythm of the work, watching the bleak landscape glide past as they angled toward the cove’s eastern point.
“Doc no coward,” Jak said at last. A statement of hard fact.
“I know that,” Ryan said. “We all know that. He’s proved it to us over and over again. He had to have had a good reason for taking off that way.”
“Mutie hunters tricked him?”
“Maybe. He was acting funny after we got off the ship.”
