by James Axler
Having regained his senses, the battered miner, blood sheeting off his chin, lunged up at his tormentor, trying to knock the pot out of his hand.
Barbwire held it out of reach above his head and snap-kicked the smaller man in the chest. It wasn’t a full power blow, but it sent the poor bundle of bones hurtling backward, crashing onto his butt and skidding across the slick ground.
“Mero, let’s put an end to this,” Auriel said into her com link mike.
“I’m on it, Commander,” was the reply.
As Auriel and her second in command broke ranks, Barbwire plunged his fingers into the broth, fishing out a few choice chunks, which he popped into his mouth. He tried to pass the pot to the pecking order of lackeys waiting their turns, but they weren’t looking at him. They were staring at the two she-hes charging the nukeglass toward them. Turning on their heels, these lesser villains bolted for the mine shafts.
It was already too late for them to get away. Armed with a tribarrel, Mero had cut off their retreat.
There was nowhere else to run.
The five slaves dropped to knees on the glass, their palms on top of their heads, their eyes lowered in submission.
Auriel slowed to a walk as she closed distance on the pack leader. The slaves had learned that their captors would tolerate a range of antisocial behaviors, and that punishments, when they came, usually fell well short of summary execution. This was the gray zone in which predators operated. But every so often an example had to be made, to underscore the boundary and the consequences of crossing it.
Shoulder-slinging her laser rifle, Auriel keyed her battlesuit’s external speaker. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she told him.
The big man said nothing, his eyes narrowed, darting left and right, looking for a way out.
It was laughable.
Some humans couldn’t help themselves, it seemed. Even when they knew a course of action would end badly. Barbwire had soiled himself in front of the entire camp, begging to be made an object lesson to the others.
Auriel glanced at the visor’s right-hand corner, where battlesuit remote sensors displayed her adversary’s heart rate and muscle tension values.
This one was going to put up a fight.
Sure enough, he suddenly lunged for his pickax. As he charged at her, he swung the weapon up and brought it down in a tight arc that put every ounce of his body weight behind it.
Auriel let him come, her boots at shoulder width, her arms at her sides, her hands unclenched. At the very last second, as the ax screamed down, she dodged the blow, twisting in a blur to her left.
The ax’s arc continued, the point plowed deep into the glass, sending up a puff of sparkling dust and flying shards. Barbwire let out a grunt as the impact’s shock wave rippled up his arms.
Behind them, the rest of the slaves whooped and hollered. It was unclear who or what they were cheering for. The slave taking on the hated master? Or the criminal who plagued them finally facing justice? Maybe they just wanted to see someone’s—anyone’s—blood spilled.
Barbwire wrenched the pick from the glass and spun to face her. Again he charged, again he worked up maximum momentum, and brought the weapon down two-handed with all his weight behind it.
Auriel didn’t move this time. She just stood there, her arms crossed, watching as the point of the ax descended upon her.
The pack leader aimed for the center of her faceplate. His logic was obvious: if he could just split it, he could drive the ax clear through her skull.
It was another futile hope, born of ignorance and desperation.
The point of the pick got to within a foot of its intended target. There it made contact with the battlesuit’s EM shield. The weapon’s course instantly reversed—like a length of metal pipe shoved into a madly spinning flywheel.
As the ax catapulted backward out of Barbwire’s grasp, cartwheeling high in the air, he was thrown off balance, and ended up flat on his butt on the ground, his face twisted in pain.
“Get rid of that nukin’ armor, you cockroach coward,” he gritted through clenched teeth, his numbed arms held out in front of him. “And I’ll pull your stuffing out.”
A challenge to her sense of honor? Auriel thought. From this creature?
As delightful as the prospect of a barehanded fight was, she couldn’t oblige him. She had to stay in the battlesuit; it was integral to Dr. Huth’s quarantine regimen. Instead, she disabled the armor’s EM shield. It wouldn’t make the fight more fair—nothing could do that—but it allowed her to get up close and personal.
To drive home the lesson.
“I’ve lowered my shield,” she said, waving for him to stand up. “Come on, get up. Let’s see what you can do.”
Barbwire scrambled to his feet. Quickly closing the distance between them, he tried to grapple with her. For an instant, his hands slid over the black, layered plates, his fingers seeking a hard edge, something to grip. He was four inches taller than she was, and outweighed her by fifty pounds, but her reaction time was exponentially faster. She toyed with him, blocking his clumsy hands, easily stepping out of his reach.
The other slaves started beating their empty pots and pans on the ground and cheering even more wildly.
Barbwire threw an overhand right at her head, which she blocked with an armored forearm. Instead of counterpunching, she circled around his strong side. He caught her with a roundhouse left, his fist banging against the battle helmet.
It didn’t faze her; she was moving away from the blow when it landed.
The big man rubbed his skinned knuckles. Realizing that he couldn’t beat her in a punch-out, he jumped forward, wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her into the air.
She let him do it, let him try to crush her with a bear hug, knowing the armor plates would only compress so far. They were almost nose-to-nose, his hot breath fogging the outside of her visor, when Auriel cocked back her right arm and drove a gauntleted index finger into his ear hole to the second joint.
In, and then out.
Barbwire shrieked and let go of her, clutching his ear, stamping his feet, thick blood drooling between his fingers.
When she rushed him, he tried a halfhearted front kick. Auriel grabbed his leg behind the knee and held it up, making him hop around on one foot, turning him, keeping him off balance so he couldn’t throw a full power punch.
In a panic, Barbwire head-butted her helmet.
Not a good idea.
It was like head-butting a boulder. Blood poured from a deep gash in his forehead, striping his face.
Auriel dropped to a crouch and executed a perfect leg sweep that sent him crashing onto his back. Straddling his torso, she pounded him with a rain of straight, short punches to the face, bloodying his nose and mouth, breaking his front teeth, sealing shut his eyes and bouncing the back of his head against the nukeglass.
When Barbwire went limp beneath her, she straightened.
The unthinkable was hard to come by in these parts, as awful death was part of daily life, hiding around every twist in the road. It took some creativity, inspiration even, to come up with something that would stick in a Deathlander’s mind.
Auriel rounded the big man’s body, standing over the head.
The crowd begged and chanted for her to finish it.
“Those who don’t work won’t be fed,” she shouted back at them, “and they won’t be allowed to prey on those who do. Those are the rules here. And this is the punishment for disobeying them.”
She put the toes of her armored boots on Barbwire’s shoulders, pinning his back to the ground, then reached under his chin with both gauntleted hands. Gripping his jaw, using the powerful muscles of her legs and back, she pulled upward.
Sudden, unimaginable pain brought Barbwire back to consciousness, squealing and thrashing his arms and legs.
Auriel gave his chin a hard wrench to the right, cleanly snapping his neck. His legs no longer mule-kicked, they tremble-danced. Still holding on to hi
s chin, she straightened. Without the spinal column to anchor it in place, the soft tissue of the neck stretched and stretched, then the skin split, the muscle and tendon tore.
With a wet pop, the head came away in her hands. The torso’s ragged neck stump spurted blood two feet in the air; it splattered onto her black boot tops.
The slaves’ cheers abruptly stopped. It became deathly still at Ground Zero; there was no sound but the hissing of the cookfire burners.
Point made.
Letting the head roll off her gloved palms, Auriel reared back her foot and drop-kicked it in a high arc, gore pinwheeling off the tips of the hair. It landed with an audible splat beside the caldrons.
She reached down and gripped the corpse by the boot heels. As she started to drag it over to the caldrons, trailing a wide smear of blood across the nukeglass, she glanced over her shoulder. The other coldhearts no longer waited on their knees for punishment. They were scattering, trying to disappear back into the feeding line, and a black form was facedown on the glass, laying on top of a laser rifle.
Auriel opened the com link and shouted, “Mero!”
No response.
Auriel dropped the dead man’s legs and hurried over to her second in command. She found Mero twitching, head to foot. Turning her onto her back, Auriel stared at her comrade’s face through the helmet visor. Mero’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets so that only the whites showed. Foam billowed from the corners of her mouth and her jaws snapped together, like a rabid dog.
A chill ran down Auriel’s spine as she keyed the com link. “Dr. Huth! Get over here with a scanner, on the double!”
Hampered by his battlesuit, the whitecoat crossed the nukeglass in a shambling, awkward gait. He knelt beside Mero, waved the compact electronic device over her torso, then sat back on his haunches, staring fixedly at the display.
“What is it?” Auriel demanded of him. “What is it?”
He said nothing.
Auriel snatched the scanner out of his hand. The LCD screen showed a jumbled mass of lime-green coils between muscle wall and stomach. At first she thought she was looking at Mero’s intestines.
Then the coils started to move.
Chapter Ten
Ryan stood braced in the bed of an accelerating stake truck, squinting through the clouds of dust, a rag mask tied over his nose and mouth. The lavender light of evening spread across a landscape that grew more barren, more devastated, with every bend in the road. Poisoned predark villes and ruined townlets lined this section of the interstate highway, a gridwork of lengthening shadows, the concrete-lined pits and slabs that had once supported sprawling suburbs. Backdropped by low brown hills, smothered in drifts of windblown sand and soil, the dismal flatland was broken only by the occasional, half-standing brick chimney and barely upright light pole.
A landscape hammered into rubble.
A landscape scoured clean of the trappings of life.
It was impossible for Ryan to fully visualize the density and vitality of the communities lost on nukeday. In Deathlands, at least, he’d never seen that many people in one place at one time. On the fateful day more than a century ago, when the MIRV warhead had detonated over the high desert city, it had released a flash of light brighter than a thousand suns and a mile-high blast wave of incendiary heat and incandescent dust. A shock wave rippled through the earth at the speed of sound, jetting out in all directions from the explosion’s central point, fracturing roads, deconstructing tall buildings, setting the very air on fire.
Ryan had seen pictures of suburbs like these in crumbling predark magazines. As the wag jounced over splits in the roadway, he imagined what it had to have been like to look up at the retina-fogging flash from fifty miles distant, from a momentary point of safety, from a neatly kept backyard lawn surrounded by a wooden privacy fence, and in the split second before death roared down, to realize that everything that ever was—promises unfulfilled, and promises as yet undreamed of—was over and done with.
He and his companions, all except for Jak, either sat or stood in the bed of the heavily loaded wag. For twelve straight hours they had been breathing and eating the road dirt raised by ghost warriors on horseback, by the dog carts and by the other two wags ahead of them in the convoy.
There weren’t enough horses for everyone to ride. Walking would have been preferable to the continual, gut-churning motion, to the wicked jolts to the kidneys as the wag traversed washboards, lumbered over rills and gullies, but on foot they couldn’t have kept up the grueling pace.
The companions all had their weapons back, just as Burning Man had promised. Even J.B.’s hat had been returned to him.
The army in which they had enlisted, the army that bounced and zigzagged its way inexorably southward, consisted of fewer than one hundred fighters, most of them either riding horses or driving dog carts. They were going up against an opponent perhaps a tenth that number, but armed with vastly superior technology that could annihilate them all in the blink of an eye. And it looked very much like the chosen battlefield was going to be the dead zone of all dead zones, Slake City’s Ground Zero.
Though Ryan radiated confidence when he spoke to the others about a repeat of their previous, successful campaign versus the she-hes, in his gut he knew the companions had only beaten them back because luck had been on their side. At any number of critical turning points, the battle could well have, perhaps should have, gone the other way. He remembered being trapped deep in the nuke mines, cutting off the heads of wave after wave of attacking stickies with a makeshift broad sword, and piling the bloody trophies in an ore cart like pumpkins. His individual act of fury and defiance had turned the tide and rallied the otherwise doomed miners to revolt against their cockroach masters. After that, the flow of combat was one-way: reversal after reversal for the invaders, and with the reversals came a sense of escalating rout.
The sense that Ryan had now, the feeling he would never admit to any of his crew, was of ominous foreboding. Being surrounded by Burning Man’s ragtag army gave him no comfort. If not for the trio of wags and the blasters the warriors carried, this could have been the eve of battle four hundred years ago, a campaign ancient even in Doc Tanner’s time. And they were going up against an enemy able to jump realities and whose armor deflected bullets, knives and missiles of all sorts.
But there was no turning back, now.
Destiny wouldn’t allow it.
At the head of the line, Burning Man drove the lead wag, which was another battered, desert camouflage-painted, stake truck. It was bracketed by a mass of white-faced men on horseback and followed by a half-dozen four-wheeled carts, each drawn by harnessed and muzzled war dogs. Seated on the first wag’s stacked cargo, intermittently visible through the swirls of dust, was Big Mike. Burning Man had tied him by the neck to the stake wall. Ryan was grateful that Big Mike wasn’t riding in their wag. At least they didn’t have to listen to him whine.
The warriors had started out from Rupertville with enough food and fuel to last a week, enough for a round trip to Ground Zero. En route, they had stopped twice to stash fuel drums, water and food in caches off the highway to lighten their load and increase their speed. Even load-lightened, the fastest the convoy could go on the interstate was less than 25 miles per hour. And they managed that only in short stretches of fifty to a hundred yards because the roadway was in such bad shape.
Through the dust, Ryan saw a pair of riders sweep over a low rise on the left. Angling in on the convoy at a full gallop, they merged alongside the lead wag. Besup gestured to Burning Man from horseback. Galloping beside him, Jak straddled a pinto bareback, his long white hair flying out behind his head. They were advance scouts, riding ahead of the convoy, returning to report washouts of pavement, cave-ins, dropped highway overpasses and the safest alternate routes. Slake City was still too far away for them to worry about making contact with the enemy. Because of the condition of the predark road, and the fact that they had to keep detouring off it, they made halt
ing progress. There was nothing static in the path south. The forces of nature constantly recast it—dirt lane detours crosscut or washed away entirely by flash floods.
The warriors, Burning Man included, had adopted Jak as one of their own after the first night’s encampment. Ryan knew in part it had to do with their fascination over the color of his skin—or lack of same—but the sudden kinship wasn’t just because of Jak’s natural “white face.” After they had set up camp that evening, the warriors not on sentry duty amused themselves with a knife-throwing contest. Besup beat all comers by repeatedly placing his fixed-blade pig-sticker in the wooden target’s center ring from a distance of twenty paces. He was a knife-throwing machine. With his fellow fighters cheering the performance, Besup had reached out to pry his winning throw out of the ten-ring.
From the edge of the leaping firelight, something whistled through the air too fast to follow. Flying across the camp, its impact was a muffled thump. Besup froze, crouched in front of the target, his fingers gripping his knife handle. The top of his outstretched sleeve seemed to be attached to the wood. He tried to free it and couldn’t without lifting the target off the ground. He had to release his knife and lever loose the deeply buried staple. Then he held it up to the light for all to see.
A palm-sized, leaf-bladed throwing knife, its keen edge glinting.
Standing at twice the distance to the target, on the far side of the campfire, his ruby red eyes glittering fiercely, Jak held up a matching blade. He didn’t say a word.
He didn’t have to.
The stoic Besup let out an explosive bellow of laughter, then shouted something unintelligible to the others, who found it funny, too. The entire clan encircled Jak, grinning, backslapping their congratulations. Even Burning Man joined in, and after the ruckus died down, he drew the albino teen aside for a private chat.
