by James Axler
“The baron,” Glassman muttered, handing the smoking blaster to a waiting sailor. “Not anymore, dolt.”
The sailor immediately passed the captain a fresh blaster and began to reload the spent weapon.
Staring at the still body, Glassman was surprised to discover that he didn’t feel any shame or remorse. There was no shock or revulsion at the sight of chilling like before. In fact, deep inside, the former healer had to admit that he liked it, the taking of a life by force. He had used his healing skills to avoid fighting, to make himself far too valuable to ever risk in combat. And whichever side won would always need the services of a healer. He had tried to be beyond violence, not from the love of life, but from the fear of losing his own. Since childhood, Glassman had been terrified of being hurt. Just a sniveling coward, yellow to his bones. But on this mission for Kinnison, he found that new doors were opening inside his mind, and the rush of a chill was becoming a delight, only equaled by the release of sex. Something deep inside the man rose to fight off the growing madness, tried and failed. Glassman felt its departure and stood very alone in the middle of the ville, knowing that with this death he had crossed a line and would never be the same again.
“Colonel Mitchum!” he bellowed, still staring at the ground.
Hobbling through the crowd of busy slaves, the sec chief stopped a few yards away from the captain. He glanced once at his aced baron, then didn’t give the headless corpse another thought.
“Yes, sir,” Mitchum said, resting awkwardly on his crutch. The colonel was unshaved, having stood watch with his men through the long night. His clothes were filthy, a leg and an arm stiffly wrapped in bloody bandages. The gun belt from around his waist was slung across his chest in the manner of a bandolier, the holstered flintlock in easy reach of his good arm.
“Ryan gave you those wounds,” Glassman stated.
“Yes, sir, he did,” Mitchum growled, and felt the rush of hatred warm his face.
A slave cried out in triumph, lifting a hinge from the hot ashes and waving it about. An overseer snatched away the object and whipped the woman back to work.
“Find Ryan before he leaves this island and he is yours to punish for a day,” Glassman stated. “Execute the others on the spot. Understand me? No rape, no games, just put lead in their head.”
The words “or else” weren’t said aloud, but Mitchum clearly heard them spoken anyway.
“Then I’m baron here,” Mitchum said bluntly, standing a little taller.
There was a momentary pause. “If you find Ryan, yes. Until then, I’m in charge.”
“Deal. Give me his revolver,” Mitchum said eagerly, jerking his chin at the dead man.
Glassman gestured and one of the local sec men removed the gun belt from the body and gave it to Mitchum. The cracked leather was speckled with gray and red, but the colonel didn’t care. He was going to be the baron here! Mitchum draped the gun belt over his other shoulder, the two different blasters crisscrossing his chest.
“They have the Juggernaut, and if they drove over the grasslands, they could be anywhere on the island by now,” Mitchum said, checking the draw on the S&W .22 revolver. “Ryan had mentioned wanting a boat, and there’s only three villes on the island to steal one. Cargo ville burned their boats because of the plague—Ryan and his people told us about it. Ours are too well guarded, which leaves Cascade.”
Teams of men began to drag the first of the felled trees into the ville.
“Never heard of the place,” Glassman said suspiciously.
Mitchum grinned. “Little ville to the south, mostly predark ruins built on top of a waterfall. Bitch to see from the ocean. The mist from the fall sort of hides it from sight.”
Glassman wasn’t overly disturbed by the news. Kinnison knew about the dozens of villes scattered throughout the Thousand Islands that remained hidden to avoid paying tribute to him. None was very big, or of any military importance. Aside from the armed dockyard of the pirate fleet.
“How far away is it?” he asked.
“Five days on horseback. Two by sea. You have to arc far around our island if going south to avoid the reefs. Can’t take the northern route at all, unless you’re willing to pay the toll.”
“Pirates?” Glassman asked, feeling a rush of excitement over the prospect of battle.
Scratching at his stubble, Mitchum frowned. “Wish it was. Those we could handle. An old deeper lives off the north shore. It might be safe. He sleeps a lot, but when he wakes up hungry…”
“Fair enough. Get your men ready. We leave in an hour.”
The taste of ashes filling his mouth from the smoke, Mitchum hawked and spit. “South it is.”
“For us,” Captain Glassman stated. “But where that wag can roll, horses can run. You’re to take troops straight across the island, while we steam around. Then we’ll crush them between us in a two-sided attack at Cascade.”
“Should work,” Mitchum said thoughtfully, then added, “if you give us some Firebirds.”
The captain turned his head sideways, as if looking away from the sec man, but his eyes never left Mitchum. “You want more,” he said stiffly. “And yet the records I was given by the lord baron say this ville owns eight already.”
“Not anymore,” Mitchum said hatefully, both hands clenched into hard fists. “They’ve sort of been stolen.”
Chapter Fourteen
As the miles rolled by, the companions ate a cold meal from MRE packs, their blasters close at hand. On a couple of occasions, they saw more of the muties staggering about in the soggy fields, then a pack of them ripping apart a drowned opossum. At the first hint of the noisy wag’s badly tuned engine, the stickies swarmed after the vehicle, but were easily outdistanced. Keeping a careful watch on the dashboard, Krysty balanced the rising engine temperature against getting away from the stickies. She took a life only when necessary, and would rather bypass the muties than brutally run them over.
After a few hours, Jak took Krysty’s place behind the wheel, and later on in the day, Ryan replaced him. Each shift was kept short, as steering through the thick mud was exhausting work. Half-blind from the dirty windshield, each driver had to stay alert for buried logs and rocks, holding on to the steering wheel with both hands to keep from losing control.
“How are we doing?” Mildred asked, grabbing the luggage rack bolted to the ceiling and walking to the front of the school bus. An experienced car driver before being frozen, she was worried about the old engine. It had probably been quite a while since the wag had been driven anywhere, and a trip like this would be hard on a well-maintained vehicle.
“Engine is running hot, and the oil pressure is low, but we already knew there was a leak somewhere. You can see blue in the exhaust,” Ryan said, darting a glance at the dashboard. “Aside from that, the wag is okay. But we better start looking for a place to stop and refuel. The tank is almost dry.”
“Need bushes, too,” Dean admitted in a husky voice, his legs tightly crossed. “Some things can’t be done out the window of a moving wag.”
“Yes, they can,” J.B. said, from under his hat. “It just ain’t very comfortable.”
Suddenly, the bus dipped slightly and the sound of the engine rose in pitch as it revved higher, struggling to compensate. Grinding gears, Ryan pumped the gas pedal and fought to keep the engine operating. But their speed dropped to a mere crawl, and the engine temperature gauge rose alarmingly.
“What’s wrong, damage from that stickie we hit?” J.B. asked, coming fully awake in an instant.
“Fucking mud again,” he cursed, revving the engine and shifting to a higher gear. The bus sluggishly waddled along, then backfired from the rush of fuel. “It’s different, thicker or something. Can’t seem to get any speed.”
Appearing from a clump of bushes, a stickie holding the bedraggled body of a rat watched the long wag roll by and started after it hooting in delight.
“Sinking?” Jak demanded, grabbing his backpack and jacket.
&nbs
p; “Not mud this time,” Mildred said. “It’s quicksand.”
Ryan muttered a curse. A tree branch wasn’t going to work on that crap. If they halted to refuel, the wag would get jammed like a misfire in the ejector port. They couldn’t stop for any reason.
“Get that scope up here,” he barked. “We need to find dry land, and I mean now.”
Quickly, Mildred got out of the way, and the Armorer went to the front of the wag, the Navy longeyes already in his grip. Fully extending the antique, J.B. scanned the landscape ahead of the struggling wag.
“Don’t go to the left. I think that’s a lake,” he reported. “More mud straight ahead on your twelve, but I see trees to the right. Not sure the bus can drive between the trunks they’re so close, but that has to be solid ground.”
“Where?” Ryan asked, adjusting the clutch as the wag backfired again, even louder than before.
“Mile, mebbe two. On your three.”
“See them.”
“Incoming,” Dean said calmly, jacking the slide on his Browning. “We got a stickie on our tail.”
“Don’t shoot it,” Ryan ordered. “It may be able to reach us because we’re moving so slow, but it can’t get in. Too well armored.”
The boy nodded and put his blaster to a blasterport and tracked the approach of the humanoid creature. It caught the mired bus easily and began to hit the outside armor plating with its suckered hands, desperately trying to find a way in.
“Heading for the rear door,” Dean announced, the barrel of his Browning semiautomatic pistol never wavering. Just then, the handle jiggled and an inhuman face appeared in the grille-covered panel of the exit.
“Shitfire. I need that window clear to see behind us,” Ryan growled, fighting to alter the course of the vehicle toward the trees. “Ace it.”
The Browning barked once, and a hot brass casing kicked from the side of the blaster and hit the floor to roll away under the rows of seats.
“He’s gone,” Dean stated.
Ryan could only grunt in reply, both of his hands white-knuckle tight on the steering wheel. Ahead, he could see it was a real forest, just what they wanted. But a mob of stickies was forming between the trees and the companions, almost as if they understood what was happening.
Checking over his LeMat, Doc looked in that same direction and blanched. There was an army coming their way, thirty, maybe forty of the muties.
“Can we go around them, maybe refuel from inside?” Mildred asked, pulling a box of cartridges from her backpack and stuffing them into a pocket. “Rip up the floorboards or something.”
“That would only make us sink for sure,” J.B. grumbled, thumbing rounds into the S&W M-4000 shotgun and laying it aside.
“Gaia, look at them,” Krysty said, staring out the dirty window. “The engine noise must be pulling in every stickie for miles. Mebbe the whole valley.”
“Could live here,” Jak said, opening his Colt Python to check the rounds. Satisfied, he closed the cylinder with a gentle pressure so as not to damage the catch. “Wait for prey, like hellflowers and trapdoor spiders.”
“Lord, I hope not,” Mildred replied, checking the load in her own weapon. “Because that would mean it works, and they eat regularly.”
Doc began to mutter in that strange singsong manner that meant he was quoting somebody from the past. ‘“Lieutenant Broadhead, I’m only an engineer. Here to build a bridge,”’ the old man whispered hoarsely. ‘“What do I know about Zulu warriors?”’
Finally pointed straight for the forest, Ryan scowled as he saw the stickies stop and just stand there, waiting for the bus to come to them. Was it possible that these swamp stickies were smarter than the ones in the Deathlands? They would find out any minute now.
“Here they come,” Ryan said, arms shaking as he controlled the bus.
As the vehicle sloshed into the mob, the stickies parted and didn’t attack as expected, but started to climb onto the wag, as if trying to drag it down by their sheer weight. Worst of all, it was working. The bus slowed even more, the engine temperature drastically rose and the wag sank deeper into the muck. The engine backfired again, then again, from the buildup of back pressure as the tailpipes became blocked by the quicksand.
To the people inside, the noise sounded exactly like gunshots. The stickies went crazy, hooting loudly and beating the wag with their sucker-covered hands. In a matter of seconds, the bus was coated with them, a busty female hanging off the iron grid covering the front windshield, several walking on the roof, dozens of hands beating on the sheet steel blocking the side windows, making a rumbling noise like thunder. Two muties were tugging on the right-front access door, and several more rode the back bumper, hitting the grid-covered windows and exit door. Then the glass in a window shattered, and arms were thrust into the wag, eagerly searching for prey. But the jagged shards of glass ringing the frame sliced the limbs apart, fingers and suckers raining to the floor, and the stickies fought one another to pull themselves loose, which only worsened the damage.
But with the glass gone, their calls became even louder. Mixed with the banging on the sheet metal it was deafening, and the companions couldn’t talk to one another. As if sensing defeat of some kind, the muties redoubled the attack, smashing a headlight, ripping off the wiper blades and radio antenna, and bits of decorating molding went flying away.
“They’re testing our defenses,” J.B. said, swinging the Uzi to point in every direction. The noise and the hooting masked their numbers, making the thirty sound like a hundred.
“Smart,” Doc rumbled, thumbing back the hammer on his piece.
“Simple animal instinct,” Mildred retorted. “Often, baboons do this sort of thing at zoos to tease the tourists.”
Ryan glared hatefully at the stickie clinging to the glass of his tiny ventilation window. Unable to shoot the thing on the windshield, Ryan hit the horn. The startled female dangling from the windshield dropped off and was run over by the wag. But then a furious male leaped upon the windshield to attack the man and was instantly impaled on the array of knives welded to the iron grid. The slick blades piercing every limb, the dying creature pumped out its life onto the dirty glass, effectively blocking Ryan’s vision of the trees ahead. The one-eyed warrior knew that a crash was imminent, but there was no way he was going to slow.
Savagely twisting the wheel back and forth, he sent the bus rocking side to side, the spikes on the tires slashing the legs of the muties running along, the crippled creatures falling, clutching at the damaged limbs. Several tumbled from the roof and landed on their brethren, or fell under the deadly wheels.
But the smell of their own blood fed the madness of the muties, and the beating on the wag increased until there was a screech of tortured metal, and the sheet steel covering a side window was bent away. Multiple hands and faces moved over the predark glass searching for an opening. Now there was nothing between the humans and the mutants but a pane of safety glass more than a century old.
“Blades first,” Jak growled, a knife in each hand.
“Indeed,” Doc rumbled, holstering the LeMat and pulling the length of Spanish steel from its ebony sheath.
As the safety glass shattered in a spray of tiny squares, Jak jerked both hands forward. Hooting in pain, two stickies beat at the knives sticking out of their faces and dropped away. Another tried to take their place, and Doc lunged at it, the sword slicing open its throat with surgical precision. Gushing blood, the invader dropped into the crowd. But more took its place, and other sections of sheet metal started bending away under the pressure of the enraged muties.
Briefly, Dean looked at the case of Firebirds. If he could just get outside, the missiles would fly away and explode in the distance, drawing the mob away. But if he was stupe enough to launch a rocket from inside the bus, the back-blast of exhaust would fill the wag and burn them alive. They had enough armament to stop a tank, and it was useless against some mud-covered stickies.
Ryan could see the trees were c
lose and tried to spot a path or something to use, but blood and flopping limbs of the aced mutie were making that nearly impossible. Once more, he tried for his blaster to blow off its head and get an unobstructed view. But the moment he let go, the bus veered to the side, and he was forced to use both hands to steer.
By now, the stickies were all over the wag, their suction-cupped fingers playing with the windows and tugging on the doors. The companions stabbed at anything that came through the broken windows, the interior of the wag getting brighter with the removal of every panel of steel. Krysty tracked the ones on top with her blaster, but withheld firing. She wouldn’t waste ammo on a guess.
“Dumb ass bastard welder, couldn’t weld for shit!” J.B. cursed, his hands tight on the grip of the Uzi.
There was a crash from the rear of the bus, and the back door unexpectedly swung open. A young stickie was halfway through the small window, triumphantly holding the latch. It hooted in victory, and Dean blew it away. Then an adult swung in from the side and tried to climb over the stack of crates. From the far end of the wag, Doc fired the LeMat, the strident discharge of the hogleg seeming even louder in the confines of the bus. The stickie literally flew backward out the open doorway, its head a crushed mess.
Scrambling through the supplies, Jak reached the door just as another mutie climbed inside. Spinning sideways, the teenager buried his combat boot into the mutie’s stomach, driving it outside. Then grabbing the handle, Jak hauled the door shut and forced the locking bolt into place.
“Too close,” he grunted, flinching as a gob of quicksand was flung through the hole to splatter on the wall. Were the muties throwing that to blind the teenager? Just how smart were these things?
“How the hell can they run through quicksand?” Dean demanded, ducking another gob sailing in through the busted side window.
“Check the deader on the windshield,” Krysty snapped. “It’s got webbed feet, like snowshoes.”
Looking at the corpse, Mildred was amazed at the evolution of such a useful appendage.
