Baptism of Rage

by James Axler

  Krysty grunted as she hit the ground, her arm twisting under her where she landed. Above her, inches from her face, the creature’s head bobbed in the darkness, its breath sickly sweet like spilled gasoline. For a moment, its head reared back and Krysty heard it snort with apparent contempt. Then, before she could move, it came at her, head-butting her squarely against the forehead, making her ears ring.

  Without thinking, Krysty pulled her blaster’s trigger again, the bullet going off into the trees in a lightning flash of propellant. Above her, the mutie flinched, ducking away from the blaster as it went off. It wasn’t fear of being shot, Krysty thought. It was more basic than that—a fear of noise, of bright light. She fired again, blasting another shot into the night as the mutie struggled above her.

  CROUCHED BETWEEN two stationary wags, Mildred narrowed her eyes and watched the shifting shadows that moved between the trees that lined the road. She could hear the frantic firefight that was occurring farther along the road, where J.B. and Doc were holding the army of scalies at bay, and Krysty was blasting them amid the trees. They were swarming, she realized, and it was only a matter of time before they made an attack on these wags.

  Holding her ZKR 551 steady, resting her grip on her free hand, Mildred squeezed the trigger and fired a single shot into the gap between the trees, just as a shadow crossed the space there. The shadow halted, tumbling over with a yelp as Mildred’s bullet drove through its head. Mildred watched the gap as three more shadows appeared, stopping there, presumably to examine what had just happened. Her breath was coming faster now, shallow, as Mildred pulled the trigger again and again, launching bullets at the enemies. Two of them fell, but her third shot missed its target, embedding into a tree with a burst of splinters as the scalie moved aside.

  Suddenly, the scalie raced across the road, a thick branch in its stubby hand, looking this way and that as it tried to locate its hidden attacker. Mildred waited in her hiding place as the scalie approached the clutch of parked wags, watched as its stump of nose twitched. This thing was so very nearly human, Mildred realized, just a twist of DNA away from her.

  As it stepped between the wags, Mildred stroked the trigger on the ZKR 551 and a bullet embedded between the creature’s eyes. She watched from her hiding place as the mutie dropped the club in its hands and then sagged to the ground, hitting the tarmac of the road with a hideous, bone-cracking thump.

  Then Mildred spun, hearing something approach from behind her, desperately hoping she could get her revolver up in time. Another scalie, this one larger with skin like batter, was running at her across the blacktop. It had to have spotted the flash of her gunshots, giving away her position.

  Mildred lifted the ZKR, her heart drumming faster in her chest as she aimed the weapon at the approaching monstrosity. As she did so, something blurred across her vision, and the scalie dropped to the ground like a tree struck by lightning.

  Rising slightly from her crouch and peering to her left, Mildred saw Alec, the blond-haired teen from the other wag, standing with a bow in his hand. Nocking another arrow, he gave Mildred a nod in acknowledgment before turning back to his vigil, scanning the area.

  “Thanks,” Mildred whispered, the sound no louder than her breath.

  KRYSTY LAY ON THE DAMP soil, struggling beneath the weight of the mutie as it clambered upon her, holding her down. The nightmare thing flinched as she fired another blast from the Smith & Wesson .38, fearing the noise, the brightness. As the mutie flinched, Krysty put all of her effort into rolling it from her, scissoring with her legs to dislodge the monstrosity as it reached for her. Jarred by the movement, the horrible creature swayed above Krysty, and she rolled her hips.

  Entwined, they tumbled over and over, Krysty and the scalie, one on top of the other, like some perverse, pornographic dance from another era. In a blur of motion, Krysty found herself on top of the fiend, and she swung her blaster at it, smashing its butt into the creature’s head.

  The mutie howled, and Krysty felt the strength in its body as it tried to shake her loose. With her left hand, the redhead clutched at the armorlike skin at its throat, feeling its hard sharpness cutting at her flesh. She held on to the creature as it swung and rolled; it was like hanging on to a bucking bronco, the wind in her ears, the rustling of leaves from all around.

  With a determined flick, the creature tossed Krysty from it, braying in victory as she tumbled backward, slipping on fallen leaves and sliding down onto her flank with a heavy crash. Even as it cried in victory, Krysty swung up her Smith & Wesson and blasted another shot at it in midmotion. A dazzling flash in the darkness, and the bullet knifed through the air and straight into the creature’s forehead, abruptly cutting its howl with chilling finality.

  Still lying on the ground, Krysty watched as the creature sank back, a dark shadow amid other shadows. Once it dropped, Krysty let out a deep breath that she hadn’t realized she had been holding, and brought the still-warm blaster back down to her side.

  A moment later she stood, brushing the dirt off her pants’ legs and the back of her shaggy fur coat. Even as she did so, Krysty became aware of other noises, of movements all around her. She swung out the cylinder of her blaster and swiftly reloaded, conscious that she was being watched from all around.

  As she reached the surface of the blacktop, Krysty’s jog became a sprint as, behind her, the bushes parted and a dozen more scalies raced after her.

  “I need backup,” Krysty shouted, trusting someone from the wags would hear.

  She spun, blasting off three quick shots over her shoulder as the nocturnal scalies rushed after her. Then something boomed from up ahead, and one of the chasing scalies fell. The others jumped over it, leaving their companion to its fate.

  Before her, Krysty could see Doc and Charles standing close to Torino’s wag. Torino’s head was lowered as he watched the side of the road. In his hand he held a stubby blaster, and as Krysty watched he reeled off two more shots, felling more of the attacking scalies. Beside him, Doc picked off another three scalies as they began emerging from all around.

  “Keep running, Red,” Charles called. “We got your back.”

  Krysty kept running.

  NEIL CLIFFORD, forty-three years old with the start of a middle-aged paunch from too much good eating, peered out of the canvas leaves that covered the old wagon. The terrified horses, a team of four healthy mares, were fretting as the shots whizzed all about them.

  Neil turned back, keeping his voice low as he spoke to the two other occupants of the shaking wag. “Ma, Pa,” he whispered, “I got to go calm down the horses.”

  “No, Neil—” his father’s voice, urgent “—it’s dangerous out there and the redhead said we were to stay right here.”

  “Screw that,” Neil spat. “Those horses are ’bout the most valuable thing we Cliffords ever owned. I ain’t seeing them panicked or stole or shot.”

  Before his father could argue any further, Neil ducked through the partition in the canvas cover and stepped out onto the road. If he had been from a different age, he might have thought it was a fireworks display—explosions and wads of shot flying this way and that as the crazed scalies descended on the stalled convoy. Instead he knew it for what it was—a war zone.

  Neil dashed forward, his head twitching as another blast went off close by, and got in front of the nervous horses. Chestnut-brown, with deep, chocolate-colored button eyes, the foremost horses were of mixed blood but mostly Thoroughbreds, magnificent beasts in any era. Just now, sweat foamed on that chestnut hair, and their eyes rolled in wide, white pools.

  Neil grabbed for the rig that held the horses’ reins, and began talking in as calm a voice as he could manage as another explosion went off in the nearby trees. The horses resisted, turning this way and that, threatening to topple over because of the way they fought as they were harnessed together, but Neil looked his favorite—Charlotte—in the eye, urging her to calm down. “It’s just some big ol’ explosions is all it is,” he assured her,
knowing that the words didn’t matter, just his tone. “In a coupla days we’ll go out riding, just the two of us. We’ll put all this madness behind us.”

  Something boomed just over Neil’s shoulder, and he ducked so quickly that he thought for a moment that he would fall. The horse, Charlotte, watched him, whinnying in fear, her lips pulling back from her teeth.

  “It’s okay, girl,” Neil assured her breathlessly. “It’ll all be okay.”

  Another blast, and something flew past him. A second later, he saw the dark-skinned woman from the sec crew—Mildred—running toward him down the road, a blaster in her hand. She was shouting orders, but with all the noise—not least the frantic beating of his own heart—Neil Clifford couldn’t make sense of her words.

  The muzzle of Mildred’s blaster flashed, and Neil heard the shot amid other explosions all around him. Her bullet streaked past him, and Neil turned in time to see a man topple to the ground just feet away from him. No, not a man, he realized, a mutie.

  A similar creature was following, running out of the bushes at the side of the road, something raised in its hand. It was female, Neil saw, with naked, pendulous breasts swaying in the moonlight. The creature, the female, was running at him, swinging whatever the hell it was in her hand, swinging it down in an arc, aiming straight at his head. The blade of an ax glinted as it caught the moonlight, and Neil closed his eyes as he felt something warm splash down his legs. He realized he had lost control of his bladder.

  Eyes closed, hanging on to the leather reins with a grip so tight that his own fingernails cut into the palm of his hand, Neil waited for the killing blow to strike.

  Miraculously however, the ax didn’t hit him. Cowering, Neil opened his eyes. The mutie woman with the pendulous breasts was gone, her ax no longer poised to cleave his head from his shoulders. He stood up straighter, blinking back tears as he looked around.

  Mildred sprinted past him, her legs kicking out and eating up serious distance as she made her way down the road, blaster blazing. “Keep down,” she instructed, as she continued past the wag and the horses.

  Neil watched her for a moment, then something on the road before him caught his eye. The mutie woman lay there, her arms splayed. There was blood across her ugly, punched-in face where a bullet had drilled through it, and the blade of the ax was embedded in her thigh where she had misjudged its swing.

  Neil breathed a long, slow sigh of relief. Behind him, Charlotte and the other horses clip-clopped on the spot, frantically wanting to be elsewhere. The firefight raged on around him as Neil turned back to calm them.

  J.B. HELD DOWN THE TRIGGER of his mini-Uzi, spraying the scalies until the blaster clicked on empty once more. Seven of the muties dropped, red blood bursting from their demolished bodies.

  As his blaster clicked empty, J.B. spun, walking briskly along the side of the old wag until he stood beside the driver’s door. The terrified faces of Jeremiah Croxton and the young-old girl Daisy peered through the window, their eyes glistening in the darkness.

  “Get out,” J.B. instructed. “Quickly. I’ll cover you.”

  Croxton’s eyes widened, but he pushed the door open and called down to J.B. “What’s your plan?”

  The Armorer blasted an approaching scalie with the scattergun, tracking it with the gun’s muzzle as the foul human-form fell to the earth. “Get out, bring anything you can carry,” he instructed Croxton. “We’re going to have to leave the rig.”

  “No can do, friend,” Croxton bellowed, fighting to be heard over the sounds of the continuing firefight. “I can’t leave my rig.”

  J.B. turned to the man. “You can and you will. Our best chance of survival is to retreat, and we can’t move the wag. You want to live, don’t you?”

  “But…” Croxton began, but J.B. had turned away, holding his Uzi in his outstretched arm and blasting a stream of bullets at a pair of rushing scalies, sweeping their legs out from under them.

  A swift plan was forming in J.B.’s racing mind. It was rudimentary, he knew, but their options were becoming more and more limited by the second. He reached into his coat, pulling out two explosive charges no bigger than the palm of his hand, and a timing pencil. Quickly, he slapped them against the truck rig at his back, glancing up to see if Croxton had seen what he was doing. The old farmer was still inside the rig, collecting whatever belongings he thought were necessary. Good, Dix thought. The old man wouldn’t like this part of the plan one iota. They had only minutes to get clear.

  A moment later, the driver’s door was pushed open wide, and Croxton leaped from the rig, a stuffed backpack hanging over one shoulder. He stood there beside J.B. as the Armorer reeled off another lethal blast from the scattergun, and reached up to assist the blonde girl’s descent from the cab. Daisy had brought a leather satchel crammed with her own belongings, he saw.

  “What now?” Croxton asked as J.B. eyed the landscape around them.

  “Go to the other wags,” J.B. instructed. “Find some space for you and the girl there.”

  Croxton looked irritated. “I really don’t think—” he began but Dix cut him off.

  “We are badly outnumbered,” J.B. snarled, “and two of my people are lost right now. You have asked me to keep you alive, and that’s what I’m going to do. How I go about that is my business. We clear?”

  Croxton dipped his head once in acknowledgment and then, with their heads down, he and Daisy rushed down the line of stalled wags until they were lost to the shadows. Once the pair was out of sight, J.B. walked backward in the direction that they had retreated, blasting the M-4000 scattergun at anything that moved in the shadows of the trees as he retreated from Croxton’s wag. From somewhere behind him, J.B. noticed, arrow shafts whipped into the foliage, felling any scalies that tried to make a break for it to get closer to him. J.B. counted off fifteen paces, blasting the scattergun at regular intervals to keep the scalies at bay.

  Seconds later there was an explosion and the truck went up in flames.

  J.B. turned away, bringing his arm holding the Uzi up to shield his face as the charges ignited. Several scalies were caught up in the blast and instantly turned to flaming torches. And then the second ripple of explosions began, as the flames caught the moonshine in the gas tanks of the wag, setting it to flames.

  The old wag shuddered as the explosions ripped through it, shaking this way and that, amid the inferno. Scalies were like burning torches running about as the flames licked at their hard skins. Others had been thrown to the ground, the flames dancing all around them, spits of fire fizzing on the blacktop of the road. Those that still stood, or struggled to do so, were moving away, trying to escape as smoke and fire blossomed from the melting shell of the wag.

  Shaken, J.B. stumbled back a few paces, watching the flames lick at the dark sky. He chuckled to himself as the scalies retreated from the sudden illumination. It had worked.

  Krysty ran to join J.B., a wisp of smoke puffing from the barrel of her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. “They’re holding back,” she stated, “but my guess is it’s a temporary reprieve.”

  “Yeah,” J.B. agreed, “won’t take them long to regroup. We need to get out of here now.”

  Krysty looked at him, a challenge in her fierce eyes. “What about Ryan?” she asked. “And Jak?”

  J.B. thumbed the round-framed spectacles on his nose, before swinging the Uzi back to cover the shadows. “Nobody gets left behind, Krysty, you know that,” he said. “We’ll go find them.”

  As J.B. spoke, there came a grumbling noise like thunder, and he and Krysty turned to see the glowing red flames of the engine of Mitch’s bizarre wag as it jounced across the fields. Before their startled eyes, the wag leaped onto the road, its engine howling like an animal caught in a trap. In the light from Croxton’s burning wag, J.B. and Krysty saw now that it was Ryan at the controls, with Jak riding shotgun.

  “Looks like I’m too late to help out,” Ryan called as he pulled up the wag beside J.B. and Krysty.

  “You
’re not,” J.B. hollered back. “We need to get out of here right now.”

  “What the heck have you been doing without me?” Ryan asked, gazing in astonishment at the burning wag.

  “Had us a little barbecue, lover,” Krysty explained, pulling herself up to stand beside Ryan on the high decking of the patchwork wag.

  Ryan peered past the flames into the darkness. “Cooking anything nice?” he asked, though there was little humor in his tone.

  “Scalies,” Krysty explained. “A whole damn army of them.”

  J.B. took another shot with the lethal scattergun, blasting off into the shadows. “They’re coming back,” he growled. “Mebbe we can outrun them if we get moving right now.”

  In the high driving seat, Ryan worked at the controls and scanned the dark woods all around. Figures were moving there, humanoid in proportion but hunched over. On the other side of the burning grate, Jak was taking aim with his Colt Python.

  “Move now,” Jak spat, drumming bullet after bullet at the moving figures.

  Ryan reached down for the lever that stood beside his knee, grinding the wag into gear and powering the engine. With a pained howl of complaint, the haphazard vehicle lurched forward and turned toward the trees heading back in the direction they had just come from. To Ryan’s side, still clinging to the wag, Krysty secured her position and began picking off scalies with her Smith & Wesson.

  On the road, J.B. scrambled back toward the remaining wags that were waiting at the side of the trees. In the flickering illumination of the burning rig, he recognized the gangly form of Doc standing beside the passenger door of one of the horse-drawn wags.

  “Start ’em up,” J.B. barked, indicating a looping route with his hand above his head. “Follow Ryan.”