Shaking Earth

by James Axler

  Chapter Twenty

  Claudia was carrying a Ruger Mini-14 with a folding stock as well as her old M&P handblaster. She managed to get the carbine into action one-handed. Ryan heard shots crack as her engine whined to sudden acceleration.

  Neither did any good. The raiders were all over her at once, pulling her off the bike and wresting the blaster from her hands.

  The marching scavvies heard her scream. The mutie and human mob was seething in a mound over and around her like pack predators.

  “Eating,” Jak said tersely.

  With a shriek of his engine and a squeal of rubber spinning on hard-rutted earth, her lover Ricardo started to peel away to her rescue. “Stop that man or he’s dead!” Ryan shouted.

  A burly bearded scavvie with a scar down one side of his face and a slung M-16 stuck an arm out and clotheslined Ricardo right off his ride just as he launched himself. He felt onto his back and lay stunned.

  Others were stung into action. They began to run along the road, drawing or unslinging blasters.

  “Five Ax, stop them,” Ryan yelled. “It’s a trap! They’re trying to lure us in to rescue her.”

  Five Ax began hollering commands. He rode his own bike forward in front of the men running up the road, cutting in front of them like a sheepdog. They stopped, staring at him in angry consternation.

  “Jak,” Ryan said quietly.

  The M-60 blasted off with an ear-tearing snarl, rocking the Hummer back on its suspension. The scavvies who had run down the road ducked as the rounds cracked over their heads. A couple flung themselves facedown on the road. The rest scattered into the scrub, right where Ryan wanted them.

  Jak was no ace blasterman, but did know enough about machine guns to fire bursts, booming clusters of four or five or six rounds. He dropped his first one into the road fifty yards short of the feeding frenzy. Then, using the dust thrown up by the bullets striking ground, he walked his fire right into the tangle of limbs and bodies. Ryan thought he saw a mutie brandish an arm torn off the beautiful female scout. Then the bullet storm was upon them.

  The M-60 was nowhere so lordly as mighty Ma Deuce; it fired rifle rounds, the same as Ryan’s SSG, in fact. But it fired a lot of them. And while the .308s didn’t have the power to turn a body inside out the way the .50s did, there was nothing weak about them, either.

  At this range Jak’s bursts took the Chichimecs and their human prey like a scythe. Blood and parts splashed. Claudia’s screams were drowned by those of her assailants, and then all went quiet.

  Several ambushers broke away with red mouths and tried to bolt back to cover. Nice try; they died.

  In a scatter of seconds nothing lived on the road. Jak came off the trigger. The last ejected empties and metal links from the ammunition belt tinkled down into the hardpan. There was a lot of silence. The valley was a bowlful of it.

  After a moment Ryan became aware of the wind sighing through the grass and down the pass. A meadowlark sang; somewhere a mourning dove called out his territory with soft hoots. Birds didn’t have a care for humans and their spats; never had. Except for vultures and crows. Glancing up, Ryan saw there were already two of the former on hand, black crucifixes wheeling against the sky.

  Ryan came out of his briefly suspended state. Things were about to start happening in bunches. He leaned into the wag, grabbed out his Steyr and a pack with rats, extra mags and some grens stuffed into it.

  “J.B., take the wheel,” he said. “Take the wag up along that hogsback on the left. Bastards’ll be all along it. You’ll take them in enfilade. Burn them out, then pour in to the flanks of the rest when they come down the road at us. I’ll send Five Ax and the other scooter scouts along.”

  J.B. laid aside his BAR and scrambled into the front seat. “You?”

  “I’ll run the reception committee down here.”

  J.B. nodded and the Hummer roared away. Ryan quickly explained what he wanted to Five Ax with words and gestures.

  Ricardo had caught his breath enough to commence weeping and wailing. He abruptly broke away and went running right at Ryan, arms pinwheeling, shrieking like a man on fire. Fortunately he’d left his 12-gauge Winchester Defender scattergun slung. Ryan, holding his Steyr in both hands, waited him out, timed him. When the burly berserk man got in range, Ryan wheeled the butt of his Steyr up and around and laid it against the side of his head. He did it as gently as possible under the circumstances, which wasn’t very, more pushing with the wooden stock like a paddle than swinging free. It was done as much to preserve the alignment of the optics as to save the bearded scavvie’s life. Ricardo went sprawling, clutching at the dust and moaning.

  Ryan looked around, caught the eye of a scavvie he knew spoke English. “Get him squared away. If he tries for me again, I’ll chill him now. The rest of you, get off the road, spread out in a line facing up the road, find yourself some decent cover and get ready to rumble.”

  They stared at him for a moment. He was acutely aware of being a stranger among them. He had been reluctant to make use of his supposed authority. Now he saw no choice.

  The man he’d told to see to Ricardo looked up from where he knelt beside him. Miguel, Ryan thought his name to be. “This isn’t where we’re supposed to fight,” the scavvie said. “We’re supposed to meet Hector first.”

  “This is war, friend. You fight where it finds you, not where you planned.”

  Time was getting short. The Chichimecs were probably on the move already under cover, knowing their ambush was spoiled. “Time’s blood,” Ryan said. “Your move.”

  Miguel shouted in Spanish to his comrades. They broke up, disappearing into the scrub on both sides of the road. Miguel dragged the dazed Ricardo out of sight.

  In a moment Ryan was alone except for the two wags. He gestured them to come up, then pull off to either side of the road to lay down a serious fire base. It would be better tactics, he knew, to wing them out to either end of the firing line, lay down interlocked fields of fire, but he knew what was coming. He was afraid of the Chichimecs creepy-crawling up through the brush and dead ground and taking them out with grens or pipe bombs or a plain old body-swarm. Better to let the groundpounders buffer the wags; they couldn’t afford to lose the heavy weps, especially this early in the game.

  And now from the pass ahead came the first evidence that an attack was coming. A spatter of shots was thrown at the scavvies as they dispersed and went to ground. Big puffs of white smoke thrown out by black-powder blasters rolled up into the sky.

  Without rushing it, Ryan moved to a grassy mound crowned by some kind of bush. He took up position behind the low mound, got the Steyr’s bipod steel buttplate into his shoulder, his cheek welded to the stock, his eye up to the telescope.

  He had expected a certain amount of anger when the gringos took it upon themselves to chop pretty, popular Claudia to worm bait along with her attackers. But though ville dwellers, and for the most part no warriors, the scavvies were anything but sheltered. They well understood that sometimes the best gift one friend could give another was a quick death.

  Ryan laid his crosshairs on the road. A party of Chichimecs had appeared halfway along the pass, trotting in the open with a tireless coyote gait, carrying the usual random assortment of bloodletting implements. Laziness and bloodlust were getting the better of judgment. He grinned and aimed at the chest of a big guy with impressive steerlike horns and a military-style, bolt longblaster, a Springfield or a Mauser.

  Before Ryan could drop the hammer, the two machine guns from the scavvie supply wags spoke. The Chichimecs on the road were bowled over. Ryan saw his target’s right arm ripped off. The horned man fell kicking.

  Ryan shifted his aim to a norm-looking guy with an M-16 shagging his mostly bare ass into the brush, led him, fired. The Steyr’s barrel rose irresistibly as he threw the bolt by long-engrained reflex. When it came back down, there was nothing but weeds in the glass. Deep down in his belly he felt a flash of self-disgust. He’d never know for sure, but he
had a marksman’s sense he’d missed the bastard cold.

  Shots were cracking now from both sides and to the front. More black powder blaster smoke suddenly blossomed from the ridgeline to their left. Ryan heard somebody off to his left start to scream. Then he heard the unmistakable snarl of a machine gun.

  His blood froze. What if they had an MG of their own up there? They’d smoke his wags, sure as nuke shit. Unable to elevate the rifle properly from a prone position, he rolled into a seated posture, cinching his left arm up in the shooting sling, aimed the rifle at the crest in hopes he could spot the raiders’ bullet-sprayer if they had one.

  HE NEEDN’T HAVE worried. The Hummer and the half dozen motorcycle scouts trailing prudently behind its comforting mass and still more comforting M-60 had reached the heights of the crestline. As Ryan had foreseen, they found several dozen Chichimecs armed with longblasters strung out along the ridgetop in a line away from them. Since the ambushers had set up to sweep the column down on the road with fire, they had made no effort to conceal themselves from the sides.

  J.B. stopped the wag and bailed out with his BAR as Jak poured blazing death right along the Chichimec rifle line. More concerned himself with letting potential targets escape than his own safety, the Armorer just stood flatfooted by the open door, shouldered the heavy automatic rifle and began splashing muties and human raiders with well-placed sprays of .30-06.

  To either side of him Five Ax and the other riders just stopped their bikes, shouldered longblasters and fired from the saddle. The raiders went over like bottles being shot off a bawdy-house bar.

  The Chichimecs were hard-core bastards, J.B. had to give them that. Some of them actually turned and shot back. One of the scooter scouts slumped abruptly, drilled clean through the heart by a .30-30. As he and his light bike toppled into the grass, his comrades chopped down the human who had chilled him and everybody else in sight.

  J.B. tossed his Browning into the back seat of the Hummer with blue smoke still trailing from its muzzle, jumped back behind the wheel and put the hammer down. The wag’s nuke-powered electric engine was surprisingly quiet as it shifted its mass into motion, or maybe it was the ringing in his ears from all those shots going off. He took the wag bucketing along back of the ridgeline with Jak hosing down anything that moved or looked as if it might as they passed.

  To the left, a wide brown guy popped out of a bush, raising a blaster made of pipe wired and taped to a rude wooden stock. “Here, catch,” J.B. said, tossing him a pineapple-style M-26 gren from which he’d thoughtfully pulled the pin. The spoon went spinning away with a musical little twang. Reflex took over and, amazingly enough, the mutie did, catch it that is, dropping his improvised blaster to field the gren two-handed. He was staring down at the fizzing bomb cradled in both hands when J.B. swept by. The Armorer heard the blast but didn’t get to see it shred the mutie’s upper torso and blow off his face and both hands.

  A QUICK GLANCE THROUGH the scope told Ryan the machine gun belonged to the good guys. A bullet from his own front thunked into his protecting mound as he flopped down behind it once again. He got the piece braced again and began to sweep the pass for targets.

  The scope suddenly went dark.

  There was one right answer and Ryan gave it. He squeezed the trigger on the spot. The SSG roared and bucked. The Chichimec who had jumped up right in front of its muzzle, raising an ax with a yellow synthetic haft two-handed to split Ryan’s skull, instead screamed as the heavy boattailed bullet punched through his pelvis. He fell onto his face across the gun, dropping the ax.

  Ryan was already out from behind the Steyr, rolling hard to the left, hauling out his SIG-Sauer. He got the weapon free as a Chichimec came leaping over a bush at him, jabbing with a spear. Lying on his back, Ryan pumped two slugs through his attacker’s belly. The man went down shrieking and flailing right next to him. More to keep the wounded man from fouling his aim with a thrashing arm than from any kindness, Ryan put the muzzle up by the raider’s ear and quick-bored a hole through his head.

  He came up on one knee. To the left and right of him shots were cracking, screams were ripped from sundered bodies, men struggled and cursed and smelled the breath and body reek of the man they were going to kill or who would kill them.

  The Chichimecs had played it cagey. They had run up against rapid-firing blasters often enough to know that a balls-out charge across a couple hundred yards against a firing line waiting under cover would result in their getting chilled without ever getting in spear-cast range of their enemies. The few who had forgotten that lesson and tried trotting down the road had quickly been served up steaming and stinking of ruptured guts as an object lesson to their brothers.

  So they had infiltrated under cover, squirming on their bellies with astonishing speed to close with the scavvies and then rush them from close range. The problem was the scavvies, even the pudgy soft-handed ones who got all cloudy and sniffly reading some poignant scrap of poetry in a moldy scavenged predark anthology, were accustomed to fighting like tigers one-on-one. The city was a hard place. It would kill you. Not just the careless; it just got you sooner if you were. Soon or late, it killed everybody presumptuous enough to invade its waterlogged fastnesses. Everybody on the fighting line had come to terms with that. And so far survived.

  So most of the Chichimecs got blasted when they sprang. The others managed to leave some marks—the scavvies lost three killed and five wounded and bundled on the wags, excluding Claudia and the Jaguar Knight shot up on the ridge, and also not counting Claudia’s squeeze Ricardo who marched and fought on despite a busted jaw. But the marauders were quickly beaten down, especially once J.B., Jak and the scooter scouts began flaying them from their own ambush site up on the hogsback.

  Ryan chilled two more with his handblaster, a human with a break-action shotgun and a mutie with pebbled gray skin who wasn’t holding a weapon at all, but crossed Ryan’s sights and so had to die.

  And it was over just like that.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You’re late, Señor Cawdor,” Don Hector told Ryan caustically as the Hummer pulled up to the command post, which was a recreational vehicle on a hilltop.

  It was noontime, and he hadn’t eaten since a handful of something he couldn’t even remember, gulped down before sunrise, but Ryan’s appetite for the cacique’s bullshit was strangely nil. “Chichimecs tried to bushwhack us two miles back, where you promised us we’d have a clear road. Took us a while to scrape them out of our way. Maybe you oughta chop the hearts out of a couple of your recon people to smarten them up a bit.”

  Hector’s big square jaw jutted a bit more and the crow’s feet outside his eyes—that showed if you looked close he wasn’t as young as he liked to play—cut a little deeper into his dark skin. But he was good; he didn’t let anything show past that.

  “Perhaps you are right,” he said smoothly and turned away. “Perhaps I shall.”

  Don Tenorio appeared out of the command RV with Doc behind him. Tenorio had on an open-collared white shirt and was wearing his .40-caliber handblaster holstered. He looked fresh. He made a conspicuous point of embracing Ryan.

  “It is good to see you, my friend,” he said. He already knew of the ambush on the road by radio. Radio communications were unreliable, and nobody was relying on them much, but made use of them as proved feasible.

  “I was a little concerned about you and our friends,” Ryan said, nodding slightly at Hector, who had strutted over to speak to some of his Eagle Knights.

  Tenorio had ridden up with Hector and his forces to this staging point, agreed on the day before, about five miles north of the lake. Supposedly it lay directly in the path of the approaching Chichimec horde. Ryan didn’t know how Don Hector knew that. There were a lot of things he didn’t know about this setup, a fact he could basically like or lump.

  “We were in no danger,” Tenorio said. “Not even Hector’s so big a fool as to act against us before the great battle.”

  He slap
ped Ryan on the shoulder. “Come, let me see to my people.”

  WHETHER THE CHICHIMECS had jumped the gun, or keen-eyed Claudia had spotted their ambush, or whether they had simply misjudged the psychology of the scavvies and miscalled the way they’d react to seeing one of their own torn to pieces in front of their eyes, Ryan never knew and never would. As gentle and peace-loving as the scavvies were in everyday life, they weren’t loaded up with notions of mercy to foes. “Come for us and ours, you die” was the law they had lived by since Don Tenorio had led them or their parents into the halfsunk ruins a generation before. If any Chichimecs had tried to surrender, they’d been turned down terminally.

  The scavvies’ notion of first aid to fallen foes was administered with knives, rifle butts, handy rocks, or in the case of a couple of wounded who dragged themselves into the roadway as the column moved out—one trailing his guts behind him along the ground—the tires of their support wags. Conserving ammo. No skin off any part of Ryan’s anatomy. It wasn’t all that different from the rules he’d grown up playing by.

  The city contingent rested in a hollow near Hector’s war RV, not very well drained and so somewhat marshy. They were bitching about Hector sticking them there but were in generally good spirits. They were telling the story of the abortive ambush to their buddies who had come up with Tenorio’s and Hector’s bunch, and affecting to be matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

  While Tenorio saw to the wounded and went among his people, speaking to them as if they were members of his family, Ryan, with Doc, J.B. and Jak, took stock of the forces assembled. Aside from his groundpounders Hector had three big wags mounting Browning M-2 .50-calibers, and several tripod mounted M1919A4 machine guns in .30 caliber, heavy suckers that needed to be carried in several pieces, then had to be assembled to be ready for action. Once they were properly emplaced, they were deadly. Ryan was glad he wouldn’t be trying to fumble one of the beasts together while muties were jumping out of the bushes at him with obsidian daggers in their teeth.