Desert Kings

by James Axler

  “Sir, is there something wrong? Hey, Chief!”

  With a start, Delphi realized that Bellany had been talking to him for a while. “No, just lost in thought over that redhead in the last ville,” the cyborg lied quickly, then made himself chuckle. “By thunder, she was fantastic! Damn near aced me in bed, and that was before she pulled a knife and tried to gut me like a fish!”

  “Just a greedy slut.” Bellany snorted in disdain. “And you paid her two live rounds! Must have wanted it all, and she ended up with nothing.”

  “Sad, but true,” Delphi said in agreement. Actually he had been forced to slay the whore when he lost control for a second during their sex play and accidentally revealed his true self, the beams of light from his cybernetic eyes shining directly into her horrified face. She’d shrieked in terror and he’d quickly pulled a knife to slash her throat, then cut his own arm to try to cover up the murder. Thankfully, the local sec men believed the innocence of the cyborg, especially when he insisted on having another slut finish what the first one had only started. A normal man denied release would seek completion, so he’d had to do the same. Anything else would have been deemed suspicious.

  Annoying, but necessary. In the end it had cost Delphi another live round, but the cyborg had sex with another slut, finally crying out in pretend joy when inside he was seething with impatience to leave. Happily, if this mission was successful, he would never have to do such foul, degrading things again. He finally would have no need for the troopers of this convoy, or these ramshackle old war machines. He would be whole, complete, indomitable!

  Struggling to control his breathing, Delphi rubbed his bad leg, remembering the disastrous fight in the underground tunnel.

  Soon enough, Tanner, he silently raged. Oh, so very soon, revenge will be mine. Only this time, I’m not going after you. That would be too swift, too easy. This time I’m going to destroy your only reason for staying alive….

  “Hey, look!” the driver called, applying the brakes and slowing to a complete stop. “Is that the place, Chief?”

  “Looks like it,” Bellany muttered, checking the map. “What do you think, sir?”

  Rejoining the conversation, Delphi looked out the window. The wag was parked on top of a hillock, and down below were the sprawling remains of some predark city. Most of the structures had been leveled and remained only as square outlines in the thick carpeting of weeds and scraggly bushes. A hundred cars were parked neatly in grassy fields that had once been a busy city street. Delphi realized that the bronze statue of the town’s founder was nowhere in sight, the mall was now a scum-covered pond. The nuke damage to the town seemed minimal. Sierra Nevada College was a liberal arts college and not on anybody’s ICBM hit list. However, its graphic arts department had a nexus generation IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer used to train students for creating state-of-the-art computer games and special effects in movies. And he wanted it.

  “Hmm, I’m not sure,” Delphi muttered, augmenting his vision for telescopic sight. The hundreds of assorted ruins zoomed into view and he studied them carefully.

  Several of the college buildings still remained, the thick marble walls covered with moss and dense growths of wild ivy. Nevada had not been hit too hard during the war, but it had been torn to pieces by earthquakes, a volcano and the mindless rioting that soon followed skydark. Add to that the general destruction of the acid rain storms, and suddenly Delphi wasn’t at all sure that he could find the graphic arts lab anymore. It seemed that implacable time was the ultimate destroyer.

  As he searched for additional landmarks, the other wags arrived to park in a ragged line alongside the lead wag. The troopers inside the vehicles were talking animatedly, more than a few of them checking over their blasters, obviously preparing for a recce.

  Accessing his mental files, the cyborg compared his memory of the university town to the present-day jumble of weeds and broken sidewalks. Overlapping the two images, Delphi saw that too much had shifted over time, and was forced to sneak a peek at his palm. The nanotech monitor embedded into his flesh crackled into view for a moment, then faded away again. The replacement hand was not yet fully interfaced with his internal circuitry, but the brief scan had been enough.

  “Yes, this is it,” Delphi stated, sitting upright. “Daniel, take us down the hill. But move slow! I cannot vouch for the stability of the subterranean aqueducts.”

  The driver blinked in confusion.

  “Ah, sir…” Bellany started.

  “The sewers are damaged and the streets may collapse,” Delphi explained impatiently. “At the first sign of titling, head into the weeds.” Then he diplomatically added, “You’re my best driver, Dan. Try not to let me…down.”

  The man at the wheel smiled at the feeble joke. “No prob, Chief,” he boasted, shifting into gear once more.

  As the armored wag began to roll, Delphi activated the electric circuits to the 20 mm Vulcan minigun on the roof. He had a very limited supply of rounds for the Vulcan, mainly because at maximum discharge it could empty the entire vehicle of shells in under five minutes. Sluggishly a vid monitor on the dashboard flickered and scrolled into life, displaying a static-filled view of the land directly ahead of them. Touching the joystick, Delphi saw a graduated crosshairs appear on the screen. Even in his time period, this was an awesome weapon of destruction.

  “Zane, contact the other wags,” Delphi commanded, swiveling the Vulcan back and forth to check the servomotors. “I want Margaret and Vance to stay on top of the hill and keep a watch on us from a safe distance. Evan is to stay close.”

  “Already told ’em,” Bellany replied, putting the hand mike back in its clip.

  For the briefest second, the cyborg smiled for real. “You know me very well, Zane.”

  “That’s my job, Chief.” The bald man smiled, swaying to the motion of the wag. “To make sure your ass only has that one hole in it.”

  In spite of himself, Delphi snorted in amusement at the rank vulgarity, then jerked around and squeezed the trigger on the joystick. On top of the wag, the Vulcan roared for a brief second and a gelatinous thing exploded amid the branches of a large redwood a hundred feet away.

  “Damn, you’re fast,” Bellany whispered, raising an eyebrow as the clear remains of the aced mutie dripped onto the dirt like clear syrup. “I never even saw the bastard mutie!”

  “Which is why he’s in charge,” Daniel said, angling the wheel to roll around a large chuck of predark concrete studded with iron rods. “And why I drive, and Etta is the healer, and you…Ah, exactly what is it you do here again?”

  Giving a half smile, Zane smacked the driver across the back of the head.

  “Oh yeah, now I remember.” He grinned, feeding the diesels more juice. The big engines responded with a surge of power.

  As the wag crested over the hillock, a wide expanse of greenery spread out before it. The field of low grass became dotted with low bushes that merged together into a dense undergrowth. Obviously there had been a forest fire here in recent years, or perhaps acid rain, and the soil was only now reclaiming the lost territory.

  The war wag went over the bushes without any hindrance, the plants scraping along the belly of the machine. Reaching level ground, now young saplings grew in abundance: pine, birch and willow. With no regard for the plants, Daniel drove the war wag right over the saplings, snapping off the trunks at bumper level.

  The rad counter on the dashboard began to wildly click and Daniel abruptly veered away from the lake. It had to be a blast crater that had filled with water over time. Nasty. His granny had believed that when rain filled a rad pit, anybody swimming in it became a mutie. The chief said no, but it still sounded reasonable to him. Most folks were feebs, and how else could anybody explain why there were so many damn muties?

  A perforated metal pole stuck out of the ground, and Daniel headed in that direction. Soon enough, bits of predark trash were visible among the weeds and plants. Two wags smashed together, a plastic toilet seat, a len
gth of chain dangling off a cracked block of concrete.

  Pieces of dark asphalt appeared here and there among the plants, and Daniel used them as a guide through the suburbs and into the ancient city. He had done this sort of recce many times before and knew what to look for.

  Soon, the fledgling trees gave way to vertical walls of thick moss, and vines extended in every direction. Bright red umbrella bushes stood like fiery giants amid the greenery, clusters of tiny birds fluttering about inside the tangled maze of twisted branches. Delphi knew the strange bushes were not a mutation, but simply vegetation indigenous to Puerto Rico. How it got to North America was anybody’s guess. Most likely, there had been a few samples in the college greenhouse, and after the nuclear war, they began to spread. Delphi had seen lions in Texas and elephants in Maine. When humanity tried to kill itself, the zoos of the world were left alone, neglected. Some of the starving animals weren’t eaten and managed to escape and breed in the wild.

  Which unfortunately did not explain the howlers, Delphi thought. Those mutations were not listed on any of his files or records.

  Howlers were not genetic experiments designed to survive a nuclear war, or biological weapons, organic killing machines created by the military to combat the growing mutant population. No, they were something else. Something different and unknown. Privately, the cyborg feared they were true mutations, Mother Nature’s savage response to the atomic rape of the planet. Someday, they would have to be eliminated, or else humanity would find itself embroiled in another war for survival.

  More and larger buildings could be seen among the thick carpeting of moss, along with the occasional upright door or intact window. A gleaming white satellite dish thrust up from an ivy-covered building, the fire escape festooned with gently waving flowers.

  The progress of the war wag slowed from the amount of debris on the old streets. More than once, the armored prow slammed into a bush only to discover a fallen-down bridge behind the growth or corroded remains of some large vehicle. Delphi recognized a few of them as Abrams battle tanks. Clearly, somebody had known what was going on inside the quiet college, but had arrived far too late to do anything about it. Just like sex and comedy, the cyborg mused, even in combat, timing was everything.

  As the war wag reached an open area, Delphi called for a halt. Only a few yards away was a weed-encrusted fountain, the legs of a bronze statue rising from the amassed plants to end in ragged stumps above the thighs.

  “This will do,” Delphi directed, unbuckling his seat belt and standing. “We make camp here. There’s good visibility in all directions. Nothing can get close without us seeing.”

  “You expecting trouble, Chief?” Bellany asked, rising to take a Kalashnikov assault blaster from the gun rack. Expertly, the troopers checked the load in the clip, then worked the arming bolt to chamber the first 7.62 mm round.

  “No,” the cyborg stated, taking down an AK-47 for himself. “Just preparing for it.” He was wearing better weapons than this, but it would be good for morale for the others to see him armed like them. People were such fools.

  “What exactly are we after here, anyway?” Bellany asked, slinging the longblaster over a broad shoulder and stuffing his pockets with spare clips.

  “Shine, sluts and slaves?” Daniel asked hopefully, turning off the engines. The diesels sputtered a little then went still. On the dashboard, a second set of gauges and meters came to slow life, using the power from the nuke batteries inside the floor. Fuel for the motors was difficult to acquire outside of a redoubt, but the nuke batteries supplied electricity for decades before burning out.

  “Hardly,” Delphi corrected with a disapproving grimace. “There is a lot of old tech here that we can incorporate…ah, that we can use in the wags. Maybe even get the radios to work for farther than a couple of hundred feet.”

  Resting both arms on top of the steering wheel, Daniel gave a long, low whistle.

  “Working radios,” Bellany muttered. “That’d give us a chilling edge in any fight with anther wag. We gotta try for those!”

  Which was why I offered the suggestion, fool. “Exactly, old friend,” Delphi said, beaming a cold smile. “My thoughts exactly.”

  Just then the second wag rolled into view and came to a halt only a few yards away. As the engines died, the side hatch cycled open, lowering to the ground to form a short flight of stairs. Two armed troopers were standing inside the wag, the door of the security cage closed behind them just in case of any trouble. Bypassing the stairs, the two men jumped to the ground and stood in a crouched position to give the other troopers inside the wag needed clearance to fire. All of the men were carrying Browning Automatic Rifles, heavy bolt-action weapons from the Second World War. Only one person was carrying a Kalashnikov, a short redheaded woman who was the sec boss for the second wag.

  Looking over the ivy-covered ruins, Cotton Davenport grunted in satisfaction, then unlocked the door to the cage and walked outside to join the troopers. Next came two more troopers, carrying Browning longblasters, but these had bayonets attached to the end of the barrels. The blades shone mirror-bright in the weak sunlight radiating downward from the stormy sky. Both of the guards wore bandoliers slung across their chests, the loops full of shiny brass cartridges.

  “Okay, spread out and do a perimeter sweep!” Cotton commanded, her fiery curls shaking in the cool breeze. “I wanna fifty yard recce in every direction! You find anything, chill it.”

  Nodding, the four troopers headed off in different directions, their weapons held at the ready.

  “Come on, Zane,” Delphi said, starting along the central corridor of the wag. “I don’t want to waste any of the daylight we have remaining.”

  “No prob. Got your six, Chief,” the big man said, striding close behind.

  Just past the food locker, Delphi noted the left and right gunners were alert in their metal cocoons, hands resting lightly on the handles of the Remington .50-caliber machine guns. Excellent. There should not be any need for the heavy weapons on this sojourn, he thought, but it never hurt. Briefly, Delphi wondered if he should have brought along the Kalashnikovs.

  Turning into the mudroom where the troopers stored their acid rain garments, Delphi took down a hurricane lantern and slung it over a shoulder before unbolting the door to the security cage and stepping through to work the handle that activated the armored hatch. With the soft sigh of hydraulics, the section of the hull disengaged and swung down to the vine-covered ground.

  Exiting the wag, Delphi pretended to stretch sore muscles because it was expected, then strode into the ruins. Bellany stayed at his side, as Cotton and four more troopers joined the procession. Two of them wore bulky backpacks and one man openly carried a crowbar. Everybody carried lanterns and grens.

  As the group moved deeper into the ruins, the buzzing and chirping of the insect life went silent, and there was only the sound of the leaves crunching under their combat boots. Surreptitiously, Delphi checked the area with an infrared scanner inside his left hand, but saw no indication of anything large. But he stayed alert for anything cold-blooded that wouldn’t have appeared on the scanner.

  Vines were thick underfoot, making walking tricky business, and little white mushrooms were everywhere. The air smelled of damp earth, decaying matter and flowers. There was a small banana tree in the smashed display window of a clothing store and clusters of an unknown fruit festooned a public library. One of the troopers nudged another to point out a large spiderweb filling an alleyway between two buildings, and a large snake on a second-floor balcony stared unnervingly at the norms as they moved past.

  The jungle of Nevada, the cyborg darkly mused. With the weather patterns of the world this badly scrambled, it was a miracle that anybody had survived skydark.

  Behind them, the engines of the war wags gave off soft pings as they began to cool. Troopers watched the group from behind the gridwork covering the windshields, and high on the hill there came the flash of reflected light from a pair of binocs
.

  Going to the cracked marble basin of the old fountain, Delphi located the broken statue and pulled away vines until he found the rest of the figure. It was lying amid the leafy ivy and kudzu, the bronze turned a dark green from a century of corrosion.

  “Is that their baron or some kinda god?” a trooper asked curiously. The statue was of a man carrying a longblaster and powder horn, so it had to be a sec man of some kind. He’d seen hunters wearing the same kind of fringed clothing back east. The fringe waved in the breeze and helped keep off the flies and skeeters.

  “The great-grandfather of their baron, is more like it,” Delphi replied, running calculations inside his head. If the Boston Minuteman had been facing the southeast, then the main road should be to their right. Hopefully, the physics lab was still standing, or else this whole trip would be a waste. Delphi only had limited resources since being thrown out of Department Coldfire, and every failure threatened his very existence.

  Just for an instant, the cyborg relived the awful moment when a friend told him that the executive council had ordered his termination for the failure to retrieve the test subject, aka Doctor Theophilus Tanner. The occasional lack of success on a mission was to be expected in the chaos of the Deathlands, but Delphi had broken too many rules, slaughtered too many gene-pure people, in his mad quest for Tanner. All would have been forgiven if he had accomplished the task, but this level of failure meant his doom. Knowing he had only minutes in which to act, Delphi had reluctantly killed his friend and used his Ident card to raid the main warehouse for spare body parts and supplies, then established a supply cache at an abandoned redoubt. Now he walked the planet amid the dirty savages, posing as a trader, exchanging trinkets for food and buying the loyalty of men with guns and bullets, searching, hunting, committed to another desperate quest, this time to gain his own salvation.