Axler, James - Deathlands 63 - Devil Riders

by Devil Riders [lit]

  The alarm bell on the roof of the brick building started clanging once more and the sec men rallied to the sound, rushing to their posts on foot and horseback, waving their blasters and crossbows.

  With only his personal bodyguards staying close, Gaza stood on the stoop of the imposing keep and looked across the roofed ville. The one location he ignored was the temple. Only feebs would dare to venture to that place. His secrets were safe there. Now where could the outlanders be hiding? Where?

  From the barred windows of the keep, the wives of the baron watched the tableau below. Their fingers wove silent words to one another as they discussed what was happening, and how best to make it serve their needs.

  PAUSING AT THE temple door, the companions checked their blasters before entering the corridor that lead to the front exit.

  "Okay, got any idea yet how we're going to get out of the ville?" J.B. asked, racking the scattergun to exit a shell and then thumbing it back into the feeder slot. It was a habit he had developed recently to spread the lubrication inside the weapon and make sure it was feeding smoothly when there was going to be fighting in the desert. He knew how badly sand and blasters mixed.

  "We blow up the temple as a distraction," Ryan said, "then escape in the confusion."

  "That should do it." The Armorer grinned and pulled out an implo gren. "I can rig all three to go simultaneously. That'll level this whole place."

  "Save one to remove the gate," Krysty advised. "Blood is the only way they're going to let us leave."

  "Gotcha."

  "Wait a moment," Doc cried, feeling the empty holster at his hip. "Has anybody seen my LeMat?"

  Dean gestured at the dead men on the floor. "They didn't have it," he answered, then pulled a big bore revolver from his belt. "Want one of their wheelguns? No reloads, but it's better than nothing."

  "I suppose that would be wise," Doc stated, then frowned. "No, wait a moment. I remember somebody placing it inside a black statue, saying they would get it later."

  "Statue?" Jak asked, glancing at the fiberglass scorpion dominating the altar.

  "Hiding it from Hawk to keep for themselves, is what he meant," Ryan said, washing the light of the nukelamp along the side walls. "There's going to be chilling, so we need every weapon. Let's find it quick."

  In the clear beam of the headlight, the companions started back for the giant scorpion, then noticed a series of shallow alcoves lining both walls. Normally in a predark church those were filled with statues of Christian saints, but held the squat somber figures of iron maidens. Resembling a metal statue of a fat woman, the iron shells were actually hollow and hinged to open like a clam shell, the interior covered with sharp spikes. When a prisoner was forced inside and the hatch closed, the spikes would only penetrate their flesh a little bit, making even the slightest move in any direction yield untold agony. The victims often went insane after only a few days and threw themselves at the spikes to end their lives but slowly bleeding to death. Both Mildred and Doc knew that even the legendary Torquemada had considered them cruel machines and only used the iron maiden on his worst enemies.

  "Which one was it?" Dean asked, studying the line of dark figures.

  "That I do not recall," Doc rumbled. "My attention was elsewhere."

  Feeling the pressure of the enemy outside the temple, Ryan started for the closest device. "Dean, start on the left, Doc take the right."

  Going to the first iron maiden, Ryan saw a pair of wrinkled eyes staring back from the viewing slit in the metal face. Dried and lifeless, the corpse inside was long dead. The next few held only skeletons. Across the temple, the others were having a similar lack of success.

  Then peering inside an iron maiden, Ryan saw it was empty. What's more, the spikes weren't in evidence. Grabbing the handle, he twisted the locking bolt free and there was no sound, the metal well oiled. Suddenly alert, Ryan braced himself and was in front of the torture device when it started to swing aside. He stopped it purely as a precaution. A heartbeat later something slammed into the metal, knocking him backward. Even as Ryan drew his blaster, the door continued to swing open wide and a smashed wooden arrow fell to the floor with a clatter. Weighed on an angle, the oiled hatch swung closed once more with a muffled boom.

  A boobie! The torture device was rigged with a trap to keep people out? What sense did that make? Unless it was a lot more than it seemed.

  "Pass me the light," Ryan ordered.

  J.B. handed over the second nukelamp, and Ryan opened the hatch just enough to slip the light inside on the floor. Then closing the door, he carefully put his good eye to a viewing slot and saw the back swing open wide for a moment onto a brick lined passageway and then close once more.

  "Found a hidey-hole," Ryan announced to the others. "I'm going to do a fast recce."

  "At your back," J.B. said, leveling the shotgun.

  Pulling open the door again, Ryan stayed well clear but no arrow was launched this time. Had to be a one-shot boobie. Retrieving the lamp from the floor, the man hunched over to fit inside the infernal machine and braced himself as the door swung closed. There was a subdued click, and the back opened wide as it had before and he stepped through into a room filled with boxes and barrels and crates. It was an armory, with racks of longblasters lining the walls, and multiple shelves stuffed full of plastic jars of loose ammo, the rims sealed with wax to keep out the air.

  On a table directly before the secret entrance was the LeMat pistol. Laying alongside was an empty crossbow, the trigger rigged with a copper wire feeding through iron guides thick with grease and leading to the iron maiden.

  Then the device clicked impotently, trying to release an arrow that wasn't there, and the back of the maiden swung aside, admitting an Uzi machine gun held by J.B.

  "You okay?" the Armorer asked, peering around. "Son of a bitch, it's the baron's private armory!"

  "Looks like," Ryan agreed. He picked up the LeMat and tried to tuck it into a pocket, but the Civil War blaster was much too heavy, so he stuffed it into his belt instead.

  "I'll rig this open and get the rest in here," J.B. said, slinging the Uzi and grabbing some rope from a peg on the wall. Then he realized it was sticky with some sort of glue and covered with black dust. It was a fuse! And just about the worst one he had ever seen. The local armorer had no idea what the hell he was doing. Just a rank amateur.

  Ryan found extra arrows and placed them next to the crossbow while J.B. tied back the interior door, then opened the outer half of the shell and beckoned the rest of the companions over. Soon, they were spreading throughout the armory, looting the place of everything useful. The very best longblasters were grabbed by Krysty, Mildred and Jak along with bandoliers of shiny brass ammo, while Ryan and J.B. smashed open the sealed jars and passed out handfuls of different ammo to each person. Dean kept his crossbow, in case there was more silent chilling to be done, but he grabbed a plastic predark quiver full of bolts with razor sharp tips.

  After checking his LeMat for any damage or tricks, Doc tossed aside the dead guard's crude blaster and returned the Civil War piece to its holster, then began his own recce for ammo. However, while there was a lot of black powder for the homemade scatterguns and muzzle loaders of Rockpoint ville, there were no primers anywhere to be found. Apparently they used rimfire cartridges to set off their shotguns loads. A clever move, but useless for Doc since he needed percussion nipples for the LeMat. After filling his ammo pouch with a good pound of black powder, cloth wads and lead balls as a reserve, Doc then chose a massive Webley .44 revolver from the assortment of blasters on display. He had used this type of wheelgun before and found it to be a satisfactory substitute for the LeMat. The bullets were loaded with black powder, and the lead shiny smooth, showing it was also homemade. Predark rounds were always steel-coated, or copper-lined to prevent fouling the barrel.

  Draping a gun belt over his chest, Doc flinched as the leather pressed against his raw back and he was forced to buckle the holster around his waist.
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br />   Oddly, with a gun on each hip he found the configuration quite comfortable.

  "This must be a bolt-hole," Dean said slowly, testing the draw on the bow. "A place to stage a rally against invaders."

  "Bad spot get trapped," Jak growled. "One door."

  "Bull," Ryan stated, cracking his knuckles. "No baron would ever box himself in where he could be starved to death. There's another exit somewhere."

  "Probably hidden like the door," Mildred said, laying aside a British made Hollands & Hollands .475 Nitro Express rifle.

  The huge rifle had to have been the toy of some Texas millionaire and was in excellent condition, with a whole jar of the thick blunt-nosed cartridges. But the Nitro Express simply had too much power for the physician. Without most of the tools she had trained with in the predark days, the woman had only her bare hands to perform meatball surgery. Fighting to control the recoil of the .475 would strengthen her hands and lessen her delicate sense of touch. Killing enemies with the Nitro Express would render her able to save friends. The incredible irony of the matter almost made Mildred laugh and weep at the same time.

  "Want to swap?" Krysty asked, proffering a .30-30 Remington longblaster. The barrel had been modified to receive a slotted bayonet at the front, the edge of the blade was feathered from a recent sharpening.

  "Sure?" Mildred asked, accepting the lightweight hunting rifle.

  Krysty easily worked the thick bolt on the heavy Hollands & Hollands and slid in a fat half-inch-thick round, closing the massive breech with a solid, satisfying clack. "Absolutely," she said grimly. She hated to chill anything, but when blood was necessary, Krysty did the job ruthlessly as any coldheart. It was a simple matter of survival.

  "Dark night, we have enough stuff here to level this place," J.B. said, packing a coil of homemade fuse into his munitions bag, along with an assortment of items, including three predark grens. They were only concussion models, designed to knock out people with a deafening boom, not the deadly antipers that threw off bits of shrapnel. But anything would chill folks in the right hands.

  "The baron has really been holding out on his troops if they're armed with homemades and he has blasters like this in storage," Ryan said, lifting the lid of a steamer wag to find it full of cedar wood chips and belted links of fat brass. "Check this— 25mm belted ammo. I think the baron has a cannon somewhere."

  "Mebbe keep?" Jak suggested, sliding rounds into the side port of the Winchester.

  "Yeah, on the roof, most likely," Ryan agreed. "That's where I'd put it to get the best field of fire. Cover the whole ville from up there." Dropping the linked ammo, the man moved to a wall rack and started to rummage for 7.62 mm rounds for the Steyr, but so far nothing and he was dangerously low. He might have to grab that other Winchester.

  Then Ryan saw the shockingly white stock of a U.S. Marine Corps M-14 and hurried closer. He knew the M-14 was a ceremonial rifle used in parades and military reviews for the predark prez. However, it used the exact same caliber as the Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle. Pulling down the rifle, Ryan opened the 20-round clip and found it full of greasy hardball brass. Back in business!

  Going over to the trunk full of belted ammo, J.B. pulled a knife and started to open the wide 25 mm shells to carefully extract the tiny C-4 charge inside the warhead. Some of the plastique was only a dried lump, but most of it was still soft to the touch, and still as volatile as the day it was made a hundred years ago. Soon he had a small mound of the material and started using his palms to press it into crude blocks. Pulling a shower curtain salvaged from the redoubt out of his backpack, Dean passed it over and the Armorer cut it into squares to wrap the C-4 nice and tight.

  "We don't need to waste an implo gren now to get through the front gate," J.B. said confidently. "One of these blocks will blow that out of the wall like kicking a knothole."

  "Prep one as a scuttle," Ryan said, slipping spare 9 mm rounds into the loops of his gun belt. "We'll get rid of that plastic scorpion and Gaza's private stash in one move."

  "Make a hell of a distraction, too, if we time it right."

  "Sounds good. Help me with that barrel of black powder, will you?"

  While the two men got to work, Mildred continued sorting through some tools on a workbench, hoping to find a replacement for her lost scalpel, when she spied an ancient binder tucked into a shelf and blew off the dust to read the faded cover.

  "Rockpoint Water Storage Relay Station Nine," the physician read aloud in amazement, flipping through the yellowed pages of the operations manual. "So that's why the ville is here. This used to be a pumping station for a major city. Water shortage my ass."

  "Which means that isn't an artesian well attached to the fiberglass scorpion," Krysty said, practicing to reload the Hollands & Hollands. "There must be a feeder pipe somewhere."

  "Not matter," Jak declared, checking the play of a Winchester lever action rifle.

  There had been a lot of .38 long cartridges for the short barreled longblaster, and it was in prime condition without a sign of rust or corrosion. A lot of folks would fire weapons and then store them away without cleaning, only to return a month later to find the dampness in the air had combined with the residue of the powder to form a kind of acid that ruined a blaster. Mildred had told him the name of the chem, but it slipped his mind at the moment. Carbolic, or something. But there was none of that on the Winchester, which shone with oil.

  "No, we can use that to our advantage," Ryan countered. "Let's find that feeder pipe."

  Following a blurry map in the manual, Mildred led the group through the armory into a back room, the doorway damaged in spots where the door had been forcibly removed. Inside was a huge steel pipe rising from the ground and doubling back down again. There were some meters and a wheel valve on the pipe, along with a small diameter bleed rod that went into the brick wall and out of sight.

  "Straight up the ass and out of the mouth of the Scorpion God," Ryan said. "Gaza controls the water from here, turning it on for the faithful, and off for the people he doesn't like."

  "Surprised he hasn't declared himself a god yet," Dean said, showing a surprising understanding of the situation.

  "Probably will someday," his father stated. "Bastard of a way to rule a ville. A brave man will charge blasters, but thirsty people will do anything to get a drink of water."

  Checking a toolbox on the sandy floor, J.B. used a cloth to wipe the condensed moisture off a pressure meter. "Dark night! This valve is holding back over fourteen tons of pressure. There's enough water here to flood that whole ville. Wash it clean off the map."

  "Over here!" Krysty cried out, waving.

  In the corner of the pump room was a predark iron ladder bolted to the brick wall leading to a hatch set into the concrete ceiling.

  "Let's check outside," Dean said eagerly, reaching for the ladder.

  Pulling the boy back, Ryan said, "Remember, these folks like traps."

  Using his panga to probe the way, Ryan found razor blades attached to the center of the first couple of rungs. Anybody grabbing in a hurry would have sliced off fingers under their own weight. Checking carefully every foot of the way, he reached the ceiling and forced open the hatch. A warm wind blew into the armory, carrying the sound of the alarm bell still stridently ringing and clanging, and raised voices shouting in the distance. Crawling onto the roof, Ryan stayed low until he was sure there were no guards present, then worked his way to the edge and slowly stood to see the whole ville.

  Rockpoint was in turmoil, torches moving along the top of the wall and cries rising from everywhere below the rippling canopy across the ville. The light of the wag could be seen from the top of the temple in the distance, distorted shadows on the adobe wall showing the barn was occupied. But whether it was Sparrow looting the wag, or ville sec men setting a trap was unknown.

  "Everybody but the gaudy sluts out looking for us," J.B. said, pulling out his Navy scope and peering through. "And I'll be damned if they might also be hunting for us."
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  "Something sure put a round up the baron's ass," Ryan agreed, leveling his longblaster. "And Gaza doesn't even know about the temple yet."

  "Might be because we have blasters," Dean suggested, joining the adults.

  "Or type of blasters," Jak said, gesturing at the Uzi machine gun. "Some villes never seen rapidfire. Only legend."

  "That must be it," Krysty said softly, crouching low in the roof shadows. "Our blasters. They think we're spies for Trader."

  Cradling the Steyr in both hands, Ryan scowled at the notion. "Fireblast! That makes sense. Okay, get back in fast before we're seen."

  Quickly and silently, the companions scrambled down the ancient ladder back into the pump room, but as Krysty started to leave she felt compelled to look toward the keep rising above the ville, as if something were forcing her attention there. Then the urge was gone, carried away by the chill desert wind.

  The last to leave the rooftop, Ryan left the locking bolt open to speed their escape. A plan was already forming in his mind, something he had never done before. But it seemed like their only chance to leave this pesthole without fighting Gaza and Hawk.

  "Okay, new plan. Jak, help J.B. to rig the feeder pipe to blow when somebody enters this room. Krysty, Dean, buy us some time by using the shackles from Doc's table to chain the locking bar on the front door in place. Make it triple-hard for them to get inside. Mildred, give them cover."

  "And I, sir?" Doc demanded. The man hadn't joined them in the brief sojourn onto the rooftop, and was using his ebony stick as a cane when he thought nobody was watching. Ryan didn't blame the man. A whipping took a lot out of a person, left him feeling bruised deep inside as if he had rad sickness. It was a testament to the old man that he was up and moving.

  "Sit and rest, Doc. We're going to be moving fast soon, and you will only get us chilled moving slow," Ryan directed, then saw a determined look of indignation grow on the scholar's face.