by James Axler
“What the fuck are you doing?” Cranston stormed, then stopped as there was a sudden movement among the trees, and he had only a split second to react before a massive log suspended from thick ropes slammed into his chest with the force of a cannonball. Blowing guts out his mouth, the dead man was thrown off the bike and arched through the air to land sprawling in the pine needles as boneless as a bag of shit. Then rusty bear traps snapped shut with bone crushing force, the zigzag blades slicing off his hands and removing most of his thigh.
“We’ve been suckered!” Krury cried, firing his blaster blindly into the trees.
That was the cue for all of the bikers to cut loose with their weapons. In response, six more logs came swinging from the leafy tops, two missing the bikers completely, but the others smashing men and women from their saddles, the lifeless corpses hitting tree trunks with the sound of wet clothing.
Rising from behind a bush, Denver Joe sprayed the Devils with his blaster, blowing hot lead and flame at the coldheart holding the chain of the slaves. As the man stumbled backward pumping blood, the lead slave grabbed the keys off his belt and started fiddling with the locking mechanism.
“Son of a bitch!” Ballard cursed, firing at Denver Joe and then at the slaves. The first prisoner caught a round in the belly and doubled over, but the second snatched the keys before they touched the dirt and started on the lock again.
“Retreat!” Krury shouted, walking his bike around in a circle, but then another tree fell over, blocking the way again, and then a third, sealing them tightly into a killing box.
With the gang cut into two groups, panic took the Devils and they wildly wasted more lead as incoming rounds started slapping into the bikers, the sniper fire cutting them down like helpless old wrinklies. Both groups pulled their bikes into circles and took refuge behind the machines, trying to get a glimpse of the attackers. But the shadows were too thick, and the only signs were brief flashes of muzzle-fire, stabbing from the darkness in a hundred different locations.
“Nuking hell, how many of them are there?” a biker demanded, reloading frantically. Bullets hummed past the man, but he continued to shove fresh rounds into his longblaster with shaking hands. He knew that being scared didn’t chill a person, but freezing motionless in fear sure as hell did.
Flinching as a round scored her cheek, Dee shot back and growled, “What’s with this sniping shit? Why didn’t they just nuke us with more trees?”
“How the hell do I know? Mebbe they want our hogs!” Tatters cursed, grabbing Cranston’s fallen scattergun. Briefly, he checked the weapon, then triggered the 12-gauge at the hidden snipers as fast as he could.
Mostly just leaves went flying, then a man cried out and fell into view, his leg pumping blood. The bikers cheered, but then two of the Devils broke ranks and tried to make a run past the fallen trees. As they climbed on top, a machine gun opened fire, cutting them down. Just then a biker shouted in warning, and Krury turned to see the slaves escaping into the trees, Denver Joe waving them on to safety. Son of a bitch was a spy! If he ever got his hands on the mutiefucker, it’d take him a year to die on the Learning Tree!
Using a knife to slash open a saddlebag, Krury grabbed spare ammo from the tumble of supplies, then froze as he felt a tremor shake the ground. Underfoot, the pine needles began to dance about, the vibration slowly increasing until he heard a crashing noise and a huge armored wag rolled into view from down the path. Then another appeared in the opposite direction, the two transports covered with machine-gun ports and stubby cannons spitting flame.
“War wags! Use the Molotovs!” Krury shouted, then flipped backward as a burst from the hidden machine gun blew open his skull.
“Throw ’em now!” Tatters ordered, lighting a rag fuse and heaving the glass bottle over the fallen trees. Fireballs whoofed into existence from the Molotovs, and the gang heaved the firebombs in every direction until it seemed as if the forest was on fire.
Grabbing a bag of ammo from a dead friend, Tatters lead a charge into the billowing clouds of smoke, firing at anything in his way, trees, bushes, and chilling a startled slave. Crashing through the underbrush, the teen led the gang through a thicket, the thorns ripping every inch of exposed skin, only the thick leather sleeves on their raised arms protecting faces.
Something streaked through the trees to violently detonate in the leafy greenery, a tree blowing apart and sending out a lethal spray of flaming splinters. A biker dropped, the entire left side of his body riddled with burning debris. The Devil alongside the dying man grabbed his fallen blaster and took off running, leaving the mortally wounded man to gasp out his breath last alone in the bushes. Another biker tried to fire over a shoulder and ran face first into a tree, the crunch of bone was loud as a pistol shot. The limp manner she slumped to the ground was more than enough to indicate that the woman had just chilled herself.
Scrambling over a rock, Tatters paused to catch his breath as a familiar sound caught his attention. That was waves lapping on a shore. They had to be near the Nasay River!
Endless crashing sounded behind the gang, as the war wags tried to force their lumbering way through the thick growth of trees. Machine guns hammered steadily, tracer rounds stitching through the air over the racing bikers as they took off on an angle following the sound of the water.
Then the bushes abruptly stopped at the edge of a crest and there was the Nasay! A wide span of clear blue dotted with tiny islands. Knowing the heavy war wags could never follow them into the muddy river, the coldhearts threw themselves down the sloping bank, tripping over exposed rocks and roots, a few losing their footing. Splashing into the shallows, the bikers hastily waded for the deep water, the current tugging at their limbs constantly trying to drag them down.
As they reached the midspan, harsh illumination crashed across the river from a sandbar upstream and the Devils cursed to see two predark Hummers sitting on the hard-packed sand, brilliant halogen headlights fanning across the water.
“Get those lights!” Tatters cried, shooting his blaster. Then the handcannon jammed on a bad round and he bent to afford as small a target as possible while he struggled to clear the breech. Bastard reloaded bullet had blown, and the split brass had flowered in the ejector. Damn blaster was useless now.
Casting it aside, the teen abandoned the rest of his gang and dived into the water, trying to swim away while submerged. The chaos above became only flashes of light and muffled thumps. Hitting his head on a rock, the teen almost passed out and fought to stay underwater, trying to get around the obstruction, until his aching lungs forced him to surface. Gulping in a breath, Tatters saw a group of Devils cut to ribbons as the M-60 machine guns mounted on the Hummers cut loose, the heavy-duty combat rounds chewing a path of destruction across the river until reaching the men. Red blood spurted from a dozen wounds, and one man flipped over backward, hit by multiple slugs.
Now the shrubbery along the riverbank was smashed flat as a massive war wag parked on the slope, bright headlights crisscrossing the water, its forward machine guns swiveling about for fresh targets. Then a box on the roof opened wide exposing a bank of rockets inside.
Rockets? Tatters couldn’t believe his sight. It was like the old war stories the wrinklies told about. Who the bloody hell was after the gang?
The last handful of the Devils scattered at the sight, each going in a different direction. Machine-gun rounds chewed the river in sweeping patterns over and over again, as if supplied with unlimited ammo.
Diving under the water once more, Tatters tried to get across the swift current in the middle of the river, digging his fingers into the mud to crawl underwater until the teen thought his burning lungs would burst from the need for air. Then he felt weeds mixed with the mud and rocks and knew he had made it across. The sounds of battle were a distant murmur as the biker briefly raised his head to suck in a breath and continued desperately crawling into the reeds of the bank.
A broken slab of predark concrete jutted from the water,
and the biker put that between himself and the war wags. Go slow, stay low, and he might just live another day. Squirming on his belly through the black mud, Tatters startled a frog before collapsing upon a dry path of dirt.
“Made it,” he wheezed softly, the sound broken by a strained laugh. “Nuke me, fucking made it out alive!”
“Not quite, feeb,” a woman’s voice said, followed by the racking of a scattergun.
Looking in that direction, the biker saw a tall woman in clean clothing, holding the biggest shotgun he had ever seen. His blaster jammed, knife lost in the current, and too weak to try to ace the bitch, the biker knew he was trapped.
“Don’t shoot!” Tatters begged, weakly raising both hands. “I—I’m an e-escaped slave!”
“Bullshit,” she growled, walking closer until the cold metal of the weapon touched his flushed face.
“I k-know where the Devils store their slick,” he said hastily, cringing from the outlander. “Blasters, ammo, all ya can want. All ya can carry! It’s yours, just don’t ace me and it’s all yours!”
The tall woman curled a lip in disgust. “I don’t make deals with dead men,” she said, pulling the trigger. The barrage of double-aught buckshot blew off the top of his head in a horrid spray of bones and brains and blood. Mouth still working to plead for life, the corpse dropped into the mud, fingers wiggling and feet kicking in a pantomime of life. Racking the weapon, she aimed at his neck and fired again, finishing the job.
Wading across the river, the woman joined the people on the bank as they sorted through the corpses of the bikers, knives slashing every throat in ruthless efficiency. Splashing behind her, a Hummer fought over a tangle of broken tree branches and dead men, catching for a moment with its rear wheels spinning as it fought to finally get loose from the mud and surge onto dry land.
“Glad to see you’re alive, Kate,” a big man said as she joined him, his left arm tucked into his belt to keep it motionless. There was a bloody stain at the shoulder, but the red wasn’t spreading. It was just a flesh wound, one of many over a long life of fighting.
“I see you caught one, Roberto,” she said, pulling fresh shells from a looped bandolier of cartridges across her chest and shoving them into the scattergun.
“Bastards threw enough lead at us. Somebody had to get lucky,” Roberto said calmly, then added, “Or unlucky, depending on how you look at who got shot.”
“Well, don’t die on me yet,” Kate said, slinging the shotgun over a shoulder. “We got a long ways to go before this is over and done.”
He grinned. “With you all the way, Chief.”
Just then, the crowd of armed men and women on the shore parted and Denver Joe limped over, escorting a skinny man dressed in rags. Obviously one of the freed slaves from the condition of his feet.
Running stiff fingers through her wealth of golden blond hair, Kate greeted Denver Joe with a nod, which he returned. Tracking the signal of his transmitter had only brought the convoy to a mesa, but after that it had been no great trick to guess where the bikers would be heading next and cut them off in the forest.
“Nice to see you on this side of the grass, D.J.,” she said amiably. “Do we have a problem here?”
Denver Joe jerked a thumb at the man standing alongside. “Wants a favor,” he said.
“With your permission, Baron,” the man said with a bow.
Kate frowned. “Ain’t no barons here,” she drawled. “Whatcha need?”
The man glanced nervously toward the imposing war wag sitting high on the riverbank, its arsenal of blasters radiating visible waves of heat as they continued looking for targets.
“May I speak with him?” the man asked reverently.
“The boss took lead saving your ass,” she lied. “So he’s about to go under the knife. No visitors.”
“My prayers will be with him,” the man said, making some sort of symbol in the air with his hand.
Behind the thick tinted plastic of the dome, a figure sat tightly in a chair, dimly seen others moving around him. But the person in the chair didn’t seem to move at all.
“Yeah, well, it takes more than some coldheart lead to chill the Trader,” the woman said, then hawked and spit blood on the bedraggled corpse of a Devil.
Accepting the rebuff, the man was lead away to a Hummer where a man was passing out predark sneakers and MRE packs.
“And so the legend grows,” Roberto said softly.
“That’s what keeps us in biz,” Kate said, cracking a smile. “The more folks fear him, the less we’re attacked.”
With bloody water lapping at his combat boots, the man nodded. “True enough, I guess.”
“So what was the breakage?” Kate asked brusquely, starting up the bank toward War Wag One. The side hatch was open and an armed man was standing guard, watching their approach with an M-16/M-203 assault combo cradled in his hands. An ammo pouch on his belt was heavy with spare clips.
“Two of the bikes got shot up pretty bad, the rest are fine, Chief,” Roberto reported, then cursed as he slipped in the mud. Kate started to offer a hand, but held back as the man scowled darkly and righted himself.
“No casualties on our side,” he continued, as they reached the crest and got onto level ground. “But we lost a lot of the prisoners.”
“Damn,” Kate growled. “Okay, keep the broken bike for spare parts, then strip the dead. We’ll split the blasters and ammo with the surviving prisoners. They can have any of the Devil clothing they want, except the leather jackets. Those we keep. Then we’ll escort them back to that ville by the waterfall.”
“That’s two days out of our way,” he reminded her. “And we’re low as hell on fuel.”
She shrugged. “Can’t be helped. These poor bastards couldn’t hold off a one-legged chicken right now. We turn them loose here, and that is the same as acing them ourselves.”
“I’ll find room for them in the Hummers,” Roberto stated. “Wasting a lot of time, though.”
“Time we got,” Kate said, stepping through the open hatch of War Wag One. “But we needed those bikes to get control of that waterhole so we can cross the Great Salt.”
Yeah, it was always the same old battle, the man thought to himself, weight versus fuel. Hauling more water meant using additional fuel, which meant more fuel to carry so there was less room for water. And so on, and so on. It wasn’t the Core, or the muties, or the rad storms that kept them out of north Texas, it was the Great Salt, a flat featureless desert made of pure salt. He’d heard tell there was something similar way up north near Utah called the Great Salt Lake, but this was no body of salty water. Just salt, compressed hard as rock and stretching for more long miles under the blazing white sun than he liked to think about.
As the man and woman maneuvered through the ammo bins and humming comps filling the front of the big transport, the crew at the control boards and machine-gun blisters hailed them in passing. Vid screens showed views from all around the vehicle, and the radio crackled with the conversations of the guards on foot patrol. With all the nukeshit in the atmosphere, a radio couldn’t work for more than a few miles, but that was more than enough to give the convoy a fighting edge nobody else had in the Deathlands—communications.
Safe behind a tinted Plexiglas blister, Kate watched the busy crew at their tasks and said nothing.
“Okay, Jake, let’s get moving,” she ordered, slumping into a chair and draping a leg over the metal arm. “We got a lot of traveling before we can finally end this triple-cursed war permanently.”
“About time,” the redheaded driver growled, starting the big diesel engines of the armored transport. “That damn Scorpion God has needed chilling for a bastard long time.”
SLUGGISHLY, RYAN came awake clawing for his blaster. Then recalling what had happened, he released the weapon. Groaning loudly, he raised himself off the wall and sat with his shoulder against the roof. The interior of the sideways APC was dully illuminated by a reddish glow coming from through the starboard
vents and blaster ports. He could see the others laying crumpled nearby, slowly showing signs of life.
Rummaging for a candle on the wall, Ryan found one and carefully used his hands to squeeze the squashed wax back into shape before using a butane lighter to ignite the wick. As weak as the flame was, it brightened the interior considerably.
“Okay, we survived,” Ryan said quietly, wincing as the word sent daggers through his head. “Did they?”
“Damned if I know,” J.B. groaned, straightening his glasses. His beloved fedora was partially showing from underneath Mildred, but he made no effort to reclaim the hat. “Dark night, it feels like we did a bad jump and landed in a cement mixer that exploded.”
“Any damage, John?” Mildred asked, panting from the exertion of sitting upright.
“Nah, just bruised everywhere but my teeth.”
Extending a hand, Ryan help Doc to extract himself from a tangle of canvas webbing. “You okay, Doc?”
“I only injured my pride,” the scholar rumbled, straightening his rumpled clothing. “Running from a pack of overgrown bedbugs is hardly conducive to vainglorious edification. Gloria brevis!”
That was old talk, from before even skydark. Ryan rubbed his chin. “Which means what?”
“All glory is fleeting.”
“Yeah, but getting aced is forever,” the one-eyed man added grimly.
From the nose of the APC, Jak groaned. “My arm…”
Hurrying closer, Mildred checked over the albino teen. “It’s not broken, just dislocated,” she said. “You know what that means.”
“Fix,” he growled through clenched teeth.
Placing her boot in the youth’s armpit, Mildred took his limp arm by the wrist, gently turning it ever so slightly, then in one fast move pulled with both arms while shoving with her leg. There was a hard smacking noise and Jak bared his teeth from the intense pain, then relaxed to exhale deeply, gingerly flexing his fingers, then elbow.
“Th-thanks,” he gasped. “Better.”
