by James Axler
“Come on,” Ryan urged quietly. “Step outside and take a look.”
The two women, one blonde, one redhead, talked and pointed, spotting several sources for the plumes of smoke that were tangling together in the skies above Heaven Falls. The redhead stepped into the courtyard and paced a little way out to get a better look.
Unseen in the shadows, Ryan lifted his longblaster to his shoulder, shucking the blanket that had disguised it. He followed the redhead through the crosshairs, waiting until she was in line with the blonde at the door. When she was, he stroked the trigger on the weapon and a 7.62 mm bullet drilled from the barrel and hurtled through the air, piercing the redhead’s throat without pause.
The blonde looked up at the noise, turning as she saw her colleague drop to the ground.
Still hidden in the shadows, Ryan shifted his aim slightly, centered the blonde in the crosshairs and fired. He watched emotionlessly as she dropped to the ground in the doorway. Ryan lowered the Steyr and sprinted the fifty yards of open courtyard to the store-tower doorway. He could hear shouting coming from all around—people discovering the burning hives, maybe questioning the sound of his blaster shots that had echoed like cracks of thunder across the ville. He kept moving, hurrying through the open door, into the darkened, warren-like interior.
A woman was standing at the far end of the corridor. Ryan pulled his SIG Sauer P-226 handblaster from its holster and snapped off a shot, one-handed. The woman sank to the floor, her death barely seen in the unlit corridor.
Open doors ran along both sides of the corridor, Ryan realized. At the sound of his blasterfire, a head bobbed out from one of the doorways. Ryan raised his SIG Sauer, but the figure ducked back inside the storeroom.
“Get out,” Ryan shouted as he scrambled past the open doorway where he had seen the face appear. It was a woman, he saw now, dressed in a shift covered by a pale apron, its color difficult to discern in the poorly lit room. Behind her, lining every wall, Ryan saw the great clay containers of honey. “If you want to live, get out.”
The woman looked at Ryan, then at the SIG Sauer in his right hand, the scoped longblaster in his left. “Y-you can’t have blasters here,” she stammered, shocked.
“Out!” Ryan shouted at her, gesturing with the handblaster.
The woman stood defiant for a moment, so Ryan fired a shot over her head. The report was loud in the enclosed space, and the bullet penetrated a clay cylindrical vessel shelved at shoulder height. Ryan watched as honey began to drool from the holed vessel, while the apron-wearing woman finally took her cue to leave, sobbing as she tottered past him on suddenly unsteady legs.
“Right,” Ryan growled as he looked around the towering storeroom at all the clay cylinders of honey. “Time to shut down this sweet op.”
* * *
J.B. AND MILDRED approached the ville from the east, scrambling down the almost vertical rock face where the mountains met the fields. As they descended, they could see the plumes of smoke clouding the air, billowing in tufts from the burning hives.
“Looks like Doc’s been busy,” Mildred said.
J.B. looked around, searching for any sign of the old man. A scarecrow-thin figure was hurrying across an adjacent field, the tails of his coat flapping in the breeze. “There he is,” the Armorer said, pointing. “Go get him and meet me at the towers. Ryan should be there, and we have some last bits of business to conclude.”
Mildred agreed, and she sprinted across the field with the ZKR 551 target pistol in her hand. The time for stealth had passed—now there were only life-and-death decisions to be made.
* * *
SURROUNDED BY ALL that honey, Ryan was starting to feel giddy. The stuff was irradiated, produced from pollen that had been doused in the fallout of the nukecaust. It had spoken to him when he had believed the Regina and the society that she had created. But now— Now it made him feel light-headed and nauseous simply being this close to it.
Ryan looked around the storeroom, calculating how many rooms like this that the tower had to hold. Doc had said that there were probably six levels in all, and that three of them were almost full. There was enough honey here to feed a settlement the size of Heaven Falls for years—perhaps even a decade, if it didn’t spoil. They were stockpiling it—that was obvious. Perhaps they planned to take some with them when the Regina’s chosen ones left the hive to swarm. Perhaps they planned to dose up the entire Deathlands, make everyone see things from the point of view of the hive mind. Ryan and his companions had been in Heaven Falls two weeks, and in that time they had become subsumed by the strange culture that the Trai had created. It didn’t take much; a little longer and they never would have left, not even after J.B. had come to tell them what was happening. They would have just chilled him.
“Two weeks to lose your humanity,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head.
Holstering his handblaster and slinging the Steyr, Ryan paced over to one of the shelves and ran his hand along it. It was made of wood, and so was the wall behind, which meant once he got a blaze started, the whole place would go up in flames.
Ryan moved swiftly, checking the other rooms of the storage unit, searching for anyone else who might get accidentally caught up in the inferno he planned. He hadn’t come here to chill people. Whatever was going on in these folks’ heads, it wasn’t really them—he could vouch for that by his own experience, the way he had become docile and had very nearly turned on his oldest friend. He would chill if he had to, but he would not be a party to genocide.
Ryan reached the wall ladder and moved up into the second story of the storage tower.
* * *
MILDRED HAD BEEN joined by Doc, and they took a different route into the ville center. Around them, hives were burning, sputtering smoke into the air. Bees were exiting their hives in great clouds, their angry buzzing sounding like some colossal power saw cutting through the air.
Doc pulled his coat up over his head, moving in a crouch. “We have riled our insect friends,” he said, shouting to be heard over the buzzing.
“Just keep moving, Doc,” Mildred urged. “J.B. found enough explosives for all of us.”
As they hurried up the dirt trail toward the central towers, Jak appeared from a line of trees, having cut across the ville. “What happen?” he asked.
“The whole place is coming down,” Mildred told him, handing Jak detonators and several blocks of plas ex.
“What target?” Jak asked her as the three companions jogged up the dirt incline and reached the seven towers.
“Here and here,” Mildred said, pointing. “Doc, you take the one at the back. J.B.’s handling the central tower.”
“What about you?” Doc asked.
“Medical faculty,” Mildred told him. “Good luck.”
With that, the three allies split up, running toward their chosen targets. Mildred could not help but feel a pang of regret at having to destroy the medical tower. The Trai had developed such knowledge and insight. They had created a society of superbeings with the ability to heal quicker than a normal person thanks to their steady diet of honey, and had employed royal jelly to create the superfast Melissas. There was so much that Mildred could take from here, so much she still had to learn. She should save the Home....
No, she thought as she reached the medical building. That’s the honey talking, twisting my thoughts. It’s evil, pure evil. Insect reasoning trying to override my rationality.
She strode into the medical tower and saw Petra crossing the lobby.
“Mildred,” Petra gasped, “what’s going on out there? I heard screaming.”
Mildred raised her ZKR. “You’ll be hearing a lot more unless you get everyone out of here right now.”
Petra’s eyes boggled at the sight of the blaster. “You can’t—”
Mildred pulled the trigger, sending a single bullet into the floor between the woman’s feet. “Only the first one’s a warning shot,” she said. “If I shoot again, no amount of medicine will fix what will
be left of you. Got it? Now clear the faculty. You have two minutes.”
Petra ran, rushing to get everyone out of the medical tower.
* * *
J.B. APPROACHED THE central tower where the Regina made her home. Three Melissas stood guard there, including raven-haired Nancy. J.B. stomped toward them, shotgun in hand.
“Get out of here if you want to live,” J.B. snarled.
“Violator!” Nancy shrieked. “How dare you set foot in Heaven Falls after what you did to my sister-in-arms.”
J.B. wasn’t going to argue. He simply pulled the trigger, sending a wad of buckshot at the white-robed woman as she stepped from the doorway.
Nancy leaped, spinning through the air as the shotgun’s discharge raced toward her, passing over its deadly issue. She landed eight feet from J.B., and he snapped the trigger again as she danced toward him. Nancy slipped past the blast with a fraction of an inch to spare, the shot peppering the side of the Regina’s white tower.
The other Melissas were out of the tower now, too, running at J.B., a fourth one joining them from wherever she had been posted within. People peered down from the overhead walkways, dismayed by all that was happening in their peaceful, ordered community.
J.B. ducked as Nancy leaped at him, her right leg sweeping up to kick his head. Had it met, J.B. had no doubt that the blow would have taken his head from his shoulders; as it was, his reaction time was just enough to slip him beneath its punishing blow.
The Melissa followed up with a second kick, pivoting on her right leg as it met the floor and snapping out with her left. J.B. grunted as Nancy’s heel met him high in the chest, sending him lurching backward. He stroked the M-4000’s trigger again, sending another burst of shot at his attacker.
Nancy weaved in place, letting the wide burst of fire zip past her by the slimmest margin. Then the other three Melissas were with her, swarming on J.B.—swarming like angry bees.
Chapter Thirty-Two
And then everything started to blow up.
Black smoke poured from the honey storage tower and, simultaneously, two of the nearby towers exploded, their bases erupting into flame.
J.B. was thrown to the ground by the force of the blasts, and around him all four Melissas tottered and fell as if caught in an earthquake.
Seconds later, the Regina emerged from the palace tower in a sweep of yellow-and-black robes. “What is happening?” she shrieked. As she did, her eyes swept across the panorama of devastation—the Melissas, her personal guard augmented by the powers of royal jelly, lying on the ground amid billowing trails of smoke, the flames licking at the lower levels of two of the nearby towers, the dark smoke emanating from the precious honey store.
“My honey!” she cried, her eyes fixing on the last of these. “My...honey!”
Lying on his back in the dirt, J.B. struggled to make sense of things. He saw the Regina moving in a blur of yellow and black toward the honey store, and he took a moment to fire his shotgun. The Regina leaped the discharge without even turning, her awareness augmented to superhuman levels by her constant imbibing of the irradiated honey. Out of ammo, J.B. watched her go, her long golden skirts trailing behind her like a pointed tail, the black stripes running up her slender body.
Then Nancy recovered from where she had fallen, and she stomped toward J.B. as he reloaded the M-4000.
* * *
INSIDE THE HONEY store, Ryan ran a flaming torch along the wooden walls of the lower level, setting light to everything he could as he backed toward the exit. The torch was made from the blanket he had used to disguise his Steyr, wrapped around a hunk of wood he had broken from a door frame in one of the rooms. He had already been through the whole storeroom, checking to confirm there were no other people working there, and had tipped as much of the honey from the clay containers as he could without slowing his pace. Now black smoke billowed all around, flames licking the wooden walls, and the whole atmosphere was heavy with the cloying sweetness of warmed honey.
Ryan could still make it out through the main door. He had plotted a route before starting the fires, moving backward through the tower, ensuring that the space behind him was not alight. But the fire was spreading fast, running up the walls and sending red-gold tendrils into the final corridor.
There was a pop as the flames caught a knot of wood close to Ryan’s ear, and a burst of sparks spit across the floor. He had done what he could; it was time to go.
Tossing the flaming torch into the open doorway of the closest storage room, Ryan turned. He saw her immediately—the woman in the yellow-and-black dress, marching down the warren-like corridor toward him as black smoke painted the air. The Regina had arrived to save the honey or to chill the man who had destroyed it.
“Violator!” the Regina railed. “After all I have given to you and your friends, you spurn my love. After all I gave, without asking a thing in return.”
“You asked everything,” Ryan told her. “You asked for our humanity, our will, our very souls. You’re just too caught up in the mind poison to see it.”
“You’ve destroyed what it has taken years to build and to harvest,” the Regina thundered, blocking the narrow corridor. Ryan’s only exit was past her, through her.
“We’re saving you,” Ryan told her, “from a fate you can no longer comprehend.” As he spoke, he reached for the SIG Sauer holstered at his hip.
“Saving?” the Regina snarled, gesturing to the flames. “With destruction? This is the way of the old world, Ryan, not our glorious new age. The days of destruction are over—harmony shall rule humankind.”
“Your glorious new age is at an end, your highness,” Ryan said, raising the SIG Sauer to target the Regina. “Aborted before it can spread any further.” He fired, sending a single 9 mm Parabellum bullet at the Regina’s forehead.
The Regina blurred, her head moving so swiftly to avoid the bullet that it seemed as if there were three of her standing in the smoke. Then, in less than a heartbeat, she had traveled the length of the burning corridor and was on top of Ryan. He gasped, seeing the blur of the woman’s arms as they cleaved the air to bat his SIG Sauer aside.
* * *
MILDRED PLACED THE charges the way J.B. had shown her, depositing them around the medical tower working from the center outward and targeting the major support beams. She set the timer for ninety seconds.
As the timer began its countdown, Mildred took one last look around the lobby. It was sterile in its cleanliness, free of dirt and debris. The Trai had found something special here, used it to the advantage of everyone, securing wonderful health for all. But it had come at a price—the lost of their individuality.
For a moment Mildred wondered if she might take some of the medicine from one of the rooms with a view to studying it, synthesizing it, perhaps recreating it. But no. It had to be destroyed. Everything here had to be destroyed. It was the only way to be sure they had stopped the evil from spreading.
Mildred stepped from the tower as the timer reached sixty seconds and ran out into the burning plaza beyond where the other towers were beginning to crumble in on themselves amid eight-foot-high flames.
It was over. Heaven was falling down.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE VILLE walls, Ricky was preparing to set light to the last of the hives, covering it with a liquid accelerant he and J.B. had found in the redoubt. Behind him, eleven hives belched dark smoke into the air in trailing streamers, their occupants burning up within, just a tiny percentage escaping the fury of the infernos.
As Ricky finished smothering the last hive with accelerant, two Melissas sprinted toward him from their sentry post at the ville gates. Ricky remembered the altercation in the redoubt, remembered everything that J.B. had told him about these women and their phenomenal speed, and he whipped off two quick shots from his Webley, shooting straight from the hip.
One Melissa went down, her flowing white robes fluttering around her like fog. But the second seemed to jump over the bullet meant for her,
leaping high in the air and coming down just feet from where Ricky stood.
“¡Madre di satanás!” Ricky breathed, and he fired again, sending another .45 slug toward the beautiful, pale-skinned woman.
The Melissa stepped back, flicking her left hand out in a move that resembled a judo chop. Ricky heard a whip crack of air, and suddenly his bullet was zipping uselessly away in a new direction where the woman had knocked it from its trajectory.
“Impossible,” Ricky muttered, raising the Webley and reeling off another shot. He moved the weapon left and right as he fired two bullets at the fast-moving woman.
Kicking one heel against the ground, the Melissa leaped up and over Ricky’s head. As she did so, one of the bullets clipped her right leg and a trail of blood followed as she soared through the air.
Spinning to follow her, Ricky threw the last of the accelerant at the Melissa as she landed beside the hive. At the same time, he pulled the trigger of his blaster again, sending another bullet screaming from the chamber—but this time he aimed not at the Melissa but at the ground where he had spilled the accelerant. The bullet struck the accelerant and, before the superhuman sec woman could even register what was happening, she lit up like a human torch, shrieking in untold agony.
Ricky stepped back from the blaze, watching as the woman went up in flames. She stumbled on unsteady legs for a moment before crashing into the beehive. The accelerant on the beehive caught fire in an instant, and suddenly the conflagration was doubled, turning from the single figure of the flaming Melissa into a funeral pyre. The burning forms of bees rushed at the woman as their artificial nest blazed, stinging her before crashing to the ground as blackened husks.
