Axler, James - Deathlands 64 - Bloodfire Page 19

  "No good," Ryan muttered, lowering the long-blaster.

  "Too bad about the Holland & Holland," Dean said, shifting the pack on his back to a more comfortable position. "You would have had the range with that."

  "But not the accuracy needed," Mildred stated. "A sniper weapon is a hell of a lot different from a standard longblaster, or an assault rifle."

  "Like a knife is to a scalpel, right?"

  "Exactly."

  Pulling out a plastic mirror from a pocket, Ryan debated trying to flash the Trader a message, but even if the man saw the reflected light, would he recognize the old codes or strike back instantly with a missile? Fireblast, he didn't even know if it was his Trader, or merely somebody new using the rep to do business. If that was the case, then a flashing light might be mistaken for blasterfire and bring down a shitstorm of lead their way. Best to stay low for the moment.

  "Let's get moving," Ryan ordered brusquely. "We can go into the desert, use the dunes as cover. Last place we want to be is between any war wags during a rocket fight without some steel covering our ass."

  Shuffling his boots in the sand, Dean frowned. "We just gonna leave?"

  "We should take to the high ground," Doc suggested. "Reconnoiter the situation from the top of a dune."

  "That's triple stupe," J.B. said bluntly. "Up high we'd be seen and catch a lot of lead. No, we stay low and leave. That's the smart thing. They are in wags and we're on foot. So let them fight it out, and we'll come back when the smoke clears and see who was the winner."

  "If there are any survivors, much less winners," Krysty added grimly, looking skyward. "Check up there."

  Craning his neck to follow her direction, Ryan saw the roiling storm clouds overhead were darker, more yellow than usual, and the ever present smell of acid rain was increasing. Nuking hell, a chem storm was coming and that changed everything. Down below the city was on fire, with a droid hunting them and muties everywhere. Up here were battling war wags and flat, open desert where the acid rain would easily catch them and strip them to bare bones in only a few screaming minutes. Damned if they tried to escape in any direction, that left only one choice.

  "If we're going get chilled, it might as well be on our feet," Ryan said, hefting his longblaster. "Double time, let's go see who is in that APC and convince them we need a ride."

  "And if Gaza?" Jak asked, massaging his aching left arm in its sling.

  "Then we take it away from him. Let's go."

  Chapter Seventeen

  Scuttling from the smoky shadows along the preDark road, a fat lizard paused on top of the wizened corpse of a construction worker, its three eyes darting about in different directions searching for predators.

  Wrapping a tentacle around his glass knife, Larry lashed out with the blade and the lizard's head was removed. Gushing blood, the body tumbled to the pavement, and a dozen other lizards charged from their hiding places to start tearing apart their fallen brother.

  Now Larry pulled hard on the rope and a net erupted from underneath the snowy layer of salt, and the pile of lizards was hauled wiggling into the air caught in the crude net.

  "Food!" Larry said in delight, rubbing his scaled stomach in delight. Carefully untying the net from the ropes, the mutant twirled it above his head several times and then brought it crashing down on the hood of a car, killing the lizards instantly.

  "Food," he mumbled again. He pulled a large piece of window glass from a leather pouch and cut the reptiles apart and stuffed the bloody gobbets of raw flesh into his lopsided mouth.

  "Good!" He chortled in happiness, then froze instantly at the sound of thunder.

  Ramming the rest of a lizard into his mouth and stuffing the others into his pouch, Larry loped through an alleyway filled with huge sections of the salt dome and crouched in the ornamental wrought iron fencing that edged a public library. When the sparkle white ground fell, all things in the desert rushed in to see.

  Much fighting, Larry remembered, and many things died. Larry and kin follow food into pit and hunting good. Until bad metal come. Two-legs try kill Larry with thunder sticks. Twice in the cold seasons he had been stung by black bees from booming sticks, much blood and pain. His mate died from black bee, child, too. And it been good child, Larry thought, no scales like parents, no claws. Two-legs would have thought it a norm aside from eyes. Norms had little eyes, not big like child, not see in darkness and know what animals think in head. Child had helped much in hunting, find big food Larry would kill with sharp glass across neck. Eat for week!

  Then two-legs with bad metal come into stone forest, Larry remembered, kill everything. But Larry stay. He wait for two-legs to not have thunder stick, then cut across neck with glass, use claws on belly and face. Bad metal take little ones away. Someday he get them, drink redblood. Then mate and child sleep peacefully. As the two-legs started his way, Larry retreated quickly. Loping across the pavilion, the mutie disappeared into the sewer, his rubbery tentacles lashing about like wild snakes until he was through the grating and gone from sight.

  ONLY MOMENTS LATER, moving through the jumbled ruins, Gaza led the way into the choking hot chaos. The smell of acid rain was a lot less noticeable down here, the thick smoke masking the smell of anything else in the atmosphere. Masked by the swirling black smoke were tall honeycombs of flame, burning buildings with fiery tongues lashing out every opening, a few structures reduced to only the twisted outline of the softening steel frames.

  Glowing ash drifted past the two people like a snowstorm in hell, the red hot residue floating on the thermal currents of the destruction, gray soot mixing with the sparkling cover of salt dust everywhere and turning the clean wintry appearance of the Texas city into filthy graveyard pallor. Softly in the background came the constant crashing of glass as window after window shattered from the pressure and heat, the shards and slivers raining down to smash onto the sidewalks and streets once more.

  Many of the corpses in the street were reduced to bones and shoes, their clothing removed by the sharp beaks of the buzzards and vultures to reach the dried flesh and organs. But the scavengers were starting to leave, abandoning the wealth of food to fly away and take roost into the windowless stores of the city, to start anew on other bodies. Only the millipedes in the street stayed, the insects unconcerned with the growing heat and the smoke.

  Staying well clear of the writhing bugs, Gaza and Kathleen kept in the open as much as possible and used their weapons freely. Time was pressing and ammo spent saved precious moments. A sudden flurry of movement at a sewer grating made the baron jerk back and fire a long burst from his M-16. The hardball ammo threw off sparks as it hit the corroded grating, but a few rounds passed through the small holes and something shrieked in the darkness. Echoing slightly, the cries faded as if retreating into the distance.

  "We're in a goddamn mutie pit!" Baron Gaza roared, dropping the spent clip and slapping in a fresh one. "Shoot anything that moves and let's haul ass!"

  Breaking into a stride, Kathleen braced the rapidfire at her waist and sent a spray of lead into a flock of buzzards in their way. Several birds dropped to the ground in a fluttering of feathers and gore, while the rest rose hurriedly into the gray sky. With some measure of satisfaction, Gaza was chilling the millipedes, grinding their bleeding forms under his boots. A scrawny desert rat darted from underneath a car to grab a juicy morsel of an aced bird, and Gaza contemptuously kicked it aside with a crunch of bones. The rodent flew across the street to impact on the front counter inside a shadowy store, then fell limply to the floor, blood dribbling from its slack mouth and both hind feet still twitching as it tried to escape.

  Brass arching in streams, the man and woman blasted a path through the feasting scavengers and reached the wire fence encircling the park only to find this section clear of anything living. It was as if they had crossed an invisible boundary that nothing was allowed to pass.

  Or was afraid to pass, Baron Gaza realized grimly. But the sec hunter droid was destroyed; he had
seen it crash and explode. There was nothing to harm them here. This was a safe zone in the middle of the hellish ruins. But no one ever got chilled by being too careful.

  "Stand guard," he ordered brusquely, walking sideways toward the nearest APC. It was just beyond a crashed truck, set between a huge Army tank and two crashed Hummers. "I'll grab the wires and we leave."

  Breathing deeply through her nose, Kathleen vigorously nodded in agreement as they proceeded past the tank. From the other side of the wire fence, hundreds of things seemed to be watching them, from the nooks and crevices of the city, as if hungrily waiting for the people to exit the park. Their hatred was palpable, like the beat of a powerful engine.

  In a thunderous roar, a building down the street sagged inward and started to collapse, pieces of rubble slamming to the street and smashing cars while others hit lower structures like flaming meteor strikes.

  Snapping her fingers for his attention, Kathleen twirled a single finger in the air, then made a fist.

  "Bet your ass I'll hurry," Gaza grunted in reply, then gestured a direction with his rapidfire. "Check the Hummer for any more of those rockets. We may need to blast our way out of here."

  She nodded and started that way as he worked the latch of the heavy rear door and slipped into the APC. The interior was almost pitch black, and he scratched a road flare to life, filling the wag with searing red light. A scorpion on the wall scuttled away, and Gaza thrust the flare at the creature, searing off its pincers and cracking open the shell. Thrashing wildly, the scorpion fell to the corrugated floor and started stinging itself in blind madness. Grimacing at the sight, Gaza deliberately stepped over the dying creature so that it would linger in agony as he proceeded deeper into the steel box.

  Gaza found the access panel near the turret. Placing the flare on an empty seat, he managed to force open the panel with one hand, the other filled with the M-16 rapidfire. Casting the lid aside with a loud clatter, he grabbed the flare and held it up, soon locating the needed wiring harness. Yes! Carefully as possible, he gently removed the connections and wrapped the harness in a clean piece of cloth before tucking it safely away inside a pocket. Okay, back in biz.

  Suddenly, there was a frantic thumping on the metal side of the vehicle. Rushing to the exit, the baron paused for a moment listening for danger before joining his wife outside. He was losing spouses at an unprecedented rate, but it was still better them than him.

  Kathleen now had another LAW slung over a shoulder and a pair of pressurized tanks strapped to her back, a vented blaster of some kind attached to the larger tank with a flexible metallic hose.

  "Rad-blast my ass, a preDark flamethrower!" Baron Gaza gasped in shocked delight at the find. "Does it still work? Fuel okay?"

  Hurriedly, Kathleen nodded, but also held a finger to her lips for silence. Gaza frowned at that until he heard a noise coming that chilled his blood. A weird combination of sounds unlike anything he had ever heard before, partially masked by the crackling of the flames and the crash of falling masonry. A sort of whirring mixed a horrible hooting. Stickies!

  Then coming around a nearby corner was a mutie fighting a machine—the sec hunter droid from before, or another that looked exactly the same. Could there be two? More? Dripping gore, the preDark machine was battling a stickie, the rubbery mutie charging at the droid uncaring of the whirling blades and snippers. Mindlessly, the feral creature seemed to be fighting on a visceral level, without much common sense of fear.

  The stickie was missing an arm, the blood running thickly down its side. Trying to move past the mutie, the droid charged with its buzz saw extending and the creature was sliced in two, the pieces dropping to the filthy street. But as the droid started forward, more stickies appeared, stepping out of a brick wall and the corroded side of a crashed bus.

  Thunder and lightning crashed in the sky as the muties raced over the corpses, their bodies changing color and texture, blending into whatever they were near. A startled buzzard brushed a stickie, and the thing's arm became covered with black feathers. Another tripped in a pothole landing atop a desiccated corpse not yet eaten by the scavengers, and as it rose the stickie began to blend into the mummified norm.

  Gaza couldn't believe what he was seeing, and Kathleen edged closer to the man for protection. Camou stickies. They had heard rumors from outlanders about such things but never really believed them until this moment.

  As the stickies attacked, the sec hunter droid slashed out with its buzz saw and scissors at the same time, striking in the opposite direction. The closest two stickies died horribly, and the gore splattered machine retreated again toward the convoy in the park. Sitting on the crumpled hood of a crashed car, a millipede hissed at the droid as it passed and was slashed apart by the flashing blades. Then more stickies attacked, slowing the machine by the sheer bulk of the bodies. One mutie got a good grip on a red lens and tried to pull it free, and the droid threw itself against a nearby truck, crushing the stickie's head. As the dead mutie released its hold on the droid, it fell to the street, its skin rippling in different colors and textures, the suckers moving like gasping mouths, until the humanoid went still and the skin become a dull pasty white like a drowned man long deceased.

  Longblaster in hand, Gaza sneered at the sight. Muties always seemed irresistibly attracted to machinery, fires, diesel engines and the like, but this time the machines were fighting back and chilling them in droves. The armored chrome of the droid was dripping with blood, feathers, pincers and a few suckers adhering to its blades as grisly trophies of combat.

  Making a guttural sound deep in her throat, Kathleen bumped him with a hip, urging the man to leave. Gaza agreed and eased around the APC, trying to keep its bulk between them and the approaching droid. Oddly, it didn't seem to be after the norms in particular. Mebbe it was merely returning to the tank where it had first been seen, like a guard on patrol. Suddenly, the baron had a strong urge to see what was inside the preDark war machine that needed such a high level of protection. Nukes? Nerve gas? But the danger of the droid was too great to risk a recce, and he followed his wife away from the imposing hulk of the huge preDark juggernaut, its titanic cannon resting against its armored prow and pointing uselessly at the ground. Or could it be the tank itself that needed guarding?

  Dimly the man recalled a memory from childhood when a similar machine had been found in the ruins of West Virginia. The local baron had called it a Ranger, and claimed it was a thinking war wag, as if a droid and an APC had been combined. The very idea of obtaining such a weapon made the baron slow his departure until shied onward by the urgings of Kathleen.

  Careful not to trip over the corpses on the pavement, the man and woman crossed the intersection keeping low behind the lines of cars and trying to stay out of direct line of sight of the droid. But then the tentacles of the unseen thing in the sewer made another grab for their boots and got Kathleen around the ankle. As she swung her AK-47 down to blast it away, Gaza knocked the weapon aside and slashed with a knife. The flesh was spongy and severed easily. Gushing piss-yellow blood, the amputated tentacle slithered away, as an inhuman mewling and gurgling issued from the dark sewers. The baron had no idea what kind of a mutie was under the city, but was resolved not to be taken alive by the thing. There was something unclean about it that disturbed the man.

  Keeping a finger on the trigger of his M-16, Gaza watched the sewer grating for any further movements as Kathleen got off the street by stepping through the smashed window of a store. He was right behind her, covering the rear.

  Inside the building, the two glanced about at a line of chairs standing before a long mirror, the walls covered with pictures of people with strangely cut hair.

  What the place could have been the baron had no idea whatsoever.

  Only yards away, the fight in the street was growing; more and more millipedes were arriving to feast upon the dead and the dying. And apparently summoned by the death cries of their own kind, more of the camou stickies were dropping off
the sides of buildings to land on top of the droid. Its blades tore them apart, but there were always a few suckers left behind on its hull, and the chrome ran thick with the mutie blood.

  Shambling past the open window, a brick colored stickie on the sidewalk turned to stare at the two norms, then lunged for them. Trapped, Kathleen fired a burst into its face, the impacts driving the mutie back against a car at the curb. But even as they watched, the bullet wounds in its chest began to close and the stickie started taking on the metallic sheen of the sleek preDark vehicle.

  Seemingly bemused by the combat, the corpse behind the steering wheel was sporting tinted sunglasses and a white silk scarf draped around a shriveled brown throat.

  As Kathleen fired again, Gaza lit another flare and shoved it into the stickie's left eye. Hooting in pain, the creature stumbled away, sucker covered hands swatting at the flaming stick sizzling inside its distorted face.

  Unfortunately, it had been too little, too late. The droid had heard the blaster shots and was heading their way fast, the millipedes and other stickies ignored at the appearance of the armed humans.

  "Aim for the eyes!" Gaza cried, slinging his M-16 over a shoulder and drawing his knife once more.

  As Kathleen hammered the oncoming machine with the hardball ammo of her AK-47, Gaza used a knife to cut the strap off her shoulder and free the LAW. Pulling out the pin, he extended the tube to its full length. The sights popped up on the front and the firing button was uncovered.

  "Watch the wash!" he warned, assuming a launching stance. Still shooting, Kathleen moved as far away from the man as she could.

  Flame vomited out of the aft end of the launch tube, filling the hair salon with a strident volcano that blew everything loose across the store with hurricane force. Almost faster than they could follow, the antitank rocket streaked away from the front of the tube on a contrail of smoke and sparks, the propellant obviously weakened over the long years. It started straight for the droid, then unexpectedly veered slightly and went straight past the machine to slam into the side of a millinery shop. An explosion shook the entire building and it collapsed, a tidal wave of bricks and cinder blocks cascading outward to bury the droid. For several long moments, the man and woman waited, watching for any indication that the droid was still operational. But nothing stirred under the tonnage of assorted debris, and soon they lowered their weapons.