End Program

by James Axler

  He moved past the metal man and tried the door handle.

  Locked.

  No surprise there.

  “Safe now,” Jak said, pressing his face close to the door so he could be heard.

  The voice that came back was quiet, breathless. “Help us.”

  “You lock in?” Jak asked, trying the handle again. As he did, he glanced back over his shoulder, watching the way the flames were charring the walls of the corridor just beyond the little bathroom.

  “We can’t...open...” The voice trailed off, weaker with every syllable until it couldn’t be heard at all.

  The bikers had locked them in then, or something like that. Maybe they had locked themselves here for their own safety, but the lock had broken or the door had warped with the heat.

  Jak pushed his shoulder against the door, twisting the handle and pressing his weight against it, feeling for movement. Yeah, it still had a little give, there at the top and the bottom, either side of the lock itself.

  “Stay back,” Jak called, shouting to be heard over the spit-hiss-crackle of the flames.

  The reply was a whimper, that was all.

  * * *

  THE BIKES CAME FAST, blazing around both sides of the farmhouse and bearing down on Ricky as he crouched in the dirt.

  Ricky fanned the trigger of his Webley three times, sending a stream of shots at the approaching bikers as they raced around the corner closest to him. He should conserve his bullets, he knew, but conserving bullets and staying alive sometimes didn’t go together so well. Right now he was surrounded and outnumbered, with a burning building to his rear and a burning field as his only escape route.

  Behind him, two bikes bumped over the ground, weaving past their fallen comrade as they raced toward Ricky. The youth spun, sending a .45 ACP blast at the woman riding the lead bike. She had long brown hair trailing down one half of her head while the other side was shaved almost bald. She laughed as Ricky’s shot went wide, ducked low in the saddle as he loosed another blast in her direction.

  Three bikes were emerging from the other side of the building, fanning out as they tore around the corner, blocking the space between the burning building and the blazing field. Two of the riders held flaming torches, one posted pillion behind the tattooed driver, the sound of engines cutting the air like a swarm of angry honeybees.

  Ricky blasted again, sending another bullet at the trio of bikers roaring toward him. He watched as it struck the central rider’s cheek, and gasped as it pinged away with a flash of sparks.

  * * *

  IN THE BATHROOM with the metal man, Jak kicked out at the locked door, his booted foot slamming hard against it at the high point of the handle. The wood snapped with a splintering noise, creating a small round hole above the handle, two inches across.

  “Back!” Jak instructed before moving forward and kicking out again.

  Slam! His foot struck the door beside the handle.

  Slam! Again, and this time a great chunk of the door fell away when he drew his foot back.

  Jak gave it one more kick, watching dark lines appear in the wood like streaks from a painter’s brush where it was cracking. Then he ran at it, shoulder first, colliding with the locked door like a runaway freight train.

  The door tumbled forward, its lock shattering in a wrench of metal and splintering wood, hinges straining and ripping from the frame.

  Then Jak was in the next room, recovering himself as the door sagged on its remaining hinge, caught at a forty degree angle to the floor.

  It was a smaller room, less than half the size of the bathroom and it featured a chamber pot attached to a wooden seat. The room was filling with smoke, paint peeled down the wall that abutted the corridor and the tiny window was so black with smoke it was like looking out into the night. Three people crouched in the corner of the tiny room behind the commode, a straw-haired woman holding a baby and a youth in his teens, with long, dark hair that fell over his face. They looked up at Jak fearfully, their faces red with the heat.

  “Go,” Jak said, shoving the ruined door back on its single hinge.

  The youth looked at Jak through the curtain of his long bangs. “Are they still here?”

  Jak shrugged. That didn’t matter; they would die if they stayed here, that’s all he knew. “Go,” he said again, this time more forcefully.

  The youth stood, helping the woman unsteadily to her feet. She swayed as if she was drunk, and Jak guessed she was light-headed from the smoke.

  “Do this.” Jak showed the lad, pulling the top of his raised shirt down then hitching it back up until it covered his nose. “Go quick.”

  The youth copied Jak and so did the woman, traipsing out of the toilet area and into the bathroom. Once they reached the corridor, Jak heard them cry out in surprise.

  “The whole place is on fire,” the youth said. Jak figured he had been the voice he had heard through the door. “We can’t—”

  “Can,” Jak said, pushing him onward with one hand until he staggered into the corridor. “Only death here.”

  The youth glared at him, then took the woman’s hand—probably his mother—and pulled her out into the corridor as flames licked at the walls.

  “Who else?” Jak asked, keeping pace with the threesome.

  “Betsy,” the youth replied, “my dad, Trev—he works the farm—”

  “Not matter,” Jak interrupted. “How many?”

  Jak could see the teen doing the quick count in his head. “Twelve, plus the baby,” he said.

  “Eleven then,” Jak said. “Nine now.”

  Jak didn’t say anything else, as he moved down the corridor, checking the doors. The youth and the woman watched him for a moment before darting down the burning staircase.

  “Find them,” the youth pleaded.

  Jak nodded. “Not promise,” he replied.

  * * *

  METAL ON METAL. That was the burst of sparks that Ricky had seen when his bullet hit the lead biker, he was sure of it. It had that same blue tint that he had seen in his uncle’s workshop, when Tio Benito had struck the bent barrel of a useless blaster with his hammer to try to force it back into shape.

  Then, just like the first biker, this one had metal in his face, behind the skin, there below the eyes. What the hell was he fighting here? Who were these people?

  But there was no time to think about that now. Ricky was surrounded, hemmed in on all sides as the motorcycles roared toward him across the dirt patch behind the farmhouse. Ricky fumbled in his pocket for another moon clip, broke open his blaster and reloaded in scant seconds. He brought up his blaster for another shot, knowing full well he could not win—not against so many enemies, not on his own like this. He glanced at the farmhouse, hoping—wishing—that Jak would emerge—but he didn’t.

  Bike engines roared. Cruel laughter resounded through the air, coupled with the cackling taunts of the bikers and their women.

  The lead bike’s engine growled like an animal as it raced the final few feet toward Ricky, crouched in the lee of the burning building. He saw the biker’s cruel sneer, saw the sadistic rage in the man’s eyes, saw the silver streak of metal where his bullet had struck and achieved nothing. The two other bikes ran to either side, just a couple of feet behind the leader. Ricky pushed himself back, squeezed the Webley’s trigger again, hoping against hope that somehow, some way, he could survive the impossible.

  Chapter Fourteen

  And then the lead bike exploded in a fireball, erupting into a ragged, orange-yellow sphere as the fuel tank blew, sending its madly grinning rider high into the air. Riding beside the exploding bike, the leader’s two companions were caught in the shock wave—one went careening into the burning farmhouse, slamming into and through the wooden wall in a pillar of expanding flames; the other went racing off
toward the field, front wheel bent, a blanket of thick black smoke enveloping bike and rider in an instant.

  “Madre de Satanás!” Ricky cried, rolling out of the way as the inferno that had been the lead bike barreled toward him with the force of its momentum, burning pipes and red-hot slivers of rubber from the disintegrating tires preceding it in a deadly hailstorm of debris. Ricky rolled onto his chest, bringing his arms up over his head as the bike roared past in a flaming mass of skeletal struts.

  As he rolled, Ricky saw the muzzle-flash from the edge of the cornfield, heard the familiar report of Ryan’s Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster. Behind him, one of the bike riders toppled off his steed, his face erupting in a geyser of blood as he went crashing to the ground. His passenger clung on as the bike reared out of control, speeding past Ricky with a high-pitched roar of twin-stroke engine. Ricky turned and loosed a shot at the passenger. He watched in grim satisfaction as the biker’s chest bloomed with an expanding stain of blood.

  “Ricky! Stay sharp!” Ryan cried from the field’s edge, where he was kneeling with the Steyr Scout in his hands. As he spoke, he squeezed the Steyr’s trigger again, unleashing the bullet on the exhalation of his own breath, sending it on an arrow-straight path at the last biker’s chest. The woman took the bullet full force, falling backward and yet crashing over her own handlebars. In an instant, her long hair had caught in the front wheel and she let out an agonized shriek as her face was pulled mercilessly into the spinning wheel.

  Ricky turned away, heard the scream and the sound of snapping bone as the woman was dragged under her own bike. The bike sped on, wrenching its rider’s hair from her scalp and disappearing into the cornfield where black smoke cast a cover like an umbrella.

  A moment later, Krysty and Mildred emerged from the golden corn, blasters ready as they scoured the area. Ryan remained kneeling, his robotic eye lined up with the longblaster; he had not bothered to use the scope.

  “Are there more of them, Ricky?” Mildred asked urgently.

  Ricky shook his head. “I...I don’t know. We saw six, including the four-wheeler—”

  “Where’s Jak?” Ryan interrupted, standing up but still holding the longblaster ready against his shoulder.

  “In there,” Ricky said, indicating the farmhouse. The building was a flaming inferno now, thick black smoke billowing above it like the swirl of the Grim Reaper’s cloak.

  “Fireblast!”

  * * *

  DOC AND J.B. turned at the explosion. They were standing at the doors to the barn—two joining doors, locked with a thick chain. Each door was twice the height of Doc’s tall frame.

  “That came from the house,” Doc said, his brow furrowed with concern. “Do you think that Ryan—?”

  “It was too big to just be from the fire,” J.B. said. “There was an accelerant—mebbe a fuel tank of some kind.”

  “An engine, perhaps?” Doc proposed. “One of the bike gang?”

  “I reckon,” J.B. said, nodding grimly. “Which means, if they’ve got friends they’ll have heard and they’ll be on their way before we know it.” He glanced up and down the bare dirt road. “Best we get inside.”

  Doc agreed, but they still hadn’t solved the problem of the locked barn doors. People weren’t very trusting in the Deathlands, locking something up went 90 percent toward owning it, even if you hadn’t owned it to begin with.

  “There may be another door,” Doc suggested, pointing around the side of the building.

  “No,” J.B. muttered, reaching into his satchel. “We’ll use this one.” With that, J.B. produced a small charge from his bag. The charge looked like putty, and when the Armorer pressed it against the chain it molded there and stuck fast. He stuck a remote detonator into the plas ex.

  “Get back,” J.B. instructed, stepping away from the doors.

  Doc did as he was told and after a moment the charge went off, creating a small explosion, as loud as a gull’s call and just enough to break the links in the chain. Broken, the chain clattered to the ground with a cymbal clash of metal on metal.

  A moment later, J.B. reached for the doors and pulled one open before stepping inside. Doc followed.

  “Black dust!” J.B. cursed as he saw what lay beyond the doors.

  Standing at his side, just inside the doorway, Doc’s hand tensed on the grip of his LeMat pistol. Before them, the barn was filled with metal struts and arms that seemed utterly incongruous to its worn wooden structure. Nothing moved, and there was an eerie silence to the whole, spacious room.

  “What the Dickens have we walked into?” Doc asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  J.B. had no answer.

  * * *

  NINE TO FIND. That was the only thought running through Jak’s brain as he scrambled up a second flight of stairs and into the final third story of the farmhouse.

  He had checked everywhere he could on the floor below, zipping into whatever rooms he could open but finding no one. The three from the bathroom would be down the stairs by now, leaving Jak alone to find whoever was left.

  The stairs creaked and hissed as Jak’s booted feet skipped over them. There were sparks running up the sides of the stairs and the walls, tiny specks of white hotness as the rooms behind burned. The smoke was so thick that it was hard to see much other than the sparks, and Jak misjudged where the last stair was and slipped, treading down hard on a step that wasn’t there.

  At the landing, the smoke was like a curtain of fog, masking all but the closest of things. Jak could see he was in a corridor, saw two doors peeling off to left and right, the right-hand one wide-open with a flutter of flames dancing across the frame. Jak ducked his head through the open doorway and peered into the room beyond. He was in a child’s bedroom, a wooden cot standing by the wall, simple toys lining the shelves, only visible now through gaps in the billowing smoke.

  Jak rushed over to the cot, peered inside. There was a child there, wrapped in a blanket, not moving. Jak reached in, lifted the child out and realized he had been mistaken—it wasn’t a child, just a doll. Lifelike when seen through the haze of smoke, but just a caricature up close.

  Throwing the toy down, Jak stalked out of the room, calling out as he went. “Anyone here?” Jak shouted, speaking through the buffer of his shirt. Even through the material he could taste the smoke, a burnt taste that made his throat feel painfully dry. “Call out!”

  Jak listened, hoping to hear someone call back. When no one did he tried again, then a third time, but no response came.

  Jak hurried along the corridor, trying the door handles as he passed them. They were red-hot, too hot to touch without protection. He used the pulled-down sleeves of his shirt to protect his hands, but even with that he had to move quickly, checking each door with the swiftest of movements before the heat bled through the material and burnedhim.

  The first three rooms were empty—two bedrooms and a simple restroom. The fourth door was locked and Jak knocked hard against it and called out, but he received no response.

  There were no other rooms here. If the people were in the locked room, then they weren’t responding, which meant they were either unconscious or dead, probably from asphyxiation.

  Frustrated, Jak looked around again, his eyes stinging with the smoke. It was hard to see straight now, his eyes were burning with tears, aching in a way that made them feel as though they were too large for their sockets.

  Then he saw the ladder, leaning at a seventy degree angle at the end of the hallway before a window, stretching up into the roof space. An attic or perhaps a loft; somewhere to hide, anyway.

  Jak grabbed a rung of the ladder and called up. “Anyone there? Here help.” As he spoke, he climbed up the ladder, his feet clattering on the rungs.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE FARMHOUSE, Ryan and Krysty surveyed the area while Mildred scr
ambled over to join Ricky, grabbing his head and turning it to check for wounds.

  “You hurt?” she asked.

  “Few scratches,” Ricky admitted.

  “No shots?”

  “Nada.”

  The bikers were strewed around the burning building, their motorcycles scattered about them, one of which was nothing more now than a burning pile of red-hot scrap.

  “Who are these people?” Krysty asked, eyeing the fallen bikers warily.

  Ryan shook his head. “Would knowing that change anything?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” Krysty replied, accepting his point.

  As she spoke, Ryan scanned the bike gang using his new eye. It flashed through infrared, focusing sharply on one of the crew where he lay facedown in the dirt, his beard thick with dust. There was something about the man. Ryan saw a metal plate where his cheek had been shot by Ricky, as if he had suffered reconstructive surgery. There was more metal in his hand, a replacement that turned it into a weapon. That wasn’t so unusual—people lost limbs and healers did what they could with what tools they had to let people carry on. But it nagged at Ryan, seeing advanced tech like that welded to a man’s arm.

  The scan showed the man to be human, or warm-bodied anyway. Ryan couldn’t tell more than that. He was no expert in what to look for, and he was not yet proficient with his remarkable new eye.

  Mildred noticed Ryan staring as she looked up from checking over Ricky’s cuts and abrasions. “Something caught your eye, Ryan?”

  Ryan looked at her—scanned her—saw the way her body heat emanated from her central core. It was the same as the biker; so whatever that metal was, it was an implant in his skull, his hand. He was still human, more or less.

  Before Ryan answered, there was a crashing sound at the burning doorway of the house and two people stumbled out—a teenager with long, dark bangs that brushed in front of his eyes assisting a straw-haired woman, who walked as if she was drunk or high on jolt or both. Looking more closely, Ryan saw that the woman had a baby cradled in her arms, wrapped in a blanket. He stepped across to them, got his arm behind the woman and the boy and pushed them, gently but firmly, away from the burning house and the blazing debris all around.