End Program

by James Axler

  Suddenly unable to see, the sec man driving the war wag slammed his foot against the brakes—but it was too late. The war wag sped out of control, the front end a pillar of flames as it barreled straight into the high wall of the ville before coming to an abrupt halt. The wall gave as the wag struck, a reinforced section crumbling around it, great chunks of debris crushing the engine and grille even as the flames continue to roar.

  The driver opened the door and leaped free from the burning vehicle, his crew working their own doors as they hurried to safety. But safety would not be so easy to find. Driver and crew were briskly rounded upon by several bikers and they suddenly found themselves in the center of a pitched blaster-fight with enemies on every side.

  The war wag crew fell in seconds to the relentless charge of the bikers.

  * * *

  ELSEWHERE, THE SECOND war wag had been herding bikers toward the gun emplacements in the ville walls where they could be cut down without risk. But the bikers had become wise to that, and as blasterfire filled the night, the converted camper van found itself surrounded by angry bikers brandishing heavy weaponry.

  Somehow, one of the bikers had acquired a bazooka and the war wag found itself dead in its sights. The driver jerked the wheel left and right as he saw a gren hurtling toward the windshield, jounced over the rough earth as the explosive skimmed by.

  A moment later, the gren struck a dead tree twenty feet behind the war wag, cutting the trunk in two and sending viciously sharp splinters the size of chair legs in all directions.

  The war wag barreled on, its driver not quite in control as the attacks came thick and fast from all sides. Suddenly, something exploded under the front, left wheel, the bright burst of the explosion dazzling through the narrow gap in the windshield. Then the war wag struck a ditch and the vehicle lurched over, tipping forward and sideways as it struggled for purchase.

  The driver gunned the engine, trying to keep upright as the front wheels caught in a trench in the earth. The engine complained, gears clashing as the driver tried to keep moving forward. A moment later, a dark shape hurtled through the air toward the struggling vehicle, and in an instant that shape turned into an explosion.

  Caught at a fatal angle in the ditch, the camper van went up like a funeral pyre, its remaining ordnance exploding like popping candy as more firepower was turned against it. The driver and passengers were roasted alive inside.

  * * *

  IT WAS DARK inside the tent, and Ryan switched automatically to night vision, recasting the interior in greens and grays. He would rely on the artificial eye while he was inside the tent, knowing its report would be better than anything his opponent could make out in the darkness.

  As he switched vision, Ryan ran at the biker, wielding his Steyr rifle two-handed like a staff and swinging the butt toward the man’s tattooed face. It connected with a crack, the sound of the biker’s jaw breaking, and Ryan’s opponent toppled backward. He moved in again, driving the butt of the longblaster into the man’s face. The biker yelled in pain, spitting blood and broken teeth as he tried to avoid the next blow.

  Ryan scanned the man through the artificial eye. He was unarmed, no threat, just another enemy who needed to be put down. Ryan drove the rifle into his face one last time before turning to Mildred.

  “Thanks—” Mildred began. But before she could finish, Ryan was driving the butt of his Steyr Scout at her face.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The bikers were getting bolder now. Both war wags were down, and they felt they had no opposition left. Inside the ville, fires burned and the dead and wounded outnumbered the living.

  At the ville gate, J.B. watched as a determined wave of attackers circled the compound like a flock of screamwings, peeling off in ones and twos to attack specific areas where they had presumably identified weaknesses.

  The Gatling guns had ceased firing many minutes before, out of ammunition and with no time to reload. Instead, the sec men who manned them had been drawn into the ground fight, bringing handblasters and longblasters into the fray as biker upon biker breached through gaps in the wall to create more carnage.

  J.B. watched from his high position as the remaining bikers made another circuit outside. He had their speed now, could see the patterns they were using, which ones would break away and when.

  Reaching into his satchel, the Armorer brought forth something he had been saving for just such an occasion—old-fashioned fragmentation grens designed to cause the maximum spread of damage from the minimum explosive charge.

  As two of the bikes peeled away, J.B. dropped the gren. He didn’t even need to throw it, he just let it plummet over the near side of the wall where the gap had already been created—the one that the bikers planned to use to enter the ville.

  J.B. was running before the fragger struck, sprinting along the shelflike walkway that ran along the top of the wall, dropping two more grens as he ran.

  The first gren went off with a boom, ripping through the first of the two bikers and catching his companion with enough force that he was driven back out of the very gap he had been using to enter the ville.

  Outside, the next two grens went off in quick succession, blasting close to the exterior wall and sending a shower of metal flecks against the wall and the bikers who were hurtling past. Those caught up by the explosion were knocked from their saddles, flung across the wasteland that waited just beyond the ville gates. Before they could recover, sec men moved in, using longblasters and long-range assault weapons to pick them off and chill them.

  J.B. kept running, eyes on the space beyond ville limits, searching for his next target in this small but deadly war.

  * * *

  THE BATTLE WAS playing out all over the ville. The nihilistic bike gang launched wave after wave of vicious attacks, reveling in the destruction and the loss of human life. The ville’s residents defended as best as they could against an enemy that seemed to resent even its own right to live, to survive.

  The bikers seemed impervious to pain. Set light to them and they just kept coming, blast them with any one of the dozens of weapons available in the ville, and they seemed to shrug off the bullets with a laugh and redouble their efforts to chill everyone in their path. Chill their colleagues, and it just made them try to chill you even more.

  Baron Hurst, now sporting a thick bandage across his head where he had been struck by a flying chunk of broken wall, suspected that their enemies were high on jolt, fueling their anarchic, destructive behavior. It was an insightful guess, but he could not have been further from the truth.

  The truth was far stranger than anyone yet suspected.

  * * *

  RYAN’S LONGBLASTER SWISHED toward Mildred. She moved fractionally faster, stepping just clear of its path. Its butt sailed by with a rush of moving air. But Ryan was already stepping in for the chill, bringing his left hand up and aiming for Mildred’s throat.

  She saw the flash of metal in that hand—the blade of Ryan’s panga as it caught the moonlight through the rip in the tent’s roof.

  “Ryan, no!” Mildred cried and used her right hand—the one still holding the ZKR—to intercept the attack and block it. “It’s me!”

  Ryan didn’t seem to hear. He just kept driving the blade toward Mildred’s throat, a cruel and determined expression on his scarred face.

  “Die, you abomination,” Ryan gritted through his teeth.

  It was all Mildred could do to block his attack.

  * * *

  RYAN SAW THE enemy standing in the darkness. The eye showed him its face, melted like a wax candle, teeth bared—sharp like a shark’s.

  “Die, you abomination,” Ryan gritted through his teeth as he pushed his panga toward the foul monstrosity’s throat.

  His foe fought valiantly, pushing the blade away with all his?—her?—its?—migh
t.

  * * *

  MILDRED STRUGGLED TO push the blade of Ryan’s panga away.

  “Ryan, no! It’s me,” she yelled, working to get the words out as she fought to hold the blade away. “It’s Mildred.”

  For another long moment, the blade was pushing toward her. Ryan was stronger than she was and a more proficient fighter. Mildred shrieked with the effort of keeping the knife away.

  “Stop it, Ryan,” Mildred pleaded, hot tears streaming down her cheeks with the exertion. “Please stop.” She had seen men driven wild with bloodlust, men turned insane by the chilling they had witnessed around them, men turned mad with shell shock. Ryan had seen it all, she knew: his father’s murder, the loss of an eye at his brother’s hand and the loss of his son, Dean, not once but twice. If anyone had just cause to go crazy, it was Ryan. “Please stop,” Mildred begged again, glancing from side to side for help as the blade inched closer.

  * * *

  THROUGH THE NIGHT-VISION of his artificial eye, Ryan saw his enemy glaring back at him. He heard its words but they sounded like gibberish, animal sounds mimicking the human voice box.

  But as he looked, the face changed, warping from that melted wax appearance into something more human. A biker, a woman, black hair, dark skin. A human. A human who needed to be chilled.

  Ryan drew back the blade and readied to lunge.

  * * *

  AS THE BLADE drew back, Mildred let her strength ebb, and suddenly she was providing no resistance to Ryan’s gripping hand. In that moment, his grip became effectively too strong, and he pulled Mildred toward him even as he lunged at her with the knife.

  Mildred’s forehead collided with Ryan’s in a loud, hollow-sounding strike like clashing coconut shells. The knife swished behind her before Ryan dropped it, overcompensating and cutting not Mildred’s throat but merely the fabric of her sleeve.

  Ryan stumbled backward in the aftermath, his free hand going to his face, feeling for the pain that the head butt had caused. His head was spinning. He had to get out, breathe fresh air before he was sick.

  Three steps and Ryan was through the opening of the bivouac, outside on the street by the well.

  * * *

  SCANNING THE AREA for targets, J.B. saw Ryan and called to him.

  “Ryan? You okay?”

  Ryan turned, his eyes narrowed, murder in mind. It was as if he was looking at something repellent or dangerous, something that Ryan had never seen before. He eyed J.B. the way he might eye a rabid dog, as if waiting for it to attack.

  “What’s up with you?” J.B. said, scanning around for more attackers. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I’m just fine,” Ryan said, and in the next moment his left fist swung out toward J.B., cuffing him across the chin.

  Ryan felt a wave of elation as he saw J.B. fall. He looked different now—the familiar lines in the Armorer’s face seemed alien, like cracks in warped wood, and his eyes behind the lenses of his glasses seemed penetrating and feral, as though they were sizing Ryan up for a coffin. Different but the same.

  “What the hell?” J.B. spit angrily as he regained his balance, swiping his chin with the back of his hand and wincing.

  Ryan did not answer. He merely took a step closer to his oldest and most-trusted friend and sent his fist toward the man’s jaw in a vicious right hook even as the battle raged on all around them.

  J.B. was ready this time, and he stepped backward and blocked the punch with his forearm, moving instinctively.

  Ryan was on him in a second, stepping closer and using his long legs to drive more power into his follow-up punches, a left cross, a right jab and then another, the latter two aimed at the Armorer’s gut.

  Dancing on light feet, J.B. was still trying to process what was happening as he stepped out of each of Ryan’s attacks, batting each one aside in a painful clash of fist on muscle. “Ryan, what’s going on? What are you doing?”

  Silently, his lips pulled back from gritted teeth, Ryan drove another punch at the Armorer, using his greater height to come in high and strike down at the man’s face. J.B. brought up his left arm before his face to block, grunting as the powerful blow struck his forearm.

  J.B. staggered back against the onslaught, glancing briefly over his shoulder to get his bearings. The well was located just a half dozen steps behind him, its low wall in line with his knees.

  As J.B. struggled to recover, Ryan stepped back, watching his old friend with a grim expression of hate.

  * * *

  WHILE THE TWO friends were engaged in their dangerous squabble, the larger battle was raging all around them. Mildred picked off two bikers with her ZKR, firing from the shadows of the tent. Doc turned his sword stick on another biker, rapping the rider across the knuckles with the sheath before skewering him with the sword, driving the blade through his chest just two inches from his breastbone in a shower of blood and electric sparks.

  Other skirmishes were playing out all around. Sec men turned everything they could on the invaders, dropping boiling water on passing bikers from hidden positions on low rooftops, blasting bikers from the street and throwing debris all over the streets in an effort to slow them or throw them from their rides.

  One thing became clear though—the bikers were not just relentless, they cared little for their own lives. This was more than just nihilism; they seemed to believe themselves invulnerable, and to some extent that proved to be true.

  Gradually, the locals learned and they adjusted tactics accordingly. With Ricky and Jak leading the charge, a group of sec men used ropes and nets to capture invading riders rather than try to chill them, ensuring that they could not escape and cause more destruction. Alive, they could be detained—death, by contrast, proved frustratingly elusive.

  * * *

  BY THE WELL, the battle between J.B. and Ryan continued.

  “Whatever the joke is, Ryan, you better explain it to me bastard quick,” J.B. said, rubbing at the pain running up his forearm where he had just been struck.

  Instead of answering, Ryan took another step back then began to run at his friend, closing the distance between them—just six feet—and sweeping his right leg up and out, kicking at J.B.’s chest.

  The Armorer ducked, dropping almost to the ground and rolling out of the path of that vicious blow.

  Ryan followed through with another kick, this one lower to the ground and coming upward, driving his left foot against the side of J.B.’s leg so that the older man stumbled backward.

  “Going to chill you,” Ryan growled. “Worthless meat bag.”

  J.B. heard the words, even as he struggled to recover from his stumble. Already Ryan was moving toward him again, right fist drawn back to punch J.B. in the throat. The smaller man moved quicker, throwing himself aside and hefting his satchel full of ammo and armament into the path of Ryan’s fist. J.B. grimaced as he held the bag firm, blocking the other man’s blow.

  The Armorer had to move quickly. Ryan was a natural fighter and a well-trained one as well. He was already moving into his next attack, his left leg sweeping out to hook J.B. behind the knee and unbalance him. J.B. cursed as the leg hooked him, toppling onto his back and striking the dirt with a rush of expelled air from his lungs.

  “Ryan, you’ve got to stop this,” J.B. said, struggling to get his breath back. “You got to—”

  Ryan stepped back and smiled, a cruel grin that J.B. had never seen on the man’s face before, and the words died in J.B.’s throat. Before he could say another word, Ryan took a heavy step toward him and kicked, the toe of his right boot driving sharply into J.B.’s side. The older man felt the pain, and he rolled across the ground from the force of the blow. Ryan was not stopping—no matter what he said. It was crazy.

  Ryan came at him again, trotting forward the few steps before kicking his old friend once more in
the flank. J.B. hissed in pain as the breath was forced once again from his lungs.

  The Armorer scrabbled across the dirt as Ryan lunged at him with a second kick, and the bigger man’s foot scuffed his side.

  Moving swiftly, J.B. brought himself up from a crouch to a standing position, but he was bent over, struggling to catch his breath. His sides and chin ached where Ryan had clocked him, but what hurt more than that was seeing his friend turn on him like this. He had known Ryan for the longest time, trusted the man like a brother, and he would follow him through the gates of Hades itself. But now, J.B. realized, he was forced to fight him—because if he didn’t, Ryan would chill him without a moment’s hesitation.

  Ryan drew his SIG Sauer from its holster and calmly checked the ammo.

  Still doubled over, J.B. bunched his fists as Ryan came at him again. The moment Ryan was within striking distance, J.B. moved, lunging at the bigger man with his outthrust fist, striking him hard across the jaw and turning the blaster away with his other hand. Ryan was not slowed, he merely seemed to shake his head and keep coming, his own whirlwind fist driving at the Armorer, striking small but brutal blows against J.B.’s face, chest and gut as the Armorer held the blaster away.

  “You’re going to make me hurt you,” J.B. spit through gritted teeth. “Is that it?”

  Ryan glared at him, his eyes fixed on the Armorer’s, one of them a mechanical device that glistened in a way no human eye ever had. “Spoiled human meat, past your prime,” he said with a sneer, wrenching his blaster hand back to take a shot.

  J.B. lunged forward in that moment, ducking low and powering into Ryan like a bowling ball striking a pin. The SIG Sauer barked in Ryan’s hand once, the 9 mm bullet tearing through the canvas wall of one of the nearby medical tents. Ryan stumbled backward at the same time, with J.B. scrambling across the ground to force him back even farther.