by James Axler
The fragmentation grenades cracking around her were like lightning repeatedly blasting the trees nearby. Mildred had her face pressed to the ground and her arms crossed tightly in front of her head, as Ryan had drilled them time and again. She shuddered in violent reaction to noise and terror even before she felt something pluck at her pack like invisible fingers.
A gren duel was a bad idea, except when the alternative was immediate, horrible death. Such as when man-and woman-eating stickies inexplicably started dropping out of bare trees and popping out of the brush on all sides.
Such as now.
The thing was, a gren going off on the ground naturally tended to throw its blast and dangerous fragments away from the ground—up and out in a kind of fan, which was the basic heart of the so-called gren duel. If a person laid on the ground and kept his or her face covered everything should be all right.
Should be. The other thing was, explosions were tricky things, as J.B. liked to say, and gren blasts no more than any other. So should be all right was not near the same as saying you would be, when the little portable bombs started blowing off a few feet from the top of a person’s head.
Though she felt the insides of her thighs trembling, Mildred felt herself still intact. Through the ringing in her ears she heard awful squalling. Worse than stickies usually sounded, which took some doing, and indicated the gren blasts had cut down some of their terrible attackers. More to the point she heard no distinctive human cries of pain, which meant her friends were mostly intact.
Or chilled.
Before her mind could stray far down that path she made out Ryan’s voice, his bull-bellow hardly more than a distant mutter over the blast-induced tinnitus. “Throw the rest! Smoke ’em if you got ’em! Now!”
Mildred’s lips compressed back from the fear-rictus the horrible noise and shock waves washing over her had stretched her face into. Those grens were their big strike; they were hoping to parlay them into a major score in Menaville, a few klicks down the trail through the winter-bare Ouachita Range.
But she knew corpses had little use for jack, or any other earthly rewards. After the deal with Baron Doyle caught the last train to the coast, along with Baron Doyle, Ryan and J.B. had broken the grens out of their metal box and split them up among everybody, to distribute the load.
Now Mildred fumbled at the buttoned canvas pouch on her belt that held the pair of grens she carried. Though she had worn it around on her hip it had naturally managed to work its way around to the front of her body, so that she had thrown herself right on top of it. In the heat of the moment she hadn’t noticed. Now, though, she managed a wince at the thought of the deep bruise it had to have given her.
Unless the weather was freeze-your-fingers-off cold, the group tended not to wear gloves. Mildred had on fingerless gloves, which left her fingers cold and not as flexible as she liked. But then again she wasn’t performing surgery. By touch—she didn’t dare lift her face or open her eyes, and told herself it was for fear of the next barrage of grens—she got out the two cold, hard metal spheres. Yanking the pins, she threw both bombs in front of her, from each hand, all without lifting her face from the cold ground.
Her left hand brushed something that felt like a sapling with rubber bark. There was only one thing that could be: the leg of a stickie, standing almost over her. She tanked her hand back as if the rubbery mutant skin were white hot.
Her grens went off with a thunderous roar that drowned out the voices of the others. Mildred felt hot breath wash over her. Small particles stung her hands and peppered the arms of her heavy jacket like small shot.
Then something solid landed across both legs, then twitched.
Mildred screamed out loud. She couldn’t help it.
She heard Ryan shouting, “Up and get ’em!” Then a strong hand gripped her left wrist and peeled it away from the top of her skull.
In sheer panic reflex she batted at the hand. “Easy, girl,” she heard J.B. grunt. “Gotta get up, now.”
At last she raised her head and opened her eyes. Somewhere a few feet away something was flopping like a carp on a bank. She refused to focus on it.
J.B. was straightening his legs from a squat. In effect he dead-lifted Mildred to her feet, then fired his M-4000 scattergun.
As Mildred stood, the object that had landed on her rolled down the backs of her legs. Though they were still under attack, she couldn’t help a glance down.
She wished she hadn’t. Hard behind her boot heels lay a stickie leg severed right below the knee. The long, splayed toes were still clasping and unclasping like fingers. Yellow goo oozed from the torn-off end.
The M-4000 shotgun roared again. Mildred found her revolver in her hand. Combat reflexes had taken over, with her conscious mind somewhat checked out of the situation.
A freshly decapitated stickie lay on its back right across the body of the one she’d seen flopping near her. It was flopping still, but more weakly, as its lifeblood pulsed out the stump of its leg where Mildred’s gren had severed it.
There were plenty of other stickies in view. None was on its feet. They took a mess of killing. These had been killed a mess.
And messily.
“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan called. His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been breathing forest-fire smoke.
One by one the acknowledgments came back as Mildred looked around to check on her companions. In control of her wits once more, she was now focused on the task she’d trained for: saving lives and healing.
Her friends all claimed to be in good shape. As Ryan barked out orders to J.B., Krysty and Ricky to stand watch against another onslaught of the vicious muties, she gave J.B. a quick onceover.
He grinned at her. His glasses were perched on the narrow bridge of his nose, and his fedora was clamped on his head, albeit it at a bit of an angle.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Bastard stickies got the worse end of that debate.”
She knew he was as stoic as a terrier. Had that been his leg blown off, the good Lord forbid, he’d have been standing on one leg blasting away with his shotgun until he bled out. But his jacket and khaki pants didn’t show any holes that she could see. She quickly shed her pack and examined the others.
Jak had blood in his long, tangled white hair. He tried to wave her off, but she glared at him. He held still momentarily until she confirmed he had a nasty-looking but superficial frag wound on his scalp.
“Come back when you’re done, young man,” she instructed. “I’ll get that cleaned up.”
Jak grunted, but he nodded. The albino teen was helping Ryan and Doc, the three making sure all the downed stickies stayed down. Meanwhile Mildred gave quick examinations to the rest. She doctored up a few cuts and scrapes, but to her relief nobody was seriously injured.
Indeed the worst casualty was her own pack, whose outer pocket had been ripped wide open by high-speed shrapnel.
“Do you know,” Doc called, “these are quite unlike any stickies I have ever seen.”
Leaving her torn pack, Mildred straightened. For the first time she really looked at the fallen muties.
“They’re an odd color, to start with,” Krysty said.
In fact they weren’t any one color. Rather their lean bodies and misshapen faces were mottled and streaked in gray, brown and white.
“They’ve adapted to the environment?” Mildred asked incredulously.
“It stands to reason they might develop protective coloration, living out in these wooded hills for a few generations,” Krysty stated.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. He had been squatting like a curious stork next to a prone stickie. Now he straightened, waving a handkerchief-wrapped finger that was smudged with brown and light gray. “They have done more than changed the color of their hides. The blighters have camouflaged themselves.”
Ryan stepped forward to frown at the handkerchief. “Smeared themselves all over with bird crap and, uh, some kind of animal shit. Mebbe human.”
“I wondered why Jak didn’t spot them,” Krysty said, peering up at the tree branches that stretched like weird fractal claws above the trail from both sides.
“None of us did,” J.B. said. “They musta stayed close to the bigger branches. Did a bastard good job at camou, I got to admit.”
Mildred shook her head. It was just like J.B. to admire good workmanship. Even in savage muties who moments before had been lusting to tear him apart and feed on his guts.
He paused a moment to drop a reassuring hand on Ricky’s shoulder. The boy stood slumped, with his Webley Mk VI revolver in one hand and his DeLisle longblaster in the other. The carbine’s muzzle, fattened by the built-in suppressor, was angled well clear of the ground. No degree of shock or after-battle letdown was going to induce Ricky to handle a tool badly, especially not a blaster.
There were reasons why the Puerto Rican orphan and J.B. got on like oil and steel. They were both gadget freaks and gun lovers.
“Remember these things’re basically like wild animals, ’cept smarter than most,” J.B. told his protégé. “Not like where you come from, where most of them are just folks.”
Ricky nodded. He was softhearted, maybe even moreso than Mildred, with her literally otherworldly sensibilities. And while Puerto Rico was known to some as Monster Island because it teemed with dangerous, mutated animals, perhaps a bigger reason was that humanoid muties and norms lived together without any particular friction, as if that was the natural order of things.
Mildred wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it herself. She had conversed with stickie farmers during the group’s none-so-restful adventure on Monster Island, and the only problems encountered were posed by their indifferent English and her worse Spanish.
That unparalleled amity didn’t mean Monster Island was a peaceful place, though. Muties acted like regular folk, and regular folk regularly chilled each other.
“Back up off yourself, Jak,” Ryan said to the albino, who was staring at the fallen muties. “We didn’t expect to find camouflaged muties out here in the woods.”
He stuck his befouled panga at the ground until he found a soft enough spot to plunge the blade into. When it came out the soil’s embrace had cleaned away most of the stickie juices. A crackling handful of scrub oak leaves served to get the heavy, broad blade the rest of the way clean. Ryan examined it, then nodded in satisfaction and stuck it back in its sheath.
“Fact is we were all triple-stupe,” he said. “We were heading along the trail and committed the oldest stunt on the book.”
J.B. snorted. “Forgot to look up. Me as bad as anybody. Trader would’ve handed my ass to me for that.”
“He would at that,” Ryan said. “These fire-blasted stickies came within a heartbeat of doing the job for him.”
“L-lucky we had those grens,” Ricky said. His depression apparently had given way to a delayed bout of terror, as the reality of what they had just escaped and how narrowly they had escaped it landed on him like a ton of cold pig guts.
“Yeah,” Mildred couldn’t help saying sourly. “And there went our tickets to easy street.”
“Spilled blood won’t go back in the body, Mildred,” J.B. said mildly. “You know that.”
She grunted at his way of saying “no sense crying over spilled milk.”
“Anybody got any grens left?” Ryan asked.
“No, Ryan,” Doc sang out. The others echoed him.
“Good,” he said. “I’d be hotter than nuke red at anybody stupe enough to hold back when our asses were hanging over the edge like that.”
He stooped, shouldered his pack and hefted his Scout longblaster.
“Time to march. Daylight’s bleeding, and we don’t know if there’re more stickies where these bastards came from.
“And this time, everybody remember to watch the nuking trees.”
Chapter Six
“Boss,” a youthful female voice called, “company coming. New bunch of strangers just hit town.”
With a sigh Bass Croom straightened from bending over the open engine compartment of Cargo Wag *3, into which he’d just helped Dan Hogue and his grease monkeys lower the just-repaired engine.
“What’s up, Shanda?” he asked, grabbing a rag from the top of a rolling tool chest nearby and wiping at the grease that liberally coated both hands.
Shanda Peters was one of his clerks, a short, somewhat stocky young woman who wore an apron over her coveralls and red plaid flannel shirt. She had short sandy hair and an indefatigably cheerful manner, was honest and always worked hard.
If only I could say that about everybody who worked for me... Bass cut the thought off in midstream.
“Why did you think I needed to hear it?”
“Well, Eddie Roybal just came running in with his cheeks all red. Said these seven coldhearts had come into town from the hills and were asking for work. Old Lady Dunham took one look at all the blasters they were toting and sent them straight this way. Eddie overheard and came running here as fast as his eight-year-old legs could carry him.”
Bass chuckled. “See that he gets his pick of candies as a reward.” As a matter of policy, Bass tried to stay on good terms with the ville’s kids. Aside from being plain good business—and in line with his good nature—it sometimes paid dividends. Friendly children provided the merchant his very own intelligence service, right under Baron Billy’s pointed nose. And he doubted that either Billy Howe or his own sec boss, Morson, had any clue of its existence, for all that very little escaped the baron’s icy-blue gaze.
“Already taken care of, boss.”
Bass gave her a big grin and a nod as he headed toward the open door to the back storeroom.
“Good job, Shanda.”
“Eddie says Morson’s got some of his snitches bird-dogging them,” Shanda said as he passed.
“That’s their job, I guess,” Bass said. “Not like it’s any secret what I’m hiring blasters for. Come to think of it, I’d just as soon Billy keep all the eyes he wants on the process. Don’t want him getting the notion there’s anything underhanded in my intention to hire more heavily armed types. Mebbe especially at this late date.”
In the gloom of the storeroom a worried-looking Morty met him.
“We have a problem, Bass,” he said. “We just had a whole pack of coldhearts come into the store.”
“Reckon their money’s as good as anyone else’s.” Bass didn’t bother reminding his little brother that armed strangers came into the store all the time.
If they weren’t armed they tended not to make it this far, especially with the triple-damned stickies getting so close and bold these days. If they stayed any length of time, they’d have to give up their blasters.
“But they’re probably gonna stuff their pockets with goods and only offer to chill us if we call them on it!”
“Then why aren’t you out front keeping an eye on them?”
Morty just shook his head and made an exasperated sound. Bass knew it well: as if he was the biggest stupe ever born for even suggesting such a thing.
Breathing deeply and reminding himself to be patient, he pushed on into the store.
It was a testimony to just how hard a set of hard cases his visitors were, that what might well have been the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on in his entire life was the second thing he noticed.
The first was the man who stood calmly on the far side of the counter beside the door. He had the pale eye and lean build of a gray Plains wolf in a long black coat. He wore his hair in an unruly black shag and had a patch over his left eye. An old scar ran top to bottom beneath it. He wore a well-filled backpack. The butt o
f a slung longblaster stuck up above it on the right side.
The woman beside him was spectacular, flame-haired, emerald-eyed, damned near as tall as the man. Behind her right shoulder stood a shorter, broader black woman with beaded plaits. She looked older than the other but wasn’t half bad-looking. Had a nice rack, anyway, Bass noted.
To the tall man’s other side stood a like banty cock of a man in a fedora and battered brown leather jacket. He wore round steel-rimmed specs and a mild expression, which fooled Bass Croom not at all—nor likely would’ve if it hadn’t been for the shotgun butt sticking up above his own right shoulder, or the Uzi strapped to the left side of his pack.
A bit behind him a gangly wrinklie with a long frock coat stood blinking, and leaning on an ebony cane. A couple kids—young men, anyway—wandered the aisle behind, gaping at the goods on the shelves. One of them was an albino, with ruby eyes and long white hair hanging to the shoulders of his camouflage jacket with jagged-looking bits of glass and metal glittering on it. He was just a wisp, looking as if a good puff would blow him off his feet.
Standing at his side was a Mex-looking kid, only a little taller than the albino and if anything younger, with a round olive face, black bangs and lively dark eyes.
“Gentlemen,” Bass said. “Ladies.”
“You Sebastian Croom?” the one-eyed man asked.
“Bastion Croom. Yes. How may I help you folks?”
“My name’s Ryan Cawdor.” He introduced the rest by name, which Bass filed away. He was good at names, especially when they went with such a memorable set of faces.
“We hear you’re hiring,” Ryan finished. “We’re looking for work.”
Bass cocked a brow. This Cawdor hadn’t bothered saying we’re new in town, suggesting he gave the merchant credit for being bright enough to know that himself, and had a distaste for wasting words. Bass liked talking plenty, and listening, too. Still, verbal frugality was a trait he could respect in others.