by James Axler
Bass nodded, then gripped Ryan’s shoulder briefly.
“Thanks.”
“It’s what you pay us for. Get inside.”
When the last of the former captives got inside, he followed, shutting the door behind him. There wasn’t much point to guarding from the outside. It was just one more person to be spotted by Raker’s sec.
As Kit promised, all their personal gear and weapons were inside the prefab wood building, heaped on the concrete floor or laid on heavy tables. The actual cargo and trade goods stayed locked within the wags until morning, when the treacherous rest stop owner and his sec chief reckoned they’d be safe as anywhere.
People were sorting through stuff for their own personal weapons, kept in line by Krysty and Mildred. That wasted time, but Ryan reckoned it was worth some delay for people to use what they were familiar with. Most of the drivers didn’t carry personal weapons, but got issued arms at need from a stock carried in one of the wags, where they remained. They just stood by waiting—which was safer, Ryan calculated, than wandering around outside.
J.B. had quickly donned his backpack, slung his scattergun and moved to one of the windows with his Uzi cradled in his competent hands.
“Movement,” he called softly.
Ryan retrieved his weapons. Handing the lever-action longblaster he’d taken from the guard to Krysty, he slung his Steyr Scout over his shoulder and went up to peer through the mesh that covered the fly-specked glass at J.B.’s side.
He caught glimpses of people running up the block in the direction of the adobe jail where the men had been kept.
A piercing mechanical wail ripped the night air. Ryan wondered where Raker had come up with a hand-cranked alarm siren. He knew they were old-fashioned even before skydark.
“That’s it,” J.B. said. He turned and knelt, raising the mini-Uzi to aim out the window.
Over the rising-falling whine, surprisingly loud, Ryan heard gasps and suppressed squeals of fear behind him. He turned to see Bass hold up his hands with palms down in a soothing gesture.
“Easy, everybody,” he said. “We’ve got to move calmly and with purpose.”
Amazingly, Ryan felt the incipient panic levels drop inside the crowded room. Not go away, but far enough from redline the whole crowd wasn’t about to dissolve into a terrified useless mob. The big man had charisma and his people’s trust.
“Start moving people into the wags,” Ryan said.
“Shouldn’t we fort-up here?” Cable asked.
“They’ll surround us and chill us,” J.B. said, not turning from the window. “Our only chance is try to break for it.”
Cable frowned slightly. Ryan saw his lips suddenly seal tight on whatever rejoinder he was about to make. The sec boss was no stupe; he’d been about to object they had little chance to get away, driving out of a roused compound.
Then he realized they had no chance forted up here.
The door opened. Above the siren, which had been joined by confused shouts from outside, Ryan felt it more than heard it. Or maybe he caught the motion from a corner of his eye as it parted slightly and a figure slipped through.
He spun as blasters came up. Hammers clicked back like a young army of robot crickets.
“Wait!” he called.
The figure that had entered so rapidly and shut the door behind it was unmistakable.
“Jak!” Krysty breathed.
“Where were you?” Mildred asked.
The fine pale features twisted in a flash of annoyance. “Stupe question,” he said. “Came to warn.”
“About what, young man?” Bass asked.
Ryan frowned. He was aware of a sound the seemed to be rising beneath the still howling alarm, a strange subterranean rumble like an approaching avalanche.
“That,” Jak said.
Chapter Nineteen
“What is that?” Bass asked, big head cocked to one side to listen to the low roar getting louder.
“Buffalo,” Jak said. “Coming here.”
“How many buffalo?” Ryan asked.
“All.”
“Shit! All right, everybody grab what you can and run for the wags!”
Nobody argued. They’d seen the unbelievable size and power of the buffalo herd.
People who hadn’t gotten to what they were looking for grabbed what was nearest. The ones looking confused and hesitant got grabbed next and towed toward the exit.
The rush turned to a logjam at the door. Ryan shouted and started yanking people back by collars and the hoods of their jackets. Bass stepped up and started tossing people bodily aside to clear the exit.
Shouts cracked outside. Ryan heard screams, then several people retreated quickly back inside the warehouse.
Leaning down, Ryan dared a brief look at about waist-height around the door frame. A couple of sec men stood a block away, north, toward the jail. As Ryan looked, one fired a handblaster. The other was shouldering a longblaster.
A body—Ryan thought male—lay facedown in the street eight feet from the door. Pulling briefly back, Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer P-226 with his left hand. Then, straightening, he stuck his left arm and his head out, took quick aim on the longblaster man and triggered three quick shots.
The two sec men jumped out of sight around the corner of a building. The handblaster guy seemed to be pulling his friend behind him to cover. But Ryan was unsure whether any of his shots had hit.
He rammed the SIG back in its holster. Unslinging his Scout, he strode out the door to kneel with his right side against the wall and the blaster leveled.
“Move ’em out!” he shouted.
He heard the rush of bodies and thump of boots behind him. He also heard the drumbeat of buffalo hooves getting loud.
He glanced to his left. He thought he saw an orange glow, just visible above the roof across the street. Using fire to spook the herd, he thought.
Looking back through his scope he saw a sec man’s face poking from cover at a building’s corner. He seemed to be staring toward the glow.
The only target Ryan had was the sec man’s nose, so he lined up the shot and took it. He saw blood spray and heard a squall of surprise and agony. The head jerked back out of sight.
With a tremendous grinding squeal the gate and fence gave way under the impact of uncountable tons of flesh and bone. Ryan turned and raced for the parked wags.
Raker’s sec men and armed employees weren’t the bigger threat any longer.
* * *
RICKY WASN’T STRONG enough a motorbike rider yet to feel good about steering with one hand while shooting his big Webley revolver with the other. But accuracy wasn’t an issue. The target was the starry sky, and his speed was low enough he could easily put a foot down when he started to lose control of the bike.
“Move it, you buffaloes!” he screamed. “¡Ándale!”
A moving wall of tails and churning rumps rolled up over the slow slope in front of him. Forty yards away to his right he saw Olympia likewise shooting her blaster in the air. By her face, she was screaming something, too.
But Ricky couldn’t hear her. They weren’t actually chasing the whole herd. At least, not the super-gigantic one that had menaced them earlier. As far as Ricky knew this wasn’t even the same herd: it was big, though not quite the ocean of flesh the other had been. And the brushfires they’d set in the grass to the east, fortunately still dry from an arid winter, had only gotten a portion of the herd moving.
Still, it was a big portion—a lot of animals. As he and Olympia followed the stampede to the top of the rise his heart was in his throat with a sudden spasm of fresh fear. What about his friends?
He stopped. The compound lay spread out, huge and dark but for a few lights glimmering faint and yellow from windows.
The sta
mpede was headed pretty much right at the main gate.
Stopping at the crest, he saw flashes of bright yellow flame as sec men on guard panic-fired their blasters into the horned faces of the herd. He even thought one or two went down. But they made barely a ripple in the living tidal wave as their fellows stomped right over them.
He hadn’t heard the gunshots, but he actually heard the crash as the herd hit the fence. Or imagined he did.
For a moment he thought it would hold. He saw the front of the stampede start to mound up like a breaking wave, as animals behind rolled up against the ones stalled at the fence.
Then the gate went down with a squeal of tortured metal. A heartbeat later a section of fence as wide as the wave front of panicked animals was flattened. The stampede rushed on, barely slowed.
“What have we done?” he breathed. Ricky crossed himself with his thumb.
He heard a dwindling engine snarl as Olympia slowed to a stop beside him on Jak’s motorbike.
“Our friends have to fend for themselves now,” she said, as if she could read his mind. And truly, he doubted that took much if any of her doomie gift.
Ricky turned eyes blurred with sudden hot tears toward her. “But—”
“Not all of our people will make it,” the woman said with a matter-of-factness that made him hate her for a moment, then she turned and looked him in the eye. “But I have seen that without this happening, none of them lives to see sunup. They were already starting to break out when your friend Jak was still pedaling toward that drain where a stream crosses beneath the fence I saw in my vision. They would have all been trapped and chilled. Or recaptured, tortured and sold.”
He could find no words to ask if they had done the right thing. Should he have believed her?
“Only time will tell if we’ve done the right thing,” she told him. And once again he realized it wasn’t that uncanny she knew his thoughts. “Let’s hurry down and do what we can do.”
He risked a quick glance toward the rest stop. The dark tide had already flooded into the wag park. He saw muzzle-flashes and thought he saw a wag battered.
He couldn’t watch any more. Instead he concentrated on following Olympia down the forward slope at a breakneck pace.
* * *
WITH A CRASH and multiple glass fountains from the windows that wound up on top, the battered blue bus fell over on its side.
“Fireblast!” Ryan snarled.
At least a dozen of the freed captives had managed to clamber aboard before the stampede pushed it over.
He sprinted toward the fuel tanker. For a moment at least it was clear of the living flood, but a single buffalo charged him from between two of the cargo wags.
Ryan snapped a shot at it. The creature bellowed and turned aside. He sprinted, reaching the rounded steel flank of the tank, and quickly began to climb the front set of rungs.
As he did, the tanker began to rock. It had been parked toward the center of the wag yard oriented north-south with its tractor at the northern end, meaning it would have to roll through ninety degrees to get out the western gate. He was climbing the western side of the tank, away from the buffalo, although the great shaggy animals had begun to lope by to both sides, trailing long strings of slobber from their fleshy underlips.
Can they actually turn this bastard over? he wondered.
Then he got to the top, saw over to the far side.
“Fireblast!”
The fleeing beasts didn’t just fill the rad-sucking main street. They were overflowing into the east-west side streets, as well. Plus, even as Ryan hoisted himself onto the flat metal catwalk, he saw some kind of structure go down like a playing-card house halfway between the gate and here.
Between where the gate used to be and here. It was gone, submerged under a flood of bodies that was being funneled into the compound through a gigantic gap in the eastern fence.
He could see the rounded low hills a quarter mile or so east outlined against the orange glow of the likely grassfire that had got the stampede started. He thought he saw two tiny figures on motorbikes between the hilltops and the back of the herd.
“At least there’s an end to them,” he heard J.B. say as he clambered up to sit on the rear sandbag nest. Like Ryan he carried his backpack.
Ryan shouldered his Steyr, aimed and fired. One of the buffalo butting against the east side of the tanker bucked, gave a bawl loud enough to be heard over the enormous racket and dropped down as if dead.
“Still more outside than in,” Ryan said.
J.B. triggered a blast from his Uzi. Ryan saw several buffalo flinch and veer about thirty feet from the tanker. The Armorer was trying to get the herd to steer clear of the big rig.
Ryan risked a look around. What he saw was, if anything, worse than he imagined.
Worst, of course, was the school bus lying on its side. People were still desperately climbing out the windows. Not all were making it.
But as Ryan saw a slight blonde woman whom he recognized as one of the drivers start to slip back inside a busted-out window as a fresh surge of the living tide rocked the fallen wag, a big dark hand reached down, caught her skinny wrist and yanked her right straight out of the bus.
Ryan recognized Chef. Not that he was hard to make out, even in the starlight and confusion. He was one of three black men with the convoy, and he was the only huge burly one with a square head and massive bearded jaw. He was standing with his massive legs braced, helping people escape.
He swung the blonde woman over the west side of the downed bus, then he simply let her go.
Upraised hands caught her and eased the squirming, shrieking woman down. Ryan saw that six or eight people, presumably ones who’d already gotten clear of the doomed wag, were gathered there amid some of the gear that’d been carried aboard. For the moment, anyway, it was clear of buffalo. In fact they only seemed to be streaming around the northern end of the bus.
Ryan turned and shot another buffalo ramming into the wag he and J.B. were on. Aside from the fact they were on it, the tanker’s survival was crucial to the survival of the convoy. That fuel was worth risking their hides for, and not because of its high barter value.
This time he didn’t even try to luck into a heart shot, the way he had last time. The conditions were too bad and the targets in constant writhing motion. Instead he aimed to break a shoulder joint, an easier target that would reliably put one of the big beasts down. Not chill it, at least right away. But it would zero the creature out as a threat.
From the inner corner of his eye he caught a flash and heard more screams from the vicinity of the bus. Snapping his head around, he was just in time to see Chef, a ham-hock hand pressed to his side, stagger backward and topple over the undercarriage of the wag into the seething mass of terrified buffalo. Ryan heard him bellow as a huge, horned head tossed him. Then his bass voice rose in screams that were quickly cut off as he fell beneath the churning black hooves.
Just north of the wag park, in the street east of Raker’s big house, Ryan saw Butler. The enormous sec man was dressed in T-shirt and jeans and in his stocking feet. He was jacking the lever of a Winchester-style longblaster for another shot at the escapees.
Ryan swung his own longblaster toward him. He didn’t bother with the scope, but rather lined up fast with the battle sights. As the sec boss raised his own weapon, Ryan fired. Butler’s head jerked, and blood gouted out the back of the bull neck in a black mist. He went down.
Ryan turned back and used up the rest of his 10-round mag of 7.62 mm rounds on the animals still shoving against the tanker. By the last couple of shots, it was on others trying desperately to clamber over the still thrashing bodies of the ones he’d crippled, to keep from getting trampled by those that continued relentlessly pressing from behind.
By then he had a decent barrier created. Between
that and J.B.’s judicious bursts of 9 mm rounds, which would do little more than sting the giant frenzied animals—they had the herd so that it was simply flowing around the tractor-trailer combo like water around a rock.
As he pulled a fresh magazine from his backpack, Ryan took quick stock of the situation. Most of the cargo wags remained on their wheels except the pair that had been parked on the east edge of the yard and side-on to the stampede. The smaller blaster wag with the M-249 was rolled even as he watched, though.
He switched out magazines and looked for more targets.
Though blasterfire now crackled all around, at least no one seemed to be shooting at them. The rest of the rest stop’s defenders, showing better sense than Bry Raker’s late sec boss, were shooting at the great big frantic animals that were clearly the greater threat.
Pushing bison aside with its big snout, Bass Croom’s command wag with its homemade armored plate bulled its way into the still clear space in the lee of the fallen school bus. Bass’s right hand stuck out the driver’s window and blasted with his ParaOrdnance. Morty leaned out the passenger side, his long blond hair wild, firing with a lever-action carbine.
As the running bison started to sheer away from the armored wag, Bass stuck his face out the window.
“Come on!” he shouted, waving his blaster for emphasis. “Climb aboard! We gotta get out of here!”
A big bull put its head down and started to charge full-on at the command wag. Ryan dropped it with a shoulder shot. It fell and skidded with its black snout pressed against the grille as frightened survivors dived in the opened back doors of the wag or climbed up the sides.
Ryan heard other engines snarl above the mighty thunder of the herd. The convoy was preparing to get under way, anyway. Whether they could escape the stampede was still the big question.
He glanced up at Raker’s house. The stout adobe walls had simply defeated the stampede, as Ryan feared they would. The fleeing monsters simply ran around it.
“Son of a bitch,” Ryan cursed. He hungered to take vengeance on the rest stop boss for his treachery, but now he would simply squat inside laughing his bastard ass off in perfect safety. Unless he did something triple stupe like run outside to try to save the rest of his business from being smashed and stomped to kindling by the stampede.