by James Axler
Reassuringly he heard the sledgehammering of hooves on weathered, sturdy planks as the two women, presumably followed hard by Doc, crossed the bridge.
Then, as he rode up to Alysa, a scream pealed from behind him. He heard a giant, cracking, splintering sound.
He spun to see Krysty’s little red roan mare falling on its side just at the bridge’s end, saliva flying from its face. The horse’s thrashing body smashed free a whole section of the heavy timber top rail on her right.
Blood hosed in a ruby arc from a throat torn open by black frog-mutie talons.
* * *
“USE MORE FORCE, LUKE.”
The chunk of concrete, twice as big as J.B.’s head and with nasty jabs and hooks of rust-reddened rebar sticking out of it, clanged against the long steel handle of the wrench. The hard sharp-edged concrete bit at his palms. He wished he’d thought to wear gloves.
“What’s that, Trader?” he asked.
Standing in the shade of War Wag Two, Trader chuckled. “Bad joke. And an old one, a reference to an old-days vid.”
J.B. blinked owlishly at him, in part because his exertions had worked his glasses down his nose and he couldn’t rightly see the man as anything but a long, narrow, shadowy blur. But also because he never reckoned a man as triple-hard and bottom-line as the Trader to go in for such foolishness.
As if reading his thoughts, the man said, “I deal in scavvy, son. I like to know the quality of my own merch. What exactly do you think you’re doing there, anyway, abusing my tools like that?”
That stung J.B. as deeply, but he had the sense to throttle down the sudden racing of his temper.
“I’m trying to get this cable loose so we can haul that cargo wag out the ditch,” he said, speaking slowly and tautly so as not to lose control of his words. It wasn’t so much that Trader was his boss—he had no reflex fear or deference to authority. To say the least. But the man was Trader, as formidable a figure as the Deathlands knew.
“Son, I know that,” Trader said, and now his gravelly voice had a touch of steel in it, like the broke-off chunk of roadway foolishly clutched in J.B.’s chafed hands. “I know what goes on in my convoy. What I want to know is why you are pounding on the handle of my four-foot open-end wrench with a nuking rock?”
J.B. frowned. Sweat ran into his eyes, stinging like anything and blurring out his vision worse than before. He fought the impulse to blink it furiously away. He was afraid that would make him look as nervous as he was.
“Well, I’m trying to get at this steel tow-cable,” he said, struggling a bit as he tried to keep the words from tumbling over each other, without making it sound like he was lecturing a feeb. “The bolt’s froze.”
He could make out Trader’s head turning. His heart sank. The shape approaching through the hot sun was little more detailed to his weak eyes than Trader’s. But he’d learned to recognize his immediate boss and mentor in pretty much any visibility.
“Hear that, Rance?” Trader asked.
She spit in the dust between her and J.B. “What you’re doing would be ace on the line if it was frozen, boy. But it ain’t.”
He shook his head in total bewilderment. “But—but—it won’t turn. I tried and tried. Even tried hanging on the handle. My ass ain’t that skinny!”
Rance sighed in audible disgust. “This is outside stowage, Dix.”
He hated when she called him Dix.
“Do you think Trader wants his shit walking away every time we stop for a piss-break? We can’t have eyes on every square inch of every wag every minute of the day. So the bolts securing outside stores are reverse-threaded.”
Trader was lighting a cigar. J.B. could tell by the smell it wasn’t one of the cheroots Rance favored. Trader liked the big hand-rolled ones.
“Be surprised how well that works,” Trader said, whipping the match until it went out and then holding it to let it cool off. “Most thieves who make a go at helping themselves to my stuff like that react the same way you do.”
The spent match cooled, Trader stuck it in a pocket of his worn jeans, faded near-white by countless suns. He didn’t believe in leaving any more signs of his passage than dead necessary. He insisted his people do the same.
J.B. stared at him as if struck in the head with that damn traitor wrench. He looked at Rance. He still couldn’t make out her features, but the hands on the hips spoke clearly.
“So, what do you think about your new acquisition now?” Rance asked Trader.
The man hunched a shoulder. “I take it this isn’t the best performance he got in him?”
Rance laughed. “No. He’s good with machines—most of the time. But his problem is he has no conception of how good he ain’t yet.”
“So he thinks he knows more than he does?”
She gestured at the wrench and the rock J.B. had forgotten he was holding at crotch level. Sheepishly he let it go, and remembered just in time to hop back to keep it from smashing his own feet.
Trader grunted, then he grinned.
“Your problem mainly is that you’re young, boy,” he said, not harshly. “That’s a problem most of us get over. The question is whether we do it walking or lying down. With dirt hitting us in the eyes.”
He walked off in that purposeful manner of his, not hurrying but going somewhere fast.
Staring after him, J.B. blew out a long breath.
“That could have gone better,” he said.
Chapter Twelve
Mildred wasn’t a woman accustomed to screaming.
But the cry of helpless fear was torn from her throat when she saw Krysty’s horse go down with its throat torn out.
Mildred’s mule shied, braying. In the dash through the monstrous, hunched forms that suddenly crowded the bridge, the two women had gotten separated. Krysty had made it all the way across, only to be brought down.
Mildred’s way was blocked. Not only by the mortally wounded animal, but a ten-foot length of top-rail timber as big around as her thigh.
Uttering a sharp croak, a huge shape hopped off the intact rail on the west and landed in front of Mildred’s mount. It raised a hand that had five fingers, webbed and tipped with long, curving claws.
Her mule slammed the mutie down with both hooves on its chest. Mildred heard a crunch and a gasping wheeze.
Another frog swiped at the mule. It laid its long ears back against its neck and bit a big chunk out of the mutie’s face. Screaming like a human woman, the creature fell back against the rail. Blood spurted past the webbing of the claws that covered its snout.
Mildred tried to shoot another that lunged at her with her ZKR 551 target pistol. The frog slapped the sturdy revolver between its palms, trapping it, thrusting the muzzle skyward—and clamping the cylinder so that it wouldn’t turn.
Meaning it also wouldn’t shoot.
That angered Mildred. Screaming was an uncommon reaction to fear in her. Her usual mode was rage, which hit a beat later.
She began to kick the creature furiously in the side with boots that had reinforced steel toes. The frog grunted dismally but held on.
Its eyes were large and bulbous, like frog eyes, but the irises were a bright shocking blue, like a human’s. Mildred tried not to think about that.
From the corner of her eye Mildred saw a mutie loom over Krysty, whose thigh was trapped beneath the still-thrashing body of her mare. Ryan had turned his black-and-white mount back and had fisted his SIG-Sauer handblaster. But there were too many stooped-over mutie bodies in the way to reach her in time.
Mildred roared now in sheer rage. She felt her opponent’s ribs break under a savage kick. But still the mutie held her blaster.
Over the ruckus she heard a distinct, heavy thump. The mutie standing over Krysty froze a moment with claws upraised. Its weird froglike face looked puzzled somehow.
Then it turned its snout back down to its prey, as the mare uttered a final strangled gasp and went still atop the struggling redhead.
* * *
&
nbsp; “DARK NIGHT! WHERE do these little bastards come from?”
No sooner had he shouted the words than the .50-caliber blaster mounted in the rear casemate of War Wag One cut loose with a wag-size flame and a world-size noise right over his head. Cursing in a voice not even he could hear for the catastrophic sound, J.B. flattened himself in the sandbag emplacement atop the Mercedes-Benz panel van running right behind the war wag.
The convoy rolled down a sandy, dry stream bottom between steep walls of red Oklahoma clay with bits and pieces of acid-rain-scorched vegetation clinging to them. The tops of both sides seemed to be lined with muties, small, toothy and scaly. They rained down rocks, crude spears, and not infrequently themselves on the vehicles of Trader’s vehicles.
“All over,” said the man hunkered beside J.B. He was another wrench from Rance’s crew, a compact balding black man named Marcus. “I hate coming this way. Little fuckers always swarm us like anything.”
The air was full of pink dust and the smell of hot diesel oil and lubricants—and a triple-heavy stink of burned propellant from the Ma Deuce blast. J.B.’s ears rang so badly he could barely hear the man a foot and a half from his head.
Marcus whipped up his massive SPAS scattergun and triggered a blast to the rear of the box. A mutie, a little over three feet high, like a tailless reptilian humanoid—or humanoid reptile—emitted a squeal as the charge of Number 4 buck hit it, exploding the yellow-pink finely scaled skin of its chest and belly above the filthy rag loincloth it wore. It flipped over the back end of the box.
On the vehicle behind, a former rental truck now painted in an absurd camo of streaked gray and green, a woman in a leather cap and goggles raised a fist and hollered curses at the Mercedes from her own sandbag emplacement. Apparently a few stray pellets from Marcus’s shot had sung past her ears.
J.B. was sitting facing forward. He had the steel buttplate of the SKS he’d been issued for this day’s run pressed to his shoulder and was swinging the heavy longblaster left and right, searching for targets. So far, no muties had come down on the front end of the box or the cab. And the ones along the gully’s walls popped up and down too fast to waste a cartridge on.
“Dark night!” he shouted, as the M-60 mounted in a hardpoint atop War Wag One’s middle segment ripped a burst along the cliff-top to their left. “Why are we driving this way? We’re triple-fat targets down in this nuking ditch!”
Marcus shrugged. “Business,” he said. “That’s what makes Trader Trader. He’s willin’ to take risks others ain’t.”
He chuckled. Owing to a vagary in the incredible ruckus of gunfire, shouts, screams and the weird squalling of the blunt-snouted muties, J.B. actually heard him.
“O’ course, he’s got the firepower others ain’t,” he said. “Not to mention the armor.”
“Which we aren’t inside of,” J.B. said sourly.
The convoy had two of the monstrous war wags: three-sectioned vehicles capable of running on both tracks and big knobby wheels, plus every known kind of fuel that could burn. They were a combination of salvaged predark military tech and the wizardry of Trader’s crew—not least J.B.’s boss, Rance Weeden, and the man he secretly longed to work for, Weapons Master Ace DeGuello. Trader’s personal ride, War Wag One, rolled point this day, as it generally did. War Wag Two brought up the rear.
The M-60 snarled. J.B. approved of the way the gunner was firing in measured bursts—three shots, four, then five, and three again. It was a way to minimize overheating in the big weapon and to maximize the shots between barrel changes, which were double-hard to do in action—a major design flaw of the machine gun.
And then the big blaster fell silent.
J.B. frowned. He could see muties popping up on the gully walls ahead. It should be a target rich environment. Mebbe the barrel melted, he thought. Sooner or later heat caught up with a machine gun.
Marcus clapped his hand to the side of his head as if he’d been stung. Johnny knew he had to be listening to the earpiece stuck in his ear from the compact walkie-talkie stuck in his shirt pocket.
“Fuck!” the assistant wrench exclaimed. “Sixty’s jammed. And it’s the only top-mounted blaster on War Wag One!”
* * *
“¡MADRE DE DIOS!” Ricky yelped in frustrated fury as he threw the bolt of his DeLisle carbine. The copper-jacketed 230-grain .45 ACP slug had hit the monster square in the side of its inhumanly deep chest.
And it had barely distracted the humanoid frog. It was either extraordinarily durable, like a stickie, or simply too bulky and well-protected by thick hide and heavy bones for what was still a handblaster bullet to stop it with a single solid torso shot.
When the muties had suddenly boiled up over both sides of the wood bridge to assail his friend, he had swung off his stubby yellow pony and onto the ground. His reflex was to provide covering fire.
The pony had panicked and reared, neighing shrilly. He had lost valuable seconds trying to fight to keep control of it. Then he realized that, small as the beast was, it was stronger than he was, and that his job now was shooting, not minding his ride.
By that time, Krysty’s horse was already falling, fatally wounded.
He heard a strange, heavy crunching in the snow from right behind. He set his jaw. I have to take the shot, he told himself. Mother Mary, give me strength.
He got the picture above the iron sights of the suppressed longblaster just as the beast leaned forward into a downward blow aimed at the helpless woman. Ricky had accounted for a slight forward motion.
Just enough. The huge head jerked visibly. Black blood sprayed away from its head. It crumpled.
Ricky spun, frantically working the bolt action of the weapon, which promptly jammed. In his own haste he had short-shucked it, managing not to yank the bolt far enough to properly feed even the short .45 cartridge.
The monster was right behind him, staring at him with gigantic hazel eyes. It had a claw upraised to slice open his face.
The right eye exploded in black. Dragon’s breath washed, scalding, across the left side of Ricky’s face. Terrible noise threatened to implode his eardrum as fast tiny particles stung his cheek and temple.
The mutie dropped. A cloud of its brain and gore hung in the chill evening air for what seemed an eternity before falling like clotted rain on the snow.
Jak was at Ricky’s side. His face was set in a predator’s grin, the ruby eyes slits of fierce joy. Blue smoke wisped thin from the ribbed barrel of his huge .357 Magnum Colt Python handblaster.
Again operating on reflex, Ricky hauled the bolt open in an effort to clear the cartridge, which had stuck upright in the breach. His second furious attempt worked. The round spun free.
But by then a heavy inhuman hand, black-green, both webbed and cruelly clawed, had come down on Jak’s right shoulder, too late for Ricky to intervene.
* * *
MILDRED SAW THE frog mutie’s head explode.
Then the one she was fighting with squealed. She looked back at it to see a slim length of steel withdrawing from the blood and the aqueous, fluid-spurting ruin of its left eye.
Mildred shoved her now-freed revolver’s muzzle into the other eye and fired. She saw the rubbery face inflate like a giant balloon from the sudden gas overpressure of the muzzle-blast.
For a horrifying instant, it looked almost like a mottled green mask of a human face.
Then the creature slumped back against the rail. Its arms twitched and big hind legs kicked. But it was clearly dead.
A huge boom on Mildred’s other side told her that Doc, having stabbed her attacker with his swordstick, had unleashed the shotgun tube slung under the barrel of his LeMat revolver on another mutie.
Ryan was closing in on the fallen Krysty, shooting and stabbing. Behind him, Mildred saw Alysa and her horse fighting like demons to keep their way clear. But the monsters were plentiful.
They had closed in a circle around the trapped Krysty. Mildred tried to charge them, but her mule refused to get
too near. She started blasting humped backs. Her bullets seemed to have no effect.
Krysty screamed.
* * *
A HEAVY, COOL calm settled on J.B. In the heat of the firefight, the dust and noise and danger, his heart and been racing so hard it threatened to pulverize his rib cage from the inside.
Now he felt it slow as he drew in a deep breath. There was just one thing to do.
So, naturally, he did it.
Slinging his longblaster, he stood up out of the sandbag nest. “Have you gone crazy?” Marcus yelped. “Get down, you feeb!”
A spear from above flashed by in front of J.B.’s face. He didn’t flinch. His mind had already calculated it wouldn’t hit him.
He took a couple of halting steps to the front of the cargo box, leaped the palm-size gap to the roof of the cab. Fortunately the Mercedes had a flat snout, van-size, instead of a coffin hood like the truck following.
Hunkering down on the cab, dropping one palm to the sun-hot metal of the roof as the other secured the downward-slung muzzle of his SKS, J.B. hung his face down beside the driver’s window.
Unexpected motion in her peripheral vision made the driver glance over. Her brown eyes widened.
“Close up!” J.B. shouted.
The driver was conscious of her craft—Trader’s people were good at their jobs, or they didn’t have them. She kept glancing at the armor-clad mass of the vehicle just ahead, then back at the unexpected apparition of an upside-down head in her window.
J.B. let go of the SKS to make a rolling gesture at the driver with his finger extended. “Close up!” he yelled again. He made sure to mouth the words exaggeratedly.
The driver’s eyes actually got wider. Then, apparently deciding if this crazy new kid wanted a novel way to wind up with dirt hitting him in the eyes, that was his lookout, she put the pedal down. The heavy-loaded truck shuddered, then lurched so that its flat nose almost slammed the rear weapon mount of War Wag One.
The perforated barrel of the .50-caliber Browning M2 machine gun mounted there was already turning and rising slightly as its gunner found a new target. He probably didn’t even see J.B.