Eden’s Twilight

by James Axler

  In the rear of the massive APC, a dozen crewmen were preparing their blasters for the coming fight, a large dark-haired woman standing among them.

  “Remember what I told you,” Helga directed, slinging a canvas bag full of spare ammo belts and the M-60 rapidfire over a shoulder. “Once inside the ville, no more chilling. Wound or blind only, but no chilling! We need these folks alive to talk.”

  “Yeah, we’ll make ’em talk, Chief,” a greasy crewman said with a sneer, obscenely rubbing his crotch.

  The other men laughed in lusty agreement while doing a final check of their brand-new flak jackets, rapidfires and grens.

  “Sure, have fun, rape all you want,” Helga stated, fixing the men with a hard stare. “But only after we have control of the ville. Only then! Anybody dies before then, and I’ll sell your asses to the cannies. Savvy?”

  “Yeah, we savvy,” a burly crewman muttered, attaching a bayonet to the end of the Kalashnikov. There were neat rows of scratches in the wooden stock to mark each person he had personally gutted, and it was almost time for a new stock, the old one nearly worn through in spots. Any damn feeb could shoot someone from a distance. Where was the fun in that? Ah, but you had to get up close and personal for a gutting. Then you could look into their terrified eyes and watch the actual life fade away. That was a lot better than rape. Oh yes, much, much better than that.

  Wrapped in a thick blanket, a doomie child sat alone in the corner on a wooden crate of MRE envelopes. With infinite patience, the mutie waited for the swirling whirlpool of events to finally coalesce into a single moment of clarity. The future was in motion again, forming and changing like warm quicksilver, each pattern new and distinct, but all of them rich with the terrible red hue of human suffering. Untold hundreds would perish tonight, and the child privately wished that he could be among them to end the long years of forced servitude to his horrible master.

  “Again!” Broke-Neck Pete commanded, his face shiny with avarice. “Use every rocket! But bring down those fragging trees!”

  By now, most of the grove was on fire, the flames raging unchecked. Once the way was clear, Pete would personally drive Roadhog to the wall and punch through with his small supply of CeeGee missiles. That wasn’t the name of the predark weapon, just what he personally called them. There did not seem to be any designation for the oversize launchers except the name of the manufacturer, Carl Gustav. But that was okay, what predark blaster didn’t have somebody’s name on it?

  But more importantly, the massive 87 mm rockets packed twice the punch of a slim 66 mm LAW, and completely blew apart every war wag he had ever encountered as if it were made of window glass instead of welded steel. The trader had only three of the CeeGee launchers left, but they should be more than enough to open a crack in the wall around Cascade, and then the pipe bombs stolen from Two-Son ville would finish the job. Pete had been hoarding the heavy antitank launchers for years, hoping to use them against the Trader. But now he was offered an even better target than revenge, the combined tech of the predark world. And it was all waiting for him behind a simple stone wall. Broke-Neck Pete, the first emperor of Nuke America!

  Soon, oh so very soon, the city of Cascade would be his. It was only a matter of minutes…

  SCREECHING TO A HALT at the base of the wall, the companions charged out of the sheriff’s van and started up the enclosed stairwell leading to a guard kiosk. A deputy sat on the steps smoking a cheroot, and his eyes went wide at the appearance of Ryan and the others. As he fumbled with an M-16 rapidfire, Ryan shot the man in the throat and ran past him without slowing. Mercy was a luxury they could ill afford at the moment. Time was short.

  The one-eyed man encountered no more guards on the zigzagging stairs, and he paused to catch his breath halfway up the tower. Damn electrocution had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit. Glancing out a narrow slit in the brickwork, Ryan cursed at the sight of several Jeeps full of armed people stopping near the van and surrounding the vehicle. They seemed to be shouting orders, then all of them opened fire, the fusillade of rounds tearing the apart the vehicle until it whoofed into flames.

  “So much for protect and service,” Mildred snorted, hefting the Winchester. “They’ll be coming up the stairs next, John!”

  “Already on it,” J.B. replied, kneeling on the concrete. Stretched across the landing, a dark string was looped around the iron-pipe railing of the stairwell and attached to the pin of a gren with the arming lever already removed.

  “Anti-pers?” Krysty asked.

  “Willie peter,” the Armorer answered smugly. “That chem storm will make a wall of fire and stop anybody from coming this way for quite a while!”

  “Thermite would be better,” Doc stated, thankful for the short break.

  “True. But I’m saving that for Pete.”

  “But what about the implo gren?”

  “We have other plans for that,” Ryan stated, starting up the stairs once more.

  Reaching the top landing, the companions angled their rapidfires upward and put a long burst through the closed wooden door at the top of the stairs. They were rewarded with howls of pain, and then the door was blown apart by a deafening shotgun blast.

  Ryan charged up the last few steps and swept the kiosk with the rapidfire, catching two deputies in the act of closing their bulletproof vests. They died on the spot, but he’d only wounded a third man wearing his vest and sitting at a table. The impact of the 7.62 mm rounds spun the startled guard around in the wheeled chair, and he fell out firing a big-bore handcannon, a lance of flame extending from the muzzle. As Ryan stitched the guard with the rapidfire, he staggered from the brutal impact of a large-caliber round, and felt the sharp pain of a rib cracking. Fireblast, the vests were shit! No damn padding at all.

  Ignoring the dull throb in his chest, Ryan stumbled to a mounted gun and worked the arming bolt to then sweep the top of the wall with a steady hail of .50-caliber rounds. Men and women screamed from the unexpected attack from behind, and fell away into the darkness of the night. Meanwhile, the other companions started shooting their M-16 rapidfires down at the guards walking patrol on top of the depot with similar bloody results. As the clips emptied, Krysty and Mildred dropped their weapons and took the combo blasters from the dead guards.

  When the belt ended, Ryan released the hot blaster and went outside, walking swiftly along the top of the wide stone wall, keeping a good distance from the coils of electrified barbed wire.

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc cried, pointing outside the ville.

  Expecting a new attack, Ryan glanced in that direction, but only saw a fiery warbird climbing high into the starry sky, going almost straight up. Mutie shit, that was rising from the west, not the east! It was the signal from Jak, which meant that Roberto was already here. Redoubling his speed, the one-eyed man triggered the rapidfire at anything that moved in the darkness ahead, brutally clearing the way until standing above the depot.

  Maintaining flanking positions, the rest of the companions stayed close, emptying clips in mere seconds, grabbing replacements from the dead and the dying. Carefully placing her shots, Mildred used the telescopic sight of the Winchester to pick off anybody coming their way with heavy ordnance.

  Turning away from the defense complex, Ryan shot off the strands of barbed wire, sparking electrical cables sailing away. Now looking down, he could see the dirt road going directly from the ville to the craggy foothills in the west.

  Just then, machine-gun chatter came from a nearby kiosk, the hum of the passing bullets clearly audible. Ruthlessly, Krysty crouched to point her M-16 that way and trigger the 40 mm gren launcher. It loudly thumped, and a split second later the brick kiosk exploded in a fireball, shrieking figures running around inside the inferno and waving their arms.

  As if in response, a blinding searchlight swung around to trap the companions in a deadly zone of visibility. Everybody discharged their rapidfires at the source of the light, and immediately came the sound of shatte
ring glass. The searchlight winked out.

  Ensconced in blackness once more, J.B. hauled out the implo gren, pulled the pin and simply dropped the bomb over the outside edge of the wall. The ferruled sphere vanished into the gloom below, and the companions dropped, holding on tight.

  Running people were hurrying along the top of the wall, coming ever closer, when there came a brief flash of light from below, closely followed by a hurricane of air rushing downward. Caught by surprise, the deputies were hauled into the barbed wire, the electrified strands crackling and sizzling as the men wailed in agony.

  The second that the wind eased, Ryan stood and dropped a willie peter gren off to the side. As it detonated, the flaming chem storm revealed a huge crater in the dirt road, ten, maybe twenty feet deep. But there was no sign of the feeder pipe.

  Then, from the depot, there came an odd thumping sound, rapidly building in volume and in strength.

  “Gaia, they’re getting ready to release the steam!” Krysty shouted.

  “Use the rockets!” Ryan snarled, tossing aside the rapidfire and pulling the LAW off his shoulder. “All together! We have to hit it all together.”

  Moving fast, everybody obeyed, spreading out slightly to assume a firing position. From within the depot, the mechanical thumping got louder and machine guns yammered nonstop from the eastern wall. People were shouting in the streets, blasters firing randomly. Halfway up, the stairwell leading to the guard kiosk exploded into writhing flames, and a second searchlight swept the wall to stop directly on the poised companions.

  “On my mark!” Ryan bellowed, lightly placing a finger on the button, the plastic launch tube cool against his sweaty cheek. “Three…two…one…mark!”

  In tight formation, the antitank weapons discharged, a stiletto of white flame stabbing out from the front, while a volcano of smoke and hot exhaust vomited from the rear. Streaking straight down, the rockets barely had enough time to arm their warheads before hitting the soft ground and detonating.

  The overlapping explosions sounded louder than a nuke storm, and huge volumes of dirt were thrown aside in a dark tidal wave…along with several large chunks of curved steel pipe.

  Suddenly the depot stopped pounding, and from the smoking depression a thundering geyser of white steam erupted, reaching for the stars, quickly spreading like a blossoming hellflower to send a boiling mist across the ville and cropland. Already halfway back to the kiosk, the companions cried out from the stinging deluge and barely made it inside to slam the door shut and take refuge inside the weapons closet.

  However, not everybody was so fortunate. Anybody caught out in the open began to howl from the boiling rain, and most of the people were scalded alive, falling limply to the muddy ground long before they were able to reach any kind of protective cover.

  As the force of the titanic geyser dissipated, the rain of boiling death slowed and finally stopped. An eerie stillness covered the sodden village, hot water dripping off the rooftops and trickling down the rain gutters, wispy tendrils of steam rising from the hundreds of bloated, red bodies covering the sidewalks and streets.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Long before the fires were completely extinguished in the barrier forest, the steam truck Thunder crashed into the charred branches, smashing them aside to create a path for the other wags. In tight formation, the LVTP-7 Roadhog came next, closely followed by the speedy little delivery vans, the halogen headlights throwing out overlapping cones of bright illumination.

  Rolling through a wide cornfield, the steam truck reached the city wall without incident and stopped just short of touching the paved road encircling the ville.

  “Strange,” Pete muttered, fingering the leather brace supporting his neck. “You would think the sec men would be firing at us by now.”

  “Mebbe they’re all chilled,” Helga guessed. “That boiling rain must have aced anybody out in the open.”

  “Possible, but I strongly dislike coincidences,” Pete said uneasily. He turned to address the doomie, but the child was crooning softly to himself, rocking back and forth, lost in the secret world of his mind. Bah, blasted freak was useless half of the time, and more cryptic than a Chinese VCR manual the other half. He really should have aced him years ago.

  “All right, let’s circle the place and find the gate,” Pete directed, edging forward in his chair. “Have Thunder and the vans go left, we’ll go to the right. Whoever finds the gate, radio the others before trying to gain control!” Who knows? Maybe he could take the place intact and use it as his new base, rather than merely looting the tech and hauling it hundreds of miles to his home outside Saint Louie.

  “What about the CeeGee launchers?” Helga asked, trying not to sound disappointed. She had really been looking forward to blasting down the wall. There was a funny sensation inside her mind, almost as if she could see something…somebody around the corner. There was a murky impression of red hair blowing in the wind, but nothing more.

  “Keep them ready in case Roberto made it across the Mud Lake,” the little trader commanded with a sneer. “But with any luck, he’s in the belly of a kraken by now.”

  “Along with the triple-cursed lass!”

  As Helga issued the orders into a mike, the five wags quickly separated and took off in different directions.

  EXITING FROM THE DRIPPING brick kiosk, the companions stumbled along the wall, the granite slippery with small puddles, the dense air heavy with moisture and difficult to breathe. Their ears still rang slightly from the stentorian keen of the steam explosion.

  The top of the barrier had been cleared of everything: corpses, blasters, brass and blood, and most of the barbed wire along the western side of the wall was gone, the tangled strands ripped free from their insulated moorings. However, the ville below was strewed with bodies, norms, horses and dogs, the sagging trees dripping water, the shiny streets misty with steam. Every torch and oil lantern had been extinguished, only the electric streetlights were still functioning, the stark white glow harshly displaying the stark desolation. Cascade was a city of the dead.

  Nothing was moving for as far as the companions could see, aside from rivulets of water flowing into the storm gratings of the street. The scattered fires were extinguished, dark smoke rising upward to merge with the starry sky. Then dozens of doors slammed open in the houses and stores, and out poured armed townsfolk. They milled around aimlessly at first, unsure of what to do or where to go. Then the mob surged toward the ville square, converging upon the gazebo like iron filings drawn to a powerful magnet. A stocky woman took the wet stage and began to shout orders too faint to hear from atop the wall. But the crowd took heart and rushed to obey. First, the dead were checked for ammo and grens, then every vehicle was started and driven to the massive southern gate to form a curved line in front of the portal. More cars were added, along with Jeeps, trucks and, oddly, bales of hay, until there was a wide span solidly blocking the main street. Then the civies took defensive positions behind the makeshift barricade and waited for the coming invaders.

  “That isn’t even going to slow down Pete,” Mildred stated with conviction, thumbing fresh rounds into the side port of the Winchester.

  “Don’t think it’ll have to,” Ryan replied, pointing with the M-16 rapidfire. “Look there!”

  A large group of people stood at the iron gate of the bunker, the golden hair of Jessica Colt visible even from this great distance.

  “Jak must have told them how to find that trick door!” J.B. realized in unabashed delight. “It’s nice to have reinforcements, but I’m not really sure how fifty more folks on foot are going to stop war wags.” Squinting, the Armorer rummaged in the munitions bag for the navy telescope. “Are they carrying bazookas?”

  “Don’t need them,” Ryan said confidently.

  Studying the rough granite exterior of the foothills, Jessica spoke into a radio, then directed the others to take cover. A few seconds later the face of the rock violently exploded outward, and War Wag One rolled
through the jagged opening, the rocket pod trailing smoke. It was closely followed by the UCV and Big Joe.

  “War Wag Two is still alive?” Mildred gasped. “Excellent!”

  “Thought so,” Ryan said, almost grinning. “Option sixteen, my ass. No trader ever gives up without a fight.”

  “This will help a lot,” Krysty said tersely. “But without the laser to even the odds Roberto is in for a hell of a fight.”

  “No problem there,” J.B. stated, taking a small leather pouch from his bag. “I found this in the safe of the sheriff’s office.” He pulled on the drawstrings and opened the pouch. “These are the diamonds that Yates stole.”

  “Superlative, John Barrymore!” Doc cried, then scowled. “But however can we get these to him? It’s a thirty-foot drop to the ground, and impossible to get through the ville and the gate.”

  “We can check the kiosks for some rope,” Mildred said, starting back inside at a run.

  “Don’t worry about it, Millie!” J.B. stated confidently. “See here on the pouch? It’s marked ‘War Wag One.’”

  “So what?” Krysty asked with a frown. “Isn’t that the pouch taken from War Wag One?”

  J.B. smiled. “Yep, sure is!”

  “But then…oh.”

  “But then why would it be marked that way,” Mildred said slowly, comprehension brightening her face. “Unless there were more diamonds in the other wags!”

  “Only a fool keeps all of his brass in one pocket,” Ryan stated, resting the Steyr on a shoulder. “Especially for something as important as a can opener.”

  “By Gadfrey, the man said that we would never know all of his secrets,” Doc said in dark admiration. “And it seems that Roberto is a man of infinite resources.”

  “Traders are trickier than a bent-dick dog,” J.B. added, tucking away the pouch.

  “However, knowing Pete, it’s still a long way from a fair fight,” Krysty declared uneasily. There was something in the wind that she didn’t like. A disquieting feeling of being watched by unseen eyes.