by James Axler
Using his cane, Baron Rushmore loudly banged the welkin twice, then tucked the stick under an arm to cup his hands together. “All right, I’m going after the outlanders!” he shouted. “I want twenty volunteers with rapid-fires!”
The crowd cheered its approval.
“What’s wrong with a scattergun?” a fat sec man asked, proffering his weapon.
“Because I’ve looked into their faces,” Rushmore said bluntly, “and these are pros. Coldhearts tougher than boiled steel, and meaner than a stickie on jolt.”
“I can take them,” the sec man boasted.
“No, you can’t, Archie,” Baron Rushmore stated, turning away. “Okay, twenty sec men with rapid-fires! I’ll personally replace any brass used, and the first stud to chill this Ryan gets his redhead for a month!”
“Rather have his horse,” a sec woman stated, defiantly crossing her brawny arms.
“Done! His horse and his blasters, or his woman. Take your pick!”
Stunned at the extravagant reward, the crowd wildly cheered even louder than before, this time adding some catcalls and whistles.
“Yee-haw!” a sec man bellowed, waving a Thompson .45 machine pistol. “It’s chilling time!”
Chapter Eleven
The moon was low in the starry sky, descending toward the horizon, dawn only a few hours away, when the Fire Hammer crashed through an icy snowbank, the twin halogen headlights sending out brilliant blue-white beams. As they swept through the forest, frightened birds took flight at the artificial dawn.
Bursting out of a bush, a stickie charged the machine, waving its sucker-covered hands overhead, all the while hooting loudly. The mutie only got a few yards before the long barrel of a rapid-fire jutted from a small blasterport. In stuttering fury, the big weapon cut loose, and the stickie was torn apart by the hammering barrage of rounds from the M-60 rapid-fire safely inside. As the body fell, the Fire Hammer rolled by, the gunner working the arming bolt to clear a jammed round from the hot breech.
“Trouble?” Queen Angstrom demanded from the front of the armored vehicle.
“I think too many reloads is making the brass weak, ma’am,” the man replied, finally getting the bent shell casing free. It hit the metal floor and madly rolled until disappearing into an air vent.
“Then save the rest until we really need them,” she ordered, steering the huge machine around a fallen tree.
“As you command,” he said, closing the blasterport to stop the rush of cold air from getting inside.
Just then, the radio speaker in the ceiling crackled with an indecipherable message.
“Hammer to scouts, repeat,” Angstrom said loud and clear into a handheld microphone. “Did not copy, repeat!”
In reply, the ceiling crackled once more, then a large bundle of furs stepped out of the bushes in the distance. A Granite Empire sec man waved a gloved hand, then flashed a thumb.
“We found them,” Angstrom whispered excitedly, leaning forward in her chair. The original padding had been eaten by insects long ago, so now the chair was heavily padded with soft wolfskin and multiple layers of shag carpeting.
“Should I ready the laser, ma’am?” the sec man asked from the rear of the armored personnel carrier.
“Immediately,” Angstrom said low in her throat, the words almost a purr.
“With pleasure.” He twisted the throttle on a Harley-Davidson, kicking the compact gasoline engine alive.
The interior of the Fire Hammer was cramped, packed high with supplies, mostly fuel. But that minor inconvenience was more than countered by the waves of warmth pouring from the floor vents.
Built to carry a crew of ten predark soldiers, eight troopers, driver and gunner, the war wag was now barely able to hold two people. The pod of the laser used a lot of space, and everything else was the food, ammunition, jars of shine and the machine.
A wide Harley-Davidson motorcycle with both wheels removed had the frame welded to the rear floor of the APC, the big Twin-V88 engine attached with a leather strap to a portable Komatsu electric generator. In turn, that was hard-wired to a step-up transformer inside a protective wooden box, and thick insulated cable fed power to the laser. It took King Angstrom years to get the laser to work, and dozens of whitecoats had been blinded or burned alive until the sizzling beam could be properly focused. Then it was another year before he’d found a way to power the weapon for battle.
However, the Fire Hammer was now a rolling juggernaut of advanced destruction, fully capable of merely blinding enemies so that they could be used as slaves, or destroying them completely.
At the front of the APC, Angstrom sat in front of a complex control board covered with flickering meters, twitching dials and glowing screens. Her husband had not known what any of them had been used for, and so had switched off everything to save fuel. But the queen had worked out the details of most of the board, and turned all of it back on again. With all of the radioactive hash in the atmosphere, the radio and radar were pretty much useless, their ranges reduced to roughly a hundred feet. However, this was how predark commanders had ridden into battle, listening to the hum, clatter and steady beeps of the assorted instruments. She found that fact oddly comforting.
Of course, her grandfather used to tell stories about how his grandfather claimed the machine could actually fix itself if broken in battle. But that was pure nonsense. Just a stretch to tell the children before bedtime.
Working the pair of big levers that served the APC for a steering wheel, the queen parked the Fire Hammer on a low rise that afforded an excellent view of the snowy landscape ahead.
“Send out flanking scouts,” she said, thumbing the microphone alive. “Knives and crossbows only! We don’t want to wake them this early in the morning.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Major Svenson said, his crackling voice replied from a speaker. “Alive if possible?”
“Oh yes, they must be taken alive—” Angstrom stopped as there came a high-pitched scream from the dark tunnel directly ahead. Then there came the crackle of blasterfire and the dull thud of a pipe bomb exploding.
“Report!” Angstrom snapped, grabbing a pair of binoculars from a cushioned holster. “What happened?”
“Unknown, ma’am,” Svenson said
Shooting weapons backward over their shoulders, several sec men raced out of the dark tunnel set into the cliff face. They were closely followed by a group of naked women streaked with dirt, and apparently with leafy green vines coming out of their orifices.
“Meat puppets!” gasped the sec man in the rear of the APC.
“Fire at will!” Svenson commanded, dropping the hand radio to aim and discharging his longblaster.
Falling into position, the scouts cut loose with their flintlock longblasters, the barrage of .66 miniballs ripping off chunks of the drooling women and throwing them backward.
But even missing limbs, they stiffly rose once more and attacked. Several of the sec men were caught ramming fresh loads into their weapons, and fell screaming under the clawed hands of the naked slaves. In only moments they were covered with wiggling vines.
“Left wing, use pipe bombs!” the major ordered. “Right wing, retreat, and give cover fire!”
Sluggishly, the captured sec men rose to look blankly at their brothers, then awkwardly give the thumbs-up signal. Right on cue, more of the naked slaves stumbled from the dark tunnel, men and women this time, all of them waving and smiling. Only their terrified eyes revealed the horrible truth of the situation.
“Chill them all!” Angstrom commanded, flipping a row of switches on the main control board.
With a low hum of controlled hydraulics, a hinged section of the armored roof swung open wide, and the PEP laser cycled outside.
A painted crosshair appeared on a monitor along the softly beeping radar screen, and An
gstrom used a joystick to center the laser on the tunnel, then squeezed the trigger.
From atop the APC, a shimmering beam of concentrated annihilation lanced out to sweep across the sec men and slaves. At the touch of the beam, the people seemed to explode as their blood instantly boiled.
Standing partially behind another bush, a large sec man caught in the beam shrieked as he was only cut in twain, the two halves of his body sliding away from each other, his face registering pain beyond words as his internal organs slithered to the ground like a heap of greasy ropes. Then his head cracked open, revealing a writhing nest of leafy tendrils, tiny filaments flexing and moving at the totally unexpected infusion of moonlight.
The ragged gobbets of flesh were still falling when a second wave of slaves appeared, a bizarre mixture of humans, stickies and grizzly bears.
The Granite Empire sec men opened fire on the slaves, the miniballs dispatching several of them even as the flintlocks and horse blasters threw out a dense gray cloud of gunsmoke. Then the laser stabbed out once more, a soft beam sweeping across their faces, the eyeballs turning white before bursting like overripe grapes.
Yet even as they fell, more leafy vines appeared from inside the tunnel, spreading outward in every direction to hunt for new hosts.
“Gods of our fathers protect us!” a sec man screamed, backing away.
Tripping on a fallen branch, he landed sprawling and the vines swarmed all over his body. Screaming curses, he pulled at a knife and wildly hacked at himself, but the unstoppable vines raced inside his mouth and up both nostrils. Next, they went up his pants, and the sec man went still, a wordless scream distorting his face into a rictus of madness. Then he slowly turned and smiled, his movements jerky and mechanical, drool flowing from his slack lips.
“Forgive me, old friend,” Svenson whispered, firing from the hip. The Remington boomed, the hellstorm of lead pellets opening the man’s chest to expose his vine-covered organs.
Incredibly, the corpse still shuffled closer and clumsily pulled a handblaster to start shooting blindly. Instantly, all of the other sec men triggered their weapons. The deafening volley of flintlocks, shotguns and handblasters was deafening, and the hail of hot lead ripped out what little life was remaining in the bedraggled creatures.
But even as it dropped, the tiny vines started moving across the snow on the hunt for fresh flesh.
Snarling curses under her breath, Angstrom worked the controls of the PEP laser, and squeezed the trigger again until it locked into place.
Once more the rainbow beam of the polycyclic laser stabbed out. But this time the beam flashed over the heads of the meat puppets to score a glowing red gully in the rockface just above the predark tunnel. The cold rocks violently exploded at the thermal inversion, filling the nearby forest with a maelstrom of deadly rock splinters.
Horses, sec men and slaves died in droves. But the laser kept onward, sweeping back and forth along the mountainside, until the rock was glowing a dull orange. Within seconds that changed to a bright cherry-red, then a brilliant yellow and finally white.
As slow as winter blood, the molten rock began to sag across the opening of the tunnel. Still smiling, the naked slaves mindlessly attacked the lava with their bare hands, trying to staunch the hellish attack. Their fingers disappeared at every fleeting touch, and soon their charred bodies fell under the unstoppable advance.
Moments later the entire mouth of the tunnel vanished from sight, the entrance completely blocking the slowly descending lava.
“All right, that’s enough,” Angstrom announced, releasing the trigger. “No sense wasting fuel.”
“Do we go home now, ma’am?” the sec man asked, turning off the motorcycle engine. It sputtered, and coughed, then died away.
“If the outlanders were in there, then I have all the vengeance anybody could ever want,” Angstrom replied, forcing her hand to release the joystick. “But until I see their bleeding corpses, this manhunt continues.”
“By your command.”
“Major, send out more scouts!” Angstrom said into the hand mike. “Look for horse tracks, footprints, spoor, spent brass, anything and everything! If the outlanders left before we got here, I want to know when they did, and where they went!”
* * ** * *
ON THE OTHER side of Cobalt Mountain, once the companions were past the warming effects of the lava flow, the mountains swiftly reverted to a frozen vista. Eating what they could with a single hand, the companions rode long and hard through a growing blizzard looking for a safe place to spend the night.
“Egad, it is like the seventh level of Dante’s Hell,” Doc muttered, shivering under the makeshift poncho of a horse blanket.
“Or summer in Minneapolis,” Mildred said through her chattering teeth.
All of the companions were similarly dressed. A simple cut in the middle of a heavy blanket made a crude poncho that at least kept off the majority of the snow, and lessened the stinging effects of the bitter wind. But covered with an accumulation of snow, Ryan and the others were starting to resemble snowmen, their horses only visible by the steam of their weary exhalations. They desperately wanted to stop and build a campfire in the forest, but the danger of being discovered by the vengeful sec men of Little Eden was too risky, so they had to keep moving.
Just before dawn, the companions found an abandoned hydroelectric power station. The access door, spotted by Krysty inside a snowbank they passed, as incongruous as a bowling ball in the Vatican. The thick portal was sealed with ice, but a sizzling road flare by J.B. cleared the jamb and the ancient door smoothly swung open on recessed hinges.
The air inside was cold, and smelled metallic, but the delicate coating of frost on the floor tiles clearly showed that no other living thing had ever breached the facility. Thick cables stretched like a spiderweb overhead, tiny icicles reflecting the morning light and giving the gloomy interior a strange, winter-festival feeling.
The heavily laden horses were a tight fit through the door, but once out of the storm, the animals stomped their hooves and shook off the accumulated snow.
“Why don’t we keep riding?” Ricky asked, scowling at the ominous mountains of predark machinery.
“Too much snow and too many cliffs,” Ryan explained patiently, flicking a butane lighter into life. “Unless you know how to fly.”
“Besides, storm hide tracks, and door lock,” Jak said with a smile, brushing the snow off his sleeves. “What more want, gaudy sluts and popcorn?”
Muttering something indistinct, Ricky shook the snow off his clothing.
The decades of exterior snow had never made it past the door, but everything inside was covered with frost and ice. Stairs, hallways, control stations, bus bars and transformers glistened as if made by elves. Even the huge turbines, whose perfectly balanced blades had once powered the electrical grid for the entire state, were now thickly coated with ice crystals. Powerful in life, they were now inert, and strangely beautiful.
The interior of the power plant was dark, but the candles of the companions sent out a flickering nimbus of illumination that was reflected off the thousands of shiny surfaces until they walked in artificial daylight.
A sign near an observation window said it had been installed to allow visitors to see the rainbow created by the thundering deluge of water rushing over the dam.
Only now the concrete dam was part of a new cliff, the window overlooking a vast expanse of cloudy air that seemed to extend downward for miles. Nothing else was in sight, but an ocean of fleecy clouds.
“Wow, I keep waiting for Lando to arrive, and say the Empire has betrayed us,” Mildred said with a chuckle.
“Another private joke?” J.B. asked with a tolerant smile.
“Sadly, yes.”
Just then, a weird greenish glow appeared in the darkness, closely followed by a dozen m
ore. They tumbled through the cold air to settle on the cliff just outside the section near the observation window.
“Found a box of chem sticks in an emergency locker!” Krysty announced proudly. “Now, whose turn is it to cook?”
“Mine,” Ryan said, checking the ceiling. “There’s enough space for the smoke to rise and not choke us. Any firewood around?”
“Lots of furniture over here!” Doc called out, cupping a hand around a candle to shield the flame. “However, much of it appears to be plastic or coated with that fake leather the good doctor warned us about. Naughty hide, or whatever it was called.”
“Don’t burn that,” Mildred stated. “The fumes would make us very ill.”
“How about door?” Jak asked, rapping one with the barrel of his handblaster.
“Looks like cherry. That will burn fine.”
Unexpectedly, something rose from the clouds below to hover just outside the window. The creature was large, and scaly, with a wicked curved beak that seemed designed for tearing flesh. The wings were leathery and moved with such incredible speed they were almost a blur.
“Mother of God, that’s a screamwing,” Mildred whispered, inching away from the thick glass. “I’d prefer not to see another of those bastards up close.”
At her movement, the winged mutant opened its mouth as if to bellow a cry, but there was only silence. Then it flew directly toward the woman, only to harmlessly bounce off the transparent material.
“Okay, that’s obviously not glass,” J.B. said, lowering his Uzi machine pistol.
As the mutie stubbornly bumped into the unbreakable plastic, the companions had an unparalleled view of the thing.
“Ugly son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered, holstering the SIG-Sauer. “But we’re safe enough this time. We couldn’t get through that material with a gren. A screamwing has no chance.”
Futilely clawing at the window, the screamwing slammed into it again and again, the noise of the impacts only dimly discernable.