by SP Durnin
Within in the monster MATTOC, the general was—literally—foaming at the mouth in rage. Spittle flew from his lips as he screamed into the radio for his men to use suppressive fire and force Al to abandon his attempt to open their transport with a Voltron-sized electric can opener. He backhanded Elle away when she tried pulling him towards the vehicle’s hatch, moving instead to strike their driver about the head and shoulders in a maddened attempt to goad him into action. He wanted that earth-mover off them. There were too many unaccounted-for elements in this fight. Hess needed to withdraw his men to recover and re-access his tactics to subdue Pecos, but they needed to retreat now. Before his army (and the RUST movement in total) was crushed by a bunch of redneck Texans, and a bastard like Foster.
That simply couldn’t happen. General Winston Hess was not going to lose to such an undisciplined, disrespectful, and poor excuse for a soldier.
He slapped the back of his driver’s head until the technician managed to back away from Allan’s machine faster than it could follow them. Gaining some clearance in which to maneuver, the man cranked the wheel around turning his vehicle to port and…
Right into the Screamin’ Mimi’s path.
Both the howling general and his frazzled driver had been focused on Allan’s machine angling off. They’d assumed he’d been attempting to get a better positioning for those cutting disks of his, maybe even move about and work over their side that had lost its crash-plate to Foster’s first charge. Neither had seen the pink transport’s approach from their flank through what was left of Hess’s army. And now, it was too late.
Pulling two additional sections for troops and supplies required the Mimi to have power to spare, hence its hydrogen power source. The most brilliant minds of NASA and MIT—after being placed under non-disclosure restrictions and told they’d be “disappeared” if they discussed their work with anyone—had labored for six years, eventually developing an efficient way to split the hydrogen and oxygen atoms of water and create a high-output fuel cell. This allowed her to go from zero to ‘Holy shit, Did You See That?’ fast, in no time at all. When her prow-blade all but obscured Hess’s view outside, she was moving far faster than anything her size should have a right to. If she’d been equipped with a “flux capacitor,” the old fixer’s pride and joy would’ve easily broken the spacetime continuum, thereby traveling back in time.
The general had a moment to take a quick breath in preparation of yelling yet another pointless order at his driver before the Mimi struck. He caught a glimpse of George Foster through her narrow windshield for an instant, and his expression—combined with the sight of the massive blade hurtling at him like the wrath of angry angels—caused Hess to lose control of his bowels.
Then the Mimi struck, and irresistible force met immovable object.
Object.
Lost.
The impact of the two huge vehicles coming together was beyond anything Jake had experienced prior, including the explosion George used to destroy the Pensacola Dam. He vaguely heard Cho scream something in his ear as her arms went tighter around him but couldn’t comprehend what it was she’d said. Their collision shook the ground, bringing combat to a halt by overall consent. The atmospheric pressure wave generated took men off their feet as far back as the Pecos northern gate. Thankfully, Ted managed to catch Willow when she nearly flew from the wall, tossing them both to the container top beside the cowering Leo and Bee afterwards. Even the towering Henry Sampson dropped flat, covering his head with both muscular arms as the sound wave shook ribs inside his body.
Hess and his driver were killed outright. Smashed into bone-riddled glop as the Mimi’s nose cut the front of his MATTOC in half. It all but ignored the thick front bumper, shearing on through the steel with more ease that a welding torch would a sheet of flimsy cheese-cloth. It crushed the opposing heavy-transport’s cabin, turning it into a flattened mass that pressed back against the third axel. Pecos survivors and RUST soldiers alike dove for cover again when sparks from shredded electronics ignited the fuel gushing from the transport’s ruptured fuel tank, wreathing both MATTOCs in a roaring ball of fire.
O’Connor and Cho saw the mangled front of Hess’s burning tomb and the Mimi’s nose both rise from the ground much like an inverted “V.” The general’s wreck nearly went vertical on its rear-end before falling on top of the Mimi as the pink blade gutted its undercarriage, then the firestorm obscured them from view.
“Jee-zus!!” He moved their Hummer closer to the flames but had to halt some distance away. The heat was just too much to approach farther.
Kat moved into the navi-guesser’s seat. “Okay, that tops me accidentally burning a Denny’s. Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“Not in this life. At least, not outside of a few Anime cartoons.” He stared at the pyre. “I’d say that’s definitely the end of our whole General Hess problem.”
The pretty ninja nodded in agreement as she glanced around. There was a smattering of fire from RUST stragglers, but most abandoned their positions and ran for one of the remaining school busses with high levels of motivation. Both were still taking fire, but the busses began turning to flee north with their rear doors open. A few dozen soldiers made it in to safety as they dodged rounds from the Pecos walls, but many more fell with bullets in the back. Maybe not “sporting” on the part off the Southern defenders, but those men had just attacked them. The town had dead and wounded of its own, and its people weren’t feeling particularly merciful.
Kat turned to search the flames with her gaze. “Do you think George and Rae survived? I mean; that’s an inferno. The Mimi’s bomb-proof, and rocket-proof and all, but it must be really, really hot in there. They might be briquettes.”
“I hope not. George was positive they’d be okay, but seeing at that? I just don’t know.” Jake watched the last RUST survivors get pulled up through the bus doors as they headed for the horizon, then turned away. “He’s always been right about things like that before, so…”
Bullets peppered their vehicle, and both dove for the floorboard. Rae had done an excellent job augmenting its armor while stuck at her junkyard cache back in Ohio, but there were limits. Sustained fire from above through the windshield was one of them. The hardened glass had done its job, but over the course of the battle it had taken damage. Impact points from different caliber rounds spotted its surface, and even before this latest attack a spider-web of cracks had tracked nearly the entire windshield. Jake and Kat cringed under the assault, feeling the hot stings of glass and metal cutting at them as they huddled together, both attempting to cover the other with their own body. The seats above them shredded and stuffing fell down at them as the weapons fire continued for much longer than was comfortable.
When it final stopped, they peeked cautiously over the dash.
Elle stood on the roof of a dump truck, only thirty yards away. In the noise and confusion created by the two MATTOCs colliding, she’d tossed a fragmentation grenade into the bed and killed the defenders within. Then she’d emptied one of their rifles she’d picked up into the truck’s cab, turning its driver and his co-pilot into bloody Swiss cheese before turning the vehicle’s heavy weapon upon her once-friends.
The blonde didn’t look good. Half of her hair was burned away, along with the right side of her RUST fatigue top. Ugly blisters covered half her face, her ear on the same side was partially melted, and what they could see of her right torso was covered in painful looking burns too. But her pain-maddened eyes still locked onto them with unbridled hatred as Jake and Kat hunkered behind the dash.
“You idiots!” Elle screamed, throwing away the empty M240 and reaching behind her waist with her left hand. “You stupid, weak, fucks ruined everything! We were going to revive the nation! We were going to take it all back from those things, but you…you just couldn’t obey anyone, could you!”
She pulled an old M72 LAW (Light Anti-tank Weapon) up from behind her right hip and extended the tube to its full 36-inch length.
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“Well. that won’t happen now without the general. But the two of you are dead!”
“Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me!” Kat exclaimed as the blonde pointed the business end of her weapon at them.
“Hey! Skank-a-licious! Remember those trackers in our tac-vests?”
Elle’s charred face snapped around to see for who’d called out and the back of her head blew away in a spirt of red brain matter. The .223 round entered her left eye at thirty-seven hundred feet-per-second, plowing through her sinus into the frontal lobe, on through her hypothalamus, pulped her cerebral cortex, and exited from the occipital bone of her skull. She flopped bonelessly to her left from the dump truck as what little remained of her nearly-vaporized medulla oblongata sent erratic impulses down her dying spinal cord. That prompted the muscles of her burned right arm—the one gripping the LAW’s firing pad—to spasm, and launch the 66mm explosive projectile from the tube.
Into the dump truck.
While not anywhere near the explosion generated by the Mimi’s destruction of General Hess’s MATTOC, the resulting fireball was quite impressive.
As the truck consumed itself, O’Connor and Cho remained huddled together in the Hummer. Jake couldn’t believe they’d pulled off Foster’s insane plan, let alone survived it. He had fully expected to die out there when he’d seen how many fighters Hess had, despite what he’d said to Kat, and his relief was almost palatable. Moving one hand up to her hair, he felt a sharp pain in his forearm. Taking a look he saw a round had passed cleanly through the meaty part. It hurt like hell, but the bullet had missed the bones. “Well, shit. It’s not bad, but I got shot. Again.”
Cho laughed and hugged him tighter. “Me too.”
“What?”
She let him pull away slightly and showed him her left shoulder. There was a deep crease in her flesh where she’d been hit. While the wound bled a fair amount, it wasn’t life-threatening. “Nice, huh? Lucky that twat got her head ventilated. I’d feed her her ovaries for this. It’ll be a totally cool scar though.”
“That’s barely a flesh wound, but welcome to the club.” Jake levered himself up into the driver’s seat and helped her from the floor. “I think we need to hit the med-center.”
Examining his arm briefly, Kat concurred. “Isn’t that the same one you got grazed back at the water treatment plant, when we rescued Allan and Maggie?”
“Yep. I’m beginning to see a pattern here…”
* * *
Up on the wall around Pecos, Leo let go of the microphones transmit button and turned off Rae’s hand-held tracking monitor. The same one his friends had used long ago to follow him to the now-dead Purifiers power plant hideout. Bee gave him a grateful smile, pressed one eye to the scope of long arm, and watched the dump truck burn.
“That’s what you get, bitch.” She said happily.
* * *
Once the bonfire had burned itself out, and after Jake and Kat received a quick patch job from Doc Barker, they—with the help of the Pecos dozers and Allan’s heavy construct—finally managed to pull the remains of Hess’s MATTOC from its resting place on top the Mimi.
The general’s transport was deformed from the heat; its front end mangled nearly beyond recognition, and twisted into oddly organic-looking shapes. Once hauled off Foster’s baby though—so long as you overlooked the fact all of the Mimi’s tires had melted or burned away—she didn’t seem to have taken any damage. Her hull was still quite warm, but the charred soot on its surface brushed easily away under Jake’s hand.
“Wow. Let’s hear it for NASA-made rocket coating.” Kat’s eyebrows went up.
“What she said.” Al looked seriously impressed too. “Damn. I’d love to get my hands on some of that SEP-skin stuff.”
Jake stepped to the airlock-style door at the back of the drive section. “I dunno man. That buzz-saw of yours might look a little weird in Pepto-pink.”
“It looks weird now.” Kat moved to help him spin the locking wheel, since his arm was bandaged and in a sling.
“This from ‘Smurf-berry Bluebell’?” Allan failed to hide his grin.
“Oh, hell no. Don’t look at me.” Jake shook his head when Cho shot him an angry look. “I didn’t say a word. I actually like having—and using—my man-bits, thank you very much.”
Kat’s eyes narrowed. “Rae better hope she cooked in there…”
The three of them pulled the heavy hatch open, and stood back.
“Huh. I guess you really are never too old.” Kat noted, as they caught sight of their friends together in the Mimi’s driver’s seat.
Rae squeaked then tried to hide behind Foster’s blocky form. No mean feat when she was straddling his lap. The old man just snorted, took the cigar from between his teeth, and threw a disapproving glare over his shoulder at them.
“Fer fuck’s sake, people! Don’t none a’ you dimwits know how ta knock on a goddamn door?” He growled.
-CHAPTER THIRTEEN-
“Ryker, you fuck up my baby in any way an’ I’ll skin your worthless ass!” The old man snarled. “Then I’ll hang it on her inner hull inside by what used ta’ be yer nut-sack as an object lesson for any other smart-mouthed little turd, who thinks he knows her better than me!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me, boy!” Foster yelled. “I fuckin’ work fer a living!”
Allan kept working at the lug-nuts holding the Mimi’s front-most, driver’s side wheel on. “Copy that, sir.”
“Boy, yer pushin’ it…” George cranked away on the opposing wheel.
After taking a trio of Pecos salvage teams to a cache he knew about just west of Sheffield, Texas, and returning with a brand new set of Mimi-sized, combat radials, the pair of them had set about the task of changing off their transports melted tires. An unenviable task at best, seeing as how thanks to her SEP-skin coated undercarriage, axles, wheels, and even goddamn lug-nuts—which Allan couldn’t retain a grip on and kept dropping—were equally as slick as her protective hull. If Jake’s party wanted to be on their merry way over the Rockies however, it needed to be done. They wouldn’t get very far driving on the rims. Those wouldn’t get damaged by such an attempt, but they were also frictionless. They’d found that out when George tried to drive her back through the gate on them. It had taken a pair of bulldozers (and some heavy-duty tow chains wrapped around the Mimi’s front axle) to get her back to Ryker’s workshop.
That had been a fun time.
They’d nearly completed work when Rae appeared at the rear hatch. She’d been inside speaking with her contact in the Safe Zone and seemed a tad miffed. “Well, we won’t be heading out for a while.”
“Like hell! I didn’t do all this work fer nothin’, woman!”
“Why’s that?” Al inquired far more civilly than his crusty, old partner and wiped his hands on a handy shop-rag.
“I just spoke with Thunderbolt.” Rae folded her arms under her breasts and leaned a hip against Foster’s shoulder as he knelt working at the lugs. “There’s a horde out of New Mexico a few miles up 285, and another coming at us from Fort Stockton to the south. A Reaper pilot noticed the one from Carlsbad a day before our fight with RUST and called it in, and another scoped out the southern approach. That second one will reach us first.”
George stopped working at the lug and frowned. “Son of a bitch. That’s why Hess had such a hard-on for Pecos. He knew about the dead coming out a’ Carlsbad an’ didn’t wanna run east again. Stupid-ass would’a still been wastin’ my valuable oxygen if he’d a’ just swallowed the ol’ pride.”
“Yeah. Kinda glad he didn’t,” Allan told him.
Conceding the point, Foster went on. “With the containers full a’ dirt, these walls aren’t movin’ anywhere. Our only real worries are gonna be food —cause lemon-face Wilson claims the water tower is full—and the ghouls getting over the top edge.”
“I’ve yet to see a zombie that can fly.” Rae pointed out gently.
“Smart
-ass.” Foster winked at her. “I’m talkin’ if they start piling up on top a’ one another. None of em will complain about getting’ squashed or try ta’ move back. They could stack right on up over the barrier.”
“We need to talk with Willow and the council about this.” Rae turned serious fast.
“Damn skippy we do.” George tightened his final lug and stood. “You wanna track down Jake and China-doll? They need to be in on this.”
Rae glanced towards the rear sections of the Mimi sitting on the opposite side of Allan’s workshop with a wry expression. “That won’t take long.”
“Shit, again?” The older man puzzled as Al coughed away his laugh. “They goin’ for a new world record or somethin’?”
“Making up for lost time I suppose.”
Foster laughed and slapped her butt on his way past. “Yeah? Well, think I’ll go return the favor from the other day. Teach these two to bust in unannounced when a guy’s spendin’ some quality time with his lady. Besides, short-stuff over there told me about Cho’s tattoo, so-o-o…”
* * *
Allan fought mightily to keep his face neutral as Rae went to work resetting Foster’s broken nose.
“She threw what at you?” He asked.
“One a’ my gah-dab fhag ganadez.”
Al shook his head and feigned bafflement.
George winced under Rae’s fingers. “A fhag ganade.”
His chest hurt so much from fighting the giggles. “A what?”