by James Axler
He opened his mouth to scream at Lint, and then a vast, soaring gout of flame fireballed high into the sky to his right and a tremendous cracking roar, half deafening him. The shock wave of the explosion blew him over, sent him tumbling into the gully where he slammed into Hooley, already a sprawled and dazed figure.
"Number Four!" Ryan gasped. "Hellfire, I forgot how much bang-bang we piled into that one! Must've been most of the dynamite for the trip!" Groggily, his ears ringing, he got to his knees and bawled at Lint, half seen in the hatchway, "Tell 'em now! Now!"
Lint's head disappeared. Ryan clambered to his feet. The stickies had come to a halt, were gawping back down along the convoy at what was left of the once blazing truck, now only bits of burning debris scattered about among the rocks and boulders. There was a crater where the vehicle had once stood.
"Even more reason for that bastard Teague to send his road gangs out now," Ryan muttered. Hooley gaped at him as though the massive explosion had turned his brain to jelly.
"Never mind," snapped Ryan, then growled, "If that was a four-minute fuse I'm a dogface."
The stickies had come out of their daze. They were advancing over the edge of the roof again, squealing in rage and triumphant anticipation. Ryan counted at least twenty of the brutes with almost certainly more on the way. And that was just on this war wag.
But it didn't matter now. The beasts were all so much dead meat.
Calmly he watched as the roof-long rods suddenly glowed into life, triggered by Ches in the war wag's cabin below. In a second the entire picture was transformed into one of utter carnage as several thousand volts flowed into the roof rails, along the metal strips that lined the vehicle's side panels and hung along the length of the war wag's underside.
Seared flesh smoked and blackened. Shrieking figures were jolted into the air.
Ryan turned his eye to look along the length of the convoy, seeing the side panels of each war wag, land wag and truck glow eerily white, almost in sequence as, in each cab, a lever was thrown, power was generated, death created.
He saw bodies flung away from the parked vehicles, others adhering to side panels, scorched dark brown and then black. He saw bright, vivid flashes of light. He heard the sizzling, crackling stutter of electrical power jolting flesh, and the squeals, now no longer furious but tormented, agonized, of stickies that were mere microseconds from heart stoppage.
The air held a solid reek of cordite, smoke and something akin to roast pork, stomach-churningly strong.
All along the convoy the panel glow faded, to die as abruptly as it had come to life. Blackened bodies, glued to panels, now fell to the ground like overripe fruit from a tree, littering the roadside in jumbled heaps of starkly, stiffened limbs.
There were survivors, those who had not been swarming over the vehicle, those who had not been in contact with plates or rods. But they could be mopped up easily enough. And quickly enough. Right now, in fact.
Ryan gestured to Hooley. "Tell 'em I'm off on a buggy ride."
He ran to the rear of the roof and jumped for the cab of the closely parked truck behind.
THE MAN CALLED SCALE watched the carnage from the shelter of a small cave overlooking the road. His face registered no emotion—it rarely did—but his mouth was dry. He could not believe what he was seeing. The stickies had been the mainspring of his great plan. Now that plan had collapsed like a house of cards. No one had even hinted that the Trader had electrified his war wags and rigs. And the power! The power they must have used up in maybe fifteen, twenty secs would have been colossal. How could they afford to waste so much? It was like pissing it away.
That weirdo prick, the Warlock, was not going to be pleased when told that all his stickies had been grilled to a crisp, were just so many lumps of fried bacon lying around on an old wrecked blacktop. Not pleased at all. In fact, thought Scale, it might be wiser not to tell him. All things considered, it might be a hell of a lot wiser not to go within a thousand miles of him ever again, avoid him like the plague.
"Scale."
So much for Fat Harry and all his shit about the Trader's winding his operation down. Scale had a good mind to drive to the tubby bastard's trading post and do extremely unpleasant things to him. Like, for instance, flay the skin off him, a layer at a time, then salt the nukeshitting piece of human-shaped garbage down. There was so much flesh on the bastard that it might take some sweet time. And maybe he'd salt him after every crapping layer.
"Scale. Listen!"
And if it wasn't for the fact that right now he didn't have enough gas to make such a visit possible, and in any case that sneaky fat man had built his trading post like a fortress and regularly cleared scrub, shrub and bush from all around him so he could always see who was coming, and had ass-licked the muties who lived in the region so they were all well disposed toward him, Scale reckoned he fire-blasted well would go take a trip and sort the fat lying sweaty hog out. As it was…
"Scale!"
Scale swung around savagely, one arm extended like a steel rod. It hit the man with the long arms on the side of the throat and slammed him over sideways, making him gag and splutter. The long-armed man felt gingerly at his throat as he scrambled to his feet.
"No need for that, Scale."
"Every need."
"Scale, we gotta get outta here. Damned fast."
"Yeah."
"Maybe we could regroup, huh, Scale? Hit these bastards when they least expect us!"
Scale stared at him, no expression on his face but cold fury in his eyes.
"I ought to kill you. Kill you now." His voice was an icy whisper.
Scale would do no such thing for the simple reason that big as he was, powerful as he was, kingpin of his own group of mutants as he certainly was, by force of personality and force of arms, he could not drive a powered vehicle, and the long-armed man was his personal wheelman. Scale had simply never bothered to learn the mechanics of driving. From the time he was a child, Scale had always been able to make others do his chores for him, and driving was something he left to the long-armed man.
Scale stared down at the scene below.
Mouth gaping, the long-armed man watched, too— watched as the high back of the big trailer rig behind the leading war wag suddenly swung away and down, crashing to the road and forming a long ramp down which surged a small armed personnel buggy.
A second buggy roared down the ramp after the first. Then a third. The rig was a massive buggy pen.
Not for the first time in the past quarter hour, the long-armed man cursed the crassness of Scale, the vaulting ambition that had driven him to take on the Trader. The Trader and his men were legends in the Deathlands. Attacking them had been an act of sheer madness from first to last.
The long-armed man knew what was at the heart of it, and who was at the heart of it. The strange and sinister being who sometimes called himself the Warlock, sometimes the Sorcerer, sometimes the Magus, who made fleeting visits to the Deathlands bearing weird old-world artifacts: sometimes weapons, sometimes gadgets whose exact purpose often took a long time to explain. The long-armed man was afraid of the Warlock, with his terrifying half face and his steel eye, and his two tightly leashed companions.
It was the Warlock who had let loose the stickies, maybe three, four winters back. He had brought a couple to a small township to the west, suddenly appearing one day in his armored truck with them in tow. One had died—had suddenly sickened, just wasted away, much to the Warlock's displeasure—but Wolfram the carny man had taken the other, taught it tricks, carried it off. Free, of course; the Warlock did not take coin or cred for any of the merchandise he brought to the Deathlands, possibly because most of it was of no use to man or beast. Even so, the Warlock gave away everything, useless or not. The long-armed man could never figure out how the Warlock existed, or even where he existed. Some had tried to discover that, but they'd never come back with a location. In fact they'd never come back, period.
And then, the long-armed
man recalled, maybe a year after they'd first appeared there suddenly seemed to be stickies everywhere. Some said the Warlock had created them, but that was just foolishness. No one could create men. Except God. And it was well-known that God did not exist. You only had to look around you to see that.
Whatever, a small army of stickies had come out of the northwest and that was it. Most had attached themselves to Scale's troop of marauders, and the long-armed man was dead certain that was entirely because of the Warlock, There was the time Scale had ordered him to drive over two hundred klicks to a tiny hamlet in the foothills of the Darks, The long-armed man had been told to stay put, sit in the land wag for as long as it took for Scale to conduct his business, ostensibly a visit to this real high-class cathouse the ville boasted. But two hundred klicks for a screw? Hell, Scale must've thought his brains were addled. The man with the long arms had never discovered the real reason for that somewhat clandestine visit, but shortly thereafter the stickies had appeared, and you didn't have to be a genius to connect the two events.
So, he thought now, the Warlock was sure as hell behind the stickies and now this particular bunch of stickies was no more, were just lumps of fried meat, and the Warlock, if the long-armed man was correct in his assumptions, was gonna be oh so pissed.
The Trader's buggies were converted panel trucks, drastically converted. The lead buggy seemed to bristle with weaponry. There was an MG-slit for the front passenger seat, another MG rear-mounted in the roof. Two stubby barrels jutting out of the front looked like cannon. Poking out of the enclosed rear was what seemed at a distance suspiciously like a mortar barrel, and running along the driver's side, underneath the door, was a long tube.
The long-armed man watched gloomily as the buggy hurtled along the narrow space between trucks and roadside, its front-MG sputtering flame. Rounds flayed a bunch of semi-fried stickies trying to regroup beside the huge bulk of the war wag in the center of the convoy. Stickies seemed able to take handgun bullets, even automatic rifle fire, but they didn't have a hope against the jolting velocity, the flesh-rupturing force, of nearly point-blank MG tracers. The buggy cleared a path, jolting on its shocks as it careered along the rutted road, its bulk smashing into dazed survivors, hurling them to one side.
The three buggies raced and weaved around the parked trucks as a murky Deathlands dawn crept up from the east, sharpening the picture, turning the shadows of tall rocks into pointing, accusatory fingers. Men were now disgorging from the trucks, heavily armed and grim visaged. Pockets of resistance were being mopped up swiftly and professionally, and the long-armed man knew that time was running out, that any moment now the Trader's death-dealing squads, angry and vengeful, would be opening up the tunnel under the road, scouring the rocks for snipers.
And heading up here.
"Scale! We gotta blow!"
Parked in the cave behind the two muties was a jeep and two small trucks, and what remained of Scale's force, tense and nervous, knowing that everything had gone disastrously wrong, that it was a shuttleup of the first magnitude. A narrow rocky track ran from the cave mouth, dived through wind-sculpted boulders, paralleled the blacktop far below before curving around to the south and slicing through the hills down toward the ugly seared plain and their campsite, maybe five klicks away. Once there…
"Scale!" The long-armed man's voice was high pitched with panic.
"Quit yappin'. Let's go."
Scale swung around and headed for one of the trucks. A man with deep, hollow eyes and a nose that drooped to his upper lip, joining with it in a flabby mass of graying skin, said in surprise, "You not takin' your jeep, Scale?"
Scale shook his head.
"You take it, Burt. You and Koll. Get outta here fast and warn the camp we're shiftin'. We'll hold the norms off and kill those buggy riders."
The man with the drooping nose made an O with his forefinger and thumb.
"Yeah, Scale. You get us some fresh norm meat, huh?"
"I'll get us some fresh norm meat," muttered Scale, his tone colorless, his eyes unblinking.
He jammed open the passenger door of the nearest truck and climbed in. The man with the long arms jumped into the driver's seat, sweating, not looking at his leader. He said in a low voice, "Smart, Scale. Take the heat off us."
Scale did not bother to reply as the jeep in front started up, revved hard, roared away in a swirl of dust, its sound like a heavy MG jabbering, its muffler long gone. The long-armed man eased the panel truck slowly toward the cave entrance. He braked just inside the opening, then jumped out and ran to the boulder-screened edge of the track.
In the distance the jeep was already at the bottom of the short hill and was now bumping and jouncing along the track at high speed. Farther on was a bend to the right, into the hills. That was where another track, from the road below, joined it. The long-armed man watched as the jeep powered along the straight to hit the bend at speed. It screeched out of sight. The long-armed man turned his eyes to the road below, and for the first time in a long while a gap-toothed smile creased his face.
The lead buggy had clearly spotted the jeep. It was way beyond the feeder track, but suddenly its driver threw her into reverse and stormed back along the road. Then the driver hit the brakes and dust clouded. He geared up, yanked hard at the wheel, trod on the gas again and the buggy, engine howling, roared up the high-incline track.
The long-armed man dodged back into boulder cover as the little vehicle appeared at the top of the track and hurtled out of sight after the jeep. Another buggy followed. The long-armed man frowned: one was okay, two was not so hot. He kept his eyes on the track but no more buggies appeared. He couldn't hear any more engine roar through the heavy chatter of MG- and auto-fire still ripping out below.
He plodded back to the truck, hauled himself in.
"Two of them 'stead of one."
"We can hit 'em."
Scale sounded supremely confident, utterly sure of himself, and the long-armed man shuddered silently. He drove fast but warily. While on the parallel track he kept glancing to his left, down to the road below, to see if he could catch any sign that someone down there had spotted them. But it looked as if luck—or some damn thing— was on their side. Someone down there had let off a smoke grenade and that, together with all the dust and shit that was still being kicked up, had dragged an obscuring pall over the proceedings.
He swung right, checked out the rearview mirror. The second truck was on their tail but not too close. He began to feel relief seeping through him. Maybe they were going to make it, out of this one alive, after all.
His thoughts turned suddenly to the red-haired girl. She was certainly one sweet receptacle for his meat! After Scale was done with her, of course. Always after Scale. The long-armed man felt no resentment.toward his leader in this or any other matter. Scale was one strong hombre and he went first in all things, and the long-armed man was perfectly content to remain in his shadow. He was not ambitious.
He flicked back to Red Hair. Man, that was going to be something— He felt himself stiffen as he thought about her. He wondered idly why there'd been no other women on that two-wag train—the one they'd hit and mauled the crap out of yesterday. Kind of weird, that was; he couldn't figure it out at all. Young, too, and that was weird as well, because all the others had been oldies. Dead meat now. And useless. Tough and stringy. Took days to boil up an oldy for soup. No good at all unless you were starving and it was the only meat around. And with Scale you were never starving. Smart shit, was Scale.
Except when it came to thinking he could take the Trader.
As the long-armed man slowed to take a bend he felt a couple of thumps on the side of the truck, tremoring through. He glanced at the rearview mirror, saw nothing out of line his side, then noticed the driver of the following truck had an arm poked out his window, was waving frantically.
He said, "Anythin' your side, Scale? We hit some-thin'?"
Scale shrugged, heaved down the window, stuck his head out
.
Then yanked it back in again with a yell, jammed the window up.
"Stickies!" he snapped. "Two of 'em. Must've beat it back here, waited for us—I dunno."
"Shit, Scale, they're with us. Let 'em in."
"They don't look too fuckin' happy."
Hands gripping the battered wheel, the long-armed man glanced at his leader, saw that Scale didn't look any too happy, either.
"You can talk to 'em, Scale. About the only one that can."
Talking to stickies was a tiring business. They understood words but you had to yell at them, enunciate each sentence, each word, each separate syllable, extremely clearly. Some kind of lip-reading process, as far as the long-armed man understood it. Once you'd got it into their noodles what you wished them to do, you let them get on with it, let them create the mayhem you wanted. They were very good at creating mayhem.
Scale eased the window down halfway. He pushed his head out and began screaming at the top of his voice. The words were lost in the roar of the truck's engine. Then his head whacked back inside the cab again, and he thrust the window up. A microsecond later a suctioned hand thudded against the glass, spread out, glued itself on. A hideous face suddenly appeared, eyes in frenzy. The glass shook as the sticky jerked at it furiously, one-handed.
Scale yelled at the men crouching in the rear of the bouncing vehicle.
"Blast the fuckers off! Through the panels!"
The long-armed man felt sweat begin to soak his face. He squawked, "Nuke that idea, Scale. We get slugs zippin' around in this space, we're gonna get scalped if nothin' else!"
"Do it!" snarled Scale.
More thuds, sounding like kicks delivered with strength. The sticky at the window had disappeared. One of the men in the back said, "They's on the roof, Scale, an' we ain't all that tight up there."
Part of the roof had been pierced at some point during the truck's history. Wooden panels had been fixed over the gaps.