Axler, James - Deathlands 65 - Hellbenders

by Hellbenders [lit]

  "Dark night, I can think of better ways to start an assault," he gritted.

  "If you get us through this in one piece, I wouldn't give a shit if you sat back and let the rest of us get on with it," Jenny said, '"cause you sure as hell would have done more than enough."

  "I might hold you to that—-if I get us through," J.B. muttered, swinging the wheel as a looming dark shape, coming up suddenly out of the rain of dust, proclaimed that he had sighted one wall of the channel.

  He stomped on the brake to skid the vehicle to the left, catching sight of the other wall, and the slightly lighter gap between that proclaimed he had found the exit gap. Cursing softly, unwilling even to waste energy or concentration on talking aloud, J.B. headed straight for the light, and put his foot down, ignoring the dust that rattled against the windshield.

  "Sweet mother, you've done it!" Mildred exclaimed as the wag came out of the channel and into the lighter air of the desert. It was suddenly easier to see, and J.B. was able to get his bearings.

  The Armorer knew that there was little time to waste. The sound of wags roaring out of the enclosed channels and into the desert at either end of the outcrop would be enough to make the two trade convoys aware of an attack, and every second lost in turning and heading back into the arena to take up battle would be a second that the two sets of sec could prepare a defense. Every second counted, and no time could be wasted on turning the wags.

  So J.B. leaned heavily on the wheel and executed exactly the same kind of torturous metal-bending turn that Correll was executing at that same moment. His wag complained heavily, the wheels seeming slow in their ability to respond to his efforts at the wheel.

  "Turn us over now and I'll never forgive you, John," Mildred murmured to herself as the wag tilted alarmingly, throwing them across the interior.

  "Trust me," the Armorer replied, almost to himself, as the wag righted itself and was facing the right direction— heading straight back into the arena. Through the lighter desert rain, he could see that the wags in front of him were still facing the wrong way to meet an attack, and the sec men still out of position, facing toward him but with the air of those frozen in sudden surprise.

  "I always do, John," Mildred added, checking her Czech manufactured ZKR target pistol. A handblaster wouldn't be useful in the first attack, as they would be using the machine blasters mounted in the side of the wag to attack, but at some point, she had the feeling, it may just descend to hand-to-hand combat, in which case she wanted to be ready.

  At least, far more in readiness than either of the convoys they would be attacking.

  "SHIT! GRAB THE GIRLS and let's get under cover," Baron Tad Hutter yelled at his sec men as the storm started to blow up. He jumped down from the wag and ran toward the seemingly shackled girls until he was halted by a voice that sounded loud and strong above the howl of the wind.

  "Just hold your ass still right there unless you want to have it blown off!"

  Unwilling as he was to appear to heed such terms in his position as baron, Hutter's instinct for self preservation made him pull up sharply. He looked up to see Baron Al Jourgensen standing at the door of his own wag, a Sharps rifle in his hands, raised and trained on Hutter.

  "Don't be a stupe," Hutter snapped. "Look at the storm. We need to get this done with as soon as possible!"

  "Then tell your sec men to hurry up with the unloading," Jourgensen snapped back.

  "Be reasonable."

  "Be reasonable nothing—you fulfill your side of the bargain, and we'll fulfill ours as soon as you've got everything unloaded."

  "But—"

  The catch on the Sharps clicked, audible to Hutter even above the howl of the storm.

  "Don't argue, Tad. You're not in any position to start handing out orders, okay?"

  Hutter held his hands aloft. "Okay, Al, you've got all the cards right now, but we'll see." He turned slowly so that he faced his men. "You heard the man, start—"

  He was cut short in bemusement by the sight that met him. It would appear to him that his men had, in fact, given up the unloading altogether, as they seemed to be facing completely in the opposite direction to the central exchange point.

  It was then, as he looked at them, that he became aware of an undertone to the storm that had been bothering him for a few minutes without him being able to put a name to what it was. There was a growling sound that had nothing to do with the rush of wind and debris through the arena formed by the outcrop. It was the sound of wag engines being pushed to the limit. And as he looked past his immobile and stunned sec force, he could see three wags turning tightly and coming toward his men, headed directly for the entrance to the outcrop. Furious, he turned back to scream at Jourgensen.

  "You bastard! You've set us up!"

  But the words died on his lips. He could see beyond Baron Al that a similar situation was occurring at the rear of the Charity convoy. Jourgensen's eyes met those of Hutter across the dust storm wastes, each ready to accuse the other but stopped dead by the bewilderment on the other's face.

  "You?" Jourgensen yelled.

  Hutter shook his head. "Ambush," he screamed. "Get back, for fuck's sake, get into defensive positions," he yelled at his men as he turned and headed back to the lead wag on the Summerfield convoy.

  Jourgensen, too, had decided that the best course of action was to ignore his opposing baron and concentrate on the menace that was now threatening. There would be time enough for Summerfield after this was sorted out. He slipped back into his wag, and picked up the handset, yelling, "Defensive now—watch the rear, turn the wags."

  In the confusion, seed crops and supplies were left scattered across the center of the arena as the sec men headed back to the safety of their wags and the machine blasters and mounted flamethrowers, which would now prove to be of use in a way that Hutter couldn't have predicted.

  Which actions also left the women, seemingly shackled together and guarded by two sec men, standing in the middle of the arena, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

  Which wasn't quite the case.

  Ayesha and Claudette had both recognized the sound of the wags beneath the storm, and had been looking out for them. Now that the only sec man paying them any attention were those with empty blasters, it was the time to act.

  "Okay, let's try and head back to the wag," Ayesha screamed above the noise of the storm.

  "Good move," Claudette yelled back, her plaits whipping around her head in the howling storm. "At least we can get a defensive position better there than out here in the open."

  "What about the sec men?" one of the women asked. "Won't they think it's suspicious if we go back to the wag?"

  "Not if these stupes take us back," Claudette replied, indicating the two sec men who had been acting as their unwilling cover.

  "You've got to be joking," the sec man with the empty Uzi said with venom, throwing his useless blaster down to the desert floor and turning to run. "Baron!" he yelled, but was cut short by a burst of blasterfire from Claudette, who figured that all pretense was now blown and that they had been forced into the open. Before he had the chance to advance more than a few yards, the words were chilled on his lips as blood flooded into his lungs and bubbled up his throat from the immense internal injuries he received as a result of Claudette's Uzi slugs hitting home.

  The sec driver turned to Ayesha, all his nerves now, ironically, quelled by a terror greater than any he had ever known before.

  "You bitch, this is all your doing," he yelled, flinging himself toward her.

  The girl stepped back, slipping off her shackles and bringing the knife up so that it was blade upward in her palm. As he lunged, she stepped calmly to one side and slashed at him, catching him across the side of his face. As he stumbled and fell, his hand came up to his face, leaving his ribs open at the side. She slashed under the rib cage, the razor-honed blade cutting through his clothes and scoring through flesh, fat and muscle. He howled in pain and doubled up on the floor of the arena, n
o longer an immediate threat.

  "Drop the shackles and run like hell," Claudette yelled, hanging back to marshal the women along to the wag while Ayesha dealt with the driver. When the girl joined her, Claudette looked around to see that Anita was the only one of the women who hadn't run directly to the wag. In the confusion, no shots had been fired on them, and frankly it was unlikely that it had even been noticed that they were unshackled—until Anita had chosen to draw attention to this.

  The blowsy blonde was hammering on the window of Baron Al's wag, screaming at him to let her in and save her, and she would do anything for him, and she wasn't to blame, it was his good-for-nothing daughter who had sold them down the river to something called the Hellbenders.

  In a torrent of words that emerged as an almost incoherent jumble, the blonde had managed to spill the whole plot to Baron Al in a pathetic attempt to save her skin. The irony being that, in among the noise and confusion, and the fact that the window of his wag was firmly wound to shut out the dust, all the baron could see was a red-eyed, swollen-faced woman screaming at him. He looked at her in complete incomprehension.

  "Bitch," Claudette muttered, "I've been wanting to do this for hours." She raised her blaster.

  It was quick, but far from painless. She put two slugs into the woman's knees, and Anita crashed to the ground with an ear piercing yell of agony. The next two shots were into her shoulders, making it impossible for her to do anything but lie there, immobile, wailing in pain and confusion.

  Claudette and Ayesha made their way hurriedly back to the wag, Claudette pausing briefly to put a slug into Anita's guts, blood spreading across the blonde's dirty white blouse, her face contorted in pain.

  Her death was quickened by a final slug that was put through her open, mewling mouth, blowing her head apart. Claudette then stopped to spare the astounded baron a wink before making her way back to the safety of the wag.

  As she bounded in and slammed the doors, she said breathlessly, "I hope you can drive one of these things, girl, 'cause I sure as shit can't."

  Chapter Twenty

  "Man the guns!" Correll yelled. "We've got them chilled and buried—they can't get out!" He whooped joyously as he brought the wag out of its dangerous skid-cum-turn, and the two airborne wheels hit the desert floor with a bone-jarring thud. He slammed the wag into the highest gear and ground his foot into the metal floor, hunching over the wheel as much as the metal box on his lap would allow him.

  Ryan, Krysty and the other Hellbenders in the lead wag slid from their seats, balance still a little uncertain from the erratic passage of the wag, and positioned themselves behind the machine blasters that were mounted inside the wag, with the barrels protruding through engineered holes in the sides. Because these had been made and mounted before skydark, they were the latest in military sec tech from before the nukecaust, and had cameras and infrared mounts that relayed a view of the outside world, and the target area, to whoever was seated at the end of the mount.

  Ryan settled his good orb against the sight, adjusting to the slight variation in quality between the image on the small eye screen and the reality around him. The age of the equipment was beginning to tell, even though Correll's people had maintained all the wags as best they could, and the image that settled on his retina was slightly flat and two-dimensional, with a faded quality that wouldn't help anyone to differentiate between wags and clouds of dust in the chaos outside. The broken digital image pixilated the outside world into little more than a series of shadows. But those shadows were enough.

  "We're closing," Correll yelled. "Get ready to blast the bastards!"

  Ryan shifted forward in his seat, his eye jammed up against the sight, the stock of the blaster hard against the cords of muscle on his shoulder. The rear wag of the Charity convoy came into view, and he was aware of moving shadows along the roof. Above the roar of the wag engine, a chatter of blasterfire could just about be discerned, and there was the high pitched scream of tortured metal as the shells from the Charity sec men's blasters hit the outside of the armored wag and ricocheted off. Before he had the chance to squeeze the trigger and pick off some of the shadows, Correll had piloted the wag past at speed, and they were headed for the lead. It was obvious that Correll wanted the lead wag and the life of Baron Al Jourgensen, the man he had referred to as "Red, the son of a gaudy whore." Behind them, he heard the throatier roar of a machine blaster from the next wag, as it attempted to take out the wag that had fired on them.

  Beside Ryan, Krysty squeezed off a few shots to test her machine blaster, aiming at shadows that moved across the top of a wag they passed. The heavy-caliber slugs tore into the shadows, leaving red tracers in their wake, some of the shadows disappearing into the sandstorm around as the red lines ripped through them, throwing them off the wag.

  "Lead wag coming up," Correll yelled over his shoulder without glancing behind him, making sure that the personnel of his wag were aware of his priority.

  BEHIND HIS CONVOY LEADER , Lonnie pushed his wag to the max, keeping hard on Correll as they roared through the narrow gap that formed the entrance to the arena. It was narrow, and filled with the swirling dust thrown up by the storm, but it was nothing compared to the channel they had just left. In the wake left by the leading wag, Lonnie charted a course into the arena with ease.

  "Heads up, we're about to hit it," he rapped out sharply as the crew behind him took up positions.

  This wag was also a preDark military vehicle, but hadn't been designed as an armored wag in the same way as the one piloted by the Hellbenders' leader. This was an armored personnel carrier in which the Hellbenders had cut holes large enough for heavy-duty blasters to be placed. The work would have taken a long time, as the armoring of the wag was strong, but then the group had been waiting for a long time, and this was the reward for their patience. The holes were small, but large enough for the barrel of a blaster and also for the sight to gain some view of the area around the barrel. It was a small circumference, but with wags in front and behind, the important thing was to focus on what you could see, and leave the rest to your compatriots.

  It was none too secure to try to sight carefully, as seats in the wag hadn't been made with the idea of tryin to fire from the sides. They were made purely for transport, and so were facing the wrong way, and at the wrong angles for the crew with the blasters to sit and sight their targets comfortably. Instead, Jak, Dean and Catherine were lined up down one side of the vehicle, balancing and trying to compensate for the erratic motion of the wag as it rode roughshod over the even rougher terrain. The blasters down this side of the vehicle were all AK-47s, the Kalashnikovs grouped together as part of the overall plan to allow for a smoother transition of ammo when needed. In the same way, the far side of the wag, where Danny, Doc and the other crew stood idle, waiting for the wag to turn on the return run before they sighted and began their assault, were all equipped with Heckler & Kochs, the pool of ammo for these blasters being grouped on their side.

  In this sense, the planning had been superb; however, there had been no way that anyone could have allowed for the sandstorm that was now raging outside. The clouds of dust raised by the motion of the wags would have made things difficult enough, but the roughly hacked holes for the blaster barrels and sights, although tight as they could have been made, still allowed a little room for the howling wind outside to drive sand through the gaps and into the interior of the wag. It wasn't much, but for those who stood by the blasters, trying to get a sight on the enemy, it was enough.

  "Hot pipe! This'll take my eyeball out before I have a chance to pick off anyone out there," Dean shouted as he took his eye away from the sight to try to clear it of the stinging grit that was misting his vision.

  "Aim for dark, fire quick, then clean eyes," Jak snapped, ignoring the stinging in his own fiery red eyes in order to pull cleanly on the trigger of the AK-47 and take out some of the sec firing at them, slamming a couple of slugs into the side of a wag, whose armoring and protection
was minimal, for good measure.

  "White boy's right," Catherine said between shots of her own. "Ignore the pain. It's much more satisfying to see those bastards go down," she added with a grin as one of her shots took out a sec man, his head splitting like a ripe melon, visible even through the dust storm. The blood and brain from his exploding skull was absorbed into the swirling dust around as his body slumped, the impact of the slug absorbed almost totally above neck level—where there was nothing now left to indicate he had ever had a head.

  The grin on the blonde's face turned to a grimace of pain as a flurry of shots from the opposing sec ripped along the side of the wag. The vast majority of the shells ricocheted harmlessly off the wag's armor, but Catherine had drawn the short straw when it came to luck, and was about to become the first casualty among the Hellbenders.

  Two slugs from the sec men squeezed through the gap around the barrel and sight of the AK-47, and if she hadn't turned to reply to Jak's comments, they may have just wounded her in the upper arm or missed altogether. But that fraction that she moved to speak, pushing her head away from and higher than the sight on her blaster put her in direct line for the shots that had squeezed through.

  The first one caught her on the cheekbone, freezing the grimace for an awful second as it ripped the flesh away from her face, exposing the bone and teeth of the jaw, before the bone seemed to splinter and powder in front of them. It seemed as though everything were happening in slow motion as her head jerked upward slightly, the second slug hitting home at her temple, ripping flesh and hair from her head. Her green eyes seemed for one fraction of a second to register the most intense pain and surprise, pleading for a reason why this had happened by such a fluke, before the light went from the eyes, followed by the viscous fluid of the eyeball itself as it exploded under the pressure of the blow.