Axler, James - Deathlands 65 - Hellbenders

by Hellbenders [lit]

  And then, suddenly, the wing of the wag had passed beyond the rear of the vehicle it had been pushing against, that vehicle now pushed to one side, the occupants thrown across the interior and abandoning their blasters.

  "Shit!" Ayesha cursed as the wag, suddenly released from the restraints of the metal bulk in front of it, shot out across the gap between the convoy and the wall of the rock arena. She stamped on the brake, making the vehicle skid on the uneven and loose surface, the suddenly locked tires searching for purchase on the shifting sands of the desert floor. The wag skidded in a circle, and she righted it in time to be facing the entrance at the rear of the Charity convoy. The only problem with this being that the path to the entrance was blocked by the circling wags of the Hellbenders' convoy, with Correll in the lead, approaching at speed through the dust of the storm and conflict.

  "Aw, fuck," Claudette muttered. To get this far, this close to getting away, and then to get chilled by the very people who were supposed to be on your side… The dark-skinned girl watched openmouthed and wide-eyed as the lead wag closed on theirs, seeing through the grime and dust an equally surprised gaunt face as the driver jammed on his brakes and went into a skid, attempting to pilot his wag into the narrow space between the women's wag and the convoy that still stood in the arena.

  Ayesha mirrored the actions of Correll, swinging the wheel of her wag and risking crushing the wag against the rock wall.

  The two wags swung violently away from each other, like two magnetic poles that repel, but it was too little, too late. The front wings of both wags locked together in a squeal of metal, the opposing forces of each powerful wag engine forcing the metal into ridiculous shapes, pushing at each other so that the steering wheels in each cab failed to respond to the drivers.

  Ayesha found herself thrown across the wheel, the hard plastic jarring and bruising her chest and stomach, knocking the air from her and leaving her dazed and confused. She shook her head to try to clear it, and felt the need to violently vomit as a result, a need that was increased when she looked around to ask Claudette how she was, and found the dark-skinned girl staring at her from one lifeless eye, the other impaled with a long sliver of toughened glass from the windshield that had been worked loose from its frame by the twisting, distorting effects of the impact and had driven through her left eye and into the brain, lobotomizing her so that she died blissfully unaware of the pain it had caused her.

  Ayesha puked over the dead girl, then heaved and spit out the bile that tasted raw in her mouth. She looked over the back seat. Some of the women were unconscious from the impact, but most were still able to move.

  "I dunno," Ayesha muttered, "we'll just have to try and get out of the battlefield and wait for the result."

  "Some good you've been," moaned one of the women, picking herself up.

  Ayesha boiled inside. She'd tried, as hard as she could, and all she had was this?

  "Fuck it, look after yourselves, then," she spit before opening the wag door on her side of the cab and sliding out into the sandstorm.

  Outside, the Hellbenders were pouring out of their wags, their circling assault action having been halted by the crash between Correll and Ayesha. The leader of the Hellbenders was one of the first to hit the desert floor, having given orders over the radio for his people to disperse and begin the fight on the outside. Correll grasped a Heckler & Koch in one hand, and in the other he had a long bladed saber that was of tooled steel and had been taken from the redoubt. Coming face-to-face with him, Ayesha stopped dead in her tracks, taken aback by the wild-eyed, gaunt man, and also by the fact that he had a long metal box strapped to his chest. Whatever was in it, it wasn't just being used as armor, and Ayesha practically shrunk beneath his gaze.

  Jak, Dean and Danny were out of the second wag quickly, and the bespectacled youth led the way through the crowd of wild-eyed fighters to where the crash had occurred.

  Correll was looming over Ayesha through the dust and smoke. She was sure that he would cut her down where she stood, especially as she was the daughter of Baron Al Jourgensen, his sworn foe. In the heat of those eyes, all bargains would be forgotten.

  And yet he looked at her with eyes that suddenly cleared from their fires of fury, and just for a second registered an infinite tenderness.

  "Poor child," he murmured before brushing past her with a wild yell and heading for the front of the convoy, where Baron Al's wag was just moving off.

  "Ayesha!" Danny yelled, coming upon her out of the dust and grasping her. "You're okay!"

  "Just," she replied, "and it won't stay that way unless we find some way of getting away from this slaughterhouse."

  "This way," Jak said, "find wag."

  "Yeah, good idea," Dean agreed. "Where the hell is everyone?"

  "I, my dear boy, have finally got here," Doc said, coming up to them, "but of the others…"

  Dean and Jak looked around them. It was almost impossible to see in the swirling dust and smoke of the battlefield what was going on. Ryan and Krysty had to be in among it, and from the sounds of blasterfire and close combat, it seemed that mere yards away the sec men from Charity had emerged from their wags to take up hand-to-hand combat with the Hellbenders. They were forced to, as the sudden static nature of the other vehicles had left them with no target large or visible enough to fire at from inside the safety of the wags.

  Suddenly, Dean caught sight of Krysty's Titian flame of hair moving freely in the breeze as the woman encountered a sec man from Charity. As she moved nearer, they could see that the sec man had mistaken her for one of the more docile women from the wag, and was trying to trap her with a view to carrying her off. He had a Glock handblaster and a skinning knife, which he used to thrust at her, driving her backward. What he failed to realize was that she was leading him on, goading him into more confident, harder thrusts with the knife, nearly puncturing her skin. And then his confidence got the better of him, and he made his big mistake. He grinned with a leer and thrust the knife to try to rip the shoulder of her coat, to expose her bare flesh. But Krysty stepped under the blow and struck at his vulnerable side, striking below the heart with the heel of her hand. As the jarring blow turned the triumphant leer to a look of astonished agony, she drew back her arm and delivered a straight-fingered blow to his throat that ruptured the tissue within. He began to choke, and as he sank to the ground she raised one leg and delivered a chilling blow with the silvered toe of her boot, striking him at the joint of the jaw, just below the temple. The trauma to the brain finished off whatever life the sec man still had within him.

  "Nice to know you haven't lost your touch," the one-eyed warrior commented as he emerged from the dust and smoke, the Steyr in one hand and his panga in the other. "I don't know who's chilling who out there, and I don't think they do, either. My bet is we should get the hell out and regroup on the outside of the rocks, try and see what the hell is actually happening in here."

  "We could take one of the wags at the rear," Dean suggested. "They've all gone blood-chill crazy out here, and I figure we should just shoot whoever gets in the way— can't trust any of them not to chill us."

  Ryan agreed. "Only problem is, how do we let J.B. and Mildred know what the hell is going on?"

  "HOW THE HELL are we supposed to know what's going on here?" the Armorer asked Jenny as the wag spun yet again in the increasingly dense mix of smoke and dust that rose on the arena.

  "And how the hell am I supposed to know?" the woman snapped back.

  "It's your operation, not ours," Mildred replied with a bite in her tone. "And what was that about abandoning the wags because they've crashed?" she added, referring to the garbled command from Correll that had emerged from the static and confusion of the radio.

  "Shit, how do I know? It must be something that happened back there."

  "How about making it happen here?" the Armorer suggested, sighting the wag driven by Tulk and bearing Baron Tad Hutter begin to move out into the middle of the arena.

  "
What?"

  "He's moving, and we can't keep going in circles forever," J.B. said sharply. "So brace yourselves."

  With which the Armorer put his foot down hard to the floor of the wag and shot toward the moving wag. Tulk had moved forward cautiously, trying to sight the assault convoy as it came around again, and this had given J.B. the slight edge that he needed. As the baron's wag moved outward, J.B. drove straight at it, flinging his wag to one side at the last moment so that it caught the baron's wag with a broadside that made it skid in a circle, the front wing badly dented and bent in so that it trapped the front wheel and prevented it from rotating.

  Behind the Armorer, the other Hellbenders' wags skidded to a halt in order to avoid crashing into the leading vehicle, and the doors opened to discharge a crew hellbent on revenge.

  "My God, John, you could have given us a little more warning that that," Mildred gasped, the air driven from her by the impact.

  "Had to be done," the Armorer replied tersely. "Hutter was trying to get over to the other side."

  "Why the hell would he do that?"

  "My guess is he wants to grab the women in the confusion—shit, looks like Jourgensen had a similar idea— get the fuck out!" the Armorer yelled as another wag appeared in the center of the arena through the mist and smoke.

  J.B. grabbed Mildred and pulled her through the door of the wag, diving for cover and carrying her with him as Jourgensen's wag pulled up too late to avoid a collision with the two wags that had already crashed into the middle of the arena.

  "Tell me this isn't going to get worse," Mildred said as she saw Correll charging after the crashed wag, yelling at the top of his lungs.

  "Dark night, I could tell you but I'd probably be lying," the Armorer replied. "Come on, let's see if we can get over to the other side. Ryan and Krysty were with Correll, so chances are they're still over there somewhere," he said, raising the M-4000 in order to cut a path through any firefight they may chance on. Mildred had her Czech-made ZKR to hand. It was hardly ideal conditions for a sharp-shooting target blaster such as the ZKR, but any handblaster would be effective in the close conditions.

  Baron Al climbed from the wreck of his wag, still stunned by the impact of the crash, to come face-to-face with Tad Hutter, who had clambered from the wreckage of his own wag, leaving Tulk long chilled and impaled on the remains of the steering column, the dark metal protruding out of his back where the impact had driven it through his chest after the steering wheel had sheered off. He had died with the certain knowledge that his hated baron couldn't get out of the conflict alive.

  "Jourgensen, what the fuck are you playing at?" Hutter yelled, leveling his blaster.

  Baron Al looked at him with surprise, as though he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing or hearing.

  "Me?" he said blandly.

  "Asshole," Hutter muttered as he raised the blaster.

  "No! Leave him—he's mine!" came a yell from behind Jourgensen that made both barons look around in surprise.

  Correll was charging across the open space, oblivious of the carnage around and the blaster shots that strayed across his path. He had his saber raised, and was upon the startled Jourgensen before he had a chance to move.

  "We've waited so long for this, you pox-riddled bastard, but at last you'll pay," he screamed, long strings of saliva hanging from his jaws as he set to the baron with a vengeance, the saber chopping through Jourgensen's flesh and bone, scoring nerves and gouging out muscle so that great gouts of blood flooded from his body. Jourgensen, still not fully alert and now aware only of his own defenselessness, realized too late what was happening to him, and went down under the frenzied attack.

  Hutter raised his blaster to chill the mad dog and also to put Jourgensen out of his misery, but his sole attempt at charity for the baron of Charity was stopped by two streams of blasterfire that came his way from Jenny's and Rudi's Uzis. They'd heard their leader cry out and wanted him to achieve his revenge without interruption.

  But in their single-minded desire, they had neglected to watch their backs, and so found themselves open to blasterfire from those few sec men who had decided that they should keep a watch on their baron.

  Jenny and Rudi weren't the only ones to leave themselves open in this manner. Correll was now in a world of his own, the chaos and carnage around him meaning nothing, failing to register in his addled brain. For Joseph Correll, the Hellbenders and the whole assault and ambush on the trade convoy between Summerfield and Charity was as of naught. The only thing that mattered was that Baron Al "Red" Jourgensen was now beneath his blade, the chilled corpse of the baron nothing more than a mess of offal as the saber hacked him into ever smaller pieces. Correll raised his head to the skies, clouded as they were with smoke, sand and the smell of destruction, and laughed long and loud. He looked over to where some of Jourgensen's sec men had emerged from the mists.

  He knew what was to happen, but it no longer mattered. There was nothing now left for him to live for. His raison d'entre was fulfilled. He turned to the sec men and raised the saber aloft triumphantly, laughing wildly and welcoming the hail of blasterfire that ripped into him. The metal box on his chest gave way under the hail of fire as it ripped into his exposed head and limbs, the stress on the primitive welding making it give way beneath the onslaught.

  Correll stayed on his feet—kept partly upright by the force of the bullets ripping into him—long enough for the box to fall open, and its contents to finally be revealed.

  The charred and semimummified remains of Correll's wife tumbled from the box and fell on the mutilated remains of her tormentor…followed closely by Correll's lifeless corpse.

  The real battle was over. Now it was just a question of who would get out alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dean, Jak and Danny backtracked through the sandstorm and smoke, each with his blaster at the ready, in search of a wag that could be used to get them out of the arena. Doc followed, bringing Ayesha with him. But the one-eyed man held back.

  "What is it, lover?" Krysty asked him.

  "J.B. and Millie," Ryan replied simply. "We need to find them. They won't know where we are."

  "They might if they saw Correll," Krysty replied. "They knew he was in our wag, and they'd probably guess which direction to take."

  "That's a lot of mebbes," Ryan said grimly. "I've got to try and find them."

  "In this? We could wander forever and still not find them," Krysty told him.

  "We?" Ryan queried, then grinned when he saw the expression on her face. "Okay, let's do it."

  While Ryan and Krysty set off to try to find J.B. and Mildred, the other five in the group were making their way toward the rear of the convoy in search of a wag they could use.

  "Shit, I'll be glad when we can get the hell out of here," Danny whispered to Dean.

  Jak heard him and grinned with a vulpine relish. "No one get in our way," he said simply, a leaf-bladed knife appearing in his hand. "Get close, chill quick and quiet— no one guess where we are."

  "You don't know how much I hope so," Danny murmured fervently.

  The party of five had been lucky so far. The main hand-to-hand was taking part toward the middle of the desert floor, where the Hellbenders had rushed to take on the sec men as they emerged from their wags. So getting back as far as the rear of the convoy was a matter of keeping eyes and ears open and staying close to the wall. Jak, Dean and Doc knew their respective strengths and fighting skills, but Ayesha and Danny were still unknown quantities, so they didn't want to risk conflict unless it was absolutely necessary.

  The last wag in the Charity convoy was nothing more than a personnel carrier, closed in with welded sheet metal and a few slots cut in the side for blasters to be pushed through. The slots were empty, and there were four people engaged in hand-to-hand combat around the vehicle, with as many corpses between them. Forced up close by the poor visibility, these three men and one woman were fighting full-on, handblasters trying to get into a positi
on where they could get a clear shot.

  Jak looked at Dean. "You take those two," he murmured, indicating a woman and man—one of whom Dean recognized as a Hellbender—up close to the wag. "And I take them," he added, indicating two men who were careering across the desert floor, locked in a deadly embrace, the only outcome of which could be one of them buying the farm.

  Both of them would, if Jak had anything to do with it. Before his words had even died on the air, the albino hunter had slipped across the desert floor, through a cloud of dust and was up behind the grappling men. Even in the dull light, the leaf-bladed knife was an arc of gleaming steel as it cut through the air and then through flesh and artery. Jak had timed his movements precisely, so that the edge of the knife sliced the carotid artery of the man whose back was to him, catching him as he turned.

  The knife caught the second man on the downstroke, as he stared at Jak in wide-eyed, openmouthed surprise. It was his last expression, as the knife swathed patterns in the dust and sliced open his throat, his life draining from his eyes as blood drained from his open throat.

  The entire chilling had taken only a few seconds, in which time Dean had slipped through the smoke and approached the other fighting couple. He had the Hi-Power in his hand, and although it was risky to fire, in case the blaster noise attracted other combatants who may be near, two well-placed slugs should see the job done. The two combatants were so engrossed in their own personal struggle that they didn't notice the younger Cawdor approach them stealthily. Dean loosed two shots at less than three yards. Both were aimed for the head of each fighter, and in less than a second both struck home. The two combatants hit the desert floor unaware of how they had been chilled.

  Jak turned and beckoned Doc, Danny and Ayesha forward. As they joined the pair, Jak and Dean were checking that the wag was empty. There was a corpse in the front, which Jak pulled out and discarded on the desert floor.

  Dean turned with a puzzled expression. "Where have Krysty and Dad got to?"