by James Axler
Brakes squealing, engine roaring, the wag decelerated from fifty to thirty miles per hour in only seconds. Then the screeching transmission exploded from the strain of the reversal, the spinning gears tearing themselves apart and shotgunning out of the floor. Ryan fought the wheel as the speed dropped further, but it wasn't enough, and the wag slammed into the old tree, plowing through in an explosion of rotten wood. The collision sent the vehicle airborne for a few yards, then dropped to slam onto the asphalt in a resounding crash of crumpling metal and smashing glass. The radiator erupted into a geyser of steam, the axles broke apart and the spinning tires shot away.
Still in motion from sheer inertia, the wreck threw off a spray of sparks from the chassis scraping along the rough surface of the roadway. Shuddering, jerking, clanging, the destroyed wag noisily ground to a halt a good fifty paces farther down the road.
Only the steady ticking of hot metal slowly cooling broke the profound silence of the roadway.
Chapter Fifteen
Crouching sec men armed with knives and flintlocks stole toward the smoking ruins of the school bus.
A trapped bubble of air rose from the quicksand lake to burst on the surface, sounding very much like a human cough. Condors flew high in the stormy sky above, and tropical birds twittered in the oak and birch trees of the nearby forest, waiting for the night when they could hunt. Darting from stone to weed, a rat scurried along the ground with an ear held triumphantly in its jaw. The tattered bodies of the fallen stickies were strewed along two miles of mud and quicksand, ending in the crumpled remains of the wrecked school bus. A column of smoke rose from the quietly burning engine, and the rear door was gone, showing piles of crates and more corpses inside.
A short distance away, a dozen more soldiers sat on their horses with longblasters pressed to their shoulders, shiny new flint in every weapon and tense fingers on the triggers.
"If there's a God still in heaven, hear my plea." a corporal whispered hoarsely. "Let the outlanders still live, so I may avenge my brother."
Mitchum leaned over in his saddle and pressed the point of his knife to the sec man's throat. A drop of blood rose from the skin and flowed easily along the razor-sharp blade.
"Don't speak again without my permission," Mitchum whispered, applying more pressure. The sec man inhaled sharply, craning back his head to keep from being cut. "Or I will wear you as boots. I learned many things as a prisoner of the cannies. Skinning a fool was only the beginning."
"They killed my brother," the corporal said without moving his jaw. He could feel the warm blood flow down his throat. "Shot him in the back in cold blood. Want them bad."
Mitchum studied the rage in the man's eyes and returned the blade to its sheath. "The man who died in the mountains with us," he said slowly. "Trying to outdraw the white-skinned man."
"That was Cob, my older bro," the sec man grunted. "I'm Whyte."
"Fair fight. I was there," the officer said out of the side of his mouth, now watching the troopers creep inside the bus. The men with longblasters got tense, leaning forward in anticipation to the brutal recoil of their black-powder weapons.
"Don't care," Whyte snarled, looking up at the mounted officer, reaching for his own knife. "I want them!"
Smoothly, Mitchum drew his blaster and slapped the corporal on the back of the neck just below the swell of the skull. Whyte didn't even gasp as he limply dropped to the ground. His hands dug at the pavement for a moment, then stopped, but his back rose and fell in the rhythm of life.
"Anybody else speaks out of turn," Mitchum said softly, cocking back the hammer of his piece, "and he dies on the spot. Now drag this feeb away and remove the corporal stripes from his shirt. He's a private now."
A private saluted the officer and hauled the unconscious trooper away just as a sec man appeared at the rear of the bus. He splayed an empty hand, closed it, then cut the air with a flat palm.
"Scorch!" Mitchum spit angrily, and thumped his heels on the horse's rump to get it moving. Reaching the wreck, he slid off the animal and tethered the reins to a broken sapling. There were lots of them about, forming an orderly path that zigzagged to the vehicle. The driver had to have been dying or blind to hit so many.
"Any sign they had been inside?" Mitchum demanded of the waiting sec men.
The leader of the recce saluted. "Yes, sir. Lots of blood and spent brass is everywhere."
"Must of been a hell of a fight," another man agreed. "There be bullet holes in the windows and roof."
"A gangbang," the colonel stated gruffly. The swamp stickies had been doing a lot of that lately. Attacking in larger and larger groups to ace passing norms. Blasters weren't stopping them anymore.
"Mebbe they are aced, sir," a corporal suggested, peeking in through a busted window frame. "And something dragged the bodies away. Lots of things will eat norm flesh that's black with rot, but never touch a fresh mutie corpse."
"That's true," the sergeant agreed, kicking at some debris on the cracked pavement.
Yes, it was possible, even likely, but Mitchum didn't trust such an easy answer. He wouldn't believe Ryan was dead until he saw the body and cut out its heart.
"What about their possessions?" Mitchum demanded, walking around the twisted shell of the broken wag. "Are their backpacks or the rapidfires still inside?"
"No, sir," a private answered. "We looked, but those are gone."
"They're alive!" Mitchum growled, slamming a fist into the side of the bus, denting the weakened metal. Ryan and his people were alive and had escaped again. Animals might have dragged away the bodies, but not the blasters.
"What a heap of dreck," a sergeant snorted in disgust. "Must of hit that log and gone flying. Shitfire, both axles are busted to pieces, and the engine block is cracked. Look at that oil spill! There's no way I could fix this wag. It was in better shape when we dug it out of those ruins."
"Might be able to find a few parts that work," a private suggested, lifting a wheel-bearing assembly from one of the axles. It was slightly bent, but still should work. He tucked it into a pocket.
"Stop that," Mitchum directed, going for his horse. "We'll scav for anything usable on the return. But first we find those rad-sucking outlanders and send them to Davey in pieces."
Mounting his horse, he walked it to the middle of the roadway, watching the trees for snipers. Nothing was stirring, but he didn't relax. Something was terribly wrong here; he just didn't know what it was.
"I want a recce of the whole area," Mitchum directed. "If they walked away, there'll be tracks. Sergeant, form three teams of five men. The outlanders are still alive, and we will find them!"
"Yes, sir!" the sergeant replied with a smart salute.
Then a voice shouted from inside the wag. "Hey, there's a pile of flintlocks in here, and they ain't even scratched!"
"Any ammo?" another asked, walking closer.
"Sure! Lots!"
Battle instincts flared, and Mitchum spun in the saddle.
"Don't touch those!" he bellowed. "It's a trap!"
But the warning was too late. A sec man cried out as something inside the bus burst into a sizzling chem spray. There followed a small explosion, then a roaring whoosh as flames filled the bus, stretching out the windows and doorways to completely engulf the vehicle in a rapidly expanding fireball.
"They boobied the fuel!" a man shrieked as a burning wave of shine blew him out the door, clothes and hair instantly bursting into flames.
Desperately covering his face, Mitchum dropped behind his horse for protection as the hellstorm washed over the group of startled sec men, igniting them like greasy torches.
The conflagration consumed the entire area, the growing flames reaching to the trees, and the screams of the dying men seemed to last forever.
PUSHING THEIR WAY through the dense greenery, Ryan stopped as Krysty whirled to look behind them.
"Trouble?" he asked, grabbing his blaster.
"They found the booby," she said. "I pity th
em."
"Fuck 'em," Jak snarled, limping along. A tree branch had been cut into a crude crutch, and the teenager was stiffly hobbling along, his face a mask of barely contained fury.
Hoisting her med kit, Mildred didn't blame him for being angry. A barrel of shine had fallen on his leg in the crash, giving the teenager a sprained ankle. She had wrapped it tight with wet strips of cloth that would tighten as they dried. Not much, but it was the best she could do. The sprain had to be very painful, but the teenager didn't complain. Mildred had two aspirins she was holding in reserve until nightfall to help him get to sleep. But the more he walked, the worse it would feel.
"Hated to use all of my plas in one shot," J.B. said, removing his hat to wipe off the sweatband with a handkerchief. Then he set the fedora back in place. "But once the wag was broke, that aced the plan of trading it for a ship at Cascade."
"Hope it got them all," Dean said grimly, rubbing his sore ribs. Nothing was broken, but he had a lot of painful bruises.
"I think we can count on some of the sec men surviving," Ryan said, "and that soon these hills will be crawling with troops."
"Can stop reporting back," Jak said, dragging a thumb dramatically across his throat.
"Ace that. We want them to report to the local baron," Ryan explained. "He'll send out troops to hunt for us, and we'll sneak into the ville tonight and steal a boat."
"Dangerous," Krysty said, taking out her canteen and drinking deeply. "But it should work. Surprise will be on our side."
"No other options," Ryan said grimly. They were strangers in enemy territory, with every hand turned against them. Back in the Deathlands, rapidfires offered a man some degree of protection; here they were a death warrant.
"Needs drive where the devil must," Doc rumbled cryptically. "We didn't start this conflict, but by God we shall finish it!"
"I just want to leave," Ryan said, checking the clip in his handblaster. "Not interested in starting a war. Too many of them, and we're low on ammo. I have twelve rounds for the SIG-Sauer. Two mags of five for the Steyr."
"Four," Jak said, patting the blaster on his hip. "And lost knife stickie fell out window."
"Three rounds," Krysty said. "And one is a black-powder reload that might not work."
"Two," Mildred said.
"Nine," Dean announced proudly. "Full clip."
"Uzi is out," J.B. stated. "Six rounds for the scattergun."
Fireblast! They wasted a ton of precious ammo in the fight with the stickies. At least they still had most of their food and water. "How much farther to the ville?"
Pulling out a sextant, J.B. shot the sun and did some quick calculations. Then he carefully unfolded a map. Found in a redoubt, it was old and faded, the plastic coating worn thin in spots, but the priceless antique was still readable.
"Dark night, I have no idea where we are," he complained, looking upward to scowl at the sun partially hidden by storm clouds. "According to my map, we're half a mile in the ocean."
"Nuke quakes must have moved the island," Krysty said.
"So we're lost," Mildred stated with a frown.
"Pretty much," he said, tucking the sextant inside his shirt. "We know the ville is somewhere close, and to the south. That's it."
Pulling out his compass, J.B. checked the direction. "And south should be that way," he pointed. "Toward those big trees with the flower— Hey!"
Everybody waited expectantly while J.B. stared at his compass. "There it is again," he muttered.
"What?" Dean asked, craning his neck to see.
He showed the boy. "Every couple of seconds, the compass needle flicks to the west. Something electrical that way," J.B. stated, looking at the dense greenery to their right. "Something big and still in operation."
"A pulsating magnetic field," Mildred said thoughtfully. "If Cascade had an airport before, it could be the ILM beacons for the landing field."
"Not south, west," Jak said, leaning against a tree and massaging his armpit where the crutch had been rubbing.
Listening to the sounds of the forest, Ryan slowly said, "It's got to be close. The atmosphere is so fucked up with rads that mag fields can't reach very far. A mile or so, at the most."
"Beacon is a sort of radio?" Dean asked.
Still studying the compass, J.B. nodded. "Yes."
"Very close, then," Krysty agreed, her hair fanning outward. "And the landing field should be far away from the buildings. The ville may not even know it's there."
"Could be a good place to rest," Mildred added.
Jak shot her an angry look, then relented and shrugged. He was a crip at the moment. Only a stupe would deny it.
"Sounds good. Dean, think you can climb one of these," Ryan asked, thumping the trunk of a mutated oak, "and get us a recce?"
The boy studied the tree closely. "Sure," he stated, and dropped his backpack to the ground. Tightening his belt, the boy started shimmying up the thick trunk and disappeared into the foliage.
"Anything?" his father shouted.
"Nothing yet!" came back the answer. "Wait a minute."
The companions drew closer to the tree, hands on their weapons in case of trouble. A minute passed, then several, their expressions began to turn worried.
"Dean?" Krysty called gently through cupped hands.
But only the rustle of leaves responded, a few colorful birds taking flight from the dense overhang of greenery.
"I'm going after him," Ryan declared, passing the Steyr to the redhead. Dropping his backpack, the man grabbed a low limb and chinned himself off the ground just as Dean dropped through the leaves to land sprawling in the bushes.
"Plane," the boy said standing, his face bright with excitement. "Think I found a plane!"
"In the air?" Mildred asked in concern, scanning the sky through the holes in the sylvan canopy. It was one of her biggest worries. Even worse than a runaway plague. Anybody who got a powered airplane into the sky could seize absolute control of the Deathlands. There were few enough weapons working these days, and nothing that would challenge a skyfighter. Even an old box kite like the Wright brothers made for the U.S. government to use in World War I and some black-powder bombs would be enough. Just the threat of death from above would make most villes surrender automatically. The destruction of the world from the sky bombs had burned a very real fear of aerial attacks into the very souls of the human survivors.
Dean shook his head. "No, just caught in the branches. About a mile away. Big one. Looks intact."
"Useless," Krysty said. "If it's visible, it's been looted."
The boy shook his head. "No way you could find it from the ground. Got to be high to see it."
There was a pause. "I think," he added honestly.
"Even crumbling walls can offer shelter," Doc offered as comment.
"An airplane," Ryan muttered, rubbing his chin. "Same direction as the pulse?"
"Yes, Dad."
"Remember what the Trader taught us about crashed planes," J.B. said, patting his empty Uzi machine pistol.
"Just what I was thinking," the Deathlands warrior said, almost grinning. Shelter or not, there could be salvage. Blasters, ammo, food, hidden sagely away where nobody would ever find them. Lots of things they needed.
"Let's check it out," Ryan said, and started pushing a path through the tangled growth.
GROANING SOFTLY, Whyte awoke to a pounding headache and the stink of burning flesh. Almost immediately, there was a violent explosion, and something fell alongside the sec man with a thump. As his vision cleared, Whyte saw it was a dead stickie with a gaping hole in its bleeding chest. The mutie worked its suckers a few times as if fighting for life, then went still.
Hastily scrambling away, the sec man drew his own blaster and scanned the area for more of the muties. There were none, but he gasped upon seeing the smoking remains of a huge explosion.
The bus was spread wide open, resembling a metal flower that had been set on fire. Thick black smoke from the chassis was curling
high into the overcast sky. The charred remains of norms and horses lay strewed across the asphalt, many of the bodies in pieces as if torn apart by wild animals.
After a moment, he realized it had to be from their ammo pouches detonating when the men were set on fire from the explosion. Cooked alive, then blown in two. Black dust, what a bad way to get aced. Wasn't even quick.
"A bastard trap," Whyte growled angrily. "Triple damn the outlanders. I'll make them pay."
"Over here!" a voice called.
Spinning, Whyte cocked back the hammer on his big flintlock. But only the dead were in sight, skins burned black, hair gone and clothing reduced to a layer of ash over the charred remains. Then he noticed a smoking blaster being waved from behind the sprawled body of a cooked horse. Approaching carefully, the sec man went around the chilled animal to discover Colonel Mitchum on the ground, his legs pinned under the beast from the knees down.
"Get this off me!" Mitchum ordered brusquely, wriggling.
"Yes, sir," Whyte replied, and grabbed the reins. But as he pulled they broke apart, the leather straps severely weakened from the firestorm.
"Get a longblaster," the colonel directed. "Shove it underneath and I can drag myself out. Hurry! My legs went numb an hour ago."
"Gotcha," Whyte said, rummaging around until he found a flintlock rifle that hadn't been blown apart when its ammo cooked off from the heat. Carefully shoving the barrel under the limp beast, Whyte shoved hard upward and the half ton of deadweight slowly lifted off the ground.
Grunting from the exertion, Mitchum wriggled free, leaving his boots trapped under the beast, and rolled away. Whyte released the rifle and let the carcass drop.
"It was you," the sec man said awkwardly. "You shot that stickie coming for me."
"Of course," Mitchum growled, massaging his legs and bare feet. With the return of circulation, pins and needles were making his legs tingle painfully and he rode out the return of feeling, not daring to move an inch.
"You saved my life," Whyte said, feeling angry and confused at the same time.