by James Axler
Another human wielding a spear came charging over the hilltop and promptly tripped over his dead comrade. Before the attacker hit the ground, Ryan had drilled a hole through the top of his head. His entire body spasmed repeatedly and then lay still.
The Armorer was nowhere to be seen. Ryan looked frantically around. Then from just over the hill he heard the staccato snarl of the Browning automatic rifle. J.B. had hopped the crest to pour fire into the flank of the muties charging the city line.
A cheer unfurling along the hilltop told Ryan the sudden desperation charge by the Chichimecs had been driven off. By chance the hill’s north face offered virtually nothing by way of cover. In just the twenty yards or so of clear ground the invaders had to charge across, the city fighters had been able to shoot them all down, with help from J.B.
The Armorer jumped back over the rise, holding his BAR in one hand and clamping his fedora to his head with the other. “Cannies’re shooting back,” he said, and Ryan felt the thumps of bullets hitting the far side through the soles of his boots. “They’ve pretty much had it, but a man could still get dead.”
The cheering turned to screams.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Three
The huge mob of invaders in front of the scavvies’ position was milling in confusion. The missile wags had continued to punish the Chichimecs, the rockets drawing corkscrews of white smoke overhead before arcing down to burst among the enemy with bright red flashes and puffs of black smoke. J.B. and Jak added their firepower to the slaughter once more.
Although it was still beset on two sides, Hector’s force had solidified and was pouring fire into the Chichimecs. As many as a third of the valley men had been killed or routed off, but now the rest fought briskly. Ryan cinched up his shooting sling and began to seek out any invaders who looked as though they might be in positions of command. When he found them, he chilled them.
Already huge piles of dead and writhing, groaning wounded lay out in front of the scavvies’ hilltop. Ryan was amazed at the fanaticism—or sheer desperation—that kept them hanging on in the face of such a terrible bloodletting. It was as great a slaughter as any he had seen.
As he watched, it became too much. The Chichimecs broke. First a few clumps broke away and began running to the north. Then the whole mass seemed to fray and then disintegrate like a clod of earth caught in a torrent, streaming away from the terrible blasters that flayed them with relentless fire.
Again the scavvies cheered. Some of them started to rise up as if to pursue. Ryan yelled at them and waved his arms. Cooler-headed comrades dragged them back down. The headlong retreat might be another ruse, designed to draw out the defending forces in a pursuit that would destroy their own cohesion, scatter them so they could be bushwhacked in convenient bite-size chunks.
And then the flight stopped. The running Chichimecs slowed, halted. Then, turning, they began to run back at their tormentors at the same mad speed, shaking their weapons and screaming with rage.
“Fireblast!” Ryan said.
“Ryan! Watch it!” J.B. shouted. He rose and fired a burst from the hip, into the ground right in front of his friend.
Ryan jumped back. The bullets had cut a rattlesnake clean in two. The halves writhed in a final frenzy. As Ryan watched, a second snake slid from the grass, headed right toward him. It was a standard-size rattler, maybe four feet long, and looked normal. But it wasn’t acting normal. There was nothing normal at all about a rattler emerging from the grass to charge a human.
Ryan blasted the snake with his Steyr. J.B. vaulted onto the hood of the Hummer. “Bastards’re all over the place!”
They seemed to be all over the line, as well. Scavvies were jumping up and away from their positions with frantic haste. A few who hadn’t been alert or quick enough screamed as fangs pumped toxins into bodies or limbs or pain-contorting faces.
A clump of scavvies not thirty yards from the Hummer began to holler and slap themselves and run the way the crew from the valley gun wag had. Ryan saw small flying shapes swarming around them.
“Wasps,” Jak said. “Wasps and snakes. Animals fight us now.”
Ryan had joined J.B. on the wag hood. They looked at each other.
“The Holy Child—” J.B. began.
“Can control the emotions of men and animals,” Ryan finished.
The onslaught of vermin were breaking the scavvie line. Behind the creatures came hundreds of Chichimecs, yelling their bloodlust—bloodlust that, Ryan knew with sudden conviction, had replaced the panic that had driven them to rout because of the mutie powers of their prophet, or god, or whatever he was.
One of the scooter scouts was forking his stationary bike off to the right of the Hummer, firing an M-16 into the onrushing muties. Ryan shouted, waved at the man. When the scout looked up, Ryan beckoned furiously with an arm. The man looked puzzled, but slung his longblaster and rode over to the wag.
Ryan jumped down. “I need your ride.” He grabbed the man’s arm and all but threw him off the dirt bike.
“Better hump it on up here,” J.B. said helpfully to the scout, who stood staring wildly after Ryan as the one-eyed man jumped on the bike and gunned it off to the northwest, angling away from the charging Chichimecs. “Snakes.”
RYAN HEARD a shout from behind him, looked back over his shoulder. A lone biker was riding in his wake: Five Ax. For a moment Ryan wondered if the Jaguar Knight was trying to recover his comrade’s stolen property.
The other bike came up alongside. Five Ax grinned and flashed Ryan a quick thumbs-up. Realizing the other had followed to watch his back, Ryan nodded and grinned.
He was several hundred yards wide of the screeching, racing mob of Chichimecs. Beyond them he could see Don Hector’s men streaming back away from the battlefield in droves. Maybe monsters had gotten in among them, or maybe it was something as mundane—but still dangerous—as hornets and rattlesnakes. He could still hear machine guns, both the slow deep thump of the .50s and the higher-pitched rip of the .30-calibers and rockets continued to snake across the sky, although they were now falling behind the main crush of invaders as they charged for the scavvies. The defenders were still fighting back, still bringing some pretty awesome firepower to bear. But he knew that couldn’t last.
A pair of figures loomed up in his path: Chichimecs, one of them a mutie with sheets of skin hanging from his chin and torso and limbs like bloody moss. Ryan yanked up on his handlebars. His front wheel came off the ground and bit into the mutie’s chest like a circular saw. The mutie screamed and fell backward as blood and tissue flew. Ryan felt bones break as his weight combined with the bike’s landed on the man. He kept riding.
Ahead of him and a little to the left rose a small hill. By its near-perfect conical shape he guessed it was a baby smoky. Hopefully a dead one, although since it wasn’t spitting hot gas and molten rock right that moment its actual state was the last of his worries. He swung wide and then ran the bike up it almost to the top. He laid the machine down, unslung the rifle, began to scramble to the crest. Five Ax laid his bike down next to Ryan’s and immediately began to fire single-aimed shots from his FN FAL.
A glance back told Ryan why: Chichimec stragglers were running toward them from all directions.
Good thing he tagged along, Ryan knew. The Jaguar Knight had followed to watch his back. He’d just have to trust him to do it long enough.
Ryan unslung the Steyr and went to his belly. A bullet whanged off a rock a yard to his left; a muscle in his cheek twitched.
He crawled upward, peered over the top. A knot of invaders stood four hundred yards away. He pushed his Steyr in front of him, pulled the butt into its shoulder, peered through the scope.
A bullet from somewhere behind cracked overhead. “Fast, fast,” Five Ax urged in English. He swapped mags.
After a moment of near panic when he saw no targets—the earth is wide, the field of view of a telescopic sight very narrow—Ryan found the group he had seen before. There were a do
zen Chichimecs, human and mutant, and a figure he guessed was human, although it seemed to be wearing the skin of an animal, complete with the animal’s head draped over his own. But even that bizarre sight wasn’t what commanded his attention.
In the midst of the group stood a figure that was maybe four feet tall and maybe three feet wide. Its skin was chalky white, the lank hair on its round skull was silvery-white. It looked something like old, faded ads Ryan had once seen, featuring what he’d read was the Michelin Tire Man, with fat hanging in folds around it. It was standing where it could just peer south over the top of a rise.
A full-auto burst roared out from behind Ryan, a very bad sign. He laid the crosshairs on the middle of the body. Even he, hardened chiller that he was, felt a tiny pang at dropping the hammer on a child. But not enough of a pang that he didn’t take a deep breath, release some of it, hold, gently squeeze the trigger as if it were one of Krysty’s perfect snowy breasts….
Something slammed into his back at the instant the shot broke.
A wave of agony and terror washed over Ryan and knotted his guts. Desperately he rolled onto his back. Or tried to; he got halfway and something jammed him, stopped him cold. A Chichimec was standing right over him. Five Ax had the long FN FAL across the invader’s throat like a bar and was trying to choke him with it from behind.
Still almost sickened by repeated electric shocks of emotion, Ryan struggled and with a convulsive heave of effort brought out his SIG-Sauer. Five Ax’s eyes got wide as Ryan raised the blaster; copper-jacketed nines would punch right through the Chichimec’s skinny body into his.
Ryan fired twice. The noseless mutie who had been about to plunge a spear into Five Ax’s back fell.
Five Ax released the raider he was holding with his longblaster. The man dropped to his hands and knees across Ryan’s legs. He tried to get up. When he looked back toward Five Ax, the Jaguar Knight’s macahuitl struck him in the center of the forehead and split his skull.
Hot blood pulsed over Ryan’s legs. Ignoring it, he pointed his SIG-Sauer past the Jaguar Knight. He could see four or five Chichimecs. But they were no longer trying to attack the pair. As Five Ax wrenched his weapon free and turned, the raiders began to back away. Their faces began to twist as from unbearable agony or fear. Tears gushed from their eyes. Crying out as though in pain, they ran away to the north.
Ryan’s own strange sourceless panic had ebbed. He rolled over onto his stomach again, got behind his rifle and looked through the scope. The group of raiders he had seen before was now gathered tightly around what he could only glimpse as a supine white form. He had tagged the Holy Child. Now he’d finish the job, if only one of those bastards down there would move just a little out of his line of fire….
He felt an odd wrench at his back. He yanked around to find himself looking up at Five Ax. Five Ax held up the obsidian-tipped spear he had just pulled out of Ryan’s backpack.
“Spoiled my shot,” Ryan said accusingly.
Five Ax grinned. “Better go now.” He jerked his head to the south.
The surviving Chichimecs were all headed north at a brisk pace. That meant hundreds of them were headed, if only incidentally, right at this hill. The Holy Child had obviously broadcast his pain and terror when Ryan’s bullet hit him. Fortunately he was tuned more to his followers’ wavelength, or whatever you’d call it, than Ryan’s. The one-eyed man had almost been unmanned by the psychic blast as it was. The invaders were still feeling their leader’s pain, or so Ryan guessed. They were obviously no longer interested in fighting.
But Ryan couldn’t but think it would be unhealthy to just sit here and let them flow past. And if they caught the notion the two enemies on the hill were the ones responsible for their holy one’s anguish…
“Yeah,” Ryan said, “reckon we better do that thing.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Four
The moon hung low over the mountains to the west. Down south the smokies were hardly making their presence known.
“Tenorio’s heading back to the city,” Ryan said into the mike from the Hummer’s radio. “He’s got about twenty wounded with him. Couple won’t make it, no way. Three, four more, mebbe. Rest’re basically patch-up jobs.”
“I’ll be glad of something to do.” Mildred’s voice came back. “Been getting antsy, sitting here watching Krysty and fretting about you boys being off in the middle of some battle. Is that crazy old coot coming back with Don T.?”
“Doc? Yeah. He’d rather sleep in a nice soft bed tonight than in the back seat of the wag.” He glanced toward the big bonfire at the main camp a hundred yards away. A ring of city fighters was attempting a drunken dance of celebration. They kept weaving perilously near the flames. “Can’t say I blame him. Are you sure Krysty—”
“Ryan, I told you, I’m not sure of anything except that her life’s not in danger, and that’s mainly because she’s so tough. Her fever’s mostly gone and she seems to be sleeping normally right now. I still have no idea what’s hit her. And if there’s any change in her status I’ll definitely call you right that instant.”
“All right.”
“Now, quit fussing and go back and play the hero. Get drunk, unwind, live a little. You’ve earned it, from what I hear.”
“All of us. Jak and J.B. were right in the thick of it—you know them, no way to keep them out. And I’m not sure Doc wasn’t in as much danger as any of us, back there at HQ with Don Hector on hand.”
“You were the one who turned the tide, though, Ryan.”
“Yeah.” He turned away from the fire and the noisy celebration. “I shot a kid.”
“What’s this? Regrets?”
“Well, not really. I mean, I try to do what I have to do—”
“Just nail that down right there, Ryan. You do what you have to do. Shooting a child doesn’t come easy to you? Well, congratulations on still being part of the human race in spite of being Deathlands born and bred. But that child was turning the whole battle against you, fixing to wipe out the whole army. Maybe this isn’t our fight, although you know I agree with your reasons for making it ours. But at that point you were saving your life and J.B.’s and Jak’s and Doc’s, as well, and maybe Krysty’s and mine, too. It’s a bad old world, Ryan.”
“Yeah. Okay. And if Krysty—”
“I’ll keep her near me so I can keep an eye on her while I’m helping with the wounded. And I’ll call you. I promise. Bye.”
For a moment he stood looking at the microphone in his hand. It was usually this way after a fight. Once that old adrenaline quit holding you by the neck, a body started to feel wrung out and empty.
“Rye-on,” a voice called from behind him. “Amigo.”
He turned. It was Five Ax, carrying a heavy earthenware bowl. With him came J.B. Neither was too steady on his pins. The Jaguar Knight pressed the bowl on him. He looked into it and by reflex wrinkled his nose.
“Pulque,” the Armorer said. “Local brew. Our city friends trade the valley folk for it. Looks like snot, smells like a horse. Don’t taste half bad, which isn’t to say it tastes good. But it’ll knock you on your ass.”
Ryan raised his eyebrow. “This is a good thing?”
“This is a good thing.” The Armorer laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. Ryan noticed there was no tremor to the grip, and it came to him he’d seldom seen his friend anywhere near incapacitated by drink. “Sometimes a man needs knocked-on-his-ass for a spell. Comprende, like they say in Mex-talk?”
“Yeah.” Uncertainly he accepted the bowl from Five Ax, who grinned like a goblin and slapped his shoulder.
“Helps if you hold your breath when you drink it,” J.B. said.
So Ryan did.
THE MOON ROLLED UP the sky, getting smaller but more intense. The volcanoes away off to the south emitted a loud fart or two. Their hearts weren’t in it. The celebration broke up into smaller gatherings.
Ryan, J.B. and Jak were hanging out by the Hummer with Five Ax and a couple
of his Jaguar Knight buddies. They’d made their own fire out of dried cow chips and grass. There wasn’t a lot of wood to be found in the valley. Trees weren’t common. It was kind of a small, pallid fire, but that suited a more intimate, wound-down kind of gathering. It didn’t smell bad, which might have surprised Ryan if he hadn’t encountered the primary fuel source before. The key was getting properly cured cow crap, which mostly meant dry.
J.B. was laid out under the wag, snoring like a dirt bike with an out-of-tune engine. His lack of consciousness owed far more to postcombat exhaustion than alcoholic intake, Ryan felt sure. Jak squatted on his haunches on the far side of the fire. His eyes glittered like rubies with reflected flamelight. Ryan had made himself relax about the youth, although he was still keeping an eye on him. Jak and alcohol could sometimes be a volatile mixture.
There was another potential worry. Some of the people from the valley villes, especially the ones burned out by the Chichimecs, had come around the battlefield to gloat over the dead bodies of their tormentors. They had plenty to gloat over. Don Tenorio estimated on the basis of reports from his people who’d scouted the field after the action that there were over two thousand dead invaders strewn across the green grass and black lava. Don Hector, who had been in full manic glory after the battle, had been strutting around making far higher claims. Even if the valley cacique hadn’t been a few rounds short of a full mag, Ryan would’ve credited the city alcade over him where it came to counting.
The defenders hadn’t exactly escaped unscathed. The scavvies had lost a total of thirty-one dead and a couple more than that wounded. The valley army, almost half its strength, well upward of two hundred dead, wounded or gone on what Doc termed “French leave.” For the city force it was a big bite of their total strength as it was. But in lasting terms it would gouge a disproportionately huge cavity out of the small, tight-knit scavenger community. The victors celebrated this night with single-minded purpose in part because they knew tomorrow the serious grieving would begin.