by James Axler
Then her emerald eyes widened and she straightened her arms in front of her.
A Joker Creek sec man—Mildred had a vague flash impression of familiarity—had come in the open front door with a blaster in hand. It was an old Smith & Wesson Military and Police revolver, a cheaper but infinitely rugged and reliable cousin to her own match-grade .38 double-action blaster.
It was even closer to Krysty’s S&W 640 snub-nose—with which she blasted the man twice from eight feet while he was still looking around the room.
He dropped to the floorboards, his blood gushing out to stain a tatty throw rug set just inside it for visitors to wipe their feet.
Across the street the whole three-story building collapsed. The monster dozer crunched right on through, turning right to take out the next building toward the center of town.
“Out the back,” Mildred said.
Krysty went to the man she’d shot. He stirred feebly. She put a boot on his outflung blaster hand and stepped down. Bones crunched. He moaned.
Stooping, she twitched the blaster out of his mangled fingers with her left hand.
“I’m ready.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Half stunned by cracking his head on the front of the wooden wag bed, Ryan lay still a moment. He was completely enveloped by thunder and crashing and dust and diesel fumes as the bulldozer shrugged off the wreckage of the building he’d just bailed from as if it were no more than snowflakes. The machine then smashed its happy way into the neighboring structure.
He heard coughing. As if of its own accord, his right hand came up holding his SIG handblaster.
A pale hand waved at the dust. A lean white face appeared over the edge of the wag. Jak saw the 9 mm and grinned.
“No blast,” he said.
Moving his right hand to stop pointing the blaster at his friend’s skinny nose, Ryan reached his left hand. Jak caught his wrist and with his surprising wiry strength helped Ryan get up enough to get a boot beneath him.
“Break bones?” Jak asked. Ryan as much as read his lips as heard him over the racket.
Ryan blew out a breath. “Think not,” he said. “But my bruises got bruises.”
With more effort than he was pleased to have to expend, he clambered out of the wag and dropped to the hard-dirt yard beside Jak. His first move was to tuck the SIG back in its holster. The second was to pull the Scout around by its sling and check it quickly.
“Ace,” he muttered. The quality of noise produced by the Komatsu changed. Jak grabbed Ryan’s arm.
“Going other way,” he shouted.
Over the top of a mound of kindling that had been a reasonably well-made three-story structure about two minutes ago, Ryan saw the yellow back of the cab. The beast was crossing the main street. As he watched, it rolled free of the rubble of its latest victim and ground onto the street at an angle. Dust obscured it. A moment later the sound of window glass exploding announced its arrival at the false front of a building across the dirt street.
“Having fun,” Jak said.
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “Looks like he aims to maximize damage before taking down Dark Lady’s precious gaudy. Amping up the pressure, I guess. Plus pure meanness.”
He cracked the bolt on his Steyr. He saw what he knew he would, the yellow gleam of a chambered cartridge. But a wise blaster always made sure.
“Hope Dark Lady was right about being able to help J.B. and Ricky surprise the puke,” Ryan said.
He slammed the bolt closed.
“Let’s go spoil the fun for some of these other bastards.”
* * *
THE MAIN BARROOM of the Library Lounge was a hive of busy action around J.B. and his young apprentice as they stood in the gloom waiting for Dark Lady. Some of the employees were busy loading blasters. Others were shoveling books into crates and handing them off to others who carried them downstairs to the relative safety of the basement. Dark Lady’s giant factotum, Mikey-Bob, went by holding a double-size crate that had to have been loaded with a hundred pounds of cracked and ancient hardbacks in his arms. Both his heads looked as grim as death.
The sounds from outside were distant and muted by the walls. But it was clear that Hell was coming to Amity Springs with a bloody vengeance, and it was getting closer.
Down the stairs came Dark Lady. She seemed oddly calm. She carried a metal briefcase.
She laid it on a table next to J. B. and Ricky.
“Gentlemen,” she said, snapping the latches with crisp metal sounds, “I promised you what I hope will prove the means of providing an unpleasant surprise for our visitors and their monstrous machine.”
She opened the lid.
“Will this serve, do you think?”
J.B. looked into the case. He felt his eyes go wide.
He looked at Ricky. The kid was staring, too. A look of sheer delight spread slowly across his face. Warms the cockles, it does, J.B. thought. He wasn’t an overly sensitive man. Or a regularly sensitive man, come to that. But for just a moment he allowed himself to savor a moment of pure pleasure shared with his pupil.
He looked at Dark Lady and smiled.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I do believe we can make some use of this.”
* * *
SIDE BY SIDE Mildred and Krysty fought their way back through the ville of Amity Springs.
They stopped when they could to snipe at the Crazy Dogs and their Joker Creek allies. The locals were fighting back, too.
And they were laying serious hurt on the invaders, though they were also taking hurt themselves. Mildred understood just why there had been no successful assault on the wealthy ville before. It seemed every adult had at least a longblaster, and a bunch of the kids had blasters, too. And more than a few of them were full autos, M-16s or their little brother M-4s.
But there were more attackers than Mildred had realized at first, and they kept coming despite their losses.
She guessed the fact that they had an ace in the hole in an invincible yellow metal monster tended to keep up morale.
The Amity Springs folk tried to fight it, too. She saw a pair of youths clamber onto the front of the dozer as it angled across the street, halfway along its crooked path of destruction toward Dark Lady’s HQ at the center of town. One actually ran up to grab the door handle outside the cab.
A storm of blasterfire from the sec men following on foot swept them off the dozer like rubbish, streaming blood as they fell back to the street. The bulldozer continued its grinding, crushing, all-destroying way.
A pair of sec men stalked past the alley where Mildred and Krysty sheltered. Seeming intent on targets already, they didn’t notice the two women crouching behind some piled refuse.
Not until Krysty stepped up, put her claimed M&P blaster almost to the side of the nearer one’s red-bandanna head, and fired. He jerked and went down.
His partner whirled, bringing up a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. Mildred double tapped him. As he went down, Krysty deftly twisted the scattergun from his hand.
After cutting back around behind the building, the dozer burst through a building to their left.
From across the street scuttled a short, stocky man with a bald head gleaming in the early morning light. Mildred recognized Wilson, the shopkeeper. He hurled something that trailed orange fire against the side of the bulldozer.
It was a Molotov cocktail. It burst, sending a reverse cascade of garish orange flame up the machine’s track and yellow flank. It didn’t take; it barely scorched the paint. But the driver shied the huge machine away. Instead of smashing Wilson’s general store it turned back to the north.
And a Crazy Dog rider put a boot down, turned his bike sideways and shouldered a Mini-14 longblaster. He fired three quick shots. The slugs cut down the shopkeeper before he could r
ace back to cover.
Muzzle-fire flashed from the doorway of his store. The Crazy Dog rider jerked and fired a shot into the street.
Another 3-round burst ripped out. The Dog started to slump. Wilson’s wife, Kris, walked from her shop firing an M-16 from one generous hip.
Another bike roared along the street toward her. Deftly she shouldered the weapon, turned and fired another burst. Mildred saw the rider’s head come apart and he went over the rear of his ride.
Continuing to fire short bursts west along the street one-handed, the red-haired woman grabbed her husband by the collar and started to drag him.
“You help,” Mildred said. “I’ll cover.”
Krysty darted out. Mildred came around the mouth of the alley and opened fire on a knot of sec men. Already cowering from Kris’s shots, they dived out of sight, through a broken window or between buildings.
Krysty helped Kris drag Wilson into the shop. Then she emerged, shooting the M&P as she crossed the street.
“Is he alive?” Mildred asked. Krysty shook her head.
They headed back to the other street.
“Ryan!” Krysty called.
In the far alley, half obscured by shadows, stood a familiar lean figure in a long coat. Mildred thought she saw teeth flash in a grin. Then he vanished.
The two women came to the corner and looked cautiously up and down the main street. The dozer smashed through yet another building and continued irresistibly at an angle across the street. It was almost to the center of the ville and the Library Lounge now.
Mildred looked left. Jak suddenly appeared on the boardwalk across the way. He shot a double bird at an approaching coldheart motorcyclist, then ducked down the alley in which the women had briefly glimpsed Ryan.
The burly bike roared in after, then it halted. Brandishing a big double-action revolver, the rider looked around in confusion. His quarry had simply vanished.
But Krysty and Mildred had watched Jak scale a rain gutter as agilely as a monkey. He was perched on a ground-floor roof. When the motorcyclist stopped, he leaped lithely onto the saddle behind the Crazy Dog.
The coldheart roared in surprise. Jak reached his hands around the man’s throat, then yanked them quickly back to the sides.
A fan of blood sprayed dark from the biker’s scissored-out throat. The small but lethal blades of the leaf-bladed knives in Jak’s hands glinted in the light that filtered off the street.
He leaped off the bike as it toppled and disappeared.
“Oh, no!” Krysty exclaimed.
She was looking right. Mildred leaned out to see past her in time to watch the bulldozer accelerate through a sleet of blasterfire to punch in the false front of the Library Lounge.
Chapter Thirty
There was an avalanche of rumbling and creaking. Blasterfire crescendoed, muffled from the upper floors and blasting Ricky’s eardrums in the barroom.
Through his ringing ears and the holocaust roar he heard Dark Lady shouting in a startling brassy voice from somewhere overhead, “Everybody out! Now!”
“Move!” Mikey-Bob added his two-throated bull bellow from the back by the exit. He tucked a box of books under his left arm and, snagging a young busboy by the collar, flung him bodily through the swing doors to the kitchen.
J.B.’s calm was unruffled, as always.
“You heard the man,” he said, slinging the backpack he’d just finished stuffing with the contents of the metal case. “Men. Time to go.”
Without seeming to hurry, but making good time just the same, he made for the back door. Ricky scuttled after him, wondering what the older man’s secrets were.
Other employees, including both male and female entertainers, ignored the commands of both their boss and her giant lieutenant to continue cranking rounds out the front windows. The noise from outside was so cataclysmic even blasters going off in the saloon’s echoing confines were getting overwhelmed.
“Dark Lady!” Ricky shouted as J.B. hit the doors.
“She’s got to fend for herself now.”
The front of the gaudy imploded.
Despite the fact that both reason and fear told Ricky to bolt through the kitchen and out the door and Devil take anyone and anything in his path, he stood in the open door rooted to the spot.
With fatal fascination he watched the defenders at the windows thrown down as a vast gray object like a metal wall pushed through the wood of the façade. It was the blade of a bulldozer, clearly. But before now he’d had no grasp of how freakishly huge this one was.
The monster’s progress stopped. The engine growl subsided. One end of the blade jutted at a slight angle into the barroom on Ricky’s right. The other was actually out of sight beyond the interior wall to his left. And the top of it was invisible above the ceiling, whose wood rafters sagged and whose planks rained dust and debris to join the chaos of smoke, dust and fragments that swirled in the room.
And screams.
“Come on,” J.B. said. He almost sounded urgent this time.
“People are hurt! We’ve got to—”
He felt his own collar grasped, then he was being towed inexorably back through the kitchen.
“We’ve got to do our jobs,” J.B. said, as if that explained everything and answered all objections.
Ricky Morales realized that, if he wanted to continue as the Armorer’s apprentice—it did. He turned and ran for the outdoors as the earthquake noise of the house-size diesel began to rise again.
* * *
THE FRONT OF the Library Lounge buckled to the Super Dozer’s impact. Krysty sucked in a sharp breath as she saw people fall from the upper floors to land in the street.
“I hope J.B. got clear,” Mildred said. “Ricky, too.”
“I’m sure they did,” Krysty replied. “You know how J.B. is.”
Both women ducked back as a shot cracked over their heads from up the street. They looked quickly west.
Emboldened, the invaders were pushing hard for the center of the ville. A knot of Crazy Dogs rode by, hooting triumphantly and waving their blasters. Joker Creek sec men jogged along both sides of the street. Or at least Krysty judged them to be sec men, by the fact they weren’t riding. It wasn’t as if they wore uniforms, or dressed any more sedately than the motorcycle-riding coldhearts.
Bent low, Ryan and Jak darted out of an alley and across the street toward where the women crouched. Ryan blasted two quick shots up the street. Though her heart jumped into her throat, Krysty saw no evidence of shots thrown at them.
“Power on out of here,” Ryan called as he approached. “Circle north, then east to where we can see the gaudy.”
The four did so. Krysty felt concerned they might run afoul of the invaders, but the coldhearts and sec men seemed focused entirely on whatever the massive Super Dozer was doing to the Library Lounge, which entailed a power of crunching and engine-roaring, though thankfully no screams.
That she could hear.
Ryan led them two blocks north, then turned west onto a street that showed no sign of intruders. They slowed to a walk as they approached the corner that should afford them a view of the Lounge.
“Bastards don’t seem really worried about leaving locals with guns in their rear,” Mildred said.
“They see no need, likely,” Ryan said. “They’ve got the giant wrecking machine. Looks like they hope the ville will just surrender if Dark Lady’s headquarters goes down. But if they got to, they can make good on Trumbo’s threat to scrape Amity Springs right off the face of the Earth.”
They reached the corner. Jak sprinted ahead the last few steps to peer around first. Krysty saw Ryan’s face tighten at the albino’s impetuousness, but he said nothing. This was no time to waste words.
Jak signed it was safe to approach.
; “Keep an eye out behind us, Jak,” Ryan said as he came up to look.
Krysty joined Ryan, hunkering down to look with her face beneath his.
The monstrous machine was using its treads to turn left and right, mostly in place. She frowned. She didn’t understand what the point was.
“Probably trying to take out structural support without going in too far,” Ryan said. “Or, just rubbing it in.”
“Why doesn’t that thing get stuck when it just drives right through buildings? I mean, I know it’s big. But come on.”
“A tank might,” Ryan said. “But this isn’t a tank. It doesn’t need armor—though it’s got some, especially that bastard blade—nor a big blaster. Anyway, this is what it does. But it still can get stuck, so the driver may not want to take unnecessary chances.”
Even as he said that the engine’s growl got louder. With one final side-to-side wag it straightened itself and backed out of the hole it had made in the front of the Library Lounge. It pulled back up the main street about twenty yards, so that its rear was invisible from where Krysty and her friends were. Then it stopped.
A man appeared in front of the engine, right behind the blade.
“Trumbo,” Ryan said. He pushed his left hand through the shooting loop of his sling and got ready to shoulder the Scout for a shot.
The burly treacherous sec boss held a fist to his face. “Had enough yet, Dark Lady?” His amplified voice boomed.
“Didn’t their sound wag make the trip?” Krysty asked.
“Putting on a show,” Ryan said.
“Or do you want us to knock the whole place down around your sweet little ass cheeks?” the sec boss asked, warming to his role.
Though the floors above the gaudy’s main barroom had begun to sag in the middle toward the hole the dozer had made, a spatter of blasterfire crackled from one or two of the upper-story windows. Trumbo promptly dived back off the dozer, out of sight down the far side, the way he had climbed up.
“I may not be sure of her judgment,” Mildred said, “but I have to say I do like Dark Lady’s style.”