Motherlode

by James Axler

  Ryan shrugged. “She knows how much mercy she can expect from Trumbo—or from Diego, who’s no doubt the one holding his chain. So she might as well hold out to the end.”

  He flashed a grin at the women. “But I like it, too.”

  Krysty saw something that made her heart jump.

  “Look,” she said, pointing into the gap between the dozer blade and the doomed gaudy house.

  “It’s J.B. and Ricky!”

  * * *

  “OKAY, KID,” J.B. said to his apprentice as they crouched behind the northwest corner of the Library Lounge. “Stick close to me, keep the coldhearts off my ass and try not to get squashed.”

  He thought that covered everything, so he ran out into the open intersection. Straight toward the idling 168-ton bulldozer.

  He ran bent over, but not because the backpack weighed anything to speak of, but to reduce his silhouette to the Crazy Dogs and turncoat sec men who were gathered behind and to the sides of the dozer.

  A couple shots flew his way from his right, where sec men had shifted north from the main street. He put on a little extra speed and hit the dozer’s blade sideways. The steel plate was warm from the sun and smelled of dust and, incongruously, perfume.

  Ricky thumped into the blade right behind him.

  Holding his Uzi in his right hand, J.B. leaned out around the blade. He saw several sec men on foot and Crazy Dogs on their bikes. He fired a short burst to make them flinch.

  Ducking back, he nodded to his apprentice.

  “Thin them out for me,” he said. He had to raise his voice to make it heard above the rumble of the giant engine just the other side of the massive blade. The monster dozer itself stayed put. For now. “Need some breathing room to do the job.”

  Ricky grinned and nodded. He tucked the Webley revolver he’d been holding in its holster and unslung his DeLisle longblaster.

  Holding the Uzi in both hands, J.B. swung around again and fired another burst.

  “I see five of them, right now,” he said, pulling back.

  “Got it.”

  Ricky knelt. He paused, took a deep breath and crossed himself. Then he leaned out from cover of the giant steel plate, shouldering his longblaster.

  It thumped. J.B. was impressed by just how much noise the carbine didn’t make, between the fat sound suppressor shrouding the barrel and the big subsonic .45 slugs it fired. Ricky and his uncle had done an ace job building it.

  J.B. was a man who just naturally admired craftsmanship in weaponry when he had a moment to himself to do so. As he did now.

  “Okay,” Ricky said, ducking back as bullets stormed past. “Four.”

  “Got it.”

  J.B. held up a finger for the kid to wait. The shooting subsided. The Armorer leaned out promptly to loose another brief spatter of 9 mm rounds.

  As he returned to cover, he signaled Ricky to take his turn. With laudably machine-like precision the youth did. His carbine spoke.

  “Three,” he said, putting his back to the dozer blade again.

  “Ace,” J.B. told him.

  Shots started to come from the east—down the block north of the gaudy and even from the half-gutted gaudy itself.

  J.B. pivoted. The two remaining sec men were high-tailing it to his left to put the mass of the dozer between them and the shooters. The Crazy Dog on his bike turned and accelerated down the street, only to jerk, throw up his hands and go down in a grinding crash with his machine.

  As he did, a loud report rolled in from the south. Ricky glanced that way.

  “It’s Ryan!” he said. “Sniped him from the street, just a block down. Now he’s running to join the others on this side of the street. They’re firing up the Dogs!”

  J.B. nodded as he heard more blasters crack.

  As if wakening to its danger belatedly, the engine’s subterranean grumble rose to an angry bellow.

  “Follow!” J.B. shouted, darting around the blade into the open as the bulldozer began to move forward.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Ricky!” Krysty cried in alarm.

  But the kid was right on J.B.’s heels.

  “He’s fine,” Ryan said. He raised his head from the Scout’s ghost-ring sights to look for other targets. “Blade missed him by at least a foot.”

  Krysty, Mildred and Jak had taken up position in doorways and an alley on the same side of the street as the Library Lounge, at the far end of the half-block to the south. Ryan had lingered a few feet out to blast the fleeing Dog. Now he moved to the cover of the alley, too.

  The Crazy Dogs and their sec men allies were mostly lined up behind the bulldozer, spilling back up the main street from the intersection. Most of them seemed content to watch the show from a point that made it hard for the gaudy’s die-hard defenders to get a bead on them.

  Until J.B. and Ricky made their move, that seemed to be the only fire directed at the invaders. For all their vaunted well-armed status, and the spirited way they’d wielded those arms in defense of themselves and their ville, the Super Dozer’s onslaught seemed to have shocked them to inaction. All their weapons were small arms, and visibly produced no more effect on the monster machine than spit.

  From a standing start J.B. and Ricky seemed to pose no more threat to the machine or its operator than a pair of early mosquitoes buzzing around outside the bulletproof cab. But the operator couldn’t see them. That clearly worried him.

  The dozer lurched ahead to try to crush them. To his relief Ryan saw J.B. and Ricky dart clear. Unfortunately that put them on the far side of the mobile yellow mountain that was the dozer.

  The dozer ground ten feet forward across the street, then bucked to a stop. Black smoke chugged from the stack of the dozer’s 12-cylinder diesel engine and its gigantic mass pivoted counterclockwise with startling speed. Realizing he had missed his quarry on his first try, the driver was trying to catch them and grind them beneath the broad treads.

  Gunshots had started to crack out again from the west side of the street where the Dogs and Joker Creek sec men were. Then J.B. and Ricky burst back around the blade, running clockwise.

  Somehow realizing that his prey had dodged, and which way, the dozer operator reversed the machine’s rotation, which was not an instantaneous process, given the thing’s tons of mass. That gave J.B. and Ricky a chance to circle again between blade and gaudy.

  Once more the dozer’s bulk sheltered them from shots from the on-looking invaders. Krysty popped a shot off at the Crazy Dogs from her 640, although at this range she’d be lucky to hit anything. That recalled Ryan to the notion of trying to lay down cover fire.

  He sighted on a Dog standing astride his bike cranking rounds out from a lever-action longblaster and dropped him with a shot that went through his chest armpit to armpit.

  What are they doing? Ryan wondered. How can I help them if I don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish?

  The pair ran around the far side of the Super Dozer again. This time the machine backed as it pivoted counterclockwise, ramming its yellow stern into the building on the southwest corner of the intersection.

  “Listen well, you blackguards!” a voice rang out. “Your time has come!”

  * * *

  HUDDLED WITH HIS back to the blade, Ricky looked at

  J.B.

  “‘Blackguards’?”

  The Armorer shrugged. He had his Uzi slung and the backpack off. He was rooting inside.

  Ricky looked back at the Library Lounge. The whole gaudy sagged noticeably toward the immense hole the dozer had punched in the front of it. The front of the second floor had actually split open; a wide crack showed in the floorboards. A figure all in black crouched in a window of the floor right above it, still a good fifteen or sixteen feet off the ground.

 
Her slim form encased in what looked like tight-fitting black leather, a black coat shrouding her shoulders, Dark Lady crouched like a panther in what had been a third story. She had a megaphone to her mouth and a furious look on what little Ricky could see of her pale face past the instrument.

  Even in that flash glance Ricky thought there was something very different about the gaudy owner now. Not just her garb.

  Nervously he looked to his left—northwest. The thick steel blade, twenty-four feet wide by eleven feet tall and bulletproof, protected them from invader bullets. Most of them.

  But with the mighty machine oriented diagonally to the intersection, there was functionally no place he and the Armorer could find cover from all of them.

  As best of a bad lot of alternatives, J.B. had picked the right front of the blade to hide behind when the dozer came to rest. That put them at the monster’s northeast corner, which meant that coldhearts to the northwest had a clear view of them. And “view,” of course, meant shot.

  Fortunately that was the side. He and J.B. had cleared most of the enemy from there earlier during the bulldozer’s gyrations. With a little help from Ryan and his Scout. Unfortunately several coldhearts had shifted that way hastily as the dozer slam-backed into the building across the intersection from the Library Lounge.

  That meant there was nothing between them and a clump of heavily armed, pissed-off-past-nuke-red invaders but a few yards of air.

  But the enemy wasn’t paying the pair any attention. The coldhearts were completely distracted by Dark Lady’s startling advent.

  Like a dozing dragon coming awake, the bulldozer’s tremendous diesel engine began to roar louder and louder. The whole fabric of the mighty machine vibrated against Ricky’s back.

  “What’s she doing?” he shouted. “She’ll get killed.”

  “Buying us what we need,” J.B. said. “Get ready to run alongside this bastard.”

  With a splintering screech, the dozer lurched forward out of the building it had back-rammed as the operator put it in gear. J.B. grabbed Ricky’s arm and towed him.

  “Follow me!”

  * * *

  CROUCHED BEHIND THE tailgate of a horse wag parked in front of the frame building that occupied the half-block south of the Library Lounge, Ryan stopped sniping at the foe to watch the scene unfold in front of him, whatever the nuke it was.

  With Ricky in tow J.B. darted up the street toward Ryan as the Super Dozer lurched forward. The big bastard engine gave it startling acceleration for its size, although nobody was going to confuse the yellow metal mountain with a jackrabbit anytime soon.

  Ryan glanced at the coldhearts strung out along the west side of the intersection, ready to blast any who showed the least sign of opening up on the now-exposed pair. But the invaders were all staring at the woman in the window of the stricken gaudy.

  The apparently doomed woman. The dozer diver clearly meant to ram the Lounge again, right under where Dark Lady was positioned.

  The dozer struck the building. This time was nowhere near as dramatic as the first—it hit mostly the hole its first attack had made.

  But Dark Lady did not passively wait for the charging behemoth to bring death to her.

  She attacked.

  As the machine plunged its blade into the heart of her home once more, she sprang. The dozer’s front deck, between the blade and the guardrail around the engine, was actually not more than a couple of feet beneath the window of the sagging third floor. She landed lightly on her feet, then crouched onto a pale hand to make clear she wasn’t scraped off by the second floor of her own headquarters.

  But the dozer stopped. The engine roar dwindled.

  Dark Lady straightened. She’d thrown away her loud-hailer. But she didn’t need it to make her ringing challenge heard.

  “Now you’ll find out,” she shouted, reaching both hands across her chest beneath her long coat, “what it means to trifle with a fully trained Combat Librarian!”

  “Are those really a thing?” Ryan heard Krysty call to Mildred.

  “I don’t know, Krysty,” the freezie replied. “I know a lot, but I don’t know everything!”

  Just as the coldhearts snapped out of their own temporary inaction and began raising their blasters, Dark Lady’s hands came out of her coat. Each one held what Ryan was flat astonished to recognize as a Micro-Uzi: a foot-long miniature cousin of the very machine pistol J.B. had strapped over his back. Each flashed fire as Dark Lady ripped off short bursts, alternating left and right, with a professional precision Ryan could only admire.

  Meanwhile J.B. had darted back to the side of the dozer. He heaved the backpack on top of the right-hand track. The return rollers held the giant loop of segmented metal plates well above the top of his fedora, which he used his recently freed hand to clamp to the top of his head as he raced balls-out for the street that ran down the gaudy’s south flank.

  After a quick, befuddled glance, Ricky followed.

  Ryan shouldered his Steyr. He fired as soon as his front sight lined up on a sec man aiming a shiny-chromed blaster at the fleeing pair. The man spun down to the street as Ryan’s 7.62 mm round ripped through him.

  Ryan wasn’t sure where he’d hit him. He also didn’t care. He jacked the action and looked for somebody else to shoot.

  The bulldozer’s engine roared again. The driver started to back up as if he could somehow get away from the slim and vengeful woman in black, spitting two-fisted fire on his very own front deck.

  From the corner of his eye he saw J.B. grab Ricky’s sleeve and drag the kid with him into a forward dive to the street. They hadn’t quite made the corner. Apparently J.B. had more pressing concerns.

  Those concerns became obvious when the contents of the backpack he had chucked onto the track detonated in an eye-searing white flash. A heartbeat later the savage crack of C-4 plas-ex going off hit Ryan hard in the ears. He actually felt the concussion wave on his face.

  Mostly backed from the ruined gaudy, the dozer suddenly began wheeling to its left. There wasn’t much else it could do. Ryan saw that the right-hand track was broken right above where the arm that moved the blade forked into upper and lower supports.

  Dark Lady had hunkered down, bracing herself against the engine railing with a right hand still filled by Micro-Uzi. The front of the dozer had protected her from the force of the blast.

  Now she leaned out to open fire on the coldhearts once more, as J.B. and Ricky scuttled on all fours the rest of the way around the side of her HQ.

  Frantically the dozer driver reversed direction. That only resulted in the huge machine pivoting back right into the front of the gaudy again. Ryan saw Dark Lady duck to avoid being decapitated.

  As she did, he saw her let the full-auto handblaster she held in her left hand fall to hang by a short lanyard from her slender wrist. Her right thumb hit the release and dropped the mag of her right-hand weapon. Her left hand plucked a fresh magazine from the harness she wore under her coat and slammed it home. Then she switched off and repeated the operation.

  Ryan grunted. Neat trick, he thought. He shot the crown of a tall Crazy Dogs’ woman aiming an SKS at the gaudy owner.

  And Combat Librarian, he amended, whatever that was. Apparently their training worked, though.

  It finally dawned on the dozer driver that his invincible machine was functionally now a gigantic yellow paperweight. Unlike a tank, it didn’t mount any blasters. Its only tool was its tremendous mass—and its ability to move it.

  Now it could only turn this way and that in place, which was the same as not being able to move at all.

  Even with their main cannon and auxiliary machine guns, Ryan knew the armor-wag crew would lose its grit when its mobile fortress turned out not to be so mobile anymore.

  The dozer operator freaked out. He yanked open the door o
f the sealed cab, which had undoubtedly been locked, and tried to dive out.

  Unfortunately he found himself looking up at a very vengeful Dark Lady, who now stood on the broad steel step beside the cab—and up the barrels of her full-auto handblasters.

  Which blasted a quick burst each. A spray of bright red liquid suddenly painted over the inside of the windshield on Ryan’s side.

  The Super Dozer’s engine died away to a subdued dragon purr.

  Dark Lady ducked back around the front of the cab as a fusillade broke out belatedly from the intruders. Most of them had gone to ground when J.B.’s track-cutting charges had cracked off—the woman Ryan had just chilled had been an exception.

  More blasterfire ripped J.B.’s and Ricky’s way. The two ducked farther back up the street to get out of the line of fire.

  Lining up another shot, Ryan frowned. Morale was a funny thing. At a time like this, it could go either way. Seeing their almighty weapon neatly trumped, they could either panic the way the operator did, or they could get double-pissed.

  Unfortunately, it looked like they had picked what Mildred would have called Door Number Two.

  And there were still dozens of the bastards. Ryan heard a familiar voice, now lacking its former electronic amplification but needing it even less than Dark Lady had, roar out, “Never mind the dozer! Boys and girls, we got the taints! Chill them all!”

  Ryan looked. But there was no sign of Trumbo. The traitor sec boss of Joker Creek was clearly canny enough to exhort his troops from behind the safety of the now-stationary bulldozer.

  Motorcycle engines rose to a triumphant and expectant howl. The Dogs and their allies prepared to attack.

  Ryan raised his piece and aimed. There was no running now. They would just die tired. The only course he saw was to chill as much as he could before he himself got chilled.

  From the west came a rip of full-auto fire.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The big Dog Ryan was drawing down on had just started his ride rolling forward. He slewed the bike to his left and stared back up the main street in what even through the iron ghost-ring sights Ryan thought to recognize as shocked surprise.