by James Axler
“They’re not what I expected either,” Ryan said, grunting. He lay next to J.B. in the shade of a stand of smallish cottonwood trees, clearly planted as a windbreak a generation before along an irrigation ditch that ran along the west side of a broad-bean field. The ditch ran with water from a tributary of the Belle Fourche in the watershed northeast of the Black Hills, maybe thirty miles north of the old Ellsworth Air Force Base crater farm and hot spot. Ryan watched their targets through the Leupold scope of his Steyr Scout longblaster. “I was thinking more—I dunno. Prairie dogs? Mutie prairie dogs? That size anyway.”
“You think they’re worse than armored coyotes?” Ricky asked from directly behind them.
Their two wags were parked on the far side of the windbreak, just beyond the morning shadow they cast on an expanse of prairie. The rest of the group stood behind the two men prone in the grass that grew around the base of the trees. Except Jak, who perched on the hood of the wag with his Python in hand, pointedly scanning the rolling land and slowly rising hills to the southwest and generally every direction except due east.
“Definitely,” Ryan answered Ricky’s question. “Armored coyotes you can still discourage by giving them a swift kick. And if they do go for your throat, you can chill them the way you would a feral dog—grab the forelegs and spread ’em hard and fast. These things...”
He shook his head.
“I don’t have a clue what’ll even faze these monsters.”
J.B. had to admit his best friend’s characterization of the creatures was no overstatement. Instead of mutie varmints the size of prairie dogs, these things were the size of timber wolves, easy. And they even looked like some kind of canines if you squinted triple hard.
But the arrangement ran to little more than the fact they had snouts, heads, high-shouldered bodies, tails and four legs.
To start with, their backs were covered in thick spines. Not thin needle-y ones, like a porcupine, but thicker, backward curved and tapering, a bit like a hedgehog. And blue, or maybe blue green, which was not like any hedgehog of J.B.’s experience.
Although the feet looked doglike enough, with strong, hooked talons of black or dark blue, the head was like nothing J.B. could call to mind, not even from his nightmares. They started out wolflike at the back, with pointed and possibly armored ears that swiveled or pressed back against their skulls, and black eyes. But instead of fang-loaded jaws, the snouts were long tubes that tapered to what at this range looked like a sucker, not unlike the kind stickies carried at the ends of their fingers. Except as bad as stickie fingers were, those didn’t have holes in them for active sucking. These rad-blasted things had to have some kind of mouth, to judge by the way they ran around kind of hoovering in the flowering bean plants right off the stakes up those narrow funnel snouts.
“What I want to know,” Mildred said, “is what kind of animal those spiny blue horrors could conceivably have mutated from?”
“No clue,” Ryan said. He didn’t say anything about abstract knowledge not loading any blasters. Once again they were in a situation where what they didn’t know might just chill them.
“They do still bear, as Ryan has observed, at least a passing resemblance to the canids,” Doc said. He sounded more fascinated than horrified. “Although what genetic leaps and bounds could have brought any such into shapes like these lie beyond my ability to encompass.”
“Mebbe they’re not carnivorous,” Krysty suggested hopefully. She stood with Mariah at her side. The girl stuck as close as a second skin to the redhead, although the rest were gradually warming to her. Or thawing anyway—as J.B. himself was. “I mean, if all they eat are these bean plants—”
The blue horrors had apparently been settled in a spell. The sod-busters had allowed weeds to sprout around their precious crops, for reasons which J.B. now judged amply clear. A jackrabbit started from a clump of green grass growing at the base of a bean plant that one of the muties had just begun to nibble.
Instantly four of the spiny creatures pounced on it from all directions. They didn’t seem to move noticeably slower than the jackrabbit. One caught it from behind before it took three long, frantic bounds. The hare actually screamed as it was hoisted into the air by a back leg.
The other muties closed in with their weird sucker-tipped snouts. The jackrabbit simply came apart in a spray of bright red blood. The dismembered chunks vanished up the skinny funnel noses without any more signs of chewing or swallowing motions than there were of jaws.
“Or not,” Krysty said.
“Do they really just suck things apart?” Ricky asked. “Because it sure looks as if they just suck things apart.”
“It does,” Mildred said. She sounded sick.
“What was that predark saying?” Ryan asked. “‘The only easy day was yesterday.’ Right.”
He snugged the Scout’s butt plate against his shoulder and thumbed off the safety.
“Blasters up, everybody,” he said. “We still don’t get paid until we clear these ugly bastards out of the beans. So—”
The longblaster spit yellow flame, bucked and roared.
From long experience of working closely with his friend and following his lead, J.B. had managed to pick up on which blue horror Ryan had targeted. He had glass on it when the copper-jacketed 7.62 mm slug hit it broadside in the right front shoulder. It was a classic takedown shot for hunting big four-legged game, meant to shatter the shoulder joint and render the beast incapable of fleeing even if the damage done by the still fast-moving bullet—and the knocked-out bone fragments—to its lungs and heart failed to chill it instantly.
Whereas those wicked thick spikes might have enabled it to shrug off a handblaster bullet, at least from certain angles, it clearly didn’t shed Ryan’s 147-grain full-metal-jacket round. Venting a steam-whistle squeal of agony, the creature reared up in the air. Its head flew back, shooting a stream of black-looking blood from its sucker-tipped muzzle. Then it fell over on its side, kicking at the yellow dirt furrows with its hind feet.
“Ace on the line,” Ryan said grimly. “They’re triple ugly. But they die, just like everyth—”
The ground erupted two feet to his left, on the far side of him from J.B., as a big blue blur surged toward him.
* * *
DIRT FLYING UP out of the ground between the trees alerted Ryan to the fact he was about to die.
He barely had time to note it, much less react to it. The blue horror that had suddenly surfaced was already in midspring while he was still lying prone with the stock of his longblaster welded to his cheek. The creature was leaping from his blind side.
Something whipped right to left above his head. It caught the mutie midjump in what would have been its lower jaw if it had jaws. The head snapped back. The creature was knocked onto its spiked haunches, wailing in pain and surprise.
A burst of full-auto blasterfire ripped above Ryan’s head shatteringly loud. The wail turned into a glass-breaking shriek that knifed right through the sound of a second short burst roping the mutie. Black blood flew from multiple impacts.
As it flopped to the ground, Ryan reared up onto his knees. The mutie began to move with visible purpose despite its pain, rocking on its side and then starting to get its taloned feet under it. Ryan shouldered his longblaster, pointed and fired.
The creature’s head shattered as if it had been struck with an ax. It went limp.
“Nice roundhouse kick, Krysty,” Mildred said approvingly.
Ryan chambered another round from the 10-round box magazine and bounced onto his feet. His lover stood right behind him, loading a fresh magazine of her own—an extended one—into the well of her Glock handblaster.
“Thanks,” he told her.
And then a dozen of the horrors boiled out of the earth all around them.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “They
can’t possibly dig that fast.”
Fortunately these new monsters surfaced too far away to spring instantly on any of the group. Instead they seemed to have some inkling what had befallen their cooling-down comrade. They began to stalk around the embattled group, staring them down with eyes like bottomless black pits.
“I think they’re already under the ground,” Mildred said slowly. She had shouldered a looted M16 in preference to her ZKR 551, whose soft-lead .38-caliber slugs might not pierce the muties’ unnatural armor, and was warily tracking whichever mutie happened to be nearest with her blaster and her wide eyes. The entire party stood in a shoulder-to-shoulder circle, facing outward. Except Jak, who now crouched on the wag’s hood with his Python in one hand and his trench knife in the other. For the moment, the muties ignored him.
“Which would mean—” Doc had drawn both his slim sword and his absurdly outsized 9-shot .44 LeMat with the short-barrel shotgun beneath the longer main one.
“That they’re all over this whole area,” Krysty finished grimly.
“You’ve got that right,” Ryan said. He might also have opted for a blade-and-handblaster combo, but he still hung on to his Scout. He felt as if its power gave him a far better chance of stopping one of the muties than his 9 mm SIG, after the way the one that had tried to jump him absorbed nine rounds at powder-burn range and showed signs of still being fit to fight.
The muties continued to orbit them. Their numbers had at least doubled and continued to grow. Some marched in a counter direction to those closest to the embattled group. All gazing unblinkingly at them with their uncanny black eyes.
“It’s like they’re coordinating,” Mildred muttered from behind the sights of her weapon.
“Wolves and feral dogs hunt cooperatively,” Doc said.
“This is worse.”
For once, Ryan found himself agreeing with the stocky woman. The way these creatures acted seemed wrong in a way that wasn’t simply explained by their outlandish mutated appearance.
Jak caught Ryan’s eye above the hunched blue backs. Ryan gave his head a slight shake. He didn’t want the albino launching a one-man attack, from the rear or not.
“I don’t know if you’re keeping up with current events, there, Ryan,” Mildred said tautly, “but they’re starting to close in.”
“Yeah,” Ryan started. “On three. One, two—”
Six blasters began barking at once. They still had three selective-fire longblasters liberated from their erstwhile captors and still had ammo stores of 5.56 mm, because they seldom shot them full-auto. They did now, Doc with his M4 carbine and Krysty, like Mildred, with a full-size M16, ripping 3-round bursts into the muties. J.B. joined in with his Mini UZI.
Ryan’s Steyr Scout came equipped with ghost-ring iron combat sights as well as the Leupold scope. He used that to blast powerful shots into the nearest horrors. He wasn’t sure whether the full-auto longblasters could punch through those thick coats of spines, but he knew the Scout could.
Weird ululations filled the air in an unearthly harmony of pain. For a moment the circling monsters melted back. Ryan heard Jak’s handblaster crack out from behind. He hoped the albino remembered to shoot either low or wide of his friends. He wasn’t triple eager to stop a high-speed jacketed hollow-point round.
Or, more likely, just slow one down.
Then more muties boiled up through the small craters the first eruption had left.
“Not good!” Mildred said, during a momentary lull in the shooting. “We don’t have that much ammo!”
Ryan was already feeding a fresh magazine into the well of his Scout, which, unlike most bolt-actions, had been built specifically to fire from detachable box feed devices—like the M16s, but in a burlier caliber. He was in little danger of running dry, but he wasn’t shooting bursts.
And there seemed little danger of them running out of snouted blue spiny things either, even though at last ten were lying on the ground around them, keening in their weird fluting voices or lying still, bleeding inky black into the grass or over the tree roots. But the numbers of the horrible things were getting larger.
“Looks like they’re nerving themselves to come again,” J.B. said.
He was swapping his machine pistol for his slung M-4000. Ryan suspected the Armorer was less concerned about the relative stopping power of the different blasters on well-protected enemies and more about the fact that, unlike the Mini UZI, his Smith & Wesson scattergun was designed to be effective at whaling on many foes up close and personal. He intended to be prepared for when the muties got on top of them.
Ryan wasn’t waiting. He raised his carbine, took flash aim and put a slug through a black, soulless left eye. At twenty feet the full-jacketed bullet had scarcely slowed from the muzzle. It splashed black ichor, turned whatever the horror used for a brain into blood pudding and continued on the length of its horizontal body. Or a good proportion of it anyway.
The monster fell without so much as a twitch.
The others lunged forward as one.
“Get away from me!” Ryan heard Mariah scream.
Chapter Eighteen
The girl’s scream ripped at Krysty’s heart like the strong digging talons the muties carried on their forelegs.
Though she knew it wasn’t safe, she took her eyes away from the open sights of her blaster to flash a quick glance over her shoulder. She wished she could assure Mariah that she and her companions would keep the monsters and their horrible sucking snouts away from her, but their chances of keeping the muties away from any of them weren’t looking good.
Mariah’s face, though dead pale, didn’t show the wide eyes and strained mouth of terror. Her brows were rammed together hard in the middle, and sheer fury flashed in her dark eyes. Her fists were knotted at her sides.
And blackness began to spool outward from her very pores.
“Ryan!” Krysty shouted. “Get clear! Now!”
Even though breaking their defensive circle was about the last thing in all the Deathlands any of them wanted to do in the face of an all-directions rush from monsters, the tall man reacted without a flicker of hesitation. He tucked his blaster across his chest almost in port-arms position and threw himself into a roll, forward and right.
The other person standing more or less directly in line with Mariah’s raging gaze was Krysty herself. She did the same as her man had, except angling to her left. There was no point in evading the whirling black death that was gathering around the child to hurl herself into a point-blank blaster shot from one of her friends.
She came up on one knee, with her left hand to the ground to arrest her forward progress. Ryan had come out of his roll in a near-perfect kneeling aim, with his Scout longblaster shouldered and ready to roar. As of course he would.
She was triple-graceful. He was a killing machine.
But before she could raise her M16, Mariah stalked past her. Her furious face and rod-stiff figure were barely visible within the whirling darkness.
The onrushing horrors froze in place. It seemed to Krysty that their bottomless black eyes went wide as they saw the girl—or more accurately, a black whirlwind with black-and-white stockinged pipe-stem legs—marching toward them.
They set up a wailing chorus in a new banshee key. It was shriller than their pain-piping but eerie in a way that would have raised the hair on Krysty’s nape even if it hadn’t been alive and capable of moving on its own.
Then the muties charged again. At Mariah.
Even the monster that seemed to materialize right in front of Krysty’s muzzle brake turned its tubular face away from her to hone in on the girl.
Mariah stopped. The whirlwind expanded to cover her completely.
The muties began running right into it. Krysty’s heart jumped into her throat for fear they would prove magically immune to its m
ysterious power, that they would suck her charge to pieces before her horrified eyes, then turn their attention back to Krysty’s friends—and to her.
But when the first mutie in Krysty’s line of vision sprang toward the cloud, the devil’s vortex simply unspooled it into rags and tatters and threads of green and black.
A dozen vanished without a sound—and without turning away.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed.
Still the blue-green muties came on. “It’s like they’re attacking the cloud, not her,” Ricky said in wondering tones.
“Reload and stay frosty,” Ryan commanded. He didn’t call for a cease-fire, because nobody was still shooting.
Other muties came up from the ground through existing holes. Apparently the first wave to burst out had come from all the tunnels the creatures had dug for themselves. Eight or ten more appeared, one at a time. All hurled themselves to disintegration by the shortest possible path.
“What the nuke’s wrong with the things?” Ryan demanded in a hoarse voice.
“Perhaps they sense some kind of vibration from the...manifestation,” Doc said dubiously. “It seems to drive them into a frenzy.”
“Good an explanation as any,” Ryan said.
He signaled them to gather, then whistled for Jak. After the briefest hesitation, the albino hopped down. He wiped the big blade of his trench knife on a dead mutie lying by the wag, then trotted over to take his place with the rest. He looked matter-of-fact, but Krysty could tell by the lingering dilation of the pupils of his ruby eyes that he was more than a little freaked out by the attack.
The black wind continued to whirl on for half a minute after the last mutie appeared to dash itself to destruction in it. Then it collapsed into Mariah and was gone.
Krysty broke ranks to run to her and catch her in a hug. “Mariah! Thank you. Are you all right, honey?”
The girl’s slight figure trembled within her arms, but she nodded. And when she raised her face to look up at Krysty, her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed.