Prodigal's Return

by James Axler

  “Was that a norm?” a child asked, struggling to cock back the hammer on a longblaster twice her size.

  “Just possum,” Jak said, relaxing his grip on the M-16 rapidfire. “Come help get saddle off horse. Be here while. You like horses?”

  “Sure!” She grinned, cradling the weapon. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Well, once knew trader named Fat Stephen…” Jak began, and chatting away, they walked over to start tethering the nervous animals.

  “Okay, listen up, people!” Ryan commanded, working the arming bolt on the Galil. “I want a perimeter sweep of these offices, storerooms and catwalks!

  “Two by two!” Alan continued, removing a small cork from the end of the barrel of his black powder longblaster. “Nobody goes anywhere alone, until we know for certain this place is clear! If you need the shitter, then find a friend, or tie it in a knot! No exceptions!”

  A ragged chuckle coursed through the group of travelers as they hauled out their newly acquired weaponry from the coldhearts. There were of lot of small caliber zip guns and homemade scatterguns, but also a fair number of handblasters, and a smattering of boltaction longblasters. It was evident that until their recent defeat in the hollows, the coldhearts had been extremely successful in their chosen field of work.

  “Know a good hunting poem, Lib’ary?” a man asked, hoisting a Browning .22 bolt-action longblaster.

  “Lie-brar-ee,” she replied, exasperated. “Why is that so hard for folks to say?”

  Dramatically clearing his throat, Doc started to respond, but then a low growl came from the flickering shadows deep within a maze of steam pipes, electrical conduits and pressure valves.

  Everybody turned fast just as a grizzly bear lumbered into view, twice the height of a human. The dark fur of the colossal beast was speckled with tiny white areas, patches of wrinkled gray skin showing where the acid rain had singed the animal.

  “Light it up!” Ryan ordered, cutting loose with the Galil rapidfire. The 5.56 mm rounds stitched the huge animal across the chest, but the bear only seemed enraged by the attack. It raised both clawed paws to start forward, roaring defiantly.

  Shooting from the hip, J.B. put a burst of 9 mm rounds into the bear, just as Alan pulled back the heavy hammer on his flintlock longblaster, aimed and fired. Smoke and flame vomited from the blaster’s muzzle, the booming discharge rattling the office doors.

  Screaming in rage, the bear was slammed backward by the trip-hammer arrival of the .78 miniball, crimson flowing freely from its wounds front and back.

  The travelers unleashed a flurry of arrows, the shafts feathering the bear’s chest. Sneezing blood, the animal turned to try to escape. A boomerang spun past it, only to return and slam into its head. With a grunt, the bear dropped.

  “Cordelia, slit its throat!” Alan bellowed, already busy tamping a fresh charge into his longblaster. “Davies, Jacamor, find out how that thing got inside!”

  Brandishing blasters and lanterns, a dozen travelers started to spread out from the wags, the nimbus of blue light diverging as they went to check the cinder-block walls for any cracks or missing doors. Then a woman screamed, and her lantern crashed to floor. As the glass reservoir shattered, the shine ignited and a pool of flames formed to rise high, exposing the back of a man holding the woman by the face.

  The stranger was wearing only tattered rags, and every inch of exposed skin was covered with tiny suckers that opened and closed with moist sucking sounds. Then he turned to hoot softly at the travelers, his inhuman face streaked with fresh blood.

  Everybody instantly cut loose with a wild barrage of blasterfire and arrows. Torn to pieces, the stickie tumbled away, releasing the woman’s twitching corpse, most of her face and throat gone.

  “Nuking hellfire, what is this place?” Alan demanded, dropping the longblaster to draw both his flintlock pistols.

  “A safe zone where everything in the area goes to hide when the rain comes!” Krysty snarled, her M-16 combo jerking about at every flickering shadow.

  “But the doors were locked…?.” a man began, then flew backward into the gloom. He shrieked briefly in pain, which was followed by ghastly tearing noises.

  Sending a chattering volley of 9 mm rounds into the darkness, J.B. cursed as the muzzle-flashes revealed several more stickies, their hands and faces shiny with fresh blood.

  Once more the two groups unleashed assorted weapons, and some of the stickies fell, but the rest stayed in the shadows. Igniting one of his remaining Molotovs, J.B. smashed the vinegar bottle on a maze of steel pipes and liquid fire rained down upon the creeping muties. Their anguished hoots were quickly terminated by a brief rattle of blasters. But then, on the other side of the power plant, a horse whinnied and rose defiantly as a second grizzly bear came forward to rake the animal with its sharp claws.

  Swinging up her longblaster, the little girl fired, the booming weapon sending a miniball humming past the bear to smack into the ceiling only inches away from the skylight.

  Snarling a curse, Jak fired a volley into the bear, the stream of 5.56 mm rounds doing scant damage. But the sheer volume of lead held the animal at bay until the child could race back to the safety of the wag.

  As the rapidfire emptied, Jak dived aside and Doc triggered the LeMat. The face of the bear exploded in a horrid spray at the arrival of the .44 Magnum bone shredder. But as the decapitated body collapsed, another bear was revealed, along with a snarling cougar, and then a shambling crowd of softly hooting stickies. A lot more of them.

  “Blessed Buddha save us!” a traveler whimpered, dropping his longblaster and backing away in terror.

  “Ace them all!” Ryan and Alan shouted in unison.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On the top of a rocky hill, a laurel bush quivered slightly, and a pair of blue eyes peered from within the branches. Soon it was joined by more eyes, brown, green and black. The faces of the Alton ville sec men were streaked with dry mud, their clothing covered with twigs and leaves. One of them even had an aced bird tied to a shoulder as additional camouflage. But more importantly, everybody was heavily armed, and not smiling.

  “Now, who are these assholes?” a sec men whispered, squinting at the norms below. “There’s no sign of Ryan and his gang.”

  “Trust me, they’re here somewhere,” Chief Ralhoun muttered, trying to extend her powers down into the valley, and failing completely.

  “Shah tracked these folks from that fight in the hollows,” she continued, “and he’s never wrong. Never!” She scratched the old pit bull behind the ears. Shah wagged his tail in pleasure but didn’t make a sound.

  A crude wall of railroad cars encircled a large campsite situated inside a box canyon. The predark containers were made of corrugated iron, and a small crack here and there showed that they were filled with dirt. Stacked two deep, and reinforced by hundreds of black iron rails, the cars made a formidable barrier, even without the thicket of punji sticks along the perimeter, or the coils of razor wire on top.

  The front gate was merely another railroad car, the wheels set sideways. It was braced from behind by a sheaf of railroad ties set deep in the ground, and four massive ties served as locking bars. There were no hinges; the gate had to be pushed open from the inside. Pulling it out would be damn near impossible.

  The fortified camp was very well defended with numerous guard towers, armed sentries walking along the top of the wall, and what looked like a pack of cougars running about inside an enclosure made of punji sticks. There was a second enclosure that was empty for some reason, another filled with horses, and a fourth filled with barefoot people dressed in rags, wearing collars and chains.

  “Nuke me, but that’s a slave pen,” a sec men said with a dark scowl. “Don’t like those much.”

  “Nobody does,” Chief Ralhoun answered gruffly, easing the safety off a Beretta.

  Most of the slaves were hard at work, drawing water from a well, mucking out the shitters or chopping wood.

  Surrounding the pe
n was a double row of low buildings made of wooden railroad ties notched together like the tree trunks in a log cabin. The slanted roofs were also made of railroad ties, and thickly coated with what looked like tar as protection from the acid rain. Each structure had its own private shitter with a half-moon on the door, and there were dozens of sandbag nests scattered about in strategic locations so that the coldhearts could use them as fallback positions in case the camp was invaded. Which, considering their wall, was highly unlikely, Ralhoun thought dourly. She was very proud of her home, but this military hard site made Alton look like the pitched tent of a Sippy barb.

  Off to the side of the camp were a couple empty gallows, and a lashing post with a rotting corpse nailed in place. And smack in the middle of the camp was a brick roundhouse with a domed roof made out of some green metal.

  “Is…is that copper?” Latimer whispered.

  “Gotta be,” Ralhoun answered, trying hard not to be impressed. A metal roof. She had never heard of such a thing before! There was enough copper showing to make a million rounds of brass, which meant that either the coldhearts didn’t know how to make brass, or they had a monumental supply of ammo.

  The banded doors of the roundhouse were large enough for a mil wag to roll through, and smoke rose from three separate stone chimneys. Another sandbag wall surrounded the roundhouse, with chained cougars and armed sec men stationed along the length. A smooth stretch of brick road extended from the front gate in the wall directly to the largest door in the roundhouse, which was garishly painted with a skull and crossbones.

  “That must be where their baron keeps his war wag,” a sec woman stated, hefting a heavy crossbow. “Holy shit! What a stronghold! I don’t think even ol’ Bessy here could breech that wall!” A half stick of dynamite was attached to the arrow in her crossbow, the outside of the cylinder covered with rusty nails held in place by a thick layer of candle wax.

  “I can take it out,” Latimer boasted, patting the pocket of his nylon windbreaker. It bulged ominously.

  “Only if ya don’t miss,” the sec woman said.

  “Have I ever?”

  “Not yet,” Ralhoun replied. “How many of those grens you got left?”

  “Just the one,” he replied grimly. “But it’ll do.”

  “Damn, there’s a lot of them,” a young sec woman muttered uneasily, twisting her hands on an Enfield longblaster. “Must be fifty coldhearts, mebbe more!”

  Deep in thought, Ralhoun merely grunted in reply.

  “That’s too many of them for us to risk a nightcreep, Chief,” a sec man stated, lowering a Thompson rapidfire. “I want them bad, the same as you, but trying to get inside that camp would be suicide.”

  In the distance, lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled softly.

  “Yeah, agreed,” Ralhoun growled, easing deeper into the bushes. “So we’ll hide in those caves we found in the foothills. Sooner or later, something will happen and we’ll get our chance for revenge. A rival gang of coldhearts will attack to get their hands on the big-ass wag, or some barbs will raid the place for the horses, or mebbe the slaves will revolt. That would be perfect.”

  “And if nothing happens?” Latimer asked, crawling through the morass of greenery.

  “Then we make it happen,” Ralhoun said softly, grinning without any trace of humor.

  As the sec men snaked through the thick foliage, lightning flashed again in the distant mountains, the storm heading swiftly in their direction.

  SHAMBLING OUT of the shadows inside the power plant, a stickie came forward, waving both sucker-covered hands in the air as if greeting an old friend. Shooting from the hip, Ryan put a single round into the mutie’s forehead, and the back of the misshapen head exploding in a pinkish geyser.

  “Get up the bastard stairs!” Ryan shouted, putting a long burst of the 5.56 mm rounds from the Galil into a cougar creeping through the maze of pipes and conduits. In these tight confines, that was the real danger.

  Cornered by some stickies, a terrified horse was torn apart, the still-beating organs stuffed into the inhuman mouths with happy gobbling sounds.

  “You heard the man, up those stairs!” Alan bellowed, shooting one blaster, then the other. “They can’t reach us on the catwalk!”

  However, a score of travelers scrambled into their wags and slammed the doors, locking them tight.

  “Stupes,” Cordelia growled, blowing the head off a stickie just as it reached for her face. “Never again, ya rad sucking feebs! Never again!”

  Waving his arms, a man ran out of the shadows, the upper half of his body covered with a gelatinous mass that pulsed red with every beat of his dying heart.

  “Flapjacks!” Mildred snarled, and swung up her rapidfire to put a mercy round through the head of the dying norm.

  Crawling along the ceiling were more of the translucent muties, and as she watched, one of them let go, to plummet straight down onto a horse. The animal reared, its hooves pawing the air, as the pulsating flapjack began to darken in color.

  Pausing for only a second, Mildred put a single round into the horse’s head, and as it dropped, the flapjack burst under the weight, sticky fluids spraying outward in every direction.

  “Stairs! Now!” Ryan commanded, slapping a fresh magazine into the Galil.

  Moving fast, the companions formed a tight cluster around the base of the nearest set of iron steps, and began to lay down suppressing fire, using only short bursts to keep the growing horde of animals and muties at bay.

  “Follow me!” Cordelia ordered, pounding up the stairs, her boots loudly clanging on every step. As she reached the landing, she cursed and fired at a movement in the darkness. Half masked by flickering shadows, the rabbit was torn in two by the impact of the .63 miniball.

  Clutching weapons, the travelers hastily charged onto the catwalk until the metal began to groan from their weight.

  “Disperse!” Mildred shouted over the blasting Winchester.

  Nobody moved, unsure what to do.

  “Scatter, ya stupes! Stop bunching up!” Library yelled, and her friends quickly spread out along the network of walkways, their boots scraping free decades of dust.

  The last one up the stairs, Ryan poured hot lead into the growing crowd of animals, waiting until the very last second in an effort to build a wall of fallen bodies. But there didn’t seem to be an end to the invasion. Squirrels, rats, opossums, and now even birds were streaming into the power plant. Most of the woodland creatures were harmless, but the sheer mass of them seriously hindered the efforts of the people to ace the more dangerous species.

  Then from out of the darkness four bears waddled closer, their fangs bared for battle.

  Shooting the first one in the throat, Ryan dropped the animal at the foot of the stairs. As the others started climbing over, he paused, then chilled them both. Snarling in rage, the last bear tried to reach Ryan from the side railing, the claws missing him by the thickness of a prayer.

  Spinning through the smoky air, a ’rang came from nowhere and slammed into the animal’s open mouth, shattering several teeth. Howling in pain, the bear quickly retreated, blood dribbling from its snout. But as it departed, several stickies converged upon the makeshift barrier of corpses, hooting wildly as they started to feast.

  Walking up the stairs backward, Ryan chilled the muties with carefully placed head shots as several more boomerangs flashed by, closely followed by some arrows and then a hatchet. As Ryan reached the catwalk, a tall mound of corpses blocked the staircase.

  “That’ll do!” he shouted, inserting a fresh magazine into the Galil rapidfire. “But everybody check the other stairs! Block them with whatever is available—bodies, barrels, boxes! Just keep them off the catwalks!”

  “Move with a purpose, people!” Alan shouted, running away into the shadows.

  “Dark night, how are they getting inside?” J.B. demanded, shoving a fresh shell into the hot scattergun and immediately firing. Then he did the same thing again, and again.


  “No bastard idea!” Ryan snarled, firing directly into the eye of a stickie. The inhuman head jerked back, and the body dropped, but the hand stayed anchored to the railing by the sucker-covered fingers.

  “No spoor litters the floor, so they have never been in here before!” Doc yelled, triggering the M-16 combo.

  Down on the ground level, a wounded bear stumbled backward to trip over a cougar. Instantly, the two animals began to roll about, snarling and biting, sharp claws ripping away great hunks of flesh and fur.

  “So why are they here now?” Krysty demanded, using both the M-16 and her hand blaster.

  “Survival instinct!” Mildred told her, hastily shoving fresh rounds into the side of the Winchester. “They followed the sound of our horses!” She had seen something like this on a nature program once, on cable TV. During a forest fire, the first animals to take flight suddenly became the leaders of everything else alive. Usually, they went in the correct direction, reaching a river, or lake, where all the animals could wait out the blaze, but sometimes they took a wrong turn, and everything ended up going off a cliff.

  “We lead in here?” Jak demanded, leaning over the railing to trigger single rounds from the M-16. The 5.56 mm rounds weren’t powerful enough to chill most of the creatures below, so he was concentrating on shooting out their eyes, and then letting blind rage do the rest as the frantic beasts attacked the first thing they encountered. The trick worked well on the bears and cougars, but there were no visible eyes on a flapjack, and with their misshapen faces, it was difficult to tell where the eyes were located on the stickies in the dim light.

  “Look out!” Library cried, pointing her crossbow directly at Doc.

  Dropping low, he saw the arrow flick by to slam into something furry with a lot of sharp, white teeth, which had been crawling along an overhead girder.

  “My thanks, dear lady!” Doc shouted, sending a burst of perfectly imbalanced tumblers into a bear pounding on the side of a wag on the floor below. The animal convulsed at the arrival of the 5.56 mm rounds, but otherwise seemed undamaged. Drawing his .44 handblaster, Doc fired a fast four times, and the bear eased to the floor with a low groan as if going to sleep.