by James Axler
She didn’t have much experience swinging a pickax against a moving target. She wasn’t sure anybody did, even these days when murder was the number-one sport.
But with fiendish satisfaction she saw the heavy, downward-curved tine of the pick stab through the matted hair right above the charging cannie’s forehead. The creature’s hands, raised to grab and rend, flailed wildly as random electrochemical impulses blasted through its brain.
Momentum carried it forward. Its convulsing put it onto the ground right beside Mildred’s left boot. Unwilling to let go of the haft, Mildred found her arms cruelly wound around into an unnatural position.
As she tried frantically to turn the right way to untangle herself, she saw a pair of cannies closing in fast on Krysty, with a third behind. The redhead was still going for the reload. She wasn’t going to get it done in time to keep the horrors from closing in on her.
“Krysty, shovel!” Mildred cried.
Without hesitation, Krysty stuffed the magazine into the well, thumb-clicked to let the heavy steel slide drive home, jamming a fresh cartridge into the breech—and then stuck the blaster into her waistband and front-kicked the cannie that was almost on top of her.
The creature squawked and staggered back into the arms of the one behind it. The other cannie dodged around the pair. With balletic grace Krysty pivoted and picked up the shovel she had stuck in the dirt when the creatures attacked. She spun back the other way, swinging the implement two-handed at waist level.
The cannie that was almost on top of her somehow managed to dance back out of the way of the whistling stroke. Krysty stepped into it and pistoned the end of the shovel handle into its sternum. It uttered a croaking sound and fell onto the pair behind it even as they untangled themselves.
Meanwhile, with a heave of frantic effort, Mildred jerked the pick free of the cannie’s skull. It was still twitching unnervingly against her calf, but she reckoned she could count it out of the fight. Choking up on the ax handle with her right hand, she thrust its head into the wide-open, yellow-fawned mouth of a cannie.
Teeth splintered loudly. Too much blood erupted then for Mildred to make out any more details of the damage done, but since the thing went down holding its face and gurgling and choking on its own blood, she liked the result.
Her triumph was short-lived.
They were all around her.
* * *
SWUNG SIDEWAYS, HELD so that it presented a sort of wooden blade, the stock of Ricky’s DeLisle carbine made a most satisfactory sound as it crunched in the left side of a loping cannie’s skull. He felt blood droplets hot against his cheek, chin and lower lip.
It grossed him out less than the saliva that had been projected there moments before by the thing’s panting breath.
He barely remembered scrambling up here to the tricky, loose-earth slope above the hole to the buried office, or whatever it was they’d been excavating. That was the obvious weak point to their defenses, since they couldn’t guard it without breaking routine. But Ryan didn’t want himself nor any of his people to end up staring at the stars because they’d underestimated the strange albino creatures’ intelligence.
In his peripheral vision he caught another white blur rushing him from behind his left shoulder. Fortunately the cannies were slipping, sliding and getting bogged down in the loose dirt. Otherwise he’d have been chilled in a hurry.
As fast as he could, Ricky wheeled clockwise. By reflex he bent his elbows and tucked them in tight to his rib cage.
He felt the jar through the steel sleeve that shrouded his carbine’s pierced barrel. His buttstock had struck the right forearm the creature was extending to grab or rake him with long black nails. It lacked the force to break the bone, but deflected the attack. Ricky swatted the cannie in the face with the butt. It also wasn’t strong enough to do damage, but it either surprised or disoriented the cannie enough that it fell back with a croak of dismay, partially lost its balance in the treacherous, shifting soil and started to fall backward.
It got a hand down to prevent it from falling on its butt, though that opened it to an angry thrust with the steel buttstock right into its throat.
It fell back, clutching its neck, kicking and gagging. Or she did, Ricky thought. It’s a woman. Or a girl, or whatever. Even though the small bare breasts weren’t badly shaped, they didn’t attract him. She was trying to kill and eat him. Or maybe just skip straight to the eating part and let his dying take care of itself; he doubted the cannies were picky that way. So he reckoned the naked breasts didn’t count even before he punched in her windpipe.
An apt pupil of his río Benito, as well as of J. B. Dix, Ricky was not thrilled to use his finely tuned blaster as a bludgeon. But as he had helped his uncle build the weapon with his own hands, he knew that the Ishapore-built Enfield military longblaster they had made it from was justly renowned for the strength of its action. And, as a military long arm, it was designed to be used for hand-to-hand combat at need. The changes he and his uncle and mentor had made—rebarreling the piece, rechambering it for .45 caliber, modifying the magazine well to accept magazines made for the ubiquitous Model 1911 semiautomatic handblaster—hadn’t weakened it in the slightest. His uncle Benito believed in building to last, and had passed that belief on to Ricky.
But even the best-made weapon couldn’t give him eyes in the back of his head.
Arms enfolded Ricky from behind. He gagged on foul carrion breath that gusted over his left shoulder. Taloned hands clasped each other before his sternum.
He imagined doglike jaws opened wide to bite into the back of his skull. The frightful dished red void that had been young Blinda’s face when her grief-crazed sister deposited her on Mathus Conn’s gaudy-house floor filled his mind.
Before curving yellow fangs had a chance to do likewise, Ricky swung his head backward, hard. A tooth gashed the crown of his skull, then he actually felt the tooth snap, as his head continued back to smash into the cannie’s upper jaw.
I’m gonna get infected! The thought flashed through his mind. He understood that disease was far less rampant in the world he lived in than it had been before nuke day. Those who were susceptible to disease didn’t live to see the other side, along with hundreds of millions of others. But he also reckoned there couldn’t be a worse way to push your luck than getting bitten by a cannibal.
An unwashed cannibal. That was clear now, too. From getting up close to the white creatures, he wasn’t sure their breath smelled worse than the rest of them.
To get infected he’d have to live, a lot longer than he seemed likely to. Even as he threw himself forward, twisting his body to break the weakened grasp, more hands were seizing him, pinching him cruelly, raking him with their claws.
Screaming, he struck and kicked and struggled for all he was worth. But treacherous footing or not, there were too many of the reeking white bodies for him to fight off. Individually they didn’t seem strong—not even as strong as Ricky was. But in a mob they were formidable.
As he battled merely to keep hold of his blaster and delay the inevitable tearing of yellow fangs into his vulnerable flesh, Ricky saw that his friends were likewise all about to die.
* * *
Chapter Twelve
With all her strength, Krysty wielded her shovel with authority.
She was keeping the swarming white bodies back. For the moment.
But even as she watched, Doc, who had impaled a cannie on his rapier, vanished under a sudden onslaught of white bodies. The old man continued to flail at them valiantly with his emptied LeMat, but his efforts were clearly doomed.
She swung the shovel again, screaming, not with fear—or not primarily fear—but with falcon fury. But she was looking not at her own foes, but at Ryan’s.
She saw Ryan Cawdor, her life-mate and love, intercept a cannie leaping from upslope over his head by slamming a palm to his bare sternum midair, his panga cocked back to deliver the skull-splitting chill-stroke. He already stood on top of a bl
ood-slick, writhing mound of fallen foes. But still they came for him, shrieking and wailing, claws outstretched and toothy jaws wide.
As she swung the shovel in whistling arcs, holding the vile beasts at bay, she looked around, blinking sweat from her eyes. She saw J.B. ram the muzzle of his shotgun into the solar plexus of a cannie, then raise the blaster and bring it down with piston precision to snap its neck with the steel buttplate. Then another creature landed on the Armorer’s back, knocking his hat off, jaws straining to tear away the flesh of his face.
J.B. jabbed a stiffened thumb back for its eye. It turned its own weirdly protracted face aside to take the strike on a chalky cheek.
“No!” Mildred screamed. She slogged forward, boots sinking deep in the loose dirt, raising her pickax high over her head.
“Mildred, don’t!” Krysty yelled. Her friend was so freaked out by the threat to J.B. that she was about to risk driving the tine of the pick straight through both the cannie’s body and his.
The redhead was so distracted that she allowed another cannie to launch itself beneath the howling arc of her gore-spattering shovel and grab her by the legs. She yelped as sharp fangs sank into her calf.
Quickly she spun the shovel and stabbed the creature’s head down into the back of its neck. Blood sprayed as the broad blade glanced off the vertebrae and sliced through the right side of the neck, severing the carotid artery as well as the jugular vein on the side. The cannie slumped to the soil as its brain was abruptly short on blood-supplied oxygen. But a half dozen of the horrors converged on her, grabbing her arms and the shovel handle, snapping at her face as she kicked out powerfully.
Another cannie flew away, but there were too many. For her, for everybody.
About to call on Gaia to give her strength for what she knew would be the last time, she heard a scream.
Despite her own peril, Krysty looked toward the sound: up, over the heads of her short, scrawny, but wiry foes at the top of the slope. Another coamer had burst from the scrub, but this one had another white-faced, white-haired figure on its back.
It was Jak Lauren. He had his right elbow locked around the cannie’s neck and a trench knife gripped in the fist. His ruby eyes glowed with demon glee as he yanked one of his butterfly knives out of the creature’s back with his left, then immediately plunged it back into its kidneys.
Its shriek was that of a human in intolerable agony.
The attacks on Krysty had ceased. The cannies about to swarm her and bring her down were all staring at the same grisly spectacle she was.
The cannibal’s knees buckled. Jak let his black sneakers hit the loose-dirt slope, released his hold on its neck and allowed the creature to fall free. As it convulsed and screeched in agony on the ground, he stepped to one side.
As slick as a conjurer, he made the small blade in his left hand disappear. He drew his big Python and fired a blast into the small of the back of another cannie who was sliding down the slope a few feet ahead and to his left. Its own howl of pain could be heard even after the ear-shatteringly sharp report of the .357 Magnum handblaster.
Krysty realized her own attackers had lost all interest in her. They were too shocked by this sudden attack from behind—and the agonized cries of their comrades.
She smiled.
* * *
FOR A LONG moment Buffort Sumz and his family sat frozen in silent surprise, staring in shock at the bizarre and terrible creature crouched on top of their dining table and the ruins of their supper, with chunks of busted roofing lying around it.
It was like nothing Buffort had ever seen outside a nightmare. It looked like a person, if a triple-scrawny one. Mostly. But it had that awful dead-white skin and lanky white hair hanging to the sides of its face, and it was the face that had all the horror; it was mostly human, too, except for being all drawn out in the mouth so that it looked as if the creature was half wolf.
Buffort was not smart. He knew that, and was content to leave the figuring to Yoostas, who was clever enough for both of them and more. But the thing’s resemblance to the face Wymie Berdone had glimpsed out the window where her sister was chilled was unmistakable.
It was obvious even to him that he was staring into the wild, wide, bloodred eyes of the being that had bitten off a little girl’s face at a snap, or one of its kin.
The thing’s pale dick was swinging right through what had been a piled-up platter of mashed potatoes.
It launched itself straight at Betty Jo. Its impossibly long jaws snapped shut on the black-pigtailed girl’s plump face with a sound like Paw-Paw biting into a big slice of watermelon. Except instead of pink the juice that squirted out was deep, glistening red.
The monster that was clinging to the front of Betty Jo, who still sat upright at the big table, turned its head.
It was crunching face bones loudly in its jaws, a scrap of skin hanging out the side of its lower jaw. It tossed its head up and the flap disappeared as its gullet worked.
Betty Jo’s face was gone—the whole thing, just as if it had been scooped out by the monster’s inhuman jaws. Just like little Blinda’s.
That broke the spell that had been holding the Sumz clan motionless and silent. Women screamed; men screamed.
Suddenly the white things were falling from the caved-in ceiling like dislodged rats, snarling, leaping and snapping. Screaming, “Betty Jo!” in pain and horror, Sister-Maw made as if to move to her daughter’s aid. But another creature dropped between them, rearing up with black-nailed hands raised to rake at her big boobs.
She seized the searing-hot handles of a cast-iron kettle of stew simmering on the stove and hurled its contents right into the cannie’s face. It shrilled in agony and clapped already blistering hands to its steam-gushing face. As it fell writhing to the floorboards hidden under a thick, spongy layer of fallen food and other trash, a creature swung from the rafters briefly, then landed on Sister-Maw’s back and sank its fangs into her stout neck.
Buffort sat as if his rear end had grown roots to his chair. His mind could not absorb what his eyeballs tried to show it. Most of the other Sumz family members were bolting and fleeing from the table, screaming in panic. Buffort saw four cannies with Eddie, who was pretty much the runt of his litter, held by his arms and legs spread-out between them. As Buffort watched, still not really understanding, one of them wrenched the boy’s left arm clean out of the socket and commenced to gnaw on it like a roasted turkey leg.
But Yoostas knew what was happening. Little redheaded banty cock that he was, he didn’t run or scream. After only a heartbeat or two of frozen shock he jumped right up, picked up the three-legged stool he’d been sitting on and commenced to bash a cannie’s face with it.
Seeing his littler brother take the fight to the invading monsters moved Buffort to action. They kept dropping in, right onto the tabletop, scattering bowls and plates of perfectly good food, which they ignored, every last one of them, in favor of munching on live and howling Sumzes. With a roar, Buffort stood up, too. He put his slab hands on the underside of the table as he did so.
It was a great big table, about twenty feet long and a good four wide, braced by all kinds of slantwise struts from the legs beneath. It weighed hundreds of pounds, but no one ever accused Buffort Sumz of being weak in his body.
Up went the table, spilling squalling naked cannies. Shifting his grip to both sides of his end of the huge table, his natural strength driven by a sudden surge of fear and fury that made his face flush with heat like a triple-bad sunburn, he raised the entire table up by one end. Then he turned, just a bit, grunting like a boar sexing a sow, and smashed it right down again.
Four of the cannies got caught clean beneath it. They were squashed, with a satisfactory cracking of bones like a big old sap-rich bonfire, and big splashes of blood shooting out to either side. Another got its lower half pinned beneath. Its upper part lay facedown, snapping its jaws at the floor and clawing futilely with its hand.
Yoostas swung the stool with extra f
orce, right to left. It practically exploded against the side of a cannie’s face. So did the cannie’s head.
A half dozen cannies converged on Yoostas, one falling on him from the gaping hole in the ceiling. He jabbed one of the stool legs he was left holding in either hand over his shoulder into that one’s face. It fell off him, mewling and clutching an eye that streamed fluid.
The others grabbed Yoostas’s arms and held him. He kicked one away. Another grabbed him by the ankle and held that. As he screamed in sheer outrage and struggled furiously to break free, another jumped on his back. This one grabbed his face and twisted it viciously to one side.
Buffort heard his brother’s neck snap. The little man folded to the floor like an empty grain sack.
“Yoostas!” Buffort shouted. He had to drop the table, whose weight had overpowered even his rage-boosted strength. But he got his mountainous mass moving toward his fallen brother, who had disappeared under a seething mass of bare white buttocks and reddened muzzles, hoping against hope there’d still be something he could do for his brother. Already it seemed the rest of his family members were down. He slipped on a floor made slippery by inch-deep blood, torn-out organs and ripped-off limbs.
The creatures looked at him with their strange red eyes. Then they began to leap at him.
Bellowing, he batted at them. He felt bones break as he slammed a creature with one of his tree-trunk forearms, heard a monster squall most satisfactorily. Another, and another. He caught one’s head in a ham-like hand, lifted it off the floor, grabbed its skinny shoulders and unscrewed its head a full turn.
Suddenly a heavy weight descended on his head. He felt claw-like nails digging beneath his bone-shelf brows for his eyes. He cried out shrilly, slapping at the horror. It stank even in his nostrils. He felt its breath hot as an open oven on his cheek.