by James Axler
Sharp pain shot through his left eye socket. He squealed, frozen momentarily by intolerable agony.
His vision crazed. He seemed to be looking down at his own capacious belly, straining against the front of his homespun shirt, and gazing in horror across the room as two of the cannies played Keep Away with Bobby-Joan’s blond head. He always hated that game—he always lost…
His right palm connected with the creature on his back. He slapped it, hard. Then he smushed it against himself with that hand while his left grabbed hold of its greasy hair. Shifting his grip, he managed to catch its head in both hands and fling it across the room.
He plucked the others off himself and flung them away, hard, but they just kept coming, grabbing at him, biting him. He felt claws rake his arm and sharp fangs sink into the bulge of his belly.
He slammed a hammer fist down on the side of the face of the one who was biting his gut. It crunched and dropped away.
Buffort broke. He didn’t like to fight. Never had. He hated pain, and never had much interest in causing it to others. He just wanted to hang with his kin and laugh and fuck whatever woman or girl felt like having him, the way Sumzes had done since time in a memorial, as Paw-Paw said and Buffort never could understand. And he couldn’t see right.
He started crying and lumbered into a run. His boots slogged through deep, squishing gunk. He couldn’t see for shit, what with one eye looking ahead and the other showing the front of his overalls and beneath, the seething red mess of the floor like the world’s grossest stew.
He managed to bat away the things that jumped for him, chittering and snapping. Around him he heard the sounds of ripping and chewing, and the moans and screams of the sadly not-yet-dead. His family. His loved ones. Who just moments before had been enjoying a peaceful family supper, the way they had a thousand time before.
He got to the front door of the house and yanked it open. Outside was a hell-scape like the one inside, except more spread-out and lit by torches and the flames of a burning outhouse. There were white things everywhere, and the numerous members of his clan who hadn’t been at dinner were fighting a losing battle against the creatures.
Or were just being eaten.
He cast around with his one eye that pointed where he wanted for something to use as a weapon. Then suddenly there was another of the horrible things, clinging to his belly and grinning right up into his other eye.
He squalled and tried to swat it away, but others suddenly fell down from the roof, grabbing his arms and weighing them down.
The cannie that was clinging to his belly began to dig. Buffort struggled mightily, smashing the creature hanging on to his left arm against the cabin wall, but others came, landing on his head, grabbing on to his legs, his arms…
Others joined the one clinging to the front of his overalls. He watched in horror as they tore the tough fabric open—and then his belly. Hooting with what sounded like demon laughter, they began to yank out greasy wet coils of his own guts as unimaginable pain shocked through him.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
A coamer had wrapped its arms around Ryan’s chest, effectively pinning his left hand to his side. To get a hand-on wristlock behind Ryan’s powerful torso, the monster had to turn its muzzle aside and press its cheek against the man’s chest, unable to try to bite with its doglike jaws.
As favors went, it was a small one. At least two others had hold of Ryan’s right arm—the one he was using to swing his heavy panga to such deadly effect against them.
Feeling the grips on his arm slacken, Ryan wrenched it free with a grunt of effort. He brought the pommel of the panga’s hilt down hard, busting a skull.
Jak fired again. The bullet punched through the shoulder blade of another cannie racing to join the two dozen or so already in the deadly scrum by the entrance to the dig, erupting through the creature’s chest in a shower of gore.
Ryan sensed the intent of his own attackers waver. He could almost smell their fear, over the stink of their never-washed bodies and rotting-meat breaths, and the stringent smell of already burned blaster powder and lubricant.
To perceive was to act. He sheathed the panga to draw his SIG handblaster from the waistband of his jeans, where he’d thrust it after the slide locked back in battery position over an empty magazine. He clicked the release to drop the spent mag. His left hand deftly fished a full magazine from a pocket of his coat and slammed it home in the well. Then he pushed the slide release with his thumb. The heavy steel slide slammed home, stripping a shiny cartridge off and powering it into the breech of his handblaster.
Jak added his own chilling wolf howl to the screams of his wounded victims. Ryan felt the cannies shift away from him. The sudden onslaught and howling unnerved them.
He stuck his SIG’s muzzle almost into the reeking tangle of hair on the back of a cannie’s head. Perhaps sensing its imminent doom, the creature started to look around.
Instead of the back of the skull Ryan triggered the blaster a finger’s breadth from the horror’s left temple. He smelled burned human flesh as the white skin sizzled in the muzzle-flash. A fountain of brain chunks and blood, black in the lamplight, blew out the far side of the thing’s head.
“Rip into them with all you’ve got!” Ryan shouted, his voice hoarse. “Take it to the bastards hard!”
He swung his panga into the back of a cannie clambering up pyramid of its vile kin to get at Krysty, who was immobilized by a mob of the creatures but was still fending them away from her face and head and chest by jabbing with the handle of her shovel, which she now held with hands far apart for maximum leverage and control. The heavy blade bit deep with a wood-cutting sound. The coamer squealed in pain and bent backward with shocking flexibility, trying to claw the pain from its back with long-nailed hands. Ryan ripped the big knife free as Krysty stuck the monster in the throat. It fell off its fellows, choking to death on its own crushed larynx.
The others were already starting to lose interest in the statuesque and violent redhead. As Krysty kicked one off her, Ryan shifted his attention elsewhere. His lover could take care of herself from here on.
He saw a cannie fly up into the air propelled by a long, stork-like leg. A moment later Doc seemed to lever himself off the ground. He smashed the butt of his LeMat into the face of a nearby attacker and thrust another, who seemed unsure of himself, through the neck.
J.B. managed to crawl from beneath a seething pile of bodies. He had his Uzi slung over the back of his battered leather jacket, which now had a few more scuffs in it, his M-4000 shotgun in his right hand and his fedora on his left. Pausing to settle the hat firmly on his head again and straighten his wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, he stood, swapping blasters and replacing a spent mag in his Uzi with a fresh one.
The cannies noticed at once they were basically all wrestling with one another. The Armorer pivoted neatly and sprayed the pile with expert short bursts of 9 mm death. Blood and gobbets of flesh flew everywhere. Cannies screamed. Those that could, bolted.
The shattering blasterfire and the flight of their comrades unsettled another struggling mass of coamers. Two of their matted-hair heads suddenly slammed together. Mildred rose from among them like a goddess of wrath.
“You bastards have got to take a nuking bath once in a while,” she yelled, punching furiously in all directions.
The coamers routed. They steamed back up the sloping sides of the cave-in on all fours, like the baboons their muzzles made them resemble. Even Jak stopped shooting or even cutting them to spur them on their way with hearty boots to the backside.
“Well, that was nasty,” Mildred muttered. “Never smelled anything so bad since we had to crawl through thirty yards of fermented feral-dog shit.”
With no one left to fight, Jak joined the others. “What took you so long?” J.B. asked half-humorously. But only half.
Jak grinned his white-wolf grin. “Busy,” he said.
“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan asked. The
words rasped his throat. He put away his weapons, took out his canteen, unscrewed the top and took a sip of water to rinse out the dust and less mentionable substances that had gotten in there when he was fighting for his life. He spit it out and took a hefty swallow.
“If you want to call it that,” Mildred said.
The others concurred. Jak and J.B. actually sounded chipper. Adult though he was, Jak was still a bloodthirsty wild child at heart. And bone practical though he was, J.B. loved nothing better than a good scrap.
Especially when his side won.
“So why now?” Ricky asked, slogging down from his position above the entry to the sunken office complex.
Like all of them, the youth was covered head to boots in a mess of gore, caked dirt and ropy cannibal slobber. Ryan realized that included him, too. Nonsqueamish though he was, that didn’t make him happy.
“Was that not the point of the exercise, after all?” Doc asked. He dusted off his coat sleeves and shot his cuffs. It didn’t help his woeful appearance any, but Ryan understood the gesture.
“To get swarmed like that?’ he asked, coming down to join them. Clearly hoping his friends wouldn’t notice, he more collapsed against than leaned on the one makeshift table that hadn’t been knocked down, ignoring the naked, blood-twined pair of coamer chills lying on top of it.
“I thought they’d, like, throw stuff at us the way they have before, maybe give us a chance to pick one off in a position where we could get to the chill before his buddies did. Or her buddies, I guess,” Ricky said.
Most of the dead cannies were male, but a few were clearly female.
“It was a straight-up human-wave attack,” Mildred said, nodding around at the pale-skinned chills and the few moaning wounded, a good two dozen of them, strewed around the dig site. “If you can call them that.”
“What do you mean, Mildred?” Krysty asked. She propped her shapely butt against the table right next to Ricky.
“I mean, are these ugly bastards even human, with dog faces like that? Are they mutants? Animals? Or are they something else?”
“Animals,” Jak stated vehemently.
“I think he’s right,” Ricky said.
“I find myself unsure,” Doc added. “They clearly display—not what we would consider overabundant intelligence, perhaps, but a clear, and clearly nonbestial, sense of purpose.”
“He’s right,” J.B. said. “Take them one at a time, they don’t act that bright. But just like there’s some reason they haven’t hassled us much before, and mostly here, I reckon there was a reason they decided to swarm us tonight.”
And night it was. The sky overhead was clotted with ugly, bruised-looking clouds, mostly visible only because of the yellow lightning threading through the ones to the south.
“Hive mind?” Mildred asked.
Ryan shrugged. “Details don’t reload any blasters,” he said. “Human or mutie or animal, they attacked us now in a way they never did before. And yeah. I’m thinking there was a reason beyond instinct, or they just got all triple peckish at once and needed a good feed. That’s worth knowing.”
“‘It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles,’” J.B. said.
“Is that something else Trader said?” Mildred asked.
“Sun Tzu,” Doc said. “The Art of War.”
“But the Trader liked to quote it,” Ryan said, allowing himself a faint smile. “Don’t let J.B. snow you.”
“What now, lover?” Krysty asked.
“Get these fire-blasted chills cleared out of here before they start to stink, but pick out the best-looking one, so to speak, to take into Sinkhole as proof of who’s behind the attack on those people.”
“Shall we carry it to Mr. Conn’s gaudy tonight?” Doc asked. He was already sounding vague. Like all of them, he felt a deep letdown in the aftermath of a hard fight. It made him more likely than usual to lose focus and wander off among his memories.
Ryan looked up at the sky again. As if on cue, a single raindrop hit him in the patch that covered the emptiness where his left eye had been and exploded.
“Storm’s coming,” he said. “Sooner rather than later. We’d best fort ourselves up here, underground, and wait for morning. We don’t want to risk hitting the trail in the dark, anyway, in case the coamers decide to come back for a rematch.”
“It’s not going to matter anyway,” Ricky said cheerfully. “Even that crazy chica will have to admit we’re innocent of killing her sister now!”
* * *
“THIS IS BAD, WYMIE,” Mance said. “Triple bad.”
The black-haired young woman could only nod. Nausea and rage warred in her belly.
Triple bad didn’t begin to do it justice. Not all the lives in the world could ever mean as much to her as her murdered baby sister, and she had never had much use for the Sumz family and their frankly degenerate ways.
But if the slaughter of the unknown couple back at their camp had been an outrage, this was beyond a nightmare.
She was grateful that the curdled-milk dawn light seeping through and spilling over the pines to the east turned all the blood and gore and ripped-out organs to shades of gray. Even by lamplight, the blood of her mother and stepdad splashed all around the inside of their well-built house of stone had been bright, so shockingly bright red…
Morse Hoskin was a neighbor of the Sumz clan, who’d made the trip to their homestead in the predawn hours. Just what errand took him there at such an hour he’d been remarkably evasive about. Wymie suspected it was to visit one of the notoriously loose Sumz womenfolk. For a passel of proud and deliberate inbreds, some of them sure liked to spread it around.
What he had seen there had sent him skittering for Wymie’s posse as fast as his spindly shanks could carry him. Mance had awakened her in her makeshift tent to bring her the dreadful news.
But nothing could have prepared her for the impact of the sight. Or the smells. It was like the aftermath of an explosion in a slaughterhouse. Or an outhouse. Not even the pervasive stink of the turpentine distillery could mask the reek of death.
Even the structures had suffered in the attack. The big house had its roof caved in, with busted beam-ends sticking out at crazy angles. A couple of their shanty-style outbuildings had been largely knocked in on themselves.
Wymie couldn’t tell if that was because of the battle, or the outlanders’ sheer joy in destruction for its own sake. She wouldn’t put anything past Blinda’s murderers.
Dorden approached, looking even graver than usual.
“A terrible thing,” he said. “So much devastation. The whole clan appears to have been wiped out—at least two dozen souls.”
He stopped and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. It was already a muggy day, and the air was still in the hollow were the Sumzes had built their home.
“Hard to believe the outlanders could have done all this,” he said.
“They must’ve had help,” Wymie said. Her anger was bubbling. “Some traitors from among us.”
“Like Conn?” Mance asked.
She shook her head in irritation. “He’s just a feeb,” she said. “I don’t see him as a traitor. We’ll find out who is, though, and root out that corruption.”
She frowned. “I wonder what happened to Lem and Gator and the help they were supposed to bring back. It’d come in handy right about now.”
Somebody made a crack about trying to recruit the gaudy sluts at Stenson’s Creek. Wymie glared at them.
Then someone called her name.
It was Angus Chen. “Come look at this,” he said. He looked as if he were about to puke.
Wymie followed the carpenter, picking her way over and around debris she didn’t want to look at too closely or think about at all. Up ahead, a couple of her followers were staring down at the ground.
At first she wondered why the cannie outlanders would leave a string of sausages lying out in the yard with just the end chewed o
ff. Mebbe they got full? They’d done a power of eating, from the evidence of gnawed-up limbs and chewed-off faces, which lent credence to her theory they now had helpers.
Then she realized she wasn’t looking at sausages. She was looking at guts. Human guts.
They had been pulled out like thread off a spool, and left to lie in their own blood splashes in the dirt. It made her own innards roil to think about what that had to have felt like.
The trail led into a wood shed that had half fallen in on itself. Moaning came from the darkness within.
“Somebody’s alive in there,” Edmun said. “Poor bastard.”
From inside the shed came the strained voice of ace tracker Lou Eddars. “It’s Buffort! He’s goin’ fast.”
Resolution didn’t settle her queasy stomach, but it kept it and the remnants of whatever congealed and half-heated leftovers she had gulped down for breakfast where they belonged. She scrambled bent over into the opening, and winced as she felt a link of intestine squelch beneath her boot.
She didn’t even know if a person’s guts could feel anything, once they got yanked out of the body. But the man they belonged to was clearly past caring. Even in the gray dawn light filtering in through the doorway, Buffort Sumz’s face was bloodless, and knotted with suffering she couldn’t begin to imagine.
His right eye dangled on its stem clear down his slab of a cheek. The skin was drenched in half-dried blood and fresh tears.
“What happened here, Buffort?” she asked. She realized what a triple-stupe question that was even as it was leaving her lips, so she hurried on. “Who did this to you?”
“They come—through the roof,” he groaned. “Tore poor little Eddie apart like an ol’ chicken.”
“Who did?”
“Yoostas fought ’em. Fought ’em hard. But they got him. I tried to fight, but they—hurt me.”
She knelt on top of the split hardwood chunks, barely noticing how they gouged her knees through her jeans. She cradled his huge blood- and tearstained face in her hands.