Moonfeast

by James Axler

  In the center of the room, several large wooden spools used to carry cable had been tipped over sideways to be used as makeshift tables. Old-fashioned glass lanterns stood on each of them, the alcohol flames turned up all the way to give the maximum amount of light. Surrounded by the tables was a sec man firmly strapped into a chair, and a black woman was standing nearby running the flame of a butane cigarette lighter over the end of a pair of ordinary pliers.

  Short and stocky, the woman’s beaded plaits hung to her shoulders and occasionally clattered when she moved. She was dressed in denim jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and a lumpy canvas satchel hung at her side, the worn fabric bearing the faded lettering M*A*S*H. A police-issue gunbelt circled her waist, the holster supporting a Czech-made .38 ZKR target pistol.

  Born in the twentieth century, Dr. Mildred Weyth had gone into the hospital for routine surgery, but something had gone terribly wrong and the attending doctors desperately attempted to save the life of their friend by putting her into an experimental cryogenic freezer unit. A hundred and some odd years later, Mildred awoke to find the nuclear war long over and herself trapped in a never-ending battle for survival in the nightmarish world of what had once been the United States of America.

  “Now this is going to hurt,” Mildred said, cutting off the lighter and waving the pliers to cool them down. “But there’s no other way if you ever want to eat meat again. Understand?”

  Dumbly, the man nodded, his muscles visibly tightening.

  “I don’t know about this,” said a stocky man wearing a bloodstained carpenter’s apron. The loops were filled with different types of knives, homemade probes and car mechanic tools. “I’ve never been able to transplant the teeth from a corpse into a living man before.”

  “That’s because you probably waited too long,” Mildred admonished. “Or washed the teeth first. Never do that. Teeth are alive, but if the roots are cleaned of blood they die in moments. You have to remove the bloody teeth from a warm corpse, and hammer them into the gums of the patient as fast as you can. Then lash his mouth shut to keep him from using the teeth for a week. After that, he should be okay.”

  “’ow eat wid no ’eeth?” the sec man mumbled.

  Mildred smiled tolerantly. “We’ll leave a gap in the front for you to drink soup and water.”

  “’hine?” he asked hopefully.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “All the damn shine you want.”

  “Sorry to interrupt, Millie, but we have to go,” J.B. said, resting a hand on her shoulder.

  She shook the man off, intent upon the forthcoming surgery. “In a minute, John,” she answered, examining the bowl of freshly extracted teeth.

  “Now, Mildred,” Ryan stated gruffly, stepping closer.

  Hearing that tone in his voice, the physician sighed and passed the sterilized pliers to the ville healer. “Wash them with shine afterward. Wash everything with shine, before, after and during.”

  “Understood,” he said, touching the pliers with a dirty finger to test their cleanliness.

  Sighing deeply, Mildred quickly stuffed the rest of her instruments haphazardly back into her med kit, wished the patient good luck and followed the other companions out of the building. Her instruments, such as they were, could be cleaned and organized later. But first and foremost, the physician had to stay alive. It was a sort of sidestep to the ancient Hippocratic medical code: first, do no harm.

  Reaching the bus, the companions checked for anybody loitering nearby, then Ryan rapped on the bumper with the barrel of the SIG-Sauer.

  “Hey, Albert,” Ryan said, using the code for all-clear.

  “The name’s Adam,” Jak replied, working the handle to open the folding door. As they entered, the teenager wrinkled his nose. “Who-wee! What all been doing? Skinning week-aced-old stickies?”

  “I would not at all be surprised if that exact scenario occurred here on a daily basis,” Doc rumbled, taking a seat. “Immediately followed by a dung-fire barbecue.” Rummaging though his backpack, he extracted an MRE food pack and found the tiny lemon-scented moist towelette that came with each U.S. Army meal-ready-to-eat. Removing his handkerchief, the man wiped his face and hands thoroughly, then did it again. Better.

  Since Jak was already behind the wheel, Ryan went to the seat directly behind the teenager and settled into place with both of his weapons at the ready. Everybody else took similar positions, and for a moment the wag was filled with the mechanical sounds of bolts being worked and safeties being disengaged.

  “Nice and slow,” Ryan advised, placing the Steyr out of sight and pulling out the pass. “Remember, we have the baron’s permission to leave.”

  “If only it true,” Jak said, shifting gears and easing in the clutch. The clouds were thick overhead, but they could still see that the masked sun was starting to dip behind the western mountains. One heartbeat after that, the pass would become only a piece of paper again, as useless as a eunuch in a gaudy house.

  Rolling along the paved streets, the teenager kept the pace of the wag steady, as if they had all the time in the world. A wrinklie with a crippled leg hobbled along the sidewalk, using his lantern to light the pitch torches set on the corners. The workday was nearly done, and the crowds of ville people were going into the ramshackle huts to start the evening meal.

  Passing a group of sec men standing on a corner, Doc tried to smile affably, but they scowled in return, one of the women going so far as to hawk and spit at the vehicle.

  “The age of courtesy is dead, and so shall we be, if our egress is long delayed,” Doc muttered, hefting the massive LeMat just below the louvered window. “Make haste with thy chariot, Hermes!”

  “For once, the old coot is right,” Mildred said unexpectedly. “Better move it, or lose it!”

  “Hear that,” Jak muttered in agreement, shifting into a faster gear.

  “J.B., do we have any explos?” Ryan asked, scanning the rooftops.

  “Some,” the man replied. “Want me to make some bombs?”

  “Just a big one,” Ryan countered grimly. “We’ll try blowing a hole in the wall before we go into the chains.”

  “We don’t have enough to breach the ville wall,” J.B. stated honestly.

  “Make it anyway,” Ryan ordered, pulling out a butane lighter and setting it on the seat.

  The rumbling storm clouds were turning lavender as the bus turned the corner at the barracks and headed for the main gate of Hobart. The wall was massive, as it needed to be this deep in the Deathlands, well over ten feet tall, and made of everything and anything the locals could get their hands on: bricks, pieces of smashed bridges, concrete slabs, wooden logs, cinder blocks, thousands of pieces of broken glass and endless coils of barbed wire. Armed sec men walked patrol along the wide top, and guard towers were situated every hundred feet, the wooden platforms equipped with machine guns. There was no way of knowing if the baron had any brass for the military rapidfires, but only a feeb would put them on the wall otherwise. The gate itself was a composed of railroad beams bolted and chained together into a formidable mass, the outside surface studded with thousands of sharp nails.

  Set directly in front of the gate was a sandbag nest blocking the path of any possible invaders. The nest contained armed sec men and two shiny brass Civil War cannons that Doc called Napoleons. Nearby were small wooden barrels of black powder and several low pyramids of dull gray cannon balls.

  “They set for war,” Jak said, going around the nest and braking to a halt directly in front of the deadly cannons. He hated to park there, but it was the only way to leave. The baron was a triple-cursed bastard, but not a fool.

  Impatiently the companions waited for a sec man wearing sergeant stripes to leave the others and saunter their way. The man was clearly in no hurry, and deliberately took his sweet time crossing the scant few yards.

  Somewhere in the ville, a bell began to toll.

  “Nobody can leave,” the bored sergeant said as a greeting.

  “We
got a pass,” Ryan countered, lifting the window to hold out the paper.

  Scowling in disbelief, the sergeant took the slip and unfolded the paper, reading it carefully. His cocky smile slowly vanished. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “It’s real!”

  “Mind getting a shake on there?” J.B. added, resting an elbow out the window. “We got some business to handle for the baron. And you know how he hates failure.”

  “Sure, sure, no prob,” the sergeant replied, then looked up and cupped his hands. “Ahoy, the wall! Open her up!”

  “Say what?” a guard yelled down. “Nobody ever leaves, Sarge. You know that!”

  “You been smoking wolfweed again, sir?” Another guard laughed.

  “I said, open the fragging gate!” the sergeant boomed, a hand going to his blaster. “They have a pass from the baron himself! So move your asses, or you’ll go to the mines!”

  That threat clearly startled the sec men, one of them dropping a smoking cig from his slack mouth.

  “Yes, sir!” the first guard replied loudly, snapping off a proper salute. The second guard merely dashed into the thickening shadows.

  A few moments later there came the sound of a gasoline engine sputtering into life, then rumbling gears, and the titanic gate slowly scraped aside, moving slower than winter ice.

  “Be back soon,” Jak cheerfully lied, and shifted gears to casually drive through the widening crack between the gate and the wall. They were less than halfway through when somebody unexpectedly shouted for them to stop.

  “Fake!” a sec woman shouted. “The pass is a fake!”

  “Chill them!” the sergeant shouted at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth.

  Instantly, Ryan triggered the Steyr, and the woman flipped over backward, her red life spraying into the air. As the rest of the companions opened fire at the sec men behind the sandbags, Jak stomped on the gas pedal and shifted into high gear. The engine paused as it revved to full power, then the armored bus shot forward with a roar, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipes.

  Releasing the handle on the gren, Krysty threw it backward over the bus and it hit the ground to roll a few feet then violently detonate. A score of screaming people clutched their faces, blood gushing from the hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds.

  Twisting the steering wheel hard, Jak guided the wag at an angle where the cannons couldn’t reach. One of the Napoleons thundered anyway, the cannonball humming past the rear of the vehicle and missing by the thickness of an atheist’s prayer.

  “Move this heap!” Doc bellowed, holding down the trigger of the single-action LeMat and fanning the hammer with the palm of his other hand. The big-bore blaster fired a fast three times, and two more sec men tumbled into eternity, one of them discharging his own handblaster impotently into the sky.

  “It’s a break!” somebody shouted on the wall, and a blaster boomed, sending out a thick cloud of dark smoke.

  Something zinged off the roof of the bus, and J.B. responded with a short burst from the Uzi. A man cried out in pain and fell back into the ville.

  “Hug the wall!” Mildred shouted, snapping off shots from the ZKR. “The machine guns in the towers can’t reach us there!”

  However, a flurry of arrows shot down from the sec men on the wall and something crashed to the ground just behind the bus and exploded into flames.

  “But their Molotovs can,” Krysty cursed, her hair flexing wildly. “We can’t risk going all the way around to the pass with those raining down.”

  “No choice then. Head for the trees!” Ryan growled, acing a dimly seen figure brandishing another Molotov. The man fell and the bottle shattered, whoofing into a fireball. Standing upright, the man shrieked insanely, his entire body covered with flames. Ryan tracked the man as he dashed around madly, but didn’t waste a brass on acing an enemy who was already on the last train west. Hopefully, the pitiful screams would discourage the other sec men from following his example.

  “That’ll put us into range of the machine guns,” Mildred reminded, hastily reloading.

  “Got better plan?” Jak asked over a shoulder.

  “No!”

  “Then hold on to ass!” the albino snarled, and banked away from the safety of the wall.

  As the wag streaked across the open grassland, everybody braced for the arrival of machine-gun fire. Nothing happened for almost a full minute, and the speeding bus was nearly at the trees when the ville gate began to lumber aside and out poured a dozen sec men on galloping horses, closely followed by a dozen more.

  Chapter Three

  Just then, the rapidfires in the guard towers cut loose with a rattling cacophony, the leaves in the trees over the bus exploding in an emerald blizzard.

  “Keep the riders between us and the machine guns!” Ryan shouted, firing his longblaster twice. “They’re not going to ace their own people!”

  With a cry, a sec man clutched his arm while the horse next to him buckled with a wounded knee. The riders were so tightly packed, the horses collided with one another, sending three more riders down in a tangle of limbs and cursing. However, the rest of the hunting party arched around their fallen brethren and kept coming, bent low over the necks of their horses, now even more grimly intent upon reaching the hated runaways.

  As the companions sent hot lead at the sec men, Jak steered the jouncing bus into a swatch of shadows thrown by the ville wall from the setting sun. Once inside the darkness, he hit the headlights to see, then cursed and aced the lights. Their glow would only silhouette the wag and make them a perfect target. The teenager would have to do this the hard way. Shaking his head, Jak sent the sunglasses flying away, then squinted hard into the darkness ahead, starting to zigzag around what seemed to be bushes and tree stumps. Most villes kept the area around their walls completely clear so that an enemy would have nothing to hide behind during an attack. However, one good-size rain gully, or a tree stump, and the bus would be smashed, leaving them stranded and helpless at the mercy of the brutal ville sec force.

  Reloading her blaster, Krysty started to aim at the riders once more, when she had the oddest sense of danger from ahead of the bus. Acting on impulse, she flipped on the headlights again, the beams showing a large griz bear sitting directly in the path of the racing vehicle eating a wiggling rabbit with too many legs. Triggering her S&W a fast five times, the woman wounded the giant beast, as Jak arched around it from the other side.

  “Why do?” the teenager demanded angrily. A seasoned hunter, the albino teen didn’t chill animals for fun, only for food.

  “Watch,” Krysty replied, reloading once more.

  Seconds later, the riders encountered the bear. Bellowing a strident roar, it reached out with both paws and slammed two of the sec men out of their saddles to start mauling them. The other riders slowed for only a moment, then resumed their pursuit of the outlanders in the bus. But the gap between the two was significantly wider now.

  The rapidfires in the towers spoke again, louder and longer this time, then stopped as the thick greenery of the forest closed over the companions, removing them from sight.

  “Okay, give some cover, Doc,” J.B. snarled, biting the fuse on a pipe bomb in two, then flicking alive a butane lighter.

  Surging to the rear of the vehicle, Doc yanked aside the locking bar and lifted the rear shutter, then fired the LeMat twice, the booming reports vomiting forth a dark cloud of gunsmoke. Safely out of sight of the riders for a single instant, J.B. quickly lit the fuse and simply dropped the bomb in their wake. Then both men ducked as a fusillade of blasterfire came from the riders, their assortment of handblasters, predark blasters, longblasters, scatterguns and zip guns making them sound like an army. The lead hit the louvered shutters like a hailstorm, rattling them hard and chewing the green wood into splintering ruination. More than one slat broke apart and simply fell away, leaving a wide gap in the protective shield.

  “Bah, wooden armor,” Jak snorted, swerving around a tree stump and crashing through a b
ush to just avoid slamming into an oak tree. There was no road, or even a path, in this direction through the forest, which was both good and bad. The companions would have thicker cover faster, but it also meant they would be traveling a lot slower. Jouncing over a hole, Jak heard a headlight shatter, but kept his boot pressed hard against the rubber floormat. Speed was their only hope now.

  “Herd them in!” Ryan yelled, and started shooting from the right side of the bus. Krysty was close behind him doing the same thing, and everybody else went to the left.

  Assailed from the sides, the sec men rode their horses a little closer together, then a sec man shouted a warning and they began separating once more. But it was already too late. In a thunderous blast, the pipe bomb violently detonated, throwing aside ragged pieces of men and horses in a boiling hellflower of fiery destruction. A dozen sec men were aced in the explosion and several more thrown from their mounts to slam into the nearby trees, their bones breaking.

  Whinnying in terror, the remaining horses reared high, throwing additional sec men to the ground before bolting away, leaving their former masters sprawled unconscious among the dead and the dying. Then the bushes parted as the griz bear arrived, its long teeth shining brightly in the dappled forest.

  As the bus rattled away into the greenery, the screaming began and didn’t stop.

  “Okay, that should do it,” Ryan stated, working the bolt on the Steyr to clear a spent brass from the breech. “But keep a watch for any stragglers. There were too many of the bastards to count. I have no idea if we got them all.”

  “Not catch,” Jak said confidently, turning on the remaining headlight. “They on horseback, we in wag!”

  The blue-white light of the halogen beam stabbed into the murky forest, brightly illuminating the trees and bushes. A score of inhuman eyes blinked in surprise at the intrusion, then quickly disappeared, leaving the wag to rattle through the wild greenery in relative peace.