Moonfeast

by James Axler

  “Any more bombs?” Jak asked, aiming the M-16 at the struggling creature. He put a burst into the face, taking out the other eye. The rhino grunted at the loss, but never stopped digging for freedom.

  “Just the implo,” J.B. replied, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. Just how tough was this thing?

  With a colossal grunt, the rhino flopped its head onto the street and lay there panting from the exertion. But even as they watched, the countless wounds were starting to heal, the blood ceased to squirt and new armored scales began to grow in place.

  “Enough of this crap! This time, we blow open the head and remove the fragging brain,” Ryan growled, working the arming bolt of the Steyr. “Let’s see if the fragging biowep can regen that!”

  “Hold, my dear Ryan. There is no need for us to partake of further action,” Doc said, lowering both of his handblasters. “Behold, the Army of the Potomac!”

  Charging out of every building in the city appeared hundreds, thousands, of the tiny monkeys, chattering in delight at the bounty of fresh meat lying helpless on the street.

  Like ants, they converged upon the beast, ripping it apart with their bare hands and stuffing the raw flesh into their mouths with horrible gobbling noises.

  “Bioweps edible?” Jak asked, lowering the rapidfire.

  “Damned if I know,” Mildred admitted honestly. “I can’t imagine that even the paranoids at the Pentagon ever imagined an enemy trying to eat one of the things.”

  Mournfully calling in pain and rage, the rhino snapped at the monkeys, catching several in its busted jaw and trying to swallow them whole. But the others yanked the corpses free and began plunging their hands deeper into the beast, yanking off the growing scales to rip away gobbets of yellow-tinged meat, causing new geysers of yellow fluids until the gibbering horde was soaked with the blood of the biological construct.

  As the rhino ceased to struggle, the monkeys began to burrow into the twitching body, throwing out pulsating organs to the others dancing around the dying beast. But instead of consuming the organs, the monkeys reverently set them aside and stepped back as the females arrived, most of them with newborn infants tucked tightly in the crooks of their fuzzy arms.

  “The enemy of my enemy,” Doc mumbled in gallows humor, holstering his weapons.

  “Is still my fragging enemy!” Ryan finished, kicking his heels into the rump of the mare to break into a full gallop. “Let’s ride, and don’t stop until we reach the river!” Dying didn’t mean aced in his mind, and the man had no plan to relax his guard until the companions were safely locked inside a redoubt again.

  As the companions raced away, the dying rhino plaintively bellowed a call for help, which unconsciously triggered a brief burst of radioactivity from a cybernetic trans ponder implanted inside the brain. Incredibly, as the biowep sagged into unconsciousness, it felt the tingle of a response.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Parking their motorcycles on the crest of a hill, Baron Jones and Lady Veronica looked down upon the smoking ruins of PacCom ville. The rest of the sec men parked their bikes in a protective circle around the baron and his lady, their hands already full of blasters. This was jumper territory, and the only thing the little monkeys feared was flying lead.

  Oddly, this part of Clemente had never been nuked, yet it seemed to have more muties than anywhere else. Nobody alive could explain the mystery, although there were a lot of theories, most of them involving Captain Carlton and his highly questionable sexual appetites.

  “What in the name of Atom happened here?” the baron muttered, turning off his engine and kicking down the stand.

  The predark city had always been in poor condition, mostly from the acid rain and those accursed jumpers. Only now an entire building was gone, crumbling into pieces in front of his very sight. There was a fire in an other, the sea breeze helping to spread the blaze as if the entire ville had been hit by lightning. Even more bizarre, there was a huge mound of jumpers feasting on the bloody yellow carcass of something that resembled an aced thunder king. Impossible!

  “It was the one-eyed man,” Lady Veronica whispered, reaching out a hesitant hand, her fingers caressing the air. “I can almost see him, and the witch with the strange red hair…”

  “That’s because they’re still here!” cried Zane Southerland, pointing with a BAR longblaster.

  The new sec chief was a grizzled old veteran whose first official act had been to declare the staggering bounty of a year of leisure to the person who aced the traitor, Digger. Needless to say, this put him in good stead with the crew, even the folks who had once been friends with the former sec chief. The ville first! That was the unbreakable creed of a sec man. Before blood kin, or bed partners, the ville was always more important. Digger’s act of betrayal offended the sec men deeply, and everybody knew if the bastard was ever captured alive, he would never reach the ville in the same condition.

  “Where? Where are they?” another sec man demanded, using a hand to shield his face from the orange light streaming down from the clouds overhead.

  Yanking out a pair of binocs, the baron quickly swept the smoky ruins, but couldn’t find any trace of the outlanders. Then he spotted movement near the iron bridge on the opposite side of the ville. Adjusting the focus, he growled at the sight of the one-eyed man and his crew riding fast horses across the bridge.

  “Get razor, boys, we’re going after them!” the baron declared, tucking away the binocs. “Our hogs can easily catch those old nags once they hit the swamps!”

  “No, it’s already too late,” Lady Veronica snarled, lowering her hand, her hair visibly flexing.

  Just as the outlanders galloped off the bridge, the middle span violently exploded, the struts bending and twisting from the force of the blast. In spite of the distance, they could actually hear the groan of the tortured metal as the bridge sagged, trembled, then broke apart, the sections plummeting into the Red Rock River.

  “Frag it, we can catch them by using the ocean road,” Southerland declared, ramming his longblaster back into the leather boot set alongside the engine.

  “Which would bring us into range of those crossbows of Carlton’s, if he just happens to be sailing by,” the baron replied curtly, thoughtfully massaging his jagged scar.

  A dutiful wife for many years, Lady Veronica knew what the unconscious gesture meant. “You suspect a trick of some kind, my love?” the woman asked, leaning on the protective cage of bars surrounding the bike.

  “Ever since these outlanders showed up at the sulfur mine, the war for this island has rapidly escalated,” the baron said slowly, testing each word. “First, they escape from Lava Falls, and now seemed to have aced a thunder king. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re the bait and there’s some sort of elaborate trap to capture us alive. Carlton wants me splayed under his knives, as much as he wants you tied to a bed to breed him an heir.”

  “Be assured, my love, that will never happen,” Veronica declared, her voice thick with hate. A hand went to the small leather bag hanging between her breasts, and something trapped stirred at the touch, hissing and rattling, demanding freedom.

  “Even if he mounts my corpse, my little friend here will make sure it is the last thing Carlton ever does, aside from beg to be chilled by his own sec men,” the woman stated, releasing the bag once more. Instantly the thing inside went still.

  “Ah, Chief?” a sec woman said. “Something is going on down there.”

  Lowering his canteen, Southerland looked down at the ruins and started to ask a question, then his blood went cold. What was in the world was that?

  Rising from the roof of a school was a mechanical figure, a domed machine in the shape of a large spider. Standing about fifteen feet high, it had large crystal eyes, a small rotating radar dish and a sleek weapon of some kind hanging from its belly.

  “Droid,” the baron whispered in disbelief, letting go of the gold ring and grabbing a blaster.

  Scampering along the edge of the roof
, a jumper paused to chatter at the machine. Instantly the weapon swiveled toward the monkey. There was a flash of light and the creature was gone, only a pair of tiny feet left behind to show where the mutie had just been standing.

  “Gaia protect us, that’s a laser gun!” Lady Veronica cried out in shock.

  “The rads have hit the Geiger now!” Southerland agreed.

  As if able to hear the distant words, the droid raised its head to look in his direction, then started forward. But at the first step, the entire machine began to oddly shake, loose pieces tumbling free, an eye cracked and bright sparks erupted from the laser. Then the entire machine shuddered and simply fell apart, the heavily corroded metal crumbling into loose pieces of parts and reddish dust. The laser fired once more, randomly into the sky, then burst into flames.

  Across the ville a weathered billboard swung aside as a supposedly solid concrete wall slid apart and out walked another spider droid. Swiftly, it strode across the roof and over the edge to plummet ten stories to the paved street. Because of the angle, the people on the hill couldn’t see the results, but they dimly heard an explosion and saw a rising puff of greasy smoke.

  Unexpectedly, there came the rattle of heavy-caliber blasterfire and a bank building exploded, thousands of dollar bills soaring skyward, along with the smoldering remains of a predark tank, the treads and cannon arching away in different directions.

  “The ville is trying to defend itself,” the baron said out loud, pleased at the concept. But he was even happier that the ancient military weapons were tearing themselves apart at the first rally.

  Far out to sea, a partially sunken battleship seemed to expand under the lolling waves, then violently detonated, chunks of the armored hull, machinery, cannons and hundreds of rag-covered skeletons spreading out in a hellish umbrella.

  “Mebbe the legends are correct,” Lady Veronica muttered, stroking a lock of her hair. “And this really was the home of the predark SEALs.”

  “Sec men made out of living iron?” The baron scoffed. “That’s a fragging droid, not a norm.”

  “Mebbe, mebbe not,” she replied softly.

  Down on the littered streets, a garage door swung open to reveal another spider droid. But it was already leaking smoke, and slowly it began to melt from an internal short circuit. Seconds later the garage was aflame, the blaze quickly spreading to the house and then the house next door.

  “Just a bunch of drek now,” Southerland stated, returning his longblaster to the boot. “No danger from these fragging things anymore.”

  In a parking lot, the rear doors of a truck lying on its side slammed open and out stepped a spider droid. The domed body and tubular legs were streaked with rust, but it walked along the pavement without a shinny, the belly-mounted weapon spitting tiny flashes of light. Dashing around in terror, the jumpers tried to escape, but kept exploding into puffs of crimson steam.

  Scowling at the sight, the baron studied the burning ville more closely and discovered several more fully operational droids stalking the ruins, moving in a deliberate hunting pattern.

  Converging at the corpse of the thunder king, the six droids ruthlessly annihilated every jumper in sight, then tracked along a side street to an intersection. Snaking probes moved across the cracked asphalt and lifted several tiny objects that glistened golden in the reflected light.

  “Spent brass?” a sec man asked in a whisper, his face deathly pale.

  “Gotta be,” another man answered, both hands clutching the iron bars of his cage, his knuckles white. Just how smart were these metal bastards?

  Moving to the head of the pack, one spider droid took the lead and began sweeping a bright light back and forth along the street. The baron felt his heartbeat quicken as the predark machines moved along the exact path of the outlanders to the destroyed bridge. Without hesitation, the spiders climbed over the side and out of sight.

  Only minutes later, five of the droids appeared on the other side and assumed a combat formation before scuttling across a grassy field. Almost immediately, one of the machines unexpectedly paused as smoke began pouring out the rear. Turning in a circle, it fell over sideways and exploded, the blast discernable even to the people on the distant hill. The other four droids paid no attention to their fallen comrade and kept going until disappearing into the forest.

  “Is there anything between PacCom and that destroyed ville?” Lady Veronica asked, stroking her temple.

  “Nothing but a lot of empty coastline,” the baron re plied, then added, “Although there are rumors of a cannie ville hidden in the forest, but it’s just a stretch to tell the littles.”

  “Or is that the location of Carlton’s fleet?” she re plied. “The best place to hide something is where nobody would dare go looking.”

  Jones scowled. That was an interesting possibility. “Think you could find the ville, the harbor, cave, whatever it is, my love?” he asked bluntly.

  “I can try,” Lady Veronica answered hesitantly, then grew more resolute. “Yes, I’m sure that I can.”

  “Then we ambush them just outside the place,” the baron declared, starting the bike. “Where they will least expect trouble.”

  “We better move triple fast,” Lady Veronica advised. “They have a witch, and she could easily detect us coming from miles away.”

  “Is she really that good, my lady?” a sec man asked, frowning.

  “Near enough,” Lady Veronica lied. In truth, she had seen the animated hair of the other woman move against the wind, exactly like the red curls of her own father, Kyrl. Veronica’s black hair stirred a little now and then, but never anything like his did, or the outlander’s. Clearly her norm mother had thinned the blood and robbed the lady of some special abilities. But not all. She still healed faster than a norm, could please her husband in ways no norm woman could, and was able to call upon the Earth Mother Gaia to give her fantastic strength in an emergency. Well, for a few minutes, anyway, she amended.

  “Shitfire, if the fragging witch is that good, then we play it safe, go back to the ville and drive the stickies ahead of us like cattle,” the baron declared, revving his engine. “That way, she’ll only sense the muties.”

  “But not us,” Southerland added, twisting the controls on the handlebars. “Then we’ll force the location of the fleet out of the outlanders, and send the fat little bastard Carlton straight to Davey!”

  “All right, move out!” Baron Jones commanded, lurching his two-wheeler off the crest in a spray of exhaust fumes and loose dirt.

  Following the baron, his wife and the troops shouted the name of Sealton ville as a battle cry as the bikes jounced along the uneven ground and disappeared over the horizon.

  Moments later something impossibly large moved through the sea, causing a ripple effect on the surface that overwhelmed the tide. Writhing tentacles extended from the water to move along the shore, probing the rocks and debris until finding the remains of the dockyard.

  Wrapping their length around some concrete pylons, the tentacles tightened and a kraken rose from the sea, its single great eye moving around for the source of the earlier cry for help. Hauling its colossal form from the water, the kraken moved along the smoky streets, crushing cars flat and knocking down several burning buildings until finding the corpse of the thunder king.

  Tenderly reaching out a tentacle, it stroked the partially consumed body to make sure there was no chance of a regeneration, then the kraken lifted its body to expose a parrot-like beak. Gulping in air, the sensitive tongue of the enormous beast easily detected traces of norms and horses, but also the smell of gasoline engines from the direction of a nearby hill. Faced with a choice, the mutie laboriously turned and started hauling itself over the dry land toward the hated machines.

  RETRACING THEIR ROUTE from the ruins, the companions rode the horses at a gallop for several miles before finally easing their tired mounts to a gentle canter. Slowly the miles passed and the landscape changed from sand barrens with only a few trees scatter
ed around, to a wooden glen with numerous waterfalls, creeks and countless small ponds. The terrain was almost that of a swamp, but not quite.

  “Stay sharp,” Jak warned. “Stickies like weeds almost as much as ruins.”

  “Diggers, too,” Mildred added grimly, glancing at the moist soil for any indication of the underground mutant.

  “Stickies, stingwings, rhinos, jumpers, clouds…in all of their bizarre experiments with biological weaponry,” Doc said, his hands folded over the pommel of his saddle, “I wonder if the whitecoats ever tried to actually make a supersoldier, a superior human, stronger, faster, smarter.”

  Glancing sideways at Krysty, Ryan said nothing, his thoughts deeply private. Then the man flinched as a searing wave of heat washed over his left side and the head of his horse fell off its body.

  Decapitated, the beast gushed a torrent of blood, and Ryan threw himself out of the saddle to prevent being trapped under the chilled animal. He hit the ground hard, just as the horse collapsed, its legs twitching as if it was still horribly alive.

  The rest of the companions cut loose with their weapons, and the laser cut a hole through the belly of Krysty’s horse. It reared with a scream, throwing the woman to the ground. There came the tense hum of a microwave beamer and Jak’s animal literally exploded, sending the youth flying backward to land with a splash in a shallow pond.

  As the Steyr was now pinned under the animal, Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer and looked around for the enemy. He found them in an instant. Three big spider droids were moving through the field of weeds, the tufted top of the waving plants just brushing the belly-mounted weapons of the machines.

  Firing a fast six times, Ryan hammered the weapon of the lead droid. He knew that it was a laser from bitter experience. He hit it every time, but the 9 mm rounds couldn’t penetrate the armored housing of the weapon. Locking onto him, the droid fired again, the energy beam slamming into the headless horse, setting its body on fire.