by James Axler
"The beast!" Amanda screamed, drawing her weapon.
"No!" Dean cried.
Diving for cover, Doc and Mildred went into the weeds as the MAC-b sprayed bullets across the hull. As the legs on the ground retracted fully under the vehicle, Ryan knocked the machine pistol out of the woman's grip with the stock of the Steyr. Her blaster fell with a clatter, and Dean put his foot on top.
"What are you doing?" she screamed. "That is the Beast! It has murdered hundreds of my people!"
"This is our tank."
"Yours?"
"Everybody okay?" Dean called out, picking up the MAC-b, never taking his sight off the so-called lady.
Mildred and Doc rose from the weeds, both of their weapons pointed straight toward the barefoot beauty.
Ryan opened and closed his hand twice in the all-clear signal. "And how is Charles?"
"Charles is fine," Mildred said, responding correctly. Neither of them relaxed, but their barrels were no longer pointed directly at the blonde on the bike.
Arm in a sling, Jak appeared in the doorway. "We fine, too."
"Good, and how are the-" Ryan started to say repairs, but looked at the furious woman. "How is the hunt going? Find those snake eggs yet?"
"Nearly," J.B. said from under the vehicle. "And I gather we have a guest?"
"Guest? Prisoner, you lying scum!" Amanda spit in unbridled fury. "So you are the masters of the Beast!"
Ryan shook his head. "This is another vehicle."
"You lie!"
"Why?" Dean asked.
"As a trick to get the ransom!" she stormed. "Or to get past the ville defenses and kill my people. But it won't work! You'll get nothing from me. I'll never talk!"
His patience clearly at an end, Ryan's face got hard, so Dean asked quickly, "What do you know of the Beast? Do we resemble the craft In any way?"
Confused, Amanda paused, conflicting emotions playing across her bruised face. "Well, no," she admitted hesitantly. "Not really. It is known to have metal treads and you have wheels."
"Anything else?"
She studied the vehicle closely. Its dull gray hull was battered and damaged, the radio antenna only a short nub, something metallic bad melted on the rooftop, rivulets of cooled steel dangling down like silvery icicles, and there were scorch marks where burning fluids had washed over the vehicle from stem to stern. The reports of her spies told how nothing seemed to mark the mirror black bull of the Beast.
"Your craft, although large, is much too small," Amanda said, moving toward the open door. It promptly closed. "And where is the blaster with the light that kills?"
"We don't have one," Ryan replied gruffly. "Be nice if we did."
The cicadas stooped singing.
"Infrared shows ten incoming," Krysty called over the PA system.
Everybody turned and lifted their blasters a split second before the roar of engines. Then the front line of trucks shook as a wave of motorcycles bounded over them in tight formation. The bikes hit the ground hard, but the leather clad riders stayed on, yelling a battle cry and revving the engines to full throttle.
"Yee-haw!" screamed a bearded man, a blaster in his free hand, long hair flying in the wind. "Found them!"
"Run them down!" cried a tall man with a gap-toothed smile.
"Don't kill the slut!" added another, wielding an
"Kill everybody!" a bald giant corrected.
Dean tossed the blonde her MAC-b, as he turned and fired twice with the Mossberg. He hit nothing, the reports only causing a flurry of return fire from the cavorting bikes.
Putting his back to Leviathan, J.B. cut loose with the Uzi, chasing the wild bikers. "Damn bikers are harder to hit than bees!"
"J.B.!" Ryan snapped, quickly exchanging the Steyr for the Armorer's M-4000 shotgun. "Fix the tranny!"
"In the middle of a fight?"
"We may have to evac!"
Accepting the logic, J.B. slung his machine gun and crawled under Leviathan, dragging the canteen of precious hydraulic fluid after him. A shot zinged off the concrete near his boots, nearly puncturing the canteen, and he was gone from sight.
"Look at that! They're running away!" a biker cried, swinging around for another pass. "Hiding like babies!"
"Let's make them dance!" yelled a snaggletoothed rider, shooting a sawed-off shotgun. The left barrel failed to discharge, but the right boomed, showering pellets into the ground near Ryan, who neither flinched nor paused as he loaded his own crowd sweeper. As the biker roared by, the one eyed man fired, blowing off the man's arm at the elbow. Howling in agony, the rider went down, blood gushing from the ragged stump.
Drawing his .357 Magnum Colt Python, Jak assumed a firing stance. Holding the big bore blaster steady with two hands, he tracked a target and fired once. A biker's helmet exploded off his head leaving the man stunned but undamaged.
"I got the mutie!" a fat redheaded man shouted, brandishing a Thompson submachine gun with a huge cheesewheel clip, and he hosed a stream of bullets at the pale teenager. Jak's pantleg fluttered as a slug came lethally close. The albino teen fired again, and the man's face was removed in chunks. The riderless bike raced off, hit the severed arm, bounced and flipped into the air to crash resoundingly on the dirty concrete.
Bypassing the white-haired killer, the rest of the bikers concentrated on the open hatchway of Leviathan. A round slammed into an ammo locker next to Krysty at the starboard Remington. Her hair flattening in response, the redhead spun and fanned her Ruger at the motorcycle riders rushing straight toward her.
"They're trying to get in!" Mildred yelled, her .38 banging away, the rounds hitting with surgical precision. The bikers recoiled from the impacts, but didn't fall. "Some of them have flak jackets!"
"Then consider me Baldar on the bridge!" Doc said. He shoved Mildred inside, slamming shut the door while firing his LeMat from the hip. "None shall pass!"
Splitting apart, the pack swerved away the closed hull, darting between the individual defenders. A biker made a pass at Doc with a length of chain that smashed onto the hull with sledgehammer force. The elderly man nimbly ducked and the LeMat boomed, the muzzle-flame almost reaching the laughing biker. The motorcycle kept going, but the rider flew off and crashed through the window of a rusty car.
Segmented into slices, Mildred's angry face appeared in the louvered slots of a blasterport. "Baldar, my ass! This isn't Asgard, you old coot! Get inside! I'll give cover with the Remington!"
"Can't risk them getting in," Krysty said as the military diesels started. "And if one gren bounces into the ammo bin, this tin can is history!" Then she killed the engine when a squawk of pain came from J.B. under the floor.
A scraggly woman in a sleeveless T-shirt expertly flipped her bike onto its rear wheel and charged for Ryan. With the engine giving her protective cover, he had no choice but to dive out of the way. The studded wheels spun past his head, missing by an inch. From the prone position, he triggered the SIG-Sauer upward and removed most of the biker's throat with a single well-placed shot. She tumbled sideways and got caught angled in the spinning spokes of her wheels. The results were colorful.
Through a blasterport, Mildred fired twice, making an obscenely fat biker stagger, but not fall off. Dean blew the tires off another two-wheeler and the machine crashed into the end of a truck, the bike going underneath, the rider hitting it dead on. Blood sprayed out from the impact, and the limp body slid down the metal wall, leaving a horrid trail of teeth and eyes.
Leathering his gun, Ryan unlimbered the Steyr and worked the bolt. Area effect wasn't doing the job. Time for big punch.
A sputtering chatter announced that Krysty was operating the Remington on full-auto, the .50-caliber rounds chewing the ground as she hosed men and machines with high-Caliber death. Two woofed into pyres. Mildred added the firepower of the port Remington. but the rest wheeled crazily about in a knot of confusion, making it impossible for them to get a clear shot.
Crouching behind her motorcycle, Amanda was hosin
g the lines of trucks and cars endlessly with her MAC-b as if bullets were free. When the machine pistol stopped, she dropped a clip and reloaded in a heartbeat. She didn't appear to be doing any damage to the bikers, but if there was anybody hiding in the ruins, they would have been insane to chance rising into view.
Slowing his chopper, a beefy biker with a crew cut pulled something from within his jacket and tossed it at them.
"Gren!" Jak shouted, fanning his Magnum.
As the ball arched into the sky, Dean tracked it with his Mossberg, patiently waiting. As the gren reached the apex of its arch and slowed, he fired. The charge detonated, slapping them with a powerful concussion.
"Hot pipe! If that had been AP," he cried, dropping the exhausted shotgun and drawing his Browning Hi-Power blaster, "the shrapnel would have aced the lot of us!"
Every blaster spit flame at the muscular biker, but he turned tail and took off into the distance.
"Excellent, one less to fight," Doc rumbled, his back to the tank for protection, the LeMat .44 booming at the attackers. Ricochets zinged off the composite armor hull and the man flinched as a line of blood appeared along his cheek.
"Unless he's going for more grens," Ryan grunted. "That's what I'd do." His Steyr SSG-70 blasted hot lead death at a giant biker who was mising a spiked baseball bat. The big steel-jacketed slug went clean through the man, wounding a bald rider behind him in the chest. Cawdor shot again, and missed. "There's too many, and they're too bastard fast! Let's finish this now!"
Struggling to regroup, the remaining bikers retaliated with their machine pistols, hosing the tank. Somebody inside the vehicle touched off the rear .40 mm cannon, adding their destructive bid to the battle zone. Blood pooled around burning wreckage. Jagged pieces of wrecked bikes covered the concrete and threatened to trip the friends at every step, and the bikers maintained a constant fusillade of incoming rounds.
Ryan shouldered his longblaster and drew the SIG-Sauer. The silenced 9 mm pistol coughed and a motorcycle fuel tank burst, covering a biker with gasoline that ignited as it dripped upon the hot engine. Running amok, the human torch screamed at the top of his lungs. His companions wheeled uncaring past the torch, and then mercifully his ammo cooked off and killed him.
Inside Leviathan, Krysty rammed AP shells into the front 75 mm recoilless rifles. "J.B., how you doing?" she yelled at the floor. The big blasters couldn't traverse or swivel, only elevate. But if the bikers got stupid and slowed in front of the tank, they would never know what hit them. "J.B.?" she repeated. "Hey, J.B.!"
There was no answer.
Leaving the Vulcan, Mildred moved to the closed hatch in the floor, not daring to open it for fear of who might be on the other side. "John, you okay?"
Silence. Outside, a black dart riding a column of flame streaked past Leviathan to violently impact on the distant highway, concrete and asphalt forming a geyser.
"They got a bazooka!" Dean shouted.
Backtracking the most likely trajectory, Ryan saw a distant figure crouching on top of a truck, a long tube in his or her hands. The one-eyed man forced the sounds of battle from his mind, concentrating on task at hand. Closing a hatch on the end of the long tube, the figure stood and raised it to his or her shoulder. Ryan instantly emptied the SIG-Sauer, riding the bucking 9 mm rounds into a tight cluster. For a moment, the figure seemed unaffected, then took a step backward, dropped the weapon and tumbled off the truck.
"Not anymore," he announced, ramming a fresh clip into the blaster. In that part of any warrior's mind that remained cool during any battle, Ryan noted it was his last loaded clip. Fifteen shots, and he'd have to grab something off the ground. There was a sawed-off nearby, but he didn't trust the ammo.
Suddenly, a riderless motorcycle soared over a pile of rubble, flying straight for the motionless Leviathan. A sputtering fuse dangled from its lumpy saddlebags.
"Kamikaze!" Amanda yelled, the recovered Thompson chattering nonstop in her grip.
Weapons tracked the airborne assailant and the booby-trapped bike detonated into a fireball, shrapnel raining on the prow of the tank. A handlebar and seat slammed off the iron bar grid, as a red-hot piston smacked into the hardened windshield, sending out cracks but not quite bursting through.
"Not want us whole anymore," Jak said, reloading his blaster without looking. Snapping the cylinder shut, he took off at a run. "Get bazooka. Cover!"
"Go!" Dean said, ramming in a fresh clip. Careening over the bodies of their fallen comrades, the bikers stubbornly maintained the attack on the tank. One of the tires went flat, then another.
Brutally, Leviathan was pounded under a hail of bullets and grens as the hull was ruthlessly probed for a weak spot.
Crouching behind the smoking ruin of a dead bike for cover, Ryan watched the motorcycles circle the tank like coyotes closing on a wounded animal. They were outgunned and outmanned at this point, but refused to leave. He could feel it in his bones. The Sons of the Knife had something more planned.
Safely masked by the clouds of smoke in front of Leviathan, the gang stopped for a second, a scruffy fellow passing out packs of grayish clay to the others-shaped charges of C-4.
A horn beeped and the bikers turned to see a beautiful redhead in the driver's seat behind the cracked windshield just as the twin 75 mm rifles spoke in unison. The volcanic hellstorm of AP shotgun rounds blew the attackers off their bikes. Reduced to mincemeat, unrecognizable chunks flew everywhere and the riddled two-wheelers spun away as engines burst into flames, and fuel tanks exploded.
Wary of shrapnel, the friends converged on the sight and did a clean sweep of the wounded survivors. In seconds it was done. The bikers lay sprawled on the pound, pumping out their lives into the weeds.
Holstering his 9 mm blaster, Ryan reviewed the battle zone as he reloaded the empty clip of his Steyr from the loose rounds in his pocket. Four tires on Leviathan were only rubbery tatters, and the tank was listing to starboard some, but nothing serious. Spent brass covered the ground, making walking treacherous. Acrid smoke from the burning bikes was probably the only thing keeping the stingwings away from the mangled bodies. He could see them circling overhead, waiting for the first opportunity to begin their feeding frenzy.
Retrieving the shotgun, Ryan knocked on the side of the hull with the stock. "Hey, J.B.! You alive?"
A greasy hand came into view, and the hatless Armorer crawled out. Struggling to his feet, J.B. dusted himself off with dirty hands. "Well, it's done. We have a working transmission again."
"What took so damn long?" Ryan asked in concern.
"Where the hell's my hat?" J.B. demanded.
It was found and returned, basically intact. The Armorer straightened the rumpled brim and pulled his fedora into its accustomed locale. "What took so long? You ever try a repair job in the dark, upside down, with bullets flying by?"
"Besides," he added, hitching his belt, "I had to take care of something in case we got captured by those rad-licking scums."
With a clank, the bolt on the side hatch was released and the hatch slid aside, revealing Mildred, med kit in hand. "Anybody hurt?" she asked, exiting carefully.
"Just them," Ryan said, ramming home the clip.
She surveyed the carnage. "Better them than us. But still a waste of life." Mildred hopped to the ground, then walked over and handed Doc a foil pack containing a moistened towelette from an MRE pack.
"Clean that cut," she ordered. "Don't want an infection, do you?"
Doc accepted the towelette with a grateful nod.
Busy working the bolt of her Thompson to clear a round jammed in the ejector, Amanda jerked up her head at those words and openly stared at the stocky black woman.
A sharp whistle came from the weeds. Ryan answered, and Jak returned with a stovepipe-style bazooka in his grip and a canvas sack of bulky rockets slung over a shoulder. He deposited the booty inside Leviathan.
"How did they find us?" Dean demanded, sitting on the step of the tank. Even though it was par
tially depleted, his ammo vest weighed a ton. He was bone tired, but had no intention of showing the fact. "Been following us, or what?"
Ryan rested the butt of the longblaster on his hip. "I think they live here," Ryan said, studying the bullet-riddled vehicles of the rest stop. The destruction was widespread.
"Lived," Doc corrected, tossing away the soiled towelette. He winced slightly as the air hit the alcobol in the scrape. "Past tense, my dear Ryan. Past tense."
"In ruins?" Jak asked.
"Sure. Fuel in the underground tanks, spare parts by the ton and plenty of space to hide lots of folks inside the bigger trucks."
Wheeling over her BMW, Amanda said, "That makes sense. That way, they could safely hide and decide who they'll hit and who can pass."
"Decide?" Dean repeated, reclaiming his Mossberg. A swipe of a cloth removed some human remains from the barrel. "Why wouldn't they hit everyone who stopped?"
"If they ambushed everybody, soon nobody would stop here, and what's the point?"
"Gotcha."
"Yes, very clever," Amanda stated, kicking down the stand.
"Hey, Ryan. What about those bikes?" Mildred asked, indicating several of the more intact motorcycles. "Couple of them seem in good shape."
"Might make fine scouting craft," Krysty added, stepping into view, "and good escape wags."
"We could strap them to the outside of Leviathan," Dean suggested, rising wearily, ready to do his share of the work, "We have the mounts."
"So we do," Ryan said, running a callused hand over the stands installed by the coldhearts from the redoubt. "Okay. We'll use the drive chains of the busted cycles to secure the serviceable bikes."
"Doc, Jak, guard duty," Krysty said. "I'll be on the infrared."
The decision made, two functioning motorcycles were firmly attached to the hull of the tank. Afterward, the friends rooted among the dead, salvaging weapons, ammo, an ax, a can opener, a precious set of binocs only slightly warped and a ring of brass keys.
"Could come in handy," J.B. said, pocketing the keys.
"What for?" Mildred asked. "We don't even know what they unlock."