by Kris Holt
I thought of them, all of them, where they'd be, what they'd be doing. Gregor would be in his tent on the outskirts. At the first sign of danger, he'd pack away his tools and flee to high ground. Mar would be marshalling the troops, leading by example. Cassie would be tucked away beneath a ghillie-suit on some distant ridge, calling down death from afar. Rat had never arrived. She'd be out on patrol. I was hoping she was somewhere out on the far side of the camp, two miles or more away. If we were overrun, there was a still a chance she could flee to safety.
'You can say what you like,' I whispered to the empty space where Jayci had been, 'but there ain't no way I'm lying back and leaving everything up to others. I might be sick but they took me in, and I owe them.'
Fine words for sure, but I wouldn't be doing anything without a gun. No way would Jayci leave me unarmed, whatever the camp rules were. I checked the pack behind my head and allowed myself a grim smile when my fingers touched the sleek metal sides of my laser.
Yeah, you heard me right, my laser. Whether what I'd seen was all in my head or not, I still remembered what my mom had said. It was a gift, no longer my mom's weapon. Now, it was mine, and I'd be putting it to use to defend my family.
Beneath the gun, my clothes, some clean bandages and a small plastic bottle that rattled in the palm of my hand. I said a little prayer as I cracked it open and a couple of candy jacks popped into my hand. Somewhere inside me, a voice urged caution. You had a bullet in your gut, it said. Who knows if your system will still be able to cope with stimulants? This wasn't a time for questions, though. There was a couple of minutes at most to finish getting ready. I was going to have to find out the hard way. I pulled on my pants, pressed a candy jack onto my tongue and swallowed. Only then did I crawl to the entranceway, exposing my gun to the light and myself to fate.
Mama Smokes' gang were moving, preparing, talking on their radios, guiding one another to where they needed to be. I clicked mine on, the better to listen. The signal went in and out as people sprinted among dunes that reached fifty feet high or more. There wasn't much natural cover in a desert, so they'd stacked up sandbags to make makeshift defences. Down by the water at the rear of the camp, they'd built a wooden platform for the snipers. I could see Cassie and a couple of others lying on there now, sighting the enemy army as it came.
And come it did, and how.
What was immediately clear is that we were outnumbered at least two to one. Di Vio's force was mostly skirmishers, fifty or sixty trikes on the approach. Each had a driver and a weapons man stood behind. Beyond the first wave, I counted three heavy jeeptrikes, not cresting the dunes with hovertech but climbing them on snarling tracks. What they lacked in movement they made up for in armor. They could easily carry five men each inside their tough outer shell.
Behind the rest of his troops, dominating the horizon, Di Vio's own immense monster truck straddled the landscape like a wonder of the world. The massive vehicle sat low in the sand, wheels and engine guarded by welded plates that were probably inches thick.
Waves of troops disgorged from within as it rolled to a stop. The battle began as some took potshots from shielded firing positions behind the wheelarches. Atop the chassis, front and center, Di Vio sat upon his throne. The seat had been adapted into an armoured bunker with a long-barrelled cannon in the front. Nate Di Vio wasn't trusting this job to Jensen – he was taking charge directly.
The trikes peeled off and snaked towards the camp, opening fire as they came within range. One passenger was hit early on and cartwheeled away off the back of his vehicle, while one of the drivers slumped over his controls and veered into one of the camp's tents, taking it down with him.
As well as gunners, there were also trikemen armed with stun batons. One roared around a defensive position, striking down one of the girls as she tried to flee. As I watched, he stooped and dragged the unconscious woman onto the back of the trike before turning and roaring away.
'C'mon, damn you,' I hissed at the pistol. The green bar that denoted the charge was filling, but all too slowly.
The jeeptrikes kicked in next. Heavy cannons opened up and bullets raked a position marked with sandbags a short distance away, causing the women there to duck for another source of cover. Behind me and away to my right, Cass' rifle popped, taking down a runner that had leapt off his trike and was scavenging our supplies.
'Riders heading into camp,' the radio blared. 'Snipers, be aware.'
Some of the trikes had broken formation and had indeed headed into the camp itself, looking to steal supplies, lay boobytraps or capture any of the girls who were moving from one position to another. Whatever it took to flush us out, whittle us down, force our hand. One roared up across from me and began rifling through the tent opposite.
The scavenger was wearing a grey combat jacket with built-in armor plates that clinked together as he moved. The jacket looked custom-fitted, pulled over his head and up tight to his face. By rights he should have been cooking in something that heavy, but he didn't look to be suffering due to the heat at all – no doubt the jackets were another of Nate Di Vio's little innovations. The clothes, the modern guns, sheer weight of numbers. They had a dozen small edges that were making the difference.
I'd ducked back inside the tent and the scavenger made it right up to the entrance before he saw me. My new friend clearly hadn't been expecting resistance on his little side mission, much less resistance from a half-naked hillbilly with a two-week beard. He had one of the T-shaped automatics from earlier hanging from a sling around his neck but he didn't have his hands on it, and he was slow to bring it around. That is, just slow enough for the candy jack to fire in my brain. With my gun still not charged and no faith in the strength in my arms, I pushed the heavy tentpole down in his direction. It popped loose from the canvas, cracking him on the bridge of his nose, knocking him down onto his knees.
I was poised to finish the fight when an fierce streak of pain lanced up my insides, balling in the space around my wound. I doubled over as the tent collapsed behind me and Di Vio's henchman took this as an invite to rush me. It took everything I had to lift the tentpole again and heave it in his direction. He stopped, seeming surprised as the tapered end of the pole pierced his throat. I pulled back on it once more, and he choked and fell away.
Behind me, the battle wasn't going well. The camp's outer defences had fallen quickly, the women within either captured or dead. This was no time for finesse. I took the henchman's automatic pistol from around his neck and emptied the chamber into the trikes still pouring down the hill. When the chamber clicked to empty, I threw the gun after the bullets I'd fired. I could see it was all doomed effort. The jeeptrikes were coming and when they rolled into the heart of the camp, that would be that.
Or so I thought. The jeeptrike that was leading the way was suddenly engulfed in an explosion that tore away the track on the right hand side and sunk it into the hot sand. Two men stepped out of the smoking wreckage and were promptly picked off by Cass' sniper squad down by the water. The second trike veered to avoid the booby-trapped approach that had accounted for the first one and was pierced by a rocket from a dune-topping defensive position up above me. A second rocket quickly followed the first and I could hear cheers from the radio. Mama Smokes' charges might not have had many resources at their disposal, but they were using what they had to devastating effect.
The cheers cut off abruptly, replaced for a few seconds with white noise. Then Di Vio's voice invaded the airwaves and spread out through the defensive positions like scorpion venom..
'So you have a rocket launcher,' he said. 'How nice for you. But you should know that I'm not here to mess around. I have a town to run and an apocalypse to avoid. So in the interests of getting this battle over and done with, allow me to demonstrate my latest foray into military invention – the August Cannon.'
The air changed around me as he spoke, growing cool and hissing. I stared up at his truck-mounted cannon. The pitch of the sound grew and grew until the weapon was whistl
ing like an old-world kettle. The barrel began to glow with ruby-coloured light. Di Vio knelt in the space behind and turned the gun onto the defensive position that had destroyed his second jeeptrike.
I wasn't the only one paying attention. Cass saw the danger, but her rounds pinged off the armor-plating shielding the gunner. The whistle of the cannon became a scream as it fired, superheating the air, obliterating the defensive position in the blink of an eye and turning the sand around it into vast bubbles of glass. There was a lull in the aftermath, as if no-one could quite believe the power of the weapon we'd just seen.
Twice more Di Vio swung the cannon around, twice more the screech rang out. First, he destroyed the camp's fuel depot and after that, the sniper outpost at the rear. The snipers had already abandoned it after the first attack. The aftermath of the final blast boiled the water into steam at the edge of the oasis.
A beep from the ground between my feet told me that my laser was finally charged. I had just picked it up when the tell-tale whistle of the August Cannon started up again – and this time, it was pointed directly to where I was standing at the heart of the outlaw camp.
Chapter 30 – Biting Back
Think how I felt. Think how you'd feel. You just regained consciousness after a two-week coma. You had to die and play games and catch fire to come back. You had to defend yourself from an armed man with nothing but a tentpole and a killer sense of timing. And every bit of you, from your aching head to your twisted guts, hurts like it ain't never hurt before.
But you're still standing.
You're about to be vaporized, but you're still standing.
'Remember that you brought this on yourselves. You had a chance to surrender' – Di Vio again, over the radio, broadcasting to anyone and everyone – 'but you chose to die.'
'You ain't giving anyone no goddamn choice,' I growled back, even though I knew he couldn't hear me, and wouldn't listen if he could.
Running wasn't an option - my limbs weren't doing all the things I wanted them to. And yet, it felt pretty apt that I was watching the biggest bad in the Sands crouch down inside his bunker like the worst kind of coward. You learned a lot of things about a man when he pointed a gun at you - whether his eyes met yours, whether his hands were shaking. It's a darn sight harder to kill a man when you're looking him in the eye.
Everything pointed to a man with a complex. Nate Di Vio had the biggest army, the biggest vehicle, the biggest gun and every kind of technological advantage, yet he was still hiding. He was a desperate man, and I took down desperate men.
Calmly, like Di Vio's superweapon wasn't screaming in my ears and the ears of everyone for miles around, I bent down to where my pistol was lying at my feet, picked it up, focused the beam on Di Vio's bunker above me and moved it slowly across the metal fortress from left to right, about halfway up. Cassie might have been a deadshot, but I alone had a way to punch through his armor.
I finished my sweep to find the laser was out of charge again. It was designed for one-off shots, not sustained beams, but it had done a job today.
Everything went silent. Like dead, dead silent. The fighting had stopped. Mama Smokes' girls had nothing left in the tank, and Di Vio's troops already thought they'd won.
A hundred pairs of eyes turned to the sky as the sundered roof of the bunker tipped and fell away with a clang. I held Jayci's binoculars up to my eyes, looking to see if I'd literally cut the head off the beast.
For a second, nothing moved beyond the smoking, severed tip of the August Cannon. Then, a tight mass of smouldering copper curls emerged atop a futuristic-looking metal cloak. Nate Di Vio was singed, but he was very much alive. Through the binoculars, I saw his smug grin, like he knew I was watching him. As he stood up, his army began to cheer. My heart sank. A way away on the ridge, the weary remains of our own force must have been feeling that an unlikely victory had been ripped away from them.
That's when the August Cannon exploded.
The wave that the destroyed cannon threw out blew over the men standing beneath the truck a hundred feet below. Di Vio dropped out of the broken cabin like a rock off a bridge, plummeting down the side of the truck, crashing off the wheel arch and landing face down, motionless, in the sand. For a moment he lay prone beneath a blanket of dust and fused metal, and then his panicked charges dug him out, threw his ass on the back of a trike and sped away. Meanwhile, his crippled monster truck ground to a complete halt. There was ragged empty space where his bunker had been, and the truck looked for all the world like a hill after mining charges had torn out its heart. Of course, what was showering down on those below wasn't dirt but red hot metal shards. The radio cut to immensely loud static, deafening anyone left in the valley who still had their hearing.
The ground shook again beneath me with the force of trike engines, and I turned, thinking I was going to have to face down another assault. But the group that swept past me in the blink of an eye and away down the hill was in perfect arrowhead formation, and led by a pink-haired figure dressed all in black, her long shirt tails flapping out behind her. Now that the August Cannon was out of action, Mar, the dark angel, could lead a decisive counterattack. Before her and the wings in her wake, Di Vio's army broke and fled back across the desert, the same way that they'd come. They escaped with a small number of prisoners, and leaving more than half their number behind. Just more nameless dead in the Sands.
It took me a few minutes to compose myself after switching the radio off. Di Vio's men had taken the lion's share of the damage, but Mama Smokes' own had suffered horrible losses too. When I reached the bottom of the hill, she was detailing her troops to gather the bodies of the dead from both sides and lay them in an area outside of the camp. She herself disappeared to use her medical skills to help anyone she could. Even though I'd brought down Di Vio single-handedly, no-one said a word to me. I was a rock in a stream, beyond the flow. As I watched, a female priest came out in sombre robes at the edge of the battlefield and offered blessings to all of those that had passed. I'd never seen a female priest in all my years at Twelve. I wanted to watch her do her thing, see if she did things the same as they would have in the compounds, but it was too hard. I felt somehow responsible for the dead, like I'd brought a plague with me when I arrived.
I found Mar and Cassie working together with the clean up crew. I was pretty much on top of them before they saw me. Neither of them stopped what they were doing.
'Good shooting there,' I said to Cassie. The girl grunted, pulled up a dead companion by her arms and dragged her away. Now clearly wasn't the time.
'You got strength to help?' Mar asked.
'No,' I said truthfully, and feeling pretty damn wretched about it. The girl nodded, as if she'd expected this. Then she said, 'Then at least look around and try to find Rat.'
My gut lanced with pain again, though I wasn't sure that this one wasn't in my mind. 'She wasn't with you?'
Mar was working overtime to not meet my eye. 'Rat's team were on patrol on the outskirts. They radioed in the attack, they were the ones that engaged first.'
I stood there, stunned. Di Vio's numbers were enough to overwhelm the whole camp. The first skirmish wouldn't have been worthy of the name. I thought of my new sister, not two weeks fresh in my mind, gunned down and left to die a mile away while I was lying on my back.
'Maybe they captured her,' Mar said. To what end, or how that was better in any meaningful sense, was best left to her imagination.
Other thoughts arrived, the better to crowd that one out. Sad thing was, these ones were no better.
'Have you seen Gregor or Jayci?' I said.
'Neither,' Mar said, matter-of-fact. I scanned the ground in a panic, hoping all at once to see that white dress with the colored hem, before I remembered what that would mean, and opting once again for the horrible uncertainty.
Cassie brushed past me and I realised I was in the way of the moving detail. I wanted to say something to them, about how the women had fought bravely, about how t
hey'd resisted horrible odds to earn a victory, but nothing I had was going to cut it, and so I just stood there dumb.
'Make yourself useful, Phoenix, or make yourself scarce.' Mar sounded more weary than I'd ever heard her. I chose the latter option. It was all I could manage.
When I'd got clear of the battlefield, I leaned up against one of the camp's few brick structures, a wall that looked out over a dune. There was a path leading out behind the wall from a low archway to a small ring of trees away from the water. Inside the ring, I could see a handful of stone cairns resting on the sand.
It was the camp cemetery. For all I knew, there might have been fifty years of female outlaws buried there. Even if all the space had been empty right now, it wouldn't have been big enough to hold a quarter of the bodies being stacked up below me.
When I looked out to the horizon, two silhouettes were walking towards me across the sand, a huge, momentous golden sun blazing in their wake as it set. The silhouette on the left was perfectly round and waddling for all it was worth. The one on the right was short and slight in every way the other was wide. A pair of trailing braids had spawned a third line the width of a lasso rope, and at the end of that, a struggling man fought unsuccessfully to resist being dragged towards what was left of the camp.