by James Axler
They climbed out the window and hurried down the passage between the tall buildings. When they got to the far end, Ryan could see the cover between them and the oil tanks was intermittent, a jumble of smaller buildings of different sizes and half-buried hulks of vehicles. He reached over and untied Lima’s bonds. There were ice crystals in the whitecoat’s eyebrows and eyelashes.
“This is so you can run faster and keep up with us,” Ryan told him. “The men chasing us will be happy to kill you, too. Just like they killed Echo. Without a second thought. Don’t fall behind.”
With a piercing whine and a downblast of turbo wind, the hovertruck swooped into the gap between the roofs of the two buildings and hung there for a second. Then it turned, bringing the cargo doorway and its line of blasters to bear.
Before the shooters could open fire, the companions were around the corner, using the three-story building for cover. With Jak in the lead, they raced across the snowy ruin of a street for the line of buildings uphill.
The hovertruck could follow them, and it did, but it couldn’t pin them down for more than a few seconds. They were moving too quickly, and there was too much cover to hide behind. The companions had fought alongside one another for years. In this situation they didn’t need direction or hand signals. As soon as the aircraft got into position to lay down fire, they split up, scattering for the next nearest hiding places, always moving uphill, toward the high ground of the tank farm.
Blasterfire cracked as Ryan ducked after Lima and Krysty into the wreckage of a predark Chinook helicopter. A slug keyholed the roof, knocking out a two-foot diameter of the cockpit’s rusted floor. He waited until he heard the hovertruck move off, then jumped out the other side of the cargo hold. Lima and Krysty followed him up a snowy lane between a single-story building and what looked like an abandoned Jeep—roof missing except for the side supports, doors missing, tireless wheels sitting on rims.
The orange suits fired from the aircraft’s new vantage point, seventy-five feet to the left. The single shots were meant to pin them down.
The return fire was a burst of full-auto.
“Ricky,” Krysty said.
“Save your ammo, boy!” Ryan yelled. Across the street he saw Ricky and Doc slip over a fence and disappear behind a storage shed.
He led Krysty and Lima to the corner of the small building, which was about two hundred feet from the front of one of the oil tanks. It was a dicey crossing because of the lack of cover and because it was uphill. The whine of the hovertruck made him look over his shoulder, but it wasn’t coming their way. It was headed in the opposite direction, back to the row of long buildings.
Ryan shouted for the others to make their move. Seizing the chance, they all raced for the two rearmost oil tanks. The sprint left him bent over and gasping for air, and when he gasped the cold cut into his lungs like a steel blade.
“Look, Ryan!” Krysty said.
When he straightened, he saw the hovertruck circle the four buildings, then land to pick up the other shooters.
They had reached the high ground, but looking at it close up Ryan realized they couldn’t hold it for long. The oil tanks were all breached, the sides filigreed with rust. They wouldn’t slow a bullet any more than the roof of the helicopter had.
Behind them was the saddle between low peaks, choked with snowdrifts. Beyond that was frozen sea. Beyond that was whitecapped blue water.
“Cave! There!” Jak shouted. He waved at them from the top of the saddle.
Ryan and the others hurried to join him. To the north was a glacial cliff that ran along the shoreline of sea ice. Protected from the wind by the curve of cliff and landmass was indeed a hole. A big blue hole at the base of a towering white wall, at about what would have been the waterline.
“It could go in a few feet and dead-end,” J.B. pointed out. “Can’t tell from here.”
“What do you think, Jak?” Mildred said.
“Good cave.”
“Only one way to find out for sure,” Ryan said. At least it was a place they could make a stand until their ammo ran out.
Sliding, slipping, falling, they scrambled madly down the far side of the saddle. When they hit the frozen shoreline, they ran single file straight for the cave. It was taller than Ryan had thought, maybe twenty feet at the top, and easily that wide, too. They got inside the lip just as the hovertruck swooped past.
Ryan knew the orange suits would follow their tracks across the pristine snow. It was exactly what he wanted them to do. Follow the tracks. Land the aircraft. And then come get them.
Or try.
Ryan turned on the flashlight. Mildred already had hers on. The floors, walls and ceiling were cut from ancient glacial ice. When they advanced past the initial chamber, the cave narrowed. In a series of anterooms, connected large and small chambers, it wound back into the cliff then turned parallel to the shore.
They moved deeper and though it had to be an illusion, the temperature seemed to plummet even farther, which caused them all to shiver violently. The tightness in Ryan’s chest made it difficult for him to breathe.
“This is not a happy place,” Mildred said, playing her beam over the blue polished walls and floor.
“Death place,” Jak added.
The penetrating cold drained Ryan’s physical and mental energy. It was doing the same thing to the others. They moved slower, with apparently more effort. Then the flashlights lit up an opening that led to a much bigger chamber, so big the width was hard to determine because the flashlight beams couldn’t penetrate into the darkness far enough to reach the other side. The dome of ceiling was easily forty feet above their heads. In the middle of the ice floor was a pool of liquid twenty-five feet across.
Ryan stepped near the edge and shone his light into the blue water, but he couldn’t see to the bottom.
“Why isn’t that water frozen?” Ricky asked.
“This is an island, remember,” Mildred told him. “That has got to be salt water. It freezes at a lower temperature than fresh. That hole could go all the way down to the seafloor.”
Ryan noticed with alarm that Mildred was slurring her words; she was losing the ability to control her speech. What came next? Hand eye coordination? Her motor functions? Her breathing? How much longer before her body gave out and she dropped? Before they all dropped?
A strange noise from deeper in the cave broke his train of thought. It sounded like clapping, or slapping. He listened harder. It was slapping, and it was getting louder, indicating movement coming in their direction. And then he was hit by a wave of rotten fish smell that made him choke.
He and Mildred shone their flashlights across the chamber. Their shaking hands made the beams jump wildly. At the very edge of the illumination, out of the dim, dark cold, a wall of monsters appeared. Six feet tall, three hundred pounds, with eyes as red as Jak’s, and beaks like black steel daggers, they advanced shoulder to sloping shoulder. For their size and weight, they moved with incredible speed, tiny wings extended for balance, almost skating their webbed feet across the ice.
Frozen, shaking fingers or not, cold-stiffened joints and cold-dulled brains or not, the sight of those pengies coming at them sent the companions into rapid, instinctive motion. Holding the muties spotlighted in their flashlight beams, Ryan and Mildred reached back, fumbling for their submachine guns. But by then the others had already framed their targets and were opening fire. The noise in the chamber wasn’t just from full-auto gunshots echoing off walls and ceilings of ice; the companions were screaming at the tops of their lungs to equalize the pressure and keep from being deafened in the enclosed space; the pengies were screeching the call to murder without mercy.
* * *
ADAM SETTLED BACK in the copilot’s chair as William circled the hovertruck away from the cave entrance. He flew a few hundred yards from the cliff then se
t the aircraft down on the ice sheet.
“Go ahead and shut it down,” Adam said.
When George and the other three orange suits started to rise from their chairs, he waved them back down. “There’s no rush now,” he said.
“But we have orders to kill them and take the bodies back,” George said.
“And we’ll do that for sure,” Adam replied. “They’re not going anywhere. If they come out of the cave, we’ll cut them down.”
“And if they don’t?” George asked.
“Mighty cold in there,” Adam said. “Nice and warm in here. If we let them freeze for half an hour or so, our job will be a lot easier. Some of them will already be dead by that time.”
“I want to get back to my family,” George told him. “I’m worried about them. The redoubt is still under attack, remember?”
“A few minutes isn’t going to matter,” Adam said. “There are squads of well-trained, well-armed black suits to protect your family. Better that you return to them in one piece than get shot to hell going in that stinking cave before you have to.”
The sound of muffled automatic fire rolled across the ice. It went on and on.
The only place it could have been coming from was the cave.
“What the hell are they shooting at in there?” George said.
“Let’s hope it’s a mass suicide,” William replied.
Chapter Nineteen
The giant homicidal birds waddled into a 9 mm buzz saw. Their gaping beaks and flapping stubs of wings were strobelighted by the overlaid muzzle-flashes of five stuttering MP-5s. Dozens of rounds slammed into their fleshy torsos as they crossed the middle of the chamber.
It was as though the pengies had hit an invisible wall.
They staggered back, toppled sideways and crashed to the ice, feet and wings trembling feebly in final spasm.
But not all of them went down.
The wounded kept on coming.
Jak leaped forward, and jumped in front of Mildred, who was still trying to make her numbed fingers close on the MP-5’s pistol grip. The diminutive albino reached way up, jammed the barrel of his submachine blaster into an oncoming pengie’s throat and sent a 5-round burst through its brain and out the top of its head. A geyser of black blood shot straight up into the air. Jak neatly stepped aside as the steaming blood splattered down and the pengie fell onto its face.
The pitched, one-sided battle lasted no more than two minutes, but it seemed a lot longer than that to Ryan, who didn’t manage to fire a single shot. Nine huge pengies lay dead on the ice; three others, though grievously wounded, had made it into the pool and disappeared in its depths.
“Gaia, that was close,” Krysty said through chattering teeth.
Ryan quickly slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. She was shivering violently.
Doc was staring down at the feathered bodies with a strange expression on his face. “I have an idea,” he said. “It might seem crazy at first glance, but I assure you there is considerable precedent.”
He pulled a long, single-edge, fixed-blade knife from his coveralls.
Ryan had no clue what was up with the old man. When he looked around at the others, it was plain they didn’t either. He hoped Doc hadn’t slipped a cog. Again.
“These creatures are by nature’s design well insulated and perfectly adapted for life in extreme cold,” Doc said. “Not just the coat of feathers, mind you. They have thick layers of very dense fat beneath. I think Mildred and I can easily relieve these pengies of their skins, which we can then wear like overcoats. Much as the mountain men of my century sometimes used the carcasses of fresh-killed buffalo to survive being caught without shelter in subzero temperatures.”
“We’ve had practice skinning these muties,” Mildred said, drawing out a matching knife of her own. “In the redoubt’s butcher shop.”
“G-g-go for it,” Krysty said.
Ryan and J.B. held the flashlights so they could see to work.
That they had done it before became obvious at once. With help from Ricky and Jak, they rolled the first animal onto its back, slit it from throat to crotch, then each attacking a side, began peeling back the feathered skin and connected brown fat from the almost black flesh. With the heavy blade, Doc swiftly severed the spinal column at the neck, leaving the head attached to the skin. Then they cut the wing joints at the shoulders, leaving the wings also connected to skin. Rolling the carcass onto its stomach, they peeled the pelt from the back and cut it off around the ankles.
Doc handed Krysty a gore-dripping feather coat.
“Oooh, it’s still warm,” she said, as she bundled up. The hem dragged on the ice, the dead head lolled back between her shoulders and the wings drooped down. Her cheeks were smeared with black blood from the lapels.
Mildred squatted and cut off a few inches of the hem so it wouldn’t drag so badly.
“Cut the head off, too,” Krysty said. “It’s heavy.”
“No, that’s got to stay,” Mildred said. “You can wear it like a cap. We lose a lot of our body heat through the tops of our heads.”
Working furiously, they skinned six more pengies.
Ryan was the last to shrug into a coat. It smelled like dead fish and blood, and the attached fat was slick and spongy, but it held in his body heat. The improvement was immediate and welcome.
The chamber floor looked like a slaughterhouse with the puddles of gore and skinned carcasses. The blue pool was stained and cloudy from spilled blood.
“Let’s get rid of the bodies,” Ryan said.
One by one, they slid the carcasses into the pool and watched them sink slowly out of sight.
“What now, Ryan?” J.B. asked. “We wait for the orange suits to come to us?”
“No, I have a better idea,” he said. “Pull on your pengie caps.”
At his direction they positioned the severed heads on top of their own and then held them in place by gripping the cut edges of the pelt under their chins. Ryan squinted at his companions, pleased with the result. Although somewhat shorter and thinner than the coats’ original owners, at a distance they could easily pass for the genuine article.
* * *
WILLIAM POINTED SEAWARD across the ice, his eyes wide with surprise. “Where the heck did they come from?”
Despite himself, Adam was startled, too. A huge flock of pengies had materialized in the lee of the shoreline, protected by its curve from the polar wind. It was easily as large as the group they had found the previous day. It could have been the same group for all he knew.
“That cliff is probably riddled with caves and underwater passages,” he said.
Wherever they came from, they were already beginning to move in their rhythmic circular dance.
“Over there!” George said, pointing in the opposite direction. “They’re coming out!”
Adam turned, expecting to see their quarry emerge from the cave; instead what he saw was a small group of pengies exiting the entrance. They waddled out onto the ice and set off across it to join up with their brethren.
“Do you think those pengies did the job for us in the cave?” William asked.
“Crank up this machine and let’s find out,” Adam said.
William set the hovertruck on the ice just opposite the cave entrance. Two orange suits with assault rifles watched the seaward flock from the open cargo door. Adam and George entered the cave with weapons at the ready. In the light of their headlamps, they could see blood drips on the ice floor.
George reached down, touched a splatter with a fingertip, then sniffed at it. “This isn’t human blood,” he said, licking his finger. “It looks like they wounded some pengies with all that shooting we heard.”
They followed the trail of blood drips through the winding
passage and connected chambers. The blood fall on the floor got heavier the deeper they penetrated. Then they came on a big chamber with a central pool. Pengie blood was smeared all over the ice of the floor, but there were no dead birds in sight. Then Adam looked into the pool. When he saw the dark, discolored water, he knew what it meant.
So did George, looking over his shoulder.
“We’ve got to get back!” Adam said, pulling his comrade by the arm.
They ran through the cave, bouncing off the slick walls in their haste. When they burst back out into daylight, they rushed for the hovertruck’s hold.
“William, get down here!” Adam said as they clambered in.
Through the open cargo door, he could see the pengies swaying in their hypnotic hurricane dance.
“What is it?” William asked as he hopped off the gangway.
George pointed at the eight straggler birds that had stopped halfway to the flock and appeared to be looking back in the direction of the hovertruck. “Those aren’t pengies,” he said. “Those are our targets.”
“You’re joking,” William said.
“Not joking,” Adam replied. “We found evidence they killed and skinned some pengies in the cave, then put on the skins and walked right past us. If the real pengies don’t kill them, we sure will. Everybody gear up. Let’s finish this.”
Chapter Twenty
Ryan and the others trudged over the ice, carrying their weapons on shoulder slings under their feather coats. The plan was to get as close as they could to the hovertruck and then stage a surprise attack, picking off the nearest orange suits, taking control of the hold and then the cockpit. The mass gathering of pengies farther out on the frozen sea gave them a plausible reason for leaving the cave and the shoreline—they were just a few more killer birds late for the party. They passed in front of the parked aircraft at a safe distance, intending to circle back, but before they could do that the turbines started up and it took off.