by James Axler
“Too close!” Alan snarled, spraying a group of women and children fleeing into the bushes.
“Frag that,” John commanded loudly, pointing a bony finger. “There he is!”
Snarling obscenities, a fat man with a patch on his right eye threw a hatchet at the coldhearts, and Robert barely managed to duck out of the way, the spinning wep clanging off the shiny chassis of his bike.
“Not good enough, feeb!” he retorted in dark amusement, and shot the man several times in the belly, opening the stomach like a can of spaghetti.
“We surrender!” a burly man shouted, throwing down a homie zipgun and raising both hands. “Take what you want! We surrender!”
“Fool,” John said with a sneer, killing the coward on the spot. “Not taking prisoners!”
As the incredible truth became apparent, the rest of the pilgrims broke ranks and took off in every direction, casting aside their belonging to hasten their speed.
Revving the silent engines of the military two-wheelers, the laughing Rogan brothers started circling the screaming people, shooting them down as if ammo grew on trees.
As the last of the pilgrims fell, the Rogans returned to the fat man with one eye. Retrieving the thrown hatchet, Alan braked his bike to a halt, then climbed off eagerly. Testing the edge of the wep on a thumb, the man knelt by the corpse and started to hack away, soon removing the head to add it to the collection of grisly trophies nearly filling the cargo pods of his bikes.
“Think that’s him?” Edward growled, reloading his rapidfire.
“No way,” John said with a frown. “There’s no women with black skin, albino mutie or redheads in this batch. And no silver-haired wrinklie.”
“So we hit the next ville?” Robert asked, kicking over a pretty young girl.
“Soon as Alan is done with the harvesting.”
John turned off the bike to let it recharge a little. The batteries still carried a half charge, but life had taught him the harsh lesson that survival often depended upon a bite of food, a single brass or a sip of water. Waste meant getting chilled, no more, no less.
Looking over the field of death, John rested the hot rapidfire on a shoulder as he studied the bodies stretched out in the grass like shrapnel from an explosion. Nobody was even vaguely close to the protection of the trees, and every body was clearly torn apart. There was nobody only pretending to be aced in this bunch, like the last group.
“All set,” Alan said, tucking the one-eyed head into a cargo pod. Flipping the hatchet into the air, he caught it by the wooden handle, nodded in satisfaction, then tucked the wep into his belt.
“Then let’s go,” John ordered, revving the silent engine of the bike. The gauges fluttered alive and the dashboard became illuminated. “We’ve got a lot more chilling to do.”
WITH A GRINDING NOISE, the manhole cover moved aside and J.B. crawled onto the cracked asphalt. Moving out of the way, the Armorer brought up the Uzi as he looked around for any danger. But the streets seemed clear, the ruins stretching for blocks in every direction.
A moment later Ryan levered himself out of the opening and slid the Steyr off his shoulder to work the bolt. The air was hot and dry, sweet nectar after the pungent stink of the sewer. Dilapidated buildings dotted the sandy landscape, along with fireplugs, mailboxes and all of the usual trappings of predark civilization. They had found the ruins of a predark city. It was about time their luck changed.
As the two men stood guard, Krysty came out of the manhole, her revolver sweeping for targets. Bending, she offered a hand to Mildred. The sweat-drenched physician accepted the help and awkwardly clambered onto the asphalt, hauling her canvas med kit.
Jak came next. But halfway out, the teenager sat on the rim of the hole and drew his Colt Python to aim the blaster into the darkness. From below there came the sound of blasterfire and the savage bawl of a gator. Quickly, Jak moved out of the way and Doc climbed into the sunlight with the smoking Ruger in his hand. Together, they fired their weps into the blackness, the thunderous reports illuminating the subterranean passageway. Far below, an alligator screamed in mortal agony, then went ominously silent.
Grunting in thanks, Doc holstered the Ruger and released the rope tied around his waist. Passing the end to the others, Doc stood guard while the rest of the companions started pulling. Like fish on a stringer, one by one, the backpacks were hauled out of the sewer and laid on the cracked street.
“Anybody hurt?” Mildred demanded, looking over the group.
Thankfully, there was no fresh blood spilled and nobody was grimacing in pain.
“Good enough.” Walking across the street, Mildred leaned against the rusted remains of a car and tried to catch her breath. She was exhausted, but stoutly refused to leave any of the important medical supplies behind. With the MP-5 and its spare ammo, the physician knew that she was carrying too much weight, but she just couldn’t relinquish any of the antibiotic pills or surgical gloves. Gloves! No more bare-handed surgery. She would never leave those behind.
“Should we prepare an egress, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked, gesturing at the open manhole.
Frowning deeply, Ryan wasn’t sure about what the word meant, but he understood the gesture. “No, close it up tight,” he said gruffly, working the bolt on the Steyr. “That blasterfire is going to summon all sorts of attention that we don’t want. Get your packs and let’s move.”
The bolt-action longblaster had been thoroughly cleaned during their long journey through the sewer and was now in working order again. It had been a good thing that he’d been cautious and double-checked the longblaster before using it. The barrel had indeed been blocked solid with condensed fuel and mud. Pulling the trigger on the Steyr would have been disastrous. Strong is good, but smart is better, as the Trader liked to say.
Working in unison, Jak and Doc manhandled the heavy iron cover back into place, then J.B. attached a wire and rigged a Claymore mine under a nearby civie wag, the curved front of the directional charge pointing at the sewer opening. Anybody moving the manhole would get blown in two from behind.
“Thought we left the gators behind,” Krysty stated, checking the rapidfire as she glanced around the ruins. She wasn’t getting any feelings of being observed. However, that didn’t mean they were alone.
“Gators track folks good,” Jak replied, reloading his piece. Then the youth chuckled. “But taste even better!”
Sharing a weary laugh, the companions gathered their belongings and started along one of the dusty streets, carefully keeping in the sunlight and out of the dangerous shadows. Until they had done a recce, nothing was to be taken for granted. Their travels had taken them a long way in the dark, and there was no way of knowing where they were until J.B. had a chance to use his sextant.
“Anybody recognize the town?” Ryan asked hopefully.
But that only drew a chorus of negatives.
Most of the buildings in sight were pretty tall, five, six, some of them even seven stories. But there was also the remains of a skyscraper, or at least what Ryan could only guess might have been a skyscraper. The structure stopped at about the ninth floor, the marble exterior broken to expose twisted beams of rusty steel. They’d all seen that sort of damage before. Most likely, something large blown along by the nukewind of skydark had slammed into the building. Or even a missile. Ryan wouldn’t be surprised if they followed the angle of the breakage and found a glass-lined crater in the ground. Quickly, he checked the rad counter on his lapel and was relieved to see only a normal background level of rads. The ruins weren’t hot. More good news.
“Dark night, I really hate to leave all that food and brass behind,” J.B. said, casting a sorrowful glance down the block at the manhole cover. A gust of wind was blowing some dust along the street, making the few partially intact windows of the buildings rattle in the frames.
“We’ll come back and get the rest once we have a safe place to stay,” Ryan answered. “No sense hauling it all up, just to lower it back down again.�
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“Safe where is,” Jak said in dry humor. “Watchdogs will guard.”
“You mean, the alligators?” Mildred asked askance. Then she gave a tired laugh. “Yeah, I guess they will protect our excess baggage better than having Mike Tyson as a skycap.”
She waited for a laugh. But when none came, Mildred sighed. Too many cultural references were meaningless these days. Doc got some of her jokes, but many fell flat. Humor was a victim of the war as much as anything else.
Easing off her bearskin coat, Krysty tucked it through the canvas straps of her backpack and undid a couple of buttons on her shirt. In spite of the heavy clouds, the sun was beating down hard and the temperature on the open street was quickly becoming uncomfortable after the cool darkness of the flooded sewer.
Most of the buildings in the city were smashed to rubble, piles of debris that reached twenty feet high. In others, only the windows were gone, making the buildings hollow shells that moaned as the wind blew through. Oddly, most of the destruction was only on the upper levels. Here on the street, most of the structures were in decent shape, with some of the windows and most doors relatively intact.
“This is nuke storm damage,” J.B. said, adjusting his glasses. “Something must have blocked the skydark winds from smashing the place apart.”
“Mayhap there once were hills surrounding the city,” Doc suggested, craning his neck to see down a side street. In the distance, there seemed to be only barren scrubland, a mix of sand and scraggy weeds stretching to the horizon. He found the sight oddly disturbing. Have… I been here before? he wondered.
Nervously fingering the silver lion head on his cane, Doc started to speak, then stopped. There were so many jumbled memories in his mind that he could no longer tell which were true and which were only delusions from his days of madness.
“License plates rusted clean,” Jak said, squinting at a nearby civie wag. “No read location there.” The perfectly smooth fiberglass body rested on jumbled piles of rusted machinery.
All of the wags lining the sidewalks were in ragged condition, their tires long gone, most of the windows broken and the interior not much more than cracked plastic and bare metal springs.
Brushing back his matted hair, Ryan scowled at that. Even the store signs were clean. No way of knowing if they were even in a country that spoke English, although the architecture looked familiar. But they could be anywhere.
Loose sand blew freely among the buildings, mounds reaching all the way to the roofs in some of the lower sections. Every window was rubbed white from the grinding winds, and most of the frames were bare metal, every flack of paint removed long ago by the inclement weather.
The sun appeared and disappeared behind the heavy clouds, casting dappled shadows across the nameless city, not allowing J.B. to get a read with the minisextant. As they prowled along the storefronts, the companions found that a few of the larger windows were smashed open, the dry sand covering the inside of the stores like a golden carpet.
Going to a rusted hulk parked alongside the curb, Jak tried to see inside, but the windows were solid white. Trying the handle, he was surprised to find it unlocked, and pulled open the door, warily stepping out of the way. But the vehicle was empty, stripped to the walls. The seats were gone, the safety belts, the rubber mats, and the dashboard was only a series of gaping holes where dials and controls had once been. Only a CD glittered brightly from the sagging dashboard, its shining perfection making the rest of the wag appear dowdy and wretched in comparison.
Closing the door, Jak started to scratch under his bandage. The teenager forcibly stopped himself and tucked his wandering hand into a jacket pocket. Wounds healed faster if left alone. It had been hard enough to wash it clean while in the filthy river below.
Quite unexpectedly, the sun broke free from the cloud cover and J.B. quickly reached under his shirt to pull out his miniature sextant. It took him a few moments to do the mental calculations, then check them against the predark map in his munitions bag.
“This is southeastern Arizona,” J.B. said, tucking away the old battered map at last. “We’re in the Zone. Close enough to Tucson that it really makes no damn difference.”
“Tucson,” Doc whispered, as if the word had hidden meaning. A sick feeling blossomed in his stomach for no discernable reason.
“Or at least, this is where Tucson used to be,” J.B. added casually. “Could be some other city, the way the nuke quakes moved some places around.”
“Move cities?” Jak said in a disbelieving tone. Then he added, “Nukes moved mountains. Why not city?”
“Curious. Tucson was an important city in this state,” Mildred muttered, removing the cap on her canteen. She took a small drink, trying to ration the water. “I’m startled that it wasn’t nuked.”
“Not enough bombs in existence to vap every city on the bastard planet,” Ryan stated, looking down an alleyway. It was clean and empty, not even a rat was in sight. “If there had been, we wouldn’t be here.”
Tightening the cap, Mildred had to nod at the logic. Destroying civilization, and obliterating humanity, were two entirely different things. Thank God.
Turning a corner, the companions found a buzzing mailbox, the rusty container crawling with bright yellow bees.
Ryan marked the location of the hive uneasily. Those might just be bees, or they might be those killer bees Trader had told him about so long ago. Impulsively, he reached up to rub his missing eye. As a child, he’d tried to steal honey from a hive once, and a swarm of bees had stung him all over, one of the insects getting him just under the left eye. The flesh had swollen so much that he had been blind on that side for a week. An eerie harbinger of things to come.
“We should be looking for a place to stay the night,” Mildred suggested, resting against the smooth metal post of a streetlamp. “A bank, library, police station, something solid like that.”
Cupping a hand to her face, Krysty looked upward. “We should be able to get a good view of the whole city from the top of one of these buildings,” she suggested, without much eagerness in the words.
“Indeed, madam?” Doc rumbled in hesitant agreement. “Just as long as you are not suggesting a stroll to the top of one.”
Mildred took appraisal of the destroyed skyscraper. The internal struts and beams were visibly swaying in the warm breeze. The twisted metal was probably groaning like a nearly chilled man, but at this distance there was only the sound of the endless wind.
“Not up for it, eh?” She chuckled.
“Only in my youth, dear Doctor,” Doc replied with a mocking bow. “Which at this point seems a million years ago.”
Slinging the Steyr over a shoulder, Ryan took a long pull from his canteen, the flat sterilized water from the redoubt washing out the muddy flavor of the river.
“Strange,” he said under his breath, screwing the cap back on the container.
Blaster in hand, Krysty turned. “What is it, lover?”
“The windows,” Ryan replied slowly. “None of the store windows have their shutters down.”
“Tucson had very little crime, if I remember correctly,” Mildred said, hitching her heavy med kit into a more comfortable position. Her lumbar was starting to ache from the unaccustomed weight.
“Maybe they didn’t have steel shutters the way Chicago and New York did.”
“Deuced odd, I must say,” Doc muttered, pulling out his LeMat pistol, only to holster the blaster again.
After being submerged, the black-powder charges were dead. The weapons would have to be purged and reloaded. Almost reluctantly, Doc hefted the Ruger .44 wheelgun and eased back the hammer, only to gently return it back into place. The stainless-steel blaster was a lot lighter than his cumbersome iron LeMat, and the bullets were waterproof. Both fine attributes. Then again, the LeMat was from his time period. A living piece of the past that he could hold. The touch of the Civil War blaster helped him to remember better times with his wife and children.
“This
is a good area,” Ryan declared, studying the intersection. “Mildred and Jak stay here while the rest of us do a fast recce.”
“No prob,” the physician replied, easing her med kit to the ground with a clunk. “Got you covered.”
As J.B. and Krysty went in different directions, Ryan stepped around a pothole in the sidewalk to investigate a liquor store that seemed undisturbed. The grating was raised, but when he checked the door, it was open, the lock broken apart. For a split second he had a flashback to the city in his dreams, but then it was gone.
Shaking off the old memories, Ryan loosened the panga on his belt and gently pushed open the door with the barrel of the Steyr to walk inside. Illuminated by the milky window light, the interior of the store was empty.
Everything was gone. Every stick of furniture, every light fixture, even the carpeting on the floor had been removed. The place was stripped to the walls. The foam tiles in the ceiling had been pried loose, exposing the framework of aluminum struts hanging from the gray concrete ceiling.
Warily checking the bathroom, Ryan wasn’t surprised to see that the sink and toilet were also missing, along with the wall mirror. The one-eyed man felt a cold chill creep along his spine at the sight. A looted city was to be expected, but not like this. This had been systematic, well organized. The sink hadn’t been ripped out of the wall, but unbolted and carefully removed. Scavenged. The whole nuking store had been scaved.
Quickly stepping outside, Ryan found the other companions coming out of different buildings, all of their expressions similar: confused, concerned and slightly worried.
“Same thing here,” Ryan said, resting the stock of the longblaster on a hip. “Somebody raided the whole damn city, didn’t they?”