by James Axler
“Triple-stupe bastard,” the Armorer snorted, disgusted by the sheer stupidity of the deceased owner. What good was a blaster you couldn’t use?
On the way out, Ryan paused to break open the cash register and check the money in the till. He carefully scanned the bills, then he tossed the paper aside and departed with the others, leaving the register drawer open for the insects and mice to harvest as bedding for their nests.
Krysty noticed him inspecting the money and nodded. Smart man.
None of the pay phones on the sidewalks had a Yellow Pages book, only a short chain attached to ragged pieces of faded paper. But a nearby video store had a phone book behind the counter, and Ryan carefully turned the brittle pages to search for the address of a gun shop. Strangely, there were no listings for military supplies or gunsmiths, only a sporting-goods store, which they determined was located a couple of blocks to the east.
Arriving at the location, five of the companions stayed astride their bikes at an intersection to stand guard while Ryan and J.B. walked along the middle of the street. The dark shops were lined with dead neon signs, placards in the windows announcing January sales. A few cars dotted the curb, and a police sedan was parked at a sharp angle in front of a sleek roadster, but immutable time had reduced both cop and criminal to powdery bones on the black asphalt.
The sporting-goods store was closed, an iron grille in place across its window and door. Normally, that wasn’t a problem, but unfortunately there was a broken key jammed in the lock of the grating. J.B. tried for a while, then pronounced it hopeless unless they used plastique. Holding their small supply of C-4 in reserve, Ryan checked the pawnshop across the street, the classic three brass balls hanging from a post announcing the honored profession. Pawnshops often carried weapons and ammo. The main window was coated with black paint on the inside, making it impossible to see if there were any blasters on display inside. Were the owners trying to hide from the rampaging mobs? But this city had died at the instant of skydark, and there had never been any crowd of starving people to loot the stores. Curious.
But luck was on their side. The steel grating before the establishment was drawn aside, and J.B. easily picked the lock on the door. Taking the point position, Ryan started to open the door when he stepped on something hard.
Instantly, the man froze. Only recently, he had encountered a land mine, and since then he was extremely wary of stepping on anything. His heart pounding, the man glanced at the sidewalk and slowly tilted his boot to see underneath. The lump proved to be only a small blob of congealed silvery metal on the concrete. As the puzzled man glanced around, he noticed the source of the puddled steel and felt cold adrenaline flood his body.
“Hey, Albert!” Ryan called out in forced casualness. “Get the bikes over here so we can load them easier.”
Caught by surprise, the startled companions looked hastily around for the source of the danger. If any of them used a name that began with the first letter of the alphabet, that meant they were in an ambush. But from where? The streets were empty.
“Aw, push your own damn bike,” Dean shouted, working the lever of the Weatherby while it was still in the boot. “That ain’t my job.”
With an elaborate sigh, Ryan took his hand off the door latch. “Come on, Adam,” he said to J.B. “Sooner we start, the sooner we’re done.”
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” the Armorer agreed, faking a smile, and the man ambled along the street until reaching the intersection.
“What’s wrong?” J.B. asked out of the side of his mouth, as they climbed onto the bikes.
“Droids. It’s a trap,” Ryan said urgently, thumbing the ignition button to start the big Twin-V engine. “We have to get out of here fast.”
Making as little fuss as possible, the companions rolled away on their bikes while nervously watching the pawnshop until they were a good block distant.
“Far enough,” Ryan ordered, halting the bike. “I want you all to see what we almost walked into.”
“Trip wire?” Jak asked, holding the Colt Python.
The Deathlands warrior shook his head. “Lot worse than that. Going for the door, I stepped on some congealed steel,” Ryan said. “Seemed odd, so I looked around. There’s a reason why the grating of the pawnshop was open. To chill us. Damn near succeeded, too.”
“Those crafty bastards,” Krysty said, squinting into the distance. “Look at that.”
Pulling out the telescope, J.B. located the store and scanned its front, searching for something subtle he had missed before. The man spotted it when he came to the lock on the open grating. “Dark night,” he muttered. The mechanism was gone; there was only a smooth hole in the grating where the lock should be located, the surrounding metal discolored from severe heat.
“That was done with a laser,” J.B. said, passing the Navy brass to the others. “A droid is in that store, waiting for us. Mebbe more.”
Accepting their word on the matter, Mildred waved off the telescope. But Doc took his turn with the long-eyes. “I wager the machines also placed the broken key in the lock of the sporting-goods store to divert us to their trap.”
“Tricky,” Jak agreed, cracking his knuckles. “Okay, what do?”
“Last time it took a hundred rounds of ammo to stop one of those things,” Krysty said, loosening the Webley in her belt. “Could be a dozen in there. Two dozen! We need better weapons.”
“More than that,” Ryan stated, flexing his hand above the SIG-Sauer in its holster. “We need to go someplace the droids haven’t thought of yet. Gun shops are obvious sources of ammo, police stations, too. Bet a live round the droids are waiting for us at both.”
“Navy base is a rad crater,” Dean offered, unbuttoning the flap that covered the breast pocket of his shirt. During their rest, the boy had sown the pocket into sections to hold the long cartridges for the Weatherby for easy access.
“Banks are useless,” he continued. “There isn’t anywhere else. Not for what we need.”
“Weapons were considered unnecessary at a vacation resort,” Mildred said, working the bolt on the Thompson and slinging the weapon around her neck. That way the rapidfire was instantly available, but out of the way enough for her hands to steer.
“I’m pretty sure we can find more ammo,” Ryan said, wheeling the bike around. “But first we need some distance to cover our tracks.”
As the motorcycles raced away, the tiny bell above the entrance to the gun shop gave a musical tinkle as the door swung open a crack, and a small video camera extended to track the progress of the departing humans. Then, just as smoothly, the lens retracted and the door closed, leaving the street to appear peaceful and empty for the next visitors.
TEN BLOCKS LATER, Ryan turned toward the west and slowed. Checking the street signs, he took a few turns until reaching a residential section, brightly painted pink apartment houses, interspaced fast-food restaurants and strip malls.
“What about a courier company? They’d have some weapons,” Dean suggested, bumping over a manhole cover.
Ryan glanced at the boy. “Never thought of that before,” he admitted. “Good idea, but they wouldn’t have anything we could use against the machines. Just some handcannons, mebbe a few shotguns, but no big ordnance.”
“What we need is a Finnish 20 mm ATR,” J.B. stated. “Plus a shit load of shells. That’d send those droids to the junkyard.”
“Gun collectors?” Jak suggested, arching around an open car door.
“They’d have the blasters, but no ammo,” Ryan said, checking the street. “There, that’ll do.”
“A recruitment station?” J.B. asked as they turned into the parking lot of the strip mall. Set between a vegetarian sandwich shop and an insurance agency, the small store was brightly decorated with American flags and printed inducements to earn valuable college tuition by joining the military service of your choice.
“This is why I checked the money in the liquor store,” Ryan said, parking his bike. “Wanted to make sur
e this was still American territory and that there would be a recruitment center.”
“Won’t be any blasters there,” Dean grumped.
“Good, that means no droids,” Ryan said, going to the glass door. A bell tinkled as he walked inside. “We’re here looking for maps.”
“Maps?” Jak stated, blocking the door with a folding chair. “What for?”
“The location of the National Guard armory,” Ryan said, going to a file cabinet and rifling the top drawer. “A lot of phone books don’t list the address of the armories in case of riots. Just the phone number. Also, makes them harder for enemy outlanders to find. Ah, got it.”
Going to a desk, Ryan cleared the top with a sweep of his arm and began unfolding the old map. “But these recruitment posts often do training at the armory,” Ryan finished, gently smoothing out the wrinkles. The yellow paper tore, and he moved with greater care.
“These things are from my time,” Mildred said petulantly, softly touching the remnants of an American flag hanging from a tarnished brass pole. “I have no knowledge of this.”
“You loot enough ruins, you find these things out,” Ryan muttered.
“There it is,” Krysty said, stabbing the map with a finger. “Near the big lake. Good thing we have bikes. That’s twenty miles away.”
“Hope that’s still on the mesa,” Dean said. “Could have fallen off when it rose.”
Using only fingertip pressure, Ryan folded the crumbling map as carefully as possible, then placed it inside his shirt. “Let’s find out,” he said, heading for the door.
AN HOUR LATER, the companions were traveling along the bypass of the city, skirting a canal that was broken in two, the jagged bottom sticking over the side of the mesa like the teeth of a saw.
The day was becoming hotter as the tropical sun rose in the sky, muted thunder rumbled defiantly as the climbing orb burned holes through the orange-and-purple storm clouds. Stretched across the eternal storm were the fuzzy black lines of altocumulus clouds, the dense plutonium vapors resembling prison bars, making it appear as if the whole world were in jail—a dire penitentiary that the prisoners themselves had set on fire for no sane reason.
Banking the bikes to follow the endless curve of the bypass, the companions slowly circled the predark city. There were very few cars on the roadway, which seemed odd until they drove past a Mack truck hanging out of the side of an apartment building. When the neutron bomb aced people and electronics, the speeding vehicles had sailed off the bypass from simple inertia. Maneuvering closer to the berm, they could see countless wrecks in charred impact craters spaced irregularly along the suburbs below the elevated bypass.
Rich with the smell of sulfur, the wind blew through their hair, and the companions kept a watch on the quivering gauges of their motorcycles as they settled in for a long drive. The armory was on the other side of the metropolis, many miles away.
Faded white billboards flashed, and gradually the bypass began to move away from the culvert. Soon the roadway was cutting between rows of low buildings only eight or ten stories high. Mountains of concrete and steel compared to almost any ville, but were mere foothills in comparison to the monolithic giants of downtown.
“Triple red!” J.B. shouted, throttling down his bike, both hands holding the handlebars steady as he savagely braked.
Fighting his bike to a halt, Ryan said nothing as he studied the obstacle blocking the roadway. A huge spiderweb stretched between two of the low buildings, the bottom level of the thick strands only a couple of feet off the smooth concrete.
Fat white blobs dotted the precise geometric expanse, a few cawing like condors, one sounding like a weeping man, another thrashing wildly as the occupant of the cocoon still fiercely struggled to escape.
“Poor bastards,” Mildred said. “Spiders eat their prey alive. It’s saving them for later.”
Dean raised the rifle and started to aim at the weeping cocoon, then paused. They didn’t have a lot of rounds, and if they had to fight the giant insect, this single round could make the difference between running and getting cocooned. Reluctantly, he lowered the longblaster and tucked it back into the boot. Just then a weapon fired, and the human-shaped cocoon jerked once, then went still as a crimson stain spread across the silky material.
“I think there’s enough clearance for us to walk the bikes under the web,” Ryan said, working the bolt on the smoking Steyr and sliding it back into the gun boot.
“It’s going to be tight,” J.B. said, removing his hat and stuffing it inside his jacket.
“We could burn our way through,” Dean suggested, nudging the satchel full of Molotov cocktails, the firebombs silent from the layers of protective padding between each bottle.
“And the smoke would tell everything in the city where we were,” Ryan said, stepping off his bike, but keeping a hand on the throttle to keep the engine from stalling. The timing had to be off, or maybe there was blockage in the jets, because the bike was beginning to run a little rough. He’d have to keep a watch on that problem.
Pausing before the complex arrangement, he could see the main cables that anchored the web were thicker than a man, slimmer ropes connected each cable and small strands no bigger than a soup can closed off the sections of the web, making it impossible for anything to escape. A masterpiece of nature, the spiderweb was beautiful and bone chilling. From a distance, the web had appeared old and dirty. This close they could see the shading actually came from the thousands of tiny winged insects coating every strand.
Approaching the colossal web, Ryan glanced straight up the side and quickly looked back down at the road. The sheer size of the web gave him a rush of vertigo. Probably wasn’t as bad for the folks with two good eyes, but for him the dizzying effect was strong.
The bottom strand stretched across the roadway at waist height. As he tilted the bike far enough over to roll it underneath, the engine began to sputter, the carburetor flooding from the steep angle. Quickly, he adjusted the throttle to keep the engine going as he stooped low and scuttled under the death web. Ryan was almost past the white net when something tugged on his hair. With blinding speed, he drew the SIG-Sauer and turned, ready to fire. In relief, the man saw the tug came from some of his long hair stuck to the web. Holstering the blaster, he pulled out the panga and cut himself loose, letting the web keep its small trophy of hair.
Reaching the other side, he gratefully righted the motorcycle and rubbed his scalp to ease the sting. The purring of the other bikes got louder as the vehicles were pushed by the riders under the obstruction. Regrouping on the far side, Doc and Mildred were both rubbing their heads, both obvious victims of the web, and Krysty’s animated hair was coiled so tightly to her scalp she appeared to have a curly crew cut.
“Made it.” Dean sighed, getting on his bike, gunning the engine a few times to clear away any excess shine puddled in the carb.
Doing the same, Ryan watched in approval. The boy knew machines. With each companion teaching the boy what he or she knew, Dean was getting good lessons in survival.
“Gaia save us, it’s here,” Krysty whispered, drawing the Webley.
A hundred yards down the road ahead of them, the spider was crawling off the roof of a radio station and onto the roadway. Standing twenty feet high, the bulbous torso of the mutie was striped like a tiger in yellow and black. The bristly head was oversized for the body, indicating possible intelligence, and its huge ruby eyes were perfectly stationary, making it impossible to tell in which direction the monster was looking.
Instincts honed from a hundred battles flared within the man, and Ryan reviewed their situation with lightning speed.
“Follow me,” he ordered in a normal tone of voice. Climbing onto the bike, he started to roll forward so slowly, that he needed to drag his boots along the road to keep the vehicle upright.
“Slow as possible,” Ryan added, staying in motion. “Nothing that big can change directions quickly. We get close, then hit the gas and roar right past
the motherfucker on the berm.”
“And drop a few of these in our wake,” J.B. said, easing a gren from his munitions bag.
“Got any Willy Peter?”
“Nope.”
“Damn. Then use whatever you got,” Ryan said.
Turning toward Dean, the man gestured at the web. “Give it something to worry about aside from us.”
The boy nodded and retrieved a Molotov from the padded saddlebag. Holding it ready to throw, he watched as the rest of the companions began creeping forward on their bikes, boots dragging. As the spider began to start toward them, Dean quickly ignited the oily rag tied around the neck of the bottle and smashed it on the concrete at the middle of the web. The Molotov crashed into a fireball, blue flames licking at the thick strands.
Keening loudly, the giant spider rushed for the blaze, and the companions separated to roll past the huge mutie. As they came alongside, they each drew weapons but nobody fired or made any sudden moves. A pungent wave of putrescence followed the creature as it scuttled by, the reek of honey sweetness and rotten meat almost making them gag.
Once past the norms, the spider dashed for the precious web. Crackling loudly, the flames were commencing to burn through the lower cable, the silky ropes above charring badly. In frantic haste, the spider crawled onto the web, snipping lengths free with its mandibles. In only a few moments, a ragged patch of smoking material fell to the ground, and promptly burst into flames, the silky material sending off greenish smoke.
Now angling its head, the insect keened again in a lower tone and crawled off the web to charge toward the departing norms.
“Move!” Ryan shouted. He twisted the grip on the handlebars to the last stop, and the Harley lurched forward.