Desert Kings

by James Axler

  “Ahem,” Mildred said, looking upward.

  Puzzled for a moment, J.B. then removed his beloved fedora and reverently set it aside.

  “Honest to God, John, sometimes the way you treat the ratty old thing…” she muttered, shaking her head in mock anger.

  Grinning apologetically, the man stepped closer and took her face in his hands. Gently, he kissed her on the lips, the light touch relaying more than mere words ever could. The electric moment built in intensity as their hearts quickened, and the caress enfolded to a passionate embrace, their arms wrapped tight around each other.

  Her beaded locks clicking softly, Mildred opened her mouth to John and they kissed deeper, more ardently. Their hands began to explore each other, each intimate caress fueling their mounting desire, his pale skin a perfect contrast to her dark beauty.

  Breaking apart for air, Mildred coyly raised the sheet and John climbed onto the bed. Taking her in his arms, J.B. hugged the woman tight. Responding to the strength of the man, Mildred felt her nipples tighten.

  Bending to kiss a warm breast, J.B. ran a hand along her stomach, then slid a finger inside the delicate folds of her femininity and expertly began a small circular motion. Gasping in delight, Mildred opened her thighs, and the man intensified his teasing caresses, invoking waves of pleasure until the woman thought she could stand no more and finally shuddered all over in velvet ecstasy.

  Smiling at her pleasure, J.B. looked deep into her lovely eyes, asking a silent question. Whispering his name, Mildred nodded in response and reached out to stroke his shaft, caressing the stiffening flesh. As his breath started to quicken, she released him and spread her legs completely. Changing position, J.B. lightly moved across the yielding satin until fully anointed with her moisture, the scent of their passion filling the bedchamber.

  Taking Mildred by the hips, J.B. eased forward, swelling as the electric flesh tightened around him. Murmuring wordless sounds, Mildred arched her back as he partially withdrew, then he plunged in deep, the woman crying out in pleasure at the penetration.

  Clawing her hands down his back, Mildred thrilled to the play of the hard muscles.

  As the man rose and fell, she yielded to the wonderful motion for several seconds, then began to move in reply, meeting his thrusts with her own, doubling their pleasure. Secret words were spoken as they rocked in unison, limbs entangled, their skin glistening with sweat. Then their movements became faster, intensified. Words were abandoned to primordial breathing. Their gazes locked, the man and woman joined, moving as one, striving, yielding, giving and receiving at the same time. Suddenly, Mildred gushed with new moisture, her nipples hardening, and they slammed together in a physical crescendo of sensual ecstasy, unable to breathe or to move or think, lost forever in the precious instant of perfection….

  Slowly, reality returned and they collapsed against each other, panting, trembling from the glorious aftereffect.

  Still completely engulfed inside the woman, J.B. reached out to stroke her face, and Mildred took his hand to kiss the palm and press it to her cheek. No words for spoken, and none were needed. All that could be said had already been expressed, and for a few precious moments, there was nobody else in the world, no troubles, no danger, only the smiling lovers and the ethereal music of their soft breathing.

  Chapter Seven

  Swimming…Ryan was splashing and swimming in the cool green water of the nameless lake, odd columns of red rock rising upward like the weathered pylons from some ancient temple. The water soaked his clothing and filled his boots, weighing him down like sticky lead, draining his strength, but there was no way to get them while swimming, and he was tiring fast.

  A raging fury filled the man and his exhaustion faded away to be replaced with a hard determination. Not gonna get aced out here in the middle of nowhere! Now move, you nuke-sucking bastard! Get some dirt under your feet and quickly find the convoy before it’s too late! He raged to himself. Some small part of his mind said that it may already be too late. The Trader could be lying on the side of the road chilled by the stickies, or worse, the convoy had taken off and now was miles away. But he ignored that. Ryan had fought bigger men than himself, stronger, meaner, yet always won because he did not quit.

  Unfortunately, there were only sheer rock walls in every direction he turned, unclimbable cliffs with no place to get out of the water larger than a spent brass. Then he caught a glimmer of white and instinctively started paddling in that direction. Could it be a sandy beach? A predark wreck? But as Ryan got closer, he saw there was an adobe ville sitting on a pebbled shore. Oddly, there was no wall surrounding the cluster of buildings, which naturally made him think it was a predark town that had somehow survived skydark. Yet there weren’t any telephone poles sticking out of the ground or cars parked along the curbs that he could see from this angle. Strange.

  His rage was starting to ebb away, his strength fading when Ryan felt the toe of his boot scrape ground under the green water. Barking a short laugh of relief, the man dragged himself out of the lake and flopped bonelessly on the bed of pebbles. The smooth rocks were hot from the sunlight and the soothing warmth seeped into his aching body like a healing balm.

  Catching his breath, Ryan rose from the stony beach and checked his weapons before stiffly walking toward the adobe ville, diligently searching for any signs of muties or coldhearts. He had been caught once with his pants down. Never again.

  In spite of the heavy cloud cover, the day was hot, but there was a cool breeze coming off the desert carrying a faint taste of snow from the nearby mountains, and Ryan gratefully drank in the delicious sensation. The place seemed deserted, and there was nothing dangerous in sight. Yet he was oddly apprehensive. Then it hit him. The buildings were adobe, dried mud bricks, with wooden poles sticking out of the sides to support the red clay tile roofs. But most of them reached four, five, even six stories tall. Which was flat-out impossible for adobe. The mud bricks couldn’t take that much weight unless there was another structure underneath supporting them.

  This was a fake, Ryan realized. Someplace made to look primitive to hide the real buildings. Could it be an underground cache like the Trader used, or something else?

  Warily, the twenty-year-old man drew his Colt .45 autoblaster and worked the slide to chamber a round. The sound of metal on metal was reassuring, the tiny noise seeming to echo along the sterile white streets. That was when he noticed one building that seemed different from the rest. It was a little blurry, as if seen by tired eyes, or through a faint mist. Triple weird.

  Advancing closer, Ryan studied the structure. It was a three-story adobe building, red-tile roof, wooden shutters over the windows and a weathered door with some kind of a glowing symbol set into the lentil. A sort of circle with an oval going across sideways with a large star set off center to the left.

  There was a moment of disorientation and Ryan found himself standing in the middle of a weedy road, the sound of engines growing steadily louder. Then a war wag came over a low hillock, closely followed by several more. He could not believe it. That was the convoy! But…but hadn’t he just been in a lake?

  With a squeal of pneumatic brakes, War Wag One came to a rocking halt and the side door was thrown open wide.

  “Well, nuke me!” The Trader laughed in delight, stepping into view. “Look who we have here!”

  “Never thought I’d see your sorry ass again, Cawdor!” J.B. chuckled, lowering the barrel of his Remington Bolt-action. “Nice to have you back….” The wiry man stopped talking and squinted through his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Behind you!” the Trader bellowed, swinging up a blaster and firing.

  Ducking, Ryan swiveled to see a white mist rise from a depression among the weeds, then a nest of ropy tentacles lashed madly about as a creature pushed through the weeds, the plants turning brown and withering at the passage of the hellish thing.

  Snarling in rage, Ryan grabbed for the Colt at his hip, but found only bare flesh and rumpled blankets. Then
there came the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by running water. With a supreme effort of will, the man opened his eye to see the bedroom of a redoubt. A dream. It was just that damn dream again, he thought.

  “Morning, lover!” Krysty called, sticking her head out of the bathroom. There was a toothbrush in her hand and her smile was foamy. She was dressed only in pants and boots, her new bra hanging off a doorknob. “Nice to see you moving! I was thinking about setting the mattress on fire, but wasn’t sure even that was going to work.”

  “Probably not,” Ryan growled, taking his eye patch from a bedside table and slipping it back into place. “But I know of another way that would have gotten me awake trip-fast,” he said with a gentle smile.

  “Yeah, I thought of that, too.” She chuckled, walking over, her full breasts swaying from the rolling motion of her full hips. Bending over, Krysty planted a long, minty kiss on his lips, then pulled back. “However, I’m starved and want some breakfast. Lots to do today.”

  “Yeah, fair enough,” Ryan admitted, feeling a rumble in his gut from the mere thought of food. Suddenly his desire for the woman was gone, replaced by a different kind of hunger. Throwing off the blankets, Ryan set bare feet on the floor and reached for his pants. There was a time and place for everything. He and Krysty would get some private time later on, but right now, there was work to be done.

  After a hurried breakfast of beef stew, canned bread and black coffee, the companions went directly to work on the wags. They broke only for lunch, and by late afternoon, the job was completed.

  Stepping back from the predark machine, Ryan wiped his sweaty forehead and studied the last weld on the final cage. It looked good, but he had to make sure. Grabbing the hot metal with a gloved hand, the one-eyed man shook it hard, but the gridwork stayed firm and unyielding. Done and done. They were ready to go.

  After ascertaining that the cyborg’s LAV was safe to move, the companions dragged it into the garage and shoved it out of the way in a disused corner. Then J.B. and Jak rigged the egg-smooth vehicle once more, this time adding a coffin full of live brass to the mix. When the wag detonated, the entire garage level would be filled with a maelstrom of shrapnel. To be honest, J.B. didn’t know if that could chill Delphi, but it sure was going to be spectacular! Half of the Armorer wanted to see the staggering blast, but the rest of him wanted to be as far away from the maelstrom as possible.

  When that was accomplished, the companions really got to work. The best of the civilian wags were carefully chosen and completely disassembled. Then everything not actually needed to make the machines move was meticulously removed. Each vehicle was reduced to bare framework, then rebuilt, the engines raised higher than the lake outside and the exhaust pipes altered to go straight up. Next, the companions added a reinforced fuel tank, an entire row of nuke batteries and a single seat for the driver. Then the crude speedster was surrounded by a strong cage made of blaster barrels removed from the stores of Kalashnikovs. The hollow bars were set with care at what the companions sincerely hoped was a couple of inches farther away from the driver than the reach of a hunter.

  There were still a few extra Kalashnikovs remaining, so the companions each took two, and everything else in the armory had been either set with a trap or destroyed by the arc welder.

  “Wish we had the time to add some spikes to the cage,” J.B. said wistfully, running a handkerchief along the sweatband inside his hat. “Or make them stronger. If a weld pops, a bar could come loose, and then we’d be easy pickings.”

  “Not so easy,” Jak replied, checking the load in his Colt Python, then closing the cylinder with a click. Holstering the blaster, he jerked a wrist and a knife appeared in his palm. The freshly sharpened blade gleamed like sin in the moonlight.

  Tucking a toolbox between the row of nuke batteries, the man shrugged. “Yeah, I know,” J.B. hedged uncomfortably, strapping down the sturdy case. “But still…”

  “Don’t worry, John, the doors will do,” Mildred stated, tying a cloth around her hair. Knotting it tight under her chin, she made sure every beaded lock was safely tucked away. If a hunter got a fistful of hair, at the very least it would be incredibly painful as the creature ripped it out by the roots, and at the worst, deadly as it hauled the driver into range of their claws and fangs.

  “Sure as hell hope so,” J.B. said softly. Normally he would have argued to wait for another day or two, so that he could add some refinements, but unfortunately, time was against them. The longer the companions waited, the farther Delphi got from the redoubt. Or worse, the sooner he’d jump to the redoubt, see that his spare parts were gone and attack from within, driving them out to the muties’ waiting arms.

  On impulse, the Armorer touched the implo gren in his munitions bag. One shot. That was all they’d have. One fragging chance to ace the cyborg. Grimly, the man donned his fedora. So he’d bloody make it count if he had to shove the damn thing straight down his throat first.

  Seeing his dark expression, Mildred wanted to offer him some comfort, but continued lashing down her med kit to the metal floor right next to the Kalashnikov. Back in medical school, a wise dorm mate had once compared the male of the species to brewing beer: sometimes they just needed to be left alone. True words.

  Over at the fuel pumps, Doc was holding a gurgling hose over a partially filled bucket. Slowly, the trickle of fuel slowed to a dribble, then stopped completely. All out. Hanging up the nozzle, he lifted the bucket by the handle and carried it to the last speedster. Using a cardboard funnel, the man carefully poured in the few pints of clear fluid.

  Sitting behind the wheel, Krysty turned on the paper for a few moments to check the fuel gauge.

  “How much juice did we achieve, dear lady?” Doc asked, setting the bucket aside and vigorously wiping his hands dry on a clean rag. Shooting a blaster with juice on your skin was a fast way to lose fingers.

  “That put me at a little more than half a tank,” Krysty said, frowning. “You sure there’s no more?”

  “Mayhap in another redoubt…” Doc answered guilelessly.

  She grunted in reply. “Fair enough.” After battling the droid, there had not been much fuel left in the main tank of the redoubt, so the companions split what little there was equally among them. Hopefully, it would be enough to get them through the jungle and far enough away from the hunters. On open ground, the creatures were relatively easy to ace. But in their natural environment, they were death machines. There was no doubt in her mind that the gorilla-like muties would have aced Ryan if they had been allowed to enter the pool. That had been a foolish mistake by Delphi. Many fights were lost because somebody acted stupe, more than anything else.

  Climbing into the lead speedster, Ryan closed the hinged hatch and dogged it shut with a sliding bolt. The crude door was painted a bright yellow, oddly marking its exact position in the resilient cage. Wrapping a cloth around his own hair, Ryan strapped himself in place. Turning on the engine, he checked over the few gauges still attached to the skeletal remains of the dashboard. Oil pressure, temp, power, everything looked good. Then the man revved the engine hard a few times trying to make it stall, but the machine refused to flood or choke.

  The others started their own engines, filling the garage with noise and exhaust fumes, the wall vents struggling to clean the atmosphere until there was a brisk breeze blowing through the level. Each seemed satisfied with his or her speedster, except for J.B., who still wished for something other than the Volvo SUV. It was a good wag, but relatively new and he had hoped for something older.

  The Trader always said that old metal ran better, and it was true. The flashy models produced just before the Big Flash all had electric carburetors, fuel injectors, built-in comps, and the like. So even if they somehow survived the Nuke War without getting fried by the EMP blast of an atomic blast, the fancy engines were a real nuke-in-the-ass to maintain, to his mind. Cruise control, automatic seat adjusters, kill switches, theft alarms, low-jacks, and all of that technodrek had to b
e ripped out before you could even start to rewire the engine to make them run smooth. And there had always been a few speedsters that simply could never be made to work, until a gunner for the Trader had come up with a snazzy little bypass gimmick made from assorted bits of junk. With one of those, the Trader could get any wag to run.

  Removing his glasses to polish them on a sleeve, J.B. grinned at the recollection. Dark night, I haven’t thought about Hoban in years.

  “Everybody hot?” Ryan called, glancing around.

  Hands gave curt waves as the companions did a last check on their speedsters, making sure that all of the food and general supplies were lashed down tight, the rapid-fires loaded, spare ammo tucked away safely, along with the grens. Each person had an AK-47 set in a pressure-clip on the floor, far from the questing hands of the muties, yet readily available to them if the need should arise. But more importantly, every speedster had a rubber mat glued to the floor under the driver.

  “Ready and willing!” Krysty answered, working the clutch and gearshift on what had once been a Nissan. “Just say the word!”

  “Then let’s roll!” Ryan shouted, shifting into gear and starting forward.

  Forming a ragged line, the six speedsters rolled into the exit tunnel, maneuvering easily past the series of antirad zigzags.

  “Half a league, half a league onward!” Doc sang out over the noisy engine of the Saturn SUV. It wasn’t a very powerful wag, but for some reason he felt drawn to the machine. He had no logical idea why.

  “Aw, stuff it, ya old coot!” Mildred shot back. “You know I hate that damn poem!”

  “Hate Tennyson, madam? Impossible!”

  “Mebbe just hate you!” Jak added, trying not to smirk.

  Looking over a shoulder, Doc flashed his oddly perfect teeth. “Now that I believe!”