Desert Kings

by James Axler

  Startled for only a moment, now all of the guards in the buckboard began hammering at the cannies with muskets and crossbows. Grinning widely, the bikers spread out and opened fire with their handcannons, the staggered volley of smoke temporarily masking the outlanders. But then they reappeared from the roiling fumes, throwing hand axes. The blades spun across the intervening space and slammed into the horses.

  Screaming in pain, the animals reared, throwing several of the slavers to the hard sand, bones audibly breaking as the bodies crazily tumbled along like windblown leaves.

  As the other riders struggled to control their mounts, Keifer knelt to fumble with a butane lighter, then stood and heaved a hand bomb. Instantly, the eighteen-wheeler slammed on the brakes, tires squeaking and screeching, while the sleek two-wheelers quickly separated. The clay jug hit empty sand and violently exploded. Two of the cannies wobbled on their bikes from the concussion, but none of them fell.

  As the bikers sped away, more cannies stood up in the rear of the Mack war wag, and started firing predark handcannons at the slavers. Raising his arm to throw another bomb, Keifer as blown backward with most of his face gone, the hail of blood, brains and teeth splattering across Frederickson. The driver cast a single brief look backward, then crouched and started insanely whipping the horses.

  “Yah! Yah!” the fat slaver bellowed, spittle flying from his mouth. “Faster, ya motherless gleebs, or it’s the stew pot for all of you!” The whip cracked constantly, the pounding of the hooves sounding like distant cannon fire, it was so loud.

  Fumbling to reload his musket, Barton could not believe what had just happened. The cannies had predark blasters? Then why were they throwing axes before? Mebbe to conserve ammo? He’d never seen live brass in his life, only black-powder blasters. So why were they using the brass now, unless…Nuking hell, this wasn’t a jack!

  “Ambush!” Barton shouted, firing his longblaster. “We’re heading into a fragging ambush!”

  His eyes going wide with understanding, Frederickson started pulling the reins to the left, toward the open desert. But the terrified horses didn’t want to obey and kept going forward. Frantically, he whipped the animals, but that only made them slow down in confusion, and the bikers grew closer….

  SPUTTERING AND COUGHING, the engine of the modified Saturn died away completely. Pumping the pedal, Ryan tried to coax the speedster a little farther until coasting to a full halt near the foot of a large hillock. With squealing brakes, the rest of the companions stopped nearby, Jak’s engine sputtering and dying before he came to a complete rest.

  “Guess that’s it.” Krysty sighed, yanking off the handkerchief and running a hand through her hair. “We made it farther that I thought.”

  “At least we left the acid rain behind us,” Ryan grumbled, cracking his knuckles. He knew the storm might still be coming this way, but even on foot they should be long gone before it arrived.

  “Any sign of the hunters?” Mildred asked in concern, yanking out the spent rounds from her blaster and shoving in live brass.

  “Don’t see how,” Ryan said, turning off the power to the cage, then throwing the bolt before unlocking the door.

  Pushing it open with a boot, the big man got out and stretched with obvious relief, then reached into the backpack on the floor to unearth a soup-can-size object. With a snap of his wrist, the predark Navy telescope extended for a full three feet, and Ryan placed his good eye to the end and looked around, carefully studying the distant horizon. The telescope was an amazing little thing they had found in the ruins of the Virginia Beach Naval Station. The unbreakable plastic lens was kind of heavy, but the scope compacted smaller than binocs and was perfect for the one-eyed man.

  Turning slowly, Ryan could only see barren desert. There were some reddish mountains to the north, along with several sand dunes, but nothing else. “Clear,” he announced with some satisfaction, compacting the telescope. “Didn’t think the muties could follow us this far, but it never hurts to make sure.”

  “Caution is the virtue of the wise,” Doc proclaimed, awkwardly exiting the cage.

  “So where are?” Jak asked, shaking his head and running stiff fingers through his hair. Then he paused. What was that smell…rotten eggs? He sniffed again, but this time there was only the dry desert breeze, as dead and sterile as the depths of a forgotten tomb.

  “Looks like Australia,” Mildred said, taking out a canteen to dampen a cloth and wipe down her face. But she knew they could be anywhere. These days, there were swamps in New York, and deserts in Kentucky. How anybody had survived skydark seemed a miracle.

  “Tell you in a sec,” J.B. said, removing the cloth from his hair. Crumpling it into a ball, the man stuffed the rag into his munitions bag, then reached under his shirt to pull out a minisextant. Facing the partly cloudy sky, he found the sun, got the half mirror into focus, then did some fast mental calculations. Tucking the little device away, he pulled a predark map from a pocket and spread it wide.

  “Best as I can tell…we’re in Colorado, near the Utah border, just above the Great Salt,” J.B. announced, folding the plastic-coated sheet again and tucking it carefully away in his munitions bag. “If we had any juice left we could drive to Two-Son ville.” The companions had been there a while back, and helped the local baron deal with a nasty infestation of stickies. It was one of the few villes in the world where they would receive a friendly welcome.

  “Utah,” Ryan whispered, a chill running down his back in spite of the dry heat. Briefly, he touched the leather patch covering his missing eye, remembering the nightmare once more. Then he shook it off. Mildred had said that a dream was just your brain cleaning out the drek of the day, and carried no special meaning.

  “Something wrong?” Jak asked, a knife slipping into his waiting palm. Squinting hard, the teenager glanced over the sandy vista, but there was nothing dangerous in sight. Not even a screamwing moved through the lonely sky.

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” Ryan answered, brushing back his long hair.

  “The Zone,” Doc repeated, his face darkening in somber thought. Clutching the silver lion’s head on his sword stick, he twisted the handle and pulled out a few inches of the Spanish blade hidden inside, then slammed it closed again with a solid click. This was near where he’d last tangled with Delphi, and he wondered if the locale had some special significance to the blackguard.

  The faint crackle of blasterfire reached them, closely followed by the muted roar of predark engines.

  Instantly the companions drew their blasters and waited. Nothing happened. Then the sounds of blasters came again, accompanied by the rotten-egg smell of spent black powder.

  “J.B., with me!” Ryan snapped, drawing the SIG-Sauer and starting up the sandy slope. “Everybody else stay with the supplies!”

  Working the arming bolts on their Kalashnikovs, the companions moved protectively around the speedsters as J.B. sprinted forward to try to catch the other man. He joined Ryan at the crest of the dune. The other man was lying on his belly, head tilted as he listened intently to the soft sounds of battle. Lying down, J.B. crawled closer and concentrated. He distinctly heard predark revolvers and muskets firing, along with some sort of homemade explosive. Mebbe a pipe bomb or Molotov. Then he caught the death scream of a horse.

  “Could be mercies jacking a convoy,” J.B. guessed.

  Saying nothing, Ryan took out the longeyes and crawled over the top of the dune until the other side was visible. Through the longeyes he saw a horse-drawn buckboard being chased by a pack of norms on motorcycles with an odd-looking war wag bringing up the rear. The machine seemed to have wooden planks along the exterior instead of metal armor. Then the man noted the arrows sticking out of the wood, along with the splinter clusters of bullet hits. Off by itself, a second war wag was burning out of control, the occasional crackle of live brass coming from the fire as ammo cooked off from the heat. His guess would be a hit from one of the homemade bombs, but it was only a guess.

 
; “Wood armor,” J.B. muttered softly in disbelief. “Smart. It’d be easier to make than sheet metal and weigh a lot less.”

  “Certainly better than sand bags,” Ryan said grudgingly. “One cut and the sand runs out, leaving you with an empty bag for protection.”

  “True. The stuff wouldn’t stop a gren, but then, what would?” J.B. said, answering his own question. “Nice touch that big eye. Bet a live brass that throws off the aim of most coldhearts.”

  Grunting in agreement, Ryan changed the focus on the longeyes and looked along the rocky valley, finding corpses scattered around, and a smashed two-wheeler burning. A couple of horses were galloping into the distance toward a dry riverbed.

  That was when he spotted the cage full of chilled people in the buckboard. Slavers! Were the folks attacking them sec men from some ville? He studied them closely and frowned at the sight of their pointed teeth, many of them wearing necklaces of dried human fingers and ears.

  “Cannies,” the Deathlands warrior growled in disgust.

  “Which are the cannies?’ J.B. asked, squinting at the fight. “No, wait, I see the cage. Dark night, cannies jacking slavers. Kind of makes you wish for the acid rain to come, doesn’t it?”

  Ryan nodded in reply just as a huge explosion cut off the team of horses pulling the buckboard, and the two merged, the fighting going hand-to-hand. Knives and hatchets were flashing in the bright sun, blood spraying, the cursing of the living mingling with the screams of the dying combining into the low growl of combat.

  “Hell of a fight,” J.B. said with a humorless smile. “This could be just what we need.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that.” Ryan grunted, lowering the longeyes. “Notice those other bikes hidden in the crater?” There was a circle of tumbleweeds placed around the depression to help mask the presence of the machines.

  “I’m not blind yet,” the Armorer replied, squinting through his glasses. “Those must be the reserve troops in case the fight goes bad for the cannies. Too bad there’s only four of them, and six of us, or else we could…” Sucking air through his teeth, he exhaled slowly. “You know, I just got a crazy idea.”

  “Way ahead of you, amigo,” Ryan said, compacting the longeyes and tucking it away to bring up the Steyr SSG-70. “Better move fast, this could be over soon.”

  “I’m already gone,” J.B. answered confidently, crawling backward until he was past the curve of the dune and out of sight.

  Setting the barrel of the longblaster on the grainy sand, Ryan worked the arming bolt and fiddled with the focus on the telescopic sight. A few moments later he spotted a furtive motion near a group of boulders, and saw three of the companions running low across the valley floor toward the blast crater. A glance down the other side of the dune showed Mildred standing guard over the piles of supplies with the scattergun.

  “Here we go,” Ryan whispered out of the corner of his mouth, placing a finger on the trigger of the longblaster and choosing his first target.

  Chapter Nine

  “Burn, ya bastards!” Dragon Webber screamed, wheeling around the buckboard and throwing a Molotov at the horses in the front.

  The sloshing glass bottle hit the wooden harness and burst apart to cover the animals in flames. Screaming in terror, the horses began bucking and kicking, fighting to get away.

  Lashing his whip at the cannie on the bike, Frederickson fell forward off the buckboard and was trampled to death. Then the leather reins snapped and the flaming horses bolted away in blind panic, trying to get away from the orange thing that was eating them alive.

  Out of control, the buckboard wheeled wildly and plowed into a stand of cacti coming to an abrupt halt. The slavers in the rear were thrown around haplessly, Barton going over the side to land in the spiky plants.

  Bleeding from a score of minor wounds, the slaver rose and fired both of his handcannons at the nearest cannie. The double load of lead slammed hard into the woman’s wooden armor, cracking off a piece. Grinning in triumph, Iron Mary Cantone shot back, and the slaver dropped the blasters to clutch his missing groin, hot blood gushing between his fingers as he rolled about screaming.

  Braking to a halt near the buckboard, Dragon swung his ax, ending Barton’s pitiful wails, then climbed off his bike just as another slaver launched a crossbow. The quarrel went straight through his shirt, missing the cannie by an inch and stabbing deep into the patched leather seat.

  Whipping the ax forward, Dragon got the slaver directly in the face, the man falling backward, the fresh quarrel and unloaded crossbow flying from his limp hands.

  Shouting a war chant, Hammer climbed into view from the other side of the buckboard, his ax dripping crimson and a scalp in his hands. Caught in the act of loading his musket, a slaver let go of the ramrod inside the barrel, swung up the weapon and pulled the trigger. The hammer dropped, sparks flew, the pan flashed bright, then the blaster seemed to bulge slightly just before it exploded. Dropping the shattered stock, the slaver reeled around clawing at the ruin of his face, one eye dangling down a cheek by a long string of whitish ganglia. Laughing, Hammer tossed away the scalp, pulled a knife and buried it in the chest of the mutilated slaver.

  Dropping the spent shells from his revolver, Dragon thumbed in fresh brass when he heard a galloping horse. Spinning, he closed the partially loaded cylinder and fired twice from the hip. The slaver on the horse slid off the saddle to land on the sand with a crunch, her neck twisted at an impossible angle.

  Hauling a weeping slaver up by his hair, Hammer slowly slit the struggling man’s throat, then shoved him out of the buckboard.

  “Come on, before the rest of these assholes come back!” Iron Mary snarled, kicking a corpse in the face just to make sure.

  Wasting a second looking for more horseback riders, Dragon then joined the others in the buckboard. Ignoring the barrels of trade goods, they started stripping the bodies of blasters, when one of the supposed corpses rolled over to raise a crossbow. There was a sharp twang as the slaver fired.

  Jerking to the left, Dragon felt the breeze of the arrow pass his cheek. Shitfire, that’d been close!

  Knocking aside the crossbow, Iron Mary jumped on the dying slaver, slashing wildly with a curved knife. He tried to hold her off with bare hands to no avail. Blood flew everywhere, her laughter masking his shrieks of pain until the slaver went still. Panting from the exertion of the chilling, Iron Mary smiled as she raised the blade to lick the blood off the steel.

  “Mighty sweet.” The buxom cannie chuckled, sheathing the knife.

  “We can do that later!” Dragon ordered, rattling the small door of cage. The bars were set too closely together to pull out any of the meat without hacking them apart first. “Now, hurry and find the damn key for that cage! The other slavers will come back soon, and I will not leave all of this behind!”

  “Mebbe it was in the pocket of somebody who fell out of the buckboard,” Hammer squeaked in a childish voice. The muscular cannie stood over six feet tall, but his head was grotesquely small for the gargantuan body, almost as if it had been an afterthought. A necklace of tongues hung around his throat, his exposed back covered with different tattoos of eyes to protect him from muties.

  “So hop out and get it for us, will ya?” Iron Mary smirked, going through the pockets of a bald slaver. Then her head exploded.

  Turning fast, Dragon fired his revolver at the group of slavers galloping toward them on horseback. The slavers shot back with colossal blasters, the lead balls actually humming as they went by the cannies.

  Flipping an ax forward, Hammer got a rider in the leg. The slaver went tumbling off the mount to land with a sickening crunch. Another slaver threw a net at the cannies in the buckboard, but it tangled on the cage. Shooting repeatedly until his wheel gun clicked empty, Dragon dropped behind the wooden side of the buckboard and pulled a blaster from the holster of a corpse. Checking the load, he crouched and fired, the deafening boom of the handcannon heralding a cloud of dark smoke that blocked out the world. Mor
e shots rang out from both groups, a man screamed, then a motorcycle buzzed past the buckboard with Pig swinging an ax coated with slimy human entrails. Behind him a slaver doubled over to clutch at his missing stomach and collapse sideways.

  Dropping the black-powder blaster, Dragon started to reload the predark revolver with his last few rounds. In wild confusion, the bikers and the horsemen circled about each other, firing their blasters nonstop, knives and axes flying about as the two groups battled to the death in the desert valley.

  WITH THEIR BLASTERS held at the ready, the three companions crawled along the sandy ground, edging closer to the ancient blast crater. Stopping a few yards away, J.B. checked the rad counter on his lapel and relaxed when there was only background rad showing. Good. They needed those bikes, but he had no wish to charge into a hot pit to get the Red Cough. Nothing was worth that kind of misery.

  The sounds of battle were still going strong when they reached the clump of tumbleweeds. This close, the companions could see that the desert plants had been lashed together with rope to keep them from rolling away on the breeze. A wise precaution, but having somebody hidden as a guard would have been a smarter move.

  Easing to the weeds opposite the combat, J.B. gently parted them just enough to peek through. Three cannies sat on the big bikes, resting their arms on the handlebars, grisly human trophies dangling from strands of rawhide. Every bit of chrome was covered with dull tape and the glass windshield had been replaced with a wooden board bolted to the frame. They all had throwing axes dangling from their belts, along with revolvers riding in low holsters.

  “How’s it going?” one of the bikers asked, rotating the cylinder of the wheel gun in his hands. The Colt .22 had little stopping power, but the cannie had found an entire box of cartridges in a crashed mil wag. What his grandie called an Apee, or, sometimes, an APC. It was the find of a lifetime, so he was nursing the fifty live brass along for as long as he could.