Desert Kings

by James Axler

  Going oddly still, Lily Rogan turned and walked stiffly into the darkness and out of sight.

  Damn, he had hoped for a better reaction than that! Oh, well.

  “They’re all aced,” Franklin said softly, gazing upward at the cold and distant stars. “Or will be.” Just for a moment, there seemed to be a subtle movement in the heavens, and then it was gone, lost in the infinite black.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Night had conquered the rocky vista of the Nevada plains, and the four wags of the convoy were parked in a rough square around a pair of crackling campfires.

  A dozen men were sitting around the double fires, stitching holes in their clothing, smoking predark cheroots, sipping real coffee and sharpening knives. Staying along the shadowy edge of the firelight, a pair of troopers patrolled the campsite, their arms cradling shiny new BAR longblasters. A harmonica played softly, and somewhere in the rocky plateaus, a hellhound snarled defiantly at the moon, the response of the mutie triggered by its distant canine ancestors.

  The double fires had been Delphi’s idea, to prevent a coldheart, or mutie, from extinguishing one fire and leaving his man to fight in darkness. Oh sure, the wags had headlights, but first someone had to find the wags and get his ass inside.

  “Well, time to stretch my legs before sleep,” Delphi said, pretending to yawn and stretch. “Be back in a tick.”

  The music stopped and several of the troopers looked up from whatever they were doing.

  “Want some company, Chief?” a bony norm man asked, lowering a harmonica. “Never wise to wander about alone in these parts.”

  “Hell, sir, nobody should ever go anywhere alone,” Cotton Davenport added grimly, working the freshly oiled bolt on her BAR.

  In dark harmony, a hellhound sounded its battle cry at the cold and forbidding sky once more.

  “Nothing out there I can’t handle,” the cyborg stated confidently.

  Reluctantly, Cotton grunted at that, knowing it to be true. The chief was lightning-fast with his handcannons. “Ten minutes, and then I come get you,” she replied gruffly. “Don’t care if you’re in the middle of a dump, or choking the chicken. Don’t want you out of my sight for too long, sir.”

  Bemused, the cyborg smiled tolerantly at the woman. Her devotion to his welfare was as touching as it was misguided. When it became necessary to terminate this group, he would make her death as painless as possible. “Give me an hour,” he said, hitching his gunbelt.

  “Nope,” Cotton said, shaking her head. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Twenty.”

  She paused, then shrugged. “Done.”

  “Done,” Delphi replied with a half smile, and rose to walk away into the night.

  “Him and his crazy walks….” A trooper chuckled, spooning more beans from a tin can.

  “Aw, shut your piehole and go check on Jeffery on the lead wag,” Cotton growled, returning to her military ablutions. The receiver of the longblaster was sticking slightly for no reason that she could discover, and it was making her ornery.

  Sensing this was not the time or place to challenge the woman, the trooper stood and headed for the nearest war wag, still regularly eating the predark baked beans.

  As soon as the cyborg was out of the light, Delphi activated his force field and breathed a sigh of relief as the soft glow of the immaterial barrier permeated the darkness. He never really relaxed until he was safe behind the impenetrable force barrier or inside a redoubt. There were just too many things in the world these days whose sole purpose in life seemed to be hilling and eating people.

  I helped create a few, but not this many! Delphi denoted sourly. It was almost as if Nature was responding to the Nuke War in a concentrated effort to remove the annoying species that had so damaged the world.

  When he was far enough away from the enclave of war wags, Delphi illuminated his eyes and swept the darkness for signs of stickies. He had heard a soft hooting earlier that evening, and knew they had to be somewhere in the area. Not close enough to be a threat to his wags and troopers, but possibly near enough to reach in a short walk.

  A cold wind blew over the barren landscape carrying the smell of ancient concrete dust, which meant a ruin of some kind was relatively close, so he headed in that direction. Soon enough, he found the tattered remains of a truck stop, the restaurant and pumps reduced to only jagged teeth rising from the hard crystalline ground, the soil obviously fused solid from a nuke hit.

  Wolfweed grew thick in the area, along with some more of the trip-cursed millet. Staying alert for any solies in the area, Delphi inspected the thicket of weeds and was delighted to find a score of stickies sleeping in a pile at the bottom of a rad crater. His built-in Geiger counter registered lethal radiation, but that meant nothing to his shield, and the cyborg walked confidently through the weeds to pause at the edge of the depression.

  The force field kept his smell from the muties, but the soft sound of his shoes on the fused ground caused them to stir, and one big stickie raised her misshapen head to sleepily glance around and then stare directly at the unexpected sight of a juicy two-legs standing right alongside their crib. Food!

  Standing upright with surprising speed, the hulking female raised both of her sucker-covered hands and inhaled deeply to sound a warning hoot, when Delphi raised a hand and played a colorful beam of light over the amassed muties. In an instant, all of them were awake. Several of the young scurried away in terror, then all of the adults formed a defensive wall between the children and this strange two-legs. One male hooted softly, more in puzzlement than anything else, his mind swirling with bizarre images and ideas.

  Taking heart at that, Delphi doubled the power to the Educator, then tripled it. Come on, my broken children, learn, think…learn to think! Put up a rock, pick up that broken truck axle…raise it as a club. See your enemies fall under the blows! Think, my children! Learn to think!

  One of the stickies started to reach for the axle shaft, then shuddered and dropped to the ground, a thick fluid running freely from his ears and mouth. Then the big female soiled herself, and all of the children began to bleed profusely from their horribly human-looking eyes.

  Infuriated at the reactions, the cyborg viciously increased the power of the Educator to the maximum level. Wildly going into convulsions, the family of stickies toppled to the radioactive ground, frothing and twitching.

  When the bodies stopped bleeding, Delphi turned off the Educator and fanned the pile of corpses with his laser, quickly reducing them into charred ashes and blackened bones. Failure. Another failure! But then, stickies were hardly even self-aware enough to be called sapient, much less sentient.

  Turning away from the slain muties, Delphi strode purposefully back to the campsite. Clearly, these creatures had simply been too crude to accept the advance training. Perhaps I pushed them too hard? he wondered. Or too fast? But it really made little difference. He had been able to fix everything that had been damaged by that grenade blast from Tanner, but apparently not the Educator. That sophisticated piece of equipment was beyond any of his makeshift repairs. Such a pity. It seemed to kill the stickies now, instead of awakening their minds.

  A subtle motion in the gloomy shadows made Delphi drop into a combat stance, his needler and crystal rod sweeping for targets. But then Cotton stepped into view from behind a boulder, bracketed by two other troopers holding longblasters and oil lanterns.

  “You’re early,” Delphi said, holstering his weapons.

  “Heard a hoot and thought there might be stickies around,” Cotton replied, studying the darkness as if searching for any hidden dangers. “Guess I was wrong.”

  “No, there were stickies,” Delphi grunted, mentally engaging the internal lock on the Educator inside his palm. “Just not anymore.”

  “Fair enough,” Cotton said in acknowledgment.

  However, as the group moved around the boulder and into the twin nimbi of the crackling firelight, it occurred to Delphi that the Educator now made a spl
endid torture device. Adjusted to a very low setting, a person might last for hours, maybe even days, writhing in hideous torment under the probing beam of the malfunctioning Educator.

  It would take me years to extract a fitting revenge from Tanner, the cyborg thought hatefully. So I will make sure his friends die first, crawling and begging for mercy, until I finally turn the beam upon him!

  Delphi felt himself actually smile. Days of screaming, yes, that would be sufficient. Now all he had to do was find his nemesis….

  IT SOON BECOME APPARENT to Ryan and the others that it was a wise decision to leave the mountaintop ville as soon as possible. The work on the war wag should have taken them only a few hours, but it was nearly a week before it was ready to roll, and for good reasons.

  Although Baron Levine had kept his word and food was delivered to them every day, whenever he wasn’t around it smelled odd, and Mildred was soon convinced that the cooking had been liberally seasoned with feces. As for everything else—machine grease, replacement planks, rawhide strips, shine—the local civies started asking for more and more jack until the prices were astronomical. More than once blasters were drawn, and the sec men had to intervene—reluctantly. No chillings had occurred, but it was only a matter of time. The companions had done nothing to cause the passing of the little doomie Haviva, but apparently she had been beloved by everybody from the baron down to the gaudy sluts, and now the whole ville blamed them for her boarding the last train west. The onus for the passing was lashed around them like an infernal millstone.

  When their food supplies began to run low, Jak went out hunting and brought back wild rabbits, along with every pocket jammed full of shiny green leaves. Mildred and Doc recognized the plants as kudzu, a common weed in their time that grew faster than ivy and was harder to kill than horseradish. Yet the albino hunter insisted the leaves were not only edible, but also tasty. After an experimental nibble or two, the rest of the companions had to agree with that assessment. The kudzu leaves were as sweet as cactus fruit, and left a pleasant aftertaste in the mouth. After that, somebody always went along with Jak to help carry back extra foliage. Soon the rear of the war wag was well stocked with smoked meat, kudzu, wild carrots, tree crabs, acorns, pine nuts and barrels of spring water that had been carefully boiled under Mildred’s harsh scrutiny, just in case the locals had gotten to the bubbling spring outside the ville walls before the companions had discovered its location.

  Ryan’s rad counter proclaimed the water clean of radiation, but that was the least of the companions’ worries. Every night, something large would patrol around the ville, never coming close, but always there. The sec men on the wall were unable to find the thing in the torchlight, and even alcohol lanterns augmented with pieces of broken mirrors were insufficient to the task. Norm, mutie or machine, there was no way to tell, but the presence of the midnight visitor aced any notions of slipping away in the darkness. When the companions left the ville, it would have to be during broad daylight. That meant the war wag had to be in shape for combat, which meant more time on repairs, and hunting, and so on.

  But finally everything was ready, and the companions drove the heavily patched wag out of the barn and through the beautifully carved gates of the ville. The scowling sec men watched them depart with clear pleasure, and several of the guards raised their blasters slightly, but they withheld firing, more frightened by the devastating power of the predark Kalashnikovs than the anger of their baron. The hatred of the locals was almost palpable.

  “So long, Shangri-La,” Mildred said with a sigh, watching the gates close. A moment later, they loudly locked, and then locked again. Exodus in stereo. “Aside from the people, that was a nice ville. The baron was nice, the water clean, plenty of game in the woods and no slave pens.”

  “Seen better,” Jak drawled, tucking a leaf of kudzu into his cheek as if it was a chaw of tobacco.

  Trundling down the sloping hill with Ryan at the wheel, J.B. in the passenger seat, the big rig jounced along the forest trail and back onto the predark highway. Every indication of the attempted jacking and fight was gone; even the thick carpeting of pine needles had been removed, exposing the jigsaw of cracked asphalt to the cruel light of day.

  “I was most sure that the sec men were going to try to chill us once we were out of sight of the ville,” Doc rumbled, easing down the hammer of his LeMat and holstering the blaster. “I am extremely pleased to be proved wrong.”

  “Why waste powder on outlanders already leaving?” Krysty stated, her long crimson hair flexing in the morning breeze.

  “Too true, madam. Waste not, want not. We are as aced to them now as we could ever be.”

  Heading west once more, Ryan slowed the Mack and kept a sharp watch on the bushes growing along the roadway. A loaded AK-47 rested on the patched bench between the men, along with a box full of grens. The Molotovs were gone, every precious drop poured into the fuel tanks of the lumbering Cyclops. The big diesel was running smoothly again, but it consumed juice the way a rapid-fire did brass.

  “Anything?” Ryan asked tersely, steering with one hand, the other tight on the gearshift. The transmission fluid was a mix of different types of oil and a few predark chems that J.B. added to prevent frothing. It worked, but shifting gears required a lot of muscle.

  “No, we’re clear,” J.B. answered, shifting his glasses to a more comfortable position on his nose. “Guess they really are going to let us leave alive.”

  “Wise move,” Ryan stated, going to a higher gear to accelerate the wag. The repaired engine roared with power and black smoke steadily chugged from the overhead exhaust pipes.

  The forest was cool and thick with shadows that morning, the cloud coverings in the sky a brilliant orange that almost resembled early daylight. Soon, the dried brown pine needles covered the road once more, and Ryan eased up on the engine a little, deciding that traction was more important than speed. Doc often recited some old poem about such things, but the man could never remember it correctly. Something about being soft?

  “Monkeys,” J.B. muttered, gazing out the open window. “Something to do with a monkey.”

  “Softly, softly, catchee monkey.” Ryan chuckled. “Thanks, that was preying on my mind.”

  “No prob.” J.B. chuckled. “I…” He stopped to frown, then sniffed hard. “Do you smell smoke?”

  Quickly, Ryan looked over the dashboard, but the few remaining gauges that were still working seemed to be fine. “No trouble with the engine. Mebbe we’re just cooking some grease and oil off the engine block.” Then he caught a whiff, dark and pungent, almost sweet. Wood smoke!

  Suddenly a huge crowd of animals surged across the highway—deer, wolves and a cougar—all moving fast. The sight was unnerving. Mortal adversaries like that would only travel together to escape from a greater danger—earthquakes, floods or their worst enemy, fire.

  Just then, something thumped twice on the roof of the cab. “Get this shitbox rolling!” Krysty yelled from the rear of the war wag. “The forest is on fire!”

  “Where?” J.B. shouted backward. “Behind or ahead?”

  “To the sides. Both sides!”

  Fireblast! Forcing himself not to look, Ryan concentrated on driving and shoved the stick to the highest gear while tromping on the floor pedal. The big engine responded and the war wag surged forward with renewed speed.

  “Think the locals did this?” J.B. demanded, tightening his grip on the Kalashnikov. Billowing plumes of dark smoke were starting to come through the trees, slowly turning day into twilight.

  “Nobody who lives in a wooden ville would set the bastard forest on fire,” Ryan admonished. “This must be just a coincidence. A lightning strike or something.”

  The Armorer said nothing, but the expression on his face clearly stated his opinion of the matter.

  “Yeah, I know,” Ryan muttered, hunching his shoulders. The war wag was still accelerating, but the engine gauges were starting to creep upward again, too.

  More anima
ls charged across the highway in front of the Mack, and a flock of birds and screamwings flew overhead cawing, tweeting and hooting their terror. Taking a gentle curve down the side of the mountain, Ryan ran straight into a river of smoke, the dense band of gray as impenetrable as any fog. Cursing bitterly, the one-eyed man turned on the headlights and twin halogen beams stabbed outward to pierce the swirling fumes and dimly illuminate the road surface. Mentally, the man praised J.B. for installing those nukelamps under the hood. The beams were a hundred times brighter than regular wag headlights, and didn’t drain the batteries. Without them, he’d be stone blind right now, lost in the murky gloom.

  The smell of burning pine was getting stronger, and the companions started coughing. Pulling out handkerchiefs, they quickly wet the cloth with their canteens and tied the crude masks over their faces. That eased the coughing, but their eyes still stung from the pungent wood smoke.

  Shrieking in agony, something dashed out of the burning bushes covered with writhing flames. The companions tracked the griz bear with their weapons, but, blind from the searing agony, the bear charged right back into the forest and disappeared in the roiling smoke.

  Slowly, the companions were becoming aware of a faint noise, a low crackling that steadily grew in volume. Waves of heat were coming from behind them and to the right, and there were brief flashes of reddish light dancing between the densely packed trees. The fire was almost upon them.

  Another mob of wild animals raced across the predark highway, squirrels, conies and a host of other small animals. Then something large came out of the smoke to slam hard into the wag, cracking a headlight. Ryan savagely twisted the wheel to avoid the blurred shape, and the startled face of a bull moose flashed past J.B.’s window.

  The Armorer burst into laughter at the sight, then blinked and fired off a burst from the AK-47.

  “What’d ya see?” Ryan demanded, trying to look to the right and watch the road at the same time. Just then the wag gave a thump as it rolled over something small and not quite fast enough to escape both the fire and the speeding war wag.