by James Axler
Shifting the longblaster slung over his shoulder, the man fumbled in a pocket of his loose clothing and found a flat box. Pressing the release, the box snapped open on squeaky hinges and he looked through the predark opera glasses to sweep the landscape and find the oncoming bikes. Under the magnification, he easily recognized the big Harley of the Blue Devils and smiled. Excellent! The bikers always had plenty of slaves to trade for slick, and afterward there would be a feast for those in good favor with the elders. The guard smacked his lips at the thought, displaying sharpened teeth. It had been too long since he had last eaten fresh meat. The hated Trader had chilled several convoys carrying food to the ville, and the cannies had been reduced to eating fish caught in nets for their daily meals. Disgusting. Only muties and slaves consumed animals. The warriors of Hellsgate ate man flesh to make them strong! Anything else was offal to feed to pigs.
The elders had a long-standing feud with the Trader. They wanted him chilled, but couldn’t find the bastard. He wanted them aced, but didn’t care to attack, not with the blasters of Hellsgate commanding the landscape. Nothing on wheels could challenge the ville’s monster blasters.
Placing the opera glasses back into their box, the guard walked past a crackling torch and over to a rope. He tugged hard, and down on the ground a bell rang slow and steady, announcing that outlanders were coming, but that there was no danger.
Releasing the rope, the cannie went to the edge of the tower to see a group of guards holding lanterns gathered in the yard looking up at him expectantly.
“The Devils are coming!” he shouted through cupped hands. “Along the cliff road! Ten bikes! Five miles away!”
A big man dressed in a patchwork cloak waved in response and turned to the others standing nearby.
“So they’re finally here,” Elder Thomas said in a low growl. He wasn’t sure to be glad the long wait was finally over, or nervous that the long-awaited battle was about to begin.
“The day of the Devils,” an old woman announced, her six-fingered hands shaking with excitement. “These are not the men you know. Impostors from your great enemy.”
The slave wore no chains to bind her hands or feet, and she was dressed well in canvas moccasins and a thick woolen dress to keep her old bones warm. But her weathered face was grotesque, her eyes empty holes ringed by layers of scars where white-hot knives had removed the orbs.
“Yes, I have seen it all happen in my mind,” she said, cackling. “Death comes here today.” What the wrinklie didn’t add, was that she saw the destruction of the ville come in the form of a ray of sunshine. What that could possibly mean was beyond her understanding, so she wisely kept quiet, knowing that she risked death by withholding information, but also at displeasing the chief elder.
“So you say, witch,” Thomas growled, fingering the barbed whip coiled at his hip. “You’d best to right this time, or we’ll see if you do a better job without your hands!”
She bowed at that, gushing affirmations until he ordered her silent. Damn talky bitch was more trouble than he liked to tolerate, but the wrinklie was a doomie, a mutie with the gift to see the future. A former elder of the Hellsgate had heard that sight weakened the powers of a doomie, and so he had her eyes removed to increase her value to the ville. Only thing wrong with her predictions was that once she told what was going to happen, that changed the course of events, sometimes drastically. The witch was correct more often than not, and thus couldn’t be harmed. But the pretense of listening to advice from lowly food was repugnant to the elder, and he eagerly looked forward for any excuse to gut the woman and toss her into the stew pot.
The sea breeze whipped over the tall walls of the ville, bending the torches in different directions, making a few of the men flinch as the flames got too close to their faces.
“The question is, do we take the chance?” Elder Getty asked gruffly, leaning heavily on a yellow cane carved from human thigh bones. His long beard knotted into two strands to resemble the forked tongues of a snake, and he tugged on the end of one thoughtfully. “If we chill the wrong people, we could anger the storm gods and rain destruction upon Hellsgate!”
“Praise be the sky gods,” Elder Thomas muttered, pulling a shiny blue .38 Colt from within his shirt and tucking it into his belt with the handle turned out for a fast draw.
Privately, Thomas didn’t believe in any unseen gods that ruled the air. The man had traveled far in his youth, and everywhere he went the sky was a boiling mass of rads and chems. Although, Thomas had to admit, why the acid rains never fell upon Hellsgate was something for which there was no explanation. Some said it was because they were the chosen people, or because they ate man flesh to please the gods, and once a demented slave said it was merely because of wind currents from the ocean. That sacrilege sent the slave to the table of the Blood Feast, and his wails lasted long into the night. Oh, yes, Thomas remembered it fondly. The slave had been a very satisfying meal.
“Four miles!” the guard in the tower shouted, silhouetted by the moonlight.
Elder Getty ceased tugging on his beard. “The choice must be yours,” he ordered, pointing at the younger man with a skeleton thin hand.
“Accepted.” Thomas sneered, pulling his blaster. “Master of the guards, call out your men! Let’s get the shields in place before the Devils arrive.”
A sec man blew a single clear note on a ram’s horn, and guards rapidly spread across the courtyard of the stone ville, shouting orders. The armory was opened wide, weapons passed out to eager hands, along with sealed jars of ammo and even a few grens.
Then handlers appeared from the holding pits, their shaved heads gleaming with oil from the yellow light of the fish oil lanterns as the eunuchs whipped a line of women toward the front gate. Dressed in dirty rags, the slaves were all young, but looked almost as old as the witch, from their poor diet and the daily beatings.
Teams of slaves pushed at the wooden beam holding the front gate closed, the massive slab of wood sliding along a greased notch until out of the way. Now armed sec men pushed the gate open and spread out in a defensive pattern, while the handlers lashed their charges outside the ville. For most of the females, it was the very first time they had seen the other side of the thick stone walls of Hellsgate since they had arrived so very long ago.
Arching in a semicircle around the ville, the wall stood twenty feet tall and was nearly as thick, built entirely of slabs of concrete and pieces of broken warships from the beach. Many times coldhearts and muties had attacked Hellsgate, once even rival slavers from Old Mex, and they always failed to get through the imposing palisade. Even the front gate itself was composed of a framework made of railroad ties, overlaid with slabs of sidewalk concrete. It took twenty strong men to move the gate, and nothing could blast through.
It was a formidable barrier made impregnable by the titanic cannons removed from the Navy ships in the sea, six breechloaders more than twenty feet long with a foot-wide barrel. There had been a larger undamaged cannon in the wreckage down the coast a mile or so, but it was simply too enormous to move by hand and machine. But the six were enough, more than any other ville had in the known world. The cannons weren’t movable, resting in beds of crushed stone and timber. But the elders of the time had been very careful to aim the blasters in different directions to cover the entire arch of the great wall around Hellsgate. The few times the cannons had been used against invaders, there had been no survivors and few body parts remaining to scrape off the cliff to feed the pigs.
“Okay, strip!” the chief eunuch ordered, lashing out with a bullwhip. The knotted end cracked in the air like blasterfire, making the girls flinch. “Remove every stitch! And be quick about it!” Relaying the command, other handlers also cracked their whips, urging the confused slaves on to greater speed.
Hesitantly at first, the women began to remove their simple clothing, many weeping as they obeyed. Watching from the shadows outside the circle of light, the cannie guards leered at the display of flesh, and some
reached out to cup the tender breasts of the women and brutally squeeze until tears of pain replaced those of shame. The eunuchs tried not to scowl in disapproval at the lustful actions, but few succeeded.
Soon the rags were piled on the rocky ground, and the twenty women stood shivering in the cool sea breeze.
“Chain them up!” the chief eunuch ordered, trying to keep a watch on the slaves as well as on the road near the cliff. The muted noise of the motorcycle engines could be faintly heard now, getting steadily louder. Time was short. “And be quick about it!”
Now the eunuchs pushed the sec men aside and got busy shackling the naked girls to iron rings set into the main gate. Some of the smaller women couldn’t reach the ground with their feet, and hung painfully from their wrists, fighting to hold on to the stout chains with their hands or else their own weight could painfully dislocate a shoulder.
Surrounded by armed guards atop the wall, Thomas watched the procedure below and scowled unhappily at the terrible waste. These were farming folks, not gaudy sluts, prime meat for the Blood Feast. But now their only value was that of living armor, their lives protection against the enemies rumbling toward the ville.
When the task was done, the sec men and eunuchs fled back inside Hellsgate and the gate was ponderously closed, the massive locking bar noisily sliding back into position.
“One mile!” the guard shouted, the words carried away by the ever present breeze. “They’re past Liar’s Point!”
In spite of himself, Thomas had to admit the disguise was well done. He never could have told it wasn’t the real Blue Devils without the assistance of the doomie. The gang always had a few new faces among them, and the smoked bodies draped across the rear fenders looked real enough to make him hungry.
Partially covered by the moon shadow of the eastern gun, a girl hanging naked from the cold gate wearily raised her head to see the headlights of the motorcycles turn off the road and head for the ville. Desperately, she mouthed words at the distant machines producing no sounds, and as the bikers charged ever closer, raw hatred filled her bruised body with strength and she finally screamed.
“Please!” she managed to shout, her voice raspy from years of torture. “Kill us!”
As if in response, the bikers braked to a halt along the edge of the cliff and started conferring among themselves, the headlights pulsing to the throb of the big Harley engines.
“They’ve seen the shields, Elder,” a guard said, twisting his hands nervously on an M-16 remake. “What should we do if the witch is wrong? Should we load the eastern cannon? Hate to lose all that food.”
Thomas started to answer the man when something caught his attention. In the glow of the brake lights behind the bikers, he could see the feet of the chained slaves. Shoes. The nuking slaves were wearing shoes! Bullshit. So the doomie was right as usual, and this is a trap of some kind. Probably poison in the bodies. There could be more to this than could be seen. The first elder often said one clever trick from an enemy usually meant two or three more were coming.
“Load the second and third cannons,” Thomas ordered, working the bolt action on his longblaster and sliding in the single round. “And load number four, too, just in case this is a diversion for an attack on the other side.”
“Yes, Elder!” the man said with a salute, and hurried while carrying his torch high, sparks flying on the wind.
Standing alone in the busy courtyard, the doomie turned her wizened head toward the dimly remembered glory of the stars, a worried expression playing across her gnarled features. She felt dizzy, almost sick, her mind a whirlwind of events, the actions of the present too chaotic for her to see what would come to be. Then dimly amid the blood and the madness, she caught a glimpse of a beautiful woman with yellow hair the color of the sun. Golden hair. It was she! A wave of cold took the mutie, and there was no doubt that she had just looked upon the face of death incarnate.
Lifting a box from inside his leather jacket, one of the bikers seemed to be talking to it. After a few minutes, he tucked it away and the Devils began revving their engines, making enough noise to drown out the crashing of the waves on the beach.
“What are they doing?” a sec man muttered, switching the selector lever on the M-16 remake from single shot to full-auto. This was his only clip of ammo for the rapidfire, but this day was why they had been hoarding the lead. All available black powder was reserved for the big guns. The sec man hadn’t personally fired his weapon in a year. There was rarely need. Only muties were insane enough to challenge the big guns.
“Dying,” Thomas growled, wrapping the sling of the huge longblaster around his arm to steady his aim. Aiming for the fuel tank of the big Harley, he then shifted the crosshairs and zeroed on the rider. As he caressed the trigger, the Remington blaster blew flame, and Thomas saw the Devil fall off the machine and roll straight over the cliff and out of sight. If there was a scream before he hit the rocks below, the winds carried it away. Pity.
In response, the rest of the bikers drew rapidfires, while the slaves threw off their chains and cut loose the dressed bodies, pulling out blasters hidden underneath. Crouching low, they started raking the top of the wall with small-arms fire, flattened slugs ricocheting off the metal and concrete. The ville guards returned fire, but their weapons didn’t have the reach.
Then the bikers turned off their headlights and darkness covered the landscape, with only the flashes of their blasterfire showing where the Devils were located.
“Ready the second cannon!” Thomas ordered, working the bolt of the Remington and chambering a fresh predark cartridge. “Blow them off the cliff!”
With the gun crew shouting directions, bald eunuchs lashed a team of slaves to move faster, loading the predark monster with black powder and broken lengths of chain. At this range, the shotgun blast of junk would chew the outlanders into small chunks of flesh, leveling anything along that entire section of the cliff. There was no escaping the guns of Hellsgate.
INSIDE THE DIMLY illuminated interior of War Wag One, the dashboard and control panels cast a rainbow of colors across the tense crew. Then the ceiling speaker crackled alive once more. “Repeat, Trader One, they just aced Denver Joe and have the gate covered with slaves. Main guns are being armed. Repeat, their cannons are being loaded. Do we charge the gate, or run?”
The men and women in the room exchanged tense looks, their hands tight on grips of the machine guns inside the blisters jutting from both sides of the armored transport. Nervously, the seasoned killers chewed gum to stop from fidgeting as smoking was forbidden inside the vehicle because it could damage the delicate comps operating the coms and main L-gun.
“Your call, Chief,” Roberto said, glancing backward from the main weapons panel. His wounded arm now hung in a clean sling, but the man could still use both hands to steer the big rig.
Hunched forward in a chair bolted to the floor, Kate clenched and unclenched her fists on the handles of the periscope and watched the events happening just over the hill. Black dust, how had everything fallen apart so fast? The plan had been for the bikers to mine the gate and blow it open so the war wags could roll into Hellsgate and level the place. The gate, that damn gate! It was the only access into the ville, and even then they had to outmaneuver those sixteen-inch cannons. War Wag One had missiles, but not enough to chew a hole through that bastard wall. The armor plating from the ancient warships was proof to almost any weapon. The gate was the only way in, and now it was covered with living slaves as protection.
With their diesels engines idling, two more armored wags also sat behind the hill, their lights off, exhaust puffing into the salty breeze. The additional four cargo wags were far away from the war wags in case of trouble, but well-armed with small-caliber rapidfires and a single precious flamethrower.
They were ready to give cover fire and help protect the rear from a night creep, but the brunt of any chilling would be done by War Wag One and its heavy weaponry.
Once again, Kate pressed her
face against the cracked cushion lining the ob slit of the periscope. Switching from infrared to Starlite, the front of the ville grew into daylight clarity and she could see the naked women dangling from the chains, shouting. Probably begging for death. Her heart pounded as Kate remembered doing the same in the past, and the old scars on both wrists suddenly itched as her mind heard the whip crack of a herder’s lash across her back and felt the leather cut into virgin flesh.
This was all the fault of that damn pet doomie the elders had! She had to have screwed the deal, and now the whole plan was a mess. All that time spent tracking the Devils to steal their bikes wasted. Lives lost for nothing. They were stopped again by those damn cannons, with the cannies laughing in victory behind the thick wall. Mebbe the cooks already started the stoves for a special meal this night, the slaves soiling themselves in terror as the eunuchs appeared at the top of the holding pits with chains and knives, laughing at the wails of terror from the people below….
Sounding like nukefall, a cannon of the ville discharged, splitting the night, a lance of flame stretching yards ahead of it. A whistling barrage of shrapnel blew across the ground with the bikes catching a couple of minor pieces. Quickly, the bikers moved their vehicles into the path of the cannon, knowing that they would be safe from another salvo for a few minutes until the weapon was reloaded. However, they also knew the dodge wouldn’t work a second time. Because the next volley would be both of the eastern cannons, and from that combined spread there would be no escape.
“Retreat or charge?” The ceiling speaker crackled. “You better answer us right, or we’re leaving!”