Deathlands 51-Rat King

by Axler, James

  "Okay, son," he said. "Let's fall back and get into position."

  THE WAGS RATTLED PAST the embers of the beacon fires, past the earthen mounds that circled the ville and along the main track that led into the heart of the ville.

  Murphy frowned as he peered out of the dirt-splattered windshield. The heavy-duty wipers were going at full speed, the washers squirting detergent-laced water onto the glass. But all it did was produce a muddy smear that made it hard for Murphy to keep surveillance and for Bailey to drive.

  "This is weird shit," Murphy whispered to himself.

  "Sir?" Bailey risked a sideways glance at his superior, having to throw the wheel to the left to correct the steering as a result.

  "It's probably nothing," Murphy replied, still peering intently through the mud streaks. "It's just too damn quiet out there."

  "They're hardly trained soldiers like us, sir," Bailey said intently. "Probably all still in their shit pits, sleeping or rutting like the animals they are."

  Murphy grunted. "And we have to use them for stock. Not for long, Bailey, not for long."

  "No, sir!" Bailey breathed, bringing the wag to a halt in the center of the ville. The rough circle that served as the meeting place was deserted, the shacks and huts ringing it dark.

  "I sniff Cawdor in all this," Murphy said quietly. "I just hope they've left the one-eyed bastard for me." He picked up the handset of the radio and opened the channel between the wags. "Listen here, people. I smell trouble, and if you don't, then what the fuck have you been doing all your lives? I don't know what we should expect, but look alive. Dismount and proceed with extreme caution."

  He didn't bother with the call signs, an indication of his own nervousness and wariness. It communicated itself to all the wags, where the military remnants of the old ways gathered their standard-issue Uzis and H&Ks, checking that they were ready for tiring. No one spoke.

  In the lead wag Murphy turned to the four soldiers behind him, who were also in the process of checking their weapons.

  "Let's go, people. Follow me, with extreme caution. Terminate with extreme prejudice. I think we can forget breeding stock this time out, unless we get lucky. Remember, aim for the head. We want those organs undamaged when we gather the harvest. Okay, let's go."

  He spun the sec lock on the wag's door and slid down onto the dirt floor of the circle, keeping watch all around him for any signs of life. There were none, not even the mangy hounds that they raised in this pesthole for watchdogs, and meat when the animal grew old. There was nothing at all.

  Murphy heard the clicking of other sec locks, as the rear door of the wag opened and the four men in back jumped out, fanning out around the wag to keep it guarded—to keep one another guarded. The men in front and back of the other wags followed suit, until all twenty-four men were in the circle, surrounding their wags.

  Still there was silence, as though the very atmosphere of the storm itself was holding its breath, waiting for the first move.

  RYAN SETTLED the Steyr against his shoulder, nestling the butt of the blaster into the hollow. His finger caressed the trigger, while he sighted with his eye, drawing on the driver of the last wag into the circle as he dismounted. He'd thought about taking out Murphy first—he had a score to settle with the sec chief from the redoubt—but decided against it as Murphy might be useful in getting them back into the redoubt.

  The man in his sights looked around slowly, his Uzi leveled, his eyes glittering and alert. It caused Ryan only a ripple of surprise to see that the driver was, in fact, a woman. And a ripple of surprise only because she was larger, heftier and more muscular than any of the men in the detail.

  It might be doubly useful to take her out first. He wanted to chill a driver so that it freed one wag for them to capture. Ryan assumed that the other sec men in the wag wouldn't be able to drive. He'd gathered enough about the redoubt to assume that each handed-down position was specialized and jealously guarded as such. The woman looked stronger than many of the men, so it would be good to get such a formidable opponent out of the way.

  "Keep staring right at me," Ryan whispered to himself, so much under his breath that it only emerged as a sigh. Keep staring, keep giving me a great view of your face, a clean and simple target…"

  Ryan squeezed gently on the trigger, shoulder braced for the recoil, squeezed until…

  Ryan was already on the move when the shot hit home, killing the driver. He tapped the ville dweller next to him on the shoulder to let him know that he was to maintain the position, then jumped off the roof of the shack and headed out along the back alleys of the ville.

  He heard the burst of Uzi fire, and the eerie scream of a man with no tongue as the sec man he had left behind caught the ricochet of Uzi fire. There was no way it would be directly fatal at that range, no way anyone could have got an accurate shot in with a machine pistol. The poor stupe had to have just been unlucky.

  First blood to Murphy's men.

  Ryan had memorized the alleys until he felt that he'd lived in the pesthole for years. The rest of the companions had done the same, preparing themselves for when the attack came.

  It wasn't unfolding as he'd hoped. Murphy's men were grouped in the center of the ville. That much, at least, was according to plan. But they had wags to protect them, which would make attack much more difficult.

  J.B. was waiting for him at the arranged point, by Abner's shack. The Armorer had been assigned the task of covering the far sector of the ville simply because he couldn't guarantee his mobility would be one hundred percent. By dropping back, he protected himself and also decreased the chances of being a liability to the others.

  "Had a look at them?" J.B. asked.

  Ryan nodded. "Four wags, six men per wag. Only twenty-three now, though."

  J.B. chewed his lip. "Wish we had some plas-ex. The wags give them too much cover. We need to draw them out."

  "If you come with me, that's just what I intend to do," Ryan replied, instantly changing plans.

  MURPHY FELT the cold sweat of fear ran down his back. His eyes stung with perspiration and dust, but he didn't dare relax his grip on the blaster for the fraction of a second it would take him to wipe the sweat away.

  After he heard the ricochet of the Uzi fire, and the scream from the direction of the initial shot, there had been nothing. Murphy didn't know that the ville dwellers, hidden away but watchful, had been itching to fire back, stopped only by the knowledge drilled into them by the one-eyed man and his compatriots—the knowledge that a war of attrition would have a better long-term effect than a blind firefight.

  If Murphy had known that, he would have gladly told them it was working just to goad them into some action. He glanced around at his men, who were looking as jumpy and wired as himself. Whatever had been going on here, that bastard Cawdor and his crew of scum had trained the outsiders well. He regretted the fact that he and Ryan were so opposed. Cawdor would be a good man to have on his side when the crunch came with Wallace.

  The quiet was becoming oppressive, the howling wind seeming to grow in volume, distracting as Murphy tried to listen for any sound that could give the ville dwellers away. There was nothing.

  He couldn't hear Jak, silently gliding around the back of the wags, with a leaf-bladed knife in each hand, ready to take out anything that got in his way. He couldn't hear J.B., moving around to inform Mildred, Dean and Krysty of Ryan's change of plan. He couldn't hear the ville dwellers as they moved into their new positions.

  Murphy had never had to deal with the ville when it was prepared for action. He had never been on the defensive, and he didn't like it.

  RYAN COULD FEEL the tension coming off the sec chief. Murphy knew he was giving it off.

  So Ryan felt at ease when he stepped out of the alley, shielded by the back of a shack that faced directly onto the circle. Murphy was to his left, about twenty yards away. There were six sec men between them.

  Ryan carried the Steyr on his right shoulder, an H&K hanging by
its strap from the other shoulder. He stepped into the rear of the shack, shrugging loose the Steyr and leaving it on the dirt floor while he slid the H&K into his hands, preparing to fire. He looked around at the interior of the shack. It was adobe, reinforced by old corrugated-iron sheets.

  He had been counting in his head the whole time. He was up to five hundred. It should have been plenty of time for the ville dwellers to take up their new positions.

  Now it was show time.

  Chapter Twenty

  Mildred was surprised by the silence in which the ville dwellers could move. After receiving word from J.B., she had begun the slow process of quietly informing the armed people under her command of the move around one side of the rough earthen circle. The way in which they had responded was amazing. It was almost as if, realizing that this could be their chance to rid themselves of the menace of the redoubt sec men once and for all, they were determined to be organized and careful.

  Mildred brought up the rear following the last of her people in time to catch a glimpse of Krysty down one alleyway, doing the same with her people.

  The plan itself was simple. J.B. had directed Mildred and Krysty to one side of the circle, at ten o'clock. Jak and Dean led their people to two o'clock. The two new groups formed a pincer movement to close on the sec men when their attention was distracted, and they had been drawn away from the cover of the wags by Ryan.

  Which should be about…

  Now!

  MURPHY HEARD the familiar click of the H&K and located it in a second.

  "There—fire at will," he screamed, opening fire with his own Uzi on the shack. He sprayed it with rapid-fire rounds, moving forward on the run.

  As Ryan had hoped, Murphy's men followed the lead, shaken and rattled by the unexpected response in the ville, and following their commanding officer's orders blindly, as it said in the regs. Not thinking for themselves. Being stupid.

  Breaking cover.

  "FIREBLAST!" Ryan exclaimed, throwing himself to the dirt floor as the H&K shells started to punch holes in the adobe shack, spraying straw and dried mud around him. There was whining and ricochets as some of the fire hit the sheets of corrugated iron that helped support the shack walls. Ryan could only hug the ground and wait out the barrage.

  The walls of the shack were beginning to gape large holes, the mud and straw building up on the floor, covering him. Mud clogged his nose, stung in his eyes, filled his mouth with its bitter and musty taste. Lizard-like, Ryan crawled across the floor, taking the Steyr from where he had left it. In his other hand he still held his H&K—he hadn't even fired a single shot, certainly hadn't expected Murphy to fall for it quite so completely.

  The noise in the shack was intensely loud, vibrating on the corrugated iron as if it were directly on Ryan's eardrums. The shots blurred into one continuous noise, the mixed H&K and Uzi fire concentrated on him and his hiding place—a hiding place that was rapidly becoming a filled grave, as the shack tumbled around him, and onto him. They were still firing high, as though he were standing. But the continuous fall of mud, straw and now the sheets of corrugated iron pried loose from the walls they had been supporting, was threatening to engulf him as he made slow progress toward the back door of the shack.

  KRYSTY WATCHED in mixed horror and awe as the sec men advanced on the shack where she knew Ryan was holed up, spraying it nonstop with blasterfire, pumping ammo into it as if they had an endless supply. There was no letup. When one sec man had to reload, there were at least ten others who were still on rapid fire.

  A bile rose from deep in her gut, burning in her gullet, mixing with the burning that seared her eyes as she blinked back tears. She felt as if she were watching her lover being chilled in cold blood. And she was now helpless to stop it.

  There was no doubt that his plan to draw the sec men away from the wags had worked. Murphy had led the way, striding toward the shack, across the circle of earth. The whole crew of sec men had spread out in a fan formation, pumping fire into the shack, forgetting that they were after only one man and that the whole population of the ville was unaccounted for. All led by Murphy's panic.

  Some of the ville dwellers, blasters at the ready, looked at her. She looked at J.B., standing at a junction in the alleyways of the ville where he could keep visual contact with both herself, Mildred, Jak and Dean.

  The Armorer exchanged rapid glances with both sides, then signaled.

  Krysty nodded at the faces turned to her.

  The ville dwellers, faces flushed with a mixture of fear and excitement, took their cue. A bloodthirsty yell of revenge and bravado rent the air as the ville dwellers charged, those in front firing their blasters at the sec men.

  For a first front-line assault, it was a good result— five sec men hit the ground, chilled or about to catch the last train west, shells from the large-caliber rifles or shot from the scatterguns riddling their bodies.

  Two of the sec men were chilled by their own people. Hearing the yell and the roar of blasterfire from behind them, the men next to them had turned while still firing, cutting their own men to shreds.

  "Spread out… Lay down a suppressing fire… Chill the fuckers!" Murphy yelled, panicking as the unexpected action left his mind racing. He had no idea what to do. Nothing in the manual or regs covered this. Nothing he had ever experienced, or had been passed down from his forebears, had prepared him for such an action.

  He reloaded rapidly, fumbling in his terror as he sped toward the wags, right toward the angry mob of ville dwellers. Looking up, stumbling across the earth, he was sure he saw the albino bastard's white hair and flashing red eyes appear in the crowd.

  "No blasters," Jak yelled, "too close. Hand to hand."

  Leading by example, one of the leaf-bladed knives left his hand, flashing through the hot, tense air and hitting a sec man beneath the eye, chipping the bone beneath the socket and deflecting upward to lodge behind the eyeball and into the brain. The ruptured eyeball spilled down his cheek as he hit the earth.

  Murphy's men didn't eschew the use of blasters. They still tried to fire into the crowds. It was bloody and wasteful. Although several ville dwellers were chilled or injured as the shells ripped into them, the spray of fire also took out three more of their own men.

  "Cease fire! Retreat!"

  Murphy's voice penetrated the noise, a high, keening, hysterical edge to his yell. He was frightened beyond any capacity for tactical thinking. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.

  That was okay by his men. Eleven of the twenty-four were down, nearly half the force wiped out. Two of the drivers were amongst those chilled, which meant that only two of the wags could return.

  Some of the ville dwellers pursued the sec men as they piled into the wags, but most remembered that part of the plan was to let them escape if possible.

  Because they were the way into the redoubt, even though they didn't know it.

  Dean, looking desperately around, caught sight of the ruined shack. "Hot pipe! Dad!" he yelled, running toward it while keeping himself covered.

  RYAN HAD MADE IT almost to the back of the shack, and the safety of the open doorway, when a sheet of corrugated iron had fallen from the wall and pinned him. It didn't have enough force in it to knock him out, but it did slow him down. The rusting metal sheet was thick and heavy, but he was glad that the fates had let it cover him, as he felt the impact of ricochets scream off the metal. The force was still enough to make him wince as he felt one slug punch the metal into his kidneys, a wave of hot nausea sweeping through him.

  He stayed still for only a moment, allowing the wave to sweep over him and die. It subsided, and he made a decisive move. The iron lay heavy on him because he'd been crawling across the room, but it wasn't so heavy that he was unable to move at all. Bracing his hands on the dirt floor, feeling the grit and stone fragments in the dirt bite into his palms, Ryan began to push down, his biceps straining as they took the whole weight of the sheet. His back ached, the muscles pulling hard as the
weight of the iron was lifted on his back. As he gained more height, so the weight spread down the line of his body, the muscles rippling on his torso as they began to relieve his arms and spine of the strain. His thighs lifted off the dirt, his combat boots biting into the earth floor as he pushed up…

  The sheet fell off him with a crash, tumbling to his left. Ryan gasped and fell forward, propelled by the sudden lack of resistance to his straining muscles.

  Gasping for breath, the one-eyed warrior allowed himself no time to recover, as there was none. He had to get out of the shack before he was chilled. Gathering the Steyr and the H&K, Ryan scrambled to his feet and made the few strides to the back doorway of the shack, the hole gaping open.

  He threw himself through it in a forward roll, pitching onto his shoulder and coming up with the H&K in his hand, leveled for any enemy that may be in view.

  "You're covered, Dad," Dean said calmly, his Browning Hi-Power in his fist. "I was worried about you. Murphy's turned tail and is ready to run."

  "Any wags we can use?" Ryan asked, his mind racing to cover all possibilities. If they could get on Murphy's trail in a wag, he could be their ticket into the redoubt without needing the sec men's uniforms.

  "How much of a head start have they got?" he asked.

  The boy grinned. "Nothing yet. Take a look."

  Ryan followed Dean around the alleyway and onto the edge of the center of the ville. Two of the wags lay abandoned, and through the press of bodies he could see the uniforms of dead sec men. The mass of bodies, however, was gathered around the two wags whose engines were whining in high gear, wheels spinning and kicking up earth at the back, front wheels raised from the ground by the press of bodies.

  Ryan grinned. The superior power of the wags would crush the crowd beneath their wheels before too long, but the delay might be just long enough.

  Jak appeared like a wraith from the crowd. "Ryan, good you alive. Two wags we use, but need speed."

  Ryan nodded agreement. "Get the others, split between the two wags. I can drive one, you or J.B. the other. I need to find Abner and Mac, and quick."