by Brian Craig
Without the evidence of his headlights the bikers couldn’t know for sure that he’d turned, but the seasoned fighters among them weren’t fools. The shoal was already thinning again, spreading out across a much broader front. Carl punched the buttons controlling the unfired missile-pods as fast as he could, then brought both hands back to the wheel while Pasco started the last of the functional machine-guns firing. There was no time for aiming—the objective was simply to loose off as much ammunition as possible during the pass, hoping to take out as many of the bikes and riders as chance might permit.
The enemy four-point-twos opened up too, but their fire was far from being concentrated, and Carl didn’t duck so low that he couldn’t look over the jagged rim which the imploded windshield had left in its slot.
Carl went off the road long before they were due to hit the gas-station again, and switched his lights back on momentarily to check the position of the buildings. The lights showed him a couple of dark-riding bikes; he managed to side-swipe one of them, though the other sent half a dozen bullets into the cab which embedded themselves in the doors of the storage-lockers.
A glance at the simulator showed him that all was confusion. He was through the shoal again, and the bikers were scattered—only half were turning as yet, and it would take several minutes for their general to get them organized into any sort of attack-force.
Carl brought the sneaker to a halt in front of the gas-station’s main building, unclipped his belt, and snatched the light machine-gun which Pasco was holding out to him. He kicked the door and dived out, keeping low as he scuttled around the car, then through the empty doorway and into the dark interior of the abandoned building. Pasco, who had been on the more convenient side, had paused to hurl some other objects into the darkness, and Carl was inside ahead of him.
“Cover the door,” said the ex-Op tersely, as he followed. “I’ll check the place out.” One of the objects Pasco had salvaged was a big flashlight, which he now took up and played around the room. The place was a mess, having long ago been pulverized by vandals, but the walls were brick.
Carl remained by the doorway, peering out over the roof of the sneaker, looking northwards. That was the direction from which the bikes would come, if they came precipitately. But they didn’t come; indeed, the distant roar of their engines became gradually more muted as they rallied to their point man, who was still showing his lights. The Atlas Boys sure as hell weren’t intellectual giants, but they knew enough to take a break when they had their enemy cornered.
Carl checked his watch; the illuminated display told him that they had twenty minutes and more to hold out before the monoplane arrived. Even then, the siege wouldn’t be lifted. The plane’s guns might take some of the heat off, but the fight wouldn’t be winnable until the birds arrived with their chainguns and heavy lasers, and their cargo of mercy boys.
There was a sudden chatter of machine-gun fire—not from outside but from the back of the building. Carl tensed anxiously, knowing that it was almost certainly Pasco who had fired, but knowing that almost wasn’t quite good enough. As soon as the gun was quiet he yelled: “Ray!”
“Okay, Carl,” shouted Pasco. “Just a couple of sandrats making free with the facilities. Better get out here—downstairs is too full of holes, but there’s a way up to the roof. Once we’re up we’re in Fort Apache.”
Carl immediately did as he was told. He’d already observed that there were too many empty windows, and too much darkness outside—but the station had a flat roof and might also have a parapet. That was the place to be, in order to fight off bikers.
Pasco’s way up wasn’t exactly a staircase, but that was all to the good. He crouched down so the big man could stand on his back and batter a way through the trapdoor; it only took a few seconds, but Pasco’s weight left him sore anyhow. Pasco had no difficulty pulling himself up and through once the breach was made, and then Carl began handing up to him the weapons and other equipment he’d brought from the sneaker. Apart from the flashlights and the cases of ammunition there was a radio with which he could talk to the pilots when help finally arrived.
The most difficult bit was getting Carl up once everything else had been passed through, but Pasco lay down flat and lowered his long arms. Not many men could have lifted a person of Carl’s size that way—not even the lousy eighteen inches which separated the extremity of Carl’s reach from the edge of the trap—but Pasco was strong enough to do it. Once Carl had a secure grip, though, the Sec Div man left him to scramble up as best he could. Once Carl was through he looked around for something he could use to plug up the hole, but there was nothing solid enough to make a real barricade. It was just one more potential source of danger.
But the flat roof did have a low parapet, at least on three sides, and there was no easy way up the outside of the building.
The bikes were silent now, and there was not a single headlight to be seen. Carl checked his watch again. There was still more than fifteen minutes to go before the plane arrived.
“Must be thirty or thirty-five of them,” said Carl, “unless we got very lucky. They’ll surround us, I guess. Some of the bikes will have twenty millimetre grenade-throwers—a few will have RAGs. We don’t want them to get too close.”
“You take the front and the north side,” said Pasco hoarsely. “I’ll take the back and the south. Shoot at anything that moves. Even in this light they can’t get too close without being heard or seen.”
Carl didn’t dispute the posting. It would mean that he’d be facing the direction from which the enemy would initially be coming, but that was offset by the fact that Pasco had to defend the rear edge of the roof, which had no parapet at all to hide behind. He took up his machine-gun, and Pasco divided up the ammunition. Carl’s share was more than could be comfortably carried, but he knew that it wouldn’t last long once he started blazing away. The four-point-two was a very greedy beast indeed.
He took up a position in the corner, lying prone and resting on his elbows. That allowed him to peep over the parapet readily enough, but he knew that he couldn’t fire properly from that position. He hoped that the bikers would take their time, thinking that they had all night to plan their action, but this hope was quickly dashed. Charlie Atlas knew the score, and knew that Pasco had enough seniority to call out a full squadron of gangbusters.
It was next to impossible to see anything out in the darkness, but the dismounted bikers were wearing heavy boots, and were unable to tread too carefully while carrying the weapons they’d unbolted from their bikes. The sounds of their approach were confusing, but Carl was able to judge that they were already too close for comfort. He came up into a crouch and began firing, drawing the barrel of the gun in a slow, wide arc. The moment he began shooting the muzzle-flashes from his gun gave his position away, so he moved quickly to the right, then jinked back to the left. He would have ducked back down again, but the returning fire gave him the same opportunity to spot his enemies and aim at their positions. He compromised, trying to fix their positions in his memory as he dived for cover, then coming up to the edge of the parapet very briefly to squeeze off a few hopeful bullets before scrambling to a new position and trying again.
He repeated this manoeuvre half a dozen times before the first grenade landed on the roof seven feet away, giving him just time to flatten out before it discharged. He heard Pasco cursing volubly just before the explosion, but the bang was loud enough to leave his ears numb and ringing, so that he heard no more for several seconds—and when his hearing cleared again, Pasco had stopped swearing and was shouting urgent demands into the radio. Carl didn’t dare look at his watch, but he knew that there were still ten minutes to go until the plane could sow a little panic among the enemy ranks.
He moved well away from the corner before popping up again, and this time was able to see the sparking of a machine-gun quite clearly before he aimed his own weapon. He knew that the bikers had little or no cover, and was sure that he had hit the man—but it w
asn’t the machine-gunners who were the dangerous ones. More grenades were hitting the roof now, and though the launchers were almost as unreliable when firing from the ground as they were when firing from a bike there really wasn’t much of a problem for the firers to solve. Anything which landed on the roof was a hit of sorts, and it was only a matter of time before Carl or Pasco was hurt. The grenades weren’t very big, and the bikers probably had no more than four of five each, but they posed one hell of a problem while the minutes were laboriously ticking away.
Carl knew that he had to take a risk. He got as close to the parapet as he could, then came up into a squat and launched off a long, sustained burst of fire, raking the area where—according to logic—the grenadiers should have positioned themselves. Even when the returning fire began to rattle off the parapet he stayed up, and he didn’t flatten himself until the clip ran out. He had to wriggle along snakewise then, in order to get a replacement clip, and it was lucky that he did, because the next grenade had perfect direction even if it didn’t have the range—it landed no more than three feet away from where he’d been only seconds before, and he felt the shockwave plucking at his jacket while he pressed himself into the comforting fabric of the roof. Mercifully, the grenades were designed to send most of their fire and force upwards, on the assumption that they’d be lying in the road and spitting death at enemies riding over them; had they spread their shrapnel out sideways Carl and Pasco would have been more imperilled than they were.
Carl came up again as soon as he had the new clip fitted, and again he took the risk of sending forth a long, sustained burst of fire, only ducking down again when he felt a bullet pluck at his sleeve. The wound bled and stung, but it wasn’t deep and it didn’t stop him holding the juddering gun steady. He’d almost exhausted the clip in the one burst, and he took up another before popping up to empty it. Again he had to wriggle away, and again the grenade which might have killed him arrived a couple of seconds too late to catch him on the spot.
Then it went quiet.
Carl hoped desperately, but couldn’t bring himself to believe, that they’d run out of grenades, or confidence, or both. What he and Pasco needed was for Charlie Atlas—or, even better, some newly-elevated stand-in—to call a long council-of-war, during which there would be much careful argument as to what to do next.
He checked his watch. Seven minutes to go. He couldn’t believe it. It was as if time had decided to put in an extra second in every five, just to prolong his agony.
He looked across the roof, trying to see where Pasco was. It was too dark, and the big man was lying too close to the parapet on the south-facing wall.
“I think their lead men are inside,” he said, keeping his voice as low as he could while still being certain that he was audible. “We have to cover the trapdoor as well as the sand.”
“Just pray they ain’t carrying plastic,” Pasco whispered back, “or one of these walls will be disappearing.”
Carl wasn’t the praying kind, but he knew all too soon how futile a prayer would have been. They were carrying plastic, and it was one of his walls which suddenly developed a bad case of pulverization. The only good thing was that it was not the wall beside whose parapet he was currently lying.
For a moment he thought that the charge had been too small, and that the arch which was left around the hole would hold, but the building was too old and too frail to support that kind of hope. The wall crumbled, and the parapet cracked—and half the roof, which had been weakened already by the grenades, collapsed into the belly of the gas-station.
Carl knew that Pasco must be cursing again, but he couldn’t hear a damn thing.
If the windows had still been glazed the entire station might have come down, but they had let enough of the shockwave out to keep the three walls standing. Unfortunately, more grenades were coming over now, aimed at the parts of the roof which had survived. Carl knew that the bikers couldn’t have many more to fire, but the ones which were coming over were likely to be enough.
There wasn’t time for any tactical discussion. Carl jumped, with the fully-charged four-by-two in his right hand and the last spare clip of ammunition in his left. He knew that he could fire the gun one-handed if he had to, and knew that he had to.
His landing wasn’t soft, but he knew how to roll, and did so, spreading the burden of the bruising so that he didn’t put too much strain on his ankles. Then he came to his feet and ran, firing left and right as he went. The darkness was now his chief ally; once he was away from the building no one would know whether he was friend or foe. That would include Pasco—and the mercy boys, if and when they ever got here—but Pasco was only one while the bikers were many, and when the mercy boys came the remaining Atlas Boys would probably scatter in every direction.
Even so, he drew some fire before he let his own weapon go quiet—and when he finally gave all his attention to the problem of flight he could hear booted feet moving towards him.
He ran, as quickly and as lightly as he could, paying no real heed to the matter of direction. The sounds of pursuit soon dwindled, and he found reason to be earnestly glad that the Atlas boys were such steroid-freaks. Not only did it make them bigger targets; it also gave them the delicacy and discretion of bull elephants. They were slow and they were noisy—he evaded them without undue difficulty. Nor did he fall over anything, until he ran slap bang into the parked bike—and even then he was clever enough not to damage himself more than he was already damaged.
Carl was quick to move around the bike and crouch down. It had been stripped of its weapons, but that didn’t matter. It was cover, of sorts. If and when daylight came it would be as useful as a cotton-plated breastshield, but the mercy boys would be here long before sunrise. He replaced the ammunition-clip in the gun, for the last time. Its barrel was hot enough to scorch his hand.
The grenades were no longer going off, and after one brief flutter of gunfire silence fell again. In the distance, he could hear the engine of the approaching monoplane. Pasco would undoubtedly order it in on a strafing run, but that would have only psychological value—the Atlas Boys would know as well as he did that the serious heat wouldn’t come down until the birds caught up, and if their arithmetic was serviceable they could work out that there would be a gap of at least twenty minutes before that happened.
Carl wondered whether he ought to get aboard the sickle and try to ride out, but he decided against it. The machine probably had a smart sensor anyhow, and wouldn’t start for anyone but its owner. He was as safe here as he would be further away, and he didn’t want to be lost in the desert when the rescue squad arrived. He stayed where he was, and listened to the beating of his heart.
The plane came in for its first strafing run, and sprayed a lot of fire around. It was impressive enough, in its way, but Carl doubted whether it had hit anything. In fact, from his own personal point of view the main effect of the run was to cover up the sounds of someone approaching the bike. By the time Carl was able to realize that he had company the company was almost on top of him—and it was very bad company indeed.
Even by the feeble light of the stars, Carl could see the outline of one of the most massive of the Atlas Boys—and although he could not see the others, he knew that the giant was not alone.
He came up from hiding without delay, and blazed away as liberally as his weapon would allow, throwing himself sideways as he did so in order to avoid being caught by any reflex-launched return fire. He fired his last shots from the ground, behind the bike’s rear tyre.
There must have been three of them, in all. The man-mountain whose shadow had eclipsed the stars caught at least a dozen bullets, and he went down without a peep—but he was so big and so slow to fall that he must have shielded his buddies, because both of them were able to fire back. The bike, fortunately, had a heavily-armoured fuel tank that wasn’t about to blow up because of a mild bombardment by four-by-twos, but the machine fell over, and its exhaust pipe trapped Carl’s foot, immobilizing him as
he tried to squirm further away.
As the gunfire ceased, Carl thought for one delirious moment that he had done enough. It seemed inconceivable that either of the giants had survived the withering hail of his fire—but then a shadow descended upon him out of the sky.
Unable to roll out of the way he could only tense himself against the crushing weight. Unfortunately, it transpired that tensing himself was not enough.
The Atlas Boy collapsed on top of him. He felt that he had been stomped by a dinosaur, and the wind was knocked out of him so comprehensively that although he fought hard during a second or two of blinding dizziness he simply could not slay conscious.
He knew that it had to be an auditory hallucination, but he thought he heard Pasco’s voice say: “Aw, shit!” just as he passed out.
5
Rico Andriano was not a coward.
Indeed, had he been asked, Rico would have asserted that he had not even the capacity for cowardice. He liked to think of himself as a man utterly without feelings, as untouched by fear as he was by love. He would have admitted that he valued his life, to be sure, but would have argued that he did so in a fashion that was entirely cerebral and entirely rational. He sincerely believed that he had no instinct for survival whose recklessness might betray him, but was instead possessed of a cold determination to survive. His regard for the family, he would have said, was equally level-headed; he did not love his father, his mother or his Don, but he knew that there was no life or future outside society for any being which could be considered human.
These various assertions and arguments were mostly bullshit, but they had a kernel of truth in them. Rico was not a coward; and he was not a man to back down in the face of danger. Nevertheless, while he shielded his nightsights from the glare of Kid Zero’s flashlight, and without even bothering to glance sideways at Lady Venom, he unhesitatingly threw away his gun and said, “Take it easy, Kid.”