by James Axler
They stopped instantly and began to shake all over. An older stickie rolled her eyes and dropped dead. Two others fell to their knees, trembling uncontrollably. But four of the larger males and two females yet stood, their almost-human faces staring quizzically into the golden beam of light.
“Yes, hear the message in your heads,” Delphi whispered, touching another control, boosting the signal. “Listen to the song inside your minds, my lost children, my pretty ones.”
There was no reaction from two of the creatures, but the largest male waddled closer and looked down at the loose rocks on the ground. Then he stared back into the throbbing light, and back down again at the rock.
“Yes, that’s it,” Delphi urged gently, raising the power on the cybernetic machine. “Hear the song. Listen to the music. Learn, think! Learn how to think!”
Confused and frightened, the big stickie was breathing with difficulty, odd expressions moving across its slack features.
Satisfied for the moment, Delphi released the inducer and used a different setting to send a soft green glow over the muties. They all began to coo in pleasure, and most of them crouched a little in sublimation to him in a crude bow.
His eyes shimmering, Delphi smiled coldly at the gesture. Yes, they remember me and are learning much faster than anybody could have ever dreamed, not even TITAN or the administrators of Operation Chronos. Bioweps were toys in comparison to the staggering possibilities of the stickies. And soon, my little ones would be ready to claim their heritage.
WHIPPING OUT HIS SWORD, Doc slashed the anchoring rope and the raft floated away from the bank. Crouching, Krysty and Mildred unleashed their rapidfires to rake the stony ledge with 9 mm rounds. Unstoppable, the rats dived into the water and swam after the companions like a boiling wave of hatred. Caught on the lazy current, the lumpy raft drifted into the middle of the river, the sizzling beams of the two nuke lamps stretching far ahead into the subterranean river passage. Bits and pieces of predark material showed below the surface of the running water, and pale roots carpeted the ceiling among the dripping stalactites.
Roots! We’re close to the surface, Krysty realized, firing a short burst from her rapidfire. Certainly no more than a hundred feet underground.
“Little bastards smell blood!” J.B. growled, adding a burst from the Uzi. The machine pistol chattered away as he moved it in a fast figure-eight pattern. Furry bodies exploded, but more replaced them.
“Yeah, our blood!” Ryan added, dropping a clip from the SIG-Sauer and reloading. Krysty’s tooth. Jak’s wound. Fireblast, every hungry thing down here was going to be coming after them soon, Ryan realized. Mebbe even another jelly guardian.
A fat rat jumped from the river onto the raft and Doc whacked off its snarling head with his sword.
“En garde!” he snarled, and stabbed the silvery blade into the water again and again, scoring a chill each time. But there were always more rats to replace the dead.
Moving away from the landslide, Ryan watched as the LAV disappeared from view, and made a battlefield decision. Leaning dangerously over a stack of supplies held in place by netting, Ryan pumped an entire clip into the ledge. Dropping the spent clip into the river, he slammed in another and started shooting again. The rounds were ricocheting off the armored hull of the war wag, throwing off bright sparks. Finally he got the desired results when the damp ground whoofed in flames from the spilled fuel.
“Mother of God, are you insane?” Mildred demanded, working the bolt on her rapidfire to clear a jammed round. The bent cartridge came free and sailed away to bounce off a rat in the water and splash out of sight.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Ryan snapped as the dancing light of the growing conflagration rapidly grew. The rats screamed at the appearance of the fire, and were caught by the flames, their cries becoming high-pitched shrieks painful to hear.
The noise seemed to drive the other rats crazy. Grimly, Jak peppered the ceiling with his MP-5 and Doc slashed at anything that moved in the river while the others quickly reloaded.
Standing amid the stacks, Mildred and J.B. racked the disappearing shoreline with their rapidfires, while Krysty concentrated in the rats already swimming their way. The cacophony was nearly deafening in the narrowing confines of the tunnel, especially when it was punctuated by heady zips from the 9 mm Uzi. The Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun, and the Uzi machine pistols used the same 9 mm ammo, but the Uzi was noticeably louder.
Holstering the SIG-Sauer, Ryan took the S&W M-4000 scattergun from J.B. and racked the pump to blow a hellstorm of double-aught lead at the rats scurrying along the moist earth walls. The blast aced a dozen of the rodents and made a large section of the sodden dirt collapse with a sucking sound, sending out waves of muck that almost swamped the homie raft.
Dropping from above, a sleek rodent landed on a pile of netting and rose on its hind paws as if choosing who to attack first. Thunder erupted as Doc unleashed the Ruger .44 wheelgun, the flame from the barrel reaching out to engulf the body of the animal. Literally blown to pieces, the shattered corpse sprayed outward and fell upon its chittering brethren.
Just then, the natural curve of the river took the chasm out of sight.
“Dark night, it didn’t work!” J.B. cursed, fumbling in his munitions bag.
Pulling out a military canister, the Armorer yanked the pin, ripped off the safety tape, flipped away the handle and threw the bomb as hard as possible. The canister just missed a stalagmite and hit the slick mud just above the water level and stayed there.
“Cover your ears!” Ryan bellowed, placing both of his palms flat to his head. “We’ve got about four seconds—” But that was as far as he got before a harsh yellow light flashed from around the turn, and the whole tunnel shook violently. Nuking hell, that wasn’t the gren. The LAV had finally detonated!
The surface of the water danced, and the rats started screaming as writhing tongues of flame extended through the air. A stalactite dropped from the ceiling and stabbed into the river like an executioner’s ax, just missing the raft by the thickness of a prayer. Rats fell stunned from the walls, and that was when the thrown canister of willie pete cut loose. The charge of white phosphorus blazed with searing light, then rapidly expanded outward in a burning death cloud, and actually seem to force back the titanic explosion from the burning LAV for just a second. Then the irresistible force mastered the immovable object and the companions were buffeted by the chaotic shock waves of the conflicting explosive forces.
Flying rocks and rats pelted the companions on the raft as the nonstop sound of blasters rattled from the unseen wreckage of the war wag as the vast stores of ammo cooked off from the intense heat. A strident blast announced a Claymore had triggered, then four more detonations closely followed in quick succession, the noises overlapping. There followed an earthy groan, and the popcorn-like sound of splintering stone.
“Cave-in!” Ryan warned, not sure that anybody could hear him in the tumultuous bombardment.
Now the one-eyed man feared that he had gone too far in trying to ace the horde of rats as pieces of the ceiling began to drop away—stones, bricks and blobs of mud. Mildred lost her grip on the MP-5, the rapidfire sailing away into the darkness before she grabbed the canvas strap and reclaimed the blaster.
Keyed to battle pitch, Ryan jerked to the side as a brick scraped down along the side of his arm. Doc staggered as another slammed into his backpack, and Jak had his Colt Python knocked from his grasp. The silvery weapon went tumbling toward the water and bounced off a shiny stalagmite. In foolhardy bravado, Jak lurched forward, nearly going off the shaking raft to catch the blaster while it was still in midair. Pulling it back, he exhaled, then frowned and flipped over the blaster to start shooting at the churning river.
A moment later a dead-white alligator rose from the depths and snapped at the teenager even as he fired again and again into the open maw.
“Gator!” Mildred yelled, burping the MP-5 until the clip was empty. Quick-drawing h
er ZKR, she fired directly into the red eyes of the albino monster. Clear fluids erupted from both hits, and the reptile reared backward to roll sideways below the waves.
“Thank Gaia, that was no Frankenstein.” Krysty sighed in relief, referring to a mutie alligator they had once fought. That damned thing had been all but bulletproof.
“Agreed,” Mildred replied, reloading her weapons with trembling hands.
Filthy water heaved up from the other side of the little raft as a second alligator appeared to sink its shockingly white teeth into one of the tires. Ferociously, the gator shook the entire raft. Two of the lashings came free, a net ripped and loose items began cascading overboard. Spinning, Doc added the booming firepower of the Ruger and the LeMat in a double assault, closely followed by Mildred and Krysty stitching the gator with fat 9 mm rounds. Blood showed from every hit, and the reptile bawled loudly as it rolled to get away from the stinging pain and slip back under the waves.
Moving fast, J.B. grabbed the netting and tried to recover a MRE pack, but jerked his hand back just in time as the first gator rose from the murky depths, its ruby-red eyes staring directly into his own filled with malevolent intelligence.
“Triple-damn gators are everywhere!” Ryan growled, thumbing a fresh cartridge into the belly of the scattergun, when something landed on his back and started crawling into his hair. Nuking hell, a rat! Reaching behind, Ryan grabbed the animal biting at his ear and squeezed with every ounce of strength he possessed. There was a horrid squeak, and the furry thing went still, unspeakable fluids dripping between his fingers.
Pulling the corpse loose from the tangle of black hair, Ryan gave the rat an extra crush just to make sure before flinging it away. The pulped form hit the water with a splash. A few moments, other rats converged on the corpse, and Ryan gave them three fast rounds of 12-gauge buckshot from the scattergun.
A scrawny rat landed next to Jak while he was reloading, and he stomped it flat before kicking the rodent overboard. Closing the Colt with a snap, Jak then shot two more rats climbing out of the water onto the raft, and then put four rounds into a pale gator peeking out of the choppy waves. The gator glowed like a rad-blast ghost in the bright beam of the nuke lamp.
Tying the netting closed with a piece of explosive prima cord from his munitions bag, J.B. turned and pulled out an implo gren, only to shove it back in again and try twice more before finding what he wanted. Not a spherical gren, but a pair of squat canisters. Bingo, as Millie liked to say. Priming the two charges, J.B. turned and tossed them both just ahead of the bobbing raft. They sank without a trace.
“What do?” Jak demanded, holstering the empty blaster and swinging around the rapidfire to send a short burst into the mud. Rats moving below the surface squealed and died.
“We’re picking up speed,” J.B. said, counting on his fingers. As he reached the number six, he relaxed slightly. “Anything tossed in front of us, will soon be in our wake, and so…”
Double explosions illuminated the shallow river and the surface roiled to vomit up rats, gators and eel-like snakes in every direction. Buffeted by the blast, the companions were hit by a wave of stinking filth, then an exhalation of stinking hot gas that stole the air from their lungs.
Coughing and hacking, the companions turned away from the growing fireballs in the boiling river, the twin thermite charges expanding and building in force as the nonstop chem reactions actually used the oxygen in the water to fuel the hellstorm of lambent annihilation. Smoke, flame, steam and screaming filled the passageway as impossibly brilliant light increased in brightness until the skin of the companions prickled from the raw energy reflecting off the muddy walls.
“Sweet Jesus!” Mildred cried, but there was no help coming from that direction.
With a groan beyond description, the ceiling gave way and the aft tunnel collapsed, rocks, bricks and boulders plummeting into the water.
Pivoting, Ryan gave a sharp whistle and threw Krysty the scattergun. “Start paddling!” he yelled, pulling the Steyr and turning it over to use the flat stock as a crude oar.
Kneeling, Krysty did the same, and the raft began to move slightly faster.
Spreading outward, the destruction increased in violence, cracks speeding along the earthen walls like dirty lightning bolts. Waves rose and fell around the homie craft as if it were caught in a squall at sea. A swell threw them high enough that the companions had to duck and the stacks of supplies smacked into the irregular ceiling with a resounding crash.
When they dropped back down with a sickening lurch, Ryan held on to the raft for dear life, but the impact broke his grip and he went flying. He landed flat on his back at the edge of the raft, with Doc flailing right alongside. Clawing to stay aboard, the two men watched helplessly as a nuke lamp broke free of its mooring and went over the side. The instant the hot headlight touched the cold water, the glass shattered and the light went out. Then the nuke battery crackled and split apart. Blue sparks danced along the surface of the river, and a score of rats went stiff before rolling over to float belly-up.
Grabbing on to the lashings, Ryan and Doc hauled themselves from the brink and back to safety. The electric discharges continued for another few heartbeats, then died out, leaving only a wretched stink in the damp air.
“Tie that other lamp down tight!” Ryan panted, pointing at the last nuke lamp.
Nodding, Doc got busy with both hands. If the second lamp died, the companions would be trapped underground in total darkness. Entombed alive.
Behind the raft, more rocks and debris poured from the violated ceiling until a mound rose from the river in a newborn island. A white gator waddled into view, bawling its rage at the disturbance, then a boulder squashed it flat against the loose material, driving it below the muddy waves. Unexpectedly, the walls collapsed across the river, joining the island mound into a crude dam. Then a large slab of brickwork came crashing down like a guillotine, nearly closing off the underground passageway.
Unstoppable, the dirty water rushed through the small remaining crevice, the strength of the stream intensified from the contraction. A rat come through and hit the water with a tiny splash. Then a gator tried to pass and got jammed into place, as solid as a cork. With the rushing water spraying out all around it, the reptile bawled with frustration, its deadly jaws snapping at the universe in blind rage.
The rumblings of the destruction slowly began to fade as the companions continued to rush with the current. But the water level was dropping again and their speed was decreasing. While Ryan and Krysty renewed their efforts at paddling, the others reloaded their weps and checked for any damage. Everybody had bites and scratches, but none was serious, and Mildred passed around a double dose of antibio tablets from the Deep Storage Locker. The physician had no way of knowing if the medicine was still potent, but it was the best she had against the dire possibility of infection.
After a short while, the rumbling crashes were left behind and there were only a handful of rats swimming alongside the bobbing raft. In ruthless efficiency, J.B. and Krysty Doc took care of them, and soon the companions were alone in the slowing river.
Hours passed without any incidents, with everybody poised in combat readiness. After a while, Doc and Jak replaced Ryan and Krysty at the paddling, then J.B. and Mildred. In spite of the accidental dam in their wake, the river was still flowing, just noticeably lower than before. In the stark white beam of the last nuke lamp, they could clearly see a scummy green line along the smooth wall where the water level used to reach.
Warily, Ryan noticed there weren’t any stalactites or ’mites anymore, or roots, festooning the ceiling, or mud on the walls. Just a seamless expanse of what seemed to be predark concrete, the material smooth and undamaged.
Pumping up her little flashlight, Mildred played the pale beam around for a better look. “This is a predark sewer,” she stated in relief, then laughed. “By God, I think we’ve been traveling through one all of the time!”
“Good. Sewers alway
s have manholes,” Ryan said, watching the half-burned corpse of a dead rat float past. “Soon as we find a ladder, we can get out of here.”
“And then back to redoubt?” Jak asked hesitantly.
“Mebbe,” Ryan murmured, cracking his knuckles. “If we can find it again.”
Chapter Eleven
Rolling out of the morning fog, the four big men riding the sleek black two-wheelers raised their predark rapidfires and opened fire at the line of wooden carts.
All along the caravan of pilgrims, people cried out in shock and fell over, ghastly wounds pumping red blood. The ragged line of wheeled carts came to an abrupt halt, and the men scrambled for weps while the swayback horses went absolutely still at the sound of blasters. The animals knew the noise always was a herald of death, and the only protection was to not move.
“Son of a bitch!” a sec man cursed, leaping out of a cart, a cloth napkin tied around his neck, his face and mustache smeared with greasy soup. Crouching, the sec man leveled a remade scattergun and cut loose with both barrels.
The thundering barrage of nails and broken glass missed the racing group of Rogan brothers, the makeshift ammo rattling the leaves of the nearby trees.
Braking to a halt, Edward grinned evilly and replied with the 40 mm gren launcher slung under the barrel of the M-16 assault rifle. The fat shell hit the sec man, but the range had been too close for the predark warhead to arm. Instead of exploding, the 40 mm round slammed into the chest of the man like a flying sledgehammer. Ribs shattering, internal organs crushed, blood and viscous fluid sprayed from the mouth of the startled man, and he flew backward to land sprawling in the dirt. The broken form shuddered once, then went still.
“Too close!” Alan snarled, spraying a group of women and children fleeing into the bushes.
“Frag that,” John commanded loudly, pointing a bony finger. “There he is!”
Snarling obscenities, a fat man with a patch on his right eye threw a hatchet at the coldhearts, and Robert barely managed to duck out of the way, the spinning wep clanging off the shiny chassis of his bike.