Hellbenders

by James Axler

  Chapter Twenty

  “Man the guns!” Correll yelled. “We’ve got them chilled and buried—they can’t get out!” He whooped joyously as he brought the wag out of its dangerous skid-cum-turn, and the two airborne wheels hit the desert floor with a bone-jarring thud. He slammed the wag into the highest gear and ground his foot into the metal floor, hunching over the wheel as much as the metal box on his lap would allow him.

  Ryan, Krysty and the other Hellbenders in the lead wag slid from their seats, balance still a little uncertain from the erratic passage of the wag, and positioned themselves behind the machine blasters that were mounted inside the wag, with the barrels protruding through engineered holes in the sides. Because these had been made and mounted before skydark, they were the latest in military sec tech from before the nukecaust, and had cameras and infrared mounts that relayed a view of the outside world, and the target area, to whoever was seated at the end of the mount.

  Ryan settled his good orb against the sight, adjusting to the slight variation in quality between the image on the small eye screen and the reality around him. The age of the equipment was beginning to tell, even though Correll’s people had maintained all the wags as best they could, and the image that settled on his retina was slightly flat and two-dimensional, with a faded quality that wouldn’t help anyone to differentiate between wags and clouds of dust in the chaos outside. The broken digital image pixilated the outside world into little more than a series of shadows. But those shadows were enough.

  “We’re closing,” Correll yelled. “Get ready to blast the bastards!”

  Ryan shifted forward in his seat, his eye jammed up against the sight, the stock of the blaster hard against the cords of muscle on his shoulder. The rear wag of the Charity convoy came into view, and he was aware of moving shadows along the roof. Above the roar of the wag engine, a chatter of blasterfire could just about be discerned, and there was the high-pitched scream of tortured metal as the shells from the Charity sec men’s blasters hit the outside of the armored wag and ricocheted off. Before he had the chance to squeeze the trigger and pick off some of the shadows, Correll had piloted the wag past at speed, and they were headed for the lead. It was obvious that Correll wanted the lead wag and the life of Baron Al Jourgensen, the man he had referred to as “Red, the son of a gaudy whore.” Behind them, he heard the throatier roar of a machine blaster from the next wag, as it attempted to take out the wag that had fired on them.

  Beside Ryan, Krysty squeezed off a few shots to test her machine blaster, aiming at shadows that moved across the top of a wag they passed. The heavy-caliber slugs tore into the shadows, leaving red tracers in their wake, some of the shadows disappearing into the sandstorm around as the red lines ripped through them, throwing them off the wag.

  “Lead wag coming up,” Correll yelled over his shoulder without glancing behind him, making sure that the personnel of his wag were aware of his priority.

  BEHIND HIS CONVOY LEADER, Lonnie pushed his wag to the max, keeping hard on Correll as they roared through the narrow gap that formed the entrance to the arena. It was narrow, and filled with the swirling dust thrown up by the storm, but it was nothing compared to the channel they had just left. In the wake left by the leading wag, Lonnie charted a course into the arena with ease.

  “Heads up, we’re about to hit it,” he rapped out sharply as the crew behind him took up positions.

  This wag was also a preDark military vehicle, but hadn’t been designed as an armored wag in the same way as the one piloted by the Hellbenders’ leader. This was an armored personnel carrier in which the Hellbenders had cut holes large enough for heavy-duty blasters to be placed. The work would have taken a long time, as the armoring of the wag was strong, but then the group had been waiting for a long time, and this was the reward for their patience. The holes were small, but large enough for the barrel of a blaster and also for the sight to gain some view of the area around the barrel. It was a small circumference, but with wags in front and behind, the important thing was to focus on what you could see, and leave the rest to your compatriots.

  It was none too secure to try to sight carefully, as the seats in the wag hadn’t been made with the idea of trying to fire from the sides. They were made purely for transport, and so were facing the wrong way, and at the wrong angles for the crew with the blasters to sit and sight their targets comfortably. Instead, Jak, Dean and Catherine were lined up down one side of the vehicle, balancing and trying to compensate for the erratic motion of the wag as it rode roughshod over the even rougher terrain. The blasters down this side of the vehicle were all AK-47s, the Kalashnikovs grouped together as part of the overall plan to allow for a smoother transition of ammo when needed. In the same way, the far side of the wag, where Danny, Doc and the other crew stood idle, waiting for the wag to turn on the return run before they sighted and began their assault, were all equipped with Heckler & Kochs, the pool of ammo for these blasters being grouped on their side.

  In this sense, the planning had been superb; however, there had been no way that anyone could have allowed for the sandstorm that was now raging outside. The clouds of dust raised by the motion of the wags would have made things difficult enough, but the roughly hacked holes for the blaster barrels and sights, although tight as they could have been made, still allowed a little room for the howling wind outside to drive sand through the gaps and into the interior of the wag. It wasn’t much, but for those who stood by the blasters, trying to get a sight on the enemy, it was enough.

  “Hot pipe! This’ll take my eyeball out before I have a chance to pick off anyone out there,” Dean shouted as he took his eye away from the sight to try to clear it of the stinging grit that was misting his vision.

  “Aim for dark, fire quick, then clean eyes,” Jak snapped, ignoring the stinging in his own fiery red eyes in order to pull cleanly on the trigger of the AK-47 and take out some of the sec firing at them, slamming a couple of slugs into the side of a wag, whose armoring and protection was minimal, for good measure.

  “White boy’s right,” Catherine said between shots of her own. “Ignore the pain. It’s much more satisfying to see those bastards go down,” she added with a grin as one of her shots took out a sec man, his head splitting like a ripe melon, visible even through the dust storm. The blood and brain from his exploding skull was absorbed into the swirling dust around as his body slumped, the impact of the slug absorbed almost totally above neck level—where there was nothing now left to indicate he had ever had a head.

  The grin on the blonde’s face turned to a grimace of pain as a flurry of shots from the opposing sec ripped along the side of the wag. The vast majority of the shells ricocheted harmlessly off the wag’s armor, but Catherine had drawn the short straw when it came to luck, and was about to become the first casualty among the Hellbenders.

  Two slugs from the sec men squeezed through the gap around the barrel and sight of the AK-47, and if she hadn’t turned to reply to Jak’s comments, they may have just wounded her in the upper arm or missed altogether. But that fraction that she moved to speak, pushing her head away from and higher than the sight on her blaster put her in direct line for the shots that had squeezed through.

  The first one caught her on the cheekbone, freezing the grimace for an awful second as it ripped the flesh away from her face, exposing the bone and teeth of the jaw, before the bone seemed to splinter and powder in front of them. It seemed as though everything were happening in slow-motion as her head jerked upward slightly, the second slug hitting home at her temple, ripping flesh and hair from her head. Her green eyes seemed for one fraction of a second to register the most intense pain and surprise, pleading for a reason why this had happened by such a fluke, before the light went from the eyes, followed by the viscous fluid of the eyeball itself as it exploded under the pressure of the blow.

  Just as her shot had made the opposing sec man’s head explode like a melon, so the two shots that had squeezed through the gap in the armo
ring reduced her head to pulp in a matter of a second or two and extinguished the life of the belligerent and feisty blonde.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lonnie said, looking over his shoulder as her body was thrown across the wag and landed in Danny’s lap, making the youngster puke. “When Rudi finds out, he’ll go shit mad—he’ll probably take ’em out on his own. And don’t stop firing just because of that,” he added as Jak and Dean returned their attention to their blasters and started to loose shots once more at the trade convoy.

  One thing was certain, though—the sudden, freakish and unexpected chilling of one of their own people had brought home to everyone in the wag that they were outnumbered at least two-to-one by those on the outside of the Hellbenders’ caravan, and that every life lost, especially in such a stupe manner, was more of a blow to them than to the men of either Charity or Summerfield.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you can’t drive one of these?” Claudette yelled at Ayesha. “Didn’t your daddy ever give you a wag as a present, like your brothers?”

  Inside the wag that had carried the women into the arena, the noise from outside was drowned by the argument within. With the chilled body of the sec man still in the corner, and now bereft of both sec shotgun and driver, as well as the traitorous Anita, the women were huddled in the rear while Ayesha and Claudette stood face-to-face.

  “Of course he didn’t, you stupe,” Ayesha yelled back. “I’m a girl, not a boy. Shit, you worked at the palace, or so you say—you know what he was like. Girls are for fucking, and boys get the toys.”

  A look clouded across Claudette’s face suddenly, as though the argument was suddenly forgotten.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she said quietly. “My ma always said that Red was like that.”

  Ayesha’s anger suddenly dissipated as she heard her father referred to in that manner. There were few people left alive who referred to Baron Al Jourgensen as “Red’’—she had no knowledge of this being one of the ways in which Danny and the rest of the Hellbenders knew the baron from Correll’s ranting—and a cold shiver ran down her spine as she suddenly realized something.

  “Your mother?”

  Claudette nodded briefly. “Yeah, she ended up slit from pussy to throat in a gaudy house by some drunk asshole, but before that she’d been one of his regular sluts before he got bored. That’s how come I’m here. And she told me how he got the name of Red, and how come people don’t use it anymore unless they want to die.”

  “Red like the blood of the women when he finished them,” Ayesha said in a small voice. “That what happened to your mother?”

  Claudette shrugged. “Mebbe. If not him, then some wiseass who was working for him or wanted to be him and knew who my ma was. She always said there were only so many sluts, and every man gets around to them sooner or later. Don’t think she meant to kill them, though.”

  “So you’re my sister,” Ayesha said quietly.

  “Yeah, me and mebbe half the women under twenty in this wag.” Claudette laughed harshly. “Don’t get stupe on me about it—it still don’t change the fact that you can’t drive this stupe wag. Can anyone here?” she asked in a louder voice, addressing the rest of the women. There was a general agreement that Ayesha was right—women in Charity weren’t given the power to do these things, and none of them had any driving experience.

  “Boy, that’s us well and truly fucked,” Claudette said, rubbing her face, “more than if we’d let those assholes from Summerfield get their paws on us.”

  “Mebbe not,” Ayesha said, her face determined and set as she went past Claudette and climbed over and into the front of the wag, ignoring the blasterfire that was erupting all around and could easily come through the windshield, toughened glass though it was. “Come and ride shotgun—you’ve got just about the only blaster we’ve got,” she added to her newly discovered sister.

  “What the rad-pocked, scum-sucking, sticky-fucking hell are you doing, girl?” Claudette spit out as she slipped over the seat and joined Ayesha.

  “Look, I might not know exactly how to drive one of these things right, but I must know something. I’ve sat next to sec men driving, to my brothers, to my asshole father. I’ve seen these stupe things being driven all my life. It can’t be that hard to work it out.”

  “Hell of a time to start learning,” Claudette said with a smile.

  Ayesha laughed. “Never better, babe.”

  J.B. WAS FAR from happy. He could see that Correll’s strategy was already falling to pieces, and he and Mildred were a long way from where they wanted to be—at the side of Ryan and the rest of their companions. The only way to get out of this—if there was any way at all—was to be back-to-back with people they could trust. At least that way they had a chance, with people they knew they could rely upon.

  Not like here. Not like now.

  The Armorer straightened his wag and headed toward the gap between the rocks that formed the entrance to the arena. Ahead of him he could see the Summerfield convoy from the rear, getting nearer as he closed on them. The front of the convoy was lost in the swirl of the dust storm, but he could see sec men chasing back to their wags, and those who were already mounted turn around, blasters at the ready. He could also see the sec men who were standing guard on the top of the supply wags, with the homemade flamethrowers. They bore little resemblance to anything else the Armorer had ever seen, but he recognized the danger with an unerring instinct.

  “Get into position and hold on,” he yelled, “this is going to be a little tricky.”

  J.B. rarely overstated anything, and this was one of those occasions—for, almost as he spoke, the sec man on the flamethrower nearest the approaching wag swung the contraption toward the oncoming Hellbenders’ vehicle and attempted to open up with a jet of flame.

  “Dark night,” the Armorer cursed softly at the sight that confronted him as the sec man opened up the pressure on the flamethrower and attempted to ignite it. The rickety and ramshackle weapon spluttered twice as the sec man attempted to ignite the flame and then exploded on top of the wag, throwing up a ball of flame and a dense cloud of oily smoke that made it even harder to see in the arena as the wag beneath also went up, a dull whump resounding around the rock walls as the sides of the vehicle flew outward…just as J.B. piloted his wag into range.

  The Armorer threw the wheel of his vehicle, swinging it as far to the left of the arena as he dared, hoping that the majority of the debris would avoid damaging their wag. The vehicle shook as lumps of metal thudded into it, driving it toward the rock and making him swing the wheel back to try to compensate.

  “Sweet Lord, will you look at that,” Mildred whispered as the sec men on the exploding wag were thrown into the air and across the arena, one of them thudding against the wag with a force equal to that of some of the metal debris. Their clothes and skin were covered in the flaming fuel that was used to power the flamethrower, and they described arcs of flame in the air, cutting through the dust and poor light to show where they landed.

  “Heads up—more ahead,” J.B. yelled, mindful that the explosion may yet have distracted his crew from the wags ahead.

  It was a good point. The sec men on the two wags in front of the one that had exploded had thrown themselves onto the roof of each of their wags, and were now scrambling to their feet with only one idea in mind—to meet the oncoming assault head-on.

  J.B. righted the course of his wag, and the Hellbenders and Mildred armed the blasters, ready to start firing as soon as the flame and smoke cleared and they could get a sighting.

  Unfortunately for them, the next Summerfield wag in line was able to fire first. The flamethrower crew was raised just above the smoke that was still pouring from the ruined wag, and so was able to sight the Hellbenders’ wag first. Swinging around the flamethrower, and not even thinking about the fact that one before had exploded, the sec man in charge of the contraption fired it up and ignited the flame.

  A great yellow-and-red gout of flame roared from the barrel
of the flamethrower, scorching the side of J.B.’s wag and heating up the interior so that the blasters on the inside became almost too hot to touch.

  “Shit!” Jenny yelled as the rapidly heating metal burned the palms of her hands, “what the fuck are they doing?”

  “Take him out, Millie,” J.B. yelled.

  Mildred acted quickly, yet seemingly with little fuss. She slipped her arms out of her jacket and used the sleeves to pad and insulate her hands against the heat. She moved the floor-mounted blaster until the sight caught the top of the wag, and kept her head just a fraction away from the blaster sight, so that she could feel the heat drying out her eyeball and scorching her eyebrow, yet it didn’t actually touch or burn her skin.

  Mildred had always been a crack shot. A short burst of fire from the drum-mounted machine blaster shattered the fuel tank for the flamethrower and also ripped a line of holes through the flesh of the sec man standing by it, throwing him backward off the roof of the wag as the fuel ignited and shot a line of fire along the feed line of the flamethrower, exploding it from its mounting on the roof of the wag.

  But it wasn’t just the flamethrowers that were causing problems. Although they were the most immediate danger, there were sec men both in the wags and also climbing onto the roofs of the wags armed with Uzis, Heckler & Kochs, and also AK-47s. They were starting to fire, not just at the wag driven by J.B., but also at all the Hellbenders’ wags that followed the Armorer. Heavy-duty blasterfire thudded into the armored and reinforced sides of the wags as the Hellbenders used their mounted blasters to return the fire.

  It was here that they had the advantage. There may be less of them in terms of wags and manpower, but they knew from their recce and spy reports that the wags from each ville weren’t entirely armored. The wag stock of each ville was low, and the very nature of some of the trade to be exchanged would make the use of an armored wag impossible for a quick turnaround. So it was that the Hellbenders could, in theory, take advantage of surprise to cut down wag and man numbers if they hit hard and fast.