by James Axler
It was then that both Baron Al Jourgensen and Baron Tad Hutter changed their own agendas and made the entire matter a whole lot more complicated.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Tulk! What the fuck is going on?” Hutter raged.
Elias Tulk spared himself a small smile as he sat at the wheel of the static wag. “I don’t know, Baron. We appear to be under attack of some kind.” He giggled. His mind was filled with thoughts of revenge, and in part he no longer cared if Hutter guessed the part he played.
Hutter fixed his sec chief with a long hard stare, for a moment forgetting the battle that was raging outside. “This is something to do with you, you son of a gaudy slut,” he hissed, “and I’ll find out when we get back home.”
“If…” Tulk interjected.
Hutter said nothing for a moment that seemed to stretch to forever. The inside of the wag was like a calm eye of the storm that—both in terms of nature and of a firefight—swirled and raged around them.
“We will get back,” he said finally, and in a menacingly quiet tone. “And what’s more, we’ll take the women with us. Screw the rest of this. We’re going to grab them and get the fuck out of here.”
“How am I going to relay orders to the rest of the crew, then?” Tulk pointed out the carnage outside.
Hutter looked behind him at the two sec men who were manning the wag with himself and Tulk. They had their attention seemingly fixed on the outside, flinching at the slugs that hit the armor plating and toughened glass, starring it, but the baron knew that they had been listening intently to the discussion in the front of the wag.
“There’s four of us. In case it escaped your notice, those sluts don’t have any sec with them, and Baron Al and his boys are occupied with the assholes attacking them from the other direction. We just break ranks here, ram into the middle of the convoy, scattering everyone in their surprise, grab the girls and get the fuck out.”
Tulk grinned wryly. “And that’s a plan?”
Hutter was serious. “Got anything better to do, Elias?”
BARON AL “Red” Jourgensen was seeing the color of his nickname—which hadn’t been used by anyone except Correll in many a year, both in terms of his temper, and in the blood that was flowing into the earth outside as both sides counted casualties against the sudden assault group.
“What the motherfucking hell is going down here?” he demanded of no one in particular. “That shithead Hutter thinks he can sell us down the river like this?”
“Don’t think it’s him, Baron,” replied the sec man who had been driving the leading wag. “He’s getting the attack as much as we are.”
Jourgensen shot a look over his shoulder at the men who were manning the blasters behind him. They were rattling off bursts of machine blasterfire at the Hellbenders’ wags as they passed, but were trying to conserve ammo and shoot on sight, their visibility impaired by the storm and the dust raised by the circling wags.
“How we doing?” he snapped.
One of the sec men took his eye away from the blaster sight for a moment to answer. “Can’t see a thing out there, Baron. I dunno if we’re hitting anything or even what it is we’re aiming at half the time.”
Baron Al nodded. “Right. We need those crops, so we’re gonna take ’em.” He picked up the handset of the radio. “Listen up,” he yelled, “all wags head to the opposite camp and try to take the trade. Then get out as fast as you can.”
“You think anyone actually heard that?” his driver said as slugs from the Hellbenders’ blasters whined and ricocheted off the armored wag.
“Dunno.” Baron Al shrugged. “But at least we’ve tried. Now hit the fucking gas!”
Ayesha heard the message from her father on the radio as she tried to hot-wire the wag with all the women who were the trade from Charity. The sec driver had taken the ignition key with him, possibly as some kind of private token of his own security, or just from habit. As he was now lying chilled in the center of the arena bloodbath, there was no way that either Ayesha or Claudette was going to risk getting it back again.
Claudette, seated beside the girl, also heard the message. “Lovely man,” she muttered. “No mention of us in there.”
“Did you expect anything else?” Ayesha said through gritted teeth as she stripped, then joined the wires. “Please work this time, you stupe bastard,” she added to the machinery. With a cough and a splutter, the wag’s engine came to life. “Shit, I thought that’d never happen,” she added with relief, then, “let’s get ourselves out of here and wait for the dust to settle.”
“In this storm?” Claudette grinned.
Ayesha didn’t grace the poor joke with an answer. Instead, she stared ahead of her at the chaos framed by the windshield as she tried to put the wag into gear. With a squeal and grind that was painful, and made all the women inside the wag wince, the wag ground into gear. Swinging on the wheel, Ayesha pulled it out of the convoy.
Straight into the line of the approaching wag.
THE HELLBENDERS, led by Correll, had completed four or five circuits of the convoy, and the firefight was starting to get monotonous. In the wag driven by the gaunt man, Ryan and Krysty exchanged glances that spoke volumes, and both knew that their thoughts were being echoed by Jak, Dean and Doc in the wag behind, and by J.B. and Mildred in the opposing convoy. Any attempt at strategy had gone out of the window, and after the initial gains made by the Hellbenders when they had been able to pick off sec men who hadn’t been able to make it back to secured or armored wags, the firefight had degenerated into the assault party driving around and around taking shots at whatever they could see through the storm, while sporadic fire returned at them suggested that the sec men from Charity were now all safely inside wags that offered them some protection from the fire.
It couldn’t go on like this. Sooner or later, ammo or fuel would run out, and then it would descend into hand-to-hand combat. Ryan knew that his people were more than capable of holding their own, but they would be outnumbered, and if it came to a situation where blood lust held sway, he knew that they couldn’t guarantee that the Hellbenders would recognize them when it came to face-to-face combat in a sandstorm.
Glancing across at Correll, Ryan could see that whatever shreds of sanity and reason had kept the man going for so long had now all been cast to the winds of the storm. The Hellbenders’ leader was staring maniacally ahead through the windshield, hunched over the metal box on his lap, stroking it and muttering to it as he piloted the wag in a continuing circle, occasionally whooping as he saw some blasterfire hit home.
“Not good, lover,” Krysty whispered to the one-eyed man, noticing the direction of his glance. “I figure he’s gone totally. Problem is, how do we get out of this?”
Ryan spared the woman a look. Her hair was coiled tightly to her head and neck, reflecting the way she felt about the conflict and the manner in which it was proceeding rapidly to stalemate.
“Fireblast! There’s nothing we can do while we’re stuck in here.”
It was at this point that fate took a hand.
Ayesha pulled the wag out, stamping on the accelerator to get the vehicle out of its confinement quickly, while the wheel was still at full spin and the tires bit into the swirling earth, turning the wag out of the space it occupied in the stationary convoy. The wags had been stopped and parked up close to one another, and she braced herself as the wing of the wag caught the rear of the wag in front with a squeal and a shower of sparks as metal ground on metal, slowing the progress of the wag with the women, and making Ayesha bite so hard on her lip with concentration that the salty taste of blood flooded her mouth.
The noise of grating, grinding metal was such that it seemed to the occupants of the wag to completely overtake the other sounds from outside, filling the wag with an eardrum-bursting noise that made it hard to think.
And then, suddenly, the wing of the wag had passed beyond the rear of the vehicle it had been pushing against, that vehicle now pushed to on
e side, the occupants thrown across the interior and abandoning their blasters.
“Shit!” Ayesha cursed as the wag, suddenly released from the restraints of the metal bulk in front of it, shot out across the gap between the convoy and the wall of the rock arena. She stamped on the brake, making the vehicle skid on the uneven and loose surface, the suddenly locked tires searching for purchase on the shifting sands of the desert floor. The wag skidded in a circle, and she righted it in time to be facing the entrance at the rear of the Charity convoy. The only problem with this being that the path to the entrance was blocked by the circling wags of the Hellbenders’ convoy, with Correll in the lead, approaching at speed through the dust of the storm and conflict.
“Aw, fuck,” Claudette muttered. To get this far, this close to getting away, and then to get chilled by the very people who were supposed to be on your side…The dark-skinned girl watched openmouthed and wide-eyed as the lead wag closed on theirs, seeing through the grime and dust an equally surprised gaunt face as the driver jammed on his brakes and went into a skid, attempting to pilot his wag into the narrow space between the women’s wag and the convoy that still stood in the arena.
Ayesha mirrored the actions of Correll, swinging the wheel of her wag and risking crushing the wag against the rock wall.
The two wags swung violently away from each other, like two magnetic poles that repel, but it was too little, too late. The front wings of both wags locked together in a squeal of metal, the opposing forces of each powerful wag engine forcing the metal into ridiculous shapes, pushing at each other so that the steering wheels in each cab failed to respond to the drivers.
Ayesha found herself thrown across the wheel, the hard plastic jarring and bruising her chest and stomach, knocking the air from her and leaving her dazed and confused. She shook her head to try to clear it, and felt the need to violently vomit as a result, a need that was increased when she looked around to ask Claudette how she was, and found the dark-skinned girl staring at her from one lifeless eye, the other impaled with a long sliver of toughened glass from the windshield that had been worked loose from its frame by the twisting, distorting effects of the impact and had driven through her left eye and into the brain, lobotomizing her so that she died blissfully unaware of the pain it had caused her.
Ayesha puked over the dead girl, then heaved and spit out the bile that tasted raw in her mouth. She looked over the back seat. Some of the women were unconscious from the impact, but most were still able to move.
“I dunno,” Ayesha muttered, “we’ll just have to try and get out of the battlefield and wait for the result.”
“Some good you’ve been,” moaned one of the women, picking herself up.
Ayesha boiled inside. She’d tried, as hard as she could, and all she had was this?
“Fuck it, look after yourselves, then,” she spit before opening the wag door on her side of the cab and sliding out into the sandstorm.
Outside, the Hellbenders were pouring out of their wags, their circling assault action having been halted by the crash between Correll and Ayesha. The leader of the Hellbenders was one of the first to hit the desert floor, having given orders over the radio for his people to disperse and begin the fight on the outside. Correll grasped a Heckler & Koch in one hand, and in the other he had a long-bladed saber that was of tooled steel and had been taken from the redoubt. Coming face-to-face with him, Ayesha stopped dead in her tracks, taken aback by the wild-eyed, gaunt man, and also by the fact that he had a long metal box strapped to his chest. Whatever was in it, it wasn’t just being used as armor, and Ayesha practically shrunk beneath his gaze.
Jak, Dean and Danny were out of the second wag quickly, and the bespectacled youth led the way through the crowd of wild-eyed fighters to where the crash had occurred.
Correll was looming over Ayesha through the dust and smoke. She was sure that he would cut her down where she stood, especially as she was the daughter of Baron Al Jourgensen, his sworn foe. In the heat of those eyes, all bargains would be forgotten.
And yet he looked at her with eyes that suddenly cleared from their fires of fury, and just for a second registered an infinite tenderness.
“Poor child,” he murmured before brushing past her with a wild yell and heading for the front of the convoy, where Baron Al’s wag was just moving off.
“Ayesha!” Danny yelled, coming upon her out of the dust and grasping her. “You’re okay!”
“Just,” she replied, “and it won’t stay that way unless we find some way of getting away from this slaughterhouse.”
“This way,” Jak said, “find wag.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Dean agreed. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“I, my dear boy, have finally got here,” Doc said, coming up to them, “but of the others…”
Dean and Jak looked around them. It was almost impossible to see in the swirling dust and smoke of the battlefield what was going on. Ryan and Krysty had to be in among it, and from the sounds of blasterfire and close combat, it seemed that mere yards away the sec men from Charity had emerged from their wags to take up hand-to-hand combat with the Hellbenders. They were forced to, as the sudden static nature of the other vehicles had left them with no target large or visible enough to fire at from inside the safety of the wags.
Suddenly, Dean caught sight of Krysty’s Titian flame of hair moving freely in the breeze as the woman encountered a sec man from Charity. As she moved nearer, they could see that the sec man had mistaken her for one of the more docile women from the wag, and was trying to trap her with a view to carrying her off. He had a Glock handblaster and a skinning knife, which he used to thrust at her, driving her backward. What he failed to realize was that she was leading him on, goading him into more confident, harder thrusts with the knife, nearly puncturing her skin. And then his confidence got the better of him, and he made his big mistake. He grinned with a leer and thrust the knife to try to rip the shoulder of her coat, to expose her bare flesh. But Krysty stepped under the blow and struck at his vulnerable side, striking below the heart with the heel of her hand. As the jarring blow turned the triumphant leer to a look of astonished agony, she drew back her arm and delivered a straight-fingered blow to his throat that ruptured the tissue within. He began to choke, and as he sank to the ground she raised one leg and delivered a chilling blow with the silvered toe of her boot, striking him at the joint of the jaw, just below the temple. The trauma to the brain finished off whatever life the sec man still had within him.
“Nice to know you haven’t lost your touch,” the one-eyed warrior commented as he emerged from the dust and smoke, the Steyr in one hand and his panga in the other. “I don’t know who’s chilling who out there, and I don’t think they do, either. My bet is we should get the hell out and regroup on the outside of the rocks, try and see what the hell is actually happening in here.”
“We could take one of the wags at the rear,” Dean suggested. “They’ve all gone blood-chill crazy out here, and I figure we should just shoot whoever gets in the way—can’t trust any of them not to chill us.”
Ryan agreed. “Only problem is, how do we let J.B. and Mildred know what the hell is going on?”
“HOW THE HELL are we supposed to know what’s going on here?” the Armorer asked Jenny as the wag spun yet again in the increasingly dense mix of smoke and dust that rose on the arena.
“And how the hell am I supposed to know?” the woman snapped back.
“It’s your operation, not ours,” Mildred replied with a bite in her tone. “And what was that about abandoning the wags because they’ve crashed?” she added, referring to the garbled command from Correll that had emerged from the static and confusion of the radio.
“Shit, how do I know? It must be something that happened back there.”
“How about making it happen here?” the Armorer suggested, sighting the wag driven by Tulk and bearing Baron Tad Hutter begin to move out into the middle of the arena.
“What?”
“He’s moving, and we can’t keep going in circles forever,” J.B. said sharply. “So brace yourselves.”
With which the Armorer put his foot down hard to the floor of the wag and shot toward the moving wag. Tulk had moved forward cautiously, trying to sight the assault convoy as it came around again, and this had given J.B. the slight edge that he needed. As the baron’s wag moved outward, J.B. drove straight at it, flinging his wag to one side at the last moment so that it caught the baron’s wag with a broadside that made it skid in a circle, the front wing badly dented and bent in so that it trapped the front wheel and prevented it from rotating.
Behind the Armorer, the other Hellbenders’ wags skidded to a halt in order to avoid crashing into the leading vehicle, and the doors opened to discharge a crew hell-bent on revenge.
“My God, John, you could have given us a little more warning that that,” Mildred gasped, the air driven from her by the impact.
“Had to be done,” the Armorer replied tersely. “Hutter was trying to get over to the other side.”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“My guess is he wants to grab the women in the confusion—shit, looks like Jourgensen had a similar idea—get the fuck out!” the Armorer yelled as another wag appeared in the center of the arena through the mist and smoke.
J.B. grabbed Mildred and pulled her through the door of the wag, diving for cover and carrying her with him as Jourgensen’s wag pulled up too late to avoid a collision with the two wags that had already crashed into the middle of the arena.
“Tell me this isn’t going to get worse,” Mildred said as she saw Correll charging after the crashed wag, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Dark night, I could tell you but I’d probably be lying,” the Armorer replied. “Come on, let’s see if we can get over to the other side. Ryan and Krysty were with Correll, so chances are they’re still over there somewhere,” he said, raising the M-4000 in order to cut a path through any firefight they may chance on. Mildred had her Czech-made ZKR to hand. It was hardly ideal conditions for a sharp-shooting target blaster such as the ZKR, but any handblaster would be effective in the close conditions.