Borderlands: Gunsight (21 page)

“The thing is color coordinated with the house,” Mordecai said dryly. “What a lovely idea. Probably Fluron’s.”

The creature was enclosed in a sort of giant birdcage—a homeworld alloy stronger than steel that fitted up against the rear of the house. Human bones littered the floor of the cage, along with its droppings.

Mordecai thought of Daphne and Bigjaws and hoped he could get back to her in time before she ended up like those bones and droppings in a different kind of cage.

“The Bullymong is climbing up here,” Brick said, as if only moderately interested. He yawned.

“I’m sorry about this, Brick,” Mordecai said.

Brick shrugged. “At least it’s something to fight.”

“I think we can count on that . . .”

As the creature climbed, Mordecai got a better look at it. Its pointed, spike-crested head was much smaller than its gigantic fists—it had four fingered hands, the fingers blunt, each one thick as Mordecai’s forearm. It looked like it could crush a boulder with those hands. A man’s head would implode fast as a bird’s egg in a vise, in that grip. The backs of its hands and arms were festooned with crystals that seemed to grow from metallic rocks. It climbed rungs set almost at random in the wall, and came eagerly toward them.

Mordecai looked around for a route of escape, but of course there wasn’t one. There was no way off the ledge but down—seven stories down. No room for a man to slip out between the bars of the cage if he did get down intact. Up above, there was only smooth steel wall. No handholds.

And both Mordecai and Brick were unarmed.

The Bullymong was only about four meters below them. It stopped and licked its pointed jaws, as it gazed up at them with enigmatic gemlike eyes.

Brick rubbed his hands together. “This could be a good fight!”

“Yeah, I hate to be a buzzkill, there, Brick,” Mordecai said. “And we both know you’re the baddest badass on the planet. But you’re human. And you’re unarmed. That thing isn’t human, it has four arms, and any one of them is big enough and armored enough to break your back. And by the way, the damned thing is way bigger than you. So maybe strategy might be in order. Like, for example, uh . . .”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know, but—strategy.”

“Anyhow—I’m not unarmed.”

Mordecai looked at Brick with a sudden flare of hope. “Really? You smuggled something in? What, a grenade?”

“No. I mean, I’ve got arms and fists and teeth.”

“Brick—”

Then the Bullymong was upon them.

The gigantic hand grabbed the edge of the steel ledge; another clapped on beside it. Then another, a little farther down . . . and Brick picked Mordecai up, and put him down, behind his back.

The Bullymong was suddenly there, on the ledge, using a split second to get its balance—

In that split second, Brick leapt at it, high and hard. The off-balance Bullymong gave out a strangely pathetic
screeee
sound of dismay and keeled over backward, falling, Brick’s impact and momentum keeping it from restoring its grip. There was a grunt of pain and a loud roar as the beast struck the ground on its back.

“Huh,” Mordecai said, looking down from the ledge. “Strategy.”

He was in time to see Brick standing on the Bullymong’s chest, hammering at its head—and he was also in time to see the Bullymong swipe Brick away with two of its fists, both coming from its left side, hammering him hard right back so he spun away, rolling across the bone-strewn steel floor, roaring himself.

“Skagzilla’s Arse,” Mordecai swore. He tried to think of some way to help. He came up empty.

Then the Bullymong was up—and so was Brick, wiping blood away from his mouth.

“Hey, mutant freak!” Mordecai bellowed. “Hey! Ugly! You!”

“Me?” Brick said, surprised.

“No, not you—Hey, Bullymong, you big ugly piece of . . . uh-oh.” He’d wanted the Bullymong to turn toward him, and it had. It seemed about to leap up the rungs to get at him.

Then—as Mordecai had hoped—Brick used the Bullymong’s distraction and leapt on its back, clasping it between two sets of legs, tightening his arm around its throat. He began to squeeze . . .

The Bullymong shrieked and struck at Brick but was only able to hit him obliquely. It reached back, and tried to pry him off. Brick gritted his teeth, grimaced, straining to keep his hold. But it didn’t look like he was going to keep it long. And even if he did—eventually the Bullymong, despite its evidently small brain, would realize it could back up and slam him against the steel wall of Reamus House.

That’s when Brick’s face went white, rigid, his eyes seeming to light with an inner fire—the berserker rage was upon him. He howled and redoubled his attack on the creature.

A familiar squawk sounded, up above, and Mordecai
looked up to see Bloodwing perched on the metal of the cage, directly above the Bullymong and Brick.

“You found me!” Mordecai blurted.

She had ducked her head, was wriggling in a way he’d never seen before—and then she had pushed between the bars, was dropping like a hawk after a mouse.

Some mouse. The Bullymong saw her coming and slashed at her with one of its enormous four-fingered paws. It struck her—and seeing that, Mordecai’s heart leapt into his throat.

His pet spun through the air and impacted on the inside of the cage—then dropped to the floor.

“No!” Mordecai yelled. “Bloodwing!”

She sat up, shook her head, then leapt into the air and flapped upward again. He looked at her closely—her flight path seemed normal. No obvious broken bones, anyway.

“Bloodwing! Be careful!”

She’d learned that lesson and as Brick tried to tighten his hold on the Bullymong, she swooped toward it in a curvy pattern that made her hard to hit. The giant mutant swiped at her again, missed, and this time she came at its eyes claws first. The Bullymong snapped at her with its serrated jaws, missed—and then screeched as she slashed at one of his eyes. She’d drawn blood.

Mordecai shouted, “Bloodwing—up here! Come to me!” Then he made a gesture she was trained to recognize.

He had an idea . . .

Bloodwing heard him, saw the hand-sign, and did as he asked, coming toward him but in teasing, swooping loops, some of them taking her close to the Bullymong, but never close enough.

Enraged, partly blinded, it pursued her. And with Brick still clinging, squeezing—it began climbing the rungs to the ledge. One of its hands was still trying to pry Brick off.

Suddenly it was there, at the other end of the ledge, jumping up. And almost falling off because Brick was making it lean off center. But it got its footing and came hulkingly toward Mordecai and Bloodwing—who was now settling on Mordecai’s shoulder.

“Good girl. Sorry you got hurt,” he muttered. He backed toward the sealed door and flattened against it.

“Come on, you great half-blind ugly Bullymong!” he shouted.

The Bullymong charged—and he ducked under its legs, diving between them, scrambling to keep from falling off the ledge, as Bloodwing flew dartingly to one side, and the maddened Bullymong slammed into the door with all four fists . . .

The door crashed inward, smashed off its hinges.

Moredecai got up and turned to see Brick riding the Bullymong into the building. The frame of the door was smashing apart, the creature and Brick both bellowing at once. Dust and steel shards flew . . .

Inside the building, several men screamed like frightened little girls as the rampaging Bullymong tore the sentries apart.

“Come on, Bloodwing!” Mordecai shouted. She lit on his shoulder and he ran inside.

The Bullymong was ripping into the guards as if they were soft figures of clay. Brick was no longer on the Bullymong’s back—Mordecai turned to see him scooping up the big Eridian rifle from the Reamer’s body.

Two more sentries came around another corner, close
to the Bullymong, to see what the commotion was. They shouted in horror, and turned—too slowly. Pain maddened, in a blind rage, it rushed them—and Mordecai flinched back from the sight. He turned away, hearing other voices shouting commands, around the corner to his left. Reamus’s men were trying to put the Bullymong down before it could do any more damage.

“Get down!” Brick yelled. Mordecai threw himself down, and the Eridian rifle fired, three times quickly.

Mordecai wanted to tell him,
No, you’ll just make it mad!

But luck has its own timing, and two rounds from two rocket launchers were fired, at the same moment, from around the corner—at the Bullymong. The shells struck it in the front, one hitting it right between its narrow jaws, the other in the chest, at the same moment as the powerful Eridian blasts struck it in the back and side.

The Bullymong roared—and pitched over backward, twitching.

“Come on!” Brick said, triumphantly. His face was a mask of blood, his arms soaked in it. And most of the blood was his, but he seemed gleeful.

Mordecai ran to catch up with him as he ran away from the still-twitching Bullymong. “Now where?”

But the answer came on its own—the third door Brick tried opened onto an outdoor platform where a Buzzard was warming up. Two men were sitting in the Buzzard—two startled Reamers who died quickly as Brick rushed to them and instantly smashed their heads together. He tossed the raglike corpses aside, and he and Mordecai got into the Buzzard.

“Did you see that, Mordecai?” Brick asked as they took off. “I told you I could beat him.”

Mordecai didn’t remind him of Bloodwing’s part in it—and didn’t tell him about the rocket shells hitting the Bullymong at the same moment.

“You sure did, Brick. We wouldn’t be here right now it if wasn’t for you, buddy.”

A
back stairs. Down, down to a dimly lit basement. Shadowy furnaces and huffing pipes. A turgid warmth. The smell of the burning animal fat that Jasper used to power his furnaces. Grim, this basement, all naked machinery and concrete. Smelling of industry and dust.

Daphne kind of liked it here. It was quiet and felt safe.

This, for the moment, was her realm. They were looking for her outside, all across Gunsight. She’d smashed a window, dropped a twined power cord through it so it looked like she’d went out that way. “She must’ve climbed down on this cord. She’s got to be somewhere nearby, she can’t have gotten far . . .”

Idiots.

She had the auto shotgun, the knife, and she’d picked up a machine pistol from the body of the panicky janitor she’d had to kill on the back stairs. She’d hidden his body behind the furnace. The corpse would start to smell, soon.

But she was warm here, in the darkness. She had the stolen food, a bottle of water. She had weapons. She had time to think.

To wonder why Mordecai hadn’t come back.

Maybe
, she thought, as she paced slowly back and forth in the darkness,
maybe he’d simply faced facts.

You lived on Pandora, you learned to keep it real
. And the reality was, he wasn’t likely to rescue her.

She’d wait a little more. Then she’d decide. Might be she should take this thing by the throat: Go back up and hunt Jasper down. Get him alone. Treat him rough. Make him tell where his vault was, how to get in . . . Kill him and loot the vault. But how would she get the stuff out with her?

Or she could try to disguise herself, slip out through Gunsight, make for Frostbite Highlands. Eventually, to Sanctuary.

Rescue yourself! No more waiting.

Or maybe . . .

Maybe wait just a little longer.

•  •  •

“At least we’re rid of that Claptrap,” Mordecai said. He stood in the cold gray light at the mine’s trapezoidal entrance, gazing out on the bleak prospect of the rock quarry. Bloodwing had gone out to find some carrion. There was always carrion not too far away on Pandora.

It was a little after dawn. They’d had a cold night camping in the old mines, eating a little food cadged from the Buzzard’s freight box. They’d gotten back to Mordecai’s outrunner—he had most of his weapons back. They used the last of the med hypos—but thanks to Zed meds, Brick was all healed now. He’d had cracked ribs and a concussion from that
fight with the Bullymong. Not that a concussion seemed to affect Brick much.

“But what we do now?” Brick asked as he zipped up his trousers. His pee dripped freshly down the raw stone wall.

“We find out if Reamus has taken the bait—if he and Jasper are at each other’s throats. Only I figure he’d just now be getting his assault rolling. He has a lot of men and vehicles to organize. If he has, we go in after Daphne . . . Jasper won’t be around to give any orders. We’ll get her out . . .”

“Sure. I like Daphne. One time . . .”

“I know, one time she made you something to eat.”

“Maybe they’re out searching for us.”

“Sure, he sent some guys out to hunt us down. But mostly he’s looking toward Jasper.”

“If you figured it right. Anyway, I slept, I ate, and now I’m bored. Let’s find the guys hunting us and kill them.”

“They’ll probably find us.”

“What about Feena?” Brick asked, as he stepped up to the doorway, Eridian rifle in his hands.