Borderlands: Gunsight (29 page)

“Still . . . should’ve been more alert . . .” She’d walked around a boulder and that worm thing had reared up, hissing . . .

And here she was.

She sighed and went back to stretching out the restraints. So far, not much progress. But it was better than just lying there trying not to pee on herself.

•  •  •

Perched on Mordecai’s shoulder, Bloodwing seemed to sniff the air nostalgically as they went down the stone pathway into the quarry. She craned her head to look at the moonlit bones scattered out toward the middle—bones she’d been gnawing on a few days earlier. Most of the meat she’d left was gone. Other carrion eaters had been there.

“Our allies are
here
?” Brick asked with surprise as they walked across the snow-coated rock of the old quarry to the mine entrance. “How you know which mine to go in?”

“Look at the tracks,” Mordecai said. “Those weirdly narrow boot tracks—that’s them all right. I killed a few of them when I camped here not long ago. Bloodwing had a nice snack . . .”

“They like allies that kill their friends?”

Mordecai looked at Brick—it was one of those moments
when it was hard to tell if Brick was joking or not. There were a lot of those moments.

“We’ll see if we can make up with them, Brick. Bloodwing, you wait here and keep watch. Come screechin’ after me if anyone comes in behind us.”

“Errr.”
Bloodwing hopped off his shoulder and settled onto a chunk of rock just inside the entrance, peering out into the night.

They walked into the mine, going cautiously on the downward-sloping stone floor of the shaft. Mordecai had the corrosive submachine gun strapped over one shoulder, and an autopistol on his left hip. Brick was armed with grenades and a flame-modded assault rifle that Moxxi had left in the outrunner for them at the arena.

Aiming his small flashlight into the darker corners of the mine shaft, Mordecai led the way, stepping over piles of rock fallen from the ceiling. “Looks like this rock’s fallen recently,” Mordecai said. “From the color of the breaks . . . which might be a good thing . . .”

“How is that good?” Brick asked, not unreasonably. “Means this place could fall in on us. I don’t like tunnel collapses. You can’t kill rock. I’ve tried.” He seemed to think about it, and added, “You can break it, but you can’t kill it.”

“I’ve noticed that, too . . .”

They were about fifty meters down the shaft when Mordecai smelled it. It was cold here, and the air smelled of minerals, dust, and—something else. There was a harsh tang of rankness that seemed to be increasing the deeper they went: rotting flesh, sweat, and smoke.

They went another ten meters down—and Mordecai held up his hand warningly. They stopped within ten feet of a shaft
that went straight down. If they’d been in a hurry Mordecai would probably have walked into it. The rank smell was strong here.

“They cut this here,” Mordecai said, examining the chisel marks on the gray stone. “Bastards must have a colony down there, using the quarry as a back door.”

“Tunnel Rats,” Brick said. “I hate Tunnel Rats. They hate me, too.”

“Everyone hates Tunnel Rats,” Mordecai said, shining the light down the shaft. “And they hate everyone. They’re just mutated people but . . . they’re vile. You still got that flash-bang grenade?”

“Yeah. Here.” Brick handed it over, Mordecai set the timer on the grenade, activated it, and dropped it down the shaft.

He lost sight of it quickly, in the thick shadows below—but after about ten seconds he heard it strike the bottom. A few moments later a flash briefly illuminated the lower part of the shaft. Someone screeched.

“They don’t like bright light,” Brick noted. “You sure know how to make friends with Tunnel Rats.”

Brick actually uses irony sometimes . . .

“Had to get their attention.”

“There’s a ladder over there. Should we go down?”

“Are you crazy? I hate Tunnel Rats. We’ll wait here . . .”

The Tunnel Rats didn’t come at them from the vertical shaft, though there was a ladder carved in its rock. Beyond the shaft the mine continued on its slight incline downward. And in a few minutes several pale, ratlike human faces appeared there, in Mordecai’s flashlight beam, as if the faces were floating bodiless in the air.

“Scouts,” Mordecai muttered. A black bolt, an explosive
arrow of some kind, flew from the darkness and hissed between Mordecai and Brick. It exploded a dozen meters behind them.
What weapon was that?
Mordecai wondered. “Hold your fire, dammit!” Mordecai called. “We’re here to parley! We wanta make a deal with you guys!”

The floating faces looked at one another and back toward him. One of them grinned nastily and called out in a raucous, hissy voice, “Go down the shaft! Take the ladder down! If you’re not terribly delicious, perhaps we’ll talk down there!”

“Not likely!” Mordecai said. “We’d only end up killing a lot of you, if we did that—before you killed us. We’d probably account for twenty or thirty of you . . .”

“More than that,” Brick said.

“We don’t mind if you kill a few of the slower ones!” said the Tunnel Rat, sniggering. “More meat that way! Lots more to go around!”

Probably they were the carrion eaters who’d gotten the rest of the meat off those bones up in the quarry, Mordecai guessed. They thought nothing of eating their own dead.

“Look, you shoot at us again, I’ll open up with this corrosive submachine gun!” Mordecai shouted.

The faces receded a bit, hissing as they went, almost lost in the darkness.

“Wait!” he shouted. “Tell your leader, your headman, your . . . what the hell do you call it . . . your Chief Engineer! Tell him I’ve got a chance for him to destroy an enemy before that enemy destroys him, and he’ll get hundreds of fresh bodies to eat! Hundreds!”

“Liar!” said the last visible Tunnel Rat, his face snarling, receding—gone. “Lying dinner, you are!”

“Dammit . . .”

Then came a screech from behind, and a flapping sound. Mordecai turned to see Bloodwing flying through the darkness to him. She used echolocation to find her way in tight places.

“What is it, girl?”

She flapped to his shoulder and made a low squawk that meant enemies near.

“Yeah? That could be a good thing. Come on, Brick!”

It was a long trip back up the tunnel to the surface, and they were in a hurry. Mordecai was out of breath when he got there.

“We giving up on those stinky things down there?” Brick asked, just inside the entrance.

“No . . . Keep your voice down.” He leaned out of the entrance just enough to see what Bloodwing had been trying to tell him. “Look there,” Mordecai whispered. “Some idjits searching for us. Must’ve seen our outrunner, think we’re camping in a mine shaft.”

Three Reamers were walking side by side, just about ten meters away, each one armed with an autoshotgun. They were looking toward one of the other mine entrances. Two of them had shields flickering around them.

“Errr?”
asked Bloodwing, from Mordecai’s shoulder.

“No, thanks. I’d rather you kept away from them,” he told her. He turned to Brick. “Grenades, I think. We don’t want to burn the bodies with a lot of chemicals. Tear them up good instead. Roll the grenades in close, should go up under their shields. The old underhand pitch . . .”

Brick grunted assent, and he and Mordecai activated frag grenades. Standing side by side, they pitched them underhand toward the three Reamer scouts.

The group of Reamers were standing close together, so the grenades had maximum impact, blowing them into the air.

One of the men died immediately, the other two, flipped over, were injured but largely intact thanks to their shields.

That didn’t last long. “Brick is here, bringing the pain!” Brick roared, thundering out of the mine entrance at the two men. He jumped on one, the force of his stomping boots going through the shield and crushing the man’s chest. The other was trying to bring the shotgun into play—Brick kicked it from his hand, then picked the man up by the ankles and slammed him down again, kept smashing his head on the ground till the shield blinked off and the man’s head shattered.

“That’s one way to do it,” Mordecai said. He went out to Brick, and took the first dead Reamer by the neck, dragged him by one hand toward the mine shaft. “Bring the other two, will you Brick?”

Brick dragged the other two by their collars, and they returned to the mine, trekking once more into the bowels of Pandora. Bloodwing rode on the body of the one Mordecai dragged, pecking a small snack for herself as they went.

Down, down they went, into darkness, bringing corpses with them, as if escorting them to hell. Mordecai kept the flashlight pointing down the mine, half expecting to see Tunnel Rats rushing up toward him. But the mutants were probably conferencing, somewhere far below, about how to handle the interlopers.

At last Mordecai, Brick, Bloodwing, and their dead charges got to the vertical shaft. Mordecai flashed the light across it, and wasn’t surprised to see a face blinking back at him. The Tunnel Rats had left someone on watch.

“Hey, man, how you doing?” Mordecai called in his friendliest voice. “Look! We brought gifts—three of our mutual
enemies! We killed ’em for you! Made sure to kill ’em without ruining the meat! They’re nice and fresh! Here!”

He pulled the body around to the lip of the vertical shaft. Bloodwing hopped off it and went up to his shoulder so Mordecai could kick the corpse over. It tumbled down to the bottom. Brick tossed his own dead men down, like a farmhand tossing bags of seed into a wagon.

“Good food comin’ down!” Brick shouted.

“You say they’re fresh?” hissed the rat, across from Mordecai.

“Yes!”

“We’ll eat them anyway. I suppose we could put them up for a while, ripen them . . .”

“Right, well, tell your Chief Engineer I need to talk to him! He’ll be perfectly safe! I can deliver hundreds more!”

“He’s very busy now! He’s got no time to talk to dinner! We’ve got an engineering emergency! Something meaty old surface crawlers wouldn’t understand!”

“That’s why I’m here—I can help with that, too! Tell him!”

“You’re being watched!” the face told him. “Don’t move from there, dinner!”

“You got it, pal!”

Mordecai put his arm out near Bloodwing and raised her up close to his face. She bumped her head on his forehead affectionately. “Bloodwing, head on up the tunnel. Watch out to see they don’t sneak up on us that way. I don’t trust these bastards.”

Bloodwing squawked in consent and flew off up the tunnel.

Mordecai and Brick each took a seat on the edge of the vertical shaft and composed themselves to wait.

•  •  •

Skerm came in chortling, showing his rotting teeth in a grin.

“Wanted to see if anyone made use of my prize yet,” he said. “And there she is.”

“Come here, big guy,” Daphne said. “I like a bald-headed man. They’re sexy. Give me a kiss!”

He chortled even louder and came close to the table. “You think you’re going to bite me, right? No . . . I’m not getting that close!”

He leaned near her—but keeping his face back from hers. He wasn’t counting on her jerking her hand free from the loosened strap, grabbing him by the throat. He probably didn’t think a small woman like her would have such a powerful grip—he seemed amazed at it, as she tightened her fingers on his trachea, squeezing with all the strength in her hand. The stench of his mouth washed over her as he gasped and gagged. Skerm smacked at her face with his hands, but the angle was awkward and he barely connected.

He twisted in her grasp—and then pushed hard, against the side of the table to try to break free. He made a desperate effort and pulled his head suddenly back away from her—but he’d left a big piece of his throat in her hand.

Skerm stared aghast as blood gushed from the wound; he tried to stanch the scarlet flow with his hands, but the artery was ripped through and it was no use.

He went to his knees . . . and then keeled over on his side.

The door opened, and Fluron came in. He stared at Skerm’s twitching body, then gaped at Daphne.

“You
are
dangerous!” he blurted. He seemed more impressed than appalled. “Maybe you
could
be useful to me . . .”

“B
ut how will I know that this Crusher device will travel in the course you describe, dinner?” asked the Chief Engineer in a rather nasal voice, as saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth.

The Tunnel Rat leader had his hands on the butts of machine pistols holstered on his hips. He was standing on a platform that had been raised up the vertical shaft. The synthawood platform had been cranked up from below by some mechanism Mordecai couldn’t make out. To either side of the Chief Engineer were wiry bodyguards, hunched over and toothy, the wild hate on their inbred faces as they looked at Mordecai and Brick, making them seem nearly feral. One of the bodyguards carried an old rusty shotgun; the other had a crossbow.

The Chief Engineer wasn’t quite as degenerate-looking as his fellow Tunnel Rats. The man had an actual chin, unlike most of the others. His teeth were mostly inside his mouth, instead of jutting out; his eyes were not quite so close together, as the eyes of his fellows. And he was clean-shaven,
his hair cut short. Like the others in his particular tribe, he had a jet-black suit on, but he also wore a golden gas mask, a sign of his high station, dangling around his neck.