“Get ready to move!” J.B. commanded, holstering the sawed-off to rummage around in his munitions bag. Hauling the Molotov into view, the man lit the rag fuse tied around the neck, then threw the bomb onto the dry grass. However, the Molotov missed the rock he had been aiming at and lay there undamaged.
Triggering the MAC-10, J.B. missed the bottle. Swinging his longblaster downward, Ryan shot once and a fireball erupted. Realizing what the men were doing, Mildred tossed down her bottle of shine, and Krysty ignited the flammable liquid with the muzzle-flash of her AK-47 rapid-fire. Throwing down a packet of black powder he had been saving for the LeMat, Doc set it off with a single shot from the M-16, and Jak lit an oily rag with a butane lighter and dropped it on top of a dry bush.
Crackling loudly, the flames spread across the wind-
dry hilltop with surprising speed. Already nervous from the presence of the mutie, the horses stiffened at the scent of their primordial enemy of fire, rearing high before galloping away.
Rising behind the line of flames, the wendigo voiced its rage, the fur incredibly trying to match the shifting colors of the licking flames.
Snarling as if in reply, J.B. hosed the MAC-10 at the beast, most of the 9-mm rounds missing completely. As the last clip emptied, the frustrated man tossed the useless rapid-fire away and cut loose with the 12-gauge sawed-off, the spray of double-O buckshot blowing open the chest of the snarling mutie.
Taking careful aim through the smoke, Ryan put a .444 round into the creature's head. As it fell backward, the rest of the companions quickly retreated and started a second wall of fire. This was a tactic that had served them well many times before. An enraged animal might summon the hatred to run through fire once, but the second stopped them every time.
Lumbering through the wall of the flames, the wendigo paused at the second barrier, once more giving voice to its odd moaning bellow. Incredibly, the cry was answered from several locations.
“Gaia, there's a pack of them?” Krysty demanded, fighting to control her horse. They were having enough trouble dealing with just one of the big bastards!
“Aim for the neck!” Ryan ordered, shoving a fresh cartridge into the Marlin longblaster.
As the companions riddled the throat of the beast with hot lead, J.B. poured a bottle of shine into some weeds, then tossed in a road flare. Flames rose from
the alcohol-soaked plants, but they weren't spreading fast enough to suit J.B., so he quickly dug out the coil of freshly made fuse. Igniting it with a lighter, the man tossed away the entire coil. It landed sputtering and hissing, the sparks setting fire to some dried leaves and another stand of dead bushes.
Tossing his other two flares, J.B. spread the blaze across their right flank, but no farther. A withered forest of sickly trees blanketed the rest of the landscape in that direction, extending to a shiny crystal pool that the Armorer instantly recognized as a glass lake, the heat-fused earth left behind after a tactical nuclear strike. His skin crawled at the thought of just what the companions might be breathing, but without a rad counter, J.B. had no way of knowing if this was a safe zone or if they were already aced. But that didn't matter, because until he started coughing blood, the man was going to fight for life.
As Mildred put short bursts from her rapid-fire into the mutie, blowing off strategic chunks of flesh from the arms and legs to cripple its advance, J.B. threw a spare box of mismatched cartridges into the blaze. If he couldn't see well enough to shoot, then the flames could do that job for him! As the brass began to randomly ignite from the searing heat, the mutie was hit several times and began to paw at the fire, its tentacles lashing about madly, trying to find the source of the noise.
“Okay, ace the bastard!” Ryan shouted, and every blaster owned by the companions was trigged again at the stationary target.
The barrage of copper-jacketed lead, dumdums,
stones, glass and nails removed most of the throat of the snarling wendigo. Mutely, it stumbled backward to land sprawling in the flames, the thick fur losing all color as it began to burn. Gushing yellow fluids, the beast flailed about blindly, rolling deeper into the blaze until it was completely engulfed in flames.
The companions cheered as the wendigo stopped moving, but then they stopped as three more of the huge muties appeared behind the firewall.
Batting away the flaming bushes, the wendigos incredibly pushed their way to the burning corpse, their own fur smoldering and sizzling like a hundred tiny fuses. The creatures nudged the corpse as if trying to help it awaken, but as their minds slowly accepted the reality of the death, the wendigos turned to face the norms on horseback and thunderously bellowed in fury, their black eyes full of raw hatred.
“Keep them on the other side of the firewall!” Ryan shouted, working the bolt on his longblaster. The weapon was slippery in his sweaty hands, and the man shook his head to clear his eye of some hair that had fallen across his face.
Taking advantage of the grouping, Doc braced him self and discharged the gren launcher. The black-powder “shotgun” charge boomed louder than artillery, and the recoil knocked the old man backward, almost throwing him out of the saddle if not for his boots in the stirrups. The wide spray of rocks, glass and nails went high, hissing through the swirling smoke, but missing the wendigos entirely.
The wildfire was spreading rapidly now, the flames
darting in random directions, following the thickest line of weeds, as dictated by the gentle winds.
Growling at one another, two of the muties began to head left, the others going to the right in an effort to circle around the fiery obstruction.
Caught in the act of reloading, Jak almost dropped his blaster, wondering just how smart those things were.
However, the firewall was much broader now, the blaze spreading fast across the dried grasslands, the thick volumes of smoke masking the hillside. Stymied by their attempt to go around the inferno, the wendigos tried to go through the blaze, but were forced back strictly by the pain of their burning fur. Then one of the muties grabbed the charred corpse of the aced wendigo and threw it into the heart of the fire. As the flames tamped down for a moment, the wendigo scrambled over the corpse to stand triumphant on the other side.
Instantly, Krysty and Doc emptied both of the rapid-fires into the mutie's chest, the hail of rounds invoking a score of yellow spurts, but none of them lasted longer than a few seconds.
“Doesn't this thing have a weak spot?” J.B. demanded, jerking his wrist to snap closed the breech of the sawed-off scattergun.
As the indomitable wendigo lumbered forward, Mildred leveled her blaster in both hands and fired a single round into the mutie's tender nose, a known vulnerable spot for most hunting animals. Yellow blood erupted from the hit, and the wendigo keened in misery, a sound the dying mutie had never made. Mildred shot again and missed, but then Jak flipped a hand forward, and a
knife thudded into the bloody nose, the blade going in all the way to the handle.
Wailing in agony, the wendigo turned away from this new enemy, and the companions cut loose in another tight volley, ripping off chunks of flesh and bone from the back of its head. As the grayish brain came into view, the mutie slumped to the ground, then rolled over, as if trying to protect itself.
Unleashing the scattergun from the back of his horse, J.B. missed again. With a wild expression, the man hopped off the animal to run closer to the regenerating wendigo and savagely kicked it over to trigger the remaining barrel directly into the brain. The grayish matter exploded a horrid goo across the flames, bubbling and steaming wherever they landed.
Watching from behind the wall of flames, the other wendigos bellowed in rage as they were splattered with the gore of their fallen comrade, then they turned to disappear into the thick smoke.
“Fuck this, let's ride!” Ryan commanded, kicking the horses into a full gallop.
Heading away from the growing inferno and the glowing rad pit, the companions streaked across the deadland on their horses, hooves kicking up clouds of dust from the sterilized ground. Casting a glance behind, Krysty saw that the two wendigos were again in pursuit, their charred fur healing as the creatures charged along on all fours, their inhuman gaze locked upon the companions. However, as the miles passed, the muties began to fall behind and soon disappeared over the horizon.
“Keep riding for as long as we can!” Mildred shouted
over the clattering hooves. “There's no telling if these things ever get tired!”
“Head south!” J.B. yelled, his eyes closed, his face scrunched. “If there's a swamp, there might be a bridge we could cross and burn behind us! Stop them from following!”
“And if there is not?” Doc rumbled, bent low over his galloping mount.
“Then we head for a redoubt that's a couple of hundred miles to the east,” Ryan continued, his black hair flying in the wind. “We'll be safe inside and can jump out of this area for good!”
“But our stuff⦔ Mildred began plaintively.
“Forget it!” the man retorted. “What we've got now is good enough to start again!”
“Had less when first met,” Jak added succinctly, moving to the powerful stride of his stallion.
“We found eyeglasses before,” J.B. stated confidently. “So we can do it again!”
The rest of the companions voiced their agreement to the idea, with only Mildred and Doc abstaining, their troubled faces cloudy with private thoughts.
Racing through the darkness, Dunbar bent low over the motorcycle's handlebars, straining to see the road ahead in the black night.
The bike's headlight worked just fine, but turning that on would give Ryan and the others advance warning of his approach, which would defeat the whole purpose of the hard recce. He was here to find the group and bring back their heads. Armed for the mission, Dunbar had a sawed-off scattergun in a holster at his side, a bandolier of spare brass across his chest and a Browning 30.03 longblaster tucked into the gun boot alongside the yoke of the bike. There was also a bowie knife tucked into one of his U.S. Army combat boots, and a predark gren weighed heavily in the pocket of his leather jacket.
Privately, Dunbar had mixed emotions over the assignment. Ryan and the others had freed him from the prison cell, so he owed them his life. However, they attacked people in his ville. Okay, the ville people attacked first, so the friends had only been defending themselves. But then they broke down the front gate and chilled sec men. Both acts were hanging offenses. He was obliged to ace them, yet owed them his life. If there was some way to do both, Dunbar would have gladly done it, but so far no such solution presented
itself. When in doubt, protect the ville, as his father always used to say. The teenager took some comfort in that, but his heart was still in turmoil, torn between duty and loyalty.
In preparation for a long trip, the sidecar attached to his hog was jammed with spare brass, fuel, food and water. There was even a rainproof poncho in case he was still hunting for the outlanders when the spring rains came. That had been a not-so-subtle reminder from the baron to bring back proof the outlanders were chilled, or not to come back at all. Period.
Two against six, Dunbar ruminated dourly. Those were not very good odds, especially considering that the friends had escaped from a locked ville with a hundred people blocking the way.
Lieutenant Fenton was driving the second bike. Incredibly, somehow, the sec man had survived the explosion in the apple orchard. If
survived
was the right word, Dunbar mentally corrected himself. Fenton had several broken bones and was thickly wrapped in bandages, until only a single eye glared out at the world. Not even the baron had been able to make the sec man stay in the ville and heal. Fenton wanted blood, and he wanted it now. Everybody knew that the man would be a wreck when the bandages came off, his once handsome face reduced to a mass of overlapping scars.
The lieutenant's sidecar was similarly packed with brass and assorted supplies, including a working rad counter. That had been a gift from the baron to help make sure that the Delta folk stayed clear of rad pits.
Slowly, the miles flashed by, the shadowy landscape rising like waves on the sea. Once they were past the
apple orchards, the two sec men streaked across fields of grass. Only once did the rad counter start to click, but the glow on the horizon had already warned them of the approaching rad pit, and they wisely steered clear of the ancient nuke crater.
Reaching a stretch of predark highway, the two sec men opened up the hogs to full speed and roared along at nearly eighty miles per hour for several hours until the roadway abruptly stopped near the edge of a swamp. As they slowed, a stickie rushed out of the bushes, hooting and waving its arms. Dunbar sped away, but Fenton waited until it was almost upon him before triggering his revolver. The blast shattered the night, and as the mutie fell, the lieutenant spit on the creature, then kicked the hog alive and raced away to rejoin the sec chief.
“That was a waste of brass,” Dunbar growled over the sputtering engine.
“Just wanted to make sure I could still shoot,” Fenton lied, holstering the massive blaster.
Heading toward the north, the two men arched around Redstone ville and Tickle Belly Lake.
“You know, the bubbling water there is supposed to have special healing powers,” Dunbar said as a suggestion. “Kinda magical-like.”
“Ain't nothing gonna help but chilling me some outlanders,” Fenton growled, the words muffled by the multiple layers of bandages.
Passing a rusted predark sign of a winged horse, the sec men killed their engines and coasted to a stop. Listening to the night wind, they tried to hear if anything was moving in the area.
“Can't hear a thing,” Fenton said, a hand cupped to his ear. “Think our friend is hereabouts?”
“Certainly hope not,” Dunbar replied, drawing the Browning from the boot and working the arming bolt.
There was a reason why very few wendigos ever bothered Delta ville. The muties were terrified of the Outer Guard. It lived in a cave in the foothills and watched everything that passed on the predark road. When the former baron had sent messengers to Redstone, they always gave a wide berth to this area, going miles out of their way to avoid the Guard. In spite of its size, the Outer Guard moved as fast as a horse, so if a man was on foot when it attacked, he was soon on the last train west. If a person was on horseback, it was an even race. And if a person was on a hog or in a wag, driving past was easy.
“Unless you're hauling an overloaded sidecar,” Dunbar muttered softly, making sure the longblaster was set on full-auto. One pull of the trigger now would discharge the twenty rounds in the magazine faster than a man could sneeze.
“Yeah, I know,” Fenton growled in agreement, clearly thinking along similar lines. Pulling out his own Browning, the wounded man briefly checked the weapon. “We could swing to the north, only waste an hour or so. Sound good?”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Dunbar said, then stiffened as two crimson lights appeared in the darkness ahead. There came the steady whomp-whomp-whomp of some thing large coming their way fast.
“Too late!” Dunbar yelled, triggering the BAR. “Open fire!”
The heavy longblaster was almost torn from his grip as it cycled through the twenty cartridges, and the teen could hear the lead ricocheting off the armored hull of the Guardian.
With nothing to lose anymore, Fenton turned on his headlight and spotted a dented predark machine. Over six feet high and easily three times that in length, the armored body was oblong, similar to an egg, and there were six metallic legs coming out of the sides, giving the Guardian a definite spiderlike appearance. A pair of serrated pinchers extended from just below the featureless face dominated by a pair of large, red crystal eyes that constantly spun in place. The sight was unnerving and disorientating, which was probably the idea, since this was known to be a military war machine, an ancient guardian, although of what nobody knew anymore.
Swiveling on a belly mount, some kind of blaster aimed at the two men, and a steady rattling noise rent the air, like pebbles shaken in a tin can. But nothing seemed to happen. Whatever the weapon was, it no longer worked.
However, the pinchers did, and stomped closer. The Guardian made a pass at Fenton and then Dunbar, the scissoring metal missing them by mere inches. Then a rancid smell hit the sec men, the telltale reek of rotting flesh informing them that the Guardian had slain something recently. That was when they saw the pinchers in the reflected light of the headlight, the pitted steel coated with dried blood and dangling strips of decomposing offal.
Slamming in a fresh clip, Dunbar switched back to
semiautomatic, clumsily working the arming bolt with his left hand, to hammer the machine once more with a fusillade of 30.06 rounds. But this close, he could actually see the soft-lead bullets flatten against the domed body and tumble away like tiny gray pancakes.
Trying his own weapon, Fenton lost control of the bucking BAR on full-auto, the stream of armor-piercing rounds churning a path of destruction through the dirt, then chewing bark off a tree some fifty yards away.
Suddenly, excited hooting rose from the swamp, and the men cursed as they realized the sounds of blasters had attracted the attention of a group of stickies.
As the Guardian turned to face this new threat, Fenton drew the Webley and triggered a fast four rounds. The big bore blaster thundered into the night, the massive rounds slamming dents into the armored hull and shattering one of the crystal eyes.
Turning, the machine snapped its pinchers at the man, shattering the windshield of his motorcycle, the pinchers slamming closed only inches away from his chest.
Clawing for the sawed-off, Dunbar gave the Guardian both barrels, the double report echoing across the landscape and into the swamp. The maelstrom of soft-lead pellets blasted across the machine, deepening several of the dents and opening one like folding back a curtain. Briefly, the sec chief saw inside the machine, twinkling lights, nests of wiring, banks of electric motors and a complex array of plastic netting that pulsed with moving beams of light.
Without conscious thought, Dunbar aimed the
sawed-off and pressed the trigger, then bitterly cursed as the empty weapon merely clicked.
Spinning around and around again, the Guardian then lurched away from the two men, one of its legs impotently dragging behind.
“Come back here, ya tin fuck,” Fenton growled, yanking out the spent magazine from the Browning to insert a fresh one from his ammo belt. Yanking back the arming bolt, he aimed and put two rounds into the departing machine, which only made it move faster toward the nearby trees.
“Stop wasting brass,” Dunbar said, reloading the Remington scattergun.
“No, I want it chilled,” Fenton snarled, firing six more times, the ricochets zinging off the domed hull to hit some rocks on the ground and throw off sparks.
“Lieutenant, I said enough!” Dunbar bellowed, using the whipcrack tone his father had taught both of the brothers at a very young age.
The furious sec man paused for only a moment. “Yes, sir,” he answered sullenly, lowering the smoking longblaster.
Just then, several stickies rose from the scum-covered water of the nearby swamp and began eagerly sloshing toward the muddy shore, hooting and waving their sucker-covered hands.
Instantly, the two sec men raised their weapons to fire, then holstered them, kicked the bikes into life and drove away, leaving the shambling stickies quickly behind.
“That machine was pretty badly damaged before we arrived,” Fenton said, a loose strip of his bandages
fluttering in the wind. “That's the only reason we got away so easy.”
“Agreed,” Dunbar said over the rumbling engine. “I'd guess that the outlanders have been this way and tangled with the Guardian first.”
“Pity it didn't ace 'em,” Fenton muttered, then barked a laugh. “Come to think of it, mebbe it did, and the stickies dragged off the bodies for dinner!”
“If that's the case, we're well and truly nuked,” Dunbar replied. “Because neither of us is ever going to see the inside of Delta again unless we have the heads of the outlanders!”
Slowing his bike, Fenton cast a glance at the dark swampland to the south. The stickies still raced after the two men, waving their arms and hooting wildly. Shitfire, Fenton thought. Even if they somehow managed to find the bodies in there, the outlanders would be stripped of any flesh by now, the skulls featureless white bone with nothing on them that could be used for identification.
“Sons of bitches better be alive in Modine so I can ace 'em myself,” Fenton snarled, twisting the throttle of the big motorcycle to gun the engine and race ahead into the Stygian night.
Â
A
S THE COMPANIONS
rode along the rusty railroad tracks, Mildred studied the nighttime sky above, relishing the brief respite from the usual heavy cover of polluted storm clouds. A crescent moon sat high amid a sea of the twinkling stars, the heavenly orb oddly obscured by a thin fog. The physician wasn't sure if
it was something in the sky or something around the moon itself.
Had the British ever built their mining base on Luna? she wondered. Were the astronauts still there, breeding and building, forging a new space-based civilization? Or had they perished after the last shipment of supplies? The history of humanity seemed to be equal parts incredible heroism and monumental stupidity. The yin and yang of life.
At least the companions were finally safe from those accursed wendigos.
There had been a predark bridge that extended over the southern swamp, the pylons thick with flowering vines that snapped at the horses and tried more than once to impale the companions with thorn-tipped roots.
Upon finally reaching the other side, J.B. had used half their remaining supply of ammunition to make a bomb powerful enough to blow the ancient structure in two. Which was good timing because as he finished, the stickies arrived in force, dozens of the horrid muties hooting insanely and waving their sucker-covered hands at the thought of a juicy feast of norms and horse flesh just waiting to be harvested.
The blast destroyed the bridge and sent the stickies hurtling away to land in a bubbling pool of toxic chems that melted the flesh off their bones. The resulting span between dry land and the ragged end of the bridge was a good hundred feet, so even if the wendigos were still after the companions, they would now need wings to continue the hunt. Nothing that walked was making it through that swamp alive.
Following the rusty tracks, the companions spent days traveling through abandoned farmlands. The houses, barns and silos had all crumbled back into the earth, the crops running wild, the fields of cotton, soybeans and clover mixing in a rather pleasing panorama of colors and smells.
“If it wasn't for the stickies, this would make a good place to settle,” Ryan said, an unfamiliar touch of gentleness in his normally gruff voice. “You could build a small ville on that hilltop over there, see? It has an excellent view of the landscape, and climbing up that hill would make a ville hard to attack.”
“Yes, it would,” Krysty agreed, riding her horse a little closer.
“And nobody bother for years still think this mutie territory,” Jak said with a lopsided grin, then laughed. “First time stickies good for anything.”