Authors: James Axler
“It’s worse when you see what you’re about to do,” Marla said. “You watch but you can’t stop yourself doing it, taking that step, brushing that branch aside.”
Standing beside Symon in the patchwork shack, his daughter Tarelya looked fearfully through the misted window, her breath hanging in the air like fog. “What happens if they see us? Won’t they try to eat us, too?” she asked.
Piotr looked at her and nodded. “Stay out of sight.”
“Do you have weapons here?” Symon asked, glancing around the claustrophobically disorganized interior of the supermarket.
“Besides what we carry?” Graz challenged. “Very little.”
“We’ve found a few blasters in some of the houses,” Piotr admitted, “but there’s barely any ammunition. And without ammunition, the weapons are useless.”
“Could a blaster put a dent in one of those...things?” Symon asked, indicating the swarming mouths.
“Yes,” Piotr told him. “But there are too many to risk it now. At first, we would pick them off, but our ammunition runs low and their numbers are never ending. Now we pick our battles with care and run when we can.”
“What if they come to eat this place?” Tarelya asked worriedly.
“Then we shall move,” Piotr said.
“Or we shall die,” Graz added ominously.
Symon shot him a warning look. “Don’t tease my daughter like that, friend.”
Graz began to reply but Piotr stopped him. “He meant nothing by it,” Piotr reassured the fisherman and his daughter. “Just a joke.”
But it wasn’t a joke, Symon knew that. It was a reality that these poor wretches had resigned themselves to. No doubt they had been forced to make a hasty exit from other locations. Perhaps they had lost others of their number. It was best not to ask in front of his daughter.
“Does anything eat them?” Symon asked after some consideration. “The crows?”
“Not eat them, no,” Graz told him, “but the watchers sometimes hunt them for sport.”
“They catch them,” Marla added.
“What for?” Symon asked.
Marla shook her head. “They’re psychotic. Only a nutcase would do that. The chronovores are relentless. Trust me—you don’t want to go near them.”
“Or the clockwatchers,” Graz added firmly.
Symon and his daughter continued to watch the chronovores as they feasted on the untamed energies amid the snow. Out there, through the window, End Day ran on.
Chapter Seventeen
They had left the ville far behind them now, yet it still shone like a beacon on the gray horizon as the fires burned through it. The place had been lit and heated with gas and oil, highly flammable materials that had caught the fire and spread it. The companions could only hope that the prisoners and those ville dwellers who had some decency in them had escaped the raging inferno that had once been their home. Even now, more than an hour after J.B.’s initial fire, they could hear the occasional explosion as another canister of gas went up, the boom echoing through the snowy landscape in an eerie, muffled kind of way.
Nyarla walked up front with Mildred and Doc, while Ryan spoke with Krysty and J.B.
“Quite a show you put on back there,” Ryan told J.B.
The Armorer smiled briefly. “Just survival,” he said, downplaying the whole affair. “Any showmanship was strictly accidental.”
Snow was falling still, not thick but well-spread, dotting the air with its pretty white specks. To Ryan, his face wrapped in the weighed white scarf he had carried with him longer than he cared to remember, the snow didn’t look pretty—it looked like everything else in the Deathlands, just one more way to execute a man, freezing him to death.
The falling snow left no paths visible so the group approximated the way to the mine as best as they could, sticking to the cross-country route so as to avoid stragglers from the ville. While Jak was often cast in the role of tracker, each of the companions had a strong sense of direction. Such was necessary in the shockscape of the Deathlands, where few of the traditional symbols remained by which a person could navigate, and where so much could change in a single shower of acid rain.
The military site waited as they remembered it, a crater punched into the earth, the missile tail jutting from the ground like some conquering flag placed by the gods. In a way it was, for the missiles had conquered the land once called America, leaving nothing that person could truly call his or her own. Total war had led to near-total annihilation.
As soon as they were within sight of the mine, Ryan halted the group, commanding everyone to find cover. With snow falling and the poor illumination of the struggling sun, it wasn’t hard to stay out of sight this far from the base. There had been sec men waiting when Ryan and the others had been taken there yesterday, and he didn’t want to run in to any additional problems now.
Crouched behind the bole of a tree, Ryan brought his Steyr Scout up to his eye and peered through its magnification scope. The metal felt ice-cold against his face. Beside him, J.B. produced a pair of binocs from his coat, recovered by Mildred from the haul that had been taken from him by the ice ville dwellers.
“There,” Ryan said after a moment. “Two of them, waiting right by the entrance.”
“I’ve got a third,” J.B. added. “Up at three o’clock. You see him?”
Ryan moved the rifle’s scope around until he had the sec man framed in the crosshairs. The man was taking a slow drag from a hand-rolled cigarette and smoke seemed to pour from within the confines of his fur-lined hood.
“We could take them,” J.B. suggested.
Ryan moved the Steyr’s scope back to frame the two men at the entrance. “The sounds are sure to bring backup if they have it.”
“Bring it,” the Armorer replied. “I’d sooner see them chilled now than find them snapping at our backs when we enter
that.
” He meant
Temno Bozh’ego Sada,
of course, the edge of the world. It loomed just beyond the complex of mines, a great wall of magnetic distortion turning the air into eerie shades of green and blue, warping the atmosphere in an ever-changing miasma of light.
Agreeing with his friend’s logic, Ryan hissed out commands to the other companions, warning them to get in position and get ready. If he could, he would chill these sec men from a distance and that would be the end of it. But if there was backup, like J.B. reckoned, then it would require all of his team to stay alert until the threat was dealt with.
Wrapping the shooting sling over his left arm, Ryan secured the butt of the longblaster in the groove of his shoulder, watching the sec men through the falling cascade of snow. Magnified into great white streaks by the scope, the snow obscured his vision. Ryan took a moment, steadying his breath. A thin trail of mist ballooned from between his parted lips as he prepared himself.
Then he fired. Twin shots rang out across the snowy plains, blasting in quick succession. The first sec man collapsed backward, his face erupting in a spray of blood. The second took a bullet just below the chin and he, too, went down, flopping to the ground like a beached fish.
Ryan was already switching his aim, bringing the Scout around and fixing the third sec man in its sights. The man had heard the shots, and he began sprinting across the snow toward the mine entrance. Ryan tracked him for three seconds, watching as he leaped over a mound of snow, shoving the twigs of a dead bush aside in his haste. He had the man’s speed now, and his index finger brushed the trigger of the longblaster again, sending another 7.62 mm slug hurtling from the barrel.
In the crosshairs of the scope, Ryan watched the third sec man drop to the ground, tumbling over himself as he struck the snow. The one-eyed man waited a moment, his breathing coming faster now, to see if the man would move again. A tiny red patch began to emerge beneath the sec man’s fur coat, leaking into the snow like spilled paint.
The sound of a bullet cut through the air, and J.B. cursed from beside Ryan’s shoulder. “Dark night! More of them coming. Mine entrance and up on your nine.”
“Fireblast,” Ryan spit, bringing the scope around. Five more were at the mine entrance, he saw. They were using the walls for cover and bringing up long-range blasters as they searched for their attackers.
“You handle the main entrance,” J.B. said, drawing himself up from his hiding place, “and we’ll deal with the stragglers.”
Before Ryan could say anything, J.B., Doc and Krysty were running toward the mine, while Mildred remained with Nyarla.
Ryan swiftly picked off two of the men at the mine entrance, drilling them through the skulls with a bullet each as they tried to locate their attackers. A third man got lucky, pulling up a longblaster and sending a half dozen shots in Ryan’s direction on semiauto. Ryan rolled back as the shots peppered the trees and the ground around him.
“Get the girl back,” Ryan said to Mildred as he dropped down to his belly.
Behind him, Mildred ushered Nyarla away, her hand on the young woman’s head, urging her to stay down.
Ryan had the Scout back in firing position, his eye pressed against the scope. Two of the sec men had broken away from the main entrance of the mine while the third stayed back, using a modified sniper rifle to scour the territory. The man was well-covered, peeking out from cover only briefly, just the muzzle of his rifle visible.
Ryan shifted his focus, searching the snow-covered plain for sign of the other men.
* * *
I
NSIDE
THE
EXCAVATED
redoubt, twelve sec men were readying themselves for the assault. The mine had been attacked before, over the past few years, from the time that Baron Kenojuak and his people had first begun investigating the site. It had been hard work back then, burrowing into the earth, inch by unforgiving inch, reaching into the collapsed base where the missiles had sunk it into the soil. Now, the alarm had been raised and it appeared that the place was under attack again.
“No one gets in but us and our people,” the lead sec man commanded. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man called Curt, with a scar down his left cheek and one eye turned blind white. He had fought for the ville for as long as anyone could remember, even served time in the gladiatorial ring for the entertainment of the masses. He had defended the mine from attack more than once before. “They’ll try to storm the mine soon, and we need to be ready. Grab a blaster and whatever ammo you can, and if they move against us, chill the prisoners.” He was smart enough to know a liability when he saw one—prisoners, miners, slaves, they could be replaced. The weapon stash was the important thing here.
All around Curt, the sec men split up, making their way toward the nearest exits to rain fire down on whoever dared attack their mine.
* * *
C
LOSE
TO
THE
MINE
, J.B., Krysty and Doc were working their way through the sparse cover of dead trees, searching for the enemy. They kept well apart, following a path that J.B. found to bring them around to one of the mine’s several side entries.
J.B. spotted movement in the bushes to his right, brought his M-4000 shotgun up to track it. The Armorer didn’t want to shoot without being sure. Could be it was Jak or Ricky, making their way back from the edge of beyond.
Then two figures emerged from the scrappy undergrowth, shoving a chain gun mounted on skis ahead of them. J.B. recognized the weapon, a U.S.-built EX34 that used a potentially endless loop of ammunition to deal damage to an enemy. The two men had it prepped, nudging the pipe nose of the weapon through the cover of the bushes. In the split second it took for J.B. to process this information the sec men wedged the skis in place and a stream of 7.62 mm bullets cut through the air toward the Armorer.
* * *
B
ULLETS
PELTED
THE
AIR
all around Ryan as he brought the longblaster around in a slow, steady arc, searching for the missing sec men. He found one creeping up the crater bank, his body low to the ground and the familiar black shaft of a shotgun barrel in his right hand.
Ryan fired, sending a shot through the trees. The bullet clipped the creeping sec man in the shoulder, sending him tumbling down the slope of the crater and back toward the mine entrance in a splash of spilled blood and snow.
Mildred’s voice rang out behind Ryan. “At your ten!”
Ryan saw the man’s shadow cut across his line of fire.
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan rolled, pulling his eye away from the scope and bringing the longblaster around to his ten o’clock, firing automatically. There was another sec man there, just twelve feet away. This one was wrapped in bulky furs and carrying twin handblasters in his gloved hands as he stalked toward the one-eyed man. Ryan’s blind shot hit him in the upper flesh of his left leg. The man cursed, bringing up both blasters to chill Ryan.
The sound of a shot echoed from behind Ryan, off to his exposed left, and the sec man went down without firing, tumbling forward to drill the barrels of both blasters into the snow.
Ryan turned to see Mildred kneeling a dozen feet away, the ZKR 551 clasped in a sure, two-handed grip. He dipped his head once in thanks before turning back to the Scout’s scope and searching for the man hiding in the mine entry.
* * *
I
N
THE
SNOW
-
PACKED
wilds, J.B. was scrambling toward one of the mine’s side entries. Bullets zapped through the air toward him as he ran, but the men at the chain gun were too high and they had trouble dipping the weapon’s fixed muzzle low enough to snag their target.
The two men stopped firing, and after a momentary discussion they worked together to heft the gun forward, arrowing the skis toward the retreating form of the Armorer. As they did so, Krysty and Doc appeared from opposite sides, bringing their own weapons to bear.
“You gentlemen may wish to reconsider your life choices so far,” Doc mocked as he held them both in the sights of his LeMat.
The men spun, looking for an escape route only to come face-to-face with the muzzle of Krysty’s Smith & Wesson. Behind it, her emerald eyes were all that could be seen beneath the protective wrappings across her face, a single wisp of red hair flying free from beneath her hood.
“I’d tell you not to move,” Krysty warned, “but I figure that’s redundant. Besides, I almost want you to give me an excuse.”
One of the sec men appeared to take Krysty at her word, and his hand dipped to his belt holster, reaching toward the blaster he wore there. Krysty fired but the man had ducked just out of the bullet’s path, bringing his own weapon free from its holster as the bullet careened off toward the mine.
Krysty shot again and the man sagged to the snow, the shot ripping the blaster from his hand and mangling the glove he wore into a blood-soaked mess in an instant. She stepped over him, aiming the barrel of the Smith & Wesson at his frightened face.
His partner, finally seeing the way things were headed, raised his hands in the air in surrender to Doc. “Don’t shoot!”
* * *
W
ITH
HIS
BACK
to the outside wall of the sunken redoubt, J.B. looked around, scanning the immediate area. Two mutie caribou were tethered just above the lip of the crater, close to the unexploded missile lodged in the soil. Behind that, the faintly unreal line that marked the so-called edge of the world shimmered in place like a towering wall. What was it the girl had called it
? The Tall Wall.
The mines could still be full of chillers, J.B. realized. No doubt some of the refugees from the torched ville had gravitated here, taking a much more direct route than he and his companions had. There was every chance that the mines held another fifty men and women, each one armed ten times over with blasters and ammo and who knew what else. The place was a stockpile of weaponry, and the number of sec men at any one time suggested that they had kept much of the stock there even after recovering it from the collapsed base. It stood to reason—why move it until you needed it?
“We need to shut this pesthole down,” J.B. muttered as another clutch of bullets drilled the ground beyond the mine shaft’s reach. He placed one hand to the side of his jacket, felt there for the items he had replaced a little over an hour before. These cannies had had the run of this snowbound corner of Hell for too long, terrorizing innocents like Nyarla and her missing father, he thought. It was time to cut off their lines of supply forever.
* * *
S
EC
MEN
CONTINUED
pouring from the exits of the mine, hauling fiercer weapons with them as they tried to defend their territory. In the trees, Doc and Krysty found themselves under attack from a tag team wielding a rocket launcher and a submachine gun, the latter laying down cover fire while the former reloaded. They raced for cover, leaving the two men who had operated the chain gun to stand or fall as best they could. There was no time to restrain them; it was chill or be chilled out there now. A copse of leafless trees provided scant shelter, the billowing snow blustering all around it.
Krysty gasped as a miniature rocket zipped through the trees. “We should have gone around.”
The two of them watched for a moment as the rocket impacted with a far tree in a blossom of flames.
“And have these people at our backs? Following us?” Doc suggested. “No. We burned down their ville and they have nowhere left to go now but into the very place they fear. If we had run, we would be running still, and we would never outdistance coldhearts such as these.”
Krysty knew he was right. She hated it, hated the position they had been forced into. But she thought of Kirima, Narja and the other women who had been forced to serve these heartless men, and she made peace with what she had to do.
Doc shouted a warning, and Krysty ducked automatically as another antitank missile cut a path through the leafless trees.
While the rocket launcher was being reloaded, Doc led the way across the drifting snow, blasting his LeMat in the direction of the chillers, with Krysty just a pace behind him.
* * *
H
EAD
TUCKED
IN
, longblaster in hand, Ryan sprinted across the snow as bullets cut the air around him. The sec man at the mine entrance was getting bolder, and though he wasn’t counting the shots—it was hard to do so over the general cacophony of blasterfire—Ryan was pretty certain the man had been joined by a second sharpshooter, the two of them covering the ground in an expanding semicircle.
Ahead of Ryan, a bush poked out of the snow, its twig fingers reaching up from the blanket of white. It wasn’t much in the way of cover, but it would have to suffice. Ryan ran to it, dropping and rolling to tuck himself down behind its fanned branches.
He had the Scout laid out before him instantly, the scope to his eye. He saw both men in profile, facing away from his direction, unaware that he had moved.
Gently, Ryan stroked the trigger with his index finger and let loose two quick shots, watching through the crosshairs as the man with the scoped longblaster went down, his head and chest exploding almost simultaneously.
The second man moved, not back toward the cover of the mine as Ryan might have expected, but forward, out across the snow with his longblaster resting in both hands. Ryan tracked him across the snow, breathing deeply as he lined up his shot, then fired.
The final gunman went down, a bullet wound like a bloody rose in the center of his chest.
* * *
T
HE
MEN
WITH
the rocket launcher saw Doc and Krysty charging toward them through drifting snow flurries, Doc like a scarecrow from a nightmare, Krysty’s now untucked hair blowing behind her like a living flame. The submachine gunner slammed a new magazine in the stock and depressed the trigger while his colleague took aim. Bullets sprayed the site, throwing puffs of snow all around them as Doc and Krysty weaved in a zigzag pattern down the slope.
Doc’s LeMat blasted again, but this time he had engaged the shotgun barrel, which blurted a great ball of shot at his would-be chillers. The man behind the rocket launcher took the full blast in his face, tipping him over. His finger twitched against the weapon’s trigger, discharging a rocket straight up into the air as he keeled to the ground.
His partner continued to spray the air with lead as Krysty ran at him through the trees. With incredible agility, the red-haired woman leaped over the hail of fire, her free hand snagging one dead limb of a tree overhead and swinging her up and outward in an arc perfectly judged to meet with the triggerman. She barreled through the air for a second, plummeting feetfirst into the man’s face as he tried desperately to adjust his aim. Krysty’s boot heels hit him with bone-jarring finality, the snap of his jawbone audible even over the wild discharge of his weapon.
The man looked up, but the next thing he saw—and also the last thing—was the barrel of Krysty’s blaster as she drove it down between his eyes and shot him.
“Get back,” J.B. called to them from a little way up the slope. Krysty and Doc turned, saw that J.B. was scrambling toward the half-sunken missile that dominated the crater.
“John Barrymore Dix,” Doc called, “what is it you plan to do?”
“Close this pesthole down,” J.B. replied, “once and for all.”
* * *
A
T
THE
TOP
OF
THE
SLOPE
, now standing next to the missile, J.B. enjoyed a brief moment of silence. The blasters had stopped firing and the world quieted, the angry wind muffled by the falling snow.
Taking a deep breath, J.B. looked at the missile before him. The workings had been opened at some point, and the metal panel that once hid them was torn away and hung broken. Ice glistened on the exposed insides, snow tumbling from the missile as he brushed one gloved hand across it. The Armorer reached into his jacket and pulled loose the little wad of plastic explosive he had set aside for the task.
Down below, the collapsed redoubt-turned-weapons-mine waited in ominous silence. It broke J.B.’s heart to lose all that weaponry down there, but there it was. Chipping ice away with the end of his shotgun, J.B. placed the explosive against the exposed workings and gritted his teeth as he primed it.
The little charge slapped in place, J.B. slammed the broken remains of the panel closed on the missile housing and began to run, shouting to Doc and Krysty to do the same. The timer had a short fuse—twenty seconds maybe?—and J.B. knew he simply had to generate as much distance as he damn well could before it went off, triggering the far bigger payload inside the missile. Buried the way it was, the missile’s effect would be dulled, but that wouldn’t matter. Just so long as it took this pesthole, with its psychopathic mining op, out for good, that’s all that he cared about.
He was almost level with the side entrance now, about a quarter turn around the mine and well up from the base of the sunken crater. It had to be far enough, just had to be. The count in J.B.’s head had reached fifteen and he threw himself to the ground, his arms over his head protectively, his face down in the snow. Another second of ominous silence...two...and then the charge went off. It sounded loud as it echoed across the plain, like a cosmic anvil being struck by a hammer.
But the sound was nothing in comparison to what came next. J.B.’s tiny charge ignited the long-dormant works of the missile, setting the payload off in an explosion that turned the whole place into daylight-flash for a second and a half, the accompanying noise deafening in its magnificence.
The explosion ripped across his closed eyelids in a cough of brilliance, visible even through them. And it did a magnificent job of sending the left-hand line of the crater deeper into the earth, driving a punishing stake through the heart of the mine and turning its foundations to dust, collapsing the scratch-built mine shafts.