Shouts and blasterfire came from the fortified section of the flatbed as a few solies scrambled up the splintery wooden sides to attack the companions in the rear. Mildred blew the head off a solenodon as it came over the top, and Doc blew apart two with one blast from the shotgun round in his LeMat. But the explosions and blood only drew the attention of more of the plump animals and the bloody mud darkened with their furry bodies.
“Krysty, wake up!” Mildred shouted, thumbing fresh cartridges into the S&W scattergun. She only got two into the blaster when several of the solies scurried over the top of the planks. She shot from the hip, the bodies blown into hamburger from the stainless-steel fléchettes. The other solenodons inside the wooden walls momentarily turned their attention away from the companions to attack their fallen brethren, and everybody frantically reloaded.
Hissing in rage, a solie scrambled over the wall near Jak and leaped for the teenager from behind. In midair, the mutie exploded into fur and guts.
Spinning, Jak saw a trembling Krysty brace herself by grabbing on to a barrel of juice, the smoking S&W Model 640 tight in her fist. The woman was deathly pale, her animated filaments hanging limply as if ordinary hair, but her face was grimly determined, and the pocket blaster swept the interior of the flatbed for new targets.
Fuming with frustration, J.B. tried to get the wag to move faster, but the flat tire was flopping loosely on the rim, making the front suspension shimmy so hard the steering wheel was almost jerked out of his hands. The noise of the tire was louder than the engine and attracted the solies more than grens. Dozens of the muties attacked the loose rubber, only to be crushed under the shuddered rim. Then furry heads popped into view above the battered front armor. Leaning out the window, Ryan shot the solies off the hood, angling the rounds carefully to make sure that he didn’t ruin the repair job on the radiator. But he was fast running out of ammo, and there didn’t seem to be any end to the swarm of solenodons.
Trying their best to not fall over from the constant jerks and bouncing of the war wag, the companions in the rear shuffled together and put their backs together to form a circle. The floorboards were littered with spent brass and aced solies, but the little muties kept coming over the walls in ever-increasing numbers. The companions were firing their blasters nonstop, chewing the top of the plank walls into splintery ruin as they chilled the muties before they could get over the top.
Slapping in his last clip, Jak saw a solie make it over the wall and drop successfully inside to land on top of a barrel of diesel juice. He couldn’t shoot it there! If he missed, the whole wag would go up in flames! As the solie braced for a leap, the teen hurriedly jerked his hand forward and a knife blade pinned the squirming creature to the wooden wall.
Holstering his empty LeMat, Doc broke formation to grab a Kalashnikov lying on the bedrolls, and a solenodon landed on the sleeve of his coat. Trying to shake it off, the man cursed as it slashed at the fabric, the greenish venom spreading across the worsted material. With no other choice, Doc grabbed the animal by the tail and flung it over the rear wall…then looked in horror at the tattered sleeve. His bare forearm was visible through the tear, a pair of scratches traced along the skin, but there was no blood and no sign of venom. Shaken by the near miss, Doc snatched up the AK-47 and worked the arming bolt to rejoin the fight, more determined than ever to keep the deadly muties out of the vehicle. But the rapid-fire was empty and there were no spare clips in sight.
Casting away the useless blaster, Doc pulled out his sword and hacked a solenodon in two, then speared another completely through, the blade entering the mouth and coming out the rump. Flipping the twitching body free, Doc began slashing at the muties, lopping off their heads the instant they came into view over the planks.
Dropping a spent clip from the SIG-Sauer, Ryan reloaded and kept firing, blowing a solie off the hood, then firing across the interior of the cab and blowing one apart as it tried to attack J.B. behind the wheel.
With a wrenching noise, the shredded tire came off the rim and the wag noticeably increased in speed. Now able to release the steering wheel for a second and shift to a higher gear, J.B. accelerated the wag, plowing through the millet until the tall plants began brushing the solenodons off the outside of the vehicle. Soon there were a lot less of the hairy muties making it over the planks, and then none at all.
Heading west, J.B. breathed a sigh of relief. Ryan started to hastily shove loose brass into a spent clip for the SIG-Sauer when he saw in the rearview mirror that the solenodons were still coming after the war wag, the narrow path of crushed millet plants flattened behind the big vehicle thickly carpeted with the plump muties. There didn’t seem to be any end of the things, and on the dashboard, the engine temperature gauge slowly began creeping back toward the danger zone.
Standing on the edge of a cliff, Delphi was admiring the scenic view on the other side of the chasm. Nevada was such a beautiful state with all of the white-water rivers, soaring hills and jagged mountains. Even the nuclear war had done little to damage the majestic landscape.
Oh, a few of the hills were missing, and a couple of the mountains were a lot smaller, the cyborg admitted to himself. But such minor alterations were trivial compared to what had been done to the rest of the world. Washington, D.C.; Paris; Berlin; Tokyo…dear heavens, there were sections of Europe so devastated that they would never recover. But the colossal defenses of Cheyenne Mountain, the supreme headquarters for NORAD, had spared most of the West from the atomic ravishing of the war, even if Cheyenne Mountain itself was a glowing hellzone of tortured strontium nuclei and cesium-rich lava fields. But this was why he had chosen the Lehman Caves of Nevada as his base of operations. There was little nuke damage and numerous predark ruins to scav for supplies if necessary. And it had proved necessary.
Glancing over a shoulder, Delphi checked to see how the work was progressing. A short distance away, the four war wags of his convoy were parked near the main entrance to caves. A squad of his troopers was attaching tow chains to the boulders blocking the entrance, while Cotton and the others stood guard with the Kalashnikovs.
Delphi smiled at that. This was the only way in, or out, of the labyrinthine maze of the Lehman Caves. Locks could be smashed, guards dogs slain, sec men bribed and land mines tripped. Ah, but simple boulders could only be removed by heavy machinery. High explosives would only make the front entrance to the caves collapse. True, the use of granite boulders was cumbersome and crude, but aside from moving to a redoubt, this was the only way to be sure that his home was completely undisturbed. And more important, undiscovered by any agents from TITAN or Coldfire.
Long ago, the cyborg had established numerous such disguised locales throughout the Deathlands as rewards for the coldhearts he hired to do special tasks. Now the caches were his lifeline, a few precious depots of ammo, fuel and tech.
If only I had thought of adding some spare parts for myself, Delphi thought. That would have saved me from traveling the so-called Deathlands to dig up a chip here and a circuit board there, on top of using the jungle redoubt to raid the laboratories of Coldfire and TITAN.
But at least he now had enough supplies to finish his original mission: find Doc Tanner. That would get him reinstated with Coldfire, and then his real work could continue from this deplorable interruption of…How long had it been? He really didn’t like to think about it too much. The facts only depressed him.
Glaring hostilely into the windy cavern below, Delphi felt the call of nature and loosened his clothing and began to relieve himself into the wind. The cyborg was mostly mechanical parts these days, even more so after tangling with Doc Tanner, but a few pieces of him were still quite organic, especially the one part held in his hand. There were cybernetic replacements for both males and females, but none of them functioned quite as well as the original equipment.
Softly, there came the sound of a footstep from behind.
Unable to decide if he should zip up first or turn around, Delphi paused for a moment, and froze motionless as he felt the cold sting of sharp steel pressed to his bare throat.
“Don’t move, outlander,” the huge man muttered, his breath reeking of ketones, diseases and shine. “I been watching this cliff for weeks, waiting for you to come back. And now you have, wags and bags and all, sweet as a gaudy slut to her bed.” The gigantic man cackled insanely. “Now give me your blaster or I’ll cut you like a mutie dog!”
“My troopers…” Delphi began.
“Are a hundred yards away! And if those big blasters turn in our direction…” With unnatural strength, the man pushed Delphi closer to the edge of the cliff until the deep chasm yawned only inches from his shoes. The cyborg was impressed. To possess such colossal strength, the coldheart clearly had more than a touch of mutie in his blood.
“One nudge, and you’re flying, feeb!” the giant whispered hoarsely. “Now, give me those blasters!”
“No, I don’t think so.” Delphi snarled, mentally activating his new force field. As if moved by a wall of invisible steel, the man was shoved away from the cyborg to go straight over the edge of the cliff and tumble away screaming.
Finished emptying his bladder, the cyborg rearranged his clothing and walked away from the cliff toward the waiting convoy. His sensors said there were no more hidden coldhearts in the rocks. It was silly of him not to check more regularly, but it didn’t seem to be necessary anymore. Even after Tanner had nearly slain him, and half of his systems were damaged, such primitive attacks had not been a real danger. Now, he was stronger than ever.
Walking around a boulder, Delphi found himself confronted by a dozen of his troopers from the convoy, with Cotton Davenport in lead. They looked concerned, and the Kalashnikovs in their hands were poised for combat. The rapid-fires seemed rather bulky and ungainly from the addition of a 30 mm gren launcher under the main barrel, but the man held the big-bore blasters with confident ease.
“We heard a scream, Chief,” Cotton said as a question, glancing around. “Is there trouble?”
“No,” the cyborg replied coolly. “No trouble. I aced a screamwing. Is everything loaded?”
“Yeah, sure,” Davenport answered hesitantly, slowly easing her stance to rest the AK-47 on a broad shoulder. “The boulders are ready to move on your word. A screamwing, you say?”
“Well, it certainly looked like one.” Delphi chuckled, strolling away. “Let’s get inside and load up for another trip, a very long one this time. Weeks, possibly months.”
The group of troopers registered surprise at the pronouncement.
“Months?” Cotton asked. “Shitfire, Chief, we could cross the world in that. Where we going?”
“A place called Front Royal in Virginia,” Delphi said with a frown, starting for the caves. “We’re going to find a certain…cannie by the name of Doc Tanner.” That last part had been off the cuff, but the lie sounded good. “He aced a lot of my friends, and now it’s payback time.”
“Fuckin’ hate cannies,” a trooper growled. Several of the other troopers grimly nodded in agreement. All of them had lost kin to the cooking pots of the stinking cannies, and more than a few of them carried deep scars from viciously fighting the flesh-eating devils.
“Cannies gotta get chilled, that’s the nuking truth,” Cotton agreed wholeheartedly. “You sure this Tanner is at, ah, Fort Royal?”
“Front Royal,” Delphi corrected. “And no, I’m not sure. It’s simply the best place to start.” Then the cyborg made a snap decision. “However, if we don’t find him in Virginia, then we’ll hunt for him elsewhere. Underground.”
“Underground,” Cotton repeated slowly, then glanced at the boulders blocking the entrance to the cave. “You mean, in some sort of cavern like we have?”
“Oh, much better than this.” Delphi snorted, and started to tell them about the redoubts, but stopped just in time. That knowledge would come later. First, he had to get Tanner, and when he was accepted back into Coldfire, then, and only then, could the cyborg unleash his army of primitives into the mat-trans system and openly declare war on his masters!
They abandoned me, Delphi raged internally. Left me to perish among the primitives as if I was a failed experiment, a mutie with too many legs, or a bioweapon that refused to kill. Well, never again would the cyborg allow others to hold such power over his life!
But first the cyborg would have to creature Tanner. He was the key to everything! Victory, revenge…and salvation.
S
UDDENLY THE PLANTS WERE
gone in front of the lumbering wag and J.B. hit the brakes, squinting into the night to see if there was more ground ahead or only empty air. Sharp cliffs rose around them in jagged profusion, and for past few miles the low rumble of a waterfall grew steadily louder.
Illuminated by the flickering yellow beam of the sole remaining headlight was a hard, flat scrubland with only a few tufts and clumps of the millet growing sporadically amid the uneven barrens. In the distance, mist ruled the night, and the waterfall could be heard from somewhere nearby.
“Dirt never looked so good.” Ryan exhaled, sitting up straighter in the seat. “This might be a good place to fix the bastard tire.”
“I hear that,” J.B. growled, flexing his cramped fingers. His arms ached from trying to maintain control of the shuddering wag, and his shoulders felt like a solid knot of congealed muscle. “Okay, let us—Son of a bitch!”
Glancing in the sideview mirror, Ryan grimaced at the sight of a dozen solies coming out of the tall millet and into the wan moonlight. Fireblast, he’d never seen anything like it before in his life.
“Wait here,” Ryan commanded, throwing open the door and hopping down to the ground.
Approaching the handful of solies, Ryan armed the AK-47 and skillfully put a single round into each fat mutie. Standing in the chill night air, he warily studied the field of millet for any more of the little bastards. Then a whistle sounded from the rear of the wag.
“That looks like the last of them,” Mildred said, her ZKR blaster held in a two-handed grip. “Persistent little things, aren’t they?”
“Indeed, madam,” Doc agreed, a hurricane lantern held in one hand and the LeMat in the other. “King Sisyphus was a slugabed in comparison to these arduously diligent solenodons.”
Cocking an eyebrow, Mildred stared at the man in unabashed amusement. “Refresh my memory,” she said. “Exactly what the hell did you teach in school again?”
“English literature, but I was a most voracious reader of, well, everything.”
“I guess so.” She chuckled, shaking her head.
There came the sound of wood scraping against wood, and Ryan looked up to see Jak peering over the plank wall, also holding a lantern and Kalashnikov.
“Solies might be circling,” Jak suggested uneasily. “Catch from side.”
“No, impossible. They’re too stupid for such complex thinking,” Mildred stated firmly, holstering her blaster. “I don’t care how many folds their cerebral cortex may have, the heads are simply too small for them to be intelligent.”
“Runts smart,” the teen insisted, referring to a race of humanoid muties they had encountered once. The underground dwellers had been scarcely three feet tall, but with full human intelligence. The companions survived tangling with the little warriors only because of superior firepower.
“And they were human muties with heads twice the size of these rodents,” Mildred replied. “Or whatever a solenodon technically is. I don’t know what genus, or class, they belong to.”
“Genus, pain. Class, in the arse,” Doc muttered in dark humor, resting the longblaster on a muddy shoulder. The weary companions looked like zombies fresh from the grave, their muddy clothing ripped and splattered with solie blood. All of their boots bore deep scratches from the fat muties, only the anti-landmine steel plates in the U.S. Army footwear saving them from being poisoned by the green venom of the resilient rodents.
“Hey, J.B., ace the engine!” Ryan shouted over a shoulder.
“No prob!” the man answered from the cab. The rumbling diesel died away.
Several minutes passed as Ryan listened closely to the sounds of the night, but the big man could only hear the ticking of the hot engine and the pervasive rustle of the wind-stirred millet.
“All right, that was the last of them,” Ryan declared, easing off the bolt on the Kalashnikov and draping the rapid-fire over a shoulder. “Might as well fix the fragging tire before we go any farther. Jak, stay on guard. Mildred and Doc, rustle everybody up some chow. J.B. and I will…” He frowned, feeling his gut tighten. “Where’s Krysty?”
“Asleep,” Mildred answered quickly. “She’s sleeping in one of the bedrolls. That bullet she took through her hair drained her. She needs to rest.”
“Yeah, let her sleep,” he said with surprising gentleness. “J.B. and I can fix the wag by ourselves.”
“Although we’ll probably wake her anyway with the repairs,” the Armorer said gruffly, walking into the glow of the lantern and wiping his hands on a rag. “There’s a spare tire, but no spare rim, and the one we have is more warped than a boiled boomerang.”
“Any chance you can fix it?” Mildred asked hopefully. “Hammer the rim back into shape?” She had tremendous confidence in John’s ability to repair damn near anything made of metal.
“Good enough for it to hold a seal? No way. If we were back at the redoubt, I could probably do something, but not out here.” J.B. scratched under his hat. “Now I might be able to shift a couple of tires from the back and put them on the front, but that all depends on how many we have left.”
“Why two?” Jak demanded, brushing back his snowy hair. “Only one flat.”
“Because the front tires are totally different from the rear,” J.B. explained patiently. “They’re for steering the cab, while the ones in the flatbed are for supporting the cargo. They don’t turn like the ones up front, and we need a match pair to make the cab steer smoothly. Dark night, the front suspension is banged up enough from our ride through that damn marsh! On top of which, the rear tires are bigger than the others, so we’ll have to trim the damn planks, too.”
“Fair enough,” Jak said in acceptance. “Radiator fixed.”