The overweight man high-kicked for the darkness, his arms pumping, his chin up, his brimmed canvas hat smashed down onto the back of his head.
Although J.B. swung up his scattergun and dropped the safety, bringing the muzzle around to take a swinging lead on the target, he didn’t press the trigger. That would have been a waste of a perfectly good round. Big Mike was already out of effective knock-down range of the short-barreled 12-gauge.
Ryan had likewise shouldered the Steyr, but he didn’t fire, either. When J.B. checked back, he saw his friend wasn’t looking through the scope, he was sighting around it. J.B. reckoned the light was way too dim for a scoped shot on a target moving away from Ground Zero. Apparently too dim for any shot, as Ryan lowered his weapon.
In another second, the man with no hands had disappeared into the blackness, heading back the way they’d just come, back for Slake City.
When J.B. started to pursue, Ryan caught hold of his shoulder. “No time for that,” he said.
“We’re going to just let the lying, murdering sack of shit get away?” J.B. said.
“Chances are, when we hike out tomorrow we’ll find
him a couple miles from here, dead by the side of the road,” Ryan said.
“Like to have blasted the bastard personally,” J.B. said.
“You and me both, but we’ve got other, more pressing business.”
The sounds of the fighting rolled over the ridge: the ringing booms of the pipe-bomb detonations, the strobe flashes of the explosions against the sky, the blasterfire sawing back and forth, the shrill screams of the wounded. Towering pillars of smoke rose into the air above Ground Zero, underlit by the kliegs.
Ryan slung his longblaster, unholstered his SIG and said, “We’d better get on with it.”
Without a word, the diminutive Armorer aimed his scattergun toward heaven, and followed his companion into the already raging battle. Something he had done many, many times before—too many to even count.
Only this time it felt different.
It felt…wrong.
Ever since they’d made the fateful detour off the highway and onto the hell-blasted volcanic plain, he could smell an impending disaster—like the pong of cigar, butt stank and vinegar in a single-wide trailer gaudy. A helpless, waking nightmare, waiting somewhere down the line to be played out in flesh, blood and bone.
Everybody died.
Everybody knew that.
And on the brink of eternity, everybody thought, not here, not now.
That’s what J.B. was thinking as he walked through the gap in the ridge beside his oldest surviving friend,
feeling the rumble of explosions through the soles of his boots and in the pit of his stomach.
Not here. Not now.
His instinct was telling him just the opposite; that this was it, that this was the one. This was where he got on the last train west.
He had been feeling the sense of doom for days now, but he couldn’t explain it to the others. He couldn’t put it into words that didn’t sound two-week jolt-binge, scab-assed crazy. Inch by inch, even though he had tried to keep it from happening, he and his companions had been sucked deeper. Until it was too late.
Who was kidding who?
It was too late the second they stepped off the predark highway.
J.B. remembered all too well what the she-hes’ laser rifles could do to a human being. And how useless plain old bullets were against their shiny black battle armor. The Bannock-Shoshone’s whiteface, spiritual mumbo jumbo was going to get them all turned into ghosts for real.
But if dying in this wretched, awful place was his true and only fate, if it was what Destiny had in mind for him all along, J.B. knew he couldn’t run from it. There was no escape.
So be it, he told himself as he screwed his hat down hard on his head. And fuck it.
When they rushed out onto the sloping verge of Ground Zero, J.B. immediately slung the M-4000 scattergun over his right shoulder. There was no one close enough to shoot at, and besides, the whitefaces were
between them and the enemy. They had a lot of ground to cover to catch up to Besup’s forces.
The two of them sprinted for the rear of the charging column. J.B. had difficulty keeping up with Ryan, who had longer legs and took longer strides.
As they ran, they jumped the pools of blood and the bodies of fallen warriors. Not just shot. Shot to shit. Chests, heads blown apart by stitchings of full-metal jackets. The footing was made even trickier by the litter of spent cartridge casings and bits of shrap from the pipe bombs.
Though he had to watch where he slapped down his boots, J.B. kept glancing downrange for the black-armored cockroaches. But none was in evidence. Not yet. His nose and throat burned from the smoke that overhung Ground Zero’s shallow bowl. His lungs burned from the exertion of the sprint.
Then dazzling green beams shot from the row of milspec huts, sustained beams spearing into Besup’s left flank. Two hundred yards ahead of them, men dropped as they ran, skidding on the glass. J.B. got his first glimpse of the real enemy, crouching to fire beside the domes.
Flashes, thunderclaps, multiple, overlaid explosions sent the cockroaches flying off their feet, and slamming to earth.
The sight of them blown sky-high made J.B.’s spirits leap. Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe the she-hes weren’t invincible. Maybe Burning Man wasn’t a total whack-job, maybe really he knew how to fight and beat this enemy. Maybe this wasn’t the end of the road after all.
He would have shouted for joy, but he couldn’t spare the breath.
As they closed ground on the rear of Besup’s forces, he saw the dogs released by the handlers, on cue. The front wave of the attack had already reached the edge of the sleeping pits.
His legs aching, J.B. struggled to keep up with Ryan, who was pulling away from him. Then, through the clouds of smoke he caught sight of a familiar figure. Tall, gaunt, scarecrowlike.
Doc stood over a fallen man, with the LeMat in hand. The man’s face was painted white. Then Doc cocked back the hammer spur and took aim.
Nukin’ hell, J.B. thought as he recognized the man down was Besup.
For a split second, everything seemed to stop. The clamor, the movement, the shouting. Everything and everyone went still as Doc blasted Besup point-blank.
The man’s entire body jerked as the lead ball split open his skull.
Only when J.B. got closer could he see what the she-hes had done to the warrior. And understand why the old man had taken upon himself the onus of a mercy shot. Their tribarrels had left alive two-thirds of a man. Neck to hip was a char of flesh, bone and blood vessels laser-welded shut.
Ryan didn’t pause to inspect the damage. He kept on running, through the sleeping pits, toward the point of the attack.
When J.B. reached Doc’s side, a cluster of close concussions numbed the left side of his face and body. As
hot shrap whistled overhead, he and the old man ducked and dropped to a knee on the glass.
J.B. turned in the direction of the explosions, and saw the water tower topple to the ground and break apart. The released wall of water roared across the flat ground, straight at them. He stood up, bracing himself to meet the surge. It slammed into his knees, sent him sliding and nearly bowled him over.
Far enough ahead to miss the main force of the flood, Ryan took command of the suddenly leaderless and hesitating whitefaces. Out of the forty-five who began the charge, more than half of them were wounded, dead, or dying. Shouting for the warriors to regroup, he led them onward in the final fifty-yard dash.
As J.B. and Doc took off after them, to the left, Burning Man and his bombers pressed the attack. From behind the ruins of the tower, they chucked explosives on the run at the cockroaches trying desperately to reach the protection of the mine entrance. Again, in flashes of light and ear-splitting detonations, the enemy was sent airborne. And they were slower to get up this time.
Still, all of the fleeing she-hes made it through the entrance.
No sooner had they vanished inside, than the war dogs shot through the breach after them, followed closely by Ryan and the whitefaces.
J.B. and Doc were running hard, and they were less than a hundred feet from the entrance when the air was ripped by a different sort of thundercrack. This one was in the ground under their boots. It was the roar of the massif splitting apart.
The cumulative effect of all the explosions sent a craze
of fresh crevices racing across Ground Zero. The ankle-deep standing water poured into them in torrents.
And the seams gaped wider and wider, blocking the path.
J.B. put on the brakes, stumbled and nearly fell into one headfirst.
Doc, on the other hand, vaulted the gap in an easy stride of scarecrow legs.
J.B. pushed up to his feet. Realizing he couldn’t jump the crack from a standing start, he turned back to get a running jump on it. As he did so, Krysty and Mildred raced up to join him, along with the remainder of the baron’s third reserve force.
“Where’s Ryan?” Krysty said.
“Already in the mine,” J.B. said.
From the entrance came muffled sounds of blasterfire and explosions.
“No time to waste,” Mildred said.
“Come on, come on,” Doc urged them from the far side of the crevice.
The three of them vaulted in unison.
Everyone was converging on the mine entrance, but Burning Man and his force had the clear lead. J.B. saw Jak running stride-for-stride beside the NOMEX-clad baron, who in addition to his flamethrower carried a heavily loaded backpack. When the baron suddenly stopped, thirty feet short of the opening, so did Jak, skidding.
Burning Man immediately bent over the pack and took out a pipe bomb. Using the sputtering nozzle of his flamethrower, Burning Man lit the fuse, then dropped the bomb back inside.
“Gaia, what’s he doing?” Krysty cried.
Before Jak could stop him, the baron used the pack’s straps to hammer-throw the entire payload through the mine entrance.
“Oh, fuck, no!” J.B. shouted.
To keep him from going after it, Doc had to tackle him and take him down from behind.
Then it was too late for anyone to do anything but hit the dirt.
The explosion jolted the ground so hard that it blurred J.B.’s vision. Nukeglass boulders shot like cannon balls out of the mine entrance, bouncing across the massif. The volley of flying rock was followed by a blinding, choking rush of smoke and glass dust. The klieg lights overhead faltered, going from white to yellow, threatening to wink out entirely, then brightened again.
When the debris stopped falling and the smoke and dust began to clear, it was obvious that combat was over for the moment. Through the haze, J.B. could see the entrance had collapsed in on itself. There was no way of telling how much of the shaft had come down with it.
The forces outside the mine were sealed off from the fight.
If there was any fight left.
“Could Ryan have survived?” Krysty cried, her prehensile hair drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm. “Could he have survived that?”
No one answered her.
No one wanted to say aloud what they were thinking.
Mildred draped a consoling arm over Krysty’s shoulders. Tears were already streaming down the doctor’s face.
J.B. struggled to sit up and draw breath. This was the worst of unexpected consequences. That the “doom” he had foreseen wasn’t his to suffer after all. That he would live and Ryan would be the one to die.
Rising to his feet, J.B. marched across the smoking ruin of the battlefield. He stepped up to Burning Man, who stood half-grinning as he admired his own handiwork. Without preamble, the Armorer shoved the muzzle of his 12-gauge scattergun hard under the baron’s chin. Then, finger on the trigger, hand on the forestock, he used it to raise the man’s disfigured face, to stretch his neck for all to see.
Burning Man let the flamethrower nozzle fall from his grip. His protective goggles reflected the klieg lights.
“Keep smiling, baron,” J.B. said, “you’re about to buy it.”
The crushing waves of pain kept Auriel doubled over and on her knees in front of the row of cells. While Dr. Huth looked on helplessly, scanner in hand, the specters slid back and forth inside her, dragging, rasping their substance across the surface of her heart, lungs and stomach, shifting position so they could apply maximum pressure against the walls of her torso as they expanded volume. The combined outward force grew more and more intense with every throb. She could feel her soft tissue beginning to tear and knew the bones would soon start to split.
Then her battlesuit com link opened and a voice roared in her head. “Commander, we are under attack!”
It was Saffa, one of the sisters off duty aboveground.
Through the helmet speaker’s static, Auriel could make out the unmistakable rattle of gunfire and the rumble of explosions.
“Who are they?” she wheezed.
“Adversaries unknown. They are using crude but powerful explosives. We can’t hold ground against them. Have to—”
The transmission was broken by a piercing squawk, the microphone overloaded by the proximity of the explosion.
“Who are they?” Auriel demanded, gritting her teeth as she used the cave wall to get to her feet, and the stock and barrels of her laser rifle as a third leg to keep her upright. “How many of the enemy are there? How did they get past the sentries? Identify the attackers! Come in, Saffa!”
After seemingly interminable seconds of hissing static, the she-he came back online. She was out of breath and whimpering in pain.
“Have you been wounded?” Auriel asked. “Is your battlesuit environment compromised?”
Saffa responded, but her voice had suddenly become so faint that her words were unintelligible.
“Say again,” Auriel prompted.
“My armor is intact,” came the strained reply. “Have full oxygen pressure. EM shield operational, all systems appear functional. Something’s not right, though. Something
inside
me isn’t right. I’m feeling something…oh…it’s moving…oh…oh, it hurts. Others, too. Can’t fight. We have to fall back. Everyone fall back!”
“No, do not fall back!” Auriel shouted. “You must defend the jump zone!”
The squawk of another close proximity blast cut off the transmission.
Who would dare cross the massif in the dead of night to attack them? Auriel asked herself. Not hardscrabble dirt farmers trying to rescue their loved ones. Not a pack of thieving murderers out for booty. When she glanced up at Dr. Huth, he looked dazed and paralyzed. When she really needed his whitecoat training and ingenuity, he was worse than useless.
He was deadweight.
“Who are they?” Auriel roared into her microphone.
The helmet speakers’ only answer was a steady, vacant hiss.
With an effort, Auriel moved visor-to-visor with the whitecoat and seized hold of his plated arm. “Are the others all infected?” she asked.
Unable to back away, Dr. Huth opened and closed his mouth, struggling to come up with an answer that would placate her. “It’s possible that all of the sisters are infected,” he said at last. “There is no way of telling how far it has spread. I am not feeling any symptoms of infection myself.”
Before she could press him further, there came an ominous rumbling from above—explosions muffled by the depth of the glacier—then a screech and shudder as enormous masses of glass slipped along their fracture planes.
If the sisters couldn’t defend themselves, Auriel told herself, if they couldn’t secure the jump zone, they had no good options left.
It was time to take a bad one.
“Retreat into the mines!” she yelled through the com link, this to anyone still able to hear her voice and obey. And even as she issued the fall-back order, she knew that was probably exactly what this enemy wanted. To trap them inside the shaft.
But the sisters needed to buy whatever time they could. Even if it turned out that all the effort was for nothing, it was her duty as commander to play the hand they had been dealt to the final card.
“Help me,” she growled at the whitecoat. “We have
to climb out of here and join the others in the main tunnel.”
From above them, the massif shifted again, a grinding squeal of hundreds of thousands of tons of glass on glass.
As they began to move out of the dank corridor, toward the foot of the spiral passageway, Auriel’s pain crescendoed, and both her legs stopped working. She had to lock her knees and clutch at Dr. Huth’s arm to keep from collapsing on the spot. No longer was the tearing sensation focused on a single point within her; the entire circumference of her rib cage felt like it was cracking apart and she couldn’t draw breath. Only when the specters shrank back in volume could she take in air and move her feet.
As she shuffled forward, she saw the look in the whitecoat’s eyes. And she knew he wanted to leave her behind. He was trying to figure out a way to pull it off, to bail on her and the others, and save himself. That was how he was applying his highly trained scientific mind to the problem at hand. But Auriel still held the tribarrel in her gauntleted fist. And that kept the toothless piece of shit meekly by her side.
When they had passed under the explosive-packed ceiling and reached the bottom of the spiral, there was an even more powerful quake overhead, a much louder explosion, and as chunks of the roof started falling on their EM shields, everything went black.
Stone, impenetrable black.
Auriel realized at once that the explosion had cut the mine’s main power supply.
“Detonate the ceiling!” she commanded Dr. Huth.
She would have done it herself, but she couldn’t move quickly enough. “Seal off the corridor!”
In the darkness she felt the whitecoat slip away. But there was no immediate, massive explosion, no thundering fall of tons of ceiling. When she switched her visor to infrared mode, she saw that the coward hadn’t budged more than a couple of feet from her side. Bringing down the ceiling would have killed them both.
Then the emergency power generator kicked in and the corridor’s lights came back on, albeit dimly.
Looking down the narrow passage Auriel knew that it was already too late.
It didn’t matter that the systems were back online. The momentary loss of power had to have caused the force fields to drop.
The field at the far end of the corridor containing the wild stickies.
And worse, the one keeping the specters in check.
No longer held back, the stickies rushed into the corridor, making their awful kissing sounds, waving their spindly arms, sucker adhesive dripping in strands like mucous from their palms and fingertips. In infrared mode, they were a lemon-yellow wave, filling the hallway from wall to wall with their hate and blood lust.
Their intended targets were Auriel and Dr. Huth, the blacksuited tormentors of their brethren, and they had no idea what was in store for them. They couldn’t see or hear the specters zipping over their heads like fluorescent green javelins. Some of them seemed to sense the alien presence in the air above them. They swung their arms and swatted the empty space to no effect.
Their mouths gaping wide, their needle teeth bared, they looked around in confusion.
As Auriel watched, the specters stretched themselves out into fine filaments and then slithered into the open mouths and down the unprotected nostril holes of the mutants in the middle of the pack. First one thin ribbon entered a living body, then another, and another after that, sinuous bands of lime green following the predecessor’s trail, flowing into and flooding the stickies’ bodies with…themselves.
Did it feel cold to be thus violated?
Did it feel hot?
Auriel didn’t know; that wasn’t the way they entered her.
It certainly had to have felt like
something
because the mutants stopped in their tracks, halting the rampage halfway down the corridor, clutching at their skinny necks and then at their bellies.
In this final stage of the specters’ existence there was no delay, no gestation period before they gained the power to destroy. Before Auriel’s eyes, the stickies’ naked torsos began expanding, swelling like inflating balloons. And like the skins of balloons, the more they expanded the more translucent their outer surface became.
Then came the snapping of bones.
Rhythmic snapping, in time to the coordinated pulsations of the invaders.
The bones of stickies were mostly cartilage. Soft. Pliable. Even their skulls, an adaptation that allowed them to squeeze through impossibly small spaces.
Under the internal pressure, their heads expanded
as well. Visibly expanded. Their brains short-circuited, their spinal cord nerves pinched off. They dropped to the floor, one by one. Their expressionless black eyes bugged out, shrank back, bugged out again, then popped from the sockets, held to their skulls by a thin twine of tissue. Blood sprayed in jets from ears, nose and mouth.
Maybe they were already dead, Auriel thought.
That would have been a mercy, deserved or not.
The skin of their bloated bellies stretched so tight that it was transparent. She could see the fat, green oblongs moving inside them.
Then, at random along the pile of the fallen, here and there the stickies’ torsos began to burst with explosive force, splattering the passage’s walls and ceiling with gobbets of yellow flesh and flying green gore.
This broke the spell that had the rest of the mutants paralyzed. They panicked. Some of them turned and ran back into the bowels of the massif; the rest charged straight for her. Once again freed, the specters formed a mad cyclone overhead, then joyously began chasing down fresh victims.
Auriel turned to Dr. Huth for help and found him gone.