Authors: James Axler
“Now, about naming our new wag⦔ Doc started out of the blue.
“Do we have to name it, ya old coot?” Mildred inquired.
“What coot anyway?” Jak asked, interrupting a potential argument. “Some sorta mutie bug?”
Caught with a mouthful of apple, Krysty snorted a laugh and started to choke, then paused and spit out the unchewed food. She stood, her long hair flexing and moving against the breeze.
“Something wrong?” Ryan asked, lowering his cup, a hand going for the SIG-Sauer at his side.
“Yes. Everybody into the wag,” Krysty said quietly, her voice thick with urgency. She drew the S&W and clicked back the hammer.
“Droids?” Jak asked, rising to his feet. The Colt Python was already in his hand. He strained to hear anything, but there were only the usual sounds of the night, nothing more.
“It's not droids,” Krysty whispered, edging toward the armored vehicle.
There came a soft padding from the darkness as if a soft rain was falling on the thick grass. Then there came a telltale hoot, followed by another, then dozens more from every direction.
“Stickies!” Doc bellowed, rising to draw the LeMat and start firing at the inhuman shapes loping toward them through the starry night.
Leaving the burning bridge far behind, Roberto had the convoy stop on the crest of a small hill to bury their dead, then Jessica fired a charge of precious explosives to cause an avalanche and cover the graves with tons of shale and basalt. No animals or muties would ever feast on the crewmen of the trader. End of discussion.
Heading south, the war wags rumbled along the uneven ground, the big tires rising and falling like pistons in a steam engine. But inside, they were warm and comfortable. The battle had been fought, the prize won, the aced buried. Life continued.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and Shelly appeared at the entrance of the control room. Her hair a wild corona, the woman was dressed in the dark green of a healer, and slung over a shoulder was her med kit, embroidered with the mysterious word
M*A*S*H
, exactly like the bag belonging to her teacher, Mildred Wyeth.
“Just wanted to tell you that Jimmy will be okay,” Shelly said, looking over the others for any sign of injury. The crew sometimes hid their miseries from her, not out of foolishness or false bravado.
“Will he be able to walk?” Roberto asked, looking out the windshield. The convoy was heading for some predark ruins just past a big rad pit. Kathleen had a cache of diamonds hidden there in case of an emergency, and after their last couple of fights, he wanted every crystal possible stored away for the long journey east.
“Absolutely,” Shelly answered, taking the command chair, looking over the controls and weaponry. She liked machines. They never bled, screamed or died under your knife. Nice as summer rain, were machines. “Oh, he's not going anywhere without a crutch for a couple of months, but Jimmy shouldn't even have a limp afterward.” Then the woman paused in embarrassment.
“Glad to hear it,” Roberto said, unconsciously rubbing the stiff limb. “Wish we had you when I busted mine.” Then he noticed Jessica making a strange face. She had taken over the Ear until Jimmy was back on duty. The tough little man didn't need a working leg to listen to fragging headphones.
“Something coming our way?” Roberto asked, moving closer.
“No, but I'm getting blasterfire just to the southwest of us,” Jessica replied slowly. “Rapidfires, wheelguns, some kind of black powder cannon, all kinds of drek, and it's coming from the ruins we're heading for.”
Rapidfires? That was interesting. Hardly anybody had that kind of firepower anymore. “Anything on the radar?” Roberto said, casually glancing over the control board.
“Bet your ass there is, Chief,” Quinn replied curtly, looking up from the glowing green screen. “Some kind of a wag, really big, and it's made of metal. Not iron strips nailed over wood, but the good stuff like us, predark armor.”
Armor? His interest piqued, Roberto returned to the windshield and picked up a pair of binocs to scan the darkness ahead. He easily found the firefly sparkle of rapidfires near the river, then saw the other wag. It was big, with huge-ass windows, some sort of big chilling fork in front, and the whole thing was painted a bright yellow instead of a sensible camou.
“How the frag can you tell what kind of metal it is?” Jake demanded incredulously.
“The thicker it is, the darker the shadow it throws,” Quinn replied brusquely. “Chiefâ¦rapidfires and armor, do you think we have some competition?”
“Another trader in this area?” Jessica asked scornfully.
“I agree. Everybody we know is on the other side of the Deathlands,” Roberto said, adjusting the focus. “That fat bastard Hammerstein, Olivia, Fat Stephen, Broke-Neck Pete, all of 'em are pretty nuking far away from here.”
Sitting in the corner, Yates tilted his head at that last name, but said nothing.
“No, it must be another trader,” Jessica retorted. “No gang of coldhearts, or baron, has this much live brass. These folks are throwing it around like lead grew inside apples!” She flipped a switch and the ceiling speakers came to life with the sound of blasters, cursing and a deadly hooting.
“Stickies!” Jake growled, and started to suggest using the L-Gun, but then realized that even if it had the range, there was no way to aim tight enough to hit the muties, and not also chill the norms.
Lowering the binocs, Roberto hung them on a wall hook and limped quickly back to his chair. Norms fighting norms was not his business, but Kathleen would have helped anybody being attacked by stickies, so he also did, to honor her memory. Well, anybody except the nuke-sucker Ryan Cawdor. Sweet blind Norad, just to have the son of a bitch in the range of his L-Gun one more timeâ¦!
“All right, get sharp, people,” Roberto said, tightening the seat belt. “I don't know if we can get there fast enough to save these norms, but we can at least burn out those stinking muties!”
“Pack 'em and rack 'em, boys!” Jessica said into a mike, her words echoing throughout the three war wags. “We're going to stick it to the stickies!”
Eagerly, the crews shouted their approval and started slapping clips into longblasters, preparing for the coming slaughter.
Â
S
CRAMBLING AWAY
from the campfire, the companions fired their blasters at anything that moved, desperate to reach the
UCV only a few yards away. But the stickies were everywhere, loping low across the irregular ground and charging through the bushes. Cut off from the armored wag, the companions retreated from the muties, firing every step of the way.
Running low and fast across the hard-packed sand, the muties charged straight for the companions, sucker-covered fingers outstretched eagerly, and Ryan saw a group of them lumber out of the river. The bastards had sneaked up on them from behind! That was pretty smart for a stickie, and for one terrible moment, Ryan wondered if these might be more of those smart stickies created by Delphi. But even as he aced one, Ryan could see the mutie had nothing in its misshapen hands but suckers, no spears or clubs. Good enough.
“Head for the ruins!” Ryan bellowed, triggering a round. The SIG-Sauer barked and the 9 mm copper-jacketed bullet took a stickie smack in the temple, blowing out the back of its skull across the others in a grisly spray of bones, brains and blood. Already deceased, the mutie kept running for a few feet before limply collapsing to the ground.
Lighting a road flare, J.B. tossed it aside, and several of the stickies converged on the sizzling magnesium, clawing at the light in mindless fascination. When a few more joined the group, Jak tossed over his one gren. The clump of muties was blown sky-high, the tattered bodies sailing away into the night. One hit the shore, another splashed back into the river, but the concussion only excited the others to a fever pitch, and the muties raced even faster for the companions.
Working the selector pin on his LeMat, Doc switched to the smooth-bore 12-gauge and triggered the mini-shotgun. The blast completely removed the head of a female stickie, and she stumbled past the scholar, arms outstretched, her sagging breasts flapping obscenely.
With the other companions maintaining defensive fire, J.B. tossed two more flares. One died on impact, but the other
stayed lit, rolling along, throwing off smoke and hellish light. As the stickies gathered around again, Krysty rolled in her gren, and once more the creatures were annihilated.
But more and more of them were steadily coming out of the river, and there were no more grens or pipe bombs.
Dangerously low on ammo, the companions reached the outskirts of the ruins and scrambled up a slope of loose masonry, trying for the second floor of an office building. Ryan and Mildred took out the first wave of muties as the others grabbed moldy pieces of predark furniture and threw them together as a crude barricade. Then J.B. sent down a withering hail of 9 mm rounds from the Uzi, while Ryan and Mildred rejoined the group.
With their back to a wall, the companions could now concentrate their blasters in a single direction, and they started taking turns chilling the monsters and reloading. Doing so again and again.
Holstering the empty SIG-Sauer, Ryan swung up the Steyr and started taking out stickies, the long 7.62 mm cartridges going through one mutie and also chilling the one behind. However, he knew this was only a holding action. There seemed to be a lot more stickies than the companions had brass, and when they ran out it would all be over but the screaming. There was more ammo in the UCV, but how to reach it with the muties in the way? Looking around frantically, he saw how close the next building was to the one they were in now, and evolved a fast plan.
“Cover me!” Ryan shouted, turning away from the fight and running deeper into the dark ruins.
Maneuvering purely by the silvery moonlight, the Deathlands warrior went to a couple of windows before finding one that overlooked an alleyway. It was a ten-foot drop onto loose rubble. Perfect.
Kicking out the few pieces of glass still in the frame, Ryan grabbed a warped closet door and yanked it off the rusty
hinges. Awkwardly, he placed it on the sill and slid it across the alley and into another window. Thumping the makeshift bridge with a hard fist, he decided it should hold, and sharply whistled for the others. Rummaging in his pockets for loose rounds, he hastily reloaded a clip for the SIG-Sauer as the rest of the companions came running with the stickies close behind, hooting insanely.
“Bridge!” Ryan bellowed, placing his shots carefully, trying to block the rush of the muties with their own corpses. He succeeded, until the stickies started crawling sideways along the moldy walls like mottled insects.
The companions needed no prompting to scurry individually across the creaking door to the next building. Slinging the Uzi, J.B. thumbed a couple of the new cartridges into the scattergun and rained hellfire on the muties, giving Ryan a few seconds to get across, and then the one-eyed man used the Steyr to hold back the stickies as J.B. joined them.
Once he reached solid footing, the Armorer kicked the door off the sill, and it fell away, clattering between the two buildings before crashing on the ground to the sound of splintering wood.
Almost instantly, an inhuman face appeared in the other window and launched itself straight for Ryan. But the thing only got halfway across the empty space before dropping away to land with a sickening crunch.
Pushing the others out of the way, Mildred pulled a knife to cut her finger and smear the window frame with the fresh blood. Driven mad by the smell, the stickies swarmed to their deaths, determined to reach the delicious norm flesh at any cost.
Using a precious minute to reload their blasters, the companions broke for the hallway, only to find it missing, the entire center of the building gutted by fire.
“Now what? Some of them are going to survive that fall,” Krysty said, her animated hair coiled tightly against her head. “The dead ones cushioning the fall of the last few live ones.”
“Then I strongly suggest we put another alleyway between us and them,” Doc said, removing the single 12-gauge cartridge from the LeMat and inserting a new one.
“Sounds good,” Ryan said, sliding a replacement clip into the SIG-Sauer and working the slide to chamber a round. “Spread out, and find the fragging stairs!”
It took the companions only a few minutes, but the stairs were also gone, eaten by termites, time and acid rain. Searching quickly, they found another pair of rooms with matching windows, and used another door to cross over to a third building. This one was in much better condition, and they raced up the creaking wooden stairs to easily reach the sagging rooftop, their weapons out and ready.
The stars were out, twinkling merrily in the ebony firmament, and they could hear the excited hoots of stickies from somewhere in the earthly darkness.
“They got across,” Jak drawled, his head tilted slightly, a pale fist hefting the Colt Python.
“Then we better move faster!” Mildred urged, trying to tighten the bandage around her wounded finger. The trick had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now she realized that the smell of blood would only draw the stickies to them like bees to honey.
Suddenly, Doc plunged a hand into her med kit and withdrew the tube of glue. Thanking him with a curt nod, she wiped the bloody finger clean with the bandage, then tossed it away, and spread the sticky fluid along the small cut. It stung for a moment, then the pain vanished and the bleeding ceased completely.
“Any more grens or pipe bombs?” Ryan asked, concentrating on thumbing fresh rounds into a clip for the Steyr.
“Nothing. We're out,” J.B. said tersely.
Inserting the clip, Ryan worked the arming lever and slung the longblaster over a shoulder. Five more shots and he'd be down to the panga. “Then we run,” he commanded.
Hopping over to the next building, the companions raced across the roof, and did it again. Finding themselves in a parking garage, they charged to the far side and crossed the street, then started going from office building to apartment complex, again, but this time they were heading back toward the UCV.
Reaching the last building on the block, the companions studied the moon shadows below for any signs of the stickies. It had been a while since they last heard hooting, but these river muties seemed to stay quiet until charging in the chill.
“I can just see the wag,” Krysty said, squinting into the night. “There doesn't appear to be any stickies nearby.” Just then, the night wind brought the distant rumble of a diesel engine, but before she was sure it vanished again on the breeze.