Authors: James Axler
“Nothing important, just wanted to remind you hotdogs that according to the duty roster, this recce is mine,” Diana stated. “And my boys are itching to find out if what the doomie says is true.”
Yeah, mine, too. Privately, Roberto wanted to countermand the woman, but that would only make her lose face in front of the crew. No choice, then. “Confirm,
Tiger,
the job is yours,” Roberto said, a narrowing of his eyes the only sign of what he was feeling.
Rubbing his chin, Jimmy started to object, and Jessica shut him down with a stern look. Rules were rules, and Roberto was the leader here, end of discussion.
“Move slow, and stay low,” the trader said into the mike. “Anything twisted, have your people run like their pants are on fire. And that's an order. You savvy?”
“No prob, Chief,” the commander of War Wag Three replied with a laugh. “I even took away their combat boots, and issued 'em sneakers.” There was a brief pause before the woman added, “Any idea what they'll really find up there?”
Salvation.
“You tell me,
Tiger Lily,
” Roberto said. “Look for the box, but come back alive.”
“Roger that,
Scorpion. Tiger Lily
out.”
Releasing the button, Roberto kept the mike in his grip, ready to relay instructions. Then he reluctantly returned it to the wall hook. He either trusted his people or he did not. There was no third option.
“All right, you lucky bastards, Diana is taking care of this one,” Jessica said loudly, looking around the control room. “So you apes stand down.”
Unhappy grumbling filled the room, and several members of the crew shifted their shoulders to glance at the hallway door as if they were going to go outside anyway. Then they relented, flicked the safeties back on and started dropping clips as a prelude to returning the rapidfires to the wall racks.
“And what the frag are you assholes doing?” Jimmy replied, placing his fists on his hips. “Keep that iron in your mitts in case Three needs cover fire!”
The frowns became grins, and the crew rushed to the blasterports. If there was any trouble, Two and Three would do what they could, but any serious chilling would be handled by War Wag One and its heavy weaponry.
Roberto touched the intercom. “Eric, get the L-Gun hot in case Tex has to burn some crystal.”
“Will do, Chief,” Suzette replied. “The comps are running five by five, no glitches or hitches. We're good to go.”
“Nice to know. Where the frag is your husband?”
“Checking the flamethrower on Two. Just in case.”
The trader had to smile at that. There was a predark word he had heard once in Two-Son ville, para-somethingâ¦What was it again? Oh yeah, para-annoyed. It meant you suspected everything of doing anything. That was Eric. The only thing that kept the twitchy little tech sane was Suzette. “Fair enough. Just let me know when he's back.”
“Will do!”
“
Scorpion
out,” Roberto said, and clicked off the device.
“And there they go,” Jake announced, his hands folded
over the steering wheel, both boots flat on the floor mat. The disappointment was clear in his voice.
A group of people climbed out of War Wag Three and walked into the chilly mist. Their shapes were lumpy with backpacks and shoulder bags, their hands cradling longblasters and torches.
Roberto nodded at that. Smart move. Even the arc lamp couldn't shine a beam around corners.
It took them only a few minutes to reach the bridge. Trudging to the nearest end, they stabbed the torches into the soft ground, then aimed crossbows upward and fired. The hooked quarrels arched high and sailed over the edge of the elevated roadway, only to slide off and come tumbling back. It took several tries before one of the hooks snagged something, but it was only a tire rim. A dozen tries later, the members of the crew hooked something strong enough to support their weight.
Divesting themselves of everything but rapidfires, they slowly climbed hand over hand to reach the top, and disappeared from sight.
“Okay, people, what do you see?” Roberto said into his mike. There was only static for an answer, and he increased the power to maximum.
“â¦epeat, can you hear us?”
“Now, we can. Proceed.”
“Okay, it's a right mare's nest up here, Chief,” a man replied, the radio crackling with static. The range was less than a hundred feet, and the megatons of nuke trash in the air still garbled the communications slightly. Anything over a mile and even the most powerful radio was useless these days.
“We've got cars and trucks piled three, four layers high,” the crewman continued. “And everything is covered with bird shit, and ivy, loose leaves andâ¦wait a sec⦔
A minute passed, then another.
“Nuking hell, the doomie was right!” the voice on the radio
called. “We found a truck crashed into an ambulance, making a sort of natural shelter. Somebody used it as a campsite, there's the remains of a fire, empty tin cans and the whole shebang.”
“What about the box?” Roberto asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice.
“It was right near a rusted-out old Caddy, and guess what? The name on the tires was Firestone.”
“Son of a bitch,” Quinn muttered, casting a furtive look at the doomie. But if Yates heard, or cared, there was no indication.
“What's inside?” Jessica demanded into her own mike.
“Tell you soon,” the crewman replied. There was a brief crackle of static and the words were lost.
“Say again, what did you find?” Roberto demanded.
“Well, hang me for a mutie, Chief,” the man replied excitedly. “I'm holding the damn thing in my hand! It's true. The legends are all true!”
“Well, get your butts back down here,” Roberto said, grinning widely. “I wanna see for myself!”
“Break out the good shine, we're on the wayâ¦What the frag?”
There was no noise from the radio, but tiny flashes of light could be seen coming from on top of the bridge. Blaster fire!
“What the frag is going on up there?” Diana demanded loudly over the radio. “Jefferson, report, goddamn it! Have you been jacked?” But there was only a thick silence.
Then there came the dull thud of a gren, and a body tumbled over the edge to hit the misty ground with a hard thump.
“Holy shit, that was Jefferson!” Quinn cried out, standing at his station.
“All right, let's go!” Jessica directed, grabbing an AK-47 and stumbling for the hallway.
“You stay!” Roberto boomed, gesturing with the hand holding the mike. “Jimmy, go get our people!”
Paused alongside the exit door, the woman radiated a controlled fury as the other crew members grimly streamed outside. Silently, the trader and his second in command held a private conversation, and she grudgingly limped back to her chair, an arm cradling her bandaged ribs. Just because he was right, didn't mean she had to like sitting on her ass.
As the crews from War Wags One, Two and Three rushed toward the ropes dangling off the bridge, they could see more flashes on top and heard the telltale boom of another gren. The recce squad appeared, scrambling along the outside edge of the bridge, firing their rapidfires at something unseen above and behind them. The crewmen on the ground raised their longblasters, but there was nothing in sight. What the frags were the others shooting at, thin air?
Reaching the rope, the recce squad grabbed it one after the other and insanely dived off the structure, swinging wildly as they slid down the nylon length with smoke rising from their gloved fists.
As they got close to the ground, the first crewman released the rope and jumped away, the others arriving only moments later. Most landed hard, but came up running. However, one crewman went sprawling and there was an audible crack of breaking bone. Grimacing in pain, he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling for the wags. Pausing in their flight, two of his companions went back, grabbed the wounded man under the arms and hauled him along, their faces pale with fright.
“Vine puppets!” a running crewman yelled, his shirt covered with blood. “The whole fragging bridge is infested with vine puppets!”
The words sent cold knives into the guts of everybody present, and they looked up just in time to see a row of naked people appear along the edge of the bridge. Incredibly, the men and women simply stepped off the edge. But they did not fall. Instead, they gracefully eased downward as if gliding on invisible wings.
However, as they got closer, the crewmen on the ground could see the leafy vines embedded throughout their nude forms, the mouths slack and drooling, the wide eyes horribly alive and shrieking in wordless torment.
Snarling curses, the crew cut loose with concentrated blasterfire from the Kalashnikovs, the 7.62 mm rounds tearing the naked people apart. But instead of red blood, a thin green sap oozed from the gaping wounds, along with hair-thin tendrils resembling pale roots.
Then the puppets landed, and the tattered corpses began walking toward the norms, the flexing ivy still connected to the animated corpses.
As the crew hastily dropped back, the M-60 machine guns of Two and Three cut loose, the big .308 rounds chewing the bodies into pieces. Shaking off the lumps of flesh, the green vines snaked out after the fleeing norms, catching the crippled crewman in the back. Instantly he went stiff, his eyes rolling in unimaginable agony.
Releasing his arms, the other crewmen fired point-blank, blowing out the back of his head, the pink brain already full of wiggling tendrils.
Not bothering to open the backpacks on the misty ground, the panting crewmen peppered the canvas bags with blasterfire until the Molotov cocktails inside ignited. Engulfed in flames, the puppets kept walking onward until the ivy blackened and jerked out of the bodies to lash around madly. Throwing off charred leaves, the greenery began to shrivel, then the vines snapped in two, the undamaged sections retreating to the bridge, the rest of the hellish plant consigned to deadly flames.
Only now more vines came snaking down from the bridge from every side, some with puppets attached and some without, obviously on the hunt for new slaves.
“Fucking mutie!” Jefferson screamed, blowing thunder at the moving greenery.
Throwing down more Molotovs, the crew tried to form a wall between them and the vines, and the plants disappeared. But then vines erupted from the ground well past the conflagration and surged forward.
Any semblance of organized resistance disappeared at that, and everybody took off, firing and running in a near panic.
Pausing to pull the arming ring from a gren, a crew member dropped her explosive charge as a vine whipped around her throat and entered her cursing mouth. Gagging, she tried to chew it out, then went oddly stiff and turned to face the other norm fumbling to work the gren in his clumsy hands.
Ruthlessly, the others cut her down, then ran for their lives.
Charging out of War Wag One, Abduhl strode into view, the pressurized canisters of a portable flamethrower strapped to his back.
As the other norms streamed past, he rained fire on the plants, forcing them back, clearing a safe zone for his brothers, then the ground below him sprouted a leafy green that went straight up between his legs. Shuddering all over, Abduhl sent a column of fire high into the sky, then he paused to turn and sweep the burning lance of lambent chems across the other crewmen. Two of them were engulfed, and instantly became screaming human torches. But even as they fell, the vines arrived, and the cooking flesh rose once more to shamble toward the open door of War Wag One.
Now, the big Fifties started working, flame and hot lead vomiting in gouts from the long vented barrels. Golden arcs of spent brass flew high, and the high-velocity barrage of combat rounds tore the walking carrion apart, intestines spilling onto the dirt. But the vines merely withdrew undamaged, and this time snaked directly toward the door.
Stepping boldly into view, Jessica smashed a Molotov on the short ladder leading to the war wag, and the vines paused, temporarily stymied. Then they began to crawl up the sides
of the great machine, seeking new avenues to reach the rich, red meat inside.
More crew members poured from Two and Three, blasting away at the thrashing vines, and crashing Molotovs onto the armored hull of War Wag One. The vines retreated, and again the big .50-caliber machine guns chattered and yammered away at the mutant greenery. But as the vines shriveled, more ivy wiggled over the predark bridge. The supply of them seemed endless.
Starting its engine, War Wag Two moved forward with the flamethrower on top sending out streams of annihilation. The bastard mix of gasoline, kerosene, coal oil and shine covered the descending vines like napalm, and the plants lashed furiously, trying uselessly to dislodge the sticky chems.
Then the honeycomb pod on top of War Wag One angled around to point straight up, and launched a full salvo of missiles. The fiery warbirds streaked away, disappearing into the starry night only to return a few heartbeats later and impact directly on top of the mutie-infested bridge.