Ryan was the last through the door hacked into the side of the cargo container. It took a second for his eye to adjust to the dim light. At the far end of the steel box, a woodstove on a platform had been swung aside, revealing a hole in the floor. The two boys disappeared down it, followed by Isabel, Doc, Krysty, Jak and Mildred. J.B. squashed down his hat and jumped in after Mildred.
Ryan looked down into the opening and saw the floor of the tunnel about four feet below, lit by flickering torches. He hopped through the hole, turned and pulled the stove platform back over the hole to cover their retreat.
After a four-or five-foot crawl, the floor of the passage dropped away from the ceiling, and he could stand upright. There was no wood-or metal-beam bracing of the tunnel walls or roof. The passage was a fissure cracked in the naked rock. Ahead he could see J.B. vanishing around a turn. As he started after him, he heard the dull pop of a second smoke round, and he knew that Haldane had the range.
The tunnel angled down.
But not down far enough to suit Ryan.
It opened onto a low-ceilinged chamber where the entire ville appeared to be waiting. Thanks to torches set in the stone walls, he could see weapons, ammo canisters and shoulder-to-shoulder men, women and children.
“You can’t stay here,” Ryan told them. “If the ground overhead takes a direct hit of high explosive, this room will cave in.”
“We’re just fine here,” Isabel said. “There’s twenty feet of solid rock above us.”
“And it’s all going to come down on your heads,” Ryan insisted. “You have to evacuate the tunnels. Get out at the bottom of the ridge, and let Haldane finish off Malosh.”
“We’re not leaving,” Isabel said. “We need to be here when Haldane tries to retake the ville. We’ve got a big surprise for him.”
The ville folk nodded in the flickering light, their assault rifles in hand.
“What about the worms?” Doc said.
“I told you we know how to handle them.”
Then they heard another soft boom from above.
“Is that a third smoke round?” Mildred said, grimacing. “Why would they need a third?”
“Mebbe the breeze is shifting topside, and they had to bust another smoke bomb to nail down the zero,” J.B. said.
“Come with us now,” Doc entreated the head woman. He tried to take her hands in his, but she stepped back out of his reach. “Please, Isabel. Before it is too late.”
“Goodbye again, Theo,” she said.
Doc shook his head, a profound sadness in his eyes.
“Do what you want, but we’re leaving,” Ryan told the ville folk. “Just point us in the right direction.”
“You’ll get lost for sure,” one of the blond boys said. “You need somebody to show you the way out. We’ll do it. We said we’d do it.”
“No, you won’t,” a woman stated emphatically.
Ryan assumed she was their mother or a close blood relative. She had the same color eyes and hair.
“You stay here where you’ll be safe,” she told the boys, “and I’ll take them myself.”
The woman slung an AK, grabbed a torch and led them out a side passage. Jak and Ryan took torches, as well.
The chosen tunnel began to descend at a steep angle almost immediately. In places it narrowed so much they had to turn sideways to squeeze past the opposing walls. As they reached a hairpin turn an even softer boom came from above.
“What’s going on up there? That’s still not HE,” Mildred said.
“Keep moving,” Ryan said.
Ahead, the corridor ceiling necked down. They had to crawl on hands and knees to pass through the gap. It was hot in the passage and getting hotter the deeper they went. Sweat peeled down the sides of Ryan’s face and trickled along his scalp. The air was noticeably stale.
The reason for this soon became clear. Thirty feet farther on, the passage was completely blocked off by a floor-to-ceiling pile of rocks.
Their guide immediately started pulling stones off the pile and tossing them aside. “We’ve got to reopen the tunnel wide enough to squeeze through,” she said.
“Why is it sealed off?” Krysty said.
“Scagworms were using it to get at our livestock,” she said.
The companions pitched in, and in a matter of minutes they had opened a two-and-a-half-foot-diameter hole at the top of the pile, near the tunnel roof. At once they could feel a breeze on their faces.
“Gaia, that’s fresh air,” Krysty said.
“We should be close to the exit at the bottom of the ridge, then,” Mildred said.
The guide climbed up the pile and squirmed through the opening, torch first.
One by one, the companions followed.
On the other side of the barrier, the arm’s-width passage descended in a steep, straight incline. The flow of air was much stronger. Almost a wind.
“Hold it,” their guide said. “Listen…”
When they stopped, over the hiss of their torches they could hear sounds from the tunnel below.
Scrabbling sounds.
The sounds of tens of thousands of crisp claw feet scraping over bare rock, and coming fast.
“Pull back!” the guide cried, turning uphill.
“No, we’d never make it,” Ryan told her as he stuck his torch in a crack. “They’d pull us down from behind. We’ve got to hold them off here, or die trying. Jak, plant your torch. Everybody, weapons up. This isn’t gonna be pretty.”
“I’m going back to the ville,” the guide said, pushing past Ryan and heading up the tunnel. “I’m sealing up the hole after I get through it. If you want to go ahead, you’re on your own.”
The scrabbling sound grew louder and louder, and as it did there were other, intermittent noises, like bolt cutters snapping shut.
J.B. stepped in front of the others, his Uzi held level in both hands. The passage was so narrow that only one person could fire at a time.
When the scagworms came, they didn’t just run along the tunnel floor. They scampered across the walls and ceiling, too.
J.B. opened fire the second he saw their shiny helmet heads. The roar of his machine pistol was deafening in the cave. Gooshey guts, like hot vanilla pudding, splattered the walls and misted his glasses as the worms distintegrated under the 9 mm hail. Their bodies dropped from the ceiling and walls, tumbling onto their dead fellows on the cave floor.
J.B. emptied his Uzi in short order. He let it fall on its neck lanyard and swung up his 12-gauge pump. Serious boom time. He fired and cycled, fired and cycled, blowing the scagworms apart.
When that blaster came up empty, too, he spun away, letting Ryan take the lead. The worms seemed endless, J.B. hadn’t made a dent in them. Ryan didn’t think, he shot. He picked off the four-inch-wide targets as fast as they appeared. Even so, their bodies were falling closer and closer to him. In the flickering light, the heaps of dying scagworms writhed and thrashed.
When Ryan’s slide locked back, he stepped aside for Doc, who raised his LeMat and discharged the shotgun barrel. The flash lit up the tunnel for thirty feet. Switching to his revolver cylinder, Doc popped off the weapon’s .44-caliber lead balls.
Not one scagworm got past him, but there were more where they came from.
“We’ve got to move back,” Ryan said as J.B. returned to the fray with his reloaded Uzi.
The air was no longer fresh. It was thick with gunsmoke and the stench of aerosolized scagworm.
The creatures were falling at J.B.’s feet when his machine pistol ran out of bullets.
Before Ryan could take up the chilling slack, a single scagworm raced along the wall past J.B.’s head. It jumped to the floor behind him and scampered on.
Doc promptly skewered the tip of its ass to the ground with the rapier blade of his swordstick. Hissing and snapping its jaws, the agile worm tried to turn and bite off his leg.
Jak put the muzzle of his Python to its eyeless head and fired. Problem solved.
Ryan still had six rounds in his SIG when the worm wave suddenly faltered and stopped.
“Looks like we won,” J.B. said, peering through spectacles coated with white spray.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “Watch your step.”
They trotted downhill, crunching and sliding on the spilled pudding and slick-armored backs. On the far side of the patch of dead, the footing was better. They made quick time to the circle of light at the end of the tunnel.
After Jak and Ryan made sure there were no worms lurking just outside, the companions left the cave and headed upwind as fast as they could run, moving west of the ville, away from the spear point of the insectoid invasion, parallel to Interstate 10. The way west was free from human coldhearts, as well, because all of Malosh’s fighters were up in Sunspot.
There was still no HE thunder from above.
No blasterfire anymore, either.
Ryan didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.
Baron Haldane wouldn’t have called off the bombardment after locking in the range. And he wouldn’t have laid down a bunch of smoke rounds just for the hell of it.
Mebbe the worms got them all? he thought as he ran.
What had actually happened was something much, much worse.
When the companions were far enough from ridge to get a view of the summit, they could see thick plumes of yellow-green smoke angling upward, stretching five or six hundred feet in the air.
They stopped to catch their breath and to stare.
“That’s not from a ranging round,” J.B. said.
“What is it, then?” Krysty said.
High above the ville, a sparse flock of buzzards descended, spiraling down to the feast. Long before they reached the top of the column of sickly smoke, they crumpled in midair, every one of them, and fell like stones from the sky.
“Good God!” Mildred said.
As the third and final sarin round whistled away toward the distant hilltop, Magus slapped the arms of his throne chair and smiled.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Only one side of his mouth turned up, and it locked there, twitching as guy wire spools slipped and caught, slipped and caught.
Baron Haldane tapped the Hummer’s side window and Cuzo started the engine. As he popped it into gear and swerved out of the wag circle, Haldane ran low and out of sight on the passenger side.
Cuzo shifted into second and flattened the accelerator against the firewall, taking dead aim at the captain’s chair and the half-human thing that sat on it.
As Magus turned in his chair to look, his alert bodyguards stepped right into the Humvee’s path, opening fire with their machine pistols. Baron Haldane was already sprinting away from the wag, making a beeline for the booby-trapped pet carrier.
Cuzo ducked below the dash as 9 mm slugs stitched across front window, blowing glass shards over his back. He plowed into one of the sec men, flipping his body up and over the SUV’s roof. The other bodyguard barely managed to scramble out of the way, on all fours. Before he could recover and resume shooting, Cuzo tapped his brakes, stuck his AK out the driver window and put thirty holes in his road trash ass.
In the meantime Magus was backing up around his captain’s chair, all herky-jerky, and calling for help from the rest of his crew. He still had the detonator clutched in his hand, but he wasn’t looking over at the pet carrier. He was too occupied by the startling, seemingly suicidal, vehicular assault.
Haldane dashed across the death circle, knelt in front of the carrier and ripped the explosive package off the door. He snap-tossed it as far away as he could.
Magus realized what was happening and jammed his thumb down on the trigger, but it was too late.
The bomb exploded harmlessly in the air.
Cuzo cranked the steering wheel hard over and floored the gas pedal again. Fishtailing the wag, he took aim at Haldane and the carrier. As he did so, two other stolen Humvees roared out of the circle, catching broadside blasterfire as they passed the road trash. From the back seats of the Humvees, two of Haldane’s men returned fire but were overwhelmed and undone by hundreds of incoming slugs. Magus’s full-auto firing squad blew in the side windows and chewed up the sheet-metal doors on the drivers’ sides. One of the Humvees immediately coasted to a stop, the inside of its surviving windows tinted red from cranial back splatter. The other Humvee kept going, but no one was driving. It ran head-on into a sandy bluff.
The road trash turned their fire on the rear of Cuzo’s Humvee, then suddenly directed their aim down at the ground in front of them.
Two-foot-long critters were popping up from the soil all around them, even from between their boots, like black maggots squirming out of a long-dead, hollowed-out rat. They swarmed from the shadows under the parked wags, turning the ground black and shiny.
It was as though somebody had rung the dinner bell.
There was only one item on the menu. It was road trash, and it was going fast.
Attacked from all sides at once, Magus’s sec men stood back to back and fired full-auto. Even at 500 rounds a minute, they couldn’t keep up with the worms. There were too many of them popping up, and they moved too quickly and too erratically over open ground. When they paused to reload, one by one the road trash were overwhelmed. Ebony jaws snapping, the worms ran up their legs and ripped into them. Literally. The worms tore holes in the living torsos and wriggled inside the tropical warmth and humidity. The plundered men screamed like little girls. Around the broken circle, wag doors slammed as the luckier ones ducked behind solid cover.
The worms were coming for Haldane, too. He held his fire and blew them apart at close range, defending his caged son with double-aught buck.
Cuzo drove over dozens of the mutie insects, crushing them. He skidded the Humvee to a stop in front of Haldane. The baron hoisted the pet carrier by its top handle and swung it onto the back seat. Over the wag’s roof he saw Magus momentarily holding his own while five or six black worms bit into the metal struts on his legs. Steel Eyes held worms in his bare hands. His half-mechanical fingers crushed their domed heads like raw eggs.
Cuzo had the Humvee rolling again before the baron could get both feet in the cab.
Haldane saw the blood all over the wag’s interior. The steering wheel was slick with it. “Are you hit?”
“Shit, yes. Look at the floorboards.”
“Let me drive.”
“No time to make a switch. We’ve got to put some distance between us and them.” Cuzo shifted into a higher gear and the wag surged faster, bounding over low boulders and shallow ruts. The wind shrieked through the bullet holes in the windshield.
“You’re going the wrong way,” the baron told him. “Nuevaville is behind us.”
“I’m gonna cut around to the northwest,” Cuzo said. “Swing wide of the Sunspot ridge and miss those nasty black critters.”
Haldane stuck his head out of the passenger-side window and looked behind them. It was hard to see because of the way the Humvee was bouncing around. When he pulled back inside he said, “Don’t think anyone is coming after us yet. No dust clouds but ours. You want me to drive so you can see to that wound you got?”
“I think it’s stopped bleeding some,” Cuzo said. “Hurts like a mutie bitch, though. I’ll give you the wheel after we cross old Interstate 10. I can see it about three miles ahead. We should be well in the clear by then.”
Haldane twisted around to the back seat. He rattled the padlock on the pet carrier door. It seemed plenty solid; it had a case-hardened frame. Even if he’d had the proper tools, he’d have had a tough time getting it open with the lurching, bucking motion of the wag.
“I’m sorry, I can’t get the door open for you, son,” he said to the small face behind the steel grate. “It’s going to have to wait until we stop for a minute. Then I’ll shoot the damn lock off, I promise.”
“I’m okay, Dad,” Thorne said bravely. “Don’t worry about me. I can wait all day if I have to.”
“It’s not far,” the baron assured him.
Through the dusty, cracked windshield, Interstate 10 became an ever more distinct ribbon across their path.
Cuzo kept the pedal to the metal, even as they neared the edge of the ruined roadway. The desert ahead looked fairly flat, except for occasional hidden dips that made Haldane’s skull bump into the headliner and his backside crash into the seat cushion. Without warning, a huge creature popped up from one of those depressions, popped up right in front of them. Its hairy jointed legs looked like tree trunks.
When Cuzo swerved to avoid a fatal collision with the thing, the Humvee went airborne. It seemed to float for sickening seconds before it crashed nose-first into a shallow gully.
The impact slammed Thorne into the door of his cage. He blacked out, for how long he couldn’t tell. When he awoke, he had a bad headache and there was blood in his mouth. Through the bars, he could see the two front seats and they were both empty. The windshield was gone, except for a sawtooth edge along the bottom of the channel.
“Dad? Dad?” the boy cried.
Then he heard wet, crunching sounds.
Very close.