Tainted Cascade (22 page)

“We have no way to thank you for this,” Hoal-thar said simply, closing his empty hand into a tight fist. “We cannot even allow you more time to cross our lands. A deal once bound in blood cannot be changed. That is the law!”

“Then consider this our gift, sir,” Doc rumbled, sliding his right hand into a pocket. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, correct?”

The tribe of barbs murmured their approval over the sentiment. Suddenly, Da-sha pulled a rusty wheelgun from her bandolier and cracked open the cylinder to spill the .38 brass onto the street. There were two spent shells and four live.

“We collect blasters, not brass,” the barb declared, tucking the blaster away once more, then pulling out a .22 zipgun and next a 9-mm Luger.

Standing nearby, Tal-hala nodded in approval and looked at the female with newfound respect.

Soon, the entire tribe was dropping clips and opening breeches, generating a small mound of ammunition in every imaginable caliber.

Waiting until everybody else was done, Hoal-thar then added his own contributions to the pile, a hundred spent rounds, fifty live and a U.S. Army gren with a double-red stripe around the canister.

“Dark night, that's willy peter!” J.B. stated, pointing a finger. “White phosphorous! It's hotter than a hundred bonfires! You might wanna keep that. It will fry a wendigo like a trout on a spit!”

“We cannot use tech,” the chief barb stated solemnly, taking the gren and pressing it into the hand of the smaller norm. “But take it with our blessings.”

Down in the basement, a burning table loudly cracked in two, sending a flurry of hot embers swirling into the sky. As if in reply, the other wendigo howled again, sounding much farther away than before.

Gathering around the mound of brass, the companions picked out the live rounds and pocketed them to check over later to make sure they were still in working condition. They would have preferred to do it immediately, but somehow they felt that would be seen as an insult. These barbs were touchier than a sweaty stick of dynamite.

“Your spears have been replaced, that is only proper,” the chief barb said formally, as if speaking from memory. “But now you must leave, outlanders. Go, and find your friends in the Horseshoe Canyon, but never enter our lands again!”

Tucking a handful of .44 Magnum rounds into a pocket, Ryan arched an eyebrow at that statement. “Our friends who ride on two-wheels?” he asked in a measured tone.

“We do not speak of such things,” Hoal-thar stated, thumping his spear on the sidewalk.

“But we still have your permission to reach Modine?” J.B. probed, pouring a fistful of assorted brass into his munitions bag.

“Once you are past the Horseshoe Canyon, it is of no concern to us what you do,” Hoal-thar said, looking directly at the man to see if he understood what wasn't being said.

“As you command, Lord,” Ryan said, placing a hand on his heart.

The chief barb gave no verbal response, but he flashed a very brief smile before turning and walking out of the predark town with the rest of the tribe close behind.

 

O
NCE PAST
the city limits, the companions picked up their speed and vanished into the overgrown farmland.

“Petrov and his gang are at the canyon,” Krysty said excitedly, her hair flexing and curling. “Think they know about the redoubt?”

“How could they?” Mildred asked, feeling herself break into a sweat.

“Dunbar had said they were going to start up a new slave trade in Modine,” Ryan said, brushing back his hair. “That canyon would be an ideal spot to grow their bastard moss out of sight of any passing trader or travelers.”

“Okay, how do you handle this? Straight on, or a nightcreep?” J.B. asked, cracking open the sawed-off to yank out the exhausted cartridges.

“Still got that skin of poisoned water?”

With a jerk of his wrist, J.B. snapped the blaster closed. “Nope, lost it with the van.”

“Then we just ride until we find them, then ace them on sight,” Ryan snarled, walking over to reclaim his horse. The animal was chomping on the grass in front of what had once been a public library. Only the sign remained.

As the companions climbed onto their horses, Doc did so using only his left hand. Only Mildred seemed to notice the fact, but said nothing.

“Stay razor, people!” Ryan commanded, tucking the longblaster back into the gun boot. “They've got the advantage on us with those bikes. But once they're within range of this longblaster, they're meat in the ground!”

“Got Steyr,” Jak reminded, scratching his horse behind an ear. The animal was clearly uneasy from the smell of the burning wendigo, but at his gentle touch she whinnied and stomped her hooves in pleasure.

“Not for long they don't,” Ryan promised, kicking his stallion into a sprint and then a full gallop.

Racing out of the predark town, the companions gave their mounts free rein, and the horses moved fast along the ancient road, eagerly leaving the ruins behind, as the smoke from the grisly bonfire in the police station rose upward to spread across the cloudy sky.

Smacking aside a hissing alligator, a female wendigo suddenly stopped wading through the steaming swampland and became alert to a terrible smell on the wind. She instantly recognized it as smoke from the burned flesh of her mate. Fire! That was the only thing her species would try to avoid. Nervously, her fur rippled through a wide spectrum of different colors at the thought of the all-consuming destroyer.

Bawling in fury, the alligator charged once more, its teeth snapping, its deadly tail swinging back and forth like a killing pendulum. Annoyed, the wendigo simply grabbed the reptile in both clawed hands and ripped it apart, the beating heart and lungs splashing into the scummy water.

Casting aside the pieces of the twitching corpse, the wendigo started to slosh directly toward the awful death smell, but then paused as she remembered the destroyed strip of sky-ground that used to arch over the pool that ate flesh. The two-legs had destroyed that. Now the only way to reach that section of land was by following the road of water. But that would take until dark to reach, and by then the two-legs who burned her mate might be gone. The idea of the two-legs escaping her wrath made the mutie insane with rage, and she
cut loose a roar that made everything in the swamp go immediately silent.

Fuming in frustration for a minute, the female reached down to grab the bloody carcass of the gator, then began sloshing toward the north. The wendigo would eat while she walked to the road of water, trusting the ever faithful wind to tell her where to go next and what to kill.

 

W
ITH A LOW RUMBLE
of working hydraulics, the blast doors to the Horseshoe Canyon moved aside, and a Guardian stepped into the bright sunshine. The armored hull sleek and smooth, painted and polished. The six legs were working in perfect unison, and two red crystal eyes scanned the riverfront hostilely.

More importantly, there was a fully functioning Bedlow needler hanging from the belly mount. The ferruled barrel was barely thicker than a finger, but fully capable of silently emitting a stream of a hundred 1-mm steel slivers per second.

Striding onto the pebble shore, the Guardian barely registered the snap of the breaking twine stretched across the opening of the redoubt. As it looked down, expecting to see a snapped twig or broken stingwing egg, the canyon walls shook from a powerful explosion. With a grinding noise, the huge boulder rolled forward with surprising speed and smashed into the machine, driving it into the loose stones and rolling over it.

Pinned underneath the boulder, the Guardian flailed its crippled legs, then with a sad ratcheting noise went completely still.

“Told you that would work,” Charlie boasted, pulling
out wads of waxed cloth from both ears as he rose from behind a blossoming juniper bush on the shoreline. “If it looks like a fragging spider, then chill it like a spider. Stomp on the bastard with your boot until it stops moving!”

“Speaking of moving…” Thal began, pointing a finger.

In a low rumble, the blast doors were already starting to close, the entranceway getting narrower by the second.

With a snarl, Petrov hurtled himself forward, charging up the sloping beach. The distance was less than a hundred feet, but by the time the man reached the doors they were almost closed, the opening only a few inches wide, impossible to get through. Risking everything, Petrov shoved his arm into the diminishing crack, skinning his knuckles, the squeeze was so tight. As the cold metal touched the coldheart's arm, he braced for the terrible onslaught of pain.

The cold metal tightened slightly on his arm, cutting off the circulation, then the imposing pressure eased, and the massive portal thankfully began to cycle open once more.

“My grandy told Big Joe about this,” Petrov said, his body visibly relaxing. “These automatic doors got some kind of sensor thing that stops it from crushing an unconscious sec man lying in the way.”

“You're just triple-damn lucky the sensor thing still worked,” Thal said, looking down the tunnel. The floor and walls were made of the same smooth material, without any sign of age, wear or even corrosion.

“No guts, no glory.” Petrov chuckled, massaging his
undamaged arm. Lining the ceiling, fluorescent lights glowed brightly, their soft hum barely discernible over the murmur of the nearby river. Electric lights! The coldheart was very impressed. He'd only occasionally seen that kind of illumination before, aside from the headlights on wags and such.

Behind the gang, the Guardian crushed under the boulder rattled softly, then went still again, hydraulic fluids leaking onto the ground like thin blood.

“Well, you sure enough got balls,” Rose muttered, resting the Uzi on her shoulder. “Big, fat, hairy balls.”

“You can load that into a blaster and fire it,” Charlie agreed, adjusting his glasses.

Just then, the blast doors began to ponderously close once more.

Hurriedly, the companions stepped into the tunnel and moved away from the entrance. The doors closed with a dull boom, and the gang stood there for a few moments listening intently for any sound of movement down the tunnel. But there was only a deep silence, heavy and imposing.

Checking over their weapons, the gang started along the tunnel, then almost jumped as hidden air vents in the walls began blowing a warm breeze on them. It tasted oddly metallic, kind of flat, almost as if the very air had been scrubbed clean.

“Bomb shelter, my arse,” Petrov muttered, slinging the longblaster over a shoulder and bringing up the S&W M-4000. “This is more like a predark mil base!” The long-range Steyr had many uses, but the inside of a building was scattergun territory.

“Bet there are a hundred of the implo grens in here
somewhere!” Charlie whispered, licking his thin lips. “Mebbe even nukes!”

“What the frag are you going to do with a nuke?” Rose snorted in disdain, the rapid-fire tight in her hands.

“I can think of a few things,” the man replied, his face shiny with dreams of destruction.

“There could also be a hundred more of those Guardians,” Thal commented. “So watch your six, and shoot anything that moves!”

“Anything that comes our way,” Petrov corrected, working the pump action on the scattergun to load a cartridge for immediate use. “Spend the brass and save your ass. That's an order!”

Nodding assent, the Pig Iron Gang moved in a tight group along the tunnel, then turned the last corner and entered the garage level of the redoubt. Dozens of wags were parked in neat rows, regular wags, armored transports, an APC with an electric minigun on top and even a tank, a loose tread lying uselessly on the floor. But aside from a few deflated tires, the wags were in fine shape, the windows intact, the paint still bright with color, the trim shining in the reflected light of the fluorescent tubes overhead.

The sight of that many predark vehicles in perfect condition made the gang stop, then they cursed at the sight of the crippled Guardian standing at a tool bench on the far side of the cavernous room. The damaged leg had been removed and was clamped into a vise while snakelike tentacles from the dented machine did something inside the tube with bright flashes of a blue light.

Nuking hell, the machine outside wasn't the old Guardian fixed, Petrov realized in shock, but a replacement!

Moving fast, Thal lit a pipe bomb and whipped it over the rows of wags. The bomb landed on the tool bench with the fuse sputtering loudly, and the Guardian had only a second to register the fact before a massive explosion engulfed that side of the garage. It vanished inside the blast as a maelstrom of loose tools flew across the room to shatter hundreds of wag windows in a deafening cacophony of destruction and send a tidal wave of glass hurtling at the four coldhearts….

 

B
ACK IN THE
fetid swamp, a group of stickies attracted by the smell of fresh blood rose from the slimy muck alongside a fallen tree to converge on the slain alligator and gleefully devour the assorted gobbets of flesh, hide and bone. Hooting in delight over the marvelous feast, the muties then followed the lumbering wendigo, happy to consume whatever else the giant being cast aside as offal.

 

R
IDING THEIR HORSES
along a shallow river, the companions had separated, with Jak, Doc and Mildred on the north side of the waterway, Ryan, Krysty and J.B. on the south bank. Each group was closely studying the ground for any sign of Petrov and his gang. Unlike hoofprints, the tire tracks of a motorcycle were very difficult to completely erase by simply dragging a leafy tree branch along behind.

“They here,” Jak declared suddenly, pointing at a tiny
puddle of water with a rainbow sheen. “That engine oil! Some bike must leak not know about.”

“More the fools they,” Doc said, the reins held tightly in his left hand.

Just then, everybody pricked up their ears at the sound of an echoing blast. It quickly faded away, leaving behind only the gentle sounds of the murmuring water.

“Was that thunder?” Mildred asked suspiciously, glancing skyward. But there were only the usual clouds of black and orange, the occasional flash of heat lightning softly crackling inside the roiling banks of pollution.

“Sounded more like a gren or pipe bomb,” J.B. noted, brushing a hand across his hair in lieu of straightening his missing hat.

“Think Petrov is trying to blast his way into the redoubt?” Krysty asked, using an oily cloth to wipe down one of the newly acquired 7.62-mm rounds before thumbing it into an empty magazine for the AK-47 rapid-fire. Unless properly maintained, old brass could jam in a weapon, easily taking off a finger or ending your life.

“I wish them good luck with that endeavor,” Doc retorted scornfully. “Those doors were built to resist a thermonuclear detonation. I doubt very highly that even a thousand pipe bombs would so much as scratch the surface!”

“Mebbe so, but I had an implo gren in my bag,” J.B. countered thoughtfully, “and there was no sign of it being used at the Boneyard.”

“Implo work on blast doors?” Jak asked with a scowl,
leather reins in one hand, the S&W handblaster in the other.

“Hell, I don't know. Nobody knows how the things work, not even Millie, so how can I know what they won't do?”

“Fair enough,” Ryan admitted, then stopped talking to scowl at a clump of bushes located underneath a yucca tree.

Slowing his mount, the one-eyed-man rode to the plants and slid off the saddle. The other companions saw nothing unusual about the flowering plants, but Ryan drew his knife to slash something inside the bushes, and they sprang apart to reveal a canvas lump. Yanking it off, the man exposed four motorcycles. They were parked close together, the engines ticking softly as they slowly cooled.

Rushing over, J.B. checked for any traps and easily disabled a mousetrap armed with a razor blade hidden under the curved dashboard for unauthorized fingers. It was crude, but effective.

“Clear,” he announced, going directly to the saddlebags and ripping one open to check inside. The bag was packed with supplies, smoked meat, bedrolls, a frying pan, even some blasters and spare brass. There was even a leather bag packed full of damp moss. Unfortunately, his glasses weren't present.

Looting the other bikes, the companions filled their pockets with ammunition, and J.B. took possession of four Molotovs. The mixture seemed a little thin, but the rags were properly soaked in machine oil. Yeah, these would do just fine.

There had even been a couple of rounds for the
AK-47's gren launcher, but none of the companions had one of those stubby blasters attached to their rapid-fires, and the Russian shell was much too small to use in the 40-mm launcher that Doc carried. J.B. tucked them into his munitions bag anyway. Even without a blaster, the 30-mm shells had a host of different uses. At the very least, he could remove the C-4 plastic explosives from the warheads and make a triple-powerful pipe bomb.

“Any sign of the rest of your stuff?” Mildred asked hopefully, dropping the clip of an AK-47 to check the brass inside. Satisfied, she tossed the rapid-fire away and tucked the magazine into a pocket for later use.

“Nothing they stole is here,” J.B. answered, checking the storage compartment hidden underneath a hinged seat. “Want me to ace the bikes?”

“Just disable them,” Ryan decided, throwing away a .44 Magnum round that had a spot of corrosion on the bottom. “We might need them later.”

Drawing her Brazilian revolver, Mildred pretended to check the ammunition while riding closer to Doc until their legs bumped.

“Yes, madam?” he asked, without looking up from his work.

“Want me to wrap that?” Mildred whispered, spinning the cylinder. “I have enough strips of cloth to do a good job.”

“What are you talking about, dear lady?” Doc asked, feigning confusion.

“I saw you favoring that hand back in the village,” she replied, closing the blaster to face him directly. “Firing that goddamn 40-mm launcher as a shotgun broke your wrist, didn't it?”

“It is merely sore, at worst, a mild sprain, I assure you,” Doc demurred uneasily.

Reaching out, Mildred grabbed his hand inside the pocket and squeezed. Doc grunted but didn't turn white or gasp outloud.

“Fair enough. A sprain won't get infected,” Mildred said, sitting back in the saddle. “Just don't use it again, or else the recoil of that blunderbus will snap those bones like breadsticks.”

“Like…what was that again?”

“Matchsticks.”

“Ah.”

“Done,” J.B. announced, dropping the spark plugs into his bag and tucking the toolbox back where he found it originally.

Personally, the man would have preferred to ride a bike instead of a horse. He got along much better with machines than animals. Unfortunately, a Harley made a very distinctive sound. The signature rumble of the big flathead engine would instantly tell Petrov and his gang of coldhearts who was coming. Stealth was more important than speed at the moment. Besides, a quiet hunter ate meat every day, as the old saying went. Wise words.