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“Should we try again?” Dean asked, hitching the straps of his backpack.
“Can’t take the risk,” his father said grimly. “A malfunk in the mat-trans could send our atoms to the middle of nowhere.”
“Think the entire network is down?” Krysty asked in concern, looking around as if she could see inside the armaglass walls.
“Only one way to find out,” Mildred said, scowling at the sole door of the chamber.
Just then the lights in the chamber flickered, and a scream erupted in the control room.
“Fireblast, the muties are eating the comps!” Ryan cursed, pulling a weapon and striding forward. “That’s why we can’t leave!” To the bugs, the intense EM fields of the comps had to be like jolt to an addict.
Rushing to the door, the companions prepared their blasters and threw open the portal. In the control room, a dozen of the hairy millipedes were crawling over the control banks, several of them partially inside the delicate machinery.
Aiming the SIG-Sauer, Ryan paused in frustration. Nukeshit, they were caught again! If they missed a bug, the blasterfire might destroy the controls. A bug hissed at their arrival and started forward with surprising speed.
“Blades only,” Ryan ordered, holstering his 9 mm blaster and pulling his panga.
“No, wait,” Krysty countered, dropping her pack and rummaging inside. “I have a better idea. Just keep these things off me for a minute.”
Jak jerked his arm and the handle of a knife appeared in the forehead of the onrushing mutie. It reared in pain, and Doc slashed out with his sword, ending its life. But the noise attracted other millipedes, and now several headed their way, crawling along the floors and walls.
Standing in triumph, Krysty yanked the cap off a road flare, and scraped the top of the waxy tube. As the flare sputtered into life, she thrust it at a nearby millipede and the furry body caught on fire. Keening in agony, the insect hastily backed away from the sizzling, popping flare.
Sporting a grin, J.B. unearthed another flare from his munitions bag as did the rest of the companions. In a concentrated effort, they herded the cringing insects into the far corner where they stomped the muties flat, gore splattering the walls and consoles. A few of the muties scurried out the open doorway, the sec controls no longer functioning, but that was okay. Once the control room was clear, Dean manually shut the door, and Jak rammed another knife into the jamb to hold it shut. Then Ryan grabbed a chair and stuck it underneath the handle.
“That won’t last long,” Krysty warned, as her flare sputtered and died. The air reeked from the fumes of the road flares, yellow drops of the excess burned material crusting the dirty floor.
“We only need a little time,” Ryan said, tossing away his flare as it went out. “Watch the air vents!”
“Think we can fix the controls to do a jump?” Mildred asked. “Hit the reboot switch, maybe?”
Before the question could be answered, there was a rustling noise in the ceiling, and the companions turned to fire at the exact same moment. Shot to pieces, the ceiling panels burst apart and a bleeding millipede dropped to the floor. Putting the tip of his blaster to its featureless face, Ryan fired the SIG-Sauer once, the slug blowing out its other end and the mutie went completely still. Good, they were learning how to efficiently chill the triple-damned things, but at a tremendous expenditure of priceless ammo.
“Mebbe fix self,” Jak said hopefully, going to the main console in the control room.
“Should have done that already,” Ryan noted, checking the hole in the ceiling for any further movements. No more muties were in sight, but he was taking nothing for granted.
“Looks like we have to get out the front door,” Dean said slowly, “past all of the muties upstairs.”
“The muties don’t seem to like fire, so we can make torches,” Ryan added gruffly. “But that means searching the darkness for something to use as a staff. Broom handles, mops, table legs, anything like that would do.”
“Check. We can cut up our spare clothing for the swaddle, or get some sheets from the base laundry. But we don’t have anything to grease the rags.”
“Grease in garage,” Jak reminded. “Bugs too.”
“Cooking grease will do,” Mildred suggested. “Or machine lubricant from the reactor in the basement.”
“Easier to scrape some off the elevator cables,” Ryan said, thoughtfully scratching the scar on his face with the tip of his blaster. “Sounds good. We can do this.”
Suddenly, there was a series of loud clicks and the emergency lights crashed on, filling the control room with a harsh white light.
“Son of a bitch,” J.B. whispered with a growing smile.
“Farewell the necessity of crude torches,” Doc rumbled pleasantly, then frowned as the light noticeably lessened. “By gadfrey, they are weakening already. We must be swift to play Prometheus and light the darkness!”
Just then, the door shook as something hit it from the other side. The companions trained their weapons in that direction, but withheld firing.
“We better hit the kitchen first,” Krysty said. “Find some water glasses or jars to put our candles in so the flames don’t blow out if we have to move fast.”
“Any idea how long will the air hold out?” Dean asked, fighting to keep a touch of nervousness from his voice.
Standing in the closest, Mildred placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Even though a veteran of the Deathlands, he was still only twelve years old. “About two days,” she said calmly.
“After that?”
“Well, we’ll start getting headaches from the accumulation of carbon monoxide, unable to sleep but always be tired, then we fall asleep and never wake up.”
“We sleep,” Jak stated as a fact. “Bugs eat.”
With a grimace, Doc rumbled, “Indubitably, my succinct friend.”
“Bad way to go,” J.B. added grimly, a bead of sweat trickling down his face. “Although, there ain’t really a good way, either.”
“We’ll use the implo grens if it comes to that,” Ryan stated. “Take the dirty little muties to hell with us. But we can always open the blast doors in the garage to bring in fresh air.”
“But without power…” Dean stopped himself, remembering that the bases were designed to operate after a nuke war and were built to open without hard current. There were stored power cells inside the walls, and even jacks for the nuke batteries of wags to get wired up to power the hydraulic system that opened the main exit. Worst case, there was a hand crank, but that was harder than pushing a tank uphill with your bare hands. Hopefully the wall units still worked.
“Sure wish the APC was intact,” the boy added wistfully, changing hands holding the lighter. “Be nice to just climb in and blast our way out.”
With a start, Ryan perked up at the mention of the armored personnel carrier. Yeah, that might just work. As dangerous as kicking a nuke, but then what wasn’t these days?
“I know that look,” J.B. said to his friend. “Okay, what’s the plan?”
“Yeah, I got one, but you aren’t going to like it.” As he explained, the faces of the companions grew tense, then hopeful.
“Hell of a gamble,” Krysty said, as the door shook once more, and something raced overhead across the ceiling. “But I think it might work.”
“Okay, forget the kitchen, we hit the offices first,” J.B. ordered, opening his munitions bag and pulling out the lone stick of dynamite. It was old and wrapped in sticky electrical tape to retard sweating pure nitro, but it was the only explosive they had aside from the grens, and they were just too damn powerful.
“Better switch to candles. Can’t be swapping grips when these lighters get too hot.”
Following the sage advice, the companions were soon ready. Kicking the chair away from the door, Ryan took the lead into the heart of the infested redoubt, one hand holding a candle, the other his blaster. The hallway was clear, but every open doorway was passed as if it were the muzzle of a loaded cannon.
Reaching the stairs, the companions went past the deactivated elevator and went carefully up the stairs. Millipedes were found scurrying along the walls or sitting on the ceiling. To conserve ammo, the muties weren’t harmed unless they attacked first. But each fight seemed to attract more of the creatures, constantly slowing their progress. To reach the office of the commanding officer of the base, the companions passed close to the armory and briefly paused, trying to decide if they should look inside, but the emergency lights were starting to seriously dim by that time and they had to move onward. Seconds counted now, before they were fighting in the darkness at the mercy of the deadly insects.
“READY, GO!” Ryan shouted, awkwardly opening the sagging door to the garage.
Cutting loose, the companions opened fire on the scurrying millipedes, blasting a tight path through the living carpet. Reaching the wrecked vehicles, the friends hastily climbed on top and jumped from hood to hood so the insects couldn’t bite them from underneath the wags. However, the noise from the millipedes quickly grew in volume as more and more of them poured into the garage at the arrival of the companions.
Placing his shots carefully, Ryan felt his heart pound at the sight, even though it was exactly what they wanted. Attracted by the mag fields of the base, once inside the things found virtually nothing to eat and were slowly concentrating their attention on the only food available. The humans.
Situated high in the corners, the emergency lights were beginning to turn yellow at this point, and as the companions jumped to the roof of the APC a bulb started to flicker. It was horribly obvious that the lights were dying faster than expected.
“Left side!” Ryan snarled, and the companions concentrated their blasters there to clear a section of the floor free of bugs.
Jumping down, Dean placed a coffee can on the floor, a tiny nubbin of prima cord sizzling on top as a fuse. Kicking a bug off his boot, the boy grabbed the hands of his friends and climbed hastily back up out of reach of the chittering muties.
“Okay, right side!” Ryan shouted, shooting a millipede off the bare concrete ceiling above them.
Now Krysty did the same thing, while Jak used a broom to shove the third charge underneath the armored vehicle. As they scrambled back on top of the war wag, Mildred put the last charge on a flat section of the armored roof, the burning fuse less than an inch long.
“Get inside!” Ryan growled, chilling two more smaller bugs charging across the rooftops of a nearby Hummer. “Move!”
Firing from the hip, J.B. used the shotgun to clear off the rear hatch, and the companions jumped to the floor and threw open the double doors with their blasters firing. The single small millipede sitting on the floor was torn to pieces and the companions piled inside the steel box, kicking out the twitching body before slamming the hatch shut and locking it tight.
“Seal the rest!” Ryan ordered, checking the gunners hatch in the ceiling and finding it already bolted tight.
“Hot pipe, there’s no lock on this one!” Dean yelled as the driver’s hatch trembled slightly and a millipede appeared at the crack, snapping its pinchers.
Twisting the head of his ebony swordstick, Doc withdrew a thin sword of Spanish steel and plunged it through the face of the bug. It screamed in agony and withdrew.
Yanking off his belt, Dean looped it through the handle of the hatch and pulled the hatch tight. Removing her gun belt, Mildred fed it through Dean’s and managed to stretch the leather just far enough to reach a stanchion and anchor it securely. The makeshift pulley would hold, but not against a lot of the determined bugs, or for very long.
Krysty already had two candles lit and placed on empty machine-gun mounts to fill the gutted war wag with vital illumination. From outside the APC, she could see that the flickering of the emergency lights was getting worse, then one array suddenly began to strobe wildly and died outright, casting the section of the garage into darkness. Gaia, they were cutting this close.
“We’re secure!” J.B. announced, tightening the latch on the belly hatch.
“Okay, start cutting!” Ryan growled, holstering his blaster and drawing the panga.
Whipping out their knives, everybody played a candle flame over the blade for a precious second, then nicked a finger and started smearing blood around the louvered air vents and small blaster ports of the vehicle. Even though they knew it was risking a finger to stick it outside, they spread the blood about as far as possible. But at the first imagined touch of a mutie, they yanked the endangered hand back and dabbed the blood merely around the ports.
The chittering soon became a muted roar, and the APC actually shook slightly from the arrival of countless dozens of the muties. The smell of blood was driving the millipedes crazy, and within moments every air vent and blaster port was alive with pinchers and slimy tongues reaching for the food.
“Wait for it,” Ryan commanded, as the tapping of the pinchers grew until it sounded like rain on a tin roof. Watching the second hand move on his wrist chron, the one-eyed man waited until the sixty-second mark and shouted, “Now!”
Covering their ears, the companions opened their mouths to equalize the pressure and try to save their hearing when the entire world seemed to erupt. The APC rocked violently from side to side from the concussions of the explosions as the dynamite charges in the coffee cans detonated slightly out of sequence.
The blasts punched through the air vents like invisible fists knocking the companions about, Ryan slamming into a hatch and crumpling to the floor. Outside, the chittering of the muties swelled into screams for a split second and then was gone as the reverberations of the trip-hammer explosions and stilettos of flame stabbed through the air vents and blaster ports, and a monstrous crunching sound filled the garage. Screeching as it scraped along the concrete floor, the wheelless APC was shoved sideways and brutally slammed into another vehicle, then flipped over sideways, tumbling the companions together into a heap and extinguishing the candles.
In the smoky blackness of the APC nothing moved, aside from the slow drip of blood.
Chapter Five
With the coming of the dawn, the Devils rolled out of the box canyon and headed north along the dried riverbed to finally reach a scraggly plain of scrub brush that slowly changed into a grasslands and finally to forest.
After the heat of the desert, it was a very welcome change for the bikers. The line of chained slaves didn’t seem to notice the difference, their every thought concentrated on placing one foot ahead of the other.
Passing a copse of trees, a group of stickies charged at the biker gang, hooting and waving their arms like the mad things they were. The Devils hit the muties with firebombs made from glass bottles, rags and shine. Several of the muties were engulfed by the chem flames, but still chased after the escaping food, until they simply toppled over dead, their brains literally cooked through.
“Black dust, those are hard to chill,” Denver Joe said, returning a Molotov into his saddlebag. “Is it much farther to this cannie ville?”
“Another day’s ride,” Cranston growled, glancing sideways at the newbie. “You’ll know it when we get there.”
That sounded rather ominous to Denver Joe, but he made no reply as the miles steadily rolled underneath the purring bikes, and the frantically running slaves.
High above, the purple and orange clouds crackled with sheet lightning, warning of a coming storm, mebbe even a twister. But there was no smell of acid rain, so the bikers kept their leisurely pace along the forest trail. Dead slaves were of no use to anybody, so every couple of hours the bikers would slow and let the people walk a few miles to catch their breath. For the hungry slaves, food would come at the end of the day, but the Devils ate while they drove, tearing off greasy chunks of dried dog wrapped in oily cloth, and drinking warm water cut with juniper-berry juice from battered aluminum canteens.
The trees were becoming thick in the heart of the forest, and soon the gang was rolling along a narrow trail through the tall evergreens and oaks, the ground covered with a thick carpet of pine needles that sweetly scented the air. Without warning, there was a loud crunching noise to one side and a thick tree snapped off at the base to come crashing down across the path, blocking it completely.
“Razor up,” Cranston ordered, drawing his longblaster and thumbing off the safety.
The bikes eased to a halt and the point men instantly slipped longblasters off their shoulders, while the women pulled levers to draw their crossbows and nocked iron arrows into place.
Resting both legs on the uneven dirt road, Cranston throttled down his bike’s big engine and listened to the silence of the forest.
“Whatcha think?” Ballard asked, his good eye sweeping across the trees.
Paying no attention to the man, Cranston leaned over the handlebars to inspect the soil. The ground here was moist, but not swampy, and there was no sign of rot on any of the other trees in the area. There was no reason for a tree to just fall over like that.
Krury scowled into the shadows under the dense canopy of evergreens. “Could have been from the rumble of our bikes,” the bald biker said slowly, almost as if he were trying to convince himself of the idea.
“Tatters, check the base of the tree,” Cranston commanded, pulling a pump-action shotgun from a leather holster strapped to his back.
Holding tight on to the pump, he racked the weapon with one hand by simply jerking it up and down. The solid mechanical sound of the receiver taking a fat 12-gauge cartridge was reassuring to the biker. The first cartridge was predark, in prime condition. The rest were handloads of questionable power. Oh, they would fire all right; he just wasn’t sure how far they could throw the combo of lead and razor blades.
Turning off his bike, the skinny Devil kicked out the stand and rested the machine carefully, watching the trees as much as he did the Harley. As the youngest member of the Blue Devils, Tatters always got the shit jobs.
Engines purring softly, the members of the biker gang stayed on their vehicles, the patched exhaust pipes steadily puffing blue-gray clouds of exhaust, as they closely watched the teen go over the base of the big tree and check the exposed roots. Nobody spoke. There was a palatable tension in the air, as thick as a rad fog above a glass lake.
“Looks rotten to me,” Tatters called out, prying back a rubbery root with the tip of his long knife. The weapon was actually a cavalry saber taken from a predark museum, but the blacksmith sharpening the blade had been careless and ground a good foot off the steel before being stopped. The short saber worked fine, and the sheath bore the same tattoo that had once been on the arm of the clumsy blacksmith.
“No greasy smells, or acid smell of plas?” Cranston demanded, the blue-steel of the pump-action shining oily smooth in the dim of the hidden sun.
Craning his neck, Tatters breathed in deep, then smiled. “Nah, it’s just a dead tree. Krury must be right. It fell over from the vibes of the bikes.”
“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Cranston stated, easing his grip on the shotgun. “Everybody stay sharp. Shoot anything that moves. David, Shelly, Denver—stay here and cover us. This looks clean but I got a tingle in my bones like when those swampies tried to jump us outside Alamo.”
A chorus of grunts signaled agreement, and the group split into two unequal parts. Revving the big engines, the coldhearts eased in their clutches and rolled off the road onto the wild grass and weeds lining the trail. Twigs snapped under the studded tires, as the motorcycles drove past the leafy crown of the dead tree and safely reached the other side of the road.
Easing his stance, Cranston sheathed the shotgun and sharply whistled at the other bikers. A lot of crap about nothing. If this had been some sort of trap, nobody in their right mind would have let half of the group just leave.
Revving their engines, the guards rolled around the tree and joined the pack again.
“Wasn’t nothing but a tree,” Dee said, her greasy shirt tied under her massive breasts to give them some support. The woman jiggled outrageously with every bounce, but no male in the gang ever complained about the sight.
“Seems so,” Cranston muttered nervously, working the throttle as the bike started to stall from overheating. The damn carb was sticking again, he thought. Have to clean that tonight.
Then the chief Devil added, “But I still got me a tingle. Let’s waste a few gallons and rocket this road. There’s something wrong here, I can fucking well feel it.”
