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“So we can’t move, but they can,” Krysty whispered. “Big advantage.”
“A predictable one,” Doc countered, “as, I think, we are about to see.”
Sure enough, even as he spoke, the engine of the wag facing them sprang to life.
“YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS,” Chambers breathed.
“Why not?” Corden countered. “We don’t want them, we just want what they’re carrying.”
“But what if the wag goes up?”
“Won’t hit near the tanks,” Demetriou told him. “Side-on, near the tail. Spin ’em and scramble ’em. They ain’t got the firepower to stop us. Play with ’em a little.”
Chambers sat back, sighing softly. Crazies. Demetriou and Corden. Running with these stupes was doing nothing for his nerves. He felt his stomach lurch in agreement. Stealing and chilling was something he wanted to do because it was easier than breaking your back for Big Bal. Doing it with Corden’s crew wasn’t easier—no way.
Demetriou gunned the wag engine until it roared, put the wag into gear and released the brake.
Chambers closed his eyes as the wag shot forward.
“STUPE CRAZY bastards,” Krysty cursed. There was every chance that the idiots coming for them could total their own wag as much as they could overturn the wag—now a seemingly too flimsy shelter—in which she and her companions were clustered. It was as if these coldhearts didn’t care. Maybe their wag was the stronger. Maybe the front bars on the wag had been put to a test like this before.
It didn’t much matter. They had some firepower, but would it be enough to stop the oncoming wag, or at least to deflect it from its course?
“I think this may be one for me,” Doc said in her ear. He was whispering, but it still sounded loud and clear. Using the frame of the glassless window as a rest for the barrel of the LeMat, Doc took aim for the windshield of the oncoming wag.
If the coldhearts were crazies, then maybe they had met their match in Doc. The prematurely aged Tanner grinned, his strong white teeth reflective of the mad glint in his eye. This was a challenge he could relish. Only a fool would accept it. Doc was that fool. When you had seen all that he had seen, experienced three different eras and still been left alive, isolated and marooned, there was little else left but to accept the insane as the sane, and to rise to any challenge presented.
If the windshield was shatterproof, then the fire would harmlessly strike and be deflected. If the grille on the front of the wag was open enough to allow the inclusion of fire…
Squeeze that trigger soon enough, and maybe you could hit both targets.
All of that swept through the tangled and darkened skeins of Doc’s mind in the few moments it took him to rest the LeMat and squeeze. He didn’t worry too much about aim. Keep it straight, and the onrushing target would be hard to miss.
The impact of the shot charge held within the percussion pistol sounded loud and deafening in the confines of the wag. A cone of silence followed it as traumatized eardrums adjusted to the sudden concussion.
A single moment stretched to infinity and back as the grape shot of the pistol spread in the molten air, close enough to take all impact, distant enough to allow it to spread across the windshield and fender. By accident or design, Doc had picked the optimum moment.
The wag slewed away from its stationary adversary, throwing up a cloud of choking dust that obscured its path.
DEMETRIOU DIDN’T FEEL the shot and the glass shards that rained over his chest, face and thorax. All were hit head-on. Nervous jerks of a traumatized system made him spin the wheel, taking them off a collision course.
Corden had seen the raised and steadied barrel, had thrown himself down, yelling a blurted and incoherent warning, a noise that made no sense in syllables but said everything in tone. It was enough to make Chambers and Thornton dive to the ground.
Corden screamed in pain as he felt shards score his back. His head connected with the edge of door frame and dash, blurring those lines of pain. For a moment he almost lost the light, but his survival instinct kicked in. If this was going wrong and they had to fight back, then he needed to stay alert to stay alive.
Demetriou’s life snuffed as he fell heavily on the wheel. His foot hit the accelerator and the wag shot across the uneven plain. The jolting made it hard for the other three coldhearts to regain any kind of control, but that very lack of guidance saved them. One rut too many, and Demetriou’s corpse shifted in his seat, his foot sliding from the pedal.
The wag slowed.
THE DUST CLOUD SETTLED and Doc could see that his volley had met with some success.
“Even playing field, I think,” he murmured. “Level, the term might be.”
“Shut up, Doc,” Krysty replied. “Let’s see what they do next. How are we doing?” she questioned a little louder.
“Okay,” Jak stated.
“Not okay,” Ryan breathed in her ear. “Seeing bastard double. Stupe thing with one eye.”
“Watch our tails, then, lover,” she said gently. “No way are you going front line until that’s fixed. Mildred? J.B.?”
“Feel like a mule kicked me, but at least I can see straight,” the Armorer said wryly.
“Second that,” Mildred added. She looked beyond the confines of the wag to where their enemy had come to rest. “Real question is, how are they doing?”
“Badly, I hope.” Krysty looked over her battered but unbowed friends. “At least,” she added, “a lot worse than us. Because it’s going to get up close and personal, if I’m not mistaken.”
Chapter Three
Thornton and Chambers wasted no time with words. Before the dust settled, Thornton kicked open the door on his side of the wag, which faced away from their now revitalized opponents. He scuttled out onto the dusty, hard-packed earth, scrambling to the front wing of the vehicle. Chambers followed in his wake, opting to cover the rear end. It would leave him a little more exposed when he chose to take a shot, but safer in the meantime. Chambers was a believer in caution.
Corden, meanwhile, had opened the door against which his bloodied shoulder was wedged and slid out, face-first. He rolled over, grimacing as the dust and grit from the ground bit into the exposed flesh. Tears of pain ran down his face. Eyes up to the sky, he could see that the blue, bending to purple and ochre, remained unchanged. For him, though, things were far from the same. Now, he was driven by more than just greed. The need to take from them what they had taken from him—a life—was a burning desire.
“Wayne, you with us?” Thornton queried, concerned at Corden’s expression, the like of which he had never seen.
“Yeah…oh, yeah…” Galvanized into action, Corden pulled himself to his feet and joined Thornton in his long-range recce over the cover of the wag’s hood. “They can’t move, and if we go to them, then we expose ourselves. Right?”
Thornton agreed. Corden glanced down the length of the wag at Chambers, who nodded.
“Right. Then we need to take ourselves to them. I’ll replace Jase. Just get as much firepower as you can and start blasting when we get in range.”
“What if we—”
Corden’s hard-eyed, ice-cold stare choked Thornton’s query in his throat. Corden’s voice was low, deep in his own throat, and had an edge that would brook no argument. “We chill those fuckers. I don’t care if it’s quick or slow. Slow’s better. But they buy the farm. If we get Hearne’s jack, then even better. But that don’t really matter now. They got one of ours. That’s what matters.”
With that, Corden pulled open the door of the wag and climbed in, keeping his head low. Thornton looked back at Chambers. The dark coldheart shrugged, gesturing helplessly. There was little they could do except go along with it. Corden was boss, and they were used to following without question.
Inside the wag, Corden gently closed Demetriou’s eyes. The young coldheart had slumped so that his torso had fallen into the well between the seats. Corden cradled his head.
“They won’t get away with this,” he whispered to the chilled man. Heaving the deadweight body upright, he reached across the bloodied lap and flicked the catch on the driver’s door. Pushing it open, he heaved the body so that it fell toward the gap, pitching off the seat and into a heap on the ground.
The engine was still ticking over, the gear preventing it from moving. Corden closed the driver’s door, then called to Chambers and Thornton.
Chambers entered the rear of the wag once more, while Thornton took Corden’s old post. Now he was riding shotgun, and would have a clear arc of fire through the shattered windshield.
“You know what we should do,” Corden said in a toneless, dead voice. “I’ll set her rolling, and then we just start blasting. Don’t give them a chance to fire back.”
“Wait—”
Corden looked back at Chambers. “Lost your nerve? If you have, then I’ll—”
“No need for us to do anything, Wayne,” Chambers interrupted him. “Stop a second…Can’t you feel it?”
Corden frowned. What was Chambers talking about? But wait…His grim visage cracked into a grin wreathed in malice.
“Yeah, I can, now. Looks like we won’t have to worry about anything. The spirits are gonna take care of ’em, right?”
Chambers nodded. “Spirits, nuke shit, call it what you want, Wayne. But it’s coming. And they ain’t been around these parts long enough to know anything about it. They won’t survive it.”
“Neither will we. Not if we don’t get the fuck out of here soon,” Thornton added, looking through the blasted windshield and up at the skies. There was no sign above them, but the air around was charged, like static electricity. The previously airless plains had the slightest of breezes, carrying that charge across the empty expanse.
Corden looked out of the wag, down at Demetriou’s corpse. Maybe a proper burial would have been good. Stop the mutie critters getting him, using him for carrion. But what the hell. Jase was gone. That piece of chilled flesh wasn’t him. Not anymore.
Corden smiled as he looked across at the wag that held their erstwhile opponents. “They’ll be expecting us to attack. Won’t know what the fuck to think when we hightail it outta here. Makes it kinda sweeter, doesn’t it?”
“Guess it does, Wayne,” Chambers agreed. He would have agreed to anything at that moment, as long as it got Corden turning the wag and headed back toward Brisbane.
Corden put the wag into gear and spun it almost 360, so that they headed away from the stranded wag and back toward the blacktop they had seemingly left so long ago.
“WHAT—” MILDRED FOLLOWED the progress of their one-time pursuers with a rising sense of bewilderment.
“That no way attack. Something wrong,” Jak commented tersely.
“Sure as shit is,” J.B. muttered. “Why come all this way, push it this far, and then…”
“Unless, my dear John Barrymore, there is a greater danger in the offing than perhaps they would wish to deal with?” Doc mused.
Krysty scanned the land around. There was nothing visible except the receding dust trail of the retreating wag. “Can’t see a thing. But…” She was aware of how tightly her hair was clinging to her neck, snaking down her back as though searching for cover.
“But?” Mildred queried.
“Feel it,” Jak whispered. “Not coldheart trouble. Something worse.”
A distant hum in the air, like the thrumming of a taut wire, was all the indication they had of anything amiss. There seemed to be no account for the coldhearts’ sudden withdrawal. Yet still that gnawing at the pit of the companions’ stomachs said that there was something very bad on the way.
Without a word, both Jak and Krysty got out of the wag, stiff, sore limbs protesting at the movement. Krysty winced as she could feel her ribs creak and tighten with every breath. Both she and Jak stood still and silent on the plain, looking slowly around. The air was moving more than previously. There was no reason why there shouldn’t be a breeze, so why did it feel uncomfortable and unnerving? It took both of them only a few minutes to realize that there seemed to be no direction from which the air moved. One second it seemed to be westerly, the next it was from the east. Or else it seemed to come from the north, only to switch south when confirmation was sought. Even more so, there was no pattern to these changes. They seemed to be either random or in such an extended sequence that it was difficult to follow the pattern.
Jak and Krysty exchanged puzzled looks. The albino teen’s normally impassive face was twisted into a questioning look.
Before either could say anything, sounds from behind them indicated that the others had come out into the open. Krysty turned to see Doc stretching, black-clad limbs twisted against the empty backdrop of the sky. J.B. stared, puzzled, at the sun as the breezes plucked at the folds of material on the backpack that held his ordnance stash. Mildred was making Ryan lean forward so that she could check his good eye for any signs of concussion.
“How you feeling, lover?” Krysty asked.
Ryan grunted. “Like shit.”
“But not concussed shit,” Mildred added dryly. “You’ll be okay. What’s with the coldhearts?” she added, indicating the direction in which their attackers had fled.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Krysty murmured. “Doesn’t feel like it’s good, though.” She looked around, aware that even as she spoke, the winds had begun to pick up. There were no clouds in the sky, yet the air was becoming charged with the kind of energy that preceded a storm.
“We find cover, quick,” Jak said matter-of-factly. Ryan looked around. Apart from the battered wag, there was precious little else that could provide cover. The black-and-green dappled hills of the plains were distant. The scrub within a radius of about five hundred yards was sparse. A few clusters of rock dotted the spaces between, but these were low to the ground and of little substance.
The wag had a windshield, but no other glass to provide protection from the elements. But they had tarps covering the supplies. Just maybe…If it was an electrical storm, the frame should conduct any lightning hits. If it was strong enough to blow the wag across the plains, well, it could do that, and it could buffet them wherever else they sought shelter out here.
Even as those thoughts raced rapidly through his mind, he was aware that tracers and eddies of dust were beginning to swirl around his feet, reaching up past his ankles.
Looking up, he could see that J.B. had reached the same conclusion and was already heading back to the wag. Ryan indicated that the others should follow suit. It was only when he saw that Doc had stopped that he turned to face where the old man stared.
“Fireblast,” the one-eyed man whistled softly.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc murmured.
In the distance, a column of dust had risen into the air. As they watched, it grew in height and width from a zephyr to a tornado, then shrank again before rising once more. It seemed to pulse, as though with a life of its own. It was moving toward them at speed. The dust eddies around their ankles had now risen almost to their knees. The breezes that had raised the dust plucked at their calves.
The others were already in the wag. The window openings facing the oncoming storm had already been blocked out by the heavy, dark tarp. J.B. was covering the rear opening. Krysty looked at Ryan and Doc.
“Come on—what are you waiting for?” she yelled.
Ryan was shaken from his reverie and moved toward the wag. The dust eddies were now bigger, stronger. He blinked and coughed as dust began to clog his nose and throat.
Then it hit him. Rain he would have expected, perhaps a rock or stone picked up in the force of the zephyrs that crossed and recrossed to make the approaching maelstrom. But while the object was not as hard or as sharp, it still dealt a heavy blow to his shoulder, but not enough to cause pain. Another of the objects hit him on the side of the head, thrown sideways and kept aloft by the counterflows of the air currents. As it slapped against his head, Ryan was shocked to hear it make a noise.
He stumbled forward, hit time and again by these objects, sure that at times they made deep noises that seemed familiar. Ryan felt soft squelching underfoot, the hard-packed surface of the plain now a shifting, uneasy and uneven mass that seemed to move, give, then be uneven again. As he reached the wag, the one-eyed man looked down, and through the murk of the dust motes, he was sure he saw…
Frogs?
Momentarily he faltered, unsure if that blow on the head had affected his senses in some way. Then he heard Krysty and Mildred calling to him through the thickening swirls of dust, and he pressed forward. Already, any sense of depth or distance was rendered a matter more of luck than judgment, and he almost ran into the wag before he saw it. Hands clutched at him, pulling him into the wag’s quieter, less dust-riddled interior, as the heavy rain of frogs splattered around him. Inside, they sounded loud and booming on the roof, a constant tattoo against which it was almost impossible to make yourself heard.
J.B. and Jak had secured every window opening except that on the door through which he had been dragged. Tendrils of dust snaked around the barely secured tarp, which the two men now held over the opening while Mildred helped Ryan into the rear of the wag. It was possible to breathe in the wag’s interior, and he took several deep breaths, his head swimming. It was dark, as J.B. had secured a tarp over the windshield, too, as a precaution against the storm shattering it and showering them with glass. But even in the gloom, Ryan could see Mildred’s amused expression, her eyes torn between trepidation and amusement.
“I know. It’s raining of frogs. Go figure. They used to have myths about that when I was a kid, but I didn’t think I’d have to wait until I’d been frozen, defrosted and seen the future before I’d witness it. Now I really have seen everything.”
“But how—”
“I don’t know. Maybe the crosswinds have whipped them up from some river running across the plains. Let’s face it, it’s so weird out there it could have brought them from anywhere.” She shrugged.
Ryan looked around. “Doc?”
“Stupe bastard still out there,” Jak said shortly. “Quick recce.”
J.B. nodded, and the two men let the tarp drop for a second before slamming it back into place as frogs and dirt slewed through the gap.
As the darkness came down once more, they were all left with one image searing their collective retinas. Through a swirl of dust and dirt that made him seem as though he were painted on parchment, Doc was whirling in the winds, moving with the currents, laughing maniacally as he was bombarded by frogs. It seemed as though he didn’t even notice the impact.
“Crazy old buzzard’s going to get himself killed,” Mildred muttered. “I’m going after him—”
“If anyone does it, it should be me,” Ryan said, preparing to move out before being stayed by a hand from the Armorer.
“I’ll go with Millie,” he said. “You’re still not up to speed, and it’ll take two of us to get that mad bastard in here.”
