Chapter Nine

“Burn, ya bastards!” Dragon Webber screamed, wheeling around the buckboard and throwing a Molotov at the horses in the front.

The sloshing glass bottle hit the wooden harness and burst apart to cover the animals in flames.

Screaming in terror, the horses began bucking and kicking, fighting to get away.

Lashing his whip at the cannie on the bike, Frederickson fell forward off the buckboard and was trampled to death. Then the leather reins snapped and the flaming horses bolted away in blind panic, trying to get away from the orange thing that was eating them alive.

Out of control, the buckboard wheeled wildly and plowed into a stand of cacti coming to an abrupt halt.

The slavers in the rear were thrown around haplessly, Barton going over the side to land in the spiky plants.

Bleeding from a score of minor wounds, the slaver rose and fired both of his handcannons at the nearest cannie. The double load of lead slammed hard into the woman’s wooden armor, cracking off a piece.

Grinning in triumph, Iron Mary Cantone shot back, and the slaver dropped the blasters to clutch his missing groin, hot blood gushing between his fingers as he rolled about screaming.

Braking to a halt near the buckboard, Dragon swung his ax, ending Barton’s pitiful wails, then climbed off his bike just as another slaver launched a crossbow. The quarrel went straight through his shirt, missing the cannie by an inch and stabbing deep into the patched leather seat.

Whipping the ax forward, Dragon got the slaver directly in the face, the man falling backward, the fresh quarrel and unloaded crossbow flying from his limp hands.

Shouting a war chant, Hammer climbed into view from the other side of the buckboard, his ax dripping crimson and a scalp in his hands. Caught in the act of loading his musket, a slaver let go of the ramrod inside the barrel, swung up the weapon and pulled the trigger. The hammer dropped, sparks flew, the pan flashed bright, then the blaster seemed to bulge slightly just before it exploded. Dropping the shattered stock, the slaver reeled around clawing at the ruin of his face, one eye dangling down a cheek by a long string of whitish ganglia. Laughing, Hammer tossed away the scalp, pulled a knife and buried it in the chest of the mutilated slaver.

Dropping the spent shells from his revolver, Dragon thumbed in fresh brass when he heard a galloping horse. Spinning, he closed the partially loaded cylinder and fired twice from the hip. The slaver on the horse slid off the saddle to land on the sand with a crunch, her neck twisted at an impossible angle.

Hauling a weeping slaver up by his hair, Hammer slowly slit the struggling man’s throat, then shoved him out of the buckboard.

“Come on, before the rest of these assholes come back!” Iron Mary snarled, kicking a corpse in the face just to make sure.

Wasting a second looking for more horseback riders, Dragon then joined the others in the buckboard.

Ignoring the barrels of trade goods, they started stripping the bodies of blasters, when one of the supposed corpses rolled over to raise a crossbow. There was a sharp twang as the slaver fired.

Jerking to the left, Dragon felt the breeze of the arrow pass his cheek. Shitfire, that’d been close!

Knocking aside the crossbow, Iron Mary jumped on the dying slaver, slashing wildly with a curved knife.

He tried to hold her off with bare hands to no avail. Blood flew everywhere, her laughter masking his shrieks of pain until the slaver went still. Panting from the exertion of the chilling, Iron Mary smiled as she raised the blade to lick the blood off the steel.

“Mighty sweet.” The buxom cannie chuckled, sheathing the knife.

“We can do that later!” Dragon ordered, rattling the small door of cage. The bars were set too closely together to pull out any of the meat without hacking them apart first. “Now, hurry and find the damn key for that cage! The other slavers will come back soon, and I will not leave all of this behind!”

“Mebbe it was in the pocket of somebody who fell out of the buckboard,” Hammer squeaked in a childish voice. The muscular cannie stood over six feet tall, but his head was grotesquely small for the gargantuan body, almost as if it had been an afterthought. A necklace of tongues hung around his throat, his exposed back covered with different tattoos of eyes to protect him from muties.

“So hop out and get it for us, will ya?” Iron Mary smirked, going through the pockets of a bald slaver.

Then her head exploded.

Turning fast, Dragon fired his revolver at the group of slavers galloping toward them on horseback. The slavers shot back with colossal blasters, the lead balls actually humming as they went by the cannies.

Flipping an ax forward, Hammer got a rider in the leg. The slaver went tumbling off the mount to land with a sickening crunch. Another slaver threw a net at the cannies in the buckboard, but it tangled on the cage. Shooting repeatedly until his wheel gun clicked empty, Dragon dropped behind the wooden side of the buckboard and pulled a blaster from the holster of a corpse. Checking the load, he crouched and fired, the deafening boom of the handcannon heralding a cloud of dark smoke that blocked out the world. More shots rang out from both groups, a man screamed, then a motorcycle buzzed past the buckboard with Pig swinging an ax coated with slimy human entrails. Behind him a slaver doubled over to clutch at his missing stomach and collapse sideways.

Dropping the black-powder blaster, Dragon started to reload the predark revolver with his last few rounds. In wild confusion, the bikers and the horsemen circled about each other, firing their blasters nonstop, knives and axes flying about as the two groups battled to the death in the desert valley.

WITH THEIR BLASTERS held at the ready, the three companions crawled along the sandy ground, edging closer to the ancient blast crater. Stopping a few yards away, J.B. checked the rad counter on his lapel and relaxed when there was only background rad showing. Good. They needed those bikes, but he had no wish to charge into a hot pit to get the Red Cough. Nothing was worth that kind of misery.

The sounds of battle were still going strong when they reached the clump of tumbleweeds. This close, the companions could see that the desert plants had been lashed together with rope to keep them from rolling away on the breeze. A wise precaution, but having somebody hidden as a guard would have been a smarter move.

Easing to the weeds opposite the combat, J.B. gently parted them just enough to peek through. Three cannies sat on the big bikes, resting their arms on the handlebars, grisly human trophies dangling from strands of rawhide. Every bit of chrome was covered with dull tape and the glass windshield had been replaced with a wooden board bolted to the frame. They all had throwing axes dangling from their belts, along with revolvers riding in low holsters.

“How’s it going?” one of the bikers asked, rotating the cylinder of the wheel gun in his hands. The Colt

.22 had little stopping power, but the cannie had found an entire box of cartridges in a crashed mil wag.

What his grandie called an Apee, or, sometimes, an APC. It was the find of a lifetime, so he was nursing the fifty live brass along for as long as he could.

“The slavers are coming this way,” a tall cannie replied, shifting his position on the Harley. “We could attack them from behind—”

“No,” the other snapped. “Dragon told us to wait right here, so here we stay until he signals for us to join the fight.”

“But they might all be aced by then!”

“So? That only means we eat sooner.” His stomach rumbled loudly just then in perfect harmony with the rumbling from the tainted clouds overhead. Fearfully, the cannie glanced skyward, then relaxed. Those were the wrong type of clouds for acid rain. Besides, it wasn’t anywhere near spring. Let the sky moan like an angry slut. The noise would help cover the sound of their engines starting just before they charged the last of the slavers. Then the feasting would begin!

Staying low to the ground, the companions separated to move around the blast crater in different directions. Leaving Doc near a scraggly yucca tree, J.B. headed for a pile of boulders when there came the soft sound of crunching sand and a cannie walked around a boulder zipping up his pants.

The two men stared at each for a full second, then the cannie clawed for his ax as J.B. stepped aside and Doc lunged into view to plunge his sword directly into the man’s throat. Red fluid gushed from the hideous wound and the cannie grabbed his neck, cutting off two of his fingers as they slid along the sharp blade. He looked into the Doc’s face with dull comprehension, then eased to the ground and went forever still.

Sliding out the blade, Doc waited until he heard a whip-poor-will from the other side of the pit, then he and J.B. grabbed the aced cannie and threw him over the wall of weeds. The warm corpse crashed between the parked two-wheelers, splattering them with blood. The cannies spun at the grisly arrival and gasped in shock.

That was when Krysty stepped into view firing her AK-47 blaster. A moment later, J.B. and Doc appeared from opposite sides of crater, triggering their own rapid-fires. The 7.62 mm Kalashnikovs and 9 mm Uzi tore the startled cannies apart, their lifeblood spraying into the air. Riddled with slugs, one of them staggered around still horribly alive, then yanked a predark gren from inside the bloody tatters of his shirt. Shooting from the hip, Krysty fired a single round and a black hole appeared in the middle of his forehead. Sighing deeply, the cannie dropped, his lifeless finger curled around the pin.

Kneeling, Krysty recovered the gren, while Doc and J.B. dragged the other bodies off the bikes. Briefly, they checked the corpses for any more grens, but there was only their axes and handcannons. Since the companions had much better weapons, those were left behind. Carrying too many weapons would chill you in the Deathlands even faster than having none. However, Doc did appropriate a cardboard box half full of .22-caliber copper-jacketed rounds. Those would make excellent trade goods at a ville.

Across the valley, the battle raged on. The smoke was getting thick around the buckboard, making it hard for both sides to see clearly. The bikers stayed in constant motion, firing their blasters and swinging axes. The slavers fought back with whips and handcannons, the flame from the muzzles of their weapons stabbing through the billowing smoke like angry lighting. One cannie stopped to pull out a Molotov and light the fuse, but a slaver discharged a scattergun, peppering the front of the big bike, blowing the tire and splintering the wooden shield. His hand raised to throw, the cannie shrieked as he drew back a bloody stump, blood pumping from the ragged tatters of flesh dangling from his wrist. Then the Molotov hit the ground at his boots and whoofed into flames. Covered with fire, the man insanely beat at the fire, his cries becoming louder and more frantic, until the gas tank of the bike hissed loudly, the fuel starting to boil from the rising heat.

“Run!” Pig screamed, stopping his bike. Kicking at the ground with both legs, he turned the bike and started to race away.

The rest of the cannie bikers followed his example, and they got a few yards away when the damaged Harley exploded, spraying out machine parts and human organs.

Taking advantage of the noisy distraction, the companions climbed onto big Harleys, kicked the engines into life and twisted the handlebar throttles until the bikes were roaring with power.

A slash of Doc’s cane cut away the restraining rope, and as the tumbleweeds rolled away, the companions raced out of the pit. Charging along the dusty ground, they curved around the loudly fighting groups and went straight for the eighteen-wheeler Mack with the big painted eye.

Standing in the rear of the war wag, a cannie smiled at the appearance of the bikes, then frowned. Those weren’t his people!

“Outlanders!” the cannie shouted, pulling a Molotov from a wooden box. He used a thumbnail to flick a wooden match alive and started to apply it to the oily rag fuse when he jerked backward to slam into the splintery planks edging the predark flatbed.

Dumbfounded, the cannie stared at the gaping hole in his chest, unable to comprehend why there was no pain from such a ghastly wound. Sliding into death, he dimly heard the report of the Steyr from the distant sand dune before eternal silence filled his darkening universe.

Sputtering in rage, the driver yanked out a rusty .45 autoloader and worked the slide just as the side window shattered, his head bursting apart from the arrival of the 7.62 mm round Ryan fired from the sand dune.

Rapidly braking to a halt near the cab of the truck, Krysty jumped off the stolen bike and yanked open the door to clamber up the step, then the seat, to reach the roof. Staying clear of the protective nails jutting from the thick planks, the woman sprayed the cannies in the rear with her Kalashnikov. Coming to a halt near the driver’s door, J.B. hosed the interior with his Uzi, the two cannies crying out in surprise as the bullets forced them into a short death jig, their lifeblood splattering the windshield.

Without bothering to slow, J.B. hopped off his bike, climbed into the cab and pushed aside the corpses to start the engine. There was a struggling whine, then the big Detroit diesels came to life, blowing blue-gray smoke from the double exhaust pipes.

Stopping behind the war wag, Doc leveled his AK-47 and looked around frantically, his heart pounding.

In the pandemonium near the buckboard, a man turned in his direction. Doc swung up the rapid-fire, but before he could shoot the man doubled over clutching his stomach. Once more there came the sound of the deadly Steyr.

Suddenly a hatch swung open in the planks and there was Krysty holding her Kalashnikov and a gory knife. On the bloody floor, a muscular cannie groaned softly and went still.

“Change of plans,” she snapped, wiping the knife on her sleeve before sheathing the blade. “There’s no room for the bikes!”

“Then hasten thy chariot, Hermes!” Doc replied, hastily getting inside and closing the hatch.

Krysty didn’t know the quote, but understood the tone. Going to the front of the wag, she thumped a fist twice on the metal roof. Promptly, the war wag lurched forward, rattling and clanging across the rocky ground.

Starting to turn toward Ryan and the others on the hill, J.B. cursed as a group of cannies looked up at the noise of the approaching vehicle.

Realizing that they were being jacked while they were in the middle of a fight, the cannies raced toward the companions.

A bald woman whose arms were covered with tattoos almost reached the big wag when the bike toppled over, juice gurgling from a new hole in the fuel tank. Stunned at the sight, the woman stood still for a moment, then the war wag plowed directly into her.

The limp body went flying to land ahead of the wag, and J.B. drove over the cannie, the heavy tires smashing her flat.

Heading around the battle, the Armorer saw that more of the cannies were running toward the war wag as it rumbled past, their faces darkly grim. One cannie pulled back his arm to throw an ax, then spun, his throat pumping out blood like a broken fountain. As the sound of the Steyr arrived, the cannies and slavers both dived for cover.

Sticking an arm out the broken window, J.B. fired a couple of bursts from the Uzi at the group, then ducked behind the door. A heartbeat later, incoming rounds hammered the side of the Mack, shattering the sideview mirror, punching clean through the wood shutter covering the door and scoring a bloody path across his left calf. Nuking hell! Snarling at the pain, J.B. switched legs and started working the gas pedal with his other foot.

In the rear of the wag, Doc and Krysty looked around frantically for a blasterport, but apparently that particular invention was unknown to the cannies. But there were boxes nailed to the floorboards to make steps so that you could get higher than the protective planks and fire at folks outside.

“Have to do this the hard way,” Krysty said, dropping a nearly spent clip to insert a full one.

Going to a firing step, Doc did the same. “On your mark, dear lady.”

She nodded. “One, two…” But the wag jerked hard to the side, throwing them to the filthy floor, and there came the dull explosion of a gren.

Scrambling to their feet, the man and woman raced to the rear wall and climbed on the boxes to peek over the top. Several cannies had reclaimed their bikes and were racing in hot pursuit. Then a flight of arrows sailed overhead from the side of the war wag, closely followed by scattergun boom, lead shot peppering the wooden armor with a rattling sound.

“It seems that the last of the slavers has expired and now the cannies have turned their full attention on us!” Doc muttered, crouching to flick the selector switch on the AK-47 to full-auto.

“Too bad for them,” Krysty retorted, doing the same. “One, two, three!”

Standing up together, they fanned the rapid-fires at the scurrying people until the clips ran empty, then they ducked again. Incoming lead pounded the wooden planks, throwing splinters with stinging force.

Then something hit the side of the war wag with a clunk. A moment later there was a huge explosion behind the wag, a hail of something very hard hammering the planks.

Pulling the pin on a gren, Krysty tossed it over the wall. As the charge detonated, she rose and began shooting at the nearest biker. The stuttering rounds chewed a path across a wooden shield, then sent up puffs of dust from the ground. A tall cannie lost his hat and another fired back with a crossbow. The barbed quarrel hit the top plank only an inch below Doc’s face. The scholar recoiled, then fired back in grim resolve.

As the rapid-fire cycled empty, Krysty dropped the blaster and drew her S&W wheel gun. It didn’t have the range of the longblaster, but it was much more accurate. Squeezing off careful rounds, Krysty saw the lead smack into the wooden shields on the lead bike, but fail to get through. Fair enough. Taking a stance, she fired again, slower, more deliberately. A tire blew on a bike, sending the rider flying, then another rider dropped his crossbow as blood gushed from a minor shoulder wound. The bike wobbled, almost toppling over, but the cannie managed to right the two-wheeler and come on even faster.

Deciding to follow the success of the redhead, Doc slung the rapid-fire over a shoulder, set the selector pin on the LeMat to the 16-gauge shotgun, stood and fired. The front tire of a second Harley disintegrated into rubbery shards, the nose dropping to stab into the sand. As the bike flipped over, the howling cannie went flying as if launched by a catapult, and impacted onto the rear of the war wag with a grisly sound. After a moment Doc checked, and the corpse was dangling from the wooden armor, held in place by the rows of sharp nails.

Holstering her blaster, Krysty checked her pants’ pockets, then her shirt. “Lighter!” she demanded, holding out a hand.

Searching his frock coat, Doc tossed over a butane lighter, one of several the companions had found in a New Mex redoubt. She made the catch, just as the war wag jogged to the right, then the left. There was another loud explosion, this time so close that loose sand rained down into the rattling eighteen-wheeler.

Going to a box of Molotovs, she lit the oily rag fuses on several, tucked away the lighter, grabbed the box and heaved the entire thing over the back wall of the flatbed. Tumbling away freely, the box crashed on the ground behind the Mack war wag and the twelve firebombs exploded, combining into a towering inferno.

Arching wide around the fiery obstacle, one of the bikers jerked his head back as a 7.62 mm round from Ryan’s Steyr took him squarely in the face. Almost casually, the cannie slid off the bike, the two-wheeler continuing onward for several yards before the front wheel twisted and it flipped, tumbling along the ground, throwing off broken machine parts.

Finding himself alone, the last cannie biker shouted something unintelligible over the sputtering diesel engine of the Mack war wag, then veered sharply away, zigzagging across the rough terrain. Twice the sandy ground kicked up along the escaping bike, then the cannie swung behind a stand of cacti and was gone from sight.

Angling out of the valley, J.B. drove the wag onto the desert and around a couple of sand dunes to finally find Mildred. He braked to a halt near her, the backpacks and extra supplies piled around her boots.

“Anybody hurt?” Mildred asked, looking closely at the dirty people. Their clothing was matted with fresh blood, but none of it seemed to be from them.

“Nothing serious,” Krysty replied coolly, reloading her S&W blaster and tucking it back into the holster.

Then she did the same for the AK-47 and slung it over a shoulder.

“I caught one in the leg,” J.B. said, hanging an arm out of the window. “But it’s just a scratch.”

“You sure?” Mildred demanded.

“Yeah.” He grunted. “No biggie.”

But seeing the man’s obvious discomfort, Mildred yanked open the door to inspect the wound.

Thankfully he had been right; it was only a flesh wound. Yanking a clean cloth from her med kit, the physician tied it around the bloody pant leg as a temporary bandage. Later on she would clean the scratch and give it a couple of stitches if necessary. But for now, that would do.

A sharp whistle announced Ryan’s arrival, the big man sliding down the slope on the seat of his pants, the Steyr held tightly in a raised hand.

“Five of them are still sucking air,” he stated, working the bolt on the Steyr to remove the spent ammo clip from inside the longblaster. “Couldn’t get a clear shot once they figured out where I was hiding.”

“Damn!” J.B. snarled, closing the door again. He flexed his injured leg and it did feel a little better. Millie could handle a bandage the way he did plas.

“However, I did spot more tire tracks,” Ryan added.

“Delphi?” Krysty asked from over the planks.

He nodded. “Could be.”

“Great!” J.B. said. “Then get your ass in the Cyclops and let’s roll!”

Ryan smiled. Cyclops was a pretty good name for a war wag.

Just then, a hail of blasterfire sounded, dust kicking up from the top of the dune.

“Good shots,” Jak admitted grudgingly. “They got bikes?”

“Nothing that looked in working condition,” Ryan answered, dropping in a fresh rotary clip; the clear plastic was slightly cloudy with scratches, having been used a hundred times before over the years. But the five live rounds inside were still visible. The Kalashnikovs and the Steyr took the same size ammo, but it had been a trip-long time since the man had found any replacement clips. When these were gone, the longblaster would have to be individually loaded before every shot.

“Horses?” Jak asked pointedly.

“Chilled, or on fire and running for their lives.”

“On fire?”

“Yep.”

“Damn.” The teenager snorted, throwing his bedroll up and over the wall of planks.

But Doc caught it and dropped the roll inside. “No need for that. There’s a hatch in the back,” he said, jerking his chin in toward the rear.

Heading that way, the albino nodded, and the companions quickly relayed their supplies and spare blasters inside the Cyclops, along with the precious toolbox, and a couple of the nuke batteries. When he had the chance, J.B. planned to wire them to the wag headlights to make a nukelamp. It was a hundred times brighter than a flare, and would last until the halogen bulb died. The downside was they weighed more than a wheelbarrow and exploded if dropped into water. But the nukelamps were still much better than tallow candles.

Dragging out the corpses, Ryan took the gunner seat, with J.B. staying at the wheel. Going to the rear, Jak and Mildred climbed through the hatch and into the fortified eighteen-wheeler. The physician could see that the wag had started out as a flatbed, designed for hauling concrete abutments, steel girders and other heavy cargo. The truck probably had an industrial transmission and reinforced frame, which made it damn near perfect for a war wag.

“Head for the dry riverbed,” Ryan directed, hefting the rapid-fire to a more comfortable position. “That’s the direction the tire tracks go.”

“Sure they’re not from this wag?” J.B. asked, starting the engine.

Brushing back his hair, Ryan frowned. “No way. This heap has worn tires. The ones from the redoubt were brand-new.”

“Fair enough,” J.B. said, shifting into gear. “Let’s haul ass!” With a shudder, the Cyclops lurched forward a couple of feet, then settled into a steady chugging as it began to build speed rolling across the hard sand.