Shaking Earth
He reared, rolled back into a sitting position, knees up. He brought the Steyr to his shoulder, bracing his elbows against the insides of his knees, snugged the buttplate tight to his shoulder’s hollow, welded his right cheek to the stock and peered through the scope with his single eye.
The blaster man who had shot at him was fumblingly spilling powder from a horn—an actual cowhorn, by the look of it—down the barrel of his musket. He was shaking so much he was pouring most of the black grains on his hand, which was twined about with strange yellow growths or veins. Ryan lined the crosshairs up on the center of his chest and squeezed.
The Steyr kicked back against his shoulder. He worked the bolt with quick, calm efficiency as the barrel rose. Another round, head-stamped 7.62 mm NATO, was chambered and ready to go when the long slim barrel came back down on line.
The musketeer was nowhere in sight. His companion, whose skin hung loose on his small skinny frame in flaps, was staring down with puzzled bloodhound eyes at what was probably him. Belatedly he caught hold of the notion he might be in some danger here. Instead of simply dropping flat, he started to turn to bolt. Ryan shot him through and through, right side to left, and dropped him like a deer.
Ryan felt another shiver of vibration through his tailbone, heard a scrape from right behind. As he spun, a terrific shuddering, crashing sound assailed his ears. He knew full-auto blasterfire when he heard it. He threw himself sideways, clumsily bringing the long rifle around and up, to aim more or less at the Armorer, who stood grinning down at him through his wire-rimmed specs from the shade of his hat brim.
“Scraped off a couple muties coming up the wall,” J.B. said.
“What are you doing up here? You’re supposed to be—”
“You’re welcome for saving your lean ass. Figured you’d need some backup.”
He walked to the front of the garage, leaned out over the parapet and whistled. “Hey, boys,” he called, “up here.”
He fired the Uzi down into the street, three, four, five quick bursts. Ryan heard shouts, screams. J.B. ducked back down as return shots cracked from the street, then rocked back over the parapet and let the rest of his magazine go in a long spray.
He sat, out of sight, to wait out the return fire from the street, waving his stubby machine pistol in the air with its heavy bolt locked back to cool it.
“Down to three mags,” he said. “Way too few to be hosing them blind through the door.”
Ryan nodded. The flash of annoyance he’d felt at his old friend was already forgotten. The companions followed Ryan’s lead. Not his commands. J.B. had spotted a weakness in their deployment and acted promptly on his own initiative to correct it.
It had been a good call. That meant they all got to live a little longer. They were a team, which had always been their mainstay.
For what it was worth now.
Ryan eased his head back above the parapet, looked through 180 degrees, ducked back, duck-walked a few steps left, raised up, checked the other half circle. The rooftops were clear of marauders, or at least any who happened to be on roofs were keeping out of sight.
“This is mebbe not so good, Ryan,” J.B. said quietly. “Street right out in front is clean, but you can bet your last meal the houses around us are swarming with the bastards. And I can see them all over the streets surrounding. There must be a couple hundred of them out there.”
Ryan lay on his back, gazed up toward the sun, knowing enough not to look directly at it. It still rode high in the sky. There was plenty of daylight left.
“Think we’ll make it until sundown?”
J.B. laughed, took a swig from a canteen, recapped it and tossed it toward Ryan, who caught it.
“Nah. Not that it’d make a spit of difference. These bastards are taking it personal. If they didn’t have their black little hearts bent on seeing the color of our insides, they’d have cut stick and pulled out long since from the hurt we’ve laid on them.”
“How about making a run for it?”
The Armorer shrugged. “They blocked us once. They might do it again. Still, it’s probably our one and only shot. Even if it likely doesn’t mean anything but the difference between getting chilled moving and getting chilled standing still.”
He looked at Ryan. “Doc says the muties keep hollering something about a ‘holy child.’ It’s like their war cry. Don’t know what damn good that does us, but there it is. Whoa, what’s that?”
The flat dirt-covered roof had shaken beneath them. The two men stared at each other. It came again, a quick triple shake that evoked unnerving creaks from the roof timbers beneath their feet.
From somewhere distant there came a groan, a rumble, a dull vibration.
“Earthquake,” Ryan said. “That last was a wall coming down, mebbe a whole house.”
“Now we know why such a neat little ville has big piles of rubble lying about the bastard alleys,” the Armorer said. “Damn tremors must come frequent enough to keep the locals rebuilding and repairing, not leave them much time to worry about cleaning up all the wreckage.”
“Former locals.” Ryan had stuck his head up again, looking around. He could see nothing. But he could sense movement around them. He could smell the odors of rank and not all human bodies on the heavy moist breeze, hear the scrabbling like a horde of locusts stripping a cornfield: not loud, but ominous. The muties, he knew, were preparing another onslaught.
Then he frowned. “Hold it,” he said softly. “J.B., you hear something?”
“Other than my pulse going like a scared horse down a flight of stairs?” Then he frowned, too, and tipped his head to the side.
“Dark night, but I think I hear—”
“Motors.” Ryan stood upright, looking off to the northeast. “Wags, mebbe a big bike.
“Coming this way.”
Chapter Eight
A heavy thudding sounded from the distance, like a hammer pounding nails. Big hammer, big nails.
J.B. smiled beatifically. “Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun. Sweetest music these ears ever did hear. Called a Ma Deuce predark.”
From around them came, more than a sound, but rather a sensation of stirring, like rats in walls. “Seems like our friends have gotten tired of playing and are takin’ their toys and heading home,” J.B. said.
They heard a cracking sound, not quite a gunshot, too sharp for an explosion. “What was that?” Ryan asked.
“You got me.”
J.B. walked to the open hatch. “Hey, down there,” he shouted. “Looks like our bacon’s saved. Cavalry’s coming.”
“And precisely what—” Mildred’s voice came floating back “—makes you think they’re on our side?”
J.B. looked at Ryan and shrugged. “There’s an old saying, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Ryan said helpfully.
“And we know what a steaming load that one is,” J.B. said. “Okay, Millie, you win. But the guys we know want to cut us up and mebbe eat us are going away, which even a pessimistic cuss such as yourself has to admit is a positive development.”
“What was that you called me?” Mildred’s voice came again, dangerously low.
“What? ‘Cuss.’It was distinctly ‘cuss,’ and Ryan will back me up on that.”
Leave me out of this, mouthed the one-eyed man.
“Besides, you know I never stoop to foul, fucking language, Millie.”
“We can always polish our baron’s jester routines later, if we happen to live,” Ryan said. “Now let’s all pipe down, hunker down, get ready to play whatever hand’s dealt us next.”
Ryan and J.B. crouched behind the roof parapet, watching the streets below and surrounding their hideout. They heard the rattle of small-arms fire—a pretty serious volume; whoever these newcomers were, they didn’t seem to have a lot of worries about ammo. The .50 thumped away, growing steadily louder. And intermittently they heard the sharp, loud cracks.
The marauders seemed to have no appetite for hanging around and getting better acquainted with the interlopers. They began streaming openly along the streets away from the approaching gunfire and motor sounds, a ragged, starved-looking band of muties and apparently normal humans mixed together indiscriminately. What might cause the norms and muties to cooperate like this Ryan had no idea. There was nothing impossible about it, of course. It was just that the hostility between norms and muties was usually so bitter and deeply ingrained that it was rare for them to coexist without bloodshed, much less to fight side by side.
He glanced at his old friend. J.B. looked back at him, shook his head, pulling down the corners of his mouth. Neither of them felt a reflex hatred of muties, obviously; Krysty Wroth was a mutie herself, albeit a beautiful one even to norm eyes. But Ryan, having all his life heard the cliché about having an itchy trigger finger, was actually feeling a tingle in that digit here and now, what with a river of potential targets flowing by right under their chins. He could tell the Armorer felt the same way.
But the raiders were headed the right direction—away—and showing no further disposition to bother them. Shooting at them would serve no useful purpose. At best it would waste scarce ammo. At worst it would draw return fire from the retreating raiders. Better to leave well enough alone.
The fugitive flow passed, ended. At the street’s far end a very different procession appeared. Men in tan uniforms advanced steadily, longblasters ready in patrol position. They were dark-skinned, dark-haired, not very tall, resembling the human raiders who accompanied the muties, but better clothed, armed and fed. Behind them cruised a heavy truck with a fabric-covered bed and a welded-together looking mount for the big Browning machine gun behind the cab. And out in front of it rolled an outlandish apparition: a tall, copper-skinned youth, wearing a feathered headdress, a green loincloth, an odd sort of golden harness over his broad chest and shoulders, and armor braces on forearms and lower legs, riding a big, blatting, outlaw-style motorcycle.
“What do you make of that?” J.B. asked. Ryan could only shake his head.
From a house across the street from their perch and a couple of doors toward the well-armed column, a skinny mutie with an outsize asymmetric head bolted. He seemed to have no better plan in mind than to get away as quickly as possible, running balls-out right down the middle of the dirt lane, elbows pumping.
It wasn’t a good enough plan.
The bizarre feathered rider raised his right forearm. A pale red beam snapped from it with an ear-shattering crack. It struck the fleeing mutie between his churning shoulder blades. His back exploded in a gout of steam. He went sprawling forward, dug a furrow in the dust with his face, lay still.
“Shit!” J.B. exclaimed. “A laser! That shit he’s wearing over his shoulders has a power-pack in it, I’ll just bet.”
“Impressive,” Ryan said.
The rider held up his arm. The column halted. The foot soldiers winged out to the building fronts to either side and lay or crouched, covering the street with their weapons.
“Look at that,” J.B. said admiringly. “They got a couple BARs with them. Beautiful.”
“Serious firepower,” Ryan said.
“Let’s hope they’re friendlier than they look.”
“If they’re not,” the one-eyed man said slowly, “I’m not sure what we can do about it.”
Two soldiers came forward, prodding two captives in front of them with the muzzles of their longblasters. The prisoners, a man and a mutie covered all over in curly golden fur, wore only loincloths. Their arms were bound behind them. One of their escorts leaned forward and apparently cut their bonds, because the two immediately brought their hands up in front of them and began massaging their wrists.
The boy in the feathers dropped his kickstand, swung off his bike, stalked up to the prisoners like a leopard. He was carrying a peculiar-looking weapon in his hand, a flat wooden club maybe two feet long that had pieces of obsidian set in either edge, to create a discontinuous double blade of black glass.
He snapped a question. The human captive turned his face away.
The warrior in the feathered headdress lashed out with the obsidian-lined club. The furry mutant’s right arm leaped away from its shoulder in a gush of blood. He screamed and dropped to his knees, ineffectually cutting the great wound, blood spurting between his fingers.
“Dark night,” J.B. said. “These are some hard bastards.”
The human captive said something to the warrior. The warrior danced a couple of steps to the side, struck down with his weapon. The screaming mutie’s head fell away from its neck, bounced twice on the road and came to rest facedown in a rut. A fountain of blood shot out of the neck stump, once, twice, three times, soaking the thirsty earth in red. Then the blood-flow ceased. The headless, one-armed body pitched forward to leak slowly into the dust.
The human captive pointed straight at the garage where the travelers and their vehicle were hidden.
The feathered warrior turned to study the structure. Then he lashed out backhand. The human captive’s head jumped off his shoulders. Without ever looking back, the warrior stalked back to his ride, forked it, kicked it to snarling life.
The cavalcade rumbled into motion again, right for the companions. “I don’t know about you,” J.B. said, “but I got a bad feeling about this.”
“Get into the wag,” Ryan called down the open hatch. “Get ready to roll.”
“Where to?” Mildred called up.
“Away.”
The truck with the big Browning stayed where it was to provide a fire base, Ryan noted glumly. Its thumb-thick bullets would punch through the Hummer like handblaster slugs through wet paper. The foot soldiers came trotting down the street and took up positions across from the garage, covering the double doors with their longblasters. A BAR-man was winged out to either side on his belly with his weapon’s bipod down.
J.B. whistled. “Them suckers’re toting FN FALs and M-1 Garands. And they pack a punch.”
“Then there’s that wrist laser,” Ryan muttered.
The strapping young warrior in the feathered headdress had been holding back, waiting for his minions to get into position. Then he gunned his V-twin engine with a blat like a submachine gun burst, streaked forward down the street, threw the bike into a dust-raising sidewise skid that brought it to a perfect halt facing the garage doors. He gazed up with a haughty expression on his aquiline features and barked something.
“What’s he say?” Ryan asked.
“Beats me,” J.B. said. “Sure sounds like he means it, though.”
“I say, Ryan,” Doc’s voice wafted up from below, “but yonder fine young bravo has just called upon us to—”
“Throw out your weapons,” the warrior called, “and give up at once!”
“English?” Ryan asked. The Armorer shrugged.
Ryan let his Steyr sling-strap slide off his shoulder, laid the rifle carefully on the rooftop. Then he stood. Two dozen rifle barrels tracked him.
“We’re peaceful travelers,” he called. “Traders. We’re not looking for trouble. We just got caught here by the raiders.”
“If you wish no trouble,” the warrior said, “then surrender now before I lose patience.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Two Arrow of the Eagle Knights. I serve Don Hector, ruler of the valley of the Anáhuac.”
“Sec men,” J.B. muttered bitterly. “Fancy drag, fancy blasters. Just lousy sec men.”
“Why do you wish to make us prisoners?” Ryan called. “All we want to do is trade. Or barring that, be on our way.”
“You travel these lands without permission. How do we know you are who you say? Now, throw your weapons out quickly. Or we will come and take them!”
Ryan held up his hand. “I have to talk to my people. Just give me a moment, please.”
Before the warrior in the gaudy headdress could refuse, Ryan hunkered out of sight. “What do you say, J.B.?”
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