Desolation Angels

“Quit screwing around,” J.B. told Ryan. Without even seeming to look he jabbed the muzzle of his shotgun hard to his left. A stickie reeled back into its circling, capering buddies, wailing and clutching the spurting crater where its left eye used to be. “We’ve got to get going.”

The pair had waded back to help their friends. The stickies faltered, confused rather than scared. “Power on!” Ryan bellowed.

They all ran flat-out for the exit. Stickies that got in their way were knocked down. Ryan trampled one that J.B. had half spun with his shoulder. His friends ran over it without breaking stride.

The one-eyed man heard angry shouts from behind, then shots. A bullet cracked past his head to the right.

Then he was out into the bright, blessed sunshine of the Detroit wasteland. His friends, all miraculously still alive, were right on his heels. A whole pack of stickies was left behind to keep their pursuers off their asses.

A bullet kicked up fallen leaves and some concrete dust three feet in front of him.

Chapter Six

“Fireblast!” Ryan shouted.

He checked himself and pivoted, bringing his longblaster to his shoulder.

A group of at least a dozen men was approaching cautiously from the direction of the big half-ruined building. They all carried longblasters and wore the distinctive dark vests of their original pursuers. They were still roughly fifty yards away.

Behind them, another garden lay past the structure’s southwest end. This one was enclosed by a barbed wire fence and more rolls of razor tape. Inside it were the jumbled remnants of what Ryan realized was a raised road that had once led to the circular structure. Now it was a spiral ramp. Apparently the big building had had rooftop parking.

Ryan fired a shot at the enemy. He didn’t hit anybody. They ducked anyway, a couple stretching flat on the ground.

They weren’t driven off, though. They promptly opened fire.

Caught between stickies in the semidarkness and so far inaccurate blasterfire in the sunshine, he had only one choice. Fortunately, before the first shot had alerted Ryan to more trouble approaching, he’d spotted a gap between buildings across the street and not twenty yards to the right of where he and his friends emerged.

“Go, go, go!” he yelled, waving his arm at the half-overgrown entrance to a street or alley. As his friends ran by behind him, he dropped to one knee and took quick aim.

His scope happened to fall on a blond head behind the receiver of a Mini-14. It looked like a woman.

That meant nothing to Ryan. If a person pointed a weapon at him or his friends, the person would die.

No exceptions. He pulled the trigger.

The Steyr kicked his shoulder with the buttplate. He held on to the stock, rode the recoil and brought the blaster back online with practiced ease.

A pink spray blossomed behind the shooter’s head when it reappeared in his telescopic sight. It plopped forward, revealing the ragged red mess where the back of the skull had been knocked out by the bullet’s passage.

He heard a rippling roar of blasterfire from behind him to the right.

“Haul ass, Ryan!” J.B. shouted. “We’re clear.”

He sprang up and ran for safety through a barrage that crackled around him like bacon frying on a grill.

Ricky knelt among weeds at the corner of a building, laying down covering fire with his suppressed longblaster. J.B. kept stepping out to fire a quick, short burst then nip back into cover.

“Here come more of them,” Ricky said as Ryan raced past him.

“Looks like the first bunch that set out after us decided not to mess with the stickies,” J.B. commented, putting his back against the wall out of the line of enemy fire. “Seems like shooting some of them just made them madder.”

“Happens sometimes,” Ryan called.

“What do I do?” Ricky yelled.

“Try to keep up!”

* * *

HER BREATH WHISTLING in her ears, Mildred slogged heavily through a muddy field of leafy green vegetables. The farmers who’d been tending it went flying in all directions at the approach of a heavily armed crew of strangers, flip-flops flopping and flat-cone straw hats falling back behind their heads to hang by chin straps.

The fact that a much bigger, just as heavily armed and amazingly pissed-off bunch of people in leather vests was running fifty yards behind the intruders probably didn’t reassure them.

Mildred felt bad as her boots squashed tender plants into the carefully tended soil. She knew these people worked hard at their plots because their survival was at stake.

But so was hers. So on she ran, heedless.

Though it couldn’t have been more than a handful of blocks, the whole flight had become a nightmare steeplechase in her mind: a blurred montage of cracked streets, shattered buildings, burned-out husks, riotous undergrowth and orderly plots like the one they were so industriously, if incidentally, violating.

The pursuers fired off an occasional shot. Like all the others—so far—it didn’t hit any of them. The bad guys were shooting on the run. Whoever it was chasing them so doggedly had discovered a few turns back that if they actually stopped to aim, they got left behind.

As they approached a half-collapsed building, Jak suddenly appeared out of a staring, blank doorway. He gestured to his friends frantically.

The place looked trashed. Once several stories tall, the building appeared to have mostly fallen in on and around itself, judging from the fragmentary sheets of red stone sticking out of the piled rubble. But the lower floor looked intact. The place still looked anything but promising, much less remotely safe.

Ryan headed for the door without hesitation.

The others followed. Ryan Cawdor wasn’t always right, but his decisions had kept them alive so far, through some of the worst situations imaginable.

At the door he turned, shouldered his Scout longblaster and fired back at their pursuers. Mildred didn’t bother glancing around. It only made her more likely to stumble or maybe twist an ankle, which would be fatal.

Anyway, there was no need. The men—and occasional woman—in vests chasing after them had had been taught caution by Ryan’s and Ricky’s marksmanship. They knew to duck when one or the other opened fire on them. They didn’t care to come too close yet, but they showed no signs of giving up.

Ryan, Krysty and Doc entered the ruin. Jak was already inside, leading the way. Mildred followed.

As she stepped inside she heard J.B. murmur something behind her. She glanced back to see Ricky nodding and grinning.

“Best keep moving,” J.B. said to Mildred.

The interior of the fallen-in building alternated shadow and shafts of sunlight from holes in the overhead. It stank worse of death than the stickies’ parking structure had.

As she followed immediately behind Krysty, Mildred quickly found out why. The path Jak led them on wound down hallways and through broken walls. A bloated torso lay against a wall inside a room next to one they passed through. Mildred couldn’t tell what sex it had been. A head with long, dark hair was turned away from them.

She reckoned that was fortunate. Along with being mottled red and yellow and green from rot, the chill had neither arms nor legs. The wounds visible through big tears in the gray-on-gray plaid flannel shirt gave Mildred the impression it had been partially eaten.

By something big.

To her physician’s eye those marks had been inflicted postmortem. She didn’t find that terribly reassuring.

To her relief she was quickly outside in the sun again. Almost immediately her relief vanished. Her group had come out on the south side of the building—meaning they were now headed back toward their pursuers.

Then she realized they were east of the street she’d last seen their enemies on. And the sight lines between were blocked by fields of high weeds. In the middle of it stood the remains of a small shantytown. The small, frail constructions, knocked together from random bits of rubble, trash and scavvy, were all the more pathetic for having obviously been trashed and abandoned. Some were no more than burned-out skeletons of charred tree limbs and twisted metal rods.

As they headed southeast, Ricky trotted out of the ruin to join them. “Did you do like I asked, Ricky?” J.B. said to him.

Ricky nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir!”

“Good man.”

Jak led them through the weeds toward a dark gray building that showed them a long, blank face. No windows were visible, only some intact ducts on the level above the street.

He moved toward the northeast end of the mostly blank wall, near an abutting building that had several more stories with glass in the windows. It might have been an annex of the first one. A loading bay door stood open between shrubby trees. The albino slipped up a ramped walkway to the bay’s far side. He crouched next to it and looked in.

Then he looked back at his friends and nodded. But he held up a hand in the sign for caution.

A crackle sounded from behind the companions. It quickly expanded into a storm of gunfire. Mildred reflexively ducked, then turned back. She saw nothing but the weeds, the shantytown and the red-faced ruin.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the nuke?”

“Ricky left them one of the little surprises he’s been working on,” J.B. said, as proud as a new poppa.

Ricky blushed. “Nothing lethal. Just a string of black-powder firecrackers with a tripwire and a pull initiator left in the front door of the place we just left. It works just the same as a firefight simulator.”

“That does not sound simulated,” Doc declared as the blasterfire continued to rage from the direction of the derelict building.

“It’s not,” J.B. said, “now.”

“Triple clever,” Ryan told them. “Now get your asses in gear. That won’t keep the bastards busy long.”

Ryan went up the ramp to where Jak still hunkered down by the yawning bay. The albino gave way for him to take a quick look inside. Then the taller man straightened and walked in.

“Because the walk-in-like-we-own-the-place thing worked so well last time,” Mildred said grumpily.

“Have some faith,” Ricky said earnestly.

“Famous last words,” Mildred replied. But she followed her friends into the relative darkness.

* * *

“COMPANY,” JAK SAID QUIETLY.

Ryan halted a few steps inside the loading bay. As he had ascertained, not much mileage could be gained by skulking. The bay opened into a large open space two stories high, with a gallery running along the far end. The stained concrete floor had been picked bare of everything except scattered trash.

It smelled of concrete and decaying greenery. At least it didn’t smell as if any chills had decomposed in here recently, Ryan thought.

His hands were empty. As risks went, it was carefully calculated. If whoever was in here was hostile and started blasting from ambush, if they did or did not have weapons wouldn’t make much difference. But whether or not they showed blasters might make a major difference as to whether anybody in here started shooting at them.

Ryan’s gamble was based on a simple judgment call. Should they go into a potential hiding place where they might find trouble, or stay outside where they knew trouble was actively hunting them?

As J.B. and Krysty stepped up to flank him, a voice called down to them from the gallery.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?”

It was a man’s voice, sarcastic but nonthreatening.

“Name’s Cawdor,” Ryan called back. “We’re outlanders just looking for a place to lie up a bit.”

A man stepped out of a darkened doorway on the upper level. He was average height, broad across the shoulders but not carrying much extra weight that Ryan could tell by his dark T-shirt and black cargo pants. His mustache and the shock of black hair hanging over his forehead made his face look pale. A handblaster rode in a flapped holster at his left hip. Ryan couldn’t make out the kind.

“Lie up, huh?” the man said. “Sounds to me like you might have something to hide out from.”

Ryan shrugged. “It’s easy finding trouble in a ville this size. We’re not looking for any.”

“I think they’re trying to jump our scavvy, Nikk,” a second voice said.

It belonged to a woman who emerged from the doorway behind him. She was about the same height as her partner and had short brown hair sprouting from a grimy camo headband. She wore a rust-colored halter top with overstuffed cargo shorts, and an MP5-K machine pistol rested in a right-hand cross-draw holster strapped in front of them.

“Always the cynic, Patch,” he said as she took her place at the railing alongside him.

She shrugged. “Realist.” Her manner was as cool as it was skeptical. “Somebody’s gotta be, with a dreamer like you in charge.”

He chuckled indulgently. “At least they were smart enough to come in with their hands empty,” he told her.

Then to Ryan he said, “We’ve got blasters on you.”

“I figured,” Ryan said. “So it doesn’t look as if you’ve got much to fear from us, does it?”

“Could be a trick,” the woman said.

Nikk laughed out loud. “It could always be a trick,” he said. “That’s what makes it a game.”

“Razor Eddie’s reporting from the rooftop, Nikk,” another man’s voice called out the door. The speaker didn’t appear. “Says a gang is heading this way. Well armed. Thinks they’re the Desolation Angels.”

“Oh, shit,” a man said from the blank darkness of a doorway on the ground floor, which dispelled any suspicion Ryan might have had that Nikk was bluffing about them being covered.

Not that he’d had many to begin with.

“Aren’t they outside their usual range?” Patch asked. She wasn’t just skeptical of Ryan and company, it appeared.

Nikk shrugged. “They’ve been expanding lately. Prob’ly looking to keep up with DPD.”

“Who’s DPD?” Ryan asked. “I don’t think we’ve made their acquaintance yet.”

“You should hope that you never do.”

“They bad news?” J.B. asked.

Nikk grinned. “You really must be new in the ville,” he said. “If you haven’t learned yet that, here in D-Town, there are only two kinds of news. Bad news—”

Patch laid her head against his shoulder. “And worse news,” she said.

“Quite the comedic duo,” Doc murmured.

Nikk shook his head. “Sorry. We’ve got no beef with the Angels. We’re not looking to start one, either. You’d best be moving on.”

“And if we don’t?” Ryan asked.

“Well, say what you will about the Angels,” the scavvy boss said, “which is mostly that they’re stoneheart bastards through and through, but they aren’t sadists. So I don’t reckon it makes them much, never mind whether we hand your bodies over to them still breathing or started on your way to room temperature.”

Chapter Seven

Ryan hit the bay door running. Rather than take the ramp, he hopped down to the driveway.

Immediately he heard shots from the west. He ducked. Unslinging his Steyr, he lay prone on the pavement, then crawled forward. The concrete-lined side of the cut totally covered him from enemy fire and concealed him from their view. He heard some of his companions drop from the opening behind him.

As it sloped down close to sidewalk level, he stopped and raised his head to peer over it. The grass was too tall to allow him to see anything.

Cautiously he raised his body on his left arm, as though he was doing a one-armed pushup. He still couldn’t see anything.

Getting uneasy at not being able to see an enemy who obviously had seen him—or who knew roughly where he was—he pulled his knee forward, got a boot sole on the concrete and came up into a bent-forward kneeling position.

At least he was able to glimpse their enemy over the tufted tops of the grass. The Desolation Angels were about fifty yards off. He saw a dozen or so, spread out into a creditable skirmish line, advancing with longblasters across their chests.

Since they got a notion of what kind of quarry they were dealing with, the Angels had begun displaying a degree of professionalism. Apparently the war for dominance—or just survival—here in the Detroit rubble was a fierce one. Fierce enough to force the players to learn something a little better than the usual bullying and mob tactics used by gangs. Or even a lot of ville sec forces.

Ryan knew there were a lot more Angels after them than the ones he could see. And they had no way to fight them off, especially not from the loading-bay cut. And he didn’t fool himself that he could deal with Nikk and his bunch—by either sweet-talking a way back into the big building, or forcing their way in.

He didn’t hold it against the scavvies that they’d turned his companions out to face the Angels’ wrath. He would have done the same thing.

He raised the Steyr and looked through the scope. It had long eye relief, meaning it was mounted farther forward than most so that there was no danger of the eyepiece kicking back and cutting into the eye socket when it fired. It didn’t make it any harder to acquire a target or aim.

He quickly lined up a face like a sunburned fist in the reticule. Allowing for the up-and-down bob the Angel’s trot imparted, he timed his shot and fired.

The man had already fallen out of sight beyond the grass when he got the rifle back down and the scope lined up.

He yelled to his friends to run.

Ryan fired again. This time the target, an older-looking man with a full beard, turned back to yell something just as Ryan’s trigger broke. The shot hit him in the left shoulder and spun him.

“Smoke bomb out!” he heard J.B. yell from right beside him. Something arced down into Ryan’s field of vision, trailing brownish-gray smoke.

“Didn’t think they’d fall for the ‘poison gas’ gag a second time,” J.B. said. “Come on, Ryan. We’ve got to go.”

Without a second thought Ryan jumped to his feet. He’d had no intention of sacrificing himself to hold the pursuers off while his friends escaped. For one thing, he doubted it would’ve worked. There were just too many of the bastards. He saw no point in risking his ass when there was no need to.

A huge cloud billowed up between him and the enemy.

“That’s our last one of those for now,” J.B. said. He ripped off a short burst from his Uzi into the smoke screen, just to make the Angels think twice about barging in blind through the smoke. Then he and Ryan sprinted down the block away from them, after their companions.

Though another large, cultivated field opened to the north, Jak had led them not toward it but along the street, back toward the jagged but looming ruins of downtown. Ryan understood his reasons—and knew the albino youth was right. Once the Angels had stopped shooting holes in the air in response to Ricky’s makeshift firefight simulator, they almost certainly had fanned out from the fallen-in building Ryan and his team had ducked through. So they probably had men heading for the field and to the building Nikk’s scavvies claimed for their own. Above all, the fugitives needed to put as much distance between them and the Angels as possible and as fast as possible.

After he’d run a couple hundred yards, Ryan stopped and turned back. Once again he dropped to one knee.

People were just starting to emerge from the yellowish cloud of smoke. The air was still, so it was still mostly intact, dissipating only slowly in the humid, heavy air. Once more he drew a quick bead on the nearest, a tall black man with the sides of his head shaved. Ryan shot him through the chest and ran after his friends as the other Angels in sight opened fire.

So far none of them had turned out to be marksmen, which was lucky. But throw enough lead in the air, a person was bound to hit something eventually. This battle could not be allowed to go on.

At least they still had some air between themselves and the baying, blasting pack. Ryan and his crew needed to find either escape or cover to stand off the Angels until nightfall.

He ran past the exposed base of a white skyscraper. It appeared to be propped up by the remnants of a building it had crashed into. The bottom floor was an open wound of structural steel and broken concrete.

Jak had already turned the group north-northeast up the next street to take them out of their pursuers’ line of fire. Ryan followed, with J.B. just ahead of him.

“Head right at the next intersection!” he called.

“Blocked!” yelled Jak, who had sprinted ahead to scout escape routes. He was ace at his job—the best, as Ryan and his friends had learned, and learned hard some weeks before, when simmering resentments between Jak and Ryan had sent the younger man heading in one direction and the rest in another. That had gone disastrously for them all.

Jak kept running the way he was going. Up ahead Ryan glimpsed what looked at first like another shantytown, but in a fairly open space between a perilously leaning skyscraper on one side and a long, low white building on the other. This one was somehow much more colorful than the sad collection of burned out and abandoned shacks they had passed before. Also it was anything but abandoned; it was occupied by a throng of people.

A few heads started to turn as someone noticed Jak running toward them, with Krysty, Doc and Mildred close behind.

“¡Nuestra, señora!” Ricky yelped. He was just crossing the next intersection, the one with the white skyscraper toppled right across it. “Angels!”

“Bastards die hard,” J.B. said.

“Just run!” Ryan yelled.

J.B. fired a burst left as he entered the intersection without even slowing. Ryan had slung his Steyr and drawn his SIG.

Sure enough, a passel of the vest-wearing coldhearts was moving fast through the shadowed canyon of the broad east-west street. The white building lay tilted at somewhere south of forty-five degrees. It had crunched into a sinister-looking brown-and-black building across from it and had domino toppled into the building north of it.

Chunks of rubble big and small had fallen from the crazy-angled building. The Angels had to slow to pick their way over, around and through that, but no more than they had to. Ryan snapped a couple shots their way.

Once again they paused to return fire. Bullets cracked through the air around Ryan. One bounced off the pavement right ahead of him and howled away in ricochet.

J.B. paused by the corner of the tilted brown-and-black skyscraper to fire a burst at the Angels under the slanted structure. Ryan saw one go down, yelling and kicking. The others dropped to take cover among the rubble.

That turned out not to be a good idea. Apparently the fallen skyscraper wasn’t altogether stable. Or perhaps the earth had just shifted in a tremor Ryan was too preoccupied to feel. A block of masonry the size of one of the Motor City’s most famous products—a big old gas-guzzler sedan—dropped straight down and crushed a kneeling Angel. The others cut off their assault and scuttled away like frightened quail.

“That was more luck than we deserve,” J.B. commented. He fired another burst but didn’t seem to hit any of their pursuers.

Ryan raced past him. J.B. grinned as he flashed by and moved to follow.

Jak had burst in among the colorful shacks. To his surprise Ryan realized it was an active marketplace of sorts. The colors came from old scavenged signs, cracked panels of plastic and that old standby for Deathlands building and decoration both, hammered-out soda cans. The shacks themselves seemed to consist largely of nonmetallic car body panels.

The people swapping goods and gossip broke apart like a flock of pecking birds that had had an alley cat dropped in their midst. Some of them, mostly keepers of the kiosks of fresh fruits and ancient predark goods, stood their ground, shaking fists and shouting in outraged anger at the intrusion.

“We’re sorry!” Krysty and Mildred shouted as they ducked between the stands. Mildred knocked over an angled rack of brightly colored garments and sent them fluttering to the ground, which was bare earth hard packed by decades of feet.