Shaking Earth

Jak stuck his hand out the window past Ryan’s head and shot the mutie with his Python.

Chapter Six

The 158-grain semijacketed slug hit the mutie in its single eye. A spray of fluid that looked more maroon than norm blood and some clotted pale chunks of what had to have been brains erupted from the creature’s back. Clear ichor gushing from its collapsed ocular, the mutie emitted a whistling shriek from its mouth and collapsed.

Despite his case-hardened constitution, Ryan winced. The .357 Magnum round had maybe the nastiest muzzle-blast of any handblaster he’d encountered, sharper and more painful to the ear than even the louder but lower-pitched report of a .44 Magnum. Primer fragments blasted out between the rear of the cylinder and the frame stung his cheek and spattered like rain on his eyepatch.

He frowned, not just at the ringing in his ears. A hunter born and bred, as much feral predatory animal as human, Jak was hard even by the standards of his time and place. The word mercy was in his vocabulary only because Doc had taught it to him. But the ruby-eyed albino boy had always accepted Ryan’s rules, which were pretty much the same as vanished Trader’s had been. And one of the foremost was: No chilling for chilling’s sake.

Then he saw Mildred, right in front of him, thrust her Czech-made .38 target revolver out her window and fire a solo shot at a figure looming behind the busted-out window next to the door. At the same time the hideous mutie Jak had chilled dropped what it had been holding concealed behind its back with its two right hands: a crude musket or shotgun made out of heavy-gauge pipe and wire.

“Fireblast!” Belatedly, Ryan was becoming aware of movement all around them, seething out of the houses like maggots from so many beast skulls. “Mildred, get us out of here!”

The stocky physician had tucked her blaster away and was doing just that. Both hands death-gripping the wheel, she goosed the beefy wag along the narrow rutted-earth street. The way the Hummer was jouncing over the ruts, Ryan had no chance of acquiring any targets through the variable-powered scope mounted on his SSG. Nor would he have been able to hold on any target long enough to take a half decent shot. Cursing to himself, he hauled out his 9 mm handblaster with the built-in silencer.

The wag was armored, if lightly. The Kevlar and steel of its roof and sides and its Lexan windows should have been more than adequate to keep off the arrows, stones and bullets the suddenly swarming muties showered down on them, especially since the blasters they were loosing off, with hollow booms and big puffs of dirty-white smoke seemed mostly to be crude homemade muzzle-loaders like the one the first mutie had carried, firing big soft blobs of lead or maybe even fistfuls of nails, busted glass and pebbles. But the Hummer wasn’t designed to be an armored personnel carrier, whose occupants were meant to do serious fighting from inside it. It was a utility vehicle, a scout car; the heavy weapon, machine gun or grenade launcher, which had once occupied its pintle mount had been intended to lay down a base of fire from a distance in support of dismounted infantry, and also to give it a sting and enable it to scoot out of any trouble it happened to roll into. It didn’t have fancy firing ports. It had windows that had to be rolled down to allow the passengers to fire out. Which of course let all kinds of missiles in.

Nor were the muties totally limited to rocks and museum-piece projectile weapons. Mildred yet out a yelp of alarm as fire blossomed yellow-orange right in their path. Flames and dense black smoke rolled in a tide up the hood to break against the windshield. Everybody ducked as a dragon’s belch of flame-heated air and choking smoke rushed in at the windows to fill the passenger compartment. Then they were through the flame pond created by the Molotov cocktail.

A crowd of screaming muties had rolled a battered stakebed truck into their path fifty yards ahead. “Hang on, everybody,” Mildred shouted, and cranked the wheel left, toward a gap between houses just large enough to pass the Hummer.

The wag heeled way over to the right as the occupants grabbed for whatever purchase they could. Jak dropped his Python inside the cargo compartment to grab a tie-down with one hand and the out-cold Krysty with the other. Their tires were still spinning off tongues of fire. Then the bow wave of dust they threw up doused the burning mixture.

Almost at once the Hummer went nose-down and tail-up like an angry stinkbug as Mildred hammered down the brakes. A pile of rubble, khaki-colored adobe blocks obstructed the alley. “Crap!” Mildred exclaimed. “Crap, crap, crap!”

“Drive on,” J.B. shouted, holding his fedora on his head with one hand and brandishing his stamped-steel machine pistol with the other. “This baby’ll plow through.”

“Not on your tintype,” Mildred shouted back, throwing the wag into reverse and cranking her head around on her neck. “Can’t even chance getting high-centered with these hoodoos swarming around like yellowjackets.”

The alley behind had filled instantly with ambushers, waving spears and clubs and at least one modern firearm—an M-1 carbine to Ryan’s quick glimpse. They stopped and stared with comical surprise as the wag chunked through a gear change and came hurtling straight back at them like a multiton rocket. Most of them were muties, although none in this clot of a half dozen or so was either as huge or grotesquely malformed as the first creature they had seen. Most were downright small. In fact, the one closest behind the Hummer, whose wide anthracite eyes locked on Ryan’s for a fraction of a second before the Hummer’s rear bumper took him in the thighs and body-slammed him to the ground, looked as human as Ryan himself.

The wag bucked, and screams, along with crunching and squelching sounds, came from beneath the vehicle as the huge cleated tires rolled over several ambushers unfortunate enough not to be able to spin around and clear the alleyway in time. One mutie, a being reminiscent of a stickie in shape but with a dry-looking tan skin covered with reddish-brown camouflage rosettes, clung to the side of the house on Ryan’s side with toe and fingers pads. Instead of knocking him free, the Hummer’s bulk spun him, pinned him and then rotated his body, crushing and grinding simultaneously as it roared backward down the alley. The creature screamed in a shrill but wholly-human voice. A blast of horrid carrion-eater breath blew in the window as the creature rolled by between the brown-stuccoed wall and the wag’s steel flank.

Then the Hummer was back on what passed for the ville’s main street. It had flooded with marauders, half a hundred or more. Mildred just kept the wag grinding in reverse, squashing a couple more of their less-agile ambushers, turning the wheel slightly to angle the Hummer into another alley catty-corner across the way behind them. For a moment they passed between mud houses, with more clearance this time. Then they were out and backing at a brisk clip across another street, right at an opening into darkness.

The structure was larger than most of the houses and had double wooden doors open wide. Muties were issuing from the interior with crates and boxes in their arms: looters. They scattered. A taller than average one who looked normal aside from having a mouth that stretched clear to the back of the jawbone on either side was caught standing right in the middle of the entry, clutching a box of what looked like hand tools. He stared at the onrushing wag as if jacklighted. The rear bumper hit him and bore him screaming back to smash him squalling against a set of wooden shelves.

Five muties cringed against the walls to either side of the wag. J.B. popped up out the top of the vehicle. “Afternoon,” he said, and chopped down the three to the right with two scything back-and-forth bursts from his Uzi.

The one nearer the door on Ryan’s side dropped what he was carrying and ran right out into the sunlit street. The other, who had long tufts of dark hair sprouting at random from face and body, raised a foot-long wrench over his head and lunged screaming at Ryan.

Ryan opened the door into him with a slam. The mutie staggered back gushing blood from a split forehead. The one-eyed man poked his SIG-Sauer through the door’s still-open window, shot him twice in the chest. Then, because he didn’t go down fast enough, he shot him again through the forehead.

The remaining mutie seemed to be making good his escape. But panicked or plain stupid, he failed to dodge to one side or the other, where a few steps would have taken him out of the line of fire. Instead he raced straight away from the door, across the street.

Unhurriedly, Doc opened his door, unfolded himself. Laying his heavy LeMat across his upraised left forearm he aimed, fired through his own open window. The ancient pistol boomed like an immense drum and spit out a four-foot-long tongue of flame, bright pink in the shaded interior. Dust puffed up from the middle of the back of the hide vest the fleeing mutie wore. The creature threw up taloned hands and went facedown on the hardpan.

The doctor lowered his smoking handblaster. He shook his head regretfully. “Ah, well,” he said, “he who turns and runs away, lives to slit our bellies later in the day.”

Jak did a roll over the rear seat of the Hummer, piled out Doc’s door with his Python in his snow-white fist. Ryan was already racing along the wall toward the gaping entryway. He darted out into the sunlight, firing his 9 mm blaster with sounds like explosively exhaled breaths. The bullets made loud cracks as they passed objects; he wasn’t wasting his precious remaining stock of subsonic rounds that made no more noise at any point than a muffled sneeze. Nor was he bothering to aim, merely trying to keep the muties who had fled the Hummer’s charge heading in the right direction long enough for him to grab hold of the open wooden door. Loud cracks from behind him told him the albino youth was doing the same thing.

The doors were heavy and their hinges protested with loud squeals against being moved. But the two men had adrenaline on their side; even the slight Jak was able to get his door into motion. Both halves swung back into place well before the marauders outside could get themselves sorted out enough to interfere. Ryan swung a hefty plank down into waiting brackets to bar the doors shut.

A smaller doorway opened in the wall on the driver’s side. Mildred got out with her ZKR in hand. J.B. eeled out the top of the pintle mount, scrambled across the Hummer’s torn and blistered Kevlar roof to drop down beside her, Uzi in hand. She nodded to him.

“Cover me,” she said, then darted through the door. She had to duck down to get through. J.B. hit the doorjamb with his Uzi up and ready.

From inside the next room two yellow flashes, two echoing cracks. Then a slow, sad, sliding sound.

“Clear,” the others heard Mildred call. “Just one mutie who wasn’t hid near as well as he thought.”

“Damn, Ryan,” J.B. said, taking in their surroundings, “nuke me till I glow and shoot me in the dark, but I think this is a garage.”

Ryan had popped out his partially empty mag from his handblaster, dropped it in a pocket, brought out a fresh magazine from another. He weighed it in his hand, eyeing it ruefully. Not many left.

He jammed it decisively home in the well. “Think mebbe you’re right, J.B.,” he said. “Even got a grease pit dug in the middle of the floor.”

Jak whipped out one of his throwing knives, stuck it in his teeth, dropped to the packed-earth floor and slithered under the rear of the Hummer. “No muties hide,” he reported, voice muffled by the wag’s mass. He slithered back out.

“Ryan, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “Come take a look at this.

“A hatchway to the roof,” he announced when his companions joined him. “It would appear the erstwhile occupants of this ville built with defense in mind.”

Ryan had already noted that the adobe walls were a good half-yard thick, enough to stop even a 7.62 mm round from his Steyr. The windows were potential vulnerabilities, but also served as firing ports. Apparently they constituted a compromise between comfort of living and defensibility. That the residents had enjoyed the luxury of making such a compromise spoke volumes for the relative stability they’d enjoyed.

Until today, anyway. “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Too bad they didn’t stay alert enough.”

“Ville like this is used to trading, Ryan,” J.B. observed. “My bet is they got took by some kind of trick like that Trojan horse Doc told us about.”

“Actually that was me,” the one-eyed man said. “My mother read The Iliad to me when I was young.”

“Whatever. It sounded like the kinda thing that’d come out of Doc’s head, anyway.”

“‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships,’” Doc quoted, “‘and topped the topless towers of Ilium?’” His drawn old face had gone pallid under grime and suntan, and sweat stood out around his hairline. Reaction was setting in. He swayed. “Emily, my Emily, why hast thou forsaken me…” he whispered.

Mildred, who had climbed back into the Hummer to check on Krysty, jumped out with a water bottle in hand. “Here, old man,” she said, holding the bottle to Doc’s lips. He drank greedily, drooling water out the right side of his mouth. “You just sit down here a minute. Rest yourself.”

She led him to a stool by the wall, sat him down.

“Actually, the ville looks deserted to me, not like it was fought over,” Ryan said. “I wonder if the people didn’t just bug when the raiders turned up.”

He accepted a bottle from Mildred, drank. “How’s Krysty?”

Mildred shrugged. “Coming around. Still feverish. I hope she doesn’t try to get up, but—Hey!”

She pointed toward the double doors. The bottom line of sunglare was interrupted at several point by shadows. Feet.

The muties were gathering right outside.

Chapter Seven

Holding up his Uzi with one hand, J.B. strode toward the front of the garage. Muzzle-flash vomited from the stub barrel. The massive walls seemed to bulge from its yammer. Weighing not much less than Ryan’s sniper rifle, the machine pistol was heavy enough to be fired one-handed without climbing uncontrollably. The Armorer walked a long burst from right to left across the double doors. Little points of brightness appeared. Pencils of sunlight stabbed into the gloom like yellow laser beams.

The echo of the shuddering muzzle-blasts seemed to continue for heartbeats after the flame flicker died away, or maybe it was the ringing in the companions’ ears. When they were able to hear anything else again they could hear moaning and thrashing from outside.

“Let them writhe,” the Armorer said, pulling the spent magazine from the Uzi. “Help keep the bastards’ minds right.”

As Ryan had just moments before, he hefted the empty magazine in his hand. “Running low. Can’t be doing that shit much more.”

Jak looked at Mildred. “Any weps? Ammo?”

She shook her head. “No trace. If any were here they were the first thing the muties cleared out.”

J.B. walked around the wag to the sprawled bodies of the looters he’d shot when they first rolled into the garage, knelt to inspect them.

“We’re a little bit lucky,” he said, pulling something gingerly from the waistband of the loincloth one wore. “We got a Colt .45 ACP, Government Model of 1911, or reasonable facsimile, in not too bad a shape, all cocked and locked.”

He held up a hefty blaster with checkered wooden grips pinched between thumb and forefinger. “This chill’s even got a couple spare mags on him.”

He straightened and prodded the corpse with the toe of his boot. “And you know what? He ain’t even a mutie.”

“Seen a couple of what looked like norms,” Mildred said. “That first dude I ran over was one.”

“We’ll sort out the mystery later.” Ryan strode over to Doc, who was sitting slumped, his head lolling to the side. He took a pinch of the old man’s cheek, which hung slack, pulled his head up.

“Doc,” he said. He patted the old man’s other cheek. “Doc, you can’t zone out on us now. We’re already down Krysty. We need everybody else to hold the fort until we can figure a way to get out of here with all our parts.”

The old man moaned. Then he blinked twice, shook himself, and sat upright. “No need to take on so, my dear boy,” he said, standing and shooting his cuffs. “Just resting my eyes.”

Ryan slapped him on the shoulder. “Good enough. Welcome back.”

“We got an exit strategy?” Mildred asked, backing out of the Hummer holding J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun.

“Our best defense is still driving real fast,” J.B. pointed out.

Ryan nodded, rubbing his long chin. “Yeah. Mebbe we can hold them off until dark, thin them out some. Then try to bust out.”

“They strike me as raiders, like the Scythians of yore, albeit lacking horses,” Doc said. “They will naturally incline toward a transient strategy, rather than a persisting one.”

“Which translates as hit-and-run’s their style, rather than sticking around to keep us under siege,” J.B. noted. “Probably even true. Mebbe we get out of this crack after all.”

“If they don’t burn us out,” Mildred muttered.

“Likely a last resort,” Ryan said. “They’ll want our wag and blasters. All the same, we better get set to discourage that sort of behavior. Mildred, is there a back way out?”

She nodded, making her beaded plaits rattle softly. “Rear of the little office. Big water jug in there, too, while I think of it. Seems clean.”

“That’s something, anyway. You and Jak hold in there, watch the front and back doors. J.B. and Doc can hold in here.”

“What about you?” J.B. asked.

“I’ll take the rifle up top, see if I can do a little street-cleaning.”

“I’d better check on Krysty first, real quick,” Mildred said, ducking into the office.

“Make quick,” Jak called from the other room. “Muties coming.”

Ryan entered the Hummer. Krysty lay on her pallet in the cargo compartment with her green eyes open. “Lover,” she whispered in a cracked voice.

Ryan leaned over to extend a water bottle to her. She reached for it. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Just lie back. You need to conserve your strength.”

Reluctantly she let him tilt the bottle to her lips. “Gaia’s with me,” she said more clearly when he pulled the bottle back. “But it’s hard.”

“You just lie back, try to sleep. Let your mind and body concentrate on healing.”

“Outside—?”

He shook his head. “We’ll handle it. If we can’t, having another body on the line too shaky to hold up a blaster wouldn’t do us any good. This is your fight, Krysty. Stay with it.”

He capped the bottle and laid it beside her. Her hand gripped his with feverish strength; he felt the heat of the battle against infection raging inside her body. She pulled the back of his hand to her lips and kissed it. Then she laid her head back down and closed her eyes.

Ryan placed her hand on her chest and made himself let go. There wasn’t any more that he could do for her in the best of circumstances. She was young and strong and healthy, as tough as they came, and she had that Gaia-aided gift of healing. She’d pull through.

He wouldn’t even think of the alternative.

A bang from outside. A hole appeared in one of the doors, knocking a slatlike splinter loose to stick out at a crazy angle from beneath it. J.B. ripped a short burst in response, blind through the wood.

Ryan ducked quickly out of the Hummer, slung his Steyr. J.B. handed him the .45, square butt foremost. “Take this and the extras. Don’t want to burn out that SIG.”

The one-eyed man accepted the heavy handblaster and tucked the two full reloads into his waistband. The SIG-Sauer was a wonderful weapon for stealthy chilling, but the integral suppressor, aside from making the weapon heavier and less wieldy, tended to hold in heat. It had a tendency to lock in a firefight, and too much sustained firing would burn out the barrel. The .45 would spare the SIG for a while, not to mention their dwindling stocks of 9 mm rounds.

A wooden ladder hung on hooks by the wall, so that a person could scramble right up it to the hatch—and pull it up after, an old Indian trick from Pueblo days long before the twentieth century that Doc had told them about. Ryan climbed up to the hatch, carefully slid aside the iron bolt. He sucked in a deep breath, snicked off the big Colt’s safety and slammed open the hatch.

Sunlight fell against his face like scalding water. He thrust the .45 up into it and swarmed after.

To find himself staring along the rounded black top of the weapon into a pair of huge black eyes, shot through with veins and flecks of gold.

The face surrounding those eyes wasn’t norm, being drawn out into a dark snout with nostrils as convoluted as a bat’s. But the surprised expression was unmistakable all the same.

For as long as it took Ryan’s forefinger to exert about three pounds of pressure on the trigger.

The eyes and the top part of the head that held them vanished into a dark haze. The mutie’s body rolled over flopping, black blood spurting from the lower jaw and stub of neck that remained. Ryan sprang upright on the roof. A norm-looking ambusher was frozen, having just crawled over the tall roof parapet behind the mutie whose head Ryan had just blown apart. He clutched a spear tipped with black volcanic glass. Ryan shot him twice. He went backward over the parapet with arms flailing.

Something struck Ryan in the back beneath his left shoulder blade. He whirled into a crouch, brought the heavy handblaster around in a two-fisted combat grip. A bandy-legged norm stood on the roof of the next house, desperately trying to notch a second dart to the end of his throwing stick. Ryan centered his sights on the white stripe conveniently painted down the front of the norm’s ribby chest, pulled the trigger. The 1911 bucked and roared. The man sat, dropping dart and launcher. He felt his chest, looked up reproachfully from the blood on his fingers to Ryan, and fell backward out of sight.

The one-eyed man went flat on his belly. He thumbed on the safety, stuck the .45 inside the waist of his fatigue pants behind his right hip—not an ideal means of carry, but Ryan was seasoned enough to know always to keep his finger out of the trigger guard until the weapon was drawn and pointing downrange, which much diminished his chances of becoming abruptly half-assed.

He reached around to probe at his back. He felt nothing from where he’d been struck, not necessarily a good sign in itself. The impact site was impossible to reach and see, but he didn’t feel any trace of blood. A quick check of the flat roof, covered with a thick and well-packed layer of the same hard earth that made up the street below and here and there sprouting a clump of weeds, showed no sign of leakage. He caught sight of the dart: a simple shaft of some kind of wood, whittled to a point and probably hardened in a fire. It hadn’t been hard thrown enough to penetrate his leather coat, which was one reason he still wore it despite the heat.

He unslung the Steyr, cracked the bolt, turned it and pulled it back enough to glimpse a confirmatory gleam of brass, yellow in the merciless sun. He closed and locked the bolt again. Then he got a knee up to his chest and a boot under him and raised himself cautiously for a look around.

Three houses up the block a couple of manlike figures pointed at the apparition of his head. One of them threw a longblaster to its shoulder. He ducked. The weapon boomed, its report echoing off the flat fronts of houses. Where the shot went, he had no idea; he heard no noise of its passage.

Through the roof Ryan felt a vibration. From down in the street in front of the garage came a dull heavy thump, followed by cheers and shouts in a language he couldn’t make out. He guessed it was Spanish. The muties seemed to have contrived a battering ram and were having a go at the doors. They seemed pretty sturdy, and anyway Ryan was going to have to let his friends below deal with the problem, at least until he got the nearby rooftops clean.