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  “Plumbing store is next,” he said. “Then we need someplace secure to hide for the night. I need time to make the explos.”

  “Already found the perfect spot,” Mildred said, patting a pocket now holding a local street map. “Thick walls, heavy doors, small windows.”

  “Jail or library,” Ryan asked, tucking a few candles into a pocket.

  “Museum.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Leaving the store, Dean glanced at the modern lightweight crossbows and fiberglass arrows, started to leave, then doubled back and took one plus a double quiver of razor-tipped hunting arrows. The crossbow and quiver combined weighed less than just the homemade crossbow from the ville.

  There were several hardware stores in town, and the companions needed to scavenge three before getting every item on the list. However, as they started to leave the building, a sec hunter droid came around the corner, its scissor-tipped arms snapping steadily in a mechanical beat. The droid was undamaged, not even scratched. After a moment, it was gone.

  “Fireblast, it’s another one,” Ryan cursed softly. “We hit that museum right fucking now. I don’t want to face another of those things without some heavy iron on our side.”

  Heading away from the second droid, the companions moved from building to building, watching the darkening shadows carefully, their weapons leveled and ready.

  The smell of smoke was getting stronger in the air, the growing fires illuminating the center of the city, casting eerie lights onto the rising black plume. High overhead, the chem clouds rumbled with thunder, and lightning crashed down to strike at the city as if offended by its presence.

  The group ceased any further explorations for supplies and headed straight for their bolt-hole. Reaching the museum, Krysty noted a swarm of scorpions scuttling along the courtyard of the stately building, each carrying a grisly piece of the past—a finger, an ear.

  “Didn’t take them long to get here.” Ryan scowled, watching the scavengers scurry away into the sewer gratings. One arm was full of plumbing supplies, mostly short pipes about a foot long and threaded at both ends, but his gun hand was free and lightly resting on the checkered grip of the SIG-Sauer.

  “The smell of this much food is going to attract everything in the desert,” Mildred agreed, fighting a shiver of repulsion. “Buzzards, cougars, stickies, everything.”

  “Millipedes,” Dean said with a frown, shifting his load of cleaning supplies. The chems had a lot of uses.

  Her hair flexing, Krysty advised, “Let them have the dead. The Great Salt can’t support that much life, and mebbe the scorpions and bugs would have wiped each other out by morning.”

  “At least this might mask our presence from the sec hunter,” J.B. said, working on the lock to the steel grille covering the entrance to the museum.

  “No,” Ryan said grimly, “it won’t.”

  As the grille came aside, they stepped in and J.B. closed the gate, expertly locking it again. Anything that wanted to get to them this way would make a hell of a racket and give them more than enough warning. The wooden front door oddly proved a greater challenge, and J.B. thought he might have to blast for a moment when the corroded lock yielded and the thick portal swung wide.

  A rank wind came billowing out like the last breath of a corpse, and the group covered their faces to wait for the building to be flushed with clean air before entering.

  Once inside, J.B. bolted the door tight, and the companions spread out to do a quick recce. However, the feeble light of their candles barely touched the vastness of the main room. Then with a cry, Dean turned and fired, the muzzle-flash illuminating a snarling mutie coming straight for them!

  But the creature didn’t react to being shot, and as Mildred shone the yellow light of her handflash onto the creature, everybody could see its shoulder was blown wide open, with fat tufts of some sort of gray foam coming out.

  “Oh, hell, it’s a museum of natural history,” Mildred said, pumping her flashlight to try to brighten the beam. The sign outside had been too badly corroded to read, and the store map had simply listed it as a museum.

  “A what?” Jak asked, raising his candle to the other exhibits. More creatures stared at him with dead glass eyes, forever frozen in a tableau of mock ferocity.

  “Sort of a trophy room,” the physician attempted to explain. “For folks to see the creatures that once roamed Earth.”

  “All aced?” the albino teen asked curiously.

  “Time itself did that,” Doc replied haughtily. “For once, the hands of humanity were clean of the crime of slaughtering living things for pleasure.”

  “No hunt fun,” Jak corrected. “Hunt food.”

  The scholar smiled benignly. “Ah, my dear Mr. Lauren, your wisdom is boundless.”

  As the group moved through the display of dinosaur skeletons and dioramas of Neolithic life, they came upon a Tyrannosaurus rex rising high above the terrazzo floor, standing dramatically on a raised platform, with velvet ropes holding back the visitors to protect the creature from them.

  “This real?” Dean asked, poking at a leg bigger than a wag.

  “Real, but long dead,” Mildred explained. “Most of the creatures lived and died millions of years ago.”

  “Millions?” Jak asked, scowling.

  “A century of centuries of centuries,” Doc espoused, walking around the Jurassic behemoth. “The preDark world, of the preDark world, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Come on, the offices are what we want,” Ryan commanded, and headed that way, leaving behind the killers from the past.

  After finding a secure room, the companions dug in for the night, buttressing the doors with marble benches. Once settled in, dinner was cooked over a small fire built in a metal waste can and fed pamphlets and brochures from the tourist shop. When those were gone, they moved on to paper from the desks and then the desks.

  “At least we don’t have to burn the oil paintings in the executive office,” Doc rumbled, contentedly picking his teeth with a paper clip. “It was an unwelcome experience to dine on hundred-year-old military stew warmed by the million-dollar fire of a stack of burning masterpieces.”

  “We saved the Gauguin and Edward Hopper,” Mildred added around her toothbrush. Then she rinsed with mineral water and spit into a trash can. “But we should have done the Jackson Pollocks. Never did like the abstract expressionists.”

  “Agreed, madam.” Doc smiled, displaying his oddly perfect teeth. “But the fumes from his depressing works would have only made the food sour.”

  Mopping his mess kit clean with a piece of bread from the MRE pack, Ryan idly listened to the old-timers chat and really could make no sense of it. Some of the artwork had been beautiful stuff, pastoral scenes of flowers. The rest were just splotches on canvas.

  After dinner, Ryan and Krysty took the first shift of walking a patrol of the building while J.B. showed the others how to make pipe bombs from the plumbing supplies, mixed with items from a paint store and a garage. If there had been the time, the Armorer could have made much more powerful guncotton from the treasure in most banks. A big stack of money, a sack of silver quarters, a high-school chemistry lab and in less than a week he was producing fulminating guncotton at a tremendous rate. The stuff was ten times more powerful than dynamite, yet much easier to make. He and Ryan had tried reloading bullets with the stuff once and even with a half charge mixed with common dirt, the blaster was blown apart. Since then, he never tried again, using the reloads found in the redoubts. They were infinitely safer.

  One at a time, each section of pipe was filled with a batch of cooked chems poured from a coffeepot, then the end cap screwed on tight and gently laid aside. While they cooled, the bombs were sensitive to shocks, but once cold, you could toss one down a flight of stairs and nothing would happen. Unless the fuse was lit, and then they detonated with staggering force, throwing out a deadly halo of shrapnel from the lead pipe.

  Doc, Jak and Dean took over the production of the
explos, as Mildred and J.B. walked a patrol. Ryan and Krysty found the private office of the curator with a comfortable sofa for sleeping and settled in for the rest of the night. Their next tour wasn’t until just before dawn.

  Chapter Twelve

  The stars disappeared and the sky brightened as dawn rose in the east, but the preDark buildings stood in shadows until the sun crept over the rim of the crater and shone upon the burning city.

  Sleeping on a blanket near the dwindling campfire, Baron Gaza awoke at the infusion of light. The air was chilly, his breath fogging slightly, and the waves of heat from the crackling fire felt good on his face. Dimly, the man could sense something was wrong, but nothing about the area seemed awry. Food was cooking, although there were no frying pans in sight lying amid the burning wood. Kathleen was sitting in the open rear doors of the APC, a rapid-fire across her lap. Della was inside the war wag, wrapped in blankets, and the others were lying nearby, naked limbs intertwined from the previous night’s orgy of debauchery.

  With streaks of dried blood on her cheek, Shala lay curled into a ball, still trembling under the blankets. Gaza smiled briefly at the memory of the rape. He had been her first, in so many ways, so after his lust was slacked, the baron wasted time giving her pleasure. And his wives had done a superb job removing her tongue, the cauterized stump barely bleeding at all it had been done so quickly. The combination of mutilation, pain and pleasure did the trick as always. She now silently worshiped him like his other wives, although he would have the rest keep a close watch on her for a while. Sometimes there were slips, and he always hated having to slit a throat on the honeymoon.

  Rising from his nest of sweat-and sex-stained blankets, Gaza rose and stretched, luxuriating in the warm morning breeze. Limping over to the edge of the cliff, the man openly relieved himself while Allison stood close by with a longblaster cradled in her arms. She grunted as he finished, then waved a hand at the city below.

  The view was murky, and Gaza tried to force the sleep from his sight when cold adrenaline coursed through his powerful body and the man violently cursed. That wasn’t the fog of sleep; it was smoke, billowing clouds of thick smoke, with flickers of writhing flames deep within. He tried to wish it away as a bad dream, but as his eyes became adjusted to the growing light he saw the ruins of some smaller buildings on the south side, charred timbers mixed with priceless debris, the perfect wags in the street reduced to smoldering wrecks.

  “Blood of my fathers,” the baron growled, taking a step toward the metropolis, “it’s burning. All of it is burning!”

  Fearful for his safety, Allison grabbed his shoulder in a strong grip, and he shook her off, then backhanded her to the ground.

  “It’s burning!” he screamed, spraying spittle into her startled face. “My empire is on fire and you let me sleep? You feeb slut.”

  Tears running down her face, Allison used both hands to try to explain she had only discovered the destruction moments before her husband. Watching the hand gestures, Gaza couldn’t follow what she was saying and turned away before he struck the ignorant bitch again. The city was burning, the wealth of the preDark world vanishing before their very eyes. There was no time for recriminations or beatings. Every moment counted now.

  “Everybody up!” Gaza shouted, striding across the campsite to reclaim his clothing draped over the front prow of the APC. “Put everything back into the wag! We’re going in to loot the ruins for blasters.”

  As he climbed into his clothes, his wives began to hurry about the area, picking up loose items and herding Shala into the vehicle. Shuffling over the uneven ground, the girl dropped her blanket, exposing her pale skin and pert breasts. Yanking on boots, Gaza paid no attention to the battered female, with more important matters on his mind. Who the nuke was this Ryan Cawdor to come out of the Deathlands like some whirlwind of destruction? First, Rockpoint was destroyed by water, and now this nameless treasure trove by fire. It was like something from the fragging preDark Bible. What in hell was coming next, a plague of mutie locust?

  As if in response, the fiery clouds in the sky rumbled ominously, making Gaza almost drop his gun belt. Trying to hide the fear in his stomach, the man forced trembling hands to buckle the holster around his waist, and he cleared his mind of foolish worries with the comforting routine of checking the big blasters. His personal handcannons had been bought from that bitch Trader before she decided he was stockpiling too many blasters. As if there was such a thing as too many weapons. She just wanted to keep him weak, unable to leave the desert and expand his domain. But that was changing now, and soon he would have that blond bitch under the knife. Not to make her a wife, oh, no, this time it would be just for the sheer pleasure of bloody revenge.

  Going to the rear of the vehicle, Gaza checked the clutch and electric motor for the heavy winch. Designed to pull the wag from swampy ground, the cable was thick and strong. When Gaza had first obtained the vehicle, he had walked out the cable to its full length to learn exactly how long it was. He had used a knife to scratch the framework for every ten paces, and now counted ten such marks. Roughly a hundred feet. The sinkhole was about that deep. Which meant there was no way he could anchor the cable and have the APC lower itself to the ground below. Damn. But he could lower down a couple of his wives to raid the ancient structures before the whole place was leveled by the flames.

  “Damn you Ryan!” he screamed at the buildings showing below the cliff. “Damn you to hell!” Strangely, the words echoed among the windowless concrete hives, as if carrying onward forever.

  CLOSING THE DOOR to the museum, J.B. locked it with a click and stood to join the others on the front steps. Washed, fed and well rested, the other companions were spread out in a defensive arc with their backs to the museum and blasters held ready. Just for a moment, J.B. thought he heard somebody calling a name, and then it was gone, carried away on the breeze.

  The plaza of the building was alive with scavengers, insects of every kind and flocks of rustling birds, mostly black buzzards. They had arrived during the night, hundreds of them, along with some vultures. Normally bitter enemies constantly fighting over every scrap of food, now the birds roosted side by side, stuffing themselves on the dried human flesh that lay sprawled in the streets in such abundance.

  Trying to hide it, Doc was repulsed by the sounds. The noise of the feasting was horrible, the ripping of cloth followed by the stabbing of sharp beaks and then the ripping of skin and cartilage. It reminded him of pigs at the trough, and he forced away the madness that welled at that dark memory.

  Away from the bloodless carnage, a smoky pall hung over the city, thick clouds swirling along the streets, distant reddish lights showing new buildings burning out of control, mingling with the occasional crash of falling masonry and splintering wood.

  “Ryan,” Mildred said, licking her lips.

  The big man turned. “Yeah?”

  “You know how I’m always pushing for us to recce just a little more, and try to salvage more technology, medicine, whatever?” She frowned. “Well, not this time. We’re standing in the middle of the powder keg, and we can’t leave fast enough.”

  “I second that,” Dean added grimly, adjusting his grip on the lightweight crossbow.

  Krysty glanced around at the other buildings and stores near the museum. Her hair was strangely still, its lack of motion showing her deep concern.

  “The question still remains,” she muttered. “How do we get out of here? A hundred feet straight up is a hell of a climb.”

  “We’ve done it before,” J.B. stated, tilting back his hat to survey the sprawling metropolis. “But only as a last resort.”

  Every building seemed to be crawling with birds and other scavengers. More winged creatures were circling the exposed city, some of them soaring between the buildings and roosting amid the gargoyles and spires of a cathedral. The stained-glass windows were about the only glass remaining intact.

  “Hell of a climb,” Ryan agreed, “so we best try and fin
d something else before we go grabbing bastard rock.”

  Walking along the steps, his presence caused a stir among the birds and he worked the bolt action on the Steyr without conscious thought. As if understanding the action, the buzzards moved away from the man to feed on other corpses. Only the vultures stayed, arching their snakelike necks in annoyance as they gobbled down ragged pieces of dried flesh.

  The companions were closest to the northern side of the cliff, the smoke thin enough to see the vertical rock wall of the sinkhole. There were a lot of cracks, and even a few ravines, but nothing that would offer a route to the surface. The sinkhole made a hell of a trap and once inside, there was no easy way out. They were like rats in a garbage can, with the open sky directly above, but no way to reach it.

  “Buried alive,” Mildred said softly, her words carrying on the morning breeze much farther than she had expected.

  Just then, a soft, familiar hooting sounded from the burning city, and the companions turned together, fingers tightening on triggers. A few blocks away, a humanoid figure was clinging to the side of a luxury hotel, holding on to the stonework with one arm while the other was batting at the birds swooping close to feed on the helpless prey. But as one vulture got too near, the humanoid grabbed a flapping wing. As the vulture frantically tried to get free, the manlike being released its grip of the wall but stayed oddly secure to the flat stonework with just bare feet as it tore the screaming vulture apart in an explosion of bloody feathers. Screaming their rage, the other vultures flapped away.