End Program Page 16

  “The baron seems like a good man ,” Ricky said as they exited the building and walked across the ville square.

  The sun had sunk low, now just a red-orange semicircle peering above the high, west wall of the ville. Ryan watched it for a moment, observing the way his cybernetic eye adjusted to its brilliance. He was seeing the world in new shades, new dimensions, and each time he noticed something new he wondered how much his world would change.

  For now at least, Ryan and his companions had a safe place to rest in that dangerously changing world.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ryan couldn’t see the surgeons at first. Instead, he saw their instruments, shiny metal barbs like the sting of a nettle, glinting under the fierce light of the operating room.

  Ryan felt the assistants holding him down before he saw them. They were strapping his head to a gurney, using thick rubber belts to pin him there. One belt was strapped across his forehead, another across his nose and a third cinched tight across his throat, so tight it made breathing a struggle.

  He strained at his bonds, looking at the tray of surgical instruments. There was something else there too, something round and bloody and staring back at him—an eyeball. The iris was green and a snake tail of optic nerve trailed from its rear, dangling from the wheeled trolley upon which the sterile metal tray rested. Ryan looked at the eye, recognizing it, instinctively knowing its source.

  Then the surgeons filed past, dressed in black shrouds, inverted ghosts. They approached the gurney solemnly, heads down, marching in step, following one after the other, six in all, ready to work on him from all sides. They were muties, creatures more like gorillas than men, black faces with probing eyes and pronounced jaws that emphasised their elongated canine teeth. Their breath smelled of cleaning fluid, that harsh bite of alcohol that made the nose wrinkle, the eyes sting.

  The lead surgeon reached for the eyeball, bringing it toward Ryan’s face, iris first. Ryan saw his own reflection in the iris, luminescent and green, like everything else reflected there.

  “I don’t want it,” he shouted, struggling against his bonds.

  The surgeons held Ryan’s head in place while he thrashed and fought against them. And then he felt rough hands play across his face, reaching for his left eye and plucking it out

  The surgeon held the plucked eye close to Ryan’s face for a moment, palm flat, and the eye seemed almost to dance there, turning left and right as it studied its surroundings. Ryan watched as it throbbed in the surgeon’s hand, pulsing with the rapid beat of his heart, his fear.

  Then he felt more pain as the other eye, the new one, was forced into his socket, pushed there the way J.B. would shove plas ex into a lock to blast it open.

  There was pressure and then the eye was in and it was working, sending new signals to Ryan’s brain. The eye was green, and seeing through it everything went green too, like standing beneath a thick canopy of vegetation. “Earth Mother,” Ryan muttered to himself, translating what he saw in a way he couldn’t have expected.

  A woman had joined them by then, although Ryan had not seen her enter: Krysty Wroth, beautiful, her cascade of red hair flowing down her back and swishing over her face like a waterfall. She was dressed in what he knew was a surgical gown, pastel green with ties at the back, and she held her head low. There was blood on the gown. Krysty shuffled toward the gurney listlessly, her head slumped. Ryan wanted to reach for her, wanted to say something, wanted to apologize.

  The surgeons pulled her hair back, kicking her forward at the same time so that her head was drawn backward, revealing her face to Ryan for the first time. There was a bloody hole where her left eye had been, scabs circling the socket in a thick, wine-red line.

  “No!” Ryan screamed. “I don’t want it! I don’t want her eye!”

  Somewhere, distant but close, a bell was ringing. It sounded like one of the surgeons had dropped a metal implement but instead of landing it kept striking against the floor, over and over.

  * * *

  THEN RYAN WAS AWAKE. Beside him, Krysty was calling his name gently from where she sat at the edge of the bed, buckling her holster back on over her blue jeans. The bell continued to ring from somewhere outside the room.

  “Ryan, wake up,” Krysty said. “There’s trouble.”

  A bell was ringing in the distance, over and over: an alarm.

  “What?” Ryan asked, not fully awake. He took in the room at a glance, recalled its tight confines, the small window with a ragged drape drawn across it on a rail. The room had been a storage room, the bed that he and Krysty slept on had no mattress and was made up from spare blankets. Still, it was comfortable enough and safe—or so he had hoped. Through the window, edges showing around the side of the ragged curtain, Ryan could see it was still dark, moonlight highlighting the violet-blue sky. “What is it?”

  “Someone said bikers,” Krysty said. “A lot of them. Even more than before”

  Ryan leaped out of bed, reaching for his SIG Sauer blaster where he had placed it cautiously beneath his pillow. He had slept in his clothes. “Fireblast! They must have followed us.”

  “Now it’s all hands to the pump, lover,” Krysty replied, flashing one of her stomach-flipping smiles at him before she stood.

  Before Ryan could reply, Ricky appeared in the doorway, slapping his palm against it. “They need us up front, guys,” he said. “Now!”

  * * *

  OUTSIDE HEARTSVILLE, FORTY-ONE bikers riding twenty-nine vehicles drove in a slow circle like a wag train, bumping over rough ground as they closed in on the ville’s high walls. A dust trail kicked up in the wake of the passing vehicles like a wall, grit and dirt flying high in the air as it was disturbed by the passage of the tires.

  At their lead, Niles rode his metal steed with Amanda clutching tightly to his back. The vehicle was a low-slung two-wheeler, with an extended front bar that thrust the front wheel ahead by almost the length again of the bike. Its engine cover was black and gold, hand-painted by Niles years before he had become the leader of the gang, back when he was still just a recruit who had turned to the bikers for safety against the woes and the predators that lurked in the radioactive terrain. The gang was bigger now. He had seen every road that was left in mainland California, driven right up to the edge of those ancient highways that had been cleaved in two by the quakes that had submerged half the state into the ocean.

  Now he rode at the head of the gang, leading them to this one last site in the area that still housed humans, this one place where people survived against the terrible odds. His face showed more metal than it had before, where the replacement skin had torn away after the bomb blast.

  * * *

  “THEY’RE GETTING CLOSER,” said the sec man standing beside the Gatling gun at the crest of the portcullis. He was staring through an extending telescope, watching the dust cloud that rose in the bikers’ wake like a wall. It flickered in the moonlight, flecks of grit momentarily catching the light. Around and below, the alarm bell was tolling as it was repeatedly struck by one of the women whom Ryan’s team had seen accompanying the baron earlier.

  Crouched beside the sec man on the gate, J.B. had his binoculars pressed against his face and was scanning the horizon for the bike gang. “How far away do you make them?” he asked.

  “Three-quarters of a mile mebbe,” the sec man replied.

  “Look,” Jak said, pointing to the north and the south, away from the east-facing gate. “All ’round us.”

  Jak had been with J.B. checking the blaster emplacements—part of their agreement with the baron—when the alarm had been raised. The albino didn’t use binoculars to scan the distance—he simply looked hard.

  “Jak’s right,” J.B. stated grimly. “They’re surrounding us, likely prepping to attack from all sides.”

  The sec man lowered his scope and looke
d up at the large Gatling gun that rested on its rotating base to his left. An identical gun stood on its own base on the other side of the gate, its two operators checking the horizon beside it.

  “We’ve got firepower here,” the sec man insisted. “Seen off worse asshats than these. Everyone here fights, ’cause we all got a stake.”

  “Yeah, but I’m guessing that your other attackers mostly came from the front,” J.B. speculated, “where the guns are strongest. What other ordnance you got here, pal?”

  “A lot of blaster emplacements at ground level,” the sec man said thoughtfully, “plus two war wags, primed and ready to roll.”

  J.B. nodded. “War wags against bikes,” he mused. “Seems like good odds, but even a bee sting can take out a man sometimes.”

  The sec man waved his hand dismissively. “Your friend worries a lot, huh?” he teased, directing his observation to Jak.

  Jak’s haunting red eyes glared at the sec man. “Worried man lives longest,” he responded.

  The sec man shrugged. It was a good point.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS EARLIER, Niles and Amanda had made love, wild and free in the ashy shadow of a burned-out shopping mall. She had kissed the ruined flesh of his face, kissed the metal plating that lurked beneath like some ancient buried treasure. And when their lovemaking had become more passionate, more intense, she had bitten at the frayed edges of the ruined skin, exposing more of the metal. Now, almost the whole of the metal jaw was exposed, and so too was the plate-and-rivet cheek that had been put in place of the flesh that had scraped away on the cliff face all those months before. The effect made Niles’s sneer more prominent, more cruel.

  “Tonight we chill,” Niles boomed in a voice that carried above even the roar of the engines. “I want everyone dead by dawn! Everyone!”

  Around him, the other members of the gang cheered their agreement, bloodlust burning brightly in their single-minded brains. Chilling was good. Chilling was the only good.

  Chill the humans.

  Chill all humans.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The alarm bell continued to ring, clanging like a dinner bell in a mess hall.

  Like most people who lived on the road, Ryan slept like a cat. It took him just a few seconds to bring himself to wakefulness and from there to be ready, mind and body, for action. Ricky led the way through the warren of corridors that crisscrossed the building they had slept in, a reconstructed building propped around an inner core that had once been a power generator. The generator still worked, or had been made to work again, providing the building with dim illumination in the narrow corridors accompanied by a low thrumming that seemed to drill through a person’s heart, making Ryan’s bones shake.

  The corridors were busy with other people, residents of the building who had heard the alarm call and were readying themselves for the worst. Villes like this had grown up to offer protection first for families who co-opted their resources, later for people with skills and the survival instincts needed to function in this broken new world that had been born from the remnants of a destroyed civilization. Villes grew wary of outlanders, because villes were seen as the places of plenty in a world where most people had nothing. Everyone who could hold a blaster would be armed, and if there weren’t enough blasters to go around then they would resort to whatever else they had for weapons, right down to the same tools they had used to till the soil in the daylight.

  The companions followed the locals through the door to the outside. The door had been propped open by a skull—human or mutie, Ryan couldn’t tell for sure.

  Outside was pandemonium. They were under siege.

  * * *

  “I HAD BEEN asleep not five minutes,” Doc groused as he hurried across the main square to join the throng of locals to defend the ville.

  Beside Doc, Mildred sighed as she checked her target pistol. “Count yourself lucky. That’s five minutes more than I got,” she told him. As so often happened, news that Mildred was a healer had traveled fast, and she had spent almost every minute since arriving in Heartsville dealing with the ville folks’ ailments.

  Around them, several dozen people were making their way swiftly to the defense positions that were scattered along the high wall. Some posts were high up while others were simply retractable slits located at ground level, allowing a defender to poke out the nose of his or her blaster to cover a narrow area outside.

  Reaching the side wall, Mildred and Doc met a sec man with a patchy blond beard, wearing a tattered baseball cap, checkered shirt and jeans. Trevor was already there, learning how to use a remade automatic longblaster that was nicked and scratched from use.

  “I’m Rog,” the sec man said. “You newcomers got weapons?”

  “Aye, that we do,” Doc said, brandishing his formidable LeMat for the sec man to see.

  Rog frowned at the blaster then nodded appreciatively. “That’s an impressive piece of hardware, Pops,” he said. “You build that?”

  “My goodness, no,” Doc replied, smiling, “but I dote on it as I would my own child.”

  The sec man laughed, then pointed out two emplacements located high along the wall that could be reached by a wooden ladder. “You two go up there, get comfortable and don’t wait too long to start blasting,” he told them. “We’ve had trouble from these bikers before. They’re devious and mean, but they scare off pretty easy. We’re hoping that the blasters on the main gates will take out their leaders and they’ll back down, but with the circling pattern they’ve adopted we’re gonna have to stay sharp.”

  “Sharp is my middle name,” Doc assured the sec man, who shook his head in confused response.

  “Hell of a coincidence that,” the sec man muttered as he made his way to instruct the next group of defenders.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, THE FORTY-STRONG biker army had reached the quarter-mile marker, closing on the ville in a slow circle, engines roaring, the stench of alcofuel hanging in the air like a heady wine.

  At the lead, Niles held one hand aloft and slowed until his bike came to a halt directly in line with the Heartsville gates. Behind him, the line of bikes pulled to a stop, spread out across the wilderness, surrounding the ville in a radial web. The sound of engines ticking over hummed through the atmosphere like an angry beehive.

  Niles eyed the gates, the magnification software in the artificial eye that the surgeons had given him bringing the Gatling guns and their operators into sharp focus. Up there, he could see a number of heads peeking out over the high wall, narrow blaster windows sliding open as the ville folk prepared to defend their home from ransacking and worse.

  Perhaps they expected to negotiate, Niles thought. But that was not what he was here for. He wanted only the destruction of the people who had settled this land.

  Niles raised his open hand, sensed the eyes of his gang upon him, heard Amanda behind him hold her breath in anticipation. Then he closed his hand into a fist, sending the signal to attack.

  It was time.

  * * *

  THE FIRST ATTACK came from a fleet of bikes, six in all, roaring toward the high walls from all directions like an approaching thunderhead. They came at the points of the clock, one at twelve, the next at two, then four and so on, timed to arrive together, chrome engines glinting in ghostly fashion as they caught the moonlight in the darkness.

  The sec men of the ville readied their blasters, targeting the approaching figures hurtling through the night, unsure whether they should shoot or wait to see if the bikers would negotiate. Baron Hurst stood atop the high wall on the south side of the ville, urging caution. It would be better to warn these attackers off peaceably than to get into a firefight. Even with the ville’s superior numbers and firepower, they remained caught in a tricky position, locked behind the walls with no facility to survive a protracted siege. B
arons may come to power through strength and intimidation, but they retained it by their ability to negotiate. Hurst knew that and he hoped he could triumph this day without bloodshed.

  Standing beside Baron Hurst, the beautiful blonde held up a pair of binocs to his eyes and a second pair to her own. One lens on her pair was cracked, a cobweb pattern across the glass.

  “They’re getting close,” she said. “We should do something.”

  “No, we wait,” the baron insisted. He had dealt with outlanders like these before, and he knew that as soon as one party fired a shot negotiations were over. His own people would wait for his signal, and until the rotary cannon residing on this wall fired, no one else would make a move.

  The bikes roared closer, one of them coming directly toward where the baron waited with his people. They were fifty yards away now, then thirty, then just a dozen. As the nearest biker closed in, he drew back his arm and Baron Hurst and his people saw he was holding something there. It was a jerrican, fourteen inches high and designed to carry spare fuel.

  With a swing of his muscled arm, the rider threw the can. It swept up into the air, rotating as its contents sloshed about inside, hurtling toward the side of the two-story wall. For a few moments, all attention was on that hurtling can, eyes following its path as it crested the wall. The biker was watching too, a 9 mm Smith & Wesson blaster in his hand. As the can breached the summit of the wall, the rider squeezed the trigger and sent a bullet through the jerrican, ripping its metal surface, a spark igniting the fuel within.

  In a fraction of a second, the can exploded, sending torn needles of red-hot metal in a burst over the people watching from the wall, even as the fireball hurtled into the ville itself.

  All around the ville, the other bikers were doing the same thing, launching their homemade bombs at the ville. Some of the projectiles were jerricans, others scratch-built. In the space of five seconds, the night sky above the ville seemed to erupt with fire, a half dozen burning comets streaking through the air before exploding inside the walls in a violent conflagration.