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  “Mother Gaia! Hellhounds would be easier to ace than a stickie,” Krysty said, cracking open her revolver and dumping the spent brass to quickly reload. The shells hit the hard ground and bounced away.

  “Stay razor, people,” J.B. growled, switching from the M-4000 scattergun to the Uzi machine pistol. “There could be more of them.”

  “Probably not,” Mildred said, glancing into the rock shadows overhead and in the wreckage piled outside the city. “The food supply in the desert is too meager to support many of these creatures. Big as a human usually means a human-size appetite.”

  “Doesn’t mean that for sure,” Ryan countered grimly, slipping a fresh clip into the SIG-Sauer. “We best stay together. That’ll reduce the chance of another mutie slipping in close.”

  “Camou stickies,” J.B. muttered, working the arming bolt of the Uzi. “Thought I’d seen it all.”

  “There is a first time for everything, John Barrymore,” Doc rumbled, purging and recharging the LeMat. The Webley would be sorely missed.

  “At least once,” Krysty agreed, her hair flexing and curling from her agitated state. Her steel blaster felt warm and familiar in her grip, but the woman drew no comfort from the weapon. This ancient city of the dead was quickly becoming a city of death. How many more battles would they have to survive before they could leave? But she already knew the answer to that question. Too damn many.

  Thumbing fresh rounds into the side feed of the Winchester, Jak approached the grisly bonfire and frowned at the sight of his leaf-shaped throwing blades mired in the crackling corpses of the deceased muties.

  “Damn, good knives,” the albino teen muttered angrily, working the lever to prime the single-shot long-blaster. “Hate lose.”

  “Blasters are better,” J.B. said.

  Masked by his sunglasses, Jak snorted. “No reload blade,” he stated. “Silent, too.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” Doc rumbled, patting the bony swordstick thrust through his belt.

  “I prefer distance,” J.B. said, straightening his fedora. “And the farther away, the better.”

  “Talk with your boots,” Ryan commanded, walking along the perimeter of the city. “Jawing and yapping ain’t getting us any closer to the surface.”

  Staying alert for any suspicious movements, the companions trudged along the base of the cliff, climbing over piles of preDark rubble and around a couple of deep chasms in the ground. The footing was treacherous, the pieces of the fallen dome constantly slipping away underfoot, and often shattering at the first step. Soon the smoldering corpses of the stickies were left far behind, only a thin plume of smoke visible to mark the location for the circling vultures.

  “Freeze,” Doc whispered softly, going motionless. “Droid. Two o’clock.”

  Everybody stopped moving at the words, and only shifted their eyes to search along the stores lining the nearby street. Halfway down the block was the damaged sec hunter droid, its eyes gone and its chrome body covered with quivering antennae. But the racing machine wasn’t coming toward the companions; it was charging along the street, crushing the corpses in its way until going out of sight.

  “Dark night,” J.B. said, rubbing the scar on his chin. “I wonder what the frag it’s after?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care,” Ryan muttered, shifting his longblaster. “As long as it ain’t us. Shift it into high gear, people. I want to be far from here when it returns.”

  The hours passed slowly as the day progressed, but the rising sun could do little to penetrate the thickening layer of turbulent clouds. Sheet lightning was crashing among the roiling orange-and-purple clouds with ever increasing ferocity. A major storm seemed to be brewing, a real Texas tempest, but at least the telltale smell of rotten eggs wasn’t in the wind, forecasting the arrival of a deadly acid rain.

  Walking carefully up the slope of a piece of the fallen dome, Ryan paused to scowl at something on the other side. Then the big man started forward, and as the rest crested the dome they could see a body sprawled on the ground, its bandage-wrapped limbs splayed at angles impossible for any living being.

  “A member of the Core,” Krysty said, squinting upward. There was no sign of any activity along the edge of the cliff, but the desert muties might be hiding like before.

  “No sign of a wound,” Mildred said, kneeling to inspect the crumpled body. “He must have simply fallen from the top.”

  “No, from that ledge,” Dean stated excitedly, pointing.

  Sure enough, only fifty feet above them was a rocky ledge in the cliff, an extension of a meandering crack that formed a kind of natural trail leading from the top.

  “And there’s our exit,” Ryan said, cracking the knuckles on both hands. “No more than fifty feet max. We can do that easy.”

  “Yeah, but we’re dead meat if stickies attack while we climb,” J.B. said gruffly, surveying the area.

  “Gotta take the chance,” Ryan stated, sliding the pack off his shoulder. “Okay, drop your packs. The lighter we are, the easier the climb. J.B. and I will stay behind to give cover. Once the rest of you reach the ledge, hitch your belts together and haul up the backpacks. Then cover us while we climb.”

  The simple plan needed no discussion, so divesting themselves of the haversacks and assorted shoulder bags, the five companions started feeling the details of the rock with their fingers. Finding small purchases, the friends wiggled the toes of their combat boots into some cracks and pulled themselves off the ground. Then testing their positions, they reached high again to continue the endless process. Time was short, but they had to move slow. They might only get one chance at this, and a single mistake would be deadly. A fall of fifty feet onto concrete would chill as fast as a round to the head.

  Taking a Molotov and a homemade pipe bomb from the bags for quick access, Ryan and J.B. readied their blasters and alternately watched the cliff and the burning preDark city as the others slowly began to ascend toward the ledge above, and freedom.

  WATCHING THE SMOKE RISE ahead of the convoy through the front windows of the lead wag, the Trader suddenly jerked alert as the desert abruptly yawned wide before War Wag One. What in hell was that, a nuke crater? But then she saw dozens of burning buildings sprawling in the ground below. That was no skybomb crater, but a sinkhole with a preDark city inside!

  “Stop!” Kate ordered, placing aside her cold can of soup, the spoon rattling loose.

  “Bet your ass I’m stopping,” Jake replied, as the massive vehicle rumbled to a slow halt. “Black dust, will ya look at that. Just look at it!”

  That Kate was doing, and even as the Trader rose from her chair, the woman found herself unsure of what to do next. The ruins were enormous! Dozens of blocks, with huge brick buildings rising almost level to the desert floor. From the billowing smoke, it appeared that most of the place was burning, but her people had done raids on crumbling preDark ruins before. Once while a mall was sinking into a swamp, and another while it was getting bombed during a sandstorm. Burning made it trickier, but not impossible. Nothing was impossible.

  “Nuking hell,” Jessica said, massaging a temple. “Just look at it!”

  “Shitfire, mebbe it is a blast crater,” Roberto muttered, hunching his shoulders as if braced for a blow. “Check the rads immediately!”

  “Already did, and it’s clear,” Eric said over the ceiling speakers. “Whatever destroyed this place wasn’t atomic.”

  “Not a hot zone, good,” Kate said, running stiff fingers through her hair. “But this was the source of that mushroom cloud we saw before?”

  “Dead on,” Jake replied, both hands still on the steering wheel of the war wag. “Same lat and long.”

  “Mebbe it was white smoke, or a salt whirlwind forming in the hole,” Jessica offered hesitantly. “Hell, I dunno. But look at all those buildings!”

  “Just fucking think of it. A complete preDark ville!” the door guard started, rubbing the back of his free hand across his mouth, the other clutching the M-16
with white fingers. “Fuel, ammo, food, clothing, meds…”

  “Rads, tox chems, muties, bobbies, cave-ins, avalanche, Gaza, the Core,” Kate added in a growl, hitching her gun belt. “The bigger the prize, the more ants there will be trying to carry pieces away.”

  “At the rate it’s going,” Roberto added, craning his neck for a better view out the front windshield, “there won’t be anything left in a few days.”

  Which raised an interesting point for Kate. Two villes destroyed in the desert, one by water, now another by fire. Could this also be the work of the outlander called Ryan? Mebbe her info on the man was scragged like a comp disk. Could be he was a technophobe, and hated any kind of science or whitecoat. She had encountered such feebs before, but generally only as loonies running about in rags. Folks like that weren’t really a threat to anybody but themselves. But this was another matter entirely.

  “Okay, we’re going to do a full recce,” Kate decided, watching the buzzards circle in the sky about the sunken city. “Put the cargo vans behind those big dunes to the south, with War Wag Two as protection. I want hands on blasters and fingers on triggers.”

  Pulling his sawed-off from the holster, Roberto scowled, “We’re going in alone?”

  “Not quite,” she replied, but then was interrupted by a shout of surprise from the tech at the radar screen.

  “Chief, we have a bounce on the screen,” he announced, working the controls. The luminous arms of the radar swept along the glowing screen, leaving ghostly blobs in its wake of varying sizes.

  “Something from a skyscraper?” Roberto asked, studying the screen.

  Glancing out the front windows, Kate scowled darkly. “No, the sig is too small and a good mile away. Must be on the far side of the crater, sinkhole, whatever this fragging thing is.”

  “Hard to tell for sure,” Blackjack said, the tech caressing the controls to urge greater clarity from the old patched equipment. “There’s so much fucking hash in the atmosphere! But it appears to be something large and metal on the far side on the crater.”

  A wag? Going to the periscope, Kate pulled it up and tried to get a look, but even with the max magnification the billowing smoke from the conflagration below masked most of the city, along with anything beyond.

  “Is it moving?” she demanded, chewing the inside of a cheek.

  The man didn’t reply for a minute, then relaxed. “No, Trader, it appears to be standing still.”

  “Just some wreckage or ruins then,” Roberto said confidently, but then added, “Although this part of the Great Salt is normally bare as a baron’s heart.”

  True enough.

  “Jake, move us farther away from the edge of the cliff. It doesn’t look too bastard stable,” Kate ordered. “We’re staying here as the anchor. Rob, send out some troops on the bikes for a recce. I want a complete circle of the pit.”

  “Looking for a way down?” Roberto asked, checking a canteen hanging from a metal peg on the wall before slinging it over an arm. “No way in hell we’re ever finding a trail wide enough for the rigs. Much less secure enough to take the weight.”

  “Only nobody tries a descent without my permission,” she commanded bluntly. “Gaza could have set fire to the ruins as a distraction to night creep us from behind.”

  “Eric, keep the ear going at full power.”

  “Done and done,” the man replied over the speakers.

  “Think Gaza is going to try and jack the whole convoy?” Roberto asked, adding a pair of binocs and an Uzi to his load. “Mighty ambitious for the baron.”

  “He jacked a ville once,” she reminded him. “Why not a convoy?”

  Stuffing some spare ammo clips into his pockets, Roberto took an Aussie digger hat hanging from the rear of his chair at the .50-cal.

  “Fair enough,” he rumbled, heading for the door. “Be back in a few.”

  “Stay razor,” Trader directed as the armed guard lowered the curved section of the hull to the sandy ground outside. Instantly, a warm breeze blew into the control room of the rig. “Radio when you can.”

  “If we can, sure,” he told her, descending the metal steps, wisps of smoke coming through the open hatchway carrying the smell of wood and some kind of meat. Whatever the frag that could possibly be she had no damn idea.

  Watching the rear vid screens, Kate saw Roberto and five other troopers haul down the motorcycles from the side-mounted racks of War Wag Two and check the engines and fuel tanks.

  “Prime the missiles in the main pod,” the Trader commanded, “We may have to provide some cover for the riders.”

  “Already on it, Chief,” Jessica replied, both hands throwing switches and turning dials. “We’re loaded and ready.”

  “Not yet. Turn off the heat-seekers, or the damn rockets will just arch down after the fire.”

  “But we’ll be shooting blind without them,” Jake said, his hands playing over the controls like a musician. “Might ace our own people!”

  Resuming her chair, Kate grunted at that possibility. “Lock the first one on the metal thing,” she said.

  “Alert, I have blasterfire,” Eric reported over the ceiling speaker.

  “Shitfire, gimme a location!” the Trader demanded, leaning toward the front window of the war wag.

  “Inconclusive,” he reported slowly. “Almost sounds like two different spots at the same time.”

  “Are they near each other?” Kate demanded. “We got some sort of a firefight going on down there?”

  The ceiling speaker crackled for a few seconds. “Negative on that, Chief,” Eric said at last. “The blasters are much too far apart to be shooting at each other.”

  “Probably just old ammo cooking off from the heat,” Fat Pete said, chewing on a piece of jerky. The man had both hands on the grips of the port-side .50-cal, and was nervously shuffling his boots on the corrugated floor.

  “Yeah?” Kate muttered angrily. “Mix ‘probable’ with ‘always’ and you get aced constantly.”

  The man had no response to that and lowered his head as if to block her from his sight.

  “Stay loose,” the Trader ordered in a softer tone. “Gaza is the one to be worried if he’s here.”

  Fat Pete grunted in reply but took on a more normal stance.

  “And what if it’s Ryan?” Jessica asked.

  “Ain’t decided on him yet,” Kate replied honestly.

  Just then, the darkening clouds overhead rumbled with thunder, and the wind slightly increased, kicking up more loose salt and sand until it was almost a visible river of motion. As each bolt of lightning lit up the fiery clouds, there was a faint crackle of static from the speakers, and several of the meters flicked, the radar screen went out of focus and the compass spun wildly.

  Pulling the half clip from her Ingram, Kate placed it aside for reloading later on, and inserted a full mag into the blaster, working the bolt to chamber a round and clicking off the safety.

  A blaster fight, or old ammo? Gaza or Ryan, or something else entirely? There was no way of telling, but something down deep in her bones told the woman that, one way or the other, there was a hell of a storm coming.

  ON THE FAR SIDE of the sinkhole, masked by the raging fires filling the city, the second sec hunter droid finally responded to the radio beacon of its smashed brother.

  The damaged droid began to remove bits and pieces of the destroyed machine, replacing weapons, servomechanisms, solenoids, eyes and power packs. The work steadily progressed with the motions of the buzzards eating the dead almost perfectly duplicating the utilitarian mechanical salvaging.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “That’s the last of it,” Baron Gaza said, tossing aside the empty can. Tightening the vapor cap on the fuel tank of the LAV 25, he locked the protective shutter into place and patted the heavy metal shielding with an open palm.

  What a find this city had been! Along with the weapons, MRE packs and ammo, he now had a full tank of fuel. Just incredible. The ground around the APC was litt
ered with empty fuel cans, laboriously hauled up from the preDark convoy at the bottom of the cliff. But all the work had been worth it. Both the main and reserve tanks were full, and there were five more twenty-gallon containers stuffed inside the war wag.

  And best of all, it wasn’t reg fuel—that would have evaporated long ago—but that good mil stuff that Trader called condensed fuel. It didn’t have a smell and didn’t evaporate worth a damn even in direct sunlight, yet it fueled a gasoline engine or a diesel.

  The ammo bins were jammed full of grens, linked belts of brass, even a couple of those fancy LAW rocket launcher things. Never having seen one before, Gaza had no idea how to fire the damn things, until Allison read the directions on top of the plastic tube. After that, it was easy as knifing a blind man. With this kind of heavy iron, nothing could stop the baron now!

  Going to the canteen hanging from a steel loop designed to attach equipment to the outside of the LAV 25, Gaza drank his fill, then poured some more on his face and slicked back his soaked hair, enjoying the feel of the drops trickling down the collar of his new khaki shirt. He didn’t know what the colorful bar of decorations meant on the left side of the shirt, but since the clothing came from the leader of the convoy below, that meant they were important, which was good enough for him.

  Standing halfway out of the APC turret, Allison frowned as she pulled back from the scope bolted on top of the big .50-cal machine gun. The longeyes couldn’t be used when the .50-cal was firing, or else the brutal recoil would remove an eye, but on single-round firing, it turned the big gun into a longblaster of fantastic range, if only moderate accuracy. However, the scope served many functions aside from merely locating a target.

  Rapping her knuckles loudly on the armored chassis of the war wag, Allison got her husband’s attention and pointed urgently toward the southern desert.

  “Trouble?” Gaza asked, scowling that way, the rivulets of water running down his face from the wet hair. To the east was the burning city, mostly hidden by the billowing plumes of dark smoke. In every other direction lay only the Great Salt, utter desolation for a hundred miles.