Eden’s Twilight Read online

  Rejoining the rest of the companions in the front office, Ryan set down a crate of grens. The others were already looting the dead men for clothing and blasters, but Jak gave a soft whistle from the corner, and the companions saw their belongings spread out on a large table. Everything was present, but had been searched: pockets turned inside out, knives removed from sheaths, spare socks unrolled, even the brass had been removed from the blasters, a dozen rounds opened and the powder spilled for inspection.

  Retrieving their own personal weapons, the companions spent a tense few minutes reloading while Ryan stood guard with the stolen wheelgun, closely watching the front door for any sign of motion. Thick wooden shutters covered the inside of the windows, and he could guess that was partially to offer the sec men protection in case they were attacked, but mostly to afford them privacy for brutal interrogations.

  “Here you go, lover!” Krysty whispered, tossing something to him.

  Deftly, Ryan made the catch with one hand and, working the slide on his SIG-Sauer to chamber a round, the one-eyed warrior stood a bit easier with two weapons balanced in his fists.

  When the others finished dressing, Ryan did the same, then helped J.B. and Doc drag the bodies into the cell and lock the door. Reclaiming the bathroom towel, Krysty poured what smelled like real coffee out of a thermos and wiped the floor clean. Hopefully, that would mask the telltale copper reek of fresh blood.

  “That real coffee I smell?” J.B. asked hopefully.

  “Thermos full,” Ryan said, jerking a thumb. “Help yourself.”

  “What are these?” Krysty asked, lifting a brown sugary ring from a pile on a small plate. The smell was heavenly, almost narcotic, and the woman wondered if the sec men had been indulging in some sort of narcotic binge of drugs and cards, working themselves up to the bloody job of torture.

  “It’s called a doughnut,” Mildred said. “Nothing but fat, sugar and salt. Just what we need to keep us going after being fried like chicken nuggets in that damn net.”

  Seeing the others hesitate, the physician took one and stuffed it whole into her mouth. “Iz goof!” she mumbled happily.

  After a hesitant nibble, the rest of the companions agreed and cleaned off the plate in a few minutes.

  “In regard to the time we were unconscious, perhaps it is not my place to inquire, but…I…That is…” Doc blushed crimson. “Have either of you ladies been…harmed in any way?”

  “Never better,” Krysty said, giving him a puzzled look. “Just sore as hell in my damn kidneys. Why? Don’t we look okay?” Then comprehension flared, and she gently smiled at the time traveler. “No, we’re fine, Doc. Nobody actually rode us while we were asleep.”

  “Glad to hear it,” J.B. growled. “Now I only want to ace these bastards, without taking them apart first.”

  Using the heavy desk to block the door, the companions raided the small armory, taking everything they could comfortably carry, especially bulletproof vests and the rocket launchers. They were very lightweight, only ten pounds or so, and came with a strap for carrying them across the back.

  Next, J.B. went straight to the safe, but the combination dial proved to be his match, and the Armorer finally relented with a dark expression.

  Spotting a first-aid box on the wall, Mildred hurried over eagerly, but it only contained things she already had in her med kit: plastic bags of clean cloth for bandages, leather strips for tourniquets, sterile water for washing wounds, plus a few tiny bottles of tinctures and jars of unguent. Just homemade brews and field bandages. Damn.

  “These assholes have been stealing everything they could for decades,” J.B. whispered, stuffing his munitions bag with grens.

  “Not that it did them any good,” Doc snorted, working the slide on a .44 Desert Eagle piston. The handcannon and spare clips went into the pockets of his rumpled frock coat.

  “Now what?” Mildred asked, taking down a lever-action Winchester. Although it was the terror of the Old West in its day, now the longblaster was considered slow and cumbersome. However, it was the only thing in the armory equipped with a telescopic sight. That could make a big difference.

  “Now we find out if the war has started yet,” Ryan stated, heading back to the front office.

  Turning off the lanterns, the companions let their sight adjust to the darkness, then eased open the shutters to peek outside. Rows of armed men and women were across the street in the town square, receiving a speech from a woman standing inside a small gazebo. Behind the sec men was a mob of women with wheelbarrows full of wicker baskets.

  “Christ, I feel like I’m going insane,” Mildred whispered, rubbing her temple. “A mowed lawn, water, sprinklers, bird baths, parking meters for God’s sake!? Never thought I’d ever live to see such things again.”

  “Nor I, madam,” Doc said uneasily. “A gazebo in the Deathlands is staggeringly disingenuous!”

  “Shut the frag up. I can’t hear what they’re saying,” Krysty said softly, straining to hear the muffled voices.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Yes, killed, only feet away from where we stand!” Mayor Spencer shouted to the crowd from the stage. “Deputy Ted Ellison, cowardly stabbed in the back by the very outsiders that we have locked in our jail!”

  The armed mob roared its approval.

  “Death to the busriders!” a woman screeched, waving a shotgun. “Hang ’em! Set them on fire, and hang ’em!”

  Once more, the crowd voiced its approval, and the cry of “busriders” was repeated several times. Nobody was quite sure what the phrase meant anymore, but it was considered the most foul curse imaginable.

  Standing tall, Mayor Spencer appreciated the fervor of the people, but did not want this to become a lynching again. There were a lot of questions the outsiders had to answer before being allowed to die. “Ted Ellison is dead. He died so that we may live!” the mayor continued, hooking thumbs into her gunbelt. “So I want everybody to be extra careful about all the hot metal and the slippery floors. Gloves and shoes, remember that. Gloves and shoes at all times!”

  “Move fast, and it’s your ass!” Sheriff MacIntyre added, walking onto the stage.

  Some of the people in the throng chuckled at that; a few seemed shocked at the rough language.

  “Furthermore,” the sheriff declared, rubbing his freshly shaved face. “You must be doubly sure to never, ever—”

  “Mayor?” The radio clipped to her belt crackled into life. “Your Honor? This is Station Nine to the mayor! Come in please!”

  Turning away from the villagers so that they could not hear her over the microphone, Henrietta Spencer pulled out the radio and thumbed the button. “This is the mayor. Go, Nine,” she commanded crisply.

  “Ma’am, there’s a…a…Hell, I don’t know what the fuck it is!” the deputy burbled, close to panic. “The damn thing looks like a steam locomotive, and it’s coming this way!”

  “Look, there are no tracks in the clover…”

  “It’s got wheels!”

  “Okay, we’ll still steam them in the tunnel like all of the other invaders,” the mayor snapped. “Why are you wasting my time about—”

  “It’s not in the fucking clover!” the deputy snarled. “This thing is on the other side of the Barrier River! It’s coming from the east! Did you hear me, the east!”

  With a struggle, the major held her temper. “Okay, it’s to the east. Who cares? Unless they have wings, or brought along a bridge—”

  “They did!”

  “Come again?” Spencer whispered, suddenly feeling very small. “They did what?”

  “A bridge! The people operating the locomotive brought along a motherfucking bridge! It sort of looks like the box trestle from the Mud Lake, and they’re trying to shove it across the Barrier to reach our side!”

  “They dragged the whole bridge here?” the mayor asked, glancing over a shoulder to the east. Nothing was in sight but the high school, the library, a playground and rows upon rows of neatly tended homes
.

  “Yes, ma’am, and they’re trying to push it across! Plus, a lot of other vehicles, too! Every goddamn one of them carrying machine guns and all kinds of military hardware. They’re gonna be on our side in only minutes!”

  “It must be Broke-Neck Pete,” MacIntyre growled.

  “I swear, if this is some sort of a joke,” Spencer began in a menacing tone.

  Just then, a fiery dart shot into the eastern sky, and everybody turned to stare in growing horror as the missile came streaking down to violently impact on a side street. The blast ripped apart that section of the street, a dozen windows shattered from shrapnel, and the concussion rolled louder than summer thunder over the entire village. Hundreds of lights appeared in the darkness. Yelling people began running around madly in the streets, dogs started howling, and the deputies on the wall cut loose with their assault rifles at something on the other side of the granite barrier.

  “Jesus Christ, ma’am, I think that was a missile!” the deputy gushed over the radio.

  “Shut the fuck up!” the mayor snarled, changing channels. “Command and Control, this is Spencer, give me audio. Repeat, this is Spencer, give me audio now!” The last few words came from the public address loudspeakers set on telephone poles around the green.

  “Now hear this,” the mayor said in forced calm, her words booming across the village. “Now hear this. Red alert. Repeat, red alert! This not a drill! All mothers get your children into the bunkers! All children to the bunkers immediately! The village is under attack!”

  Sheriff MacIntyre spoke into his radio. “Everybody else, to your post! Arm all weapons systems and prime the defensive grid! Repeat, this is not a drill. The goddamn busriders are coming over the bridge, boys! It’s time to bale or fail!”

  A few of the armed men cheered at the prospect of battle, but the rest simply took off running into the night, intent upon reaching their assigned posts. Sirens began to howl, the noise rapidly building in volume, and on the wall huge searchlights crashed into operation, the intense beams sweeping the land outside the village, looking for targets.

  “STEAM!” KRYSTY SAID, turning fast. “They’re going to ace Roberto with steam!”

  “Millie, can they do that?” J.B. asked with a worried expression.

  “Hell, yes!” she responded grimly. “If the boilers can build enough pressure, they could blow War Wag One out of that tunnel like spitting out a watermelon seed, and the heat would parboil the crew, acing them while still inside the wag!”

  “Without harming the brass or fuel,” Ryan said out loud. Fireblast, that was why the tunnel had been so fragging clean. It had to get used on a regular basis! This whole thing had been a jack from the very beginning, Cascade sending out Yates…or rather MacIntyre, as a phony doomie to confirm the fake journals. A double lie. They had to have sent out dozens of the damn things, mebbe hundreds, hoping to draw in a trader or two. They had caught a lot more than that, and now it was time for the harvest. Harvest. The word burned in his mind like a white flame of hate.

  Suddenly, heavy machine guns opened fire from the wall as another missile rose high to arch back downward again. However, this time it hit somewhere on other side of the wall, merely throwing up flaming gouts of cornstalks and several outriders.

  “Pete is trying to get the range of the wall,” Doc muttered, hefting his blaster. “Once he does, it will come down faster than the fabled walls of Jericho!”

  “That’s when the rads will really hit the Geiger,” Krysty stated, her hair waving and flexing.

  “Not our problem,” Ryan shot back, walking across the office and flicking a butane lighter alive to study the bloodstained village maps on the corkboard. “Let Pete keep these bastards busy while we find the boilers and shut them down! Mildred, any idea where they could be located?”

  “No idea whatsoever,” Mildred replied peevishly, chewing a lip. “City hall must have a big furnace, and the high school an even bigger one. Not either of those should have the sheer volume needed to take out a convoy of war wags!”

  Minutes ticked away as the companions ferociously studied the map. There was nothing there marked command, or defense grid, or steam generator, or anything useful.

  “Gaia, I know where the damn thing is!” Krysty cried out. “Remember the dirt road that cut through the cropland? The bare dirt road that went straight from the tunnel to the ville wall?”

  “Dark Night, that must be the feeder pipe!” J.B. declared. “The heat killed the grass and crops along the whole length, so they just turned the bald section into an access road!”

  “Then the boilers must be right on the other side of the wall,” Mildred added, reviewing their journey in her mind. “Which would put them—”

  “Right there!” Ryan stated, stabbing the map with a finger. “Smack between the grain silos and the water reservoir.” There was a large square there, but no name or description.

  Going to the desk, Mildred opened the top drawer and hauled out a phone book. She started flipping through the street index.

  “Careful, Millie, those pages are mighty yellow!” J.B. warned.

  “Always were,” the physician muttered, then grinned triumphantly. “Okay, that is the location for Cascade Shipping and Delivery. That’s why you couldn’t find it on the map, John. Cascade is the name of the local truck depot!”

  Pushing back his fedora, J.B. nodded. “Makes sense. When skydark hit there was probably more canned and frozen food stored there waiting to be shipped out than in all of the homes and markets combined! The depot would have meant life itself to the locals for decades.”

  “While the world starved, they supped on a cornucopia of frozen TV dinners,” Doc said, clearly offended.

  “Exactly!”

  “And now it’s their military headquarters,” Ryan growled, checking the action of the rapidfire.

  “Which means it will be full of armed sec men,” Krysty said, scowling, adjusting the strap of a LAW.

  “Not anymore, dear lady,” Doc corrected. “They will all be on the wall fighting off Broke-Neck Pete. The enemy of my enemy—”

  “Is still my fragging enemy,” Ryan interrupted. “But one fight at a time. First we save Roberto and his people, then we’ll decide what to do about Pete.”

  “Do, sir?”

  “After what we’ve seen, he can fragging have Cascade,” Ryan rasped, shouldering the longblaster. “Hell, the bastards deserve each other.”

  Just then, another missile hit, the detonation rattling the window shutters. Several buildings were ablaze downtown, the ringing clang of fire engines arriving at the scene startling both Mildred and Doc.

  “Wait, a moment, I’ve got an idea!” J.B. shouted, running down the corridor. “Be right back!”

  A few moments later there came a loud whomp, and soon a smoky J.B. returned, patting his munitions bag. “Okay, let’s go,” he said with savage cheerfulness.

  On the streets outside, the companions stayed in the shadows as several Jeeps raced by, the grim crew inside each military transport armed with an M-60 machine gun, LAW rocket launcher or a flamethrower.

  Alongside the office was a carport containing a large camou-colored Hummer. Ryan took out the overhead light with a hip shot, the bark of the SIG-Sauer lost amid the general turmoil of the building conflict.

  Incredibly, the door was unlocked, and the companions piled inside quickly. Sliding behind the wheel, J.B. reached under the dashboard and yanked out some wires, then touched them together until the engine started with a soft purr.

  Lying curled on the floor mat, Mildred passed up a cigar box she found below the front seat. “It’ll help hide your face,” she explained.

  Gratefully, the Armorer pulled out a homemade cheroot and lit up with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Nobody ever really gave up smoking, you just stopped for a while, that was all.

  Suddenly a rocket came streaming down to slam into the stone wall. The granite blocks shook visibly, a score of sec men thrown to the ground.
>
  Quickly donning the cap and sunglasses of an aced deputy, J.B. backed out of the carport, and began to head across town for the large, well-illuminated building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, guard dogs and concrete pillboxes.

  “Fireblast, there’s no way we can get through all of that in time!” Ryan swore, glancing over the fortifications. “We’ll have to try another way. Okay, head for the wall! We gotta find some stairs and fast!”

  “Going at attack from the roof?” J.B. asked, stomping on the accelerator and turning a corner at full speed.

  “Something like that,” Ryan replied, pulling a gren from his pocket and removing the tape from around the arming lever.

  A group of deputies running along the sidewalk looked curiously at the racing Hummer, and one of them started talking into a radio.

  “My dear sir!” Doc gasped in shock. “How will attacking the roof gain us access to the boilers in the basement?”

  “It won’t,” Ryan said gruffly. “And that’s the whole damn point.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The sounds of machine guns filled the night, sizzling green tracers extending from the distant wall of the ville, and reaching out from the heavy weapons of Thunder and Roadhog. Rockets streaked out from both sides, but most were caught in the streams of hot lead and exploded harmlessly in midair.

  The moment that the box trestle had been shoved across the river gorge, Pete had sent over the lightweight delivery vans as a vanguard. As expected, most of them disintegrated in the field of land mines, but a few reached the forest only to be halted. There was no pathway or road through the dense grove of pine and poplar. It was a solid barrier, a living wall of wood more than a hundred feet wide.

  “Again!” Pete commanded from the cupola of the LVTP-7. “Hit ’em again!”

  Once more, the homemade bazookas from Newton launched, sending rockets spiraling into the trees. They exploded among the foliage, sending a spray of shrapnel and flame in every direction.