Savage Armada Read online

  Pursing his lips, Doc said, "No, indeed. It is a pure-blooded creature of nature, same as you and I. Three feet tall, eight-foot wingspan, it's the killer of the sky. In a fight with a sting-wing, or a screamer, I would put my money on this winged emperor."

  Turning, Ryan studied the sky. Tiny dots were circling high above them. "Looks like they travel in flocks," he said, walking slowly toward the gateway. "Everybody move slow and walk casual to the door. Don't want to get caught in the open by these things."

  "Big bastards," Jak stated, sliding out the spent brass and inserting live rounds. The empty rounds went into a pocket he buttoned shut.

  "Oh, it is highly unlikely they will attack with one of their own dead on the ground," Doc stated. "Besides, birds fly in flocks, but attack alone."

  "Usually," Mildred whispered, already walking toward the open doorway. "You an expert on condors?"

  "No, madam, I am not."

  "Then shut up."

  An odd motion in the treetops caught Krysty's attention, and she started firing even before the condors hidden in the greenery launched themselves at the human prey.

  "The trees!" she shouted over the discharge of her revolver.

  Even as the companions turned to this new threat, the birds in the sky folded their wings and dropped straight down, their huge bodies brownish-gold blurs.

  "Dive-bombers!" Mildred cursed, lifting her ZKR blaster in both hands and tracking the huge killers. Two hundred yards away, she had their speed and squeezed off a shot. A condor flipped sideways, colliding with others and breaking the mass charge.

  The rest of the companions opened fire in every direction.

  "Can't hit them!" Dean shouted frantically, slamming in a fresh clip. Spent brass dotted the ground around his boots, some so fresh they still contained traces of smoke. "They're too fast!"

  "Don't aim at the body!" his father barked, the SIG-Sauer coughing a 9 mm death song. "Shoot at the beak! Use their speed against them!"

  Dean did as ordered, and a condor died, then another, and a third. But six more took their place from the jungle trees. The supply of the winged giants seemed endless, and his ammo was dwindling rapidly.

  He glanced at the doorway. More was in his backpack, but that was fifty feet away. Might as well be on the moon.

  Looping into their midst, a screaming condor flew between the companions, needle-sharp talons grabbing for human flesh. Jak gestured and the bird hit the ground rolling, its neck stump pumping out blood by the pint.

  Flicking the bird's head off his blade, the teenager grunted in satisfaction and fired his Magnum at another target, but kept the gore-soaked knife ready in his grip.

  "Keep shifting position!" Ryan yelled, dropping a clip and slamming a fresh mag into the SIG-Sauer. "Don't give them a stable target!"

  In ragged formation, the companions rotated in a circle. Disoriented by the tactic, several of the birds banked away from the group to try from a different direction. But that exposed their vulnerable underbellies for a critical instant, and a dozen more died in the sky.

  But then the first of the mutilated bodies arrived. The booming LeMat was violently knocked from Doc's grip by a thrashing corpse, and Ryan staggered under the impact of another. As they scrambled to recover their weapons, there was a breach in the circle and the condors rushed the weak spot in the humans' defense.

  The chattering Uzi spraying a wreath of hot lead, J.B. shrugged a shoulder and managed to slide the S&W shotgun off his back. "Millie!" he shouted, tossing the blaster her way.

  Holstering her ZKR, Mildred made the catch, turned and fired as fast as she could pump the action. The barrage of flechettes tore the incoming flock apart into an explosion of feathers and blood.

  Emptying half a clip, Ryan aced two more birds on the wing. One plummeted out of sight beyond the edge of the mesa, while the other hit amid the wreckage of the predark wags. It bounced off a dropping-splattered car hood to land on the ground.

  "Fireblast!" Ryan cursed as feathered gobbets of flesh pelted them with stinging force. "There are too many! Run for the gateway! We'll hold them off from there!"

  Breaking ranks to charge for the open doorway, the companions jumped over the twitching bodies littering the soil just as a dozen more of the feathered titans noiselessly glided around the sheet-metal building. As they soared no more than a yard off the ground, it was an eerie sight, almost nightmarish in its unnatural silence.

  Yanking another round from the row of shells sewn into the strap of the shotgun, Mildred hastily thumbed it into the receiver, worked the pump and fired from the hip. The birds in the front disintegrated under the assault of flechettes, and the rest wheeled away with uncanny speed, once again circling for another try.

  For a single moment, the mesa was clear, and the companions dashed for the doorway. Piling inside, they went around the console to reform the firing line. Nimbly Dean leaped over the skeleton on the floor, but Krysty tripped and went sprawling, losing her blaster under the shelves. Jak kicked the chair out from under the door while J.B. emptied another clip in a stuttering burst out the door. The clip ran empty, and he dropped the mag, hand scrambling to find a fresh load.

  "Dark night!" he cursed, and ducked just in time to avoid being gutted by a condor flying sideways, its talons extended like a collection of curved knives.

  Dean dodged low, the talons raking the air before his face, missing by less than an inch. Mildred blocked its attack with her med kit, the canvas ripping loudly, the precious supplies spilling onto the floor.

  Firing a brief burst through the doorway, J.B. dropped the Uzi and shouldered the door shut. A split second later, something thumped into the steel, screaming and clawing the metal in mindless fury.

  Jerking the bolt on the Steyr to free the internal mag, Ryan saw the oncoming condor just in time and swung the blaster with all of his strength to slam the bird aside. Tumbling out of control, its spine broken, the condor dropped directly onto the Tesla coil. There was a blinding flash, and a ball of ash drifted down from the air onto the floor.

  Crackling through his combat boots, Ryan felt the electric discharge hit him hard. His leg muscles cramped, and every hair on his body tried to stick straight out. His kidneys convulsed, and there was a brief sensation of his skin trying to crawl away. The racking pain passed in a few moments and the Deathlands warrior gasped for breath, knowing he had escaped electrocution purely by the thickness of his boot soles.

  "Mildred!" Doc bellowed from behind the console.

  Ryan spun at the cry, blaster at the ready, then he balked. Doc was kneeling alongside Krysty. The woman was lying on top of the ancient skeleton, her animated hair absolutely still, a smoking hand resting on the bare metal floor.

  Chapter Three

  Sluggishly Krysty awakened to the odor of her own roasting flesh. Her stomach rebelled at the thought, but then she slowly realized it wasn't herself she smelted.

  She was lying inside the gateway on a bedroll, a blanket folded under her head as a pillow. Right outside was a roaring bonfire. The rest of the companions were sitting around the crackling blaze while several gutted condors turned on a spit over flames. The others would cut slices off the hot birds with their knives and eat the meat right from the blade. A piece of tarp they used as a tent was on the ground, piled with fresh fruit and some odd lumpy tan sticks. A battered aluminum pot sat on a rock near the fire, its contents bubbling softly. Jak and Dean were standing guard duty again, their backs to the campfire with weapons in their hands. Neither seemed overly tense or apprehensive. The sunlight was coming from the wrong direction, but aside from that everything was quiet.

  "Hey," Krysty said weakly, gamely sitting upright. Merciful Gaia, every muscle in her whole body was stiff, and her hair felt strangely numb, but aside from that she seemed to be undamaged.

  Lowering a tin cup, Ryan turned in her direction and smiled broadly. "Morning, lover. Coffee?" he asked, gesturing with the cup sloshing a little of the black brew.

&nbs
p; "Please," she replied, rising from the nest of blankets and stumbling into the sunshine.

  While Ryan poured some of the boiling water from the big pot into a collapsible U.S. Army cup, Mildred moved aside to make room for the redhead on the ground.

  "Sit here," the physician said. "Feeling okay?"

  "Not dead. That's good enough," Krysty said, her tongue moving awkwardly in her mouth as if it were still asleep. "Morning?"

  "You slept through the night," Ryan said, opening a shiny silver envelope and sprinkling some brown crystals into the steaming water. He then carefully added a plastic pack of powdered milk and two of sugar.

  Krysty accepted the cup gratefully and took a healthy swallow, regardless of the temperature. "So what happened?" she asked, savoring the warmth seeping into her stiff hands. She was feeling better by the minute, the fire driving the numbness from her limbs. "There was a condor in the gateway…" Her voice trailed off.

  "Ryan aced it, but it fell on the Tesla, releasing enough voltage to melt a tank," J.B. explained, thumbing live rounds into an empty magazine. The Uzi lay nearby on a clean cloth, the blaster freshly cleaned and polished. "But the electricity went through the whole building, killing six more condors sitting on the roof. But that's what saved you, the enormous surface area dissipated the voltage enough so that you only got stunned and not fried."

  "Thank Gaia for that," Krysty said, sipping the brew with distaste. It was the usual instant coffee from an MRE pack, but there was yet an odd metallic flavor in her mouth.

  "Got any toothpaste left?" she asked hopefully. "Or chewing gum?"

  "All out," Mildred said. "Didn't the coffee help?"

  "Not really," Krysty said honestly, placing the cup aside.

  "Then try this, dear lady," Doc said offering her one of the tan sticks. "Chew it like you would gum."

  The lumpy stick resembled bamboo and was as hard as a rock. Careful of breaking a tooth, Krysty chewed and sucked until the wooden tube began to soften with her saliva and a delicious sweetness filled her mouth, completely banishing the aftertaste of the electrocution.

  "Sugarcane," Ryan said, hacking off another mouthful of condor. He chewed and swallowed before continuing. "We found a whole grove of the stuff. Jak says it's exactly what we need to make shine."

  "What about the pipes?" Krysty asked, using her fingers to take some soft splinters from her mouth.

  "Got an answer for that, too," Ryan said, tossing away the dregs of his coffee. "We got some of the coils and metal that we need from the car wrecks here. They're rusty, but salvageable."

  "What are we missing? Condenser pipes?" she guessed.

  "Bull's-eye. We've gotta have some copper tubing or we'll never distill alcohol clean enough to run the engine. But last night, J.B. spotted the lights from some ruins to the east. Say, ten, fifteen miles at the most. There should be plenty of copper pipes there. People used a lot of it in bathroom plumbing."

  "Big," Jak stated as a fact. "Need smaller." Mildred scrunched her face. "About the diameter of the copper pipes used for the ice-maker in a refrigerator?"

  The teen nodded. "Perfect."

  "But we can use bathroom plumbing if there is nothing else available," J.B. asked, pausing in his work.

  "Sure. But take longer cook. Refrig better." Picking at his teeth with a splinter of wood, Ryan grunted in annoyance. A hardware store would have exactly what they wanted, but those were almost always looted.

  "So we concentrate on the better houses, or any resort hotels still standing," the Deathlands warrior decided. "Twelve feet should do us. Just remember that old copper cracks easy, so be bastard careful removing it. We can patch a small break, but nothing big."

  "Excellent!" Doc beamed. "We are practically gone already."

  "Hopefully. The ruins might be on another island," J.B. said, gnawing on a leg. "But we can carve out canoes to get there if necessary."

  Krysty moved closer to the fire, savoring the smell of the fresh meat. "So this is an island," she said, basking her hands before the blaze. "Okay, where are we?"

  Tossing aside the cleaned bone, J.B. tapped the minisextant hanging around his neck with a thumb. "Marshall Islands, in the South Pacific."

  The aroma of the cooked birds was hitting the woman hard, and a wave of hunger rose from within. Sliding a knife from her belt sheath, Krysty cut away a large chunk of meat from the roasting condor. It smelled delicious and cut as easily as freshly fallen snow. She took a small bit and smiled. Mildred had once mentioned that these birds were almost extinct in her time. No wonder. They tasted wonderful.

  "Been a while since we jumped off American soil," Krysty commented around a full mouth, grease on her chin.

  "Still are in the U.S. America owns these islands," Ryan said, ripping open a foil packet and wiping his face with a lemon-scented towelette. Normally he saved the predark items to clean small wounds, but there was no fresh water and greasy hands on a blaster trigger would only get him aced.

  "Or rather, this used to be a hunk of America," he added. "Mildred says we gave it to back to the locals sometime around 1999 or so."

  "But the U.S. still has a lot of missile bases here, and a small Navy dockyard to fuel warships."

  "That's wonderful," Krysty enthused. "Mebbe we can find some ammo and new boots in the warehouses."

  "Possibly," J.B. said, frowning. "But there are over a thousand islands in this chain, and one of them is the most famous in the world. Bikini."

  "The Bikini Atoll?" Doc gasped, dropping a half-eaten wing. "Good God in heaven, man, that was where they detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs just to test how they worked!"

  "This is the area," Ryan stated, gesturing around them.

  "Is the air clean?" Dean asked with a worried expression. He knew his father had to have checked already, but he couldn't help but ask anyway. Hundreds of nukes. Why would the whitecoats set off that many? It was insane.

  Patiently Ryan showed the boy the tiny rad counter on his shirt. The miniature Geiger counter was silent, registering nothing more than the usual background radiation.

  "This island is clean," Ryan stated, "but we better check the rads everywhere we go. Missiles bases, Navy yard, could be mighty bad out there."

  "Gonna be lots of muties," J.B. added grimly, sliding the reloaded clip into the Uzi. He worked the bolt to chamber a round, then dropped the clip and worked the bolt again to eject the live round. Catching it in the air, the Armorer thumbed it back into the clip. Everything was working as smooth as silk. A man who didn't take care of his blaster was just a corpse looking for a hole, nothing more.

  "That's for sure," Ryan declared, standing and retrieving his longblaster. "We get the copper, come straight back here and brewing. No exploration or looting. The sooner we leave here, the better."

  Invisible from within the thick canopy of trees, he watched as they moved, as they made odd noises and did incomprehensible things. But he knew what they were. Two-legs. It had been many moons since he last saw any of the upright animals, but he remembered the taste of their flesh with great pleasure, and the urge to leap upon them right now and feed was very strong.

  Then he saw a large two-leg with only one eye lift a terrible thunder stick into view and he cringed lower among the flowery vines. Many of his kind had been killed by the sticks. They were to be avoided at any cost.

  Besides, there was no need to attack the two-legs here in their nest. He knew what they would do. As silent as a cloud, the mutie turned on the branch of the banyan tree and began the long climb to the ground. Not a leaf stirred as he passed through the thick growth of vines and flowers. The two-legs would to go to the dead place as all the others did, and he could capture them there. Soon his belly would be full of their good meat, and his children would sup upon entrails and sticky brains. But the eyes he would save for the females as a special salty treat.

  Oh, yes, there was no need to risk the terrible pain of the booming thunder sticks. No, he would wait and let the food come to him. T
hen the great feast would begin.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, the companions cleaned up as best they could, using the wet naps from the MRE packs on themselves, and scrubbing the pots and cups with gravel. There was no spare water to waste on washing dishes.

  "Better take everything," Ryan directed, sliding the backpack onto his shoulders. "Don't know how long we'll be gone. A day, a few days, mebbe more."

  The warrior made no sign that he wasn't pleased with how light the pack felt. They were low on both ammo and food. The dead condors had helped to stretch their meager supplies, but with no way to cure the meat, the cooked birds would go rancid in a few days. At the first sign of it smelling sweet, all of the meat would have to be thrown away.

  "What about this?" Mildred asked, balancing the Molotov in her palm. "Can't take it through the jungle. Could get busted, and we need every drop."

  "Bury it, madam," Doc suggested, rotating the cylinder of the LeMat to check the charges. "That should be safe enough."

  Brandishing a knife, Mildred went to the side of the sheet-metal building and began to dig in the rich black loam. Soon, she had a hole big enough. Dean arrived with a fistful of old rags, the tattered clothing from the skeleton. Gingerly she wrapped the glass bottle in several layers for extra protection, then covered it.

  "Good enough," she declared, patting the soil smooth so no telltale lump marked the burial site.

  At the front of the gateway, J.B. was busy at the closed door, stringing a piece of black wire across the jamb.

  "In case of visitors," he announced, stepping back. "Anybody tries to get inside will never reach the door alive."

  "Anything inside?" Ryan asked, checking his longblaster.

  "A frag hidden in the light fixture. Got it angled so the shrapnel won't damage the console or the power plant."

  "Good," Dean said in approval, slapping at a skeeter on his neck. He pulled away his hand and saw a tiny smear of blood on the palm. "Can't wait to leave."

  "I thought you were down to your last gren? Where did you get the plas? Never mind," Krysty said, glancing at the smooth path leading from the hole in the fence to the edge of the mesa. "You were busy while I was unconscious."