End Day. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ of surprise. Ryan guided them a ways into the meadow, then stopped the single file of riders with a raised hand. He listened hard, but there was not so much as a bird tweet or a bug chirp.

      From her perch behind him on the horse, Krysty pointed at the thick, waist-high grass to their right. She said softly in his ear, “Something there. It’s moving...”

      Jak was already standing tall in his stirrups, eyes fixed in the same direction.

      Ryan signaled for the albino to dismount and circle around behind, drew his panga from its sheath and quietly swung down from the horse. He had walked no more than twenty feet when he saw something bright red among the green. He thought he glimpsed a stout black body beneath. Whatever it was, it turned to the left and disappeared. He followed, wading through the lake of tall grass.

      Jak was moving toward him, the sun reflecting off white hair and skin. He had his arms outstretched, and he was smiling.

      When Ryan took his next step, it was met by a burst of noise from in front of him. A blur of angry birds with flaming red heads, thick black-feathered bodies and flapping, four-foot wings, shot from cover. As the buzzards rushed past him, scuttling away like gigantic swarthy chickens, he instinctively swung the panga, smacking one of them on the pate with the flat of the blade. Stunned, the bird sat down hard, beak gaping, wings spread and twitching. It stank like a slaughterhouse; there was fresh blood smeared on its chest feathers. Its stomach was grossly distended, the contents so densely packed and heavy that, like its brethren, it couldn’t fly.

      That didn’t bode well.

      He waved for the others to dismount. They left the horses to graze in the meadow and, spreading out, weapons at the ready, advanced to the edge of the clearing. Nestled among the trees, the nameless ville had once looked like something out of a predark storybook: tiny central square with bandstand, on either side of which stood a school, city hall, church with tall steeple, movie house, stores. Because of its remote location, it had survived Armageddon pretty much intact. And had apparently provided sufficient protection to a support a limited population.

      Past tense.

      The central square and surrounding street was littered with bodies. It looked as if it had rained dead people and dead dogs. Many of the corpses were torn into pieces: arms, legs and heads ripped off and flung. The buzzards had been hard at the best bits—the eyes and tongues—leaving three gory craters in every upturned face.

      Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.

      In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn’t ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.

      At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.

      “By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul’s wearing his guts for garters!”

      The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?

      In the end the reasons didn’t matter. What was done was done.

      Only this time there would be payback.

      After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.

      “Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”

      Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout’s scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.

      Ryan didn’t give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.

      He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr’s 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape’s large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.

      A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.

      “Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.

      With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.

      The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they’d find: a redoubt’s vanadium-steel door.

      The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.

      With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.

      “By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”

      He wasn’t looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:

      SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA

      UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY

      LETHAL FORCE

      TURN BACK NOW

      Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.

      “Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.

      “Only if skeletons can fire M-16s,” J.B. said.

      “After more than a century, such threats do tend to lose their teeth, my dear Mildred,” Doc said, displaying his own remarkably fine set.

      “We don’t know what defenses this place has,” Krysty stated. “But we sure as hell know what’s gone in ahead of us. Fighting enforcers in close quarters means big noise. Our element of surprise СКАЧАТЬ