End Day. James Axler

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      None of them, himself included, had the strength to do more than drag their blasters along.

      The edges of the porthole doorway were obscured by the dense, low-hanging fog. As he advanced hand over hand toward the center of the light, the hard glass turned into something softer under his palms and then his knees.

      The gray mist began to lift from the floor. The door stood open.

      He saw a pair of bare feet in front of him—small, pale, female feet, with red-painted toenails. As the fog dissipated, the woman came into full view. She was young and dressed as no Deathlander he’d ever seen—not even a baron’s wife. Her clothes looked new and were of a strange style: a jacket tailored at the waist and a knee-length skirt snugged around the hips, both cut from the same shiny gray cloth. In her ears, there were sparkling jewel studs, what Ryan thought to be diamonds from pics he had seen. Her shoulder-length hair was brown with red highlights, her small nose freckled.

      But what commanded his attention was the enormous gold handblaster she held pointed at them, hammer cocked back to fire. The hole in the business end looked as big as a sewer pipe. The slide and frame were black striped, like the pelt of a tiger. From her stance he could tell she knew what she was doing, and the yawning muzzle stayed rock steady. Her fingernail color matched that of her toes.

      “This isn’t happening,” she said, a look of horror in her eyes. Then it passed and she said, “Don’t move, any of you!”

      Ryan tried to speak and couldn’t make his throat muscles obey. A faint, wheezing noise escaped his lips.

      To his right, Ricky was still retching, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. He had already vomited all down the front of his T-shirt. It was on his cheeks, his neck and in his hair, too. The youth’s tan face looked deadly pale as he struggled to control the spasms.

      The others seemed to have better weathered the storm—at least they weren’t still puking. Some of the decorative beads in Mildred’s plaits had broken, and the braids were undone. Jak had a shallow, bleeding, horizontal cut on his chin. Doc looked dazed, but no more than unusual.

      The room where they had materialized was small and cramped. Ryan had never seen so much predark stuff concentrated in one place, but it lay in scattered, broken heaps on the Oriental carpet. A steady grinding noise was coming from the other side of the tall windows—it sounded like hundreds of wag engines all revving at once, interspersed with occasional horn blasts. When he glanced behind them, the open entrance to the chamber they had exited peeked in and out of gray mist.

      “Where are we?” Krysty asked, glowering up at their captor. “What ville is this?”

      “‘Ville’?” the woman said. “It’s Greenwich Village. Who the hell are you? And where in hell did you come from?”

      “Look at this place, Ryan,” Mildred said. “They must have just passed through here. They have to be close.”

      He stared down at a broken, framed photo on the floor. A woman in fatigues and a boonie hat was standing behind the corpse of an immense wild boar—at least five hundred pounds, he guessed. She had a bloody spear in one hand and a bloody combat knife in the other and was smiling through her camo face paint.

      It was the same woman who was holding them at blasterpoint.

      “Who is ‘they’?” the woman demanded. “Do you mean the bastards who wrecked my apartment?”

      “The bastards we’re chasing,” Ryan said, his power of speech recovered. “Which way did they go?”

      Before she could answer, a whooping, rhythmic siren erupted from outside.

      Figuring that if the woman was really going to open fire on them, she would have already done so, Ryan rushed to the bank of windows, and the others followed.

      As Mildred looked down on the street she said, “Well, that makes a nice change.”

      The enforcers’ elephantine wedding tackle was no longer on display; they had put on pants. Even so, the width and heft of their bodies was unmistakable as were the blocky shapes of their heads inside tight purple hoods. And they were still barefoot.

      The lone siren quickly became a deafening chorus. The enforcers rampaged along the sidewalk below, breaking into the small wags jammed end to end—strangely enough, the row of wags looked almost new. The muties rammed their fists through driver windows, ripped the doors from their hinges and tossed them over their shoulders. The wags sagged heavily to one side when enforcers jumped in and began tearing wires from under dashboards, presumably trying to start the engines without keys.

      Magus was nowhere in sight.

      The woman with the big blaster joined them at the window. “I am definitely losing it,” she said, her weapon now pointed at the floor. “Those things aren’t human.”

      A doorway across the street burst open, and a tall man in a robe ran down the stairs. He crossed the street, carrying a yard of polished wooden club, fat at one end, a knurled knob at the other. With the club cocked over his shoulder, he yelled over the din of alarms for an enforcer to get away from his shiny personal wag. Snapping the driver’s door free of the hinge, the creature spun at the waist, flinging it sideways like a gigantic buzz saw. It struck bathrobe man amidships and nearly cut him in two. The impact left him sprawled facedown on the pavement, in the middle of a spreading puddle of gore.

      Try as they might, the enforcers couldn’t seem to get the commandeered wags running. In frustration, holes were punched through the roofs, steering wheels snapped off and windshields kicked out onto hoods.

      “Is it just me,” Doc said, “or does this all seem a bit chaotic for old Steel Eyes? It hardly reflects the usual high level of advanced planning...” The old man was confused by what he saw outside.

      “The clockwork man likes things to go like clockwork,” Ryan agreed.

      “Mebbe his brain’s stripped a gear?” J.B. said, without tearing his eyes from the escalating destruction below, wondering how all of the wags had survived looting and scavenging, where the gas had come from.

      “Ryan, if we don’t get Magus now...” Krysty said.

      “You’re right,” he agreed. “Keep the incendies ready. We’re going to have to get in close to maximize the effect.”

      As they moved for the door, the woman once more raised her blaster. “Who are you?”

      “No time for introductions,” Ryan told her. “Shoot us in the back if you want, but we’re going after them.”

      Jak led them out the apartment door and down the marble stairs.

      “Toss the grens inside the wags if you can,” Ryan said as they crouched in the foyer. “Locate Magus.”

      They burst through the building’s front door two abreast, but had descended only the first few steps when autofire rattled from the far side of the street. A rain of bullets spanged the concrete treads and wrought-iron railings and crashed through the glass in the entry behind them.

      With hard cover more than thirty feet out of reach, Ryan had no choice. He turned and pushed the others back through the doorway. Otherwise they were going to be cut to pieces.

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