Siren Song. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ closer to thirty, J.B. estimated. They were hairless and buck naked. Some had added rudimentary tattoos across their bodies, blue swirls and lines across shoulders and chest; one displayed a shape across his face that reminded J.B. of a bat.

      As he emerged from the trees, the bat man said something, but J.B. couldn’t make sense of it. It sounded like a dog snarling, a low kind of growl. Around him, the other scalies began to laugh louder—now that was something J.B. did understand, the universal laughter of the mocking bully.

      Several of the scalies were sticking close to the trees as they reloaded their muskets. They were cumbersome weapons, and J.B. could see that the shot they fired was large and ball-like, approximately the size of an old table-tennis ball. It was one of those that had hit Ricky, large enough to tear clothes and skin, but not refined enough to pierce through the flesh.

      The Armorer calculated that Ricky had two bullets left before he would need to reload, which meant, unless he got his shotgun reloaded, the odds were lousy.

      “We going to chill them,” Ricky whispered, “or what?” The kid trusted J.B. to make these decisions. He had volunteered to carry the flare even when J.B. had tried to dissuade him. “Two blasters are better than one,” he had told the Armorer, “and you’ll have my back, right?”

      Sure, J.B. had his back all right. And look where that had got them.

      The leader with the bat tattoo was walking purposefully along the overgrown roadway toward J.B., its dark eyes flicking down to the open shotgun where J.B. had not had a chance to reload. “Outta time tuh load blasta,” Bat Tattoo taunted as he approached the Armorer. His voice was rough, like sandpaper, the accent all but impenetrable. The leader’s lips pulled back from his sharp teeth and he began to laugh. And then his head burst like a watermelon and a thunderclap echoed through the grove.

      “Dark night, Ryan, but you took your sweet bastard time!” J.B. muttered as the mutie leader went caroming past him and over the cliff edge, his head a ruined mess of brain and bone.

      Around him, the scalies were reacting with shock at their leader’s death, scrambling this way and that as they searched for their new attacker. Another shot cut the air and one of the musket-carrying muties went sailing to the ground in a sprawl of limbs.

      J.B. slipped new ammo into his shotgun’s breech as he moved, then stroked the shotgun’s trigger, sending a fearsome burst of fire at the two nearest scalies. They went down with yelps of pain, blood splattering across the blacktop.

      Beside J.B., Ricky had sunk to one knee and was firing shots from his own blaster before switching to his second weapon, a reproduction De Lisle carbine. The De Lisle was about half as long as Ricky was tall, with a bolt action and mock-wood finishing. It boomed with each shot like a miniature rumble of thunder, and each time another scalie dropped to the ground. Despite the pain in his flank, Ricky felt alive.

      * * *

      THINGSWEREAmess inside the redoubt. Located underground, it was like a concrete rabbit warren, flickering lights illuminating gray walls on which were painted dusty stripes of red, green and yellow. Bird caws echoed down the corridors. There was sand and dirt splashed over the walls by the wind, and bird droppings and insect husks carpeted the floors. Some of the corridors ended in rubble while others ended in sheer drops that looked straight out onto the ocean. Mildred followed Jak, trusting his keen tracker instincts to retrace the path they had taken a few hours ago when they had arrived.

      They had left Doc at the redoubt entrance, either to welcome Ryan and J.B. or to blast the living crap out of anyone—or anything—else who tried to enter.

      The redoubt itself was set half out to sea, one entire side cut away by the quake that had turned this strip of land into an island decades before. Despite that destruction, its automated facilities still functioned, including the ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights and, crucially, the mat-trans unit. Quite how the mat-trans could still operate when so much of the building had been wrenched away was beyond Mildred’s comprehension. They’d built these old places tough.

      The mat-trans was a twentieth-century invention designed to move troops and matériel between locations with the minimum of fuss. The matter-transporter units were located in dozens of abandoned military redoubts across the old United States of America and several other parts of the world. While the redoubts remained mostly untampered with by the locals, locked up and hidden away as they were, Mildred and her companions had utilized the mat-trans units for a number of years, zipping from location to location as they sought a better life away from the routine bloodshed of the Deathlands. Finding somewhere to settle had proved a lot harder than Mildred had expected.

      Leading the way, Jak stepped into the redoubt control room. Twin aisles of desks ran lengthwise across the room, facing a screen that was blotched with the white stripes of bird feces. The desks, too, were smothered with droppings, and as Mildred entered the room she saw a gull flap its wings in surprise as it rose from one corner. The bird had a nest here, tucked out of sight. Mildred ignored the gull as it swooped around the room, cawing in distress.

      The two companions made their way to the door to the anteroom, where they waited for their friends to join them.

      * * *

      ITWASPANDEMONIUM. Scalies were running in all directions.

      While most of the muties had scattered in blind panic, several came searching for the sniper who had executed their leader. Krysty watched from her hiding place in the bole of a tree, the Smith & Wesson .38 clutched close to her breast as two figures broke from the tree line where the bodies hung, running toward Ryan where he lay on the grass picking off their companions. One of the scalies held a knife, and it flashed as it reflected the sunlight. Glass, Krysty realized.

      As the two scalies vaulted over a fallen log, Krysty emerged and popped off two shots from the .38. The first plowed into the chest of the scalie on the left, and he seemed to flip over himself as he was driven back and to the ground. But her second shot missed, whipping away just an inch over the right hand scalie’s shoulder. Tough break—he was the one with the knife.

      The scalie changed direction. He ran not for Ryan now but for Krysty, drawing the glass knife back in preparation to swing. Krysty whipped up the .38, but the scalie was on her before she could squeeze the trigger.

      The two of them went down with a thud of bone-jarring impact. Krysty fell backward as the knife swished through the air just inches from her face. The scalie spread his legs to hold her down, crouching over her crab-style to stop her from escaping. The knife swung again, eight inches of blade flashing with the sun’s rays.

      Krysty brought up her blaster and squeezed the trigger. The .38 fired at point-blank range, but the bullet deflected on a callused section of her attacker’s armor-like flesh. The scalie howled in pain and, in the same instant, reached out with his free hand and grabbed Krysty’s blaster by the muzzle, shoving it aside.

      Krysty groaned as her wrist was bent backward. The scalie’s grip was as strong as a vise and she could feel the bones of her wrist grinding together as he clenched tighter.

      Looming above Krysty, the mutie brought his glass blade down toward her face, hissing through clenched teeth in some eerie victory trill, the blade racing toward her.

      Gaia help me, Krysty thought as she watched the blade carving the air. Hear my prayer and come to my aid in my time of need.

      Then everything seemed to slow down; the blade hovered in the air as if it was a static object.

      Krysty had grown up in Harmony СКАЧАТЬ