James Axler - Eden's Twilight

Still defiantly standing over the field of destruction were a couple of robotic spiders. At the sight, Ryan almost instinctively fired, then realized it wasn’t necessary. The flickering butane light had simply given them the momentary illusion of life. These droids would never harm anybody ever again.

Most of the spiders were reduced to only three or four legs, instead of the usual eight, and every one had its guts ripped out, the computerized workings dangling loosely like metallic intestines. Even the dreaded belly-mounted lasers drooped impotently, the slim barrels bent or hammered flat.

The companions had encountered the spiders before and aside from a single belly-mounted weapon, the machines had no other offensive capabilities. They were one-hit wonders, as Mildred liked to say—unlike the sec hunter droids, which seemed to be made out of weapons.

“Droids fighting droids,” Ryan muttered uneasily, testing the words as if they were rotting floorboards to see if they would hold his weight. “Must have been a nukestorm of a fight.” The warrior tried to reconstruct the battle in his mind. There seemed to have been pockets of resistance, as if the machines were holding positions to guard something, or somebody, in their midst.

“Looks like draw,” Jak snorted, easing down the hammer of his Colt. There was nothing dangerous here anymore. Only ghosts of the past.

“Most assuredly, my young friend, a genuine Pyrrhic victory,” Doc agreed, holstering the LeMat. “Although I would theorize that our earlier, ahem, guest, was in fact the sole survivor of this internecine conflict.”

“And it broke through the wall to attack us the moment it heard voices,” J.B. said slowly, using the shotgun to tilt back his fedora. “Yeah, that makes sense, in a droid sort of way.”

Mildred shook her head in disbelief, her beaded plaits clacking. “It stayed on guard, alone, in a black room, for a hundred years.”

“Just droid,” Jak replied, dismissing the matter.

“Wonder what they were fighting over,” Ryan said cagily. “Could be something useful.” The companions were low on food, almost out of water and on foot. Almost anything would be helpful at this point. The only thing in their favor was that the group did have plenty of ammo for once. But that was dwindling fast.

“Probably just wanted control of the base,” J.B. said with a shrug. “Who can figure out the logic of a droid?”

“Actually, I think the answer is over there,” Krysty said in a deceptively soft voice. She was looking into the far darkness, her long red hair flexing wildly.

Swinging the flashlight in that direction, Mildred revealed a cluster of Hummers parked in a protective circle around something really big that was covered with a sheet of canvas. The Hummers were carrying M-60 machine guns, and were literally torn to pieces from laser fire. Two of them had obviously caught fire and burned to the floor. Even worse, the white bones of human skeletons were strewed about the wags, many of them missing arms or heads. Rusty longblasters gleamed dully in the pale light, and spent brass was everywhere. These had clearly not been innocent bystanders, but participants in the battle. A few pieces of their aged uniforms were visible among the burned boots, torn body armor and cracked helmets. The troopers seemed to be from every branch of the armed services: army, navy, air force and marines. Only their patent leather belts seemed completely unaffected by the long passage of time.

“A pickup squad,” Doc said, resting a hand on the silver lion’s head of his ebony walking stick. “Forced recruits taken from whoever was handy when the convoy was formed.”

“What think is?” Jak asked suspiciously.

“In a predark convoy? Could be anything,” Mildred replied with a sigh. “Top-secret documents, high-ranking politicians, all sorts of useless things.”

“Or it could be a convoy of supplies for the Ohio redoubt,” Krysty said in subdued excitement. “Thousands of MRE food packs, tons of live brass, med kits…”

“Boot polish, toothpaste, laundry detergent,” Mildred continued unabated. “Uniform insignia, letterhead stationery…”

“Only one way to find out,” Krysty countered.

“Agreed. Watch for traps,” Ryan said, kicking the dome of a sec hunter droid out of the way with his combat boot as he headed for the vehicles. From long experience, he knew that some folks died hard, clutching a primed gren in their hand in a desperate hope of taking out their killers. Death kept their fingers on the arming lever, but a careless boot could knock that loose and chill the lot of them faster than a live droid.

Staying sharp, the companions watched the shadows for any suspicious movements. Unfortunately the blue flame of the butane lighters made everything seem alive in motion.

Reaching into his jacket, Jak pulled out his only flare. Thumping the end on a raised knee, the top sputtered and a sizzling dagger of flame formed, the brilliant white light banishing most of the gloom. Holding the flare high to avoid the reeking clouds of bitter smoke, Jak took the lead with Ryan and J.B. on his flanks.

Moving easily through the assorted destruction, the companions watched where they stepped, wary of the jagged metal sticking up from the wreckage like thorny brambles. Now they could see that some of the spiders had been equipped with needlers, the bodies of the sec hunter droids riddled to pieces from the superfast 1 mm fléchettes. They found the weapon cut in two by a buzzsaw, the spinning blade buried deep in the sleek machine. Pity. Sometimes those were found in working condition.

“How’s the arm?” J.B. asked, glancing at Mildred.

“Just a flesh wound, nothing serious,” the physician replied, hefting the ZKR. “When we get the chance, I’ll bandage it. I can still shoot just fine.”

“Sure, sure.” The wiry man heard the words, but looked at her hard to see if they were true. Noticing his concern, Mildred gave a game smile and bumped him with a hip. J.B. smiled in return, and they walked alongside each other until reaching the Hummers.

The military wags were wrecks, tires flat, windshields shattered, the chassis deeply scored by the lasers, the engines hammered into crumpled wads of metal.

Sidling past the aced transports, Ryan used the barrel of the Steyr to carefully lift the canvas sheet to take a gander underneath. At first he scowled, then grabbed the material and hauled it down in a single motion.

A cloud of dust rose from the canvas, obscuring whatever it had covered, but the salt breeze from the other garage thinned that out quickly, and the companions found themselves looking at a titanic wag of a type they had never seen before.

More than twenty feet long, and about half that wide, the colossal machine was clearly a transport of some kind, with eight tires that stood an easy six feet high. The angular chassis was composed of a smooth armor painted a dull tan, and the symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps was painted on the side. Large windows ringed the passenger section, each one equipped with a blasterport. Strangest of all, there were large hydraulic lifters set on each side attached to a sort of hinged fork; each of the tines was a foot wide and ended in sharp tips.

“Holy mackerel, that’s one of those urban combat vehicles!” Mildred gasped in astonishment, reaching out to touch the machine as if it were about to vanish in a cloud of fairy dust. “I saw a TV report on them just before I went in for my surgery!”

The others knew the rest of that story. The predark physician had gone under the knife for a simple operation, but there had been serious complications, and the attending physicians had had no choice but to cryogenically freeze Mildred in a desperate attempt to save her life. A hundred years later, Ryan and the companions freed Mildred from her icy prison, and she had been with them ever since. Her illness was mysteriously in remission, but she lived in growing fear that one day it would return to finish the job started so very long ago.