James Axler - Devil Riders

“Sounds good,” Ryan grunted, turning away from the droid.

Spent brass falling to the floor in a musical rain, Mildred reloaded her target pistol and snapped the cylinder shut. Tucking the blaster away, she yanked a hubcap off a civilian wag to hold it at arm’s length inside a civilian vehicle.

Still on its hood, Jak smashed the windshield with the butt of his Colt and the glass shattered into a million pieces, overfilling the hubcap. In disgust, Mildred stared at the pile of tiny, sparkling green cubes.

“Safety glass,” she snorted, pouring out the hubcap. “Couldn’t cut yourself on the stuff if you tried.”

“Use headlights,” Jak suggested, then frowned. “No, not enough. What else use?”

“Hell, I don’t know!”

Checking the gauges at a fuel pump, J.B. turned and shook his head at the others. The reservoir was completely dry, only a faint exhalation of escaping gas came from the nozzle.

“Went dry over the century,” he told them, returning the nozzle to its indented rack. So much for a firewall to stop the bugs.

Taking the keys from the ignition, Dean opened the trunk of the car and carried over a spare tire, sliding it into the crack on top of the piece of the droid, then he rushed away to rummage for another. Busting open a dusty soda machine, Krysty started throwing in glass pop bottles, the glass shattering at the rear of the crack. But there were only a few, the rest made of plastic or aluminum cans.

Carrying over a corroded bumper from a Cadillac, Ryan added it to the pile, shoving the chrome-plated metal as far back as he could. Not much, but a start.

Leaving the workbench, Doc went to a nearby closet and yanked open the door. “By the Three Kennedys!” he cried, hauling a twenty-gallon container into view. “Gasoline! Hundreds of containers!”

But Ryan could see the military identification number on the side of the cans and knew what the man had found was a lot more valuable than gas, or shine—it was condensed fuel. Unlike other flammable liquids, the stuff simply didn’t evaporate worth a damn, yet worked equally well in civilian engines and military diesels. What the hell it was made of he had no fragging idea, not even Mildred could take a guess, but the stuff did the job and that was all that really mattered.

“This is what the droid was set to guard,” Ryan grunted, as he hurried closer. “Juice enough for a fleet of wags! Okay, start hauling them out. We can block the crack with a fire bowl, use a hubcap as a basin and some rope as wick. Two or three should do the job.”

“Nothing like fire,” Jak said, then grimly added, “Except stickies.”

“Then mebbe we can get one of these wags working and leave,” J.B. added. “The farther we get from this hellhole, the better!”

“I’ll find some rope,” Dean said, running to the workbench on the far wall.

“Check the Hummers,” Ryan suggested. “They always carry spare tackle.”

“On it!”

“I’ll find more bottles for Molotovs,” Krysty said. “Maybe there’s some of those foam coffee cups in the kitchen.”

“Jak, go with her,” Ryan ordered brusquely. “Nobody goes anywhere alone until we are far from these tripcursed things!”

The albino teenager grunted in agreement and joined the woman at the stairs to disappear into the bowels of the redoubt.

Meanwhile, the remaining companions started for the closet to assist in clearing out the fuel cans. Four of the containers were already in a line on the garage floor, and as Doc turned back for another load, he spit a curse in Latin and pulled out his LeMat to shoot from the hip. Something screamed like a child inside the closet and blood sprayed onto the floor.

“There’s another crack!” Doc shouted, backing away from the room of volatile fuel. He was holding the trigger down on his single-action weapon, a raised palm hovering above the hammer to fan the black-powder cannon into action, but he withheld shooting. The bugs were crawling over the cans of fuel! One ricochet and that entire area of the redoubt could be engulfed in a firestorm of burning fuel.

As a millipede dropped off the last row of cans and started out of the supply closet, Doc shot it twice at both ends, blowing off its pinchers. Already moving, Ryan and J.B. charged forward to hit the door with their full weight. It slammed shut, cutting the insect in two. Pumping blood, the mutie wailed in agony and Doc soundly kicked it away, the dying bug hitting the wall with a splat and leaving a gruesome stain.

“That’s where the first crack leads to,” Mildred cursed, her ZKR trained on the door. “The damn fuel storage closet!”

“Droid couldn’t stop them there without chancing the whole damn base would blow,” J.B. added. “And neither can we!”

“How many bugs you think there are?” Dean demanded, quickly thumbing fresh rounds into the spent clip of the Browning. He shoved it into a pocket and started on another. Not too many loose rounds were left, so he’d have to make every shot count.

Even as the door shuddered from an impact on the other side, Ryan caught saw a flurry of motion in the crack.

“Too many!” Ryan snarled, pumping lead into the darkness. The muzzle-flash of the weapon lit the crevice in a wild strobe just enough to show a swarm of millipedes crawling along the sides and top of the opening past the makeshift barricade.

“Back to the mat-trans!” Ryan ordered, firing the Steyr. There was a gush of blood and a childlike scream, but another mutie crawled over the twitching corpse to reach the edge of the crack and snap at the companions.

Riding the Uzi in short controlled bursts, J.B. laid down some suppressive fire with his blaster, while the others retreated for the stairs. From there they covered the man until he joined them.

“What the hell is going on?” Krysty demanded from the next level below, her arms loaded with foam coffee cups.

“We’re leaving!” Mildred grunted, leaning against the stairwell door to try to keep it closed. “Anybody know a way to lock this thing in place?”

Whistling sharply, Jak tossed a knife upward and Ryan caught it by the handle, then rammed the thick blade under the doorjamb. Hesitantly, the others released the door and it held, but clearly not for long.

Nobody needed any encouragement to start racing down the stairs. As they reached the middle level, there was a slam from above and a rustling sound that grew in volume. The companions charged through the flickering control room. Jak tried to stab another knife under the jamb, but it wouldn’t hold. Abandoning the effort, the group moved into the antechamber, closed the vanadium-steel door and locked it tight.

“Safe at last,” Doc exhaled in relief, mopping his brow of a handkerchief.

Seconds later, there was a thump against the metal, followed by a scratching noise as something raked across the dense material.

“Bugs are fast,” J.B. said, removing his glasses and tucking them into a shirt pocket.

“Mildred, any more jump juice?” Ryan asked, heading across the chamber.

“Not a drop,” she said, shaking the empty canteen.

“Too bad for us, then. Everybody in!” Ryan ordered, striding to the chamber.

As the companions crowded into the unit, the heavy thumping increased against the steel portal to the chamber, then a soft electronic mist started to gather at the ceiling and floor. A tingle filled their bones, but even as the companions felt themselves drop through the floor into the infinity of the subelectronic void they noticed a change, a subtle shifting from the usual procedure, and they instantly knew that something was terribly wrong.

“We’ll camp here,” Cranston shouted over the engines, and eased the big Harley off the dried riverbed and over a bumpy culvert to head toward a gigantic rock mesa.