James Axler - Plague Lords

Doc used the point of his rapier to flip the knife closer to the whimpering wreck.

Without pause, without a nod of thanks, the trader grabbed the combat knife and propping the pommel on the ground, held the blade’s tip below his sternum. Grunting from the effort and the pain, he rolled over hard onto the knife, driving the long steel through his heart and into his chest to the hilt. After a moment of convulsive quivering, his body lay still. The point pitched a little tent in what was left of the back of his shirt.

A faint morning breeze swept down the river valley, carrying with it an awful odor. It wasn’t coming from the dead man.

“Do you smell that?” Ryan asked, pulling his sopping wet kerchief down under his chin.

Doc yanked down his mask, too. “Spoiled herring?” the Victorian said with a grimace.

Then the truth hit Ryan. Without a word, he turned and dashed for the chasm. Doc loped after him. As the one-eyed man looked down over the edge, into the riverbed, his stomach dropped to his boot soles.

Not rotten fish.

Spunk.

“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.

The bottom third of each of the bridge’s massive supports was black with stickies. Hundreds of them. They clung to the sides of the pillars, crawling, squirming over each other like bees in a hive.

Unfortunately, the dirt bike track ran right past the foot of the pillars and the puddled genetic muck before it crossed the dry riverbed to the other side.

Even more unfortunate, the smell of spilled blood from above, the screams and the gunfire and explosions had roused the writhing, hip-thrusting masses from their rut stupor. As Ryan watched, stickies disengaged and started to descend the ladder of slippery bodies to the ground.

They would follow the blood scent like a homing beacon.

“Quick!” Ryan growled, waving Doc after him as he raced back toward the campfire.

When they got there, they shouldered as many of the loaded backpacks as they could carry. As Ryan ran from the rubble field, over the sounds of the idling dirt bikes, he realized Jak’s motorcycle still wouldn’t start.

“Leave it!” Ryan shouted through a cupped hand. “Come on! Over here!”

The albino youth let the machine drop to the ground. Mildred passed her bike to him and climbed on the seat behind J.B. Krysty already had her motorcycle moving. When she roared up, Doc and Ryan jammed a couple of backpacks in the cargo rack, then battened them down with bungees. There was no time to check the contents.

“Gaia, what’s that smell!” Krysty exclaimed as solo-riding Jak, and J.B. and Mildred joined them.

“Hundreds of stickies copulating,” Doc announced.

“Down there?” Mildred said, pointing toward the drop-off and the riverbed.

“Oh, yeah,” was Ryan’s answer.

While he and Doc were tying down the backpacks, J.B. thumbed high brass shells into the loading port of his M-4000 as fast as he could. When the mag was plugged, he racked the action to chamber a round, stuffed a final shell in the port, then passed the scattergun back to Mildred.

“Stop for nothing,” Ryan told the others as he climbed on the seat behind Krysty. “All we’ve got going for us is speed and surprise. That means staying on the existing path.” He adjusted the Steyr strapped across his back, then unholstered his SIG. “If we try to break fresh trail and go around them, we might dump the bikes. If that happens, they’ll swarm us and we’re dead meat. J.B., let’s go!”

The Armorer screwed down his fedora, then roared away with Mildred pressed against his back. As Krysty and passenger Ryan, and Jak and passenger Doc followed, the lead bike vanished over the verge of the chasm. A few seconds later, the 12-gauge boomed.

Mildred was doing more than riding shotgun.

Krysty slowed a little to keep from going airborne when they hit the drop-off. As soon as the front wheel pointed down, she opened the throttle wide in second gear. The slope was steep, the dished-out path worn smooth. Along with the gut-wrenching acceleration, wind howled past Ryan’s ears and whipped at his clothes and his one good eye. Stickies who had been driven off the trail by J.B.’s passing and the shotgun blast watched dumbfounded by the combination of velocity and shrill engine noise.

As Krysty hurtled toward the stickie-covered pillars, Ryan leaned to the side and glimpsed Mildred standing on the dirt bike’s footpegs, knees bent, left hand firmly gripping the back of J.B.’s coat collar. Holding the scattergun by the pistol grip with her right, she aimed straight ahead. Another boom rang out. The spray of close-range buckshot momentarily cleared the road of obstacles, exploding a stickie’s head like a liquid-filled piñata.

Hunched over the fuel tank, Krysty shifted to third and wound the engine to redline, leaving Ryan’s stomach far behind. He didn’t know how fast they were going—he couldn’t see the speedometer—but it felt like ninety. Firing his weapon was out of the question. He couldn’t do anything but hang on.

If the muties had thrown their bodies at the bikes, they could have made them crash. Suicide in the service of chilling was certainly in their repertoire. If the strategy had occurred to them, before they could act on it, the six companions were already past the pillar bases in a screaming blur.

Dead ahead, J.B.’s brake lights flashed on, the bike shimmied as it slowed and Mildred sat down hard. Coming up on them too fast, Krysty hit her brakes, too, then downshifted an instant before they bounced into the riverbed, skidding across the loose stream gravel. To keep her from laying down the motorcycle, Ryan slammed down his left boot. Feathering the throttle and the brake, Krysty regained control and righted the bike, then she rocketed them up the much more gradual incline on the far side of the riverbed.

When Ryan glanced behind, he saw Jak powering up the slope through the dust cloud they had raised. Lanky Doc was perched on the seat behind the diminutive albino, his shoulder-length gray hair and the tails of his frock coat flapping in the breeze. With his boots propped on the footpegs, Doc’s knees were level with Jak’s shoulders. Ryan thought they looked like a radblasted carny act.

At the crest of the grade, there was nothing but open road ahead of the companions, stickie-free and string-straight.

Unable to contain his glee, J.B. accelerated away from the others like a madman. Holding down his treasured hat with one hand, throwing back his head, he hollered “Yeehah!” at the top of his lungs.

Under the wide brim of a straw planter’s hat, Okie Moore squinted through rubber-armored minibinocs. Behind him, fixed to the rusting rail, a tattered, homemade Lone Star flag snapped in the onshore breeze. From his vantage point atop the Yoko Maru’s radar mast—some twelve stories above the main deck, five stories above the roof of the wheelhouse, almost four hundred feet above ground—he could see twenty nautical miles. The cheap Taiwanese optics were never quite in focus—if one eye was sharp, the other was slightly blurred—but they were good enough to spot a telltale blip along the seam between white-capped Gulf and cloudless blue sky. So far, there was nothing to see, but the combination of fuzzy images and the glare of the midday sun had given him the beginnings of a monumental headache. It felt like someone had inserted a flexible steel rod up his right nostril and then corkscrewed it through his sinus passages until the pointy tip bored into the nerves behind his eyeball.

Okie hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, not since the trader’s sloop beating in from the southwest had dropped sail and coasted slowly through the sheltered anchorage on the Corpus side of the island, the black plastic, trash bag pennants on its headstay fluttering like dying crows. From the cockpit, through a megaphone, the skipper shouted a warning to the beach and the handful of moored ships. The three-man crew had seen Browns ville from a distance. It was a funeral pyre, set alight by the Matachìn.