James Axler - Shaking Earth

“Dark night, but I think I hear—”

“Motors.” Ryan stood upright, looking off to the northeast. “Wags, mebbe a big bike.

“Coming this way.”

A heavy thudding sounded from the distance, like a hammer pounding nails. Big hammer, big nails.

J.B. smiled beatifically. “Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun. Sweetest music these ears ever did hear. Called a Ma Deuce predark.”

From around them came, more than a sound, but rather a sensation of stirring, like rats in walls. “Seems like our friends have gotten tired of playing and are takin’ their toys and heading home,” J.B. said.

They heard a cracking sound, not quite a gunshot, too sharp for an explosion. “What was that?” Ryan asked.

“You got me.”

J.B. walked to the open hatch. “Hey, down there,” he shouted. “Looks like our bacon’s saved. Cavalry’s coming.”

“And precisely what—” Mildred’s voice came floating back “—makes you think they’re on our side?”

J.B. looked at Ryan and shrugged. “There’s an old saying, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Ryan said helpfully.

“And we know what a steaming load that one is,” J.B. said. “Okay, Millie, you win. But the guys we know want to cut us up and mebbe eat us are going away, which even a pessimistic cuss such as yourself has to admit is a positive development.”

“What was that you called me?” Mildred’s voice came again, dangerously low.

“What? ‘Cuss.’It was distinctly ‘cuss,’ and Ryan will back me up on that.”

Leave me out of this, mouthed the one-eyed man.

“Besides, you know I never stoop to foul, fucking language, Millie.”

“We can always polish our baron’s jester routines later, if we happen to live,” Ryan said. “Now let’s all pipe down, hunker down, get ready to play whatever hand’s dealt us next.”

Ryan and J.B. crouched behind the roof parapet, watching the streets below and surrounding their hideout. They heard the rattle of small-arms fire—a pretty serious volume; whoever these newcomers were, they didn’t seem to have a lot of worries about ammo. The .50 thumped away, growing steadily louder. And intermittently they heard the sharp, loud cracks.

The marauders seemed to have no appetite for hanging around and getting better acquainted with the interlopers. They began streaming openly along the streets away from the approaching gunfire and motor sounds, a ragged, starved-looking band of muties and apparently normal humans mixed together indiscriminately. What might cause the norms and muties to cooperate like this Ryan had no idea. There was nothing impossible about it, of course. It was just that the hostility between norms and muties was usually so bitter and deeply ingrained that it was rare for them to coexist without bloodshed, much less to fight side by side.

He glanced at his old friend. J.B. looked back at him, shook his head, pulling down the corners of his mouth. Neither of them felt a reflex hatred of muties, obviously; Krysty Wroth was a mutie herself, albeit a beautiful one even to norm eyes. But Ryan, having all his life heard the cliché about having an itchy trigger finger, was actually feeling a tingle in that digit here and now, what with a river of potential targets flowing by right under their chins. He could tell the Armorer felt the same way.

But the raiders were headed the right direction—away—and showing no further disposition to bother them. Shooting at them would serve no useful purpose. At best it would waste scarce ammo. At worst it would draw return fire from the retreating raiders. Better to leave well enough alone.

The fugitive flow passed, ended. At the street’s far end a very different procession appeared. Men in tan uniforms advanced steadily, longblasters ready in patrol position. They were dark-skinned, dark-haired, not very tall, resembling the human raiders who accompanied the muties, but better clothed, armed and fed. Behind them cruised a heavy truck with a fabric-covered bed and a welded-together looking mount for the big Browning machine gun behind the cab. And out in front of it rolled an outlandish apparition: a tall, copper-skinned youth, wearing a feathered headdress, a green loincloth, an odd sort of golden harness over his broad chest and shoulders, and armor braces on forearms and lower legs, riding a big, blatting, outlaw-style motorcycle.

“What do you make of that?” J.B. asked. Ryan could only shake his head.

From a house across the street from their perch and a couple of doors toward the well-armed column, a skinny mutie with an outsize asymmetric head bolted. He seemed to have no better plan in mind than to get away as quickly as possible, running balls-out right down the middle of the dirt lane, elbows pumping.

It wasn’t a good enough plan.

The bizarre feathered rider raised his right forearm. A pale red beam snapped from it with an ear-shattering crack. It struck the fleeing mutie between his churning shoulder blades. His back exploded in a gout of steam. He went sprawling forward, dug a furrow in the dust with his face, lay still.

“Shit!” J.B. exclaimed. “A laser! That shit he’s wearing over his shoulders has a power-pack in it, I’ll just bet.”

“Impressive,” Ryan said.

The rider held up his arm. The column halted. The foot soldiers winged out to the building fronts to either side and lay or crouched, covering the street with their weapons.

“Look at that,” J.B. said admiringly. “They got a couple BARs with them. Beautiful.”

“Serious firepower,” Ryan said.

“Let’s hope they’re friendlier than they look.”

“If they’re not,” the one-eyed man said slowly, “I’m not sure what we can do about it.”

Two soldiers came forward, prodding two captives in front of them with the muzzles of their longblasters. The prisoners, a man and a mutie covered all over in curly golden fur, wore only loincloths. Their arms were bound behind them. One of their escorts leaned forward and apparently cut their bonds, because the two immediately brought their hands up in front of them and began massaging their wrists.

The boy in the feathers dropped his kickstand, swung off his bike, stalked up to the prisoners like a leopard. He was carrying a peculiar-looking weapon in his hand, a flat wooden club maybe two feet long that had pieces of obsidian set in either edge, to create a discontinuous double blade of black glass.

He snapped a question. The human captive turned his face away.

The warrior in the feathered headdress lashed out with the obsidian-lined club. The furry mutant’s right arm leaped away from its shoulder in a gush of blood. He screamed and dropped to his knees, ineffectually cutting the great wound, blood spurting between his fingers.

“Dark night,” J.B. said. “These are some hard bastards.”

The human captive said something to the warrior. The warrior danced a couple of steps to the side, struck down with his weapon. The screaming mutie’s head fell away from its neck, bounced twice on the road and came to rest facedown in a rut. A fountain of blood shot out of the neck stump, once, twice, three times, soaking the thirsty earth in red. Then the blood-flow ceased. The headless, one-armed body pitched forward to leak slowly into the dust.

The human captive pointed straight at the garage where the travelers and their vehicle were hidden.

The feathered warrior turned to study the structure. Then he lashed out backhand. The human captive’s head jumped off his shoulders. Without ever looking back, the warrior stalked back to his ride, forked it, kicked it to snarling life.

The cavalcade rumbled into motion again, right for the companions. “I don’t know about you,” J.B. said, “but I got a bad feeling about this.”