James Axler - Shaking Earth

“And here I thought he was okay these days,” Mildred muttered, shaking her head as she returned to her grisly work.

“Doc,” the Armorer said with gentle firmness, “don’t go wandering off into neverland, now. We need you to keep a sharp lookout. Not had a whiff of anything menacing, two-legged or more, norm or mutie, in three whole days. And that very fact itself makes me uneasy.”

The old man nodded. His eyes seemed to have gained focus. “You are quite correct, John Barrymore. It’s when the illusion of peace and safety seems most perfect that danger draws nigh.”

“Yeah,” Mildred said bitterly. “Any state less than constant screaming terror just isn’t natural.”

J.B. nodded. “They don’t call these the Deathlands for nothing.”

RYAN CAWDOR LAY on the ground, with his bare feet planted in a lush mat of fallen Ponderosa pine needles, long and gracefully curved as sabers, held together at the bases in clusters of three. The freedom afforded by temporary safety, to take his boots off and feel untainted nature beneath his soles, was an almost erotic pleasure.

Krysty Wroth, the most beautiful woman of the Deathlands—and not just in her mate’s single prejudiced eye—lay on the ground beside him. Both were gloriously nude, enjoying a moment of closeness and solitude after an hour of lovemaking.

He marveled in the sight of her, her white skin given a faint golden luster by the sunlight filtering through the trees. He would never tire of her, could never imagine tiring of her beauty, her vitality, her untamable spirit.

Both of them were alert to their surroundings, knew from the soft forest sounds that no immediate danger threatened. Both also knew the interlude could last but moments, that they would need to pick themselves up and square themselves away too soon, because as Mildred had just observed, unheard by them, peace and safety were unnatural states in the Deathlands, unstable as an isotope of plutonium.

All the same, the Deathlands had taught them to make the most of any and all such moments they could tear out of the grim, potentially lethal fabric of their daily lives. He stroked her cheek. They kissed. “Time to go, lover.”

With a sigh of regret the lovers stood.

Ryan picked up his Steyr sniper rifle and stood guard, unself-conscious of being buck-ass naked, while Krysty dressed without either hurrying or dawdling. Then she took temporary possession of the longblaster while he got his clothes on.

When he was ready she handed him back the rifle with a smile. “Better get back to camp, lover,” she said. “Don’t want the others to think we’re ducking the dirty work…”

Her voice trailed off. Ryan had cranked the bolt on reflex on getting the blaster back, pulling it back so as to lay an eyeball on a comforting gleam of brass in the chamber, just a sliver, because he knew from bitter experience that an unexamined blaster was always in the worst possible condition.

Because the forest sounds around them—the squirrel cussing them out from up the tree and the Steller’s jays yammering at each other from the scrub—had gone as still as the grave.

“Coldhearts!” Jak Lauren yelled as he burst through the scrub oak at the foot of the clearing where Mildred worked and the others watched. “Mebbe thirty, riding hard!”

“Shit!” Mildred said.

Instantly, Doc tossed her J.B.’s Smith & Wesson longblaster and unleathered his cumbersome LeMat percussion pistol.

Mildred’s hands were still encased in gloves of gore when she fielded the M-4000. She winced. J.B. was going have a fit when this was done. She preferred her own target-grade ZKR 551 .38-caliber handblaster, but unlike Doc Tanner, she wasn’t nutty enough to waste time swapping for it when the hammer came down.

Instead she threw the shotgun to her shoulder just as three riders burst out of the patch of mountain oak hard on Jak’s tail. One of them swung a club that looked like a baseball bat with nails driven into it, the heads snipped off at a bias to create a bristle of lethal spikes. The albino youth dived facedown into the tan grass and the horses thundered past him.

“Bastards!” Mildred yelled. She aimed the front sight right for the middle of the fleshy black-bearded face of the man who’d dropped Jak and pulled the trigger. The blaster bucked and roared; the face disappeared in a spray of red blood and white bone chips.

But the physician’s pang of grief was wasted. As canny and feral as a wolf, Jak had gauged the swing and dived to avoid it. He reared up to one knee and blasted off three shots from his Colt Python. A brown-haired coldheart with ochre stripes painted across his hatchet face threw up his arms in a spasm as one of the 158-grain Magnum rounds blew one of his vertebrae into powder, then carried on with the aid of bone-splinter shrapnel to pulp his heart and lights. A remade Mini-14 with a broken stock went spinning away as his horse reared and dumped him over its croup.

The third rider charged straight for J.B., a long black queue of hair with finger bones braided into it flapping like a pennon behind and blazing away with some kind of booming revolver. He had no more luck firing from a galloping horse than most did who tried such a double-stupe stunt. The Armorer coolly reached down, picked up his Uzi and held down the trigger one-handed. Copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs punched holes in the rider at the buckskin-clad thigh, walked their way up his filthy plaid flannel shirt, tore out one side of his jaw and poked a hole through one cheekbone. That rider went down, the horse screaming and veering off into the brush to get away from the terrible flame and noise that had gone off in its face.

Jak pelted upslope, stepping on the still-writhing body of the man he’d shot. “Ryan! Krysty!” he shouted. “Where?”

J.B. and Mildred looked blankly at each other.

RYAN STOOD with his rifle butt against his shoulder but the barrel depressed, seeking targets. The telescopic sight severely restricted the shooter’s field of vision. He didn’t want to be lost in the scope when an attacker appeared from a whole different angle. Krysty was beside him, her .38 Smith & Wesson model 640 in hand. It wasn’t an ideal weapon for a fight in the woods, even with undergrowth cutting down engagement range. Still, it beat a knife to hell.

The clearing they were in was much smaller than the one a hundred paces or so away, not far downslope from the entry to the redoubt where they had left their comrades to butcher the carcass of the deer Ryan had shot that morning. They heard crackling in the brush, glimpsed large shapes between the trees. Horsemen, Krysty mouthed to Ryan.

He nodded. Neither fired. Against a known enemy, ambush was mere good sense. But unless you were a stone coldheart yourself you didn’t shoot at strangers on sight. Enemies were plentiful enough as it was without going out of your way to manufacture more in the persons of vengeful survivors.

From the direction of the camp came shouts, shots, which changed everything. With Krysty ghosting along at his side, Ryan moved fast and crouched, not directly back to where the others were but at an angle down the mountainside. That way they might either take a force attacking their friends in the flank or possibly intercept enemies attempting a flanking maneuver of their own.

The forest had come alive again with sounds of a different sort: yells, the thudding of hooves, the crack of branches breaking. Apparently a substantial band of mounted raiders had stumbled upon their camp. Ryan had time to be thankful his group had camped so near the redoubt entrance. There were too many attackers to stand off and even in these woods a party of six would have had a hard time evading them.