James Axler - Shaking Earth

A quick blur of motion, a sound like an ax hitting wood, a gasp, more of surprise than pain. Ryan took his eye from the scope to see Krysty slumped against the granite face with a crossbow bolt protruding from her back, just inward of the left shoulder.

“Krysty!” he shouted. The word seemed torn from him like skin from his back.

The woman came around. With her right hand she raised her blaster. The crossbowman was closing fast, dropping his spent weapon to reach for a Bowie-type knife in a beaded sheath under his arm. With cool deliberation Krysty aimed and shot him through his thick, dirty throat. He roared, the noise drowning in a gurgle of his own blood.

As he fell, Krysty turned at last and stumbled into the redoubt. A rider loomed above Ryan. He was a big man with flying blond braids and an eagle feather at the back of his skull, grinning all over his bearded, painted face as he raised a battered CAR-4, a 9 mm submachinegun version of the venerable M-16. Ryan knew at once he was the coldhearts’ leader.

“You lose, fucker,” the blond man said.

But Ryan had already released the empty rifle with his right hand, still holding it in his left. His panga whispered from its sheath. With a thunk, the heavy blade severed the coldheart’s gunhand right above the wrist.

The raider boss stared in gape-mouthed amazement at his own hand lying on the bare dirt, spinning as random dying neural impulses spasmed the finger on the subgun’s trigger. Blood sprayed from his arm like a hose.

Ryan followed his injured woman into the redoubt, then keyed the blastproof door shut.

Hardness against his cheek. Pulsing warm—or was he only feeling the heat being drawn out of his face into a floor cold as a baron’s heart?

Ryan lay on his belly. He was unaware of having fallen. The world, slowly, ceased to spin around him.

The groans of his companions made their way through the fog that wrapped his brain. It had been a bad jump, the kind that reached down your gullet and yanked your guts out your mouth.

Krysty!

His eye felt as if it were glued shut. He forced it open. The upper lid came away from the lower with a sick gummy sensation. His empty socket throbbed with scarlet pulses of ache.

Krysty at least had begun the jump on her back, carefully laid down by Mildred and Ryan. She remained pretty much as they had left her, left arm strapped across her sternum to immobilize it. The right, which had been crossed over her stomach, now lay by her side. A thin trickle of blood ran to the floor of the gateway where she had clenched her fist so hard during the jump that her nails had pierced her palm. Her face was unnaturally pale, almost blue, contrasting harshly with her hair, which lay limp around her head like a tangle of red seaweed.

Ryan crawled to her, more lizard than man, feeling as if a mutie the size of a mountain were squatting on his back jeering at his misery. He grabbed her right arm, felt for pulse inside her wrist. It was there and strong.

Now that he knew his woman lived, Ryan allowed himself cautiously to become aware of more of his surroundings. The chamber had walls of orange-red armaglass that passed the dim illumination of the room beyond, which had automatically come on when the gateway powered up to materialize them, like the glow of a fire. There were bad smells, not the bland sterile smell of a long-unused chamber. There were sounds, too: dull distant thumps like giant stone fists being slammed together; pops and cracks like the fire of heavy blasters, the kind needed to be toted with a big war wag; and under everything a deep-note noise that wasn’t quite a moan and wasn’t quite a roar, with a bit of crackle and sort of a seethe. A sound you could hear through your bones if both eardrums were shot.

Ryan braced himself on one elbow and looked around. J.B. had hauled himself to a sitting position and was helping Mildred do likewise. Jak already sat with his knees drawn up and his crimson eyes sunk in his face like blood spots in a sheet. A dribble of puke, semidried, still trailed from the corner of his mouth.

“Shit,” the albino said. “Look like Doc croaked.”

Doc lay on his back, arms outstretched, mouth agape, rheumy eyes staring unblinking at the top of the mat-trans chamber. Seeing him like that made Mildred shift to rise up and tend to him. Then she settled back down on her haunches, gazing sorrowfully at him and shaking her head. There was obviously no point.

“I never thought one of us would go like this,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “Dean, now Doc.”

Ryan’s mouth was a thin line. “Doc looks about as peaceful as he ever gets,” Ryan said. His heart weighed down his rib cage. Seeing Doc lying there stark and dead was like losing another part of his body.

He lifted Krysty’s hand, kissed the back of it, laid it across her other arm. Then he got up, wobbled, fought for and regained his balance, and walked staunchly upright the few steps to where his comrade lay. He knelt, reached down and, with thumb and forefinger of his right hand, started to close the lids of Doc’s eyes.

The old man jerked and blinked. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, my dear boy? Blind me?”

Ryan recoiled as if the old man had transformed into a coiled diamondback. “Fireblast!”

Doc sat up with an almost audible creak of joints. “Indeed. One might think you had never seen a man in repose.”

“Doc, you was the deadest-looking article I ever hope to see,” the Armorer said with a chuckle. The old man stood, shot his cuffs and dusted off his frock coat.

“Lover.”

Ryan’s head snapped around. Krysty was sitting up. The color had returned to her cheeks. Before he or Mildred, who had at last gained her own feet, could move to assist her, she stood.

BARE FROM THE WAIST UP, Krysty Wroth had sat in the infirmary of the Rocky Mountain redoubt, teeth locked on Ryan’s scuffed old leather belt. Mildred Wyeth had a pair of channel-lock pliers from J.B.’s armorer’s kit clamped on the head of the crossbow quarrel. The coldheart missile had a barbed iron head that reached halfway down the shaft to make it hard for the recipient to tear it out of the wound. However, a crossbow quarrel had enormous penetrating power. The bolt had actually gone all the way through Krysty’s left shoulder to tent out the fabric of her jumpsuit with two inches of gory tip.

“Hold on, Krysty,” Mildred said. She pulled hard. Krysty closed her eyes, her fingers dug deep as talons into Ryan’s hand. She made no sound.

The quarrel came free with a sucking sound. Blood gushed out, flowing down into towels they’d discovered inside an old laundry storage bin and heaped around the redhead’s middle. Mildred had told the others they’d need to let the wound bleed freely for a short time to flush the channel. The benefit would offset the minor additional blood loss.

But even before she nodded to Ryan and J.B. to start pressing gauze compresses over the holes, entrance and exit, Mildred’s broad dark face was wrinkled in a gesture of disgust. Ryan frowned.

“The smell,” Mildred said, holding the grisly trophy away from her. “Not much question what it is.”

“Not gangrene, surely?” Doc Tanner asked.

“Way too soon. No, it’s feces, probably human. Those coldheart mothers didn’t miss a beat.”

“Want to guarantee nobody gets away from them,” J.B. said, sharing a grim look with Ryan. They were well familiar with that particular trick from their time with Trader, years before. Smearing a penetrating weapon, like a missile or a punji stick, with human feces all but guaranteed infection, deep-seated and virulent, in anyone unlucky enough to be punctured by it.