James Axler - Desolation Angels

“It is not working on us,” Doc said.

J.B. shrugged. “Mebbe we’re not what they had in mind.”

“Huh,” Mildred said, sniffing the air. “It doesn’t smell like sewage. Much. Other than us, I mean. We have got to get cleaned up. I know everybody these days has a super immune system, but if we don’t want any little scratch to give us pseudomonas, so that our legs swell up and go gangrenous and have to be cut off—”

“Enough,” Ryan said. He halted them just inside the lobby.

“Anyway, it seems like a good sign,” she finished.

“People live,” Jak said. He crouched in an area right of the entrance, where a picnic table and some chairs had been set in what might have once been a kiosk. Its enclosure was now just metal uprights to hold long-vanished glass.

“Yep, they do,” Mildred said. “Somewhere. The question is, do any live here?”

“They do,” Krysty said. “I smell food cooking. With onion, garlic and basil.”

Her stomach rumbled as she said it.

“Mebbe they’ll invite us to join them for lunch,” Ricky said.

“Or to be lunch,” J.B. suggested.

Other tables and chairs sat on a tile floor, dark gray on lighter gray down the central strip that ran from the door, mixed shades of blue and gray to the sides. It looked as if the area was used for socializing. A dead escalator rose at the far end to a second story surrounded by a rail.

“Ryan, look,” Krysty said as they advanced. She pointed at a giant square doorway that opened to their right.

Like several others, it spilled yellow daylight onto the floor tiles. Through it they could see what looked to be another farm or garden. A hole in the roof—or a roof that was missing entirely—allowed the life-giving sunlight in.

“Huh,” Ryan said.

“Nobody home,” Ricky stated.

“Waiting and watching to see what we do, likely,” J.B. said.

“So what should we do, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.

He had reholstered his weapons when they ducked into the building across the intersection. Now he cupped his empty hands around his mouth and hollered, “Hello! Anybody here? We’ve reached this ville and we’re looking for work.”

A blaster shot fired from the railing toward the escalator was his reply.

Chapter Four

“Mebbe they don’t like outlanders,” J.B. said.

“You rad-sucking fool, Tyrone!” a man’s voice shouted from the gallery. “Why’d you give us away?”

“They’re mercies!” another voice yelled back defensively. “We can’t let Hizzoner’s blasters on Angels turf!”

“Back outside!” Ryan yelled, racing toward the doors, which fortuitously were open.

As the companions turned to sprint the few steps back to the outdoors, another shot cracked out. Tile splintered to Ryan’s right. Then another blaster spoke and another.

“More right!” Jak yelped. Meaning other enemies were appearing in the doorway to the odd interior garden plots.

“Hold your breath!” J.B. shouted. “Poison gas!”

Then Ryan heard a clatter and sound of something metal and weighty rolling on tile.

“Gas!” one of the ambusher screamed from the railing.

A female voice cried, “Get back!”

Ryan burst into the sunlight. He took a few steps down the steps to the street, then spun, unlimbering his Steyr and dropping to one knee. He intended to cover his friends’ retreat.

He saw dirty yellow-white smoke billowing up from the middle of the wide floor. Already it rose high enough to obscure the second-story gallery from view, which meant it also obscured them from their enemies’ view, making aimed fire impossible.

Ryan grinned as his friends came flying out of the giant half-gutted building, racing past him. He heard a rip of full-auto fire and recognized J.B.’s Uzi. The Armorer was clearly giving their attackers some additional reason not to be fast about rushing to pursue.

Of course, they would pursue. That was a given. Especially once they figured out that what J.B. had unleashed on them wasn’t poison gas at all, but just one of the black-powder smoke bombs the Armorer and his apprentice, Ricky Morales, had started making in their spare time weeks ago.

Ryan was impressed by just how much smoke a bomb the size of a predark beer can produced—and how quickly.

“Best power right on,” J.B. called as he trotted down the steps, holding his Uzi in his right hand and his fedora pressed to his head with his left. “They’re starting to get organized, and it sounds like we got them hot well past nuke red.”

Jak raced past and took off to Ryan’s right to put himself in front of his companions. Everybody else was clear. Ryan had checked them off mentally as they passed him.

They headed southwest again, away from downtown—where they knew there were hostile blasters who more than likely were still keeping eyes skinned for them, even though they hadn’t pursued. They wouldn’t be any better disposed toward the companions after they had treated them to a faceful of mutie talons and all the accumulated sewage of some unspecified but no doubt vast swath of the great half-overgrown urban ruin-scape.

It was as good a direction as any. Ryan stood and followed.

* * *

WHEN HIS BUDDY Jak sprinted past him to take the lead in the hasty retreat, Ricky found himself half-disappointed and half-relieved. It wasn’t that he was afraid to put his life on the line for his friends—he did that all the time. It was that he was a bit on the near-sighted side and hated leaving his friends’ survival dependent on senses that were far less keen than the albino’s.

He carried his DeLisle carbine in preference to his Webley handblaster. The big top-break, double-action revolver, converted by his uncle Benito to fire the same .45 ACP cartridges the longblaster did, was handier to use in a close-in fight, and faster, too. But he already knew the Detroit ruins hosted muties with bad attitudes toward norms. And the green growth that exploded through the broken pavement here and there, or sprouted in more or less orderly rows in the cultivated plots they sometimes passed, provided enemies with excellent cover. The sturdy, stocky DeLisle made a far better melee weapon than a handgun did.

They were running down the northwestern edge of the great half-ruined building. Even as he looked around for potential enemies, Ricky took in more of the extent of its ruination. He realized quickly why the big space they had glimpsed through the side door was full of crops and the daylight that gave them life. Something had taken off or collapsed the roof of the blocky center from twenty or thirty yards down from the entrance, all the way back to where an elevated track or walkway to a circular parking structure had been taken down by the same catastrophe. Or a similar one. The parking structure itself, mostly open, had survived intact, at least as far as Ricky could see. Open structures always seemed to have survived nuke blasts better than closed ones.

Another cultivated plot grew at the building’s far end, where the elevated track had gone down. From there, several figures in dark vests jogged into the street in front of Jak and Ricky. One of them, with brown hair hanging to his shoulders, knelt and aimed a longblaster at Ricky.

A sharp crack punched at his left ear. He yelped and swerved.

The man with the longblaster dropped the weapon and folded over backward. What Ricky had heard, as his rational mind belatedly informed him, was the miniature sonic boom of a longblaster bullet going by him faster than the speed of sound. But it was fired from behind him. Ricky recognized the boom that reached him as the enemy gunman fell as the sound of Ryan’s 7.62 mm Steyr Scout.

Not that Ricky was accustomed to hearing it from way out in front of its business end.