Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (16 page)

It was a great big table, about twenty feet long and a good four wide, braced by all kinds of slantwise struts from the legs beneath. It weighed hundreds of pounds, but no one ever accused Buffort Sumz of being weak in his
body
.

Up went the table, spilling squalling naked cannies. Shifting his grip to both sides of his end of the huge table, his natural strength driven by a sudden surge of fear and fury that made his face flush with heat like a triple-bad sunburn, he raised the entire table up by one end. Then he turned, just a bit, grunting like a boar sexing a sow, and smashed it right down again.

Four of the cannies got caught clean beneath it. They were squashed, with a satisfactory cracking of bones like a big old sap-rich bonfire, and big splashes of blood shooting out to either side. Another got its lower half pinned beneath. Its upper part lay facedown, snapping its jaws at the floor and clawing futilely with its hand.

Yoostas swung the stool with extra force, right to left. It practically exploded against the side of a cannie’s face. So did the cannie’s head.

A half dozen cannies converged on Yoostas, one falling on him from the gaping hole in the ceiling. He jabbed one of the stool legs he was left holding in either hand over his shoulder into that one’s face. It fell off him, mewling and clutching an eye that streamed fluid.

The others grabbed Yoostas’s arms and held him. He kicked one away. Another grabbed him by the ankle and
held that. As he screamed in sheer outrage and struggled furiously to break free, another jumped on his back. This one grabbed his face and twisted it viciously to one side.

Buffort heard his brother’s neck snap. The little man folded to the floor like an empty grain sack.

“Yoostas!” Buffort shouted. He had to drop the table, whose weight had overpowered even his rage-boosted strength. But he got his mountainous mass moving toward his fallen brother, who had disappeared under a seething mass of bare white buttocks and reddened muzzles, hoping against hope there’d still be something he could do for his brother. Already it seemed the rest of his family members were down. He slipped on a floor made slippery by inch-deep blood, torn-out organs and ripped-off limbs.

The creatures looked at him with their strange red eyes. Then they began to leap at him.

Bellowing, he batted at them. He felt bones break as he slammed a creature with one of his tree-trunk forearms, heard a monster squall most satisfactorily. Another, and another. He caught one’s head in a ham-like hand, lifted it off the floor, grabbed its skinny shoulders and unscrewed its head a full turn.

Suddenly a heavy weight descended on his head. He felt claw-like nails digging beneath his bone-shelf brows for his eyes. He cried out shrilly, slapping at the horror. It stank even in his nostrils. He felt its breath hot as an open oven on his cheek.

Sharp pain shot through his left eye socket. He squealed, frozen momentarily by intolerable agony.

His vision crazed. He seemed to be looking down at his own capacious belly, straining against the front of his homespun shirt,
and
gazing in horror across the room
as two of the cannies played Keep Away with Bobby-Joan’s blond head. He always hated that game—he always lost…

His right palm connected with the creature on his back. He slapped it, hard. Then he smushed it against himself with that hand while his left grabbed hold of its greasy hair. Shifting his grip, he managed to catch its head in both hands and fling it across the room.

He plucked the others off himself and flung them away, hard, but they just kept coming, grabbing at him, biting him. He felt claws rake his arm and sharp fangs sink into the bulge of his belly.

He slammed a hammer fist down on the side of the face of the one who was biting his gut. It crunched and dropped away.

Buffort broke. He didn’t like to fight. Never had. He hated pain, and never had much interest in causing it to others. He just wanted to hang with his kin and laugh and fuck whatever woman or girl felt like having him, the way Sumzes had done since time in a memorial, as Paw-Paw said and Buffort never could understand. And he couldn’t see right.

He started crying and lumbered into a run. His boots slogged through deep, squishing gunk. He couldn’t see for shit, what with one eye looking ahead and the other showing the front of his overalls and beneath, the seething red mess of the floor like the world’s grossest stew.

He managed to bat away the things that jumped for him, chittering and snapping. Around him he heard the sounds of ripping and chewing, and the moans and screams of the sadly not-yet-dead. His family. His loved ones. Who just moments before had been enjoying a
peaceful family supper, the way they had a thousand time before.

He got to the front door of the house and yanked it open. Outside was a hell-scape like the one inside, except more spread-out and lit by torches and the flames of a burning outhouse. There were white things everywhere, and the numerous members of his clan who hadn’t been at dinner were fighting a losing battle against the creatures.

Or were just being eaten.

He cast around with his one eye that pointed where he wanted for something to use as a weapon. Then suddenly there was another of the horrible things, clinging to his belly and grinning right up into his other eye.

He squalled and tried to swat it away, but others suddenly fell down from the roof, grabbing his arms and weighing them down.

The cannie that was clinging to his belly began to dig. Buffort struggled mightily, smashing the creature hanging on to his left arm against the cabin wall, but others came, landing on his head, grabbing on to his legs, his arms…

Others joined the one clinging to the front of his overalls. He watched in horror as they tore the tough fabric open—and then his belly. Hooting with what sounded like demon laughter, they began to yank out greasy wet coils of his own guts as unimaginable pain shocked through him.

Chapter Thirteen

A coamer had wrapped its arms around Ryan’s chest, effectively pinning his left hand to his side. To get a hand-on wristlock behind Ryan’s powerful torso, the monster had to turn its muzzle aside and press its cheek against the man’s chest, unable to try to bite with its doglike jaws.

As favors went, it was a small one. At least two others had hold of Ryan’s right arm—the one he was using to swing his heavy panga to such deadly effect against them.

Feeling the grips on his arm slacken, Ryan wrenched it free with a grunt of effort. He brought the pommel of the panga’s hilt down hard, busting a skull.

Jak fired again. The bullet punched through the shoulder blade of another cannie racing to join the two dozen or so already in the deadly scrum by the entrance to the dig, erupting through the creature’s chest in a shower of gore.

Ryan sensed the intent of his own attackers waver. He could almost smell their fear, over the stink of their never-washed bodies and rotting-meat breaths, and the stringent smell of already burned blaster powder and lubricant.

To perceive was to act. He sheathed the panga to draw his SIG handblaster from the waistband of his jeans, where he’d thrust it after the slide locked back in battery
position over an empty magazine. He clicked the release to drop the spent mag. His left hand deftly fished a full magazine from a pocket of his coat and slammed it home in the well. Then he pushed the slide release with his thumb. The heavy steel slide slammed home, stripping a shiny cartridge off and powering it into the breech of his handblaster.

Jak added his own chilling wolf howl to the screams of his wounded victims. Ryan felt the cannies shift away from him. The sudden onslaught and howling unnerved them.

He stuck his SIG’s muzzle almost into the reeking tangle of hair on the back of a cannie’s head. Perhaps sensing its imminent doom, the creature started to look around.

Instead of the back of the skull Ryan triggered the blaster a finger’s breadth from the horror’s left temple. He smelled burned human flesh as the white skin sizzled in the muzzle-flash. A fountain of brain chunks and blood, black in the lamplight, blew out the far side of the thing’s head.

“Rip into them with all you’ve got!” Ryan shouted, his voice hoarse. “Take it to the bastards hard!”

He swung his panga into the back of a cannie clambering up pyramid of its vile kin to get at Krysty, who was immobilized by a mob of the creatures but was still fending them away from her face and head and chest by jabbing with the handle of her shovel, which she now held with hands far apart for maximum leverage and control. The heavy blade bit deep with a wood-cutting sound. The coamer squealed in pain and bent backward with shocking flexibility, trying to claw the pain from its back with long-nailed hands. Ryan ripped the big knife
free as Krysty stuck the monster in the throat. It fell off its fellows, choking to death on its own crushed larynx.

The others were already starting to lose interest in the statuesque and violent redhead. As Krysty kicked one off her, Ryan shifted his attention elsewhere. His lover could take care of herself from here on.

He saw a cannie fly up into the air propelled by a long, stork-like leg. A moment later Doc seemed to lever himself off the ground. He smashed the butt of his LeMat into the face of a nearby attacker and thrust another, who seemed unsure of himself, through the neck.

J.B. managed to crawl from beneath a seething pile of bodies. He had his Uzi slung over the back of his battered leather jacket, which now had a few more scuffs in it, his M-4000 shotgun in his right hand and his fedora on his left. Pausing to settle the hat firmly on his head again and straighten his wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, he stood, swapping blasters and replacing a spent mag in his Uzi with a fresh one.

The cannies noticed at once they were basically all wrestling with one another. The Armorer pivoted neatly and sprayed the pile with expert short bursts of 9 mm death. Blood and gobbets of flesh flew everywhere. Cannies screamed. Those that could, bolted.

The shattering blasterfire and the flight of their comrades unsettled another struggling mass of coamers. Two of their matted-hair heads suddenly slammed together. Mildred rose from among them like a goddess of wrath.

“You bastards have got to take a nuking
bath
once in a while,” she yelled, punching furiously in all directions.

The coamers routed. They steamed back up the sloping sides of the cave-in on all fours, like the baboons their muzzles made them resemble. Even Jak stopped shooting
or even cutting them to spur them on their way with hearty boots to the backside.

“Well, that was nasty,” Mildred muttered. “Never smelled anything so bad since we had to crawl through thirty yards of fermented feral-dog shit.”

With no one left to fight, Jak joined the others. “What took you so long?” J.B. asked half-humorously. But only half.

Jak grinned his white-wolf grin. “Busy,” he said.

“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan asked. The words rasped his throat. He put away his weapons, took out his canteen, unscrewed the top and took a sip of water to rinse out the dust and less mentionable substances that had gotten in there when he was fighting for his life. He spit it out and took a hefty swallow.

“If you want to call it that,” Mildred said.

The others concurred. Jak and J.B. actually sounded chipper. Adult though he was, Jak was still a bloodthirsty wild child at heart. And bone practical though he was, J.B. loved nothing better than a good scrap.

Especially when his side won.

“So why now?” Ricky asked, slogging down from his position above the entry to the sunken office complex.

Like all of them, the youth was covered head to boots in a mess of gore, caked dirt and ropy cannibal slobber. Ryan realized that included him, too. Nonsqueamish though he was, that didn’t make him happy.

“Was that not the point of the exercise, after all?” Doc asked. He dusted off his coat sleeves and shot his cuffs. It didn’t help his woeful appearance any, but Ryan understood the gesture.

“To get swarmed like that?’ he asked, coming down to join them. Clearly hoping his friends wouldn’t notice, he
more collapsed against than leaned on the one makeshift table that hadn’t been knocked down, ignoring the naked, blood-twined pair of coamer chills lying on top of it.

“I thought they’d, like, throw stuff at us the way they have before, maybe give us a chance to pick one off in a position where we could get to the chill before his buddies did. Or her buddies, I guess,” Ricky said.

Most of the dead cannies were male, but a few were clearly female.

“It was a straight-up human-wave attack,” Mildred said, nodding around at the pale-skinned chills and the few moaning wounded, a good two dozen of them, strewed around the dig site. “If you can call them that.”

“What do you mean, Mildred?” Krysty asked. She propped her shapely butt against the table right next to Ricky.

“I mean, are these ugly bastards even human, with dog faces like that? Are they mutants? Animals? Or are they something else?”

“Animals,” Jak stated vehemently.

“I think he’s right,” Ricky said.

“I find myself unsure,” Doc added. “They clearly display—not what we would consider overabundant intelligence, perhaps, but a clear, and clearly nonbestial, sense of purpose.”

“He’s right,” J.B. said. “Take them one at a time, they don’t act that bright. But just like there’s some reason they haven’t hassled us much before, and mostly here, I reckon there was a reason they decided to swarm us tonight.”

And night it was. The sky overhead was clotted with ugly, bruised-looking clouds, mostly visible only because of the yellow lightning threading through the ones to the south.

“Hive mind?” Mildred asked.

Ryan shrugged. “Details don’t reload any blasters,” he said. “Human or mutie or animal, they attacked us now in a way they never did before. And yeah. I’m thinking there was a reason beyond instinct, or they just got all triple peckish at once and needed a good feed. That’s worth knowing.”

“‘It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles,’” J.B. said.