Eden’s Twilight (28 page)

“Nor I, madam,” Doc said uneasily. “A gazebo in the Deathlands is staggeringly disingenuous!”

“Shut the frag up. I can't hear what they're saying,” Krysty said softly, straining to hear the muffled voices.

“Yes, killed, only feet away from where we stand!” Mayor Spencer shouted to the crowd from the stage. “Deputy Ted Ellison, cowardly stabbed in the back by the very outsiders that we have locked in our jail!”

The armed mob roared its approval.

“Death to the busriders!” a woman screeched, waving a shotgun. “Hang 'em! Set them on fire, and hang 'em!”

Once more, the crowd voiced its approval, and the cry of “busriders” was repeated several times. Nobody was quite sure what the phrase meant anymore, but it was considered the most foul curse imaginable.

Standing tall, Mayor Spencer appreciated the fervor of the people, but did not want this to become a lynching again. There were a lot of questions the outsiders had to answer before being allowed to die. “Ted Ellison is dead. He died so that we may live!” the mayor continued, hooking thumbs into her gunbelt. “So I want everybody to be extra careful about all the hot metal and the slippery floors. Gloves and shoes, remember that. Gloves and shoes at all times!”

“Move fast, and it's your ass!” Sheriff MacIntyre added, walking onto the stage.

Some of the people in the throng chuckled at that; a few seemed shocked at the rough language.

“Furthermore,” the sheriff declared, rubbing his freshly shaved face. “You must be doubly sure to never, ever—”

“Mayor?” The radio clipped to her belt crackled into life.
“Your Honor? This is Station Nine to the mayor! Come in please!”

Turning away from the villagers so that they could not hear her over the microphone, Henrietta Spencer pulled out the radio and thumbed the button. “This is the mayor. Go, Nine,” she commanded crisply.

“Ma'am, there's a…a…Hell, I don't know what the fuck it is!” the deputy burbled, close to panic. “The damn thing looks like a steam locomotive, and it's coming this way!”

“Look, there are no tracks in the clover…”

“It's got wheels!”

“Okay, we'll still steam them in the tunnel like all of the other invaders,” the mayor snapped. “Why are you wasting my time about—”

“It's not in the fucking clover!” the deputy snarled. “This thing is on the other side of the Barrier River! It's coming from the east! Did you hear me, the east!”

With a struggle, the major held her temper. “Okay, it's to the east. Who cares? Unless they have wings, or brought along a bridge—”

“They did!”

“Come again?” Spencer whispered, suddenly feeling very small. “They did what?”

“A bridge! The people operating the locomotive brought along a motherfucking bridge! It sort of looks like the box trestle from the Mud Lake, and they're trying to shove it across the Barrier to reach our side!”

“They dragged the whole bridge here?” the mayor asked, glancing over a shoulder to the east. Nothing was in sight but the high school, the library, a playground and rows upon rows of neatly tended homes.

“Yes, ma'am, and they're trying to push it across! Plus, a lot of other vehicles, too! Every goddamn one of them carrying machine guns and all kinds of military hardware. They're gonna be on our side in only minutes!”

“It must be Broke-Neck Pete,” MacIntyre growled.

“I swear, if this is some sort of a joke,” Spencer began in a menacing tone.

Just then, a fiery dart shot into the eastern sky, and everybody turned to stare in growing horror as the missile came streaking down to violently impact on a side street. The blast ripped apart that section of the street, a dozen windows shattered from shrapnel, and the concussion rolled louder than summer thunder over the entire village. Hundreds of lights appeared in the darkness. Yelling people began running around madly in the streets, dogs started howling, and the deputies on the wall cut loose with their assault rifles at something on the other side of the granite barrier.

“Jesus Christ, ma'am, I think that was a missile!” the deputy gushed over the radio.

“Shut the fuck up!” the mayor snarled, changing channels. “Command and Control, this is Spencer, give me audio. Repeat, this is Spencer, give me audio now!” The last few words came from the public address loudspeakers set on telephone poles around the green.

“Now hear this,” the mayor said in forced calm, her words booming across the village. “Now hear this. Red alert. Repeat, red alert! This not a drill! All mothers get your children into the bunkers! All children to the bunkers immediately! The village is under attack!”

Sheriff MacIntyre spoke into his radio. “Everybody else, to your post! Arm all weapons systems and prime the defensive grid! Repeat, this is not a drill. The goddamn busriders are coming over the bridge, boys! It's time to bale or fail!”

A few of the armed men cheered at the prospect of battle, but the rest simply took off running into the night, intent upon reaching their assigned posts. Sirens began to howl, the noise rapidly building in volume, and on the wall huge searchlights crashed into operation, the intense beams sweeping the land outside the village, looking for targets.

 

“S
TEAM
!” K
RYSTY SAID
, turning fast. “They're going to ace Roberto with steam!”

“Millie, can they do that?” J.B. asked with a worried expression.

“Hell, yes!” she responded grimly. “If the boilers can build enough pressure, they could blow War Wag One out of that tunnel like spitting out a watermelon seed, and the heat would parboil the crew, acing them while still inside the wag!”

“Without harming the brass or fuel,” Ryan said out loud. Fireblast, that was why the tunnel had been so fragging clean. It had to get used on a regular basis! This whole thing had been a jack from the very beginning, Cascade sending out Yates…or rather MacIntyre, as a phony doomie to confirm the fake journals. A double lie. They had to have sent out dozens of the damn things, mebbe hundreds, hoping to draw in a trader or two. They had caught a lot more than that, and now it was time for the harvest. Harvest. The word burned in his mind like a white flame of hate.

Suddenly, heavy machine guns opened fire from the wall as another missile rose high to arch back downward again. However, this time it hit somewhere on other side of the wall, merely throwing up flaming gouts of cornstalks and several outriders.

“Pete is trying to get the range of the wall,” Doc muttered, hefting his blaster. “Once he does, it will come down faster than the fabled walls of Jericho!”

“That's when the rads will really hit the Geiger,” Krysty stated, her hair waving and flexing.

“Not our problem,” Ryan shot back, walking across the office and flicking a butane lighter alive to study the bloodstained village maps on the corkboard. “Let Pete keep these bastards busy while we find the boilers and shut them down! Mildred, any idea where they could be located?”

“No idea whatsoever,” Mildred replied peevishly, chewing a lip. “City hall must have a big furnace, and the high school
an even bigger one. Not either of those should have the sheer volume needed to take out a convoy of war wags!”

Minutes ticked away as the companions ferociously studied the map. There was nothing there marked command, or defense grid, or steam generator, or anything useful.

“Gaia, I know where the damn thing is!” Krysty cried out. “Remember the dirt road that cut through the cropland? The bare dirt road that went straight from the tunnel to the ville wall?”

“Dark Night, that must be the feeder pipe!” J.B. declared. “The heat killed the grass and crops along the whole length, so they just turned the bald section into an access road!”

“Then the boilers must be right on the other side of the wall,” Mildred added, reviewing their journey in her mind. “Which would put them—”

“Right there!” Ryan stated, stabbing the map with a finger. “Smack between the grain silos and the water reservoir.” There was a large square there, but no name or description.

Going to the desk, Mildred opened the top drawer and hauled out a phone book. She started flipping through the street index.

“Careful, Millie, those pages are mighty yellow!” J.B. warned.

“Always were,” the physician muttered, then grinned triumphantly. “Okay, that is the location for Cascade Shipping and Delivery. That's why you couldn't find it on the map, John. Cascade is the name of the local truck depot!”

Pushing back his fedora, J.B. nodded. “Makes sense. When skydark hit there was probably more canned and frozen food stored there waiting to be shipped out than in all of the homes and markets combined! The depot would have meant life itself to the locals for decades.”

“While the world starved, they supped on a cornucopia of frozen TV dinners,” Doc said, clearly offended.

“Exactly!”

“And now it's their military headquarters,” Ryan growled, checking the action of the rapidfire.

“Which means it will be full of armed sec men,” Krysty said, scowling, adjusting the strap of a LAW.

“Not anymore, dear lady,” Doc corrected. “They will all be on the wall fighting off Broke-Neck Pete. The enemy of my enemy—”

“Is still my fragging enemy,” Ryan interrupted. “But one fight at a time. First we save Roberto and his people, then we'll decide what to do about Pete.”

“Do, sir?”

“After what we've seen, he can fragging have Cascade,” Ryan rasped, shouldering the longblaster. “Hell, the bastards deserve each other.”

Just then, another missile hit, the detonation rattling the window shutters. Several buildings were ablaze downtown, the ringing clang of fire engines arriving at the scene startling both Mildred and Doc.

“Wait, a moment, I've got an idea!” J.B. shouted, running down the corridor. “Be right back!”

A few moments later there came a loud whomp, and soon a smoky J.B. returned, patting his munitions bag. “Okay, let's go,” he said with savage cheerfulness.

On the streets outside, the companions stayed in the shadows as several Jeeps raced by, the grim crew inside each military transport armed with an M-60 machine gun, LAW rocket launcher or a flamethrower.

Alongside the office was a carport containing a large camou-colored Hummer. Ryan took out the overhead light with a hip shot, the bark of the SIG-Sauer lost amid the general turmoil of the building conflict.

Incredibly, the door was unlocked, and the companions piled inside quickly. Sliding behind the wheel, J.B. reached
under the dashboard and yanked out some wires, then touched them together until the engine started with a soft purr.

Lying curled on the floor mat, Mildred passed up a cigar box she found below the front seat. “It'll help hide your face,” she explained.

Gratefully, the Armorer pulled out a homemade cheroot and lit up with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Nobody ever really gave up smoking, you just stopped for a while, that was all.

Suddenly a rocket came streaming down to slam into the stone wall. The granite blocks shook visibly, a score of sec men thrown to the ground.

Quickly donning the cap and sunglasses of an aced deputy, J.B. backed out of the carport, and began to head across town for the large, well-illuminated building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, guard dogs and concrete pillboxes.

“Fireblast, there's no way we can get through all of that in time!” Ryan swore, glancing over the fortifications. “We'll have to try another way. Okay, head for the wall! We gotta find some stairs and fast!”

“Going at attack from the roof?” J.B. asked, stomping on the accelerator and turning a corner at full speed.

“Something like that,” Ryan replied, pulling a gren from his pocket and removing the tape from around the arming lever.

A group of deputies running along the sidewalk looked curiously at the racing Hummer, and one of them started talking into a radio.

“My dear sir!” Doc gasped in shock. “How will attacking the roof gain us access to the boilers in the basement?”

“It won't,” Ryan said gruffly. “And that's the whole damn point.”

The sounds of machine guns filled the night, sizzling green tracers extending from the distant wall of the ville, and reaching out from the heavy weapons of
Thunder
and
Roadhog.
Rockets streaked out from both sides, but most were caught in the streams of hot lead and exploded harmlessly in midair.

The moment that the box trestle had been shoved across the river gorge, Pete had sent over the lightweight delivery vans as a vanguard. As expected, most of them disintegrated in the field of land mines, but a few reached the forest only to be halted. There was no pathway or road through the dense grove of pine and poplar. It was a solid barrier, a living wall of wood more than a hundred feet wide.

“Again!” Pete commanded from the cupola of the LVTP-7. “Hit 'em again!”

Once more, the homemade bazookas from Newton launched, sending rockets spiraling into the trees. They exploded among the foliage, sending a spray of shrapnel and flame in every direction.

In the rear of the massive APC, a dozen crewmen were preparing their blasters for the coming fight, a large dark-haired woman standing among them.

“Remember what I told you,” Helga directed, slinging a canvas bag full of spare ammo belts and the M-60 rapidfire over a shoulder. “Once inside the ville, no more chilling. Wound or blind only, but no chilling! We need these folks alive to talk.”

“Yeah, we'll make 'em talk, Chief,” a greasy crewman said with a sneer, obscenely rubbing his crotch.

The other men laughed in lusty agreement while doing a final check of their brand-new flak jackets, rapidfires and grens.

“Sure, have fun, rape all you want,” Helga stated, fixing the men with a hard stare. “But only after we have control of the ville. Only then! Anybody dies before then, and I'll sell your asses to the cannies. Savvy?”

“Yeah, we savvy,” a burly crewman muttered, attaching a bayonet to the end of the Kalashnikov. There were neat rows of scratches in the wooden stock to mark each person he had personally gutted, and it was almost time for a new stock, the old one nearly worn through in spots. Any damn feeb could shoot someone from a distance. Where was the fun in that? Ah, but you had to get up close and personal for a gutting. Then you could look into their terrified eyes and watch the actual life fade away. That was a lot better than rape. Oh yes, much, much better than that.

Wrapped in a thick blanket, a doomie child sat alone in the corner on a wooden crate of MRE envelopes. With infinite patience, the mutie waited for the swirling whirlpool of events to finally coalesce into a single moment of clarity. The future was in motion again, forming and changing like warm quicksilver, each pattern new and distinct, but all of them rich with the terrible red hue of human suffering. Untold hundreds would perish tonight, and the child privately wished that he could be among them to end the long years of forced servitude to his horrible master.

“Again!” Broke-Neck Pete commanded, his face shiny with avarice. “Use every rocket! But bring down those fragging trees!”

By now, most of the grove was on fire, the flames raging unchecked. Once the way was clear, Pete would personally drive
Roadhog
to the wall and punch through with his small supply of CeeGee missiles. That wasn't the name of the
predark weapon, just what he personally called them. There did not seem to be any designation for the oversize launchers except the name of the manufacturer, Carl Gustav. But that was okay, what predark blaster didn't have somebody's name on it?

But more importantly, the massive 87 mm rockets packed twice the punch of a slim 66 mm LAW, and completely blew apart every war wag he had ever encountered as if it were made of window glass instead of welded steel. The trader had only three of the CeeGee launchers left, but they should be more than enough to open a crack in the wall around Cascade, and then the pipe bombs stolen from Two-Son ville would finish the job. Pete had been hoarding the heavy antitank launchers for years, hoping to use them against the Trader. But now he was offered an even better target than revenge, the combined tech of the predark world. And it was all waiting for him behind a simple stone wall. Broke-Neck Pete, the first emperor of Nuke America!

Soon, oh so very soon, the city of Cascade would be his. It was only a matter of minutes…

 

S
CREECHING TO A HALT
at the base of the wall, the companions charged out of the sheriff's van and started up the enclosed stairwell leading to a guard kiosk. A deputy sat on the steps smoking a cheroot, and his eyes went wide at the appearance of Ryan and the others. As he fumbled with an M-16 rapidfire, Ryan shot the man in the throat and ran past him without slowing. Mercy was a luxury they could ill afford at the moment. Time was short.

The one-eyed man encountered no more guards on the zigzagging stairs, and he paused to catch his breath halfway up the tower. Damn electrocution had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit. Glancing out a narrow slit in the brickwork, Ryan cursed at the sight of several Jeeps full of armed people stopping near the van and surrounding the vehicle.
They seemed to be shouting orders, then all of them opened fire, the fusillade of rounds tearing the apart the vehicle until it whoofed into flames.

“So much for protect and service,” Mildred snorted, hefting the Winchester. “They'll be coming up the stairs next, John!”

“Already on it,” J.B. replied, kneeling on the concrete. Stretched across the landing, a dark string was looped around the iron-pipe railing of the stairwell and attached to the pin of a gren with the arming lever already removed.

“Anti-pers?” Krysty asked.

“Willie peter,” the Armorer answered smugly. “That chem storm will make a wall of fire and stop anybody from coming this way for quite a while!”

“Thermite would be better,” Doc stated, thankful for the short break.

“True. But I'm saving that for Pete.”

“But what about the implo gren?”

“We have other plans for that,” Ryan stated, starting up the stairs once more.

Reaching the top landing, the companions angled their rapidfires upward and put a long burst through the closed wooden door at the top of the stairs. They were rewarded with howls of pain, and then the door was blown apart by a deafening shotgun blast.

Ryan charged up the last few steps and swept the kiosk with the rapidfire, catching two deputies in the act of closing their bulletproof vests. They died on the spot, but he'd only wounded a third man wearing his vest and sitting at a table. The impact of the 7.62 mm rounds spun the startled guard around in the wheeled chair, and he fell out firing a big-bore handcannon, a lance of flame extending from the muzzle. As Ryan stitched the guard with the rapidfire, he staggered from the brutal impact of a large-caliber round, and felt the sharp pain of a rib cracking. Fireblast, the vests were shit! No damn padding at all.

Ignoring the dull throb in his chest, Ryan stumbled to a
mounted gun and worked the arming bolt to then sweep the top of the wall with a steady hail of .50-caliber rounds. Men and women screamed from the unexpected attack from behind, and fell away into the darkness of the night. Meanwhile, the other companions started shooting their M-16 rapidfires down at the guards walking patrol on top of the depot with similar bloody results. As the clips emptied, Krysty and Mildred dropped their weapons and took the combo blasters from the dead guards.

When the belt ended, Ryan released the hot blaster and went outside, walking swiftly along the top of the wide stone wall, keeping a good distance from the coils of electrified barbed wire.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc cried, pointing outside the ville.

Expecting a new attack, Ryan glanced in that direction, but only saw a fiery warbird climbing high into the starry sky, going almost straight up. Mutie shit, that was rising from the west, not the east! It was the signal from Jak, which meant that Roberto was already here. Redoubling his speed, the one-eyed man triggered the rapidfire at anything that moved in the darkness ahead, brutally clearing the way until standing above the depot.

Maintaining flanking positions, the rest of the companions stayed close, emptying clips in mere seconds, grabbing replacements from the dead and the dying. Carefully placing her shots, Mildred used the telescopic sight of the Winchester to pick off anybody coming their way with heavy ordnance.

Turning away from the defense complex, Ryan shot off the strands of barbed wire, sparking electrical cables sailing away. Now looking down, he could see the dirt road going directly from the ville to the craggy foothills in the west.

Just then, machine-gun chatter came from a nearby kiosk, the hum of the passing bullets clearly audible. Ruthlessly, Krysty crouched to point her M-16 that way and trigger the
40 mm gren launcher. It loudly thumped, and a split second later the brick kiosk exploded in a fireball, shrieking figures running around inside the inferno and waving their arms.

As if in response, a blinding searchlight swung around to trap the companions in a deadly zone of visibility. Everybody discharged their rapidfires at the source of the light, and immediately came the sound of shattering glass. The searchlight winked out.

Ensconced in blackness once more, J.B. hauled out the implo gren, pulled the pin and simply dropped the bomb over the outside edge of the wall. The ferruled sphere vanished into the gloom below, and the companions dropped, holding on tight.

Running people were hurrying along the top of the wall, coming ever closer, when there came a brief flash of light from below, closely followed by a hurricane of air rushing downward. Caught by surprise, the deputies were hauled into the barbed wire, the electrified strands crackling and sizzling as the men wailed in agony.

The second that the wind eased, Ryan stood and dropped a willie peter gren off to the side. As it detonated, the flaming chem storm revealed a huge crater in the dirt road, ten, maybe twenty feet deep. But there was no sign of the feeder pipe.

Then, from the depot, there came an odd thumping sound, rapidly building in volume and in strength.

“Gaia, they're getting ready to release the steam!” Krysty shouted.

“Use the rockets!” Ryan snarled, tossing aside the rapidfire and pulling the LAW off his shoulder. “All together! We have to hit it all together.”

Moving fast, everybody obeyed, spreading out slightly to assume a firing position. From within the depot, the mechanical thumping got louder and machine guns yammered nonstop from the eastern wall. People were shouting in the streets, blasters firing randomly. Halfway up, the stairwell leading to
the guard kiosk exploded into writhing flames, and a second searchlight swept the wall to stop directly on the poised companions.

“On my mark!” Ryan bellowed, lightly placing a finger on the button, the plastic launch tube cool against his sweaty cheek. “Three…two…one…mark!”

In tight formation, the antitank weapons discharged, a stiletto of white flame stabbing out from the front, while a volcano of smoke and hot exhaust vomited from the rear. Streaking straight down, the rockets barely had enough time to arm their warheads before hitting the soft ground and detonating.

The overlapping explosions sounded louder than a nuke storm, and huge volumes of dirt were thrown aside in a dark tidal wave…along with several large chunks of curved steel pipe.

Suddenly the depot stopped pounding, and from the smoking depression a thundering geyser of white steam erupted, reaching for the stars, quickly spreading like a blossoming hellflower to send a boiling mist across the ville and cropland. Already halfway back to the kiosk, the companions cried out from the stinging deluge and barely made it inside to slam the door shut and take refuge inside the weapons closet.

However, not everybody was so fortunate. Anybody caught out in the open began to howl from the boiling rain, and most of the people were scalded alive, falling limply to the muddy ground long before they were able to reach any kind of protective cover.

As the force of the titanic geyser dissipated, the rain of boiling death slowed and finally stopped. An eerie stillness covered the sodden village, hot water dripping off the rooftops and trickling down the rain gutters, wispy tendrils of steam rising from the hundreds of bloated, red bodies covering the sidewalks and streets.