End Day (13 page)

The first hoodie was joined by a second, then a third. Their bulk practically filled the anteroom. The hoods cast their faces in deep shadow

Then as if on some silent signal, each raised a clawed hand and pushed back their cowl.

They looked...
prehistoric
. Wester had no other word for it. As if they had been hatched out of beach-ball-size eggs buried in the sand of some
Jurassic Park
riverbank. He let go of the M-16's pistol grip to wipe the sweat from his palm.

The purple hoodies were clearly not afraid of what was lined up on the other side of the screen. Their eyes were slitted, the corners of their wide mouths turned up, revealing rows of sharp teeth. It looked as if they were smiling.

One of the cops in the back row let out a scream and cut loose with his assault rifle.

The full-auto burst was contagious. Training and discipline out the window; they all opened fire. Even with earplugs, the clatter of so many automatic weapons going off in a concrete box was deafening.

The cop kneeling beside Wester went down, his right eye keyholed by a ricocheting 5.56 mm round that blew off his helmet and the back of head. Then an officer standing behind him dropped and then another. Bullets whined off the walls. Wester kept shooting, because through the smoke, he could see the purple hoodies were still standing, leaning into the torrent of blasts as if it was a hurricane-force wind. If someone was yelling for them to stop shooting, it couldn't be heard over the din. He let up on the trigger only when the M-16's last shot was fired.

Four hundred rounds of ammo expended at near point-blank range in an enclosed space should have done the trick, but it hadn't.

The monsters stepped up to the heavy wire screen. Then they pulled it apart as if it was made of wet paper.

No time to reload, Wester discarded the assault rifle and drew his handgun.

As he watched helplessly, a kneeling cop was jerked to his feet by a purple hoodie, then pulled apart, like a fly in the control of a small, curious boy. While the officer screamed, his arms and legs were torn off and then his torso was sent pinwheeling over their heads to the back of the room.

Wester shot the grotesque reptilian bastard in the head, punching out shot after shot at a distance of less than four feet. The impacts of the 9 mm bullets barely registered on it. Clear snot streaming from its nostrils, it grinned at him and kept coming. Still firing, he backed up, aiming for an eye.

A fucking yellow eye.

* * *

M
C
C
REEDY
COWERED
ON
the staircase, fingers stuffed in his ears. Below it sounded like World War III. Standing between him and the full-auto meat grinder were three of the big boys. He knew they weren't protecting him from the bullets. They were protecting the little one who stood on the step next to him.

When the shooting finally stopped, he took his fingers out of his ears, but for only a second. The screaming—and the sound of the little one laughing—made him stuff them back in. Steel guy wires slid in and out of its cheek grommets, raising and lowering its lower jaw as it chortled.

It took several minutes for the screaming to end. Fearing that it wasn't really over, McCreedy kept his ears plugged as he was shoved down the steps. In the glare of the fluorescent ceiling light, brutally detached body parts lay scattered all over the floor. There were black-uniformed bodies without heads, arms or legs, blood still leaking from the various ragged stumps.

McCreedy removed his fingers from his ears and covered his nose and mouth with both hands in a feeble attempt to block the stench of spilled gore and voided bowels.

The room's purpose was obvious to him at a glance. The rows of assault rifles and combat shotguns lined up in racks along the walls were a dead giveaway.

Kicking a path through the body parts, the wide boys began gathering M-16s, olive-drab cans of ammo and crates of grenades.

They were using the police station as a gun shop, he realized. A
free
gun shop. It wasn't an aha moment. It didn't explain why creatures like them needed guns in the first place.

A purple hoodie stepped up to him and dumped a half-dozen black assault rifles in his arms. He stood there, meekly holding them until the little one decided they had enough loot.

They started back up the stairs with their burdens, tracking bloody footprints on the treads.

No one challenged them as they walked down the ground-floor hallway and out the front doors. There was no massive police presence waiting for them outside, no rows of squad cars, no phalanx of officers with weapons raised. In the distance he could hear a steady wail of sirens and the string-of-firecracker rattles of full-auto gunfire. The limo was where he had left it double-parked.

One of the big boys popped the vehicle's rear trunk lid. Inside, curled in a tight ball, eyes bugging out with terror was their other captive—Dr. James Nudelman. The strips of duct tape over his mouth and around the back of his head covered most of the big ruby-colored birthmark on the side of his face. McCreedy knew his name from the attack on the hospital. He had no idea why the man had been taken. Why would these creatures hold someone for ransom when they could barge into any bank, rip the doors off the vault, take what they wanted and leave without worrying about law enforcement? It didn't make any sense. Cops couldn't stop them, not even with automatic weapons; he'd seen the proof of that.

The purple hoodie rolled an unprotesting Nudelman to one side like a big bag of dog food, and then they began stacking the stolen weapons and ammo in the trunk. There was a lot of it to stack. What wouldn't fit with the lid closed, they took into the limo with them.

The sirens in the distance didn't seem to be coming any closer. Whatever the police were doing elsewhere in the city, they thought it was more important. Either that, or they knew they couldn't help here.

McCreedy was pushed behind the steering wheel as the limo's side door closed. He felt numbed to his core. Shell-shocked. Utterly lost. With a dry mouth, he babbled a prayer.

“Dear Lord, I know I've forsaken you...I know I don't deserve your mercy...but if just this once...”

“Drive!” the little one shrilled at him through the privacy window.

McCreedy drove.

Chapter Fifteen

Standing up, Ryan leaned into the EMT truck's front compartment. “Looks like we're in the clear for the moment,” he said. “We can't just keeping driving around. Pull over, Vee. We need to figure out a plan.”

Vee steered the truck to the curb and stopped, leaving the engine idling.

In the distance he could hear the distinct crackle of blasterfire between the wail of sirens.

“We need to pick up Magus's trail, and fast,” Ryan said.

Vee reached up to the headliner and hit a switch on the console there. Police and emergency calls instantly blasted through the radio's speakers. “How about that for a start?” she said.

Ryan didn't understand the code numbers or locations being rattled off, but their guide to Manhattan did.

“Now your pal from the future is attacking police stations,” Vee said. “That's what we're hearing outside. Three precincts in the south of the city have been hit in the last ten minutes. What's in a police station Magus would want?”

“Weapons,” Mildred said without hesitation. “Full-auto assault rifles and stores of ammo.”

“You don't have guns like that in the future?”

“We have blasters, guns,” Ryan said, “but hardly anyone is making new ones. And the new ones are very crude in comparison to what you have now. The fine points of steel making and machining have been lost. In our time we rely on the blasters that weren't destroyed in yours.”

“What is the point of taking guns if Magus has enforcers?”

“Predark weapons and ammunition are pure gold to the residents of Deathlands, my dear,” Doc said. “Hard currency, like jack, jolt and joy juice.”

“Magus uses them to trade for slaves and supplies, to bribe favors from the barons and field an army of sec men if needed,” Krysty told her.

“But police stations?” Vee said. “Attacking one is like asking to get shot full of holes.”

“Bullets not stop enforcers,” Jak stated.

“All hell is breaking loose here,” Mildred said. “The cops aren't going to be sitting in the barn drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. They'll be out responding to the widespread attacks. The stations will be almost undefended.”

“What other source of blasters is there?” Ryan asked.

“National Guard armories, I suppose,” Vee said. “But I don't know if there are fully operational ones in the city. I mean, which ones, if any, actually hold stocks of automatic weapons. They're historic buildings.”

“Magus is under the same time pressure we are,” Ryan said. “Can't go far to get the shopping done.”

“Hitting an unmanned National Guard armory wouldn't have the same shock effect, either,” Mildred said. “Attacking police stations head-on is a dagger in the heart of America's largest city. If anything, Magus is all about the gruesomely theatrical. And the eve of the world ending is the biggest stage that will ever be. Given the opportunity, Magus is putting on the opening act, warming up a global audience for the headliner, the ultimate terror.”

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc groaned, “even for Magus, that seems over the top.”

“How does any of this help us?” Krysty said.

“I've been keeping track of the locations,” Vee said. “Out of twenty-two police precincts on Manhattan, so far the Thirteenth, Tenth and Midtown South have been hit. The assaults are zigzagging back and forth, but seem to be moving in a northerly direction up the island. If that is a pattern and it continues, the next stop is the Eighteenth Precinct police station, Midtown North.”

“It's all we've got,” Ryan said. “Let's go for it.”

With lights flashing and siren screaming, Vee roared away from the curb.

“What about the paramedic?” Mildred said to Ryan. “I told him we'd let him go when we were clear.”

Hanging on to the rear compartment's ceiling, Ryan glanced back at the man strapped to the gurney. He appeared to be asleep, or maybe he'd fainted from terror. “We don't want him reporting the wag stolen,” he said. “He stays where he is until we're done.”

Ryan turned to look out the windshield. They had made no turns since the last right; the wide road ahead was straight as a string. He couldn't see the speedometer over Vee's shoulder, but she was really pouring it on. The desolate urban landscape zipped past in a blur. No trees. No dirt. No people. Just asphalt, concrete and glass. In a way it reminded him of the New York of Deathlands.

Odd to think of the pinnacle of civilization as bleak and inhuman, but that's how he saw it. A vast, cold emptiness. But Deathlands was certainly no picnic in the park, either, and this wasn't his era to judge or condemn. All he knew was he didn't want his life to end here.

He turned and looked back at his companions—J.B., Krysty, Doc, Mildred, Jak and Ricky stood or sat, eyes staring at nothing. Each was lost in his or her own thoughts, but he was sure they all felt the same way.

This was no place to die.

The few wags ahead of them didn't stay ahead for long. As Vee bore down on their back bumpers, they immediately slowed and pulled close to the curb, out of her path. He had read about the different-colored lights hanging over the intersections with side streets. Their purpose didn't seem to apply to the wag they were in. Or Vee just ignored it.

They'd been rolling for about a mile when the radio crackled with a different voice sounding a new alert, but the message was familiar: station under attack, officers down, all personnel return at once.

“Good grief!” Vee said. “That's Midtown North! They're already hitting it!”

“How far away?” Ryan asked.

“We're on Eighth Avenue,” she said, as if that would mean something to him. “It's a straight shot to Fifty-Fourth Street and the precinct house. Maybe five minutes if I don't have to slow down.”

She didn't slow down; in fact she sped up. The wag's engine screamed at redline. It felt as if the tires were barely touching the ground, as if they were floating over the street. Ryan guessed she was doing one hundred miles an hour or damned close to it. At that speed a minor fuckup, a swerve of the steering wheel, a stray dog in the road, a pothole, and they were going to flip and roll, roll and roll, until the wag was a pile of unrecognizable twisted steel wrapped around a thousand pounds of raw human hamburger.

Over the engine noise, the blasterfire outside got louder and louder—strings of single shots and long bursts of overlapping automatic fire. And there were explosions, too. To Ryan they sounded like the flat whack of detonating grens.

Vee started to slow down at Fifty-Third, past the tallest buildings he'd ever seen. They stretched up and up, he couldn't see the tops, and there were too many stories to count—even if he'd been in the mood for counting them. Then she swung a hard left on Fifty-Fourth. Ryan smelled the smoke a second before he saw the blaze. The odor was like burning tires and roasted pork.

A huge bonfire raged in front of a squat four-story, gray-stone-faced structure with a doorway at either corner of the street-facing side. It was hard to tell, but from the wreckage, it looked as if a police wag in the parking area had been rammed broadside by a big white step van. Both vehicles and the three squad cars parked next to them were fully engulfed in fire.

When Vee stopped the EMT truck in the middle of the street, everybody bailed from the wag with blasters drawn. Through the side window of one of the crushed cop wags, Ryan could just make out the head-and-shoulder silhouette of a body behind the steering wheel. It had already burned to a blackened crisp. The flames from the fuel tanks had jumped so high that they had ignited the red, white and blue flag on the stanchion at the top of the first-floor facade. The heat was withering. In the leaping firelight, the building looked dirty; the pale stone was streaked with stripes of dark moss or grime.

As Ryan moved for the closest doorway, longblaster in hand, a deafening sustained burst of autofire came from above. Muzzle-flashes strobe-lit the darkened, second-story windows.