End Day (2 page)

That they had ended up here—bodies sun-blasted, throats parched, with sand in their boots, on the verge of closing the book on Magus—was the result of a singular chain of coincidence. It had started in the relatively fertile valley on the other side of the eight-thousand-foot mountain. Steel Eyes's handful of human sec men had slipped away from their camp for some recreation and joy juice in the nearby ville's tiny gaudy house. They had gotten so drunk while waiting in line to be serviced by a lone slut, who was puffing away like the little engine that could, that they'd blathered on about their employer, the convoy and the direction they were all headed next. A day later, when the companions showed up at the gaudy house en route to points north, the sec men were long gone and the slut so sky-high on jolt she was talking nonstop and tap-dancing in a puddle of her own piss.

After verifying her Magus story—the gaudy master had overheard it, too—the companions traded an assortment of extra gear, including one fully functional, single-shot 12 gauge with a broken buttstock, for six skinny swaybacked horses. They picked up the convoy's trail just outside the ville and followed it up a steep, winding, predark mountain road. The going was slow because they had to stop often to let the horses rest. They spent one sleepless night beside the disintegrating tarmac.

By Ryan's reckoning, they were two full days behind Magus when they reached the edge of a broad meadow bordered by tall pines and a small stream. According to the gaudy master, Magus's likely next landing spot was just the other side of it. Continuing on the ruined road would have led them directly to the ville but cost them the element of surprise. Ryan guided them a ways into the meadow, then stopped the single file of riders with a raised hand. He listened hard, but there was not so much as a bird tweet or a bug chirp.

From her perch behind him on the horse, Krysty pointed at the thick, waist-high grass to their right. She said softly in his ear, “Something there. It's moving...”

Jak was already standing tall in his stirrups, eyes fixed in the same direction.

Ryan signaled for the albino to dismount and circle around behind, drew his panga from its sheath and quietly swung down from the horse. He had walked no more than twenty feet when he saw something bright red among the green. He thought he glimpsed a stout black body beneath. Whatever it was, it turned to the left and disappeared. He followed, wading through the lake of tall grass.

Jak was moving toward him, the sun reflecting off white hair and skin. He had his arms outstretched, and he was smiling.

When Ryan took his next step, it was met by a burst of noise from in front of him. A blur of angry birds with flaming red heads, thick black-feathered bodies and flapping, four-foot wings, shot from cover. As the buzzards rushed past him, scuttling away like gigantic swarthy chickens, he instinctively swung the panga, smacking one of them on the pate with the flat of the blade. Stunned, the bird sat down hard, beak gaping, wings spread and twitching. It stank like a slaughterhouse; there was fresh blood smeared on its chest feathers. Its stomach was grossly distended, the contents so densely packed and heavy that, like its brethren, it couldn't fly.

That didn't bode well.

He waved for the others to dismount. They left the horses to graze in the meadow and, spreading out, weapons at the ready, advanced to the edge of the clearing. Nestled among the trees, the nameless ville had once looked like something out of a predark storybook: tiny central square with bandstand, on either side of which stood a school, city hall, church with tall steeple, movie house, stores. Because of its remote location, it had survived Armageddon pretty much intact. And had apparently provided sufficient protection to a support a limited population.

Past tense.

The central square and surrounding street was littered with bodies. It looked as if it had rained dead people and dead dogs. Many of the corpses were torn into pieces: arms, legs and heads ripped off and flung. The buzzards had been hard at the best bits—the eyes and tongues—leaving three gory craters in every upturned face.

Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.

In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn't ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.

At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul's wearing his guts for garters!”

The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?

In the end the reasons didn't matter. What was done was done.

Only this time there would be payback.

After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.

“Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”

Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout's scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.

Ryan didn't give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.

He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr's 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape's large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.

A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.

“Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.

With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.

The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they'd find: a redoubt's vanadium-steel door.

The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.

With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”

He wasn't looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:

SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY
LETHAL FORCE

TURN BACK NOW

Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.

“Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.

“Only if skeletons can fire M-16s,” J.B. said.

“After more than a century, such threats do tend to lose their teeth, my dear Mildred,” Doc said, displaying his own remarkably fine set.

“We don't know what defenses this place has,” Krysty stated. “But we sure as hell know what's gone in ahead of us. Fighting enforcers in close quarters means big noise. Our element of surprise is going to disappear quick.”

“We could wait for the stinking
pendejos
to come out,” Ricky said. “Booby-trap their wags. Blow them all to hell and back when they try to drive off.”

“What if they're planning to use the mat-trans to jump out of here?” Ryan queried. “What if they have no intention of ever coming back? We could wait outside this redoubt until we're skeletons, too.”

The companions said nothing. He could see from their expressions his point had sunk in.

“We've got to find out what Magus is doing here,” Ryan went on. “We've dealt with enforcers in a redoubt before. The tight spaces belowground will make the incendies even more effective. Think about it—chain-reaction fireballs!”

“I do like the sound of that,” J.B. admitted.

One by one, the others nodded. None of them wanted to abandon their quarry after so long a hunt and with the finish almost in sight.

Her eyes gleaming, Krysty said, “Let's go fry us some big, fat lizard butt.”

“Before we do that,” Ryan said, “we've got another little job on our plates.”

At a trot he led them back to the circled wags. “Only way anyone is leaving this camp is on foot,” he said as he unsheathed his panga. With that he slashed the blade across the sidewall of the Winnie's left front tire, dropping the wheel to its rim with a sudden whoosh.

The companions needed no further instructions. They spread out in the near darkness and quickly cut all the tires on the wags.

As they returned to the redoubt entrance, Ricky said to no one in particular, “There's lots of gas in the wag tanks for our bikes. And water in the Winnie.”

“Ah, the unbridled optimism of youth,” Doc said with a laugh.

J.B. chuckled, too. “Yeah, the kid thinks we're actually going to live through this.”

“J.B., what do you mean?” Ricky asked.

“Wait until you come toe-to-toe with an enforcer, my boy,” Doc told him, “then the veil will be lifted.”

The far end of the tunnel was blocked by a blast-proof sec gate, steel bars backed by armaglass, which stood open. Along a bowed-out section of wall near the entry, the snouts of three M-60 machine blasters protruded from a single, horizontal firing slot. Against the wall opposite was a six-foot-high backstop on skids, designed to absorb blasterfire and minimize ricochets. The backstop was decorated with lines of 7.62 mm bullet holes at waist height. They looked as though they'd been drawn with a yardstick. Above and below the holes were irregular patches of brown—ancient crusted blood spatter.

With the others standing well clear, Ryan swept his hand over the electronic eye set in the wall above the blaster muzzles. Nothing happened. The motion detector was out of commission.

After passing through the sec gate, Ryan peered around the corner at the inside of the blaster turret. The trio of M-60s was controlled by a mechanized cam apparatus that had linked triggers and arc of fire. Someone had stripped out the guts of its electronics; wires were cut and hanging loose, circuit boards smashed. The threat on the entrance sign wasn't hollow. And Krysty was right—this place had its own built-in set of challenges.

“Listen up,” Ryan said, “some of the redoubt's automatic defense systems might still be operational. There's no telling what other kinds of traps are still armed. If we follow the footprints, the path should be safe. If we find chills on the floor, we'll know to take another route.”

“I don't think we're going to find chills,” J.B. said as he stared down at the mishmash of rusty footprints. “I get the funny feeling Magus has been here before. Most of the tracks are from barefoot drippers.”

It was something that Ryan had already noticed. The enforcers never wore boots and had very wide, very distinctive, four-toed feet.

“If Steel Eyes already knew about the existence of this redoubt,” J.B. said, “if it's been a regular stop, then whatever's inside must be rich pickin's, and there's probably a shitload of it.”

“Forget about scav,” Ryan said as he began passing out the incendies. “First and foremost, we're here to put Magus on the last train west. From here on, we're triple red. This doesn't look like a typical redoubt. Keep your eyes open and the chatter to a minimum.”

Ignoring the elevators, they took the stairwell down. In case things went off the rails, it gave them the possibility of a fighting retreat. Dusty footprints decorated the first landing. Magus and the enforcers had followed the same route.

As the companions descended, the whine of a power cycle drifted up from below. It grew louder and higher in pitch until it was a piercing, sustained scream.

“Know what?” Krysty said. “I think Magus is about to make that jump you talked about.”

It didn't sound like the power-up of a mat-trans unit to Ryan. From the noise level, the energy involved had to be immense. “We need to move faster,” he told the others. “Before they do whatever they're going to do...”

At the next floor down he took the lead through the stairwell access. A few redoubts had their own unique layout, based on the main function of the installation. The companions knew this place was different, and they didn't have time to search the place blindly; they needed a map to recce from. And, though the redoubts all sported wall-mounted maps on every level, the diagrams were not necessarily located in the same place.