Читать книгу Shaking Earth - James Axler - Страница 15

Holding up his Uzi with one hand, J.B. strode toward the front of the garage. Muzzle-flash vomited from the stub barrel. The massive walls seemed to bulge from its yammer. Weighing not much less than Ryan’s sniper rifle, the machine pistol was heavy enough to be fired one-handed without climbing uncontrollably. The Armorer walked a long burst from right to left across the double doors. Little points of brightness appeared. Pencils of sunlight stabbed into the gloom like yellow laser beams.

The echo of the shuddering muzzle-blasts seemed to continue for heartbeats after the flame flicker died away, or maybe it was the ringing in the companions’ ears. When they were able to hear anything else again they could hear moaning and thrashing from outside.

“Let them writhe,” the Armorer said, pulling the spent magazine from the Uzi. “Help keep the bastards’ minds right.”

As Ryan had just moments before, he hefted the empty magazine in his hand. “Running low. Can’t be doing that shit much more.”

Jak looked at Mildred. “Any weps? Ammo?”

She shook her head. “No trace. If any were here they were the first thing the muties cleared out.”

J.B. walked around the wag to the sprawled bodies of the looters he’d shot when they first rolled into the garage, knelt to inspect them.

“We’re a little bit lucky,” he said, pulling something gingerly from the waistband of the loincloth one wore. “We got a Colt .45 ACP, Government Model of 1911, or reasonable facsimile, in not too bad a shape, all cocked and locked.”

He held up a hefty blaster with checkered wooden grips pinched between thumb and forefinger. “This chill’s even got a couple spare mags on him.”

He straightened and prodded the corpse with the toe of his boot. “And you know what? He ain’t even a mutie.”

“Seen a couple of what looked like norms,” Mildred said. “That first dude I ran over was one.”

“We’ll sort out the mystery later.” Ryan strode over to Doc, who was sitting slumped, his head lolling to the side. He took a pinch of the old man’s cheek, which hung slack, pulled his head up.

“Doc,” he said. He patted the old man’s other cheek. “Doc, you can’t zone out on us now. We’re already down Krysty. We need everybody else to hold the fort until we can figure a way to get out of here with all our parts.”

The old man moaned. Then he blinked twice, shook himself, and sat upright. “No need to take on so, my dear boy,” he said, standing and shooting his cuffs. “Just resting my eyes.”

Ryan slapped him on the shoulder. “Good enough. Welcome back.”

“We got an exit strategy?” Mildred asked, backing out of the Hummer holding J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun.

“Our best defense is still driving real fast,” J.B. pointed out.

Ryan nodded, rubbing his long chin. “Yeah. Mebbe we can hold them off until dark, thin them out some. Then try to bust out.”

“They strike me as raiders, like the Scythians of yore, albeit lacking horses,” Doc said. “They will naturally incline toward a transient strategy, rather than a persisting one.”

“Which translates as hit-and-run’s their style, rather than sticking around to keep us under siege,” J.B. noted. “Probably even true. Mebbe we get out of this crack after all.”

“If they don’t burn us out,” Mildred muttered.

“Likely a last resort,” Ryan said. “They’ll want our wag and blasters. All the same, we better get set to discourage that sort of behavior. Mildred, is there a back way out?”

She nodded, making her beaded plaits rattle softly. “Rear of the little office. Big water jug in there, too, while I think of it. Seems clean.”

“That’s something, anyway. You and Jak hold in there, watch the front and back doors. J.B. and Doc can hold in here.”

“What about you?” J.B. asked.

“I’ll take the rifle up top, see if I can do a little street-cleaning.”

“I’d better check on Krysty first, real quick,” Mildred said, ducking into the office.

“Make quick,” Jak called from the other room. “Muties coming.”

Ryan entered the Hummer. Krysty lay on her pallet in the cargo compartment with her green eyes open. “Lover,” she whispered in a cracked voice.

Ryan leaned over to extend a water bottle to her. She reached for it. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Just lie back. You need to conserve your strength.”

Reluctantly she let him tilt the bottle to her lips. “Gaia’s with me,” she said more clearly when he pulled the bottle back. “But it’s hard.”

“You just lie back, try to sleep. Let your mind and body concentrate on healing.”

“Outside—?”

He shook his head. “We’ll handle it. If we can’t, having another body on the line too shaky to hold up a blaster wouldn’t do us any good. This is your fight, Krysty. Stay with it.”

He capped the bottle and laid it beside her. Her hand gripped his with feverish strength; he felt the heat of the battle against infection raging inside her body. She pulled the back of his hand to her lips and kissed it. Then she laid her head back down and closed her eyes.

Ryan placed her hand on her chest and made himself let go. There wasn’t any more that he could do for her in the best of circumstances. She was young and strong and healthy, as tough as they came, and she had that Gaia-aided gift of healing. She’d pull through.

He wouldn’t even think of the alternative.

A bang from outside. A hole appeared in one of the doors, knocking a slatlike splinter loose to stick out at a crazy angle from beneath it. J.B. ripped a short burst in response, blind through the wood.

Ryan ducked quickly out of the Hummer, slung his Steyr. J.B. handed him the .45, square butt foremost. “Take this and the extras. Don’t want to burn out that SIG.”

The one-eyed man accepted the heavy handblaster and tucked the two full reloads into his waistband. The SIG-Sauer was a wonderful weapon for stealthy chilling, but the integral suppressor, aside from making the weapon heavier and less wieldy, tended to hold in heat. It had a tendency to lock in a firefight, and too much sustained firing would burn out the barrel. The .45 would spare the SIG for a while, not to mention their dwindling stocks of 9 mm rounds.

A wooden ladder hung on hooks by the wall, so that a person could scramble right up it to the hatch—and pull it up after, an old Indian trick from Pueblo days long before the twentieth century that Doc had told them about. Ryan climbed up to the hatch, carefully slid aside the iron bolt. He sucked in a deep breath, snicked off the big Colt’s safety and slammed open the hatch.

Sunlight fell against his face like scalding water. He thrust the .45 up into it and swarmed after.

To find himself staring along the rounded black top of the weapon into a pair of huge black eyes, shot through with veins and flecks of gold.

The face surrounding those eyes wasn’t norm, being drawn out into a dark snout with nostrils as convoluted as a bat’s. But the surprised expression was unmistakable all the same.

For as long as it took Ryan’s forefinger to exert about three pounds of pressure on the trigger.

The eyes and the top part of the head that held them vanished into a dark haze. The mutie’s body rolled over flopping, black blood spurting from the lower jaw and stub of neck that remained. Ryan sprang upright on the roof. A norm-looking ambusher was frozen, having just crawled over the tall roof parapet behind the mutie whose head Ryan had just blown apart. He clutched a spear tipped with black volcanic glass. Ryan shot him twice. He went backward over the parapet with arms flailing.

Something struck Ryan in the back beneath his left shoulder blade. He whirled into a crouch, brought the heavy handblaster around in a two-fisted combat grip. A bandy-legged norm stood on the roof of the next house, desperately trying to notch a second dart to the end of his throwing stick. Ryan centered his sights on the white stripe conveniently painted down the front of the norm’s ribby chest, pulled the trigger. The 1911 bucked and roared. The man sat, dropping dart and launcher. He felt his chest, looked up reproachfully from the blood on his fingers to Ryan, and fell backward out of sight.

The one-eyed man went flat on his belly. He thumbed on the safety, stuck the .45 inside the waist of his fatigue pants behind his right hip—not an ideal means of carry, but Ryan was seasoned enough to know always to keep his finger out of the trigger guard until the weapon was drawn and pointing downrange, which much diminished his chances of becoming abruptly half-assed.

He reached around to probe at his back. He felt nothing from where he’d been struck, not necessarily a good sign in itself. The impact site was impossible to reach and see, but he didn’t feel any trace of blood. A quick check of the flat roof, covered with a thick and well-packed layer of the same hard earth that made up the street below and here and there sprouting a clump of weeds, showed no sign of leakage. He caught sight of the dart: a simple shaft of some kind of wood, whittled to a point and probably hardened in a fire. It hadn’t been hard thrown enough to penetrate his leather coat, which was one reason he still wore it despite the heat.

He unslung the Steyr, cracked the bolt, turned it and pulled it back enough to glimpse a confirmatory gleam of brass, yellow in the merciless sun. He closed and locked the bolt again. Then he got a knee up to his chest and a boot under him and raised himself cautiously for a look around.

Three houses up the block a couple of manlike figures pointed at the apparition of his head. One of them threw a longblaster to its shoulder. He ducked. The weapon boomed, its report echoing off the flat fronts of houses. Where the shot went, he had no idea; he heard no noise of its passage.

Through the roof Ryan felt a vibration. From down in the street in front of the garage came a dull heavy thump, followed by cheers and shouts in a language he couldn’t make out. He guessed it was Spanish. The muties seemed to have contrived a battering ram and were having a go at the doors. They seemed pretty sturdy, and anyway Ryan was going to have to let his friends below deal with the problem, at least until he got the nearby rooftops clean.

He reared, rolled back into a sitting position, knees up. He brought the Steyr to his shoulder, bracing his elbows against the insides of his knees, snugged the buttplate tight to his shoulder’s hollow, welded his right cheek to the stock and peered through the scope with his single eye.

The blaster man who had shot at him was fumblingly spilling powder from a horn—an actual cowhorn, by the look of it—down the barrel of his musket. He was shaking so much he was pouring most of the black grains on his hand, which was twined about with strange yellow growths or veins. Ryan lined the crosshairs up on the center of his chest and squeezed.

The Steyr kicked back against his shoulder. He worked the bolt with quick, calm efficiency as the barrel rose. Another round, head-stamped 7.62 mm NATO, was chambered and ready to go when the long slim barrel came back down on line.

The musketeer was nowhere in sight. His companion, whose skin hung loose on his small skinny frame in flaps, was staring down with puzzled bloodhound eyes at what was probably him. Belatedly he caught hold of the notion he might be in some danger here. Instead of simply dropping flat, he started to turn to bolt. Ryan shot him through and through, right side to left, and dropped him like a deer.

Ryan felt another shiver of vibration through his tailbone, heard a scrape from right behind. As he spun, a terrific shuddering, crashing sound assailed his ears. He knew full-auto blasterfire when he heard it. He threw himself sideways, clumsily bringing the long rifle around and up, to aim more or less at the Armorer, who stood grinning down at him through his wire-rimmed specs from the shade of his hat brim.

“Scraped off a couple muties coming up the wall,” J.B. said.

“What are you doing up here? You’re supposed to be—”

“You’re welcome for saving your lean ass. Figured you’d need some backup.”

He walked to the front of the garage, leaned out over the parapet and whistled. “Hey, boys,” he called, “up here.”

He fired the Uzi down into the street, three, four, five quick bursts. Ryan heard shouts, screams. J.B. ducked back down as return shots cracked from the street, then rocked back over the parapet and let the rest of his magazine go in a long spray.

He sat, out of sight, to wait out the return fire from the street, waving his stubby machine pistol in the air with its heavy bolt locked back to cool it.

“Down to three mags,” he said. “Way too few to be hosing them blind through the door.”

Ryan nodded. The flash of annoyance he’d felt at his old friend was already forgotten. The companions followed Ryan’s lead. Not his commands. J.B. had spotted a weakness in their deployment and acted promptly on his own initiative to correct it.

It had been a good call. That meant they all got to live a little longer. They were a team, which had always been their mainstay.

For what it was worth now.

Ryan eased his head back above the parapet, looked through 180 degrees, ducked back, duck-walked a few steps left, raised up, checked the other half circle. The rooftops were clear of marauders, or at least any who happened to be on roofs were keeping out of sight.

“This is mebbe not so good, Ryan,” J.B. said quietly. “Street right out in front is clean, but you can bet your last meal the houses around us are swarming with the bastards. And I can see them all over the streets surrounding. There must be a couple hundred of them out there.”

Ryan lay on his back, gazed up toward the sun, knowing enough not to look directly at it. It still rode high in the sky. There was plenty of daylight left.

“Think we’ll make it until sundown?”

J.B. laughed, took a swig from a canteen, recapped it and tossed it toward Ryan, who caught it.

“Nah. Not that it’d make a spit of difference. These bastards are taking it personal. If they didn’t have their black little hearts bent on seeing the color of our insides, they’d have cut stick and pulled out long since from the hurt we’ve laid on them.”

“How about making a run for it?”

The Armorer shrugged. “They blocked us once. They might do it again. Still, it’s probably our one and only shot. Even if it likely doesn’t mean anything but the difference between getting chilled moving and getting chilled standing still.”

He looked at Ryan. “Doc says the muties keep hollering something about a ‘holy child.’ It’s like their war cry. Don’t know what damn good that does us, but there it is. Whoa, what’s that?”

The flat dirt-covered roof had shaken beneath them. The two men stared at each other. It came again, a quick triple shake that evoked unnerving creaks from the roof timbers beneath their feet.

From somewhere distant there came a groan, a rumble, a dull vibration.

“Earthquake,” Ryan said. “That last was a wall coming down, mebbe a whole house.”

“Now we know why such a neat little ville has big piles of rubble lying about the bastard alleys,” the Armorer said. “Damn tremors must come frequent enough to keep the locals rebuilding and repairing, not leave them much time to worry about cleaning up all the wreckage.”

“Former locals.” Ryan had stuck his head up again, looking around. He could see nothing. But he could sense movement around them. He could smell the odors of rank and not all human bodies on the heavy moist breeze, hear the scrabbling like a horde of locusts stripping a cornfield: not loud, but ominous. The muties, he knew, were preparing another onslaught.

Then he frowned. “Hold it,” he said softly. “J.B., you hear something?”

“Other than my pulse going like a scared horse down a flight of stairs?” Then he frowned, too, and tipped his head to the side.

“Dark night, but I think I hear—”

“Motors.” Ryan stood upright, looking off to the northeast. “Wags, mebbe a big bike.

“Coming this way.”