Читать книгу Desert Kings - James Axler - Страница 6

A soft, dry wind blew over the weedy landscape, carrying the faint smell of salt. High in the sky above Nevada, dark purple clouds rumbled ominously and sheet lightning flashed brightly, momentarily parting the roiling cover to expose a fiery orange sky.

Lumbering out of the bushes, the monster slid down the steep clay bank and landed with a splash in the shallow river. Standing ten feet tall, the colossal griz bear studied the rushing water. The river was quite shallow in that area of the forest, no more than a few feet deep. Huge boulders jutted from the churning surface, the spray creating a shimmering rainbow above the flow. Wiggling through the rocky shallows were big silvery trout, golden salmon and huge schools of bright-orange sunfish resembling underwater fire. In the deeper parts black-hued catfish wiggled along the bottom eating everything they encountered without prejudice. They smelled odd, and the bear consumed them only when there was nothing else available.

In the warm summer months, the griz would travel downstream to the cliffs where there were freshwater crabs, huge blue things that tasted wonderful, the snapping pinchers easily avoided. Other forest predators savored the delicious rock-dwellers, but none of them dared to challenge the powerful griz. Wolves, cougars, even the giant bull moose avoided the monstrous killer. The griz was the largest creature in the entire mountain forest, and the unchallenged master of the entire valley.

There came a flash of gold in the rushing water and the bear lashed out a massive paw. The surface of the river smacked loudly, and a wiggling salmon bounced into the misty air. Quickly bending forward, the griz snapped powerful jaws shut on the flapping fish, the skull bones audibly cracking.

Contentedly sitting in the cold water, the bear used both paws to rip the huge salmon apart, happily gnawing on the tasty internal organs. Pale blood splattered the thick fur of the beast as it contentedly consumed all of the dying fish, then afterward it daintily washed the warm gore off its paws and lazily rose to head back for the bank.

However, as it neared the grass, the animal paused at the sound of rustling leaves and instantly growled menacingly, its haunches rising slightly in preparation for a jump. Then its nose caught a strange smell in the air. Galvanized in raw terror, all thoughts of fighting vanished. The griz turned tail to charge for the deeper water in the middle of the river.

But it barely traveled a yard when a humanoid figure jumped out of the treetop and landed squarely on the back of the forest killer. The griz bear snarled in fury as the hooting stickie slapped it with both hands, the deadly suckers adhering to the fur and flesh. With a jerk, the hands were raised, crimson gobbets of flesh ripping free from the startled bear. Violently shuddering, the wounded animal roared in agony and rolled over. But the stickie stayed in place and again plunged the sucker-covered hands deeper into the ghastly openings, pulling out more flesh with one hand and pieces of beating organs with the other.

Agony exploded inside the griz as blood sprayed into the air from the ruptured arteries. As the mutie consumed the still-living flesh, the griz mindlessly turned to run away, careening off a partially submerged tree and then slamming directly into a boulder. Broken fangs and blood erupted from the brutal impact, and the bear jerked back for a split instant, only to charge forward again, trying to reach the deep waters downstream. But its great strength was fading fast and every step was blinding agony, the sounds of eating from the thing riding on top stealing what little reason the animal possessed. It weakly tried to rub the stickie off by hitting a boulder, then the desperate animal rolled over again, keeping its attacker under the water for as long as possible before surfacing. But it was to no avail. Blood dripped off the big bear, the river running red.

Slowing noticeably, the bear could feel no pain anymore and somehow knew the end was near. Summoning its last bits of strength, the griz rose on its hind legs to bellow a challenge at the world, then it collapsed into the running water with a tremendous splash and lay still, its great lungs laboring to draw ragged breaths. Sight faded to darkness and a terrible cold filled the beast as its thoughts became confused and muddled.

Steadfastly continuing to eat, the happy stickie barely noticed when the whimpering bear finally stopped moving and collapsed dead in the cold water. When it reached the still-warm fish in the belly, the mutie hooted in delight at the unexpected prize.

As it extracted the partially chewed food, the stickie paused at the sound of a low rumble. Usually loud noises were good. Explosions and fire always meant norms were nearby, and they sometimes had prizes worth stealing. But this was different somehow, and it rapidly grew louder. Timidly, the worried stickie looked at the stormy sky, the roiling clouds of black and fiery orange crackling with sheet lightning. There was a kind of rain that fell sometimes, every drop burning worse than the orange-beast that consumed wood. Once it had seen another stickie caught in a downpour of the fire-rain before it could reach a cave. The flesh of the mutie dissolved, exposing the white sticks underneath, then those fell apart, and still the fire-rain continued, destroying animals and plants, until there were only rocks and bad ground. When the rain stopped, the mutie had fled far away, but still it feared the return of the bad water.

Sluggishly, the mutie recalled that the fire-rain had a very specific smell, similar to old bird eggs, and there was no trace of the fire-rain smell. This had to be something else. Some new animal perhaps? Drooling slightly, the stickie hooted in delight. The females were always delighted to get new meat, and would reward him by spreading their legs.

In a splintery crash, the armored war wag plowed through the row of trees, the heavy treads flattening the laurel bushes into pulp. Hooting a challenge, the stickie rose to wave both sucker-covered hands at the strange angular beast, then charged in attack. Jumping high, it sailed toward the rolling thing, but suddenly there came a series of loud bangs, the noises so close together they almost seemed to be one long explosion.

Tremendous pain ripped through the stickie as the heavy-duty combat rounds tore it apart. The mutie fell into the dirty river alongside the cooling corpse of the giant bear, slayer and victim joined together forever in death.

Rolling uncaring over the bodies, the lead APC crushed them in the mud and rocks as three more war wags appeared from the forest. Each of the armored machines was draped with sandbags for additional protection, the windows only tiny slits to prevent an enemy from shooting inside the vehicles. Instead of wheels, they rolled on armored treads, and the vented barrels of rapid-fires jutted from each side like the quills of a porcupine. On the top of the lead wag was a scarred dome, the stubby barrel of a 20 mm Vulcan minigun sweeping the opposite shoreline for any possible dangers. The next wag had a missile pod on top, the firing hatch closed at the moment, and the last two vehicles were armed with the fluted barrels of high-pressure flame-throwers. Blue-tinted smoke blew from the exhaust pipes rising from the roof of the war machines. The metal plating under the patched sandbags was badly scarred in several locations, but there were no breaches in sight.

As indomitable as mountains, the armored wags jounced across the Nelson River, the water sluiced off several layers of old blood, tufts of human hair and several mutie suckers coming loose from behind the ramming prow to wash away.

Sparkling with droplets, the war wags lumbered up the opposite bank, the prows rising high to crash down onto the grassland. The big diesel engines revved in power and the machines increased in speed.

“Smack on target.” Zane Bellany chuckled, sliding shut the steel hatch on the left blasterport and holstering his rapid-fire. It took two tries because of the cramped quarters, but the man finally got the Webley .44 wheel gun back into leather.

As bald as a rock, Bellany sported an enormous head that seemed to merge with his incredibly hairy chest. His clothes were clean, but heavily patched, and crude tattoos were visible on every inch of his exposed skin. A machete hung at his side, tucked in a rattlesnake-skin sheath.

“Waste of ammo.” The driver snorted, feeding the power plant more juice. The gauges on the illuminated dashboard flickered in response. As the wag surged forward, a piece of the aced stickie came loose and fell off the array of welded iron bars covering the windshield.

Unconcerned, Bellany shrugged as he reached for the half-eaten sandwich lying on the dashboard. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking a mouthful and chewing. “We got plenty.”

Concentrating on steering the huge transport, the driver merely grunted in reply. He was a newbie to the convoy and still had trouble getting his head around the idea of having enough ammo. All of his life the man had watched grim people fight to the death with fists, knives and clubs over the ownership of a single live brass. Yet the four wags of the convoy had cases of the stuff.

Upon joining the convoy, the driver had been given, given, a leather gunbelt containing a pristine S&W .357 revolver, the double row of loops across the back holding a total of thirty live brass. Thirty! It was a fortune in brass, but that was nothing compared to the stack of boxes stored in the armory. Grens, rockets, all kinds of predark mil shit. Just fragging incredible. How the chief kept finding the tons of stuff he had no idea.

Along with the blasters, Chief Rogan often unearthed predark meds, crystals that you could dissolve in water and drink to cure the Black Cough, the Blind Shakes, all sorts of triple-bad ills. The meds were worth a thousand times more than any blaster, yet the chief regularly gave them away. At first that seemed like an incredible waste. But whenever they returned to those villes, the convoys were greeted warmly and nobody tried to jack them in the night, sell them rad water, or any of the other feeb tricks some locals used to rip off outlanders.

Finished with the sandwich, Bellany brushed the crumbs off his shirt and reached over a shoulder to grab a roll of paper. Carefully untying the piece of cloth holding it closed, Bellany studied the hand-drawn map, then checked the compass on the dashboard before raising his head to note the landscape outside. After the river was supposed to be a series of foothills, and than a deep valley…right. They were nearly at their goal. Rolling up the map again, he tucked it back into the honeycomb and grabbed a mike from a clip attached to the ceiling.

“Okay, everybody get razor,” Bellany said, the words echoing throughout the long wag. “And somebody wake up the chief. We’re almost there.”

“And sooner than expected,” a familiar voice said from behind.

Turning, Bellany smiled in greeting at the man standing in the doorway. “We didn’t run into any trouble like last time, sir,” he said, hanging up the mike.

“Then what were you shooting at?” Chief “John Rogan” asked, frowning slightly. The man was wearing a mil jumpsuit bleached a dull gray to match his pale combat boots. Two different blasters rode in a wide gunbelt and a short crystal wand was tucked into a shoulder holster. The others had no idea what the thing was, but naturally assumed it was a weapon of some kind.

“Just a stickie,” Bellany said. “Nothing important.”

Damn it, he missed stickies? Curse the bad luck for them to be found when he was out of the control room! “Stickies, eh? Well, as you say, nothing important,” Rogan lied, limping across the cabin.

As the convoy leader took a seat, Bellany forced himself not to comment on the man’s condition. Pale and thin, Rogan always looked rather sickly, a condition that had tricked a lot of coldhearts into trying to ace the norm for his blasters. But the chief was still here while the others were now residents in the worm hotel. In spite of appearances, Rogan was lightning-fast with a blaster and rarely missed. Privately, Bellany thought it was more than possible that the chief had just a touch of mutie in his blood, but wisely never mentioned the idea out loud. Chief Rogan hated all muties with a violence that bordered on madness.

Limping to the gunner chair, the man who called himself John Rogan awkwardly eased into the seat. Studying the grille covering the front windshield, he buckled on the seat belt usually ignored by all of the other members of his crew. There were some scattered bloodstains on the metal, but no appreciable damage. Good. It had taken him quite a while to steal these four trucks from the Alaska redoubt controlled by Department Coldfire, and getting replacements was totally out of the question. If another operative of Coldfire ever found him, or worse, somebody from TITAN, then the cyborg would be ruthlessly executed on sight.

But the fools cannot kill what they cannot find, Delphi noted sagely.

However, he was still annoyed about missing the stickies, though. The cyborg would have appreciated one last attempt at raising their intelligence. But so far, the only muties that Delphi had directly encountered were flapjacks, runts and those annoying little water rat things. Whatever the hell those were! That doomie called Haviva had warned him about teeth in the dirty water, and she had been right. Teeth in the water. The phrase had stayed in his mind. And the fat little muties had been nothing but teeth in the dirty marshland water. The horrible things aced four of his men before they could escape. Teeth in the water. Delphi was extremely glad the deadly rodents were far behind them now. On the other hand, he wanted to find just one more group of stickies. He still had some faint hopes for his broken children, but it was starting to fade away. They might simply be too stupid to ever train.

“How’s the fuel?” The cyborg sighed in resignation, checking the array of flickering gauges.

“Halfway down,” the driver replied, steering around the ruins of a predark house. The roof and walls had crumbled to the ground long ago, leaving only the brick chimney. But as the war wags rumbled past, the chimney visibly trembled and broke apart, finishing the destruction.

“That’s acceptable,” Delphi commented, watching the house recede into the distance behind the convoy.

For some bizarre reason the random destruction felt ominous, almost as if it was a premonition of doom. The cyborg tried to shake off the dire thoughts. He was a realist. He did not believe in omens and portents. That was merely voodoo nonsense for the illiterate masses. Yet the disturbing feeling would not leave the man-machine hybrid, and he stared at the cloud of dust rising from the wreckage until the natural contour of the land removed it from his sight. For a moment Delphi wondered if this might be the death waiting for him in the ruins that Haviva had foretold. But she had warned him of teeth in the water. There was no water here. Only crumbling brick buildings, blast crater and weeds.

“Sir, is there something wrong? Hey, Chief!”

With a start, Delphi realized that Bellany had been talking to him for a while. “No, just lost in thought over that redhead in the last ville,” the cyborg lied quickly, then made himself chuckle. “By thunder, she was fantastic! Damn near aced me in bed, and that was before she pulled a knife and tried to gut me like a fish!”

“Just a greedy slut.” Bellany snorted in disdain. “And you paid her two live rounds! Must have wanted it all, and she ended up with nothing.”

“Sad, but true,” Delphi said in agreement. Actually he had been forced to slay the whore when he lost control for a second during their sex play and accidentally revealed his true self, the beams of light from his cybernetic eyes shining directly into her horrified face. She’d shrieked in terror and he’d quickly pulled a knife to slash her throat, then cut his own arm to try to cover up the murder. Thankfully, the local sec men believed the innocence of the cyborg, especially when he insisted on having another slut finish what the first one had only started. A normal man denied release would seek completion, so he’d had to do the same. Anything else would have been deemed suspicious.

Annoying, but necessary. In the end it had cost Delphi another live round, but the cyborg had sex with another slut, finally crying out in pretend joy when inside he was seething with impatience to leave. Happily, if this mission was successful, he would never have to do such foul, degrading things again. He finally would have no need for the troopers of this convoy, or these ramshackle old war machines. He would be whole, complete, indomitable!

Struggling to control his breathing, Delphi rubbed his bad leg, remembering the disastrous fight in the underground tunnel.

Soon enough, Tanner, he silently raged. Oh, so very soon, revenge will be mine. Only this time, I’m not going after you. That would be too swift, too easy. This time I’m going to destroy your only reason for staying alive….

“Hey, look!” the driver called, applying the brakes and slowing to a complete stop. “Is that the place, Chief?”

“Looks like it,” Bellany muttered, checking the map. “What do you think, sir?”

Rejoining the conversation, Delphi looked out the window. The wag was parked on top of a hillock, and down below were the sprawling remains of some predark city. Most of the structures had been leveled and remained only as square outlines in the thick carpeting of weeds and scraggly bushes. A hundred cars were parked neatly in grassy fields that had once been a busy city street. Delphi realized that the bronze statue of the town’s founder was nowhere in sight, the mall was now a scum-covered pond. The nuke damage to the town seemed minimal. Sierra Nevada College was a liberal arts college and not on anybody’s ICBM hit list. However, its graphic arts department had a nexus generation IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer used to train students for creating state-of-the-art computer games and special effects in movies. And he wanted it.

“Hmm, I’m not sure,” Delphi muttered, augmenting his vision for telescopic sight. The hundreds of assorted ruins zoomed into view and he studied them carefully.

Several of the college buildings still remained, the thick marble walls covered with moss and dense growths of wild ivy. Nevada had not been hit too hard during the war, but it had been torn to pieces by earthquakes, a volcano and the mindless rioting that soon followed skydark. Add to that the general destruction of the acid rain storms, and suddenly Delphi wasn’t at all sure that he could find the graphic arts lab anymore. It seemed that implacable time was the ultimate destroyer.

As he searched for additional landmarks, the other wags arrived to park in a ragged line alongside the lead wag. The troopers inside the vehicles were talking animatedly, more than a few of them checking over their blasters, obviously preparing for a recce.

Accessing his mental files, the cyborg compared his memory of the university town to the present-day jumble of weeds and broken sidewalks. Overlapping the two images, Delphi saw that too much had shifted over time, and was forced to sneak a peek at his palm. The nanotech monitor embedded into his flesh crackled into view for a moment, then faded away again. The replacement hand was not yet fully interfaced with his internal circuitry, but the brief scan had been enough.

“Yes, this is it,” Delphi stated, sitting upright. “Daniel, take us down the hill. But move slow! I cannot vouch for the stability of the subterranean aqueducts.”

The driver blinked in confusion.

“Ah, sir…” Bellany started.

“The sewers are damaged and the streets may collapse,” Delphi explained impatiently. “At the first sign of titling, head into the weeds.” Then he diplomatically added, “You’re my best driver, Dan. Try not to let me…down.”

The man at the wheel smiled at the feeble joke. “No prob, Chief,” he boasted, shifting into gear once more.

As the armored wag began to roll, Delphi activated the electric circuits to the 20 mm Vulcan minigun on the roof. He had a very limited supply of rounds for the Vulcan, mainly because at maximum discharge it could empty the entire vehicle of shells in under five minutes. Sluggishly a vid monitor on the dashboard flickered and scrolled into life, displaying a static-filled view of the land directly ahead of them. Touching the joystick, Delphi saw a graduated crosshairs appear on the screen. Even in his time period, this was an awesome weapon of destruction.

“Zane, contact the other wags,” Delphi commanded, swiveling the Vulcan back and forth to check the servomotors. “I want Margaret and Vance to stay on top of the hill and keep a watch on us from a safe distance. Evan is to stay close.”

“Already told ’em,” Bellany replied, putting the hand mike back in its clip.

For the briefest second, the cyborg smiled for real. “You know me very well, Zane.”

“That’s my job, Chief.” The bald man smiled, swaying to the motion of the wag. “To make sure your ass only has that one hole in it.”

In spite of himself, Delphi snorted in amusement at the rank vulgarity, then jerked around and squeezed the trigger on the joystick. On top of the wag, the Vulcan roared for a brief second and a gelatinous thing exploded amid the branches of a large redwood a hundred feet away.

“Damn, you’re fast,” Bellany whispered, raising an eyebrow as the clear remains of the aced mutie dripped onto the dirt like clear syrup. “I never even saw the bastard mutie!”

“Which is why he’s in charge,” Daniel said, angling the wheel to roll around a large chuck of predark concrete studded with iron rods. “And why I drive, and Etta is the healer, and you…Ah, exactly what is it you do here again?”

Giving a half smile, Zane smacked the driver across the back of the head.

“Oh yeah, now I remember.” He grinned, feeding the diesels more juice. The big engines responded with a surge of power.

As the wag crested over the hillock, a wide expanse of greenery spread out before it. The field of low grass became dotted with low bushes that merged together into a dense undergrowth. Obviously there had been a forest fire here in recent years, or perhaps acid rain, and the soil was only now reclaiming the lost territory.

The war wag went over the bushes without any hindrance, the plants scraping along the belly of the machine. Reaching level ground, now young saplings grew in abundance: pine, birch and willow. With no regard for the plants, Daniel drove the war wag right over the saplings, snapping off the trunks at bumper level.

The rad counter on the dashboard began to wildly click and Daniel abruptly veered away from the lake. It had to be a blast crater that had filled with water over time. Nasty. His granny had believed that when rain filled a rad pit, anybody swimming in it became a mutie. The chief said no, but it still sounded reasonable to him. Most folks were feebs, and how else could anybody explain why there were so many damn muties?

A perforated metal pole stuck out of the ground, and Daniel headed in that direction. Soon enough, bits of predark trash were visible among the weeds and plants. Two wags smashed together, a plastic toilet seat, a length of chain dangling off a cracked block of concrete.

Pieces of dark asphalt appeared here and there among the plants, and Daniel used them as a guide through the suburbs and into the ancient city. He had done this sort of recce many times before and knew what to look for.

Soon, the fledgling trees gave way to vertical walls of thick moss, and vines extended in every direction. Bright red umbrella bushes stood like fiery giants amid the greenery, clusters of tiny birds fluttering about inside the tangled maze of twisted branches. Delphi knew the strange bushes were not a mutation, but simply vegetation indigenous to Puerto Rico. How it got to North America was anybody’s guess. Most likely, there had been a few samples in the college greenhouse, and after the nuclear war, they began to spread. Delphi had seen lions in Texas and elephants in Maine. When humanity tried to kill itself, the zoos of the world were left alone, neglected. Some of the starving animals weren’t eaten and managed to escape and breed in the wild.

Which unfortunately did not explain the howlers, Delphi thought. Those mutations were not listed on any of his files or records.

Howlers were not genetic experiments designed to survive a nuclear war, or biological weapons, organic killing machines created by the military to combat the growing mutant population. No, they were something else. Something different and unknown. Privately, the cyborg feared they were true mutations, Mother Nature’s savage response to the atomic rape of the planet. Someday, they would have to be eliminated, or else humanity would find itself embroiled in another war for survival.

More and larger buildings could be seen among the thick carpeting of moss, along with the occasional upright door or intact window. A gleaming white satellite dish thrust up from an ivy-covered building, the fire escape festooned with gently waving flowers.

The progress of the war wag slowed from the amount of debris on the old streets. More than once, the armored prow slammed into a bush only to discover a fallen-down bridge behind the growth or corroded remains of some large vehicle. Delphi recognized a few of them as Abrams battle tanks. Clearly, somebody had known what was going on inside the quiet college, but had arrived far too late to do anything about it. Just like sex and comedy, the cyborg mused, even in combat, timing was everything.

As the war wag reached an open area, Delphi called for a halt. Only a few yards away was a weed-encrusted fountain, the legs of a bronze statue rising from the amassed plants to end in ragged stumps above the thighs.

“This will do,” Delphi directed, unbuckling his seat belt and standing. “We make camp here. There’s good visibility in all directions. Nothing can get close without us seeing.”

“You expecting trouble, Chief?” Bellany asked, rising to take a Kalashnikov assault blaster from the gun rack. Expertly, the troopers checked the load in the clip, then worked the arming bolt to chamber the first 7.62 mm round.

“No,” the cyborg stated, taking down an AK-47 for himself. “Just preparing for it.” He was wearing better weapons than this, but it would be good for morale for the others to see him armed like them. People were such fools.

“What exactly are we after here, anyway?” Bellany asked, slinging the longblaster over a broad shoulder and stuffing his pockets with spare clips.

“Shine, sluts and slaves?” Daniel asked hopefully, turning off the engines. The diesels sputtered a little then went still. On the dashboard, a second set of gauges and meters came to slow life, using the power from the nuke batteries inside the floor. Fuel for the motors was difficult to acquire outside of a redoubt, but the nuke batteries supplied electricity for decades before burning out.

“Hardly,” Delphi corrected with a disapproving grimace. “There is a lot of old tech here that we can incorporate…ah, that we can use in the wags. Maybe even get the radios to work for farther than a couple of hundred feet.”

Resting both arms on top of the steering wheel, Daniel gave a long, low whistle.

“Working radios,” Bellany muttered. “That’d give us a chilling edge in any fight with anther wag. We gotta try for those!”

Which was why I offered the suggestion, fool. “Exactly, old friend,” Delphi said, beaming a cold smile. “My thoughts exactly.”

Just then the second wag rolled into view and came to a halt only a few yards away. As the engines died, the side hatch cycled open, lowering to the ground to form a short flight of stairs. Two armed troopers were standing inside the wag, the door of the security cage closed behind them just in case of any trouble. Bypassing the stairs, the two men jumped to the ground and stood in a crouched position to give the other troopers inside the wag needed clearance to fire. All of the men were carrying Browning Automatic Rifles, heavy bolt-action weapons from the Second World War. Only one person was carrying a Kalashnikov, a short redheaded woman who was the sec boss for the second wag.

Looking over the ivy-covered ruins, Cotton Davenport grunted in satisfaction, then unlocked the door to the cage and walked outside to join the troopers. Next came two more troopers, carrying Browning longblasters, but these had bayonets attached to the end of the barrels. The blades shone mirror-bright in the weak sunlight radiating downward from the stormy sky. Both of the guards wore bandoliers slung across their chests, the loops full of shiny brass cartridges.

“Okay, spread out and do a perimeter sweep!” Cotton commanded, her fiery curls shaking in the cool breeze. “I wanna fifty yard recce in every direction! You find anything, chill it.”

Nodding, the four troopers headed off in different directions, their weapons held at the ready.

“Come on, Zane,” Delphi said, starting along the central corridor of the wag. “I don’t want to waste any of the daylight we have remaining.”

“No prob. Got your six, Chief,” the big man said, striding close behind.

Just past the food locker, Delphi noted the left and right gunners were alert in their metal cocoons, hands resting lightly on the handles of the Remington .50-caliber machine guns. Excellent. There should not be any need for the heavy weapons on this sojourn, he thought, but it never hurt. Briefly, Delphi wondered if he should have brought along the Kalashnikovs.

Turning into the mudroom where the troopers stored their acid rain garments, Delphi took down a hurricane lantern and slung it over a shoulder before unbolting the door to the security cage and stepping through to work the handle that activated the armored hatch. With the soft sigh of hydraulics, the section of the hull disengaged and swung down to the vine-covered ground.

Exiting the wag, Delphi pretended to stretch sore muscles because it was expected, then strode into the ruins. Bellany stayed at his side, as Cotton and four more troopers joined the procession. Two of them wore bulky backpacks and one man openly carried a crowbar. Everybody carried lanterns and grens.

As the group moved deeper into the ruins, the buzzing and chirping of the insect life went silent, and there was only the sound of the leaves crunching under their combat boots. Surreptitiously, Delphi checked the area with an infrared scanner inside his left hand, but saw no indication of anything large. But he stayed alert for anything cold-blooded that wouldn’t have appeared on the scanner.

Vines were thick underfoot, making walking tricky business, and little white mushrooms were everywhere. The air smelled of damp earth, decaying matter and flowers. There was a small banana tree in the smashed display window of a clothing store and clusters of an unknown fruit festooned a public library. One of the troopers nudged another to point out a large spiderweb filling an alleyway between two buildings, and a large snake on a second-floor balcony stared unnervingly at the norms as they moved past.

The jungle of Nevada, the cyborg darkly mused. With the weather patterns of the world this badly scrambled, it was a miracle that anybody had survived skydark.

Behind them, the engines of the war wags gave off soft pings as they began to cool. Troopers watched the group from behind the gridwork covering the windshields, and high on the hill there came the flash of reflected light from a pair of binocs.

Going to the cracked marble basin of the old fountain, Delphi located the broken statue and pulled away vines until he found the rest of the figure. It was lying amid the leafy ivy and kudzu, the bronze turned a dark green from a century of corrosion.

“Is that their baron or some kinda god?” a trooper asked curiously. The statue was of a man carrying a longblaster and powder horn, so it had to be a sec man of some kind. He’d seen hunters wearing the same kind of fringed clothing back east. The fringe waved in the breeze and helped keep off the flies and skeeters.

“The great-grandfather of their baron, is more like it,” Delphi replied, running calculations inside his head. If the Boston Minuteman had been facing the southeast, then the main road should be to their right. Hopefully, the physics lab was still standing, or else this whole trip would be a waste. Delphi only had limited resources since being thrown out of Department Coldfire, and every failure threatened his very existence.

Just for an instant, the cyborg relived the awful moment when a friend told him that the executive council had ordered his termination for the failure to retrieve the test subject, aka Doctor Theophilus Tanner. The occasional lack of success on a mission was to be expected in the chaos of the Deathlands, but Delphi had broken too many rules, slaughtered too many gene-pure people, in his mad quest for Tanner. All would have been forgiven if he had accomplished the task, but this level of failure meant his doom. Knowing he had only minutes in which to act, Delphi had reluctantly killed his friend and used his Ident card to raid the main warehouse for spare body parts and supplies, then established a supply cache at an abandoned redoubt. Now he walked the planet amid the dirty savages, posing as a trader, exchanging trinkets for food and buying the loyalty of men with guns and bullets, searching, hunting, committed to another desperate quest, this time to gain his own salvation.

“Well, nuke me running,” a trooper muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “Never would have supposed they had flintlocks back then. Thought that was something new.”

“Yeah?” Cotton asked, suddenly interested. “And who the frag has new flintlocks?”

The trooper started to reply when something moved in the trees, jumping from branch to branch with blurring speed, and coming their way.

“Volley fire!” Bellany shouted, and the troopers raised their BAR blasters to unleash a crackling discharge. The hail of bullets tore through the treetops, sending a score of leaves fluttering to the ground. Then a bloody screamwing plummeted into sight to bounce off the marquee of a vine-covered movie theater. The lifeless body flopped to a fire bush and the leaves closed around the small, leathery body, wrapping it tight to extract every ounce of nourishment.

“Watch for the mate,” Bellany commanded, using a thumb to switch his AK-47 from single shot to full-auto.

The words were barely spoken when a larger screamwing lanced out of the tree to swoop down and skim along the ground, its deadly beak and claws ready to kill. Without hesitation, the troopers opened fire, peppering the plant life with hot lead. But the winged mutie was too fast and the thing was almost upon them, shrieking in rage and fury, when Delphi fired once. In an explosion of gory, the head was blown off the screamwing and the body slammed into Cotton, knocking over the startled sec woman.

“Th-thanks, Chief,” the woman panted, getting back to her feet. “Nuking hell, that thing was fast! How could you ever—”

“Yes, yes, you’re welcome,” the cyborg interrupted, already contemplating other matters. “Come on, I think the building is this way!”

As he rushed off by himself, the others scrambled to catch up with Delphi as he darted from a stand of banyan trees to a sagging church. An old skeleton was lashed to the cross on top, only the ropes and jungle vines holding the dried bones in place. A plastic rosary still hung from the broken neck of the Catholic priest, a fiberglass arrow shaft going through his ribs exactly where his heart would have been located; another jutted from the left eye socket.

Ruefully, Delphi knew that after skydark, most of the survivors went temporarily mad. Terrified and starving, they turned against any symbol of authority, police officers, physicians, judges and even the clergy, killing the very people who could have helped them stay alive. Damned themselves to a century of barbarism by their own foolishness and fear. Not many people could read these days, and the word “whitecoat” was the most vile curse word. Advanced technology was suspect and considered magic by most norms. Traveling across the scorched continent, Delphi had no trouble finding sec men to join his convoy—blasters with unlimited ammo was a lure that none could resist—but very few wanted anything to do with the engines, power plant or electronic machinery.

“This place makes my skin crawl,” a trooper whispered. “It’s evil. I can feel it.”

“Frag that noise,” Bellany snapped irritably. “Watch for more screamwings and stay with the chief!”

Frantically, Delphi looked around, then charged in a fresh direction. Yes, this was it. He was close, almost there! The main street of the ruins was made of red bricks, partially crumbled back into the moist earth, witch weed and dill growing thick between the irregular rows.

A large metallic shape filled an intersection and Delphi thought it was another army tank at first. But as he got closer he realized it was the bent wreckage of an ICBM missile. Probably one of the many that had been shot down during the brief war. The ceramic nose cone was still attached, and the cyborg nervously checked for any signs of life from the thermonuclear death machine, or worse, a radiation leak. But the missile registered as magnetically inert, and there was only the low-level background radiation that blanketed the world these days. The weapon that had killed the world was dead, Delphi noted sardonically. A sword beaten, not into a plowshare, but into landfill. The irony was almost poetic. In primordial harmony, sheet lightning thundered in the stormy sky.

Moving around the missile, Delphi paused, then moved forward with renewed vigor. There it was! At last!

The graphic arts building of the college was still standing, the marble walls intact, even if the facade was slightly tilting to the left, so that the front door was now a trapezoid. The window glass for all five stories was long gone, but stout bars still covered the lopsided openings.

“What a rad pit.” Bellany scowled, resting the stock of the Kalashnikov on a hip. “You sure there’s anything useful here, Chief?”

“Absolutely,” Delphi muttered, moving to the encrusted remains of the revolving door. The shatterproof glass was also missing from the frame, and he easily stepped through the portal and into the dim interior.

The terrazzo floor was thick with dirt, only a few very small plants having found the necessary purchase to grow on the resilient material. The furnishings in the lobby were draped with vines, the ceiling thick with cobwebs, and there was a definite reek of mildew in the air. Automatically, Delphi activated his nasal filters just in case there was any black mold in the structure.

“Use your handkerchiefs!” the cyborg snapped, pulling the knotted cloth over his nose and mouth.

Understanding the danger, the troopers rushed to obey, several of them sprinkling the cloths with a few drops of shine as additional protection.

Proceeding deeper into the building, Delphi felt his artificial eyes come alive and start to glow to counter the darkness. Instantly he countermanded the process and pulled around the lantern hanging at his side. Raising the flue, he flicked a butane lighter alive and applied the flame to the rag wick. When it caught, he lowered the flue and turned the wick all the way up for maximum illumination. The wick burned with an eerie blue light from the alcohol in the glass reservoir, which only served to give the darkness an additional n-earthly feel.

As the others did the same, the lobby came to life and Delphi could now see the trappings of civilization. Dead security cameras mounted on the walls, an ATM in the corner, pay phones, an alcove filled with candy and soda machines. The ghostly echoes of a bygone era.

Going to the reception desk, Delphi held the lantern high. Most of the lettering had fallen off over the intervening century, leaving behind only a cryptic scramble of partial words and names. Useless.

Looking around the lobby, Delphi saw two sets of double doors at opposite ends. One set was broken and hanging from the rusted hinges, the other still in place, the glass in the observation port cracked but intact.

Ipso facto, Delphi mentally chuckled, heading for them. However, the doors proved to be firmly locked. The IBM supercomputer had cost the college several million dollars. He had expected some decent security. Just not this good. Could…could this have been one of the hardpoints where the redoubts had been designed? Suddenly the cyborg felt a tingling rush of excitement. This could be the answer to his prayers! Not just a college, but a top-secret military laboratory!

“Blow it,” Delphi eagerly commanded, moving back a ways.

Now the troopers with the backpacks moved up, pulling out blocks of C-4 plastique. Taking over the work, Bellany cut the big blocks into small squares and attached them to the outside of the doors where the hinges should be located on the other side. Shoving in small detonators, the trooper trailed the wiring behind him as he got clear, then attached them to a small handheld generator.

“Hot plas!” he shouted in warning, then twisted the handle on top.

The little generator gave a low whine and the C-4 violently exploded, smashing the doors apart and sending a hurricane of exhaust across the lobby, creating a storm of dust. The entire predark building seemed to vibrate from the concussion.

“Davis! Hannon! Stay by the front of this drek hole and watch for stickies,” Cotton commanded, wiping her stinging eyes with the back of a hand. “That fucking boom might bring every mutie in the area down our nuking throats!”

Coughing loudly, the two troopers shuffled away.

Hurrying closer, Delphi was stunned to see that the doors had not been removed, but instead were merely separated by a few feet, the adamantine portals still attached to the locking bar on the inside. However, the massive hinges were twisted and stretched like warm taffy, leaving a gap between the doors of about a foot.

“Shitfire, they sure built things strong before the big chill,” Bellany muttered, impressed in spite of himself. “That plas charge should have knocked down the whole damn wall!”

“Ah, but this is no ordinary building,” Delphi said, holding the lantern next to the gap. Past them was only darkness. “I think this might have been a mil base.”

“A fort?” Still blinking, Cotton furrowed her brow. “Thought you said it was a school,” she said.

“A little of both, and so much more,” the cyborg said excitedly. “Now stay close and follow my lead!”

Turning sideways, Delphi managed to squeeze through the slim opening and held the lantern high. There was another long corridor ahead of him, but this one was spotlessly clean, without any dust, vines or mold. There was a breeze coming from behind Delphi carrying the rank smells of the jungle, mixed with the tang of ages-old dust. But the air past the doors was flat and sterile, tasting rather similar to that of a redoubt. Sterile and clean. Simply amazing, he marveled. The installation seemed to be intact. The seals had to have held for a full century! And if that was true…

Unable to restrain himself further, Delphi ran forward past numerous doors marked only with project codenames—Broken Thunder, Delta Dawn, Maelstrom and the like—until reaching a plain door marked simply as Coldfire.

Eureka! Breathlessly the cyborg tapped an entry code onto the keypad and there was no response, which was not very surprising. Even the vaunted nuke batteries had limits.

Glancing behind to make sure the others coming through the doors were not close yet, the cyborg pushed up a sleeve and opened a small service panel in his arm. Pulling out a power cord, he attached it to the port of the keypad and tried again. This time a green light came on, there was a click and the door swung open wide. But before Delphi could move, there came the sound of running boots. Quickly he reclaimed the power cord just as Bellany, Davenport and the others arrived.

“Don’t like you going off by yourself, Chief,” the bald trooper growled, peering suspiciously into the open doorway. “What if you found a stickie, or a greenie, hiding in here?”

“I was in no danger,” Delphi replied tolerantly, pulling down his sleeve. “Now I want the rest of you to stay here in the hallway. I must do the next part alone.”

“Sir, I just said—” Bellany started, but was cut off by a curt hand gesture from the cyborg.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” Delphi reiterated, unable to look away from the darkness. Everything he wanted, everything he needed, could be only feet away in the Stygian gloom. “Besides—”

“No.”

The word startled the cyborg and he slowly turned. “What was that you just said?” he demanded.

“I said no,” Bellany repeated gruffly. “Where you go, so do we, Chief. End of discussion.”

Impatiently, Delphi started to rally cogent arguments, but then saw the grim determination in the trooper’s face and accepted the situation. The only way to stop the man from following would be to kill him. Delphi had no real problem with that, but there were too many others that would also have to be killed, and in the ensuing fight, some of their bullets might damage the delicate equipment inside the predark lab, ruining the whole reason for coming here in the first place.

“All right, we stay together,” Delphi said, artfully masking his annoyance. “However—”

“I’m on point,” Bellany said, stepping in front of the cyborg and walking boldly into the blackness. Holding their blasters at the ready, the other troopers stayed close to Delphi.

The floor was bare concrete, thick power cables crisscrossing the expanse in a manner shockingly similar to the jungle outside. A huge supercomputer stood mute along a cinder-block wall, the huge tanks of liquid nitrogen used to cool the machine standing in a neat row inside a chained corral.

Mountains of machinery rose and fell around the group, the shadows cast by their alcohol lanterns making the equipment seem oddly animated.

“So what are we looking for?” Cotton asked, tightening her grip on the Kalashnikov.

Pausing in thought, Delphi debated how much to tell them when one of the troopers snorted in disgust.

“Blind Norad, it really stinks in here,” he said behind the mask covering his mouth. “Kinda reminds me of a latrine.”

Pursing his lips, Delphi started to mock the fellow. After all how could there be the smell of feces inside a lab that had been sealed for a hundred years? Then he smelled it, too. Fresh dung. But how was that possible unless…

“Muties!” Delphi shouted, smashing the hurricane lantern on the floor.

The glass reservoir crashed and the supply of shine ignited, creating a rush of light that caught something large and dark just outside the nimbus of illumination.

“Go back-to-back!” Bellany shouted, raising the AK-47. “Form a circle!”

“No, don’t shoot!’ Delphi cried, but then the shadows moved again and a trooper shrieked as his arm was torn off at the shoulder, taking his blaster with it.

As the others rushed to his aid, Cotton spun and triggered her rapid-fire. The muzzle-flash strobed in the darkness almost revealing something darting between the huge predark machines. The 7.62 mm rounds ricocheted off the hulking equipment, throwing off sprays.

“Damn it, that was an order!” Delphi raged, shaking his Kalashnikov at the norm. “I said no—”

But the sec woman fired again, a longer burst, just as Bellany fired his weapon in the opposite direction.

“Shitfire, there’s two of ’em!” a trooper snarled, pulling a gren.

Aghast, Delphi pointed the rapid-fire at the man and was about to shoot when there was movement above the group and a large black creature landed in the middle of them, right on top of the smashed lantern. The blue flames rose around the mutie, apparently doing no harm to it whatsoever, but revealing every feature. It was a huge catlike creature, almost the size of a pony. The smooth fur was dead-black, the mouth a crimson slash, the long fangs dripping blood from the recent kill, and the eyes were solid yellow. Then a writhing nest of tentacles rose from the back.

“Nuke me, it’s a hellhound!” a trooper screamed, backing away in terror. Then he convulsed and toppled over, revealing a second mutie retreating into the gloom with most of his spine dangling from its horrid jaws.

Dropping his AK-47, Bellany spun in a crouch, drew the Webley and fired. The booming muzzle-flame actually touched the hellhound, scoring a long bloody furrow along its side. Snarling insanely, the big cat charged through the crowd of troopers, bowling them over as it escaped into darkness.

As the gutted body hit the ground, the troopers began firing their weapons in every direction, the discharges illuminating the predark lab. Delicate machinery exploded into pieces as the two hellhounds circled the group, going in different directions, constantly moving.

“Sons of bitches are trying to confuse us!” Cotton bellowed, squeezing off a short burst from the Kalashnikov. “How fragging smart are these muties?”

The light from the smashed lantern was beginning to flicker and die, and as the illumination diminished, the hellhounds came ever closer. Oddly, the monstrous cats seemed unconcerned about the other lanterns.

“It’s not the light!” Cotton realized, shouting over her chattering longblaster. “They don’t like fire!”

“Chief, is there anything in here we can burn?” Bellany demanded, working the bolt to free a bent shell caught in the ejector port. He got it loose and the bent casing flew away.

“I have no idea!” Delphi replied, feeling both of his hearts pound in his chest.

Suddenly one of the creatures leaped on top of a comp, only to jump off again immediately. The jar sent the big machine tilting and men scrambled away as it crashed on the floor with a deafening noise, smashing one of the lanterns. As the light vanished, a scream from the other side of the group told of another chilling.

“The eyes!” Delphi shouted. “Aim for the eyes or the ears! Those are the only weak points!”

Kicking spent brass out of their way, the troopers shuffled closer together for protection.

“You heard the man!” Cotton shouted at the top of her lungs. “Eyes and ears, boys! Send it to hell!”

Dropping back, Delphi sprayed an entire clip of rounds at the hellhounds, then dropped the exhausted weapon and pulled a pistol from his gunbelt. At the grasp of his hand, the weapon audibly charged and an indicator light on top registered in the red. The battery inside the H&K needler was fully charged.

“Everybody out!” Delphi commanded, leveling the Kalashnikov and his pistol. “I can handle this alone!”

“No nuking way. We stand together!” Bellany snarled, snapping off shots with the Webley. Then the hammer clicked on a spent shell. Ducking, the bald trooper cracked the weapon to drop the empties and hastily thumb in fresh rounds. One live cartridge fell and rolled away under a wooden desk—and a hellhound jumped over the desk to land on top of Bellany.

Shrieking obscenities, the man went down, firing the handcannon point-blank into the chest of the thing. A single swipe of the powerful claws removed his throat, while the tentacles lanced outward, spearing two other troopers, scoring minor wounds. Their rapid-fires dropped with a clatter, firing off a few rounds before stopping.

Recoiling, Delphi paused for only a second, then aimed both of his weapons and fired them simultaneously. The chattering of the assault rifle completely masked the soft hiss of the H&K coil gun. The 7.62 mm bullets bounced off the body of the beast, but the 2.5 mm depleted uranium slivers punched clean through the sleek, muscular body.

Pumping out piss-yellow blood, the hellhound snarled over a shoulder, and all of its tentacles stabbed for the cyborg. He ducked, and they missed by less than an inch. Staying in a crouch, he fired again and again, scoring hits both times.

Now the others trained their blasters on the wounded beast, hammering it with lead and steel.

Gushing sticky golden fluids, the creature sprang for the cyborg and missed, but knocked the Kalashnikov out of his hands, the rapid-fire taking the needler along with it. But as the animal landed on the desk, Davenport shoved her Ruger .357 into one of its ears and fired. The backblast threw the woman down, but the head of the beast cracked open, yellow blood erupting from the mouth and exploding the eyes. Weaving drunkenly on its legs for a long moment, the beast went still and gently laid down as if it was merely going to sleep. As the head listed sideways, the life fluids ceased to flow from the ghastly wounds and the big hellhound went still.

Taking heart from the chill, the few remaining troopers cheered wildly, now able to concentrate on the last man-killer. Trying for the nimble creature, they succeeded only in finishing the destruction of the predark lab.

Recovering his needler, Delphi cursed when he saw another trooper fall and made a command decision. The resources of the lab were already lost. Time to save what he could.

“Use the grens!” the cyborg bellowed, pulling the crystal wand from his shoulder holster.

Taking defensive positions behind the toppled comps, the troopers readied the explosive charges, ripping off the safety tape holding the arming level in place.

As if understanding the danger, the hellhound turned and looped for the door. Already facing that direction, Delphi waited until it was directly in sight, then squeezed the wand.

A scintillating laser beam stabbed out from the tip, hitting the big cat in the neck. Yellow blood formed a geyser from the punctured artery and as it turned, Delphi increased the power to maximum and burned a long burst straight down its throat. The beast went stock-still as the mauling power ray burned down its gullet. Now the grens arrived, raining down around the beast and thunderously detonating, ripping the body apart into bloody gobbets.

As the smoky blasts dissipated, Cotton walked over to inspect the corpse.

“Yeah, that’s aced proper,” she said with grim satisfaction. Then the woman hawked and spit on the tattered remains. “All right, gather the blasters and boots! Leave the bodies. They’d only be dug up during the night by animals.”

Moving slow, as if they were drunk, the exhausted men moved among their fallen comrades, taking what was necessary and ignoring the rest. Death was part of their job. Later they would mourn for lost friends, but right now there was still work to be done as quietly and efficiently as possible.

Realizing this was his best chance, Delphi holstered the laser, then took it out again, just in case there was another of the creatures hiding somewhere. Bio-weapons! Somebody was going to pay for that dearly. There was no doubt in his mind that this had been a trap set just for him. How else could animals have gotten inside a room supposedly sealed for a hundred years? Clearly, they had been placed there recently, the doors resealed. And the people in charge of all biological weapons worked for TITAN. This was bad, Delphi acknowledged.

Going to the smashed comp, Delphi looked over the wreckage and sighed. He had hoped that something might have survived the battle, but the IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer was utterly destroyed. The huge comp was the finest and fastest of its kind in the predark world, and used some of the prototype for the circuits inside his body. The cyborg had fervently hoped to find something he could use here, but that was impossible now. The circuit cubes were broken, the digital wafers shattered, and the plasma chips warped from a series of massive short circuits. Gone, all gone.

With diminishing hope, Delphi went from one server to the next, finding only trash. The last two servers had bullet holes in them, yet were still serviceable and capable of working. Good news indeed. Except that they contained none of the experimental microprocessors that he required.

Then inspiration hit and Delphi walked to the control board for the supercomputer and raised the service panel to palm over the complex wiring. Incredibly, he received an answering tingle and dug among the morass of shielded circuits to retrieve a lumpy section of a slim piece of ribbon cable. It was a Thinking Wire, and almost as advanced as the version that he carried. Even more important, the microchips embedded in the cable seemed completely undamaged!

Keeping out of sight behind the raised lid of the console, Delphi opened a port in his chest and fed in the wire. It took a few moments for his systems to initiate the new hardware, and there was a moment of disorientation. Then whole sections of deactivated programs and hardware became active in his mind. His autorepair systems were back online! Scrolling through the command menu, he held out a palm and there appeared a barely visible sheen in the air. Frowning slightly, Delphi rerouted some power and the translucent distortion expanded to a full yard, then it turned transparent.

I have a force field again! Now he was safe from bullets, lasers, anything. Everything! Even a focused EMP beam designed to burn out his internal circuitry and render him powerless, paralyzed, a prisoner inside his own augmented body. Helpless prey for the agents of TITAN. If they were actively hunting for him, then it was time to turn and take a stand. No, he’d attack them! The balance of power had been redressed. Now the war began in earnest.

“Sir?”

Quickly dissolving the immaterial force field, Delphi looked up and saw Davenport standing nearby. How much had she just seen? Did she know the truth? “Yes, what is it, Cotton?” the cyborg asked in forced casualness.

That made the sec woman pause. This was the first time he had ever called her by her first name. Guess I’ve just stepped into an aced man’s boots and am the new sec boss for the convoy.

“We’re ready to leave, Chief,” she replied, resting the still-warm barrel of her Kalashnikov on a shoulder. Bellany’s gunbelt and Webley .44 hung over the other arm. “Unless there’s something else you want to look for around here.”

“No, I’ve found what was needed,” Delphi stated, lowering the service panel and locking it closed once more. “Let’s go.”

“Where, sir?”

There was only one answer to that. “East,” Delphi said, flexing his hands, feeling the power course within them. “Let’s go home.”