“Number of villes. Way they’re spread out, rather than all clumped up together in one big defensive perimeter. You wouldn’t get that kind of population in that kind of distribution without at least comparative peace.”
The Armorer grunted noncommittally. “Likely you’re right. But still, mebbe you aren’t. No guarantees in this life.”
“Things change,” Jak said.
“Tell me something new,” Ryan said with a winter smile.
GETTING TO THE CENTERS of habitation proved to be more than difficult.
With the Hummer’s independently suspended tires bouncing over lava rocks head-size or better and his partners, including the sorely injured Krysty, bouncing around in the cab like badly stowed luggage, Ryan wondered if he would even be able to drive them off the fire mountain. It would have been vicious enough going in the dark with nothing but the jagged terrain to cope with.
The mountain was spewing. Away off to their left fountains of fire arced red across the sky. The one thing to be thankful for was that their path, such as it was, led steadily away from the eruption.
A scarlet glow shone on the hood in front of him. He leaned forward, eye straining up, trying to figure out where it came from. Suddenly a fang of rock not thirty yards to their left seemed to explode in a yellow flash. The wag rocked. The cab filled with voices crying out in surprised alarm. Impacts thunked off the Hummer’s steel and Kevlar carapace like hail. J.B., standing upright with his Uzi in lieu of the missing mount-gun, ducked into the cab with a yelp as a handful of glowing yellow embers spattered across the hood.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the fuck was that?”
“Bomb,” Doc said. Since the coldhearts had chased them off their idyllic mountain camp into the redoubt, he had been totally lucid, showing no sign of the madness that sometimes overtook him. Somewhat to Ryan’s surprise, he remained entirely calm in the face of whatever had just happened.
“You’re kidding, Doc,” Mildred said, hunching down in back, looking up and out, trying to fathom what had happened. “Somebody’s attacking?”
“Only the gods in their wrath,” Doc replied blithely. He rode in the back seat with Jak, who sat clutching one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives like a talisman in both hands. Mildred was in the aft cargo compartment tending to Krysty, who lay on a mat laid on top of their baggage, such as it was. “That was a lava bomb. A bubble, if you will, of molten rock, filled with lethal gas. If one lands too close to us we are undone, to say nothing of what should eventuate were one to strike us directly.”
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered. He straightened reluctantly, poking his head beyond the dubious protection of the cab. Almost at once he yelled, “Right, Ryan! Crank hard right!”
Ryan obeyed. The Hummer heeled over alarmingly to the left as the wag turned sharply. The one-eyed man almost left his teeth in the steering wheel as the front bucked up. And then the engine was straining, whining in anguish as it struggled to push them over a boulder in their path. The wag climbed, almost stalled, then pitched forward. Ryan gritted his teeth as the wag’s belly scraped over the sharp-toothed lava rock. But the rugged vehicle neither dropped its guts nor hung. It ground over the top and down. Mildred cursed as the top of her head hit the ceiling.
Ryan cranked his head around to see a yellow glowing worm of lava force its way over a dam of rock and slop down in a shower of sparks, right where the wag had been before the Armorer had shouted his warning.
A long breath escaped Ryan’s lungs. J.B. shoved his face back down the well of the blaster-mount. “At least we’ve shown we can take the bastard best the mountain has to throw at us!” the Armorer called.
The Hummer rocked to an impact that sank it on its springs. Two curving white blades, spaced a hand span apart, suddenly protruded downward from the Kevlar roof.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. A dark jet suddenly spewed from each curved blade. Jak and Doc cried out in alarm and flattened themselves against the doors.
“What—” Ryan began.
From almost directly overhead came the ripping roar of J.B.’s Uzi, loud even over the ceaseless bellow of the volcano. With a rending, wrenching sound, the curved blades were yanked out of the vehicle’s roof.
“Snake…” the Armorer shouted, a sudden crackle of noise like skyscraper-size firecrackers going off drowned most of his words.
“What?”
“I said, it’s a bastard rattlesnake, the biggest bastard snake I ever saw!”
Ryan stuck his head out the window and craned his neck around. Silhouetted against a demonic sky, a head as wide across as Ryan’s own shoulders reared up ten or a dozen feet above the Hummer on an impossibly thick body. Ryan wondered for an endless interval between one heartbeat and the next whether the creature was actually that huge or whether its size was an illusion produced by the glaring, ever-shifting light.
The head split open into a vast flame-yellow mouth. Its fangs, each as long as one of Ryan’s arms, unfolded like the blades of a lock-back knife. As Ryan slammed the accelerator home, the head darted forward with dizzying speed, fangs thrusting ahead of it like spears.
Mildred screamed in fury more than terror as the fangs stabbed down through the roof, one gleaming ivory scimitar missing her head by inches. Gathering the now semiconscious Krysty into her strong arms, Mildred rolled herself and the redhead to the side of the cargo compartment, away from the reeking, fuming venom that spurted in pulses from the fangs. Then she turned back to hammer at the nearest fang with the heel of her fist. It had no effect.
“A fascinating adaptation,” Doc remarked in as calmly conversational a voice as the others had ever heard him use. “Clearly the serpent soaks up heat from the ambient rocks, allowing it to move and hunt as freely at night as in the daytime.”
“That’s great, Doc,” Ryan said, “but how do we kill the nuke-blasted thing?”
Despite the wag’s wild bucking, J.B. popped back up through the vacant gun mount with his Uzi. He emptied the magazine at the creature in three long ragged bursts as it coiled yet again to strike.
Ryan saw a relatively clear stretch of slope, if steep, and sent the wag bucketing down it amid a baby avalanche of loose rubble. The impacts slammed his lower jaw into the upper and threatened to shake his joints apart.
“We’re getting away!” Mildred shouted.
“We better,” J.B. said, dropping back down into the passenger seat to change mags. “I might as well be pissing at the bastard. I’m not sure any of my rounds even penetrated.”
The monstrous snake launched itself, not in a strike but slithering down the slope parallel to them, flowing sinuously over jagged steaming black rock and gray boulders like a living avalanche. It caught up with them, lunged again, this time as if trying to bring its terrible mass crushing down on the wag. Ryan spun the wheel right. For a terrifying fraction of a second the vehicle slewed sideways in the scree, heeling way over toward the bottom of the slope, threatening to break away at any instant and go rolling down the smoky like a loose boulder, battering itself to pieces and churning its occupants to lumpy red puree. Then the vast cleated run-flat tires bit and thrust the wag forward across the slope, no longer in danger of tipping over but still not clear of the snake.
Ryan heard loud reports from close behind, dared a look over his shoulder. From one window Jak was cranking shots from his Python handblaster, from the other, Doc was booming away with his venerable LeMat. The pistol rounds, like the 9 mm bullets fired by J.B.’s Uzi, were almost certainly as futile as spitting at the rattlesnake, but Ryan had to grin approval of his comrades’ fighting spirit.
The thing was right after them, writhing with incredible speed. On a flat, on anything like a decent surface, the Hummer would’ve left the horror in its dust. On this evil broken slope, the snake had every advantage.