“I know that look,” J.B. said to his friend. “Okay, what’s the plan?”
“Yeah, I got one, but you aren’t going to like it.” As he explained, the faces of the companions grew tense, then hopeful.
“Hell of a gamble,” Krysty said, as the door shook once more, and something raced overhead across the ceiling. “But I think it might work.”
“Okay, forget the kitchen, we hit the offices first,” J.B. ordered, opening his munitions bag and pulling out the lone stick of dynamite. It was old and wrapped in sticky electrical tape to retard sweating pure nitro, but it was the only explosive they had aside from the grens, and they were just too damn powerful.
“Better switch to candles. Can’t be swapping grips when these lighters get too hot.”
Following the sage advice, the companions were soon ready. Kicking the chair away from the door, Ryan took the lead into the heart of the infested redoubt, one hand holding a candle, the other his blaster. The hallway was clear, but every open doorway was passed as if it were the muzzle of a loaded cannon.
Reaching the stairs, the companions went past the deactivated elevator and went carefully up the stairs. Millipedes were found scurrying along the walls or sitting on the ceiling. To conserve ammo, the muties weren’t harmed unless they attacked first. But each fight seemed to attract more of the creatures, constantly slowing their progress. To reach the office of the commanding officer of the base, the companions passed close to the armory and briefly paused, trying to decide if they should look inside, but the emergency lights were starting to seriously dim by that time and they had to move onward. Seconds counted now, before they were fighting in the darkness at the mercy of the deadly insects.
“READY, GO!” Ryan shouted, awkwardly opening the sagging door to the garage.
Cutting loose, the companions opened fire on the scurrying millipedes, blasting a tight path through the living carpet. Reaching the wrecked vehicles, the friends hastily climbed on top and jumped from hood to hood so the insects couldn’t bite them from underneath the wags. However, the noise from the millipedes quickly grew in volume as more and more of them poured into the garage at the arrival of the companions.
Placing his shots carefully, Ryan felt his heart pound at the sight, even though it was exactly what they wanted. Attracted by the mag fields of the base, once inside the things found virtually nothing to eat and were slowly concentrating their attention on the only food available. The humans.
Situated high in the corners, the emergency lights were beginning to turn yellow at this point, and as the companions jumped to the roof of the APC a bulb started to flicker. It was horribly obvious that the lights were dying faster than expected.
“Left side!” Ryan snarled, and the companions concentrated their blasters there to clear a section of the floor free of bugs.
Jumping down, Dean placed a coffee can on the floor, a tiny nubbin of prima cord sizzling on top as a fuse. Kicking a bug off his boot, the boy grabbed the hands of his friends and climbed hastily back up out of reach of the chittering muties.
“Okay, right side!” Ryan shouted, shooting a millipede off the bare concrete ceiling above them.
Now Krysty did the same thing, while Jak used a broom to shove the third charge underneath the armored vehicle. As they scrambled back on top of the war wag, Mildred put the last charge on a flat section of the armored roof, the burning fuse less than an inch long.
“Get inside!” Ryan growled, chilling two more smaller bugs charging across the rooftops of a nearby Hummer. “Move!”
Firing from the hip, J.B. used the shotgun to clear off the rear hatch, and the companions jumped to the floor and threw open the double doors with their blasters firing. The single small millipede sitting on the floor was torn to pieces and the companions piled inside the steel box, kicking out the twitching body before slamming the hatch shut and locking it tight.
“Seal the rest!” Ryan ordered, checking the gunners hatch in the ceiling and finding it already bolted tight.
“Hot pipe, there’s no lock on this one!” Dean yelled as the driver’s hatch trembled slightly and a millipede appeared at the crack, snapping its pinchers.
Twisting the head of his ebony swordstick, Doc withdrew a thin sword of Spanish steel and plunged it through the face of the bug. It screamed in agony and withdrew.
Yanking off his belt, Dean looped it through the handle of the hatch and pulled the hatch tight. Removing her gun belt, Mildred fed it through Dean’s and managed to stretch the leather just far enough to reach a stanchion and anchor it securely. The makeshift pulley would hold, but not against a lot of the determined bugs, or for very long.
Krysty already had two candles lit and placed on empty machine-gun mounts to fill the gutted war wag with vital illumination. From outside the APC, she could see that the flickering of the emergency lights was getting worse, then one array suddenly began to strobe wildly and died outright, casting the section of the garage into darkness. Gaia, they were cutting this close.
“We’re secure!” J.B. announced, tightening the latch on the belly hatch.
“Okay, start cutting!” Ryan growled, holstering his blaster and drawing the panga.
Whipping out their knives, everybody played a candle flame over the blade for a precious second, then nicked a finger and started smearing blood around the louvered air vents and small blaster ports of the vehicle. Even though they knew it was risking a finger to stick it outside, they spread the blood about as far as possible. But at the first imagined touch of a mutie, they yanked the endangered hand back and dabbed the blood merely around the ports.
The chittering soon became a muted roar, and the APC actually shook slightly from the arrival of countless dozens of the muties. The smell of blood was driving the millipedes crazy, and within moments every air vent and blaster port was alive with pinchers and slimy tongues reaching for the food.
“Wait for it,” Ryan commanded, as the tapping of the pinchers grew until it sounded like rain on a tin roof. Watching the second hand move on his wrist chron, the one-eyed man waited until the sixty-second mark and shouted, “Now!”
Covering their ears, the companions opened their mouths to equalize the pressure and try to save their hearing when the entire world seemed to erupt. The APC rocked violently from side to side from the concussions of the explosions as the dynamite charges in the coffee cans detonated slightly out of sequence.
The blasts punched through the air vents like invisible fists knocking the companions about, Ryan slamming into a hatch and crumpling to the floor. Outside, the chittering of the muties swelled into screams for a split second and then was gone as the reverberations of the trip-hammer explosions and stilettos of flame stabbed through the air vents and blaster ports, and a monstrous crunching sound filled the garage. Screeching as it scraped along the concrete floor, the wheelless APC was shoved sideways and brutally slammed into another vehicle, then flipped over sideways, tumbling the companions together into a heap and extinguishing the candles.
In the smoky blackness of the APC nothing moved, aside from the slow drip of blood.
Chapter Five
With the coming of the dawn, the Devils rolled out of the box canyon and headed north along the dried riverbed to finally reach a scraggly plain of scrub brush that slowly changed into a grasslands and finally to forest.
After the heat of the desert, it was a very welcome change for the bikers. The line of chained slaves didn’t seem to notice the difference, their every thought concentrated on placing one foot ahead of the other.
Passing a copse of trees, a group of stickies charged at the biker gang, hooting and waving their arms like the mad things they