Desert Kings. James Axler

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