Desert Kings. James Axler

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