Plague Lords. James Axler

to his shoulder, looking over, not through, the optics.

      In a fraction of a second, he took it all in.

      There were two parallel, north-south running slopes in the valley below them. The first was a gradual shelf, then came the steep drop-off to the river bottom, which mostly lay out of sight because of the view angle. The edge of the drop-off was marked by overlapping blast rings with black scorch marks at their epicenters. Inside the circles, the concrete rubble had been swept clean of dust. Dead stickies and parts of same lay scattered around the joined circumferences. Beyond the litter of death, the blast rings were haloed with crimson.

      The bridge deck lay in a line of massive, jumbled chunks on the ground, chunks that sprouted rusted rebar bristles. Amid the fallen blocks, about a hundred yards away, the hapless motorcycle crew had made camp for the night.

      It was also where they made their last stand.

      Immediately, Ryan caught frantic movement among the concrete slabs. A pair of norm survivors—the screamers—were being circled and set upon by packs of half-naked muties. Other stickies played tug of war with the corpses of fallen bikers.

      And that wasn’t the worst part.

      “Nukin’ hell!” J.B. growled over Ryan’s shoulder.

      Seventy-five yards away, dense black smoke poured up from a pile of offroad motorbikes. They were completely enveloped in flame. At the edges of the blaze, spindly armed muties gyrated with abandon, empty plastic jerri-cans of gasoline lay scattered at their feet. Stickies loved fire almost as much as they loved senseless chilling. Stickies didn’t ride—machinery of any kind was beyond their limited understanding. Eight of the muties were shoving the remaining four dirt bikes toward the conflagration by the handlebars and rear cargo racks.

      “Go! Go!” Ryan snarled back at the others as he thumbed the right rear of the Steyr’s receiver, sliding off the safety and peering through the scope with his one good eye. He could have opened up on the muties attacking the survivors, and mebbe, just mebbe driven them off their defenseless victims before they were torn to shreds, but if he had done that, the last of the motorcycles would have surely burned.

      And the motorcycles were the companions’ only way out.

      Ryan held the crosshairs low to compensate for the down-angled, close-range shot. He took a stationary lead on the stickie pushing the front of the first motorcycle, aiming at the head, as stickies were hard to kill otherwise. As he tightened the trigger to breakpoint, the companions were already skidding down the bike trail to his right, beelining for the pyre. His predark Austrian sniper rifle barked and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. With the gunshot echoing in the chasm, Ryan rode the recoil wave back onto the target. Through the optics he saw his stickie target bowled over. When it went down, it took the bike down, too, in a cloud of beige dust. Ryan worked the butter-smooth 60-degree bolt, locking down on a fresh 7.62 mm NATO round. He ignored the stickie standing frozen and empty-handed over the rear of the dropped motorcycle.

      Chilling them all was secondary at this point.

      Perhaps impossible.

      And with any luck, unnecessary.

      He swung his sights to the right, compensating for the suddenly altered course of the stickies. The daisy chain of bike-pushing muties was so focused on the bonfire, on adding more fuel to the blaze, on doing their little arm-waving, stickie fire dance, that they didn’t run for cover. They just lowered their hairless heads and pressed onward. Ryan touched off a second round. The 147-grain slug hit a handlebar stickie at the base of the neck, shattering its spinal column and blowing out half its throat in a twinkling puff of pink. The nearly beheaded mutie bounced like a ragdoll off the handlebars and fork, flopping to the ground on its back. The rear pusher couldn’t hold the dirt bike upright. It toppled over onto the downed stickie’s legs.

      From below the bridge came a chaotic rattle of single shots: Krysty and Mildred’s .38s, Jak’s .357 Magnum, J.B.’s 12-gauge and Doc’s black-powder .44. Around the bonfire, struck by a hail of slugs, the stickie dancers jerked to a brand-new beat. As they fell to earth, the companions charged. A center-chest scattergun blast lifted and hurled the last of the dancers backward into the blaze, where it briefly thrashed, fried and died.

      Suddenly sealed off from their goal by a row of blasters, the bike-pushing stickies stopped in their tracks. As they dumped the motorcycles, the last mutie in line spun toward the campsite, toward its brother-sister creatures who were merrily disjointing dead traders and tearing off their flesh in strips. The stickie opened the black hole of its mouth and from high in its throat, shrieked like a teakettle—for help.

      Already locked on target, Ryan snapped the cap. As the sniper rifle boomed, it punched hard into his temple. The NATO slug slammed the stickie sideways and down, turning off the piercing squeal like a switch. Too late. As the gunshot resounded in the valley and the mortally wounded creature dervished in the dirt, arms flapping, legs kicking, the other muties abandoned their sport and scurried to the edge of the rubble field, regrouping for an attack on new victims.

      Fresh screams and bloody meat. New bones to crack, marrow to spill.

      Closing fast on the dropped motorcycles, the companions spread out in a skirmish line and fired at will. J.B. shot from the hip, Mildred from her Olympic stance; both with deadly effect. Smoke and flame belched from Doc’s ancient blaster, lead balls blasting through stickie chests and backs as they turned to flee.

      J.B. and Doc quickly booted the corpses off the bikes while Krysty, Jak and Mildred used speedloaders to recharge their wheel guns. In front of them, fifty or more muties massed behind a slab of bridge deck. Waving their pale arms over their heads, the stickies made kissing sounds with their lipless mouths, jigging to their own silent, hardwired hip-hop, working themselves into a mindless fury.

      Ryan’s predark longblaster was no longer an option. Single shots from the Steyr couldn’t turn back stickies swept up in a chill frenzy. Slinging the rifle, the one-eyed man vaulted for the side of the road and the crude bike trail. The downslope was close to sixty degrees, and the path practically a straight line. He half skiied, half fell 150 feet to the bottom. He hit the ground running, yanking his SIG-Sauer from hip leather.

      At the same instant, the stickies broke from cover and rushed the five companions, who had closed ranks to concentrate the effect of their weapons. Because Ryan knew he couldn’t reach them in time, he sprinted wide right to flank the ten-abreast, mutie charge and give himself a clear line of fire.

      In an elegant dueling stance, left hand braced on the silver lion’s-head pommel of his unsheathed sword stick, Doc started the fusillade with a mighty boom. A yard of flame and gout of black-powder smoke belched from the muzzle of the LeMat’s top barrel. A fraction of a second later the others cut loose a ragged volley.

      Under the rippling smack of bullet impacts, the center of the stickie front wave crumpled and folded. Half of the closely following second rank crashed to earth, as well; some from high-velocity through-and-throughs, but most were simply tripped up, unable to avoid the sudden tangle of legs and torsos. Which, momentarily at least, saved their wretched lives.

      The third, fourth and fifth rows of attackers split down the middle and veered around their own fallen, like a torrent flowing around a boulder field. The smell and taste of the aerosolized gore, the shrill cries of pain made them all the more frantic. As they reformed their inhuman wave, the companions’ blasters roared again.

      The few muties in front who had escaped the first volley—heedless of their exposure, driven by urges too powerful to deny—high-kicked to close distance on the companions. As a result, the second round of fire was at near point-blank range, a cross-chest barrage that swept the stickies off their bare feet.

      Ryan advanced on the mutie flank, holding the SIG-Sauer in a solid, two-handed grip. Because both he and his targets were moving, it wasn’t the time for fine shooting. The blaster barked and bucked again and again, action cycling. Ryan punched out rapid-fire, center body shots as the tripped muties tried to scramble to their feet. The mutie bastards were so pumped up by the prospect of more chilling, that unless it was a head shot it took