Desert Kings. James Axler

with the barrel of his longblaster. As it swung open there came a soft exhalation of warm air, closely followed by a strange hum and a series of soft pattering again. But this time he heard it clearly. It almost sounded like rain. Had a pipe busted? Or mebbe a sink was overflowing on the top level.

      Taking the lead, Ryan proceeded down the corridor, with the rest of the companions fanned out behind him so as to not offer a group target. They reached the door without incident.

      Going to the keypad on the wall, Krysty tapped in the 3-2-5 access code. Nothing happened.

      She repeated the code, and this time the lock disengaged. The door slid aside, revealing a bare floor covered with scratch marks. The companions discovered that the room was completely empty. Sadly, this was the condition that they found most redoubts: stripped to the walls, every blaster, lightbulb and fork gone, removed by the predark soldiers after skydark and taken—well, somewhere else. They had no idea where.

      “Okay, let’s do a standard hunt,” Ryan said, removing his finger from the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. “Check under the racks for anything dropped, and be sure to look in the garbage cans.”

      Peering around a corner, J.B. called out, “I don’t think that’s necessary this time!”

      Joining the man, the rest of the companions paused in puzzlement. The area past the corner was as vacant as the front of the armory—except for a long row of wooden coffins on the cold floor.

      “Is this the abode of vampires?” Doc muttered uneasily.

      “Far from East Coast,” Jak said, referring to the ville the companions had visited once. The locals called themselves the People, and lived off human blood. They weren’t exactly the vampires of legend that Mildred had shown them in the vids, but close enough.

      “Ten…fifteen…twenty…thirty of them,” Krysty said, her hand tightening on her S&W revolver. Her thumb brushed against the smooth steel where a hammer would have been located for most other blasters. But the Model 640 had an internal hammer, making it perfect for firing from inside a coat pocket.

      “Odd place for a mortuary,” Mildred stated.

      “Mebbe they aren’t for deaders,” Ryan answered.

      “What else would you put in a coffin?”

      “Let’s find out,” J.B. suggested. Going to the first coffin, the Armorer knelt to check for traps, then pulled out a knife and wiggled the steel blade into the thin crack between the side and the lid. Pressing downward, he got some play, and moved to the other side to try again. This time the nails squealed in protest, then the lid came loose and crashed to the floor, the noise preternaturally loud in the cavernous room.

      “Are…are those what I think they are?” Mildred whispered, looking inside.

      “Son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered, holstering his blaster. Filling the coffin were AK-47 assault rifles, Kalashnikov rapid-fires. The blue-steel barrels gleamed with oil, and the wooden stock shone with polish. He lifted one of the predark blasters, testing the weight in a knowledgeable hand.

      “Seem brand-new,” Jak said suspiciously, taking another weapon. He worked the bolt and raised the AK-47 so that the overhead fluorescent lights could shine down the barrel.

      “Clean!” the teenager announced, releasing the bolt so that it snapped back into position. “All need ammo, and good to go.”

      Already at the next coffin, Jak got the lid off and chuckled at the sight of all the curved magazines for the weapons. Inspecting one, he naturally found it empty. The brass in an autoloader was pushed upward by a spring. Leave the weapon loaded for too long and the spring got weak and the blaster jammed in the middle of a fight. It was the price a person paid for having a rapid-fire that required constantly loading and unloading the ammo clips.

      The third coffin was full of loose 7.62 mm brass for the rapid-fires. The next couple contained more clips, then more Kalashnikovs, more ammo and, finally, grens. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Just simple HE charges, no thermite or Willie Peter. White phosphorous, as Mildred called it. But still, it was more grens than the companions had ever seen before except for the Alaskan redoubt.

      The last coffin contained assorted survival supplies, folding knives, canteens, Aqua-Pure tabs and the like. A baron’s ransom in irreplaceable tech.

      Judiciously, J.B. and Ryan chose a couple of the grens and disassembled them on the spot. But there were no traps, no gimmicks. The explosive mil charges were fully functional, the small wads of C-4 moist and soft. Then the two men went back and used their knives to remove the lead for some of the cartridges and poured out the powder. They half expected it to be sand or sawdust. But the silvery dust looked normal, and when Ryan touched it with the flame of a butane lighter the propellant flared brightly and yielded no smoke.

      “Smokeless gunpowder.” J.B. chuckled in delight. Most of the blasters they found stored in the redoubts were loaded with cordite. Greasy stuff that gave off almost no smoke but smelled like a mutie’s fart. This stuff gave off no smoke at all, none, and there was no smell. The Armorer knew how to make black powder and how to convert that into gunpowder. Fulminating guncotton, nitro, plas, those were no prob. Easy pie. But this stuff was a kind of predark chem far beyond his capabilities.

      Sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, Jak began to insert live brass into an empty clip. When it was full, he placed it aside and started on another. Doc joined him at the task and they began stacking the loaded magazines.

      The rest of the companions stood guard, keeping a close watch on the open door.

      “Must be about a hundred of the rapid-fires,” Krysty said slowly, biting a lip. “And mebbe a million rounds.”

      “Closer to two million as I figure it,” Mildred said, scrunching her face. “Spare body parts downstairs and enough blasters here for an army. What is the son of a bitch planning?”

      “Could be trade goods,” J.B. theorized, running a hand along the satiny finish of a Kalashnikov. He took a clip from the pile and gently inserted it into the receiver, then worked the bolt to chamber a round. “A man could buy a whole ville with just a couple of these.”

      “Or take over a dozen,” Ryan added grimly.

      “Baron Delphi?”

      “Why not? Last time he gave M-16 assault rifles to the people he hired to kill us and capture Doc. Mebbe now he plans to carve out an empire…” Ryan didn’t finish the thought, but he could see that everybody else was also reaching the same conclusion. After creating his kingdom, the cyborg would come after Doc and the rest of them again. Only this time, instead of facing four coldhearts, the companions could be facing a bastard army. A real army, hundreds of sec men armed with rapid-fires. They had tangled with something similar in Shiloh, but back then the companions did a nightcreep and used the element of surprise. That would not be the case this time.

      “What puzzles me is the use of these coffins,” Doc said, placing aside another full clip. “It is most unlikely that these funeral containers were all that he could obtain to transport the blasters. It seems more likely that—”

      “Fireblast, he must have been smuggling them out of someplace,” Ryan said, completing the old man’s thought, rubbing his chin. The last time, the cyborg seemed to have unlimited supplies. But now he was smuggling weapons? The only logical reason why he’d be doing that: the bastard cyborg had more enemies than just the companions.

      “All right, everybody grab a spare blaster and some grens,” Ryan announced, taking a loaded AK-47 and sliding the strap over a shoulder. “I want to check out the last few levels of this redoubt, then go outside and find out where we are.”

      “And then what?” Mildred asked, filling her pockets with spare ammo clips. “Should we send all of this stuff on another one-way trip to nowhere like the last batch?”

      But before the Deathlands warrior could respond, the soft pattering sound came again, closer this time and from directly above them. As the companions looked curiously upward,