Shadow Fortress. James Axler

his piece. Mitchum wanted them aced; Glassman wanted to capture them alive. He wasn’t about to let either event happen.

      “No sounds of plants being crushed under tires,” Mildred said thoughtfully as the tiny beams of sunlight streaming across the clearing flickered from the passing of a cloud overhead. “Must be a road close by.”

      “Too close,” Jak stated, keeping his .357 Magnum blaster pointed at the greenery. He was down to four rounds, and was going to make each one count before he took the last train west.

      “Think it was Mitchum?” Dean asked anxiously, his young face tense and serious. They had befriended the sec man, saving him from the stew pot of cannies, but somehow that had gotten turned around and now the sec man was hell-bent for revenge.

      “I do not believe so, lad,” Doc rumbled. “To the best of our knowledge, the good colonel did not have access to any motorized transport. Horses were his sole venue.”

      Carefully, Doc set the selector pin on his huge hand cannon from the shotgun barrel to the .44 cylinder. The LeMat was a Civil War antique, but in the old man’s steady hands the LeMat struck like the wrath of God.

      “Must be his new associate, Glassman,” Ryan said, pulling the panga from its sheath and sliding it into his belt for easier access.

      “Here fast,” Jak said slowly.

      “Those steam-powered PT boats of his are mighty quick,” J.B. agreed, tilting back his fedora. “He must have swung around the island and gotten fresh troops from Cascade ville, trying to catch us between him and Mitchum.”

      A distant rattle of a machine gun shook the jungle, the animals going quiet, the birds screaming loudly and rustling the trees as they launched for the sky.

      Frowning deeply, Krysty turned in a circle. “Gaia save us, there are Hummers everywhere.”

      “Trying to flush us out,” Jak said, awkwardly shifting his stance on the crutches.

      Reaching high, Ryan grabbed a branch and pulled himself off the ground. “Wait for my signal to follow,” he said from the blackness above. “Don’t do anything until I come back. If I get aced, head for the mountains. We passed a cave there you can use to hide in until things cool down.”

      “Get going and find that plane,” J.B. growled irritably, balancing the shotgun in his grip.

      Digging in his boots, Ryan started shimmying up the tree and soon disappeared from sight in the thick foliage. A few minutes later, a brass cartridge fell to the ground, bouncing off the branches until it hit the ground. Dean scooped it up and saw the cartridge was intact, and not a spent round ejected from his father’s blaster.

      “Live,” he reported. “Dad found it.”

      “Get moving,” J.B. said, and started up the tree himself, moving slower than Ryan because of the Uzi on his back. The little branches kept sticking into the weapon and slowing him.

      Grabbing a vine, the Armorer tried climbing that instead of the tree and made much faster progress. The vine was thicker than a gren, and the wide leaves provided good bracing for his boots. As the vine ended, he shimmied along the branch until reaching the trunk. He stabbed a knife into the wood, drawing himself up as he kicked footholds in the rough bark with his boots.

      The higher he climbed, the cooler it got and the brighter the sunlight. Soon J.B. emerged from the canopy of leaves to find himself blinking in direct sunlight. Ryan stood nearby with a boot resting in the fork of two branches, looking through the curtain of vines.

      “There she is,” he said, indicating the direction with his chin.

      Pulling himself onto the stout branch, J.B. could only marvel at the titanic machine sprawled in the treetops before them. It was gigantic.

      More than a hundred feet long, the incredible aircraft supported two huge engines with six propellers on each wing. Vines and creepers covered the plane, only the glass of the cockpit and the tail rudder clearly visible amid the flowering creepers. It was a wonder Dean had spotted it from a mile away.

      “That’s a Hercules,” Ryan said, swaying to the wind. It was a lot stronger up there and carried a strong taste of salt from the nearby ocean. “Saw a picture of one in a redoubt, pinned to the wall like a girlie poster.”

      “Yeah, I know,” J.B. replied. “I spent a month living in a crashed wreck once. Good planes.”

      Carefully, Ryan glanced downward. “Any chance the sec men could see us up here?”

      “No way in hell,” Krysty replied, crawling into view. Then the woman paused at the sight of the huge plane. “That flew?”

      “Like an angel,” Mildred said, pulling herself along a vine and stepping onto a branch. “The Hercules C-130.”

      In a short while, the rest of the companions arrived, Jak and Doc last, the elderly man assisting the wounded teenager to a fork in the trunk. The Cajun gave the old man a nod in thanks and settled his aching back against the trunk of the tree.

      “No way this thing flew,” Dean stated flatly. “No way.”

      “Big mother,” Jak agreed, massaging his throbbing ankle.

      Careful of his footing, Ryan walked along the branch and experimentally rested a boot on the tip of a wing. It didn’t move, so he put on more and more weight until he was standing fully on the leafy metal. Nothing moved. He chanced a jump, and the leaves shook a little, but the plane remained firmly in place. There was no way anybody could have moved such a colossal machine into the treetops to make a hidden ville. The aircraft had to have crashed here during a storm, and the branches grew around the trapped plane over the decades, trapping it forever.

      Moving to a more secure position, Ryan brushed away the vines to see a smooth expanse of green metal. There was no sign of rust. He rapped it with a knuckle and heard nothing. Too solid to echo. Good enough. If it hadn’t fallen in a hundred years, there was no reason it should this day.

      “Okay, it’s safe,” Ryan said to the others over a shoulder. “She’s solid as a rock, moored in place by over a dozen trees. Couldn’t move the damn thing if we wanted.”

      Curiously, the rest of the companions started warily closer, with Jak staying behind to guard their flanks. The aspirins had helped ease his pain, but not a lot.

      “Yeah, this should be okay for a temp shelter,”

      J.B. said, adjusting his glasses to glance at the fiery storm clouds overhead. The metal hull would protect them from any acid rain. If they had to stay somewhere until Jak healed, this was as good a place as any.

      “Certainly be a triple-bad bitch to attack,” Krysty agreed, placing one boot carefully ahead of the other as she crossed the wing.

      His long hair blowing in the steady wind, Ryan scowled at the pronouncement. Proceeding very slowly with a hand hovering near his blaster, the man surveyed what he could of the downed behemoth. There was no sign of anybody using it as a home. The cockpit windows weren’t broken, the side hatch was still in place and the aft cargo hatch appeared to be sealed shut. He relaxed with the knowledge that they were the first to discover the predark wreckage.

      Warily, the Deathlands warrior eased along the network of branches between the wing and the front of the plane to reach the cockpit windows. A layer of dust covered the plastic, and he used a handful of leaves to brush the transparent material clean. The sun was at the wrong angle to illuminate the interior, so Ryan cupped hands around his face to try to see inside. After a few minutes, his eye became adjusted to the darkness. The pilot and copilot were still strapped in their chairs, their skeleton hands on their throats. Their uniforms were mixed; the pilot was Air Force, the copilot Army, the navigator Navy. There were blasters in flap-covered holsters at their sides, and he thought there was another skeleton slumped over a radio set just aft of the cockpit, but it was too dark to tell. But the major factor was the complete lack of vines, spiderwebs or even cobwebs inside the vehicle. The hull hadn’t been breached over