LITMIR.BIZ

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wag steady, as if they had all the time in the world. A wrinklie with a crippled leg hobbled along the sidewalk, using his lantern to light the pitch torches set on the corners. The workday was nearly done, and the crowds of ville people were going into the ramshackle huts to start the evening meal.

      Passing a group of sec men standing on a corner, Doc tried to smile affably, but they scowled in return, one of the women going so far as to hawk and spit at the vehicle.

      “The age of courtesy is dead, and so shall we be, if our egress is long delayed,” Doc muttered, hefting the massive LeMat just below the louvered window. “Make haste with thy chariot, Hermes!”

      “For once, the old coot is right,” Mildred said unexpectedly. “Better move it, or lose it!”

      “Hear that,” Jak muttered in agreement, shifting into a faster gear.

      “J.B., do we have any explos?” Ryan asked, scanning the rooftops.

      “Some,” the man replied. “Want me to make some bombs?”

      “Just a big one,” Ryan countered grimly. “We’ll try blowing a hole in the wall before we go into the chains.”

      “We don’t have enough to breach the ville wall,” J.B. stated honestly.

      “Make it anyway,” Ryan ordered, pulling out a butane lighter and setting it on the seat.

      The rumbling storm clouds were turning lavender as the bus turned the corner at the barracks and headed for the main gate of Hobart. The wall was massive, as it needed to be this deep in the Deathlands, well over ten feet tall, and made of everything and anything the locals could get their hands on: bricks, pieces of smashed bridges, concrete slabs, wooden logs, cinder blocks, thousands of pieces of broken glass and endless coils of barbed wire. Armed sec men walked patrol along the wide top, and guard towers were situated every hundred feet, the wooden platforms equipped with machine guns. There was no way of knowing if the baron had any brass for the military rapidfires, but only a feeb would put them on the wall otherwise. The gate itself was a composed of railroad beams bolted and chained together into a formidable mass, the outside surface studded with thousands of sharp nails.

      Set directly in front of the gate was a sandbag nest blocking the path of any possible invaders. The nest contained armed sec men and two shiny brass Civil War cannons that Doc called Napoleons. Nearby were small wooden barrels of black powder and several low pyramids of dull gray cannon balls.

      “They set for war,” Jak said, going around the nest and braking to a halt directly in front of the deadly cannons. He hated to park there, but it was the only way to leave. The baron was a triple-cursed bastard, but not a fool.

      Impatiently the companions waited for a sec man wearing sergeant stripes to leave the others and saunter their way. The man was clearly in no hurry, and deliberately took his sweet time crossing the scant few yards.

      Somewhere in the ville, a bell began to toll.

      “Nobody can leave,” the bored sergeant said as a greeting.

      “We got a pass,” Ryan countered, lifting the window to hold out the paper.

      Scowling in disbelief, the sergeant took the slip and unfolded the paper, reading it carefully. His cocky smile slowly vanished. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “It’s real!”

      “Mind getting a shake on there?” J.B. added, resting an elbow out the window. “We got some business to handle for the baron. And you know how he hates failure.”

      “Sure, sure, no prob,” the sergeant replied, then looked up and cupped his hands. “Ahoy, the wall! Open her up!”

      “Say what?” a guard yelled down. “Nobody ever leaves, Sarge. You know that!”

      “You been smoking wolfweed again, sir?” Another guard laughed.

      “I said, open the fragging gate!” the sergeant boomed, a hand going to his blaster. “They have a pass from the baron himself! So move your asses, or you’ll go to the mines!”

      That threat clearly startled the sec men, one of them dropping a smoking cig from his slack mouth.

      “Yes, sir!” the first guard replied loudly, snapping off a proper salute. The second guard merely dashed into the thickening shadows.

      A few moments later there came the sound of a gasoline engine sputtering into life, then rumbling gears, and the titanic gate slowly scraped aside, moving slower than winter ice.

      “Be back soon,” Jak cheerfully lied, and shifted gears to casually drive through the widening crack between the gate and the wall. They were less than halfway through when somebody unexpectedly shouted for them to stop.

      “Fake!” a sec woman shouted. “The pass is a fake!”

      “Chill them!” the sergeant shouted at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth.

      Instantly, Ryan triggered the Steyr, and the woman flipped over backward, her red life spraying into the air. As the rest of the companions opened fire at the sec men behind the sandbags, Jak stomped on the gas pedal and shifted into high gear. The engine paused as it revved to full power, then the armored bus shot forward with a roar, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipes.

      Releasing the handle on the gren, Krysty threw it backward over the bus and it hit the ground to roll a few feet then violently detonate. A score of screaming people clutched their faces, blood gushing from the hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds.

      Twisting the steering wheel hard, Jak guided the wag at an angle where the cannons couldn’t reach. One of the Napoleons thundered anyway, the cannonball humming past the rear of the vehicle and missing by the thickness of an atheist’s prayer.

      “Move this heap!” Doc bellowed, holding down the trigger of the single-action LeMat and fanning the hammer with the palm of his other hand. The big-bore blaster fired a fast three times, and two more sec men tumbled into eternity, one of them discharging his own handblaster impotently into the sky.

      “It’s a break!” somebody shouted on the wall, and a blaster boomed, sending out a thick cloud of dark smoke.

      Something zinged off the roof of the bus, and J.B. responded with a short burst from the Uzi. A man cried out in pain and fell back into the ville.

      “Hug the wall!” Mildred shouted, snapping off shots from the ZKR. “The machine guns in the towers can’t reach us there!”

      However, a flurry of arrows shot down from the sec men on the wall and something crashed to the ground just behind the bus and exploded into flames.

      “But their Molotovs can,” Krysty cursed, her hair flexing wildly. “We can’t risk going all the way around to the pass with those raining down.”

      “No choice then. Head for the trees!” Ryan growled, acing a dimly seen figure brandishing another Molotov. The man fell and the bottle shattered, whoofing into a fireball. Standing upright, the man shrieked insanely, his entire body covered with flames. Ryan tracked the man as he dashed around madly, but didn’t waste a brass on acing an enemy who was already on the last train west. Hopefully, the pitiful screams would discourage the other sec men from following his example.

      “That’ll put us into range of the machine guns,” Mildred reminded, hastily reloading.

      “Got better plan?” Jak asked over a shoulder.

      “No!”

      “Then hold on to ass!” the albino snarled, and banked away from the safety of the wall.

      As the wag streaked across the open grassland, everybody braced for the arrival of machine-gun fire. Nothing happened for almost a full minute, and the speeding bus was nearly at the trees when the ville gate began to lumber aside and out poured a dozen sec men on galloping horses, closely followed by a dozen more.

      Chapter Three

      Just then, the rapidfires

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