LITMIR.BIZ

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wielders would overwhelm the protective qualities of Kane’s shadow suit. As each blade was eighteen inches in length, the former Magistrate knew that his organs would be speared through and through.

      Kane fired the Copperhead submachine gun, the weapon snarling out small-caliber rounds into naked, scale-encrusted chests. Two of the mutants dropped their bladed muskets and tumbled into lifeless tangles of gnarled limbs. The suddenly inert hordelings formed a barrier to their brethren’s ferocious charge, turning two dead bodies into five more stumbling, disarmed mutants. The dozen growling creatures dropped in number to five active combatants, but their bayonets still thirsted for Kane’s blood.

      Kane tracked the Copperhead, aiming at the deformed face of a reptilian attacker, then he pivoted and engaged his Sin Eater. Two thundering shots from the folding machine pistol launched a pair of 240-grain superheavy slugs that blew through mutated chests as if they were soggy slices of bread. One 9 mm round glanced off a dead mutant’s spine and careened at an angle into a second reptilian form, while the other Sin Eater round punctured the creature behind the first dying mutant.

      The last mutant lashed out with his bayonet, but Kane batted the blade away with a sweep of the Copperhead’s barrel. With a sharp kick to the mutant’s knee, Kane dropped him on the rocky hillside. A kick to the temple put the mutant out just in time for Kane to address the group of sprawled hordelings that were getting back to their feet.

      Their yellow eyes flashed angrily in the starlight, muskets held like spears and clubs. Kane whipped his Sin Eater around, knowing that even a moment of hesitation would allow the bayonet-armed monstrosities time to pinion him. The sidearm roared on full-auto, scything through the group with a salvo of thunderbolt rounds. The scaled half men writhed under the rain of smashing slugs, their bodies wrecked by Kane’s marksmanship.

      It was ruthless, but Kane reminded himself of the Greek townsfolk, their corpses visible on satellite photos. The dead people were mute testimony to the murderous intent of the charging horde.

      Right now, Kane turned his attention back toward Grant and Brigid. The pair was back to back, Brigid using Grant’s Copperhead while the massive ex-Magistrate attended to the charging swarm on his flank, utilizing his Sin Eater. The two full-auto weapons hammered out vicious volleys that sliced into the savage marauders charging down the slopes.

      Domi was nowhere to be seen, and he didn’t hear her on his Commtact.

      “Dammit,” Kane growled. Out in the open and heavily outnumbered, Grant and Brigid were hard-pressed by the surging reptilians. Domi at least had the advantage of broken terrain behind the hillcrest to give her an edge over her opponents.

      Charging, Kane raced to bolster the defensive line held by his two companions, sending a good-luck wish to the feral albino girl.

      AFTER DOMI BURNED OFF the first seven fat rounds in her compact Combat Master, she decided it was time to engage in a strategic retreat. Musket balls crackled through the air, briefly chasing after her before the mutants ran out of ammunition themselves. The hordelings expended the loads from their cheap, simple rifles and were reverting to their primal instincts of stab and smash. Fortunately for Domi, that meant that the gibbering rabble of scrawny reptilian creatures had to catch up with her first.

      With a leap, Domi launched herself down the hillside, luring the mass of nine pursuing hordelings away from Grant and Brigid. She and Kane had broken off from the main group in order to thin out the overwhelming numbers of mutants, so if that meant that she had to play wounded bird to draw the cats from her nest, then so be it. She loved Grant and Brigid like family, and no risk would be too great for her.

      With a speed belying her short legs, the albino girl opened up her lead over the bayonet-armed reptilians to thirty yards, far enough to give her some breathing room, yet close enough for her to be an enticing target for the misshapen lizard men. Domi paused to eject her empty magazine and shove another stick of seven slugs into the butt of the booming little Detonics .45. A particularly energetic and nimble mutant leaped to within fifteen yards of Domi, but she dumped his corpse onto the rocky hillside with the weight of a .45-caliber bullet. A cavernous chest wound further deformed his mutant body.

      “Eight to go,” Domi whispered, racing along to keep the hordelings from surrounding and trapping her in a killing box. The hilly land, with its sparse brush, maze of boulders and jutting rock faces was not that much different from the inhospitable, craggy terrain of the Bitterroot Mountains. As such, the reptilians didn’t have the advantage of home turf, since she could navigate the sloped, uneven ground as quickly as they could.

      Domi knew there was the possibility that the enemy would catch up with her, and she’d have to reload the Detonics because there were more pursuers than she had bullets. That didn’t worry her too much, as she still had her wicked, sheathed knife. The mutants might have been too ferocious for farmers and townsfolk hidden behind fortified walls, but against the wilderness-born albino, the savage lizard creatures would discover that had a match for their savagery. Though outnumbered, she had the added skill of countless sparring sessions with Kane and Grant, two highly trained fighting men. Domi wasn’t a martial artist, not by any stretch of the imagination, but she didn’t need to be. Her natural fighting prowess, forged in the Outlands and polished by battling alongside of some of the finest combatants on the planet, had refined her technique without tempering her instinctive brutality.

      A mutant raced along a hilltop to her right, screeching unintelligibly to his brothers who were strung out behind them. Domi snapped a shot at the reptilian mutant, but being on the run and not having a stable firing stance, she missed the gnarled hordeling by yards. The half man yowled in indignation and with maniacal strength, threw the musket like a javelin. Domi realized the weight and force behind the foot-and-a-half-long bayonet would be far more dangerous than a soft musket ball. She swerved, barely avoiding the wood-and-steel missile, but the sudden change in direction caused her to lose her footing as she stomped down hard on loose shale. Her lead over the reptilians evaporated as she took a spinning crash into the gravel. Thankfully, she still held on to her .45 and she aimed it at the hilltop mutant who was running straight at her, obviously ready to rend her with his fangs and claws. Braced and stationary, Domi was equally ready to send the clone back to the hell that vomited him onto Earth.

      Shockingly, the mutant seized up and exploded, detonating seven yards from Domi. One moment, the misshapen creature was charging; the next his internal organs were externalized as a cloud of red sticky mist. Domi registered the chatter of heavy blasters cutting loose behind her. The guns didn’t make the familiar sounds of her friends’ weapons. It took a moment for her to realize that she had to have stumbled onto one of the giant, coppery robots.

      Before she could send a call over her Commtact, two screaming clones charged out from behind a boulder. Domi swung the Detonics toward them and pounded two powerful bullets into one of the mutants, stopping him cold. The other, however, had taken a flying leap, and at the apex of his path, Domi could see the lethal bayonet spearing through the air toward her face. She rolled to one side, hearing the deadly blade sink into the hard, barren soil with tremendous force.

      The mutant screeched with insane frustration, trying to pry the weapon out of the ground. Domi scrambled to her feet and whipped the steel muzzle of her pistol across the mutant’s jaw, shattering it with a loud pop that signaled exploding bone. The mutant collapsed into a nerveless, unconscious puddle of bioengineered twitching flesh.

      It might have been a consolation that Domi only had five more mutants to face, but the creatures lurched into view all at once, hopping atop boulders. They were spread out, so she couldn’t shoot them all, even if she had five bullets left in her gun. As they grinned maliciously, fangs shimmered in the starlight.

      Panting, she curled her lip in defiance. Detonics in one hand, she slid her knife from its scabbard, her ruby-red eyes staring with the same rage as the pairs of soulless, yellow orbs that sized her up. “Want eats? Come and get ’em.”

      A gibbering chuckle escaped five pairs of lips, and they lurched forward just before freezing, yellow slits widening with horror. Domi had heard the thunderous beat of ponderous footfalls shaking the earth behind her, but now there was only silence. She would be caught in the line

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