LITMIR.BIZ

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wag heeled way over to the right as the occupants grabbed for whatever purchase they could. Jak dropped his Python inside the cargo compartment to grab a tie-down with one hand and the out-cold Krysty with the other. Their tires were still spinning off tongues of fire. Then the bow wave of dust they threw up doused the burning mixture.

      Almost at once the Hummer went nose-down and tail-up like an angry stinkbug as Mildred hammered down the brakes. A pile of rubble, khaki-colored adobe blocks obstructed the alley. “Crap!” Mildred exclaimed. “Crap, crap, crap!”

      “Drive on,” J.B. shouted, holding his fedora on his head with one hand and brandishing his stamped-steel machine pistol with the other. “This baby’ll plow through.”

      “Not on your tintype,” Mildred shouted back, throwing the wag into reverse and cranking her head around on her neck. “Can’t even chance getting high-centered with these hoodoos swarming around like yellowjackets.”

      The alley behind had filled instantly with ambushers, waving spears and clubs and at least one modern firearm—an M-1 carbine to Ryan’s quick glimpse. They stopped and stared with comical surprise as the wag chunked through a gear change and came hurtling straight back at them like a multiton rocket. Most of them were muties, although none in this clot of a half dozen or so was either as huge or grotesquely malformed as the first creature they had seen. Most were downright small. In fact, the one closest behind the Hummer, whose wide anthracite eyes locked on Ryan’s for a fraction of a second before the Hummer’s rear bumper took him in the thighs and body-slammed him to the ground, looked as human as Ryan himself.

      The wag bucked, and screams, along with crunching and squelching sounds, came from beneath the vehicle as the huge cleated tires rolled over several ambushers unfortunate enough not to be able to spin around and clear the alleyway in time. One mutie, a being reminiscent of a stickie in shape but with a dry-looking tan skin covered with reddish-brown camouflage rosettes, clung to the side of the house on Ryan’s side with toe and fingers pads. Instead of knocking him free, the Hummer’s bulk spun him, pinned him and then rotated his body, crushing and grinding simultaneously as it roared backward down the alley. The creature screamed in a shrill but wholly-human voice. A blast of horrid carrion-eater breath blew in the window as the creature rolled by between the brown-stuccoed wall and the wag’s steel flank.

      Then the Hummer was back on what passed for the ville’s main street. It had flooded with marauders, half a hundred or more. Mildred just kept the wag grinding in reverse, squashing a couple more of their less-agile ambushers, turning the wheel slightly to angle the Hummer into another alley catty-corner across the way behind them. For a moment they passed between mud houses, with more clearance this time. Then they were out and backing at a brisk clip across another street, right at an opening into darkness.

      The structure was larger than most of the houses and had double wooden doors open wide. Muties were issuing from the interior with crates and boxes in their arms: looters. They scattered. A taller than average one who looked normal aside from having a mouth that stretched clear to the back of the jawbone on either side was caught standing right in the middle of the entry, clutching a box of what looked like hand tools. He stared at the onrushing wag as if jacklighted. The rear bumper hit him and bore him screaming back to smash him squalling against a set of wooden shelves.

      Five muties cringed against the walls to either side of the wag. J.B. popped up out the top of the vehicle. “Afternoon,” he said, and chopped down the three to the right with two scything back-and-forth bursts from his Uzi.

      The one nearer the door on Ryan’s side dropped what he was carrying and ran right out into the sunlit street. The other, who had long tufts of dark hair sprouting at random from face and body, raised a foot-long wrench over his head and lunged screaming at Ryan.

      Ryan opened the door into him with a slam. The mutie staggered back gushing blood from a split forehead. The one-eyed man poked his SIG-Sauer through the door’s still-open window, shot him twice in the chest. Then, because he didn’t go down fast enough, he shot him again through the forehead.

      The remaining mutie seemed to be making good his escape. But panicked or plain stupid, he failed to dodge to one side or the other, where a few steps would have taken him out of the line of fire. Instead he raced straight away from the door, across the street.

      Unhurriedly, Doc opened his door, unfolded himself. Laying his heavy LeMat across his upraised left forearm he aimed, fired through his own open window. The ancient pistol boomed like an immense drum and spit out a four-foot-long tongue of flame, bright pink in the shaded interior. Dust puffed up from the middle of the back of the hide vest the fleeing mutie wore. The creature threw up taloned hands and went facedown on the hardpan.

      The doctor lowered his smoking handblaster. He shook his head regretfully. “Ah, well,” he said, “he who turns and runs away, lives to slit our bellies later in the day.”

      Jak did a roll over the rear seat of the Hummer, piled out Doc’s door with his Python in his snow-white fist. Ryan was already racing along the wall toward the gaping entryway. He darted out into the sunlight, firing his 9 mm blaster with sounds like explosively exhaled breaths. The bullets made loud cracks as they passed objects; he wasn’t wasting his precious remaining stock of subsonic rounds that made no more noise at any point than a muffled sneeze. Nor was he bothering to aim, merely trying to keep the muties who had fled the Hummer’s charge heading in the right direction long enough for him to grab hold of the open wooden door. Loud cracks from behind him told him the albino youth was doing the same thing.

      The doors were heavy and their hinges protested with loud squeals against being moved. But the two men had adrenaline on their side; even the slight Jak was able to get his door into motion. Both halves swung back into place well before the marauders outside could get themselves sorted out enough to interfere. Ryan swung a hefty plank down into waiting brackets to bar the doors shut.

      A smaller doorway opened in the wall on the driver’s side. Mildred got out with her ZKR in hand. J.B. eeled out the top of the pintle mount, scrambled across the Hummer’s torn and blistered Kevlar roof to drop down beside her, Uzi in hand. She nodded to him.

      “Cover me,” she said, then darted through the door. She had to duck down to get through. J.B. hit the doorjamb with his Uzi up and ready.

      From inside the next room two yellow flashes, two echoing cracks. Then a slow, sad, sliding sound.

      “Clear,” the others heard Mildred call. “Just one mutie who wasn’t hid near as well as he thought.”

      “Damn, Ryan,” J.B. said, taking in their surroundings, “nuke me till I glow and shoot me in the dark, but I think this is a garage.”

      Ryan had popped out his partially empty mag from his handblaster, dropped it in a pocket, brought out a fresh magazine from another. He weighed it in his hand, eyeing it ruefully. Not many left.

      He jammed it decisively home in the well. “Think mebbe you’re right, J.B.,” he said. “Even got a grease pit dug in the middle of the floor.”

      Jak whipped out one of his throwing knives, stuck it in his teeth, dropped to the packed-earth floor and slithered under the rear of the Hummer. “No muties hide,” he reported, voice muffled by the wag’s mass. He slithered back out.

      “Ryan, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “Come take a look at this.

      “A hatchway to the roof,” he announced when his companions joined him. “It would appear the erstwhile occupants of this ville built with defense in mind.”

      Ryan had already noted that the adobe walls were a good half-yard thick, enough to stop even a 7.62 mm round from his Steyr. The windows were potential vulnerabilities, but also served as firing ports. Apparently they constituted a compromise between comfort of living and defensibility. That the residents had enjoyed the luxury of making such a compromise spoke volumes for the relative stability they’d enjoyed.

      Until today, anyway. “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Too bad they didn’t stay alert enough.”

      “Ville like this is used to trading, Ryan,” J.B. observed.

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