Desert Kings

Nodding, the four troopers headed off in different directions, their weapons held at the ready.

“Come on, Zane,” Delphi said, starting along the central corridor of the wag. “I don’t want to waste any of the daylight we have remaining.”

“No prob. Got your six, Chief,” the big man said, striding close behind.

Just past the food locker, Delphi noted the left and right gunners were alert in their metal cocoons, hands resting lightly on the handles of the Remington .50-caliber machine guns. Excellent. There should not be any need for the heavy weapons on this sojourn, he thought, but it never hurt. Briefly, Delphi wondered if he should have brought along the Kalashnikovs.

Turning into the mudroom where the troopers stored their acid rain garments, Delphi took down a hurricane lantern and slung it over a shoulder before unbolting the door to the security cage and stepping through to work the handle that activated the armored hatch. With the soft sigh of hydraulics, the section of the hull disengaged and swung down to the vine-covered ground.

Exiting the wag, Delphi pretended to stretch sore muscles because it was expected, then strode into the ruins. Bellany stayed at his side, as Cotton and four more troopers joined the procession. Two of them wore bulky backpacks and one man openly carried a crowbar. Everybody carried lanterns and grens.

As the group moved deeper into the ruins, the buzzing and chirping of the insect life went silent, and there was only the sound of the leaves crunching under their combat boots. Surreptitiously, Delphi checked the area with an infrared scanner inside his left hand, but saw no indication of anything large. But he stayed alert for anything cold-blooded that wouldn’t have appeared on the scanner.

Vines were thick underfoot, making walking tricky business, and little white mushrooms were everywhere. The air smelled of damp earth, decaying matter and flowers. There was a small banana tree in the smashed display window of a clothing store and clusters of an unknown fruit festooned a public library. One of the troopers nudged another to point out a large spiderweb filling an alleyway between two buildings, and a large snake on a second-floor balcony stared unnervingly at the norms as they moved past.

The jungle of Nevada, the cyborg darkly mused. With the weather patterns of the world this badly scrambled, it was a miracle that anybody had survived skydark.

Behind them, the engines of the war wags gave off soft pings as they began to cool. Troopers watched the group from behind the gridwork covering the windshields, and high on the hill there came the flash of reflected light from a pair of binocs.

Going to the cracked marble basin of the old fountain, Delphi located the broken statue and pulled away vines until he found the rest of the figure. It was lying amid the leafy ivy and kudzu, the bronze turned a dark green from a century of corrosion.

“Is that their baron or some kinda god?” a trooper asked curiously. The statue was of a man carrying a longblaster and powder horn, so it had to be a sec man of some kind. He’d seen hunters wearing the same kind of fringed clothing back east. The fringe waved in the breeze and helped keep off the flies and skeeters.

“The great-grandfather of their baron, is more like it,” Delphi replied, running calculations inside his head. If the Boston Minuteman had been facing the southeast, then the main road should be to their right. Hopefully, the physics lab was still standing, or else this whole trip would be a waste. Delphi only had limited resources since being thrown out of Department Coldfire, and every failure threatened his very existence.

Just for an instant, the cyborg relived the awful moment when a friend told him that the executive council had ordered his termination for the failure to retrieve the test subject, aka Doctor Theophilus Tanner. The occasional lack of success on a mission was to be expected in the chaos of the Deathlands, but Delphi had broken too many rules, slaughtered too many gene-pure people, in his mad quest for Tanner. All would have been forgiven if he had accomplished the task, but this level of failure meant his doom. Knowing he had only minutes in which to act, Delphi had reluctantly killed his friend and used his Ident card to raid the main warehouse for spare body parts and supplies, then established a supply cache at an abandoned redoubt. Now he walked the planet amid the dirty savages, posing as a trader, exchanging trinkets for food and buying the loyalty of men with guns and bullets, searching, hunting, committed to another desperate quest, this time to gain his own salvation.

“Well, nuke me running,” a trooper muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “Never would have supposed they had flintlocks back then. Thought that was something new.”

“Yeah?” Cotton asked, suddenly interested. “And who the frag has new flintlocks?”

The trooper started to reply when something moved in the trees, jumping from branch to branch with blurring speed, and coming their way.

“Volley fire!” Bellany shouted, and the troopers raised their BAR blasters to unleash a crackling discharge. The hail of bullets tore through the treetops, sending a score of leaves fluttering to the ground. Then a bloody screamwing plummeted into sight to bounce off the marquee of a vine-covered movie theater. The lifeless body flopped to a fire bush and the leaves closed around the small, leathery body, wrapping it tight to extract every ounce of nourishment.

“Watch for the mate,” Bellany commanded, using a thumb to switch his AK-47 from single shot to full-auto.

The words were barely spoken when a larger screamwing lanced out of the tree to swoop down and skim along the ground, its deadly beak and claws ready to kill. Without hesitation, the troopers opened fire, peppering the plant life with hot lead. But the winged mutie was too fast and the thing was almost upon them, shrieking in rage and fury, when Delphi fired once. In an explosion of gory, the head was blown off the screamwing and the body slammed into Cotton, knocking over the startled sec woman.

“Th-thanks, Chief,” the woman panted, getting back to her feet. “Nuking hell, that thing was fast! How could you ever—”

“Yes, yes, you’re welcome,” the cyborg interrupted, already contemplating other matters. “Come on, I think the building is this way!”

As he rushed off by himself, the others scrambled to catch up with Delphi as he darted from a stand of banyan trees to a sagging church. An old skeleton was lashed to the cross on top, only the ropes and jungle vines holding the dried bones in place. A plastic rosary still hung from the broken neck of the Catholic priest, a fiberglass arrow shaft going through his ribs exactly where his heart would have been located; another jutted from the left eye socket.

Ruefully, Delphi knew that after skydark, most of the survivors went temporarily mad. Terrified and starving, they turned against any symbol of authority, police officers, physicians, judges and even the clergy, killing the very people who could have helped them stay alive. Damned themselves to a century of barbarism by their own foolishness and fear. Not many people could read these days, and the word “whitecoat” was the most vile curse word. Advanced technology was suspect and considered magic by most norms. Traveling across the scorched continent, Delphi had no trouble finding sec men to join his convoy—blasters with unlimited ammo was a lure that none could resist—but very few wanted anything to do with the engines, power plant or electronic machinery.

“This place makes my skin crawl,” a trooper whispered. “It’s evil. I can feel it.”

“Frag that noise,” Bellany snapped irritably. “Watch for more screamwings and stay with the chief!”

Frantically, Delphi looked around, then charged in a fresh direction. Yes, this was it. He was close, almost there! The main street of the ruins was made of red bricks, partially crumbled back into the moist earth, witch weed and dill growing thick between the irregular rows.

A large metallic shape filled an intersection and Delphi thought it was another army tank at first. But as he got closer he realized it was the bent wreckage of an ICBM missile. Probably one of the many that had been shot down during the brief war. The ceramic nose cone was still attached, and the cyborg nervously checked for any signs of life from the thermonuclear death machine, or worse, a radiation leak. But the missile registered as magnetically inert, and there was only the low-level background radiation that blanketed the world these days. The weapon that had killed the world was dead, Delphi noted sardonically. A sword beaten, not into a plowshare, but into landfill. The irony was almost poetic. In primordial harmony, sheet lightning thundered in the stormy sky.

Moving around the missile, Delphi paused, then moved forward with renewed vigor. There it was! At last!

The graphic arts building of the college was still standing, the marble walls intact, even if the facade was slightly tilting to the left, so that the front door was now a trapezoid. The window glass for all five stories was long gone, but stout bars still covered the lopsided openings.

“What a rad pit.” Bellany scowled, resting the stock of the Kalashnikov on a hip. “You sure there’s anything useful here, Chief?”

“Absolutely,” Delphi muttered, moving to the encrusted remains of the revolving door. The shatterproof glass was also missing from the frame, and he easily stepped through the portal and into the dim interior.

The terrazzo floor was thick with dirt, only a few very small plants having found the necessary purchase to grow on the resilient material. The furnishings in the lobby were draped with vines, the ceiling thick with cobwebs, and there was a definite reek of mildew in the air. Automatically, Delphi activated his nasal filters just in case there was any black mold in the structure.

“Use your handkerchiefs!” the cyborg snapped, pulling the knotted cloth over his nose and mouth.

Understanding the danger, the troopers rushed to obey, several of them sprinkling the cloths with a few drops of shine as additional protection.

Proceeding deeper into the building, Delphi felt his artificial eyes come alive and start to glow to counter the darkness. Instantly he countermanded the process and pulled around the lantern hanging at his side. Raising the flue, he flicked a butane lighter alive and applied the flame to the rag wick. When it caught, he lowered the flue and turned the wick all the way up for maximum illumination. The wick burned with an eerie blue light from the alcohol in the glass reservoir, which only served to give the darkness an additional n-earthly feel.

As the others did the same, the lobby came to life and Delphi could now see the trappings of civilization. Dead security cameras mounted on the walls, an ATM in the corner, pay phones, an alcove filled with candy and soda machines. The ghostly echoes of a bygone era.

Going to the reception desk, Delphi held the lantern high. Most of the lettering had fallen off over the intervening century, leaving behind only a cryptic scramble of partial words and names. Useless.

Looking around the lobby, Delphi saw two sets of double doors at opposite ends. One set was broken and hanging from the rusted hinges, the other still in place, the glass in the observation port cracked but intact.

Ipso facto, Delphi mentally chuckled, heading for them. However, the doors proved to be firmly locked. The IBM supercomputer had cost the college several million dollars. He had expected some decent security. Just not this good. Could…could this have been one of the hardpoints where the redoubts had been designed? Suddenly the cyborg felt a tingling rush of excitement. This could be the answer to his prayers! Not just a college, but a top-secret military laboratory!

“Blow it,” Delphi eagerly commanded, moving back a ways.

Now the troopers with the backpacks moved up, pulling out blocks of C-4 plastique. Taking over the work, Bellany cut the big blocks into small squares and attached them to the outside of the doors where the hinges should be located on the other side. Shoving in small detonators, the trooper trailed the wiring behind him as he got clear, then attached them to a small handheld generator.

“Hot plas!” he shouted in warning, then twisted the handle on top.

The little generator gave a low whine and the C-4 violently exploded, smashing the doors apart and sending a hurricane of exhaust across the lobby, creating a storm of dust. The entire predark building seemed to vibrate from the concussion.

“Davis! Hannon! Stay by the front of this drek hole and watch for stickies,” Cotton commanded, wiping her stinging eyes with the back of a hand. “That fucking boom might bring every mutie in the area down our nuking throats!”

Coughing loudly, the two troopers shuffled away.

Hurrying closer, Delphi was stunned to see that the doors had not been removed, but instead were merely separated by a few feet, the adamantine portals still attached to the locking bar on the inside. However, the massive hinges were twisted and stretched like warm taffy, leaving a gap between the doors of about a foot.

“Shitfire, they sure built things strong before the big chill,” Bellany muttered, impressed in spite of himself. “That plas charge should have knocked down the whole damn wall!”

“Ah, but this is no ordinary building,” Delphi said, holding the lantern next to the gap. Past them was only darkness. “I think this might have been a mil base.”

“A fort?” Still blinking, Cotton furrowed her brow. “Thought you said it was a school,” she said.