Devil Riders

Dropping to their knees, Jak and Doc threw thunder at the hunter with their big bore blasters, while the others fired over their heads. Lead and steel hit everywhere on the machine in a deafening cacophony of firepower, but the droid seemed undamaged. Then the impossible happened—one of the chrome rods dented, then another and a third broke apart. Encouraged, the companions concentrated on the opening in the droid’s armored body. Wires snapped, and something crackled with electricity inside the machine. When only yards away, smoke began to pour from the battered torso, then the spinning blades jammed motionless almost tearing off the arm. The droid slowed its advance, but the companions continued to fire, expending ammo at a frightful rate. Suddenly, the pneumatic hammer stopped, the lights dimmed in the crystal eyes, fat blue sparks crackled over the machine and it tipped over from the incoming barrage to crash onto the floor, sparking and oozing hydraulic fluid. Its limbs twitched for a few seconds, then the machine went still with a ratcheting noise.

The companions stopped shooting and for a few moments could only stare at the smashed war machine in amazement.

“Nuke me,” Ryan growled, levering in another round purely out of habit. “We took out a sec hunter. That never happened before, not this easy. Damn droid must have been held together by little more than its wiring and paint job.”

“It appears that immutable time has done the job for us,” Doc stated, waving the thick acrid fumes away from the muzzle of his blaster.

“Best stay sharp,” J.B. warned, removing the spent clip from his Uzi and easing in a fresh one. “There could be another.”

True enough. The companions once found five of the droids in a redoubt and barely escaped alive. At a gesture from Ryan, Jak and Doc started doing a recce sweep of the garage, moving through the amassed collection of civilian and military vehicles searching for other droids in hiding. While the rest of the companions carefully watched the men, Krysty walked past the pile of mechanical debris on the floor and held out her fingers testing the air.

“Feel that?” she said. “This crack is where the hot air is coming from. Might reach all the way to the outside.”

Fireblast, she might be right, Ryan realized, and quickly checked the rad counter clipped to his lapel to see the device was registering only standard background activity. It was just heat, not radiation from a nuke crater in the vicinity.

“Think it’s another volcano?” Krysty asked, sniffing.

Inhaling deeply, J.B. held the breath, then exhaled and shrugged. “Don’t smell any sulfur, but that doesn’t mean the area is clear.”

“What about that scream we heard?” Dean asked, kneeling to look underneath the parked wags nearby. “Think it was somebody trying to get in and the droid aced ’em?”

“Sure as hell might be,” Mildred said, frowning. Reaching into her satchel, the physician unearthed a flashlight and pumped the small handle attached to the survivalist tool several times to charge the batteries inside. She pressed the button, and the flashlight gave off a weak yellowish light. The bulb was old and the batteries were gradually dying from sheer age, but it was a lot better than the candles and torches the companions carried in their backpacks.

Playing the pale beam around inside the crack, she could see the jagged opening only reached a few yards into the thick wall and appeared to make a sharp angle to the right.

“Looks like a dead end,” Mildred said hesitantly, then a scraping noise caught her attention, and the woman pulled back just in time as a wriggling creature charged into view. In the feeble beam of the flashlight all she could see were fangs and wild hair.

“Muties!” she screamed, scrambling backward and firing her blaster.

The creature screamed like a human child, and the companions paused for a moment, unsure of their target until the thing reached the edge of the crack and reared into the light. Even in the fluorescent lights, at first it appeared to be some kind of a fuzzy worm, or a big caterpillar, its belly coated with thousands of tiny legs endlessly moving. But the head possessed no eyes or ears, only a wide segmented mouth and a set of fanged pinchers that closed to overlap each other like scythes.

“Millipedes!” Krysty cursed, shooting steadily. So that was what the droid had been doing, trying to keep out the mutant insect.

“Aim for the head!” Ryan yelled, stepping around the redhead to get a clear view. Fireblast, the thing had pinchers on both ends! So which was the head, or was the brain somewhere in the middle?

Firing a short burst from the Uzi, J.B. cursed as the rapidfire jammed on a bad cartridge. Dropping the weapon, he pulled the S&W M-4000 shotgun out of his backpack, jacked the slide with a jerk and cut loose with a hellstorm of fléchettes. The millipede exploded into gobbets of pulsating flesh, tiny legs flying everywhere, as the fusillade of steel slivers cut the writhing mutie in two, both ends pumping geysers of pink blood. But incredibly, both ends continued to move and attack.

“Not the head, aim for the heart!” Mildred cursed, dancing out of the way of the sharp pinchers. The fanged mandibles closed on a piece of the droid, denting the metal. Even as the companions peppered the creature with lead, it savaged the broken droid for a few seconds before turning back toward them.

What the hell? Ah, the damn bug was probably attracted to the intense magnetic fields of droids, and the huge power plant in the bottom level of the redoubt. Mildred remembered hearing about how nuclear power plants back in her day had endless problems with invading cockroaches and such. Great, then the area around the redoubt could be infested with dozens, maybe hundreds of these monstrosities!

Climbing onto the buckled hood of a car, Jak held the Colt Python in both hands and aimed downward at the snapping mutie. “Where heart!” he shouted, cocking back the hammer.

“The thick red band in the middle!”

“Which one? There are two bands, madam!” Doc shouted, ducking sideways as he triggered the thunderous LeMat once more. A fist-size chunk of flesh was ripped off the mutie, blood hosing from the gaping wound in one of the red bands around its body. But the thing never slowed nor stopped.

“Hit ’em both!” Ryan commanded, blowing flame at the furry horror.

Moving behind the creature, Dean crouched and discharged his Browning directly into the segmented face of the bleeding millipede. But the end of the bug only rippled from the impact, as if he were shooting into a pool of water.

“Use the grens?” the boy shouted, emptying his blaster at point-blank range, but only succeeded in cracking a pincher. The broken stub oozed blood, but the bug seemed only enraged, not mortally wounded from the damage.

“We’re too close!” his father growled in reply. “Gotta take it out this way!”

As it surged for him, Dean jumped out of the way of the mutie and the fuzzy creature went underneath the APC. “Look out, it’s behind us!” he warned, yanking the spent clip and reloading. Down to one more loaded clip, then he would have to use his knife.

Dropping onto his belly, Dean spotted the piece of bug circling around the axle to come back for him. Jak appeared from the other side of the chassis, and they both pumped hot lead into the mutie. Guts flew everywhere, spraying the belly armor of the APC with stringy goop, and the bug curled into a ball as it pumped out sticky blood and died.

“Got one!” Dean cried, standing and looking for another target.

But the last section of the millipede was already reduced to ragged pieces, the companions crunching the segmented body flat under their heavy combat boots.

“Anybody hurt?” Ryan asked, yanking out a spent magazine from the Steyr and inserting a new one. When there was no answer, he continued. “Okay, let’s find something to block that bastard hole!”

Going to the nearest wag, Krysty grabbed the rusty door of a smashed station wagon and tried to pull it off the frame. With hardly any effort on her part, the door ripped free and hit the floor bursting into pieces, completely eaten by rust. Useless.

Lifting a piece of the droid, Ryan tried to shimmy it into the crack, but there were too many gaps around the chrome metal from the irregular shape of the crevice. He left it there as a start and checked the droid for anything else, but all of the other parts were either too large, or much too small.

“My kingdom for a bag of nails,” Doc muttered. Then he spied the workbench and headed that way.

“Mebbe we can use busted glass from the windshields,” J.B. suggested, thumbing fresh cartridges into the shotgun. “Used to work keeping out the rats back in Colorado.”

“Sounds good,” Ryan grunted, turning away from the droid.

Spent brass falling to the floor in a musical rain, Mildred reloaded her target pistol and snapped the cylinder shut. Tucking the blaster away, she yanked a hubcap off a civilian wag to hold it at arm’s length inside a civilian vehicle.

Still on its hood, Jak smashed the windshield with the butt of his Colt and the glass shattered into a million pieces, overfilling the hubcap. In disgust, Mildred stared at the pile of tiny, sparkling green cubes.

“Safety glass,” she snorted, pouring out the hubcap. “Couldn’t cut yourself on the stuff if you tried.”

“Use headlights,” Jak suggested, then frowned. “No, not enough. What else use?”

“Hell, I don’t know!”

Checking the gauges at a fuel pump, J.B. turned and shook his head at the others. The reservoir was completely dry, only a faint exhalation of escaping gas came from the nozzle.

“Went dry over the century,” he told them, returning the nozzle to its indented rack. So much for a firewall to stop the bugs.

Taking the keys from the ignition, Dean opened the trunk of the car and carried over a spare tire, sliding it into the crack on top of the piece of the droid, then he rushed away to rummage for another. Busting open a dusty soda machine, Krysty started throwing in glass pop bottles, the glass shattering at the rear of the crack. But there were only a few, the rest made of plastic or aluminum cans.

Carrying over a corroded bumper from a Cadillac, Ryan added it to the pile, shoving the chrome-plated metal as far back as he could. Not much, but a start.

Leaving the workbench, Doc went to a nearby closet and yanked open the door. “By the Three Kennedys!” he cried, hauling a twenty-gallon container into view. “Gasoline! Hundreds of containers!”

But Ryan could see the military identification number on the side of the cans and knew what the man had found was a lot more valuable than gas, or shine—it was condensed fuel. Unlike other flammable liquids, the stuff simply didn’t evaporate worth a damn, yet worked equally well in civilian engines and military diesels. What the hell it was made of he had no fragging idea, not even Mildred could take a guess, but the stuff did the job and that was all that really mattered.

“This is what the droid was set to guard,” Ryan grunted, as he hurried closer. “Juice enough for a fleet of wags! Okay, start hauling them out. We can block the crack with a fire bowl, use a hubcap as a basin and some rope as wick. Two or three should do the job.”