word he had heard once in Two-Son ville, para-something…What was it again? Oh yeah, para-annoyed. It meant you suspected everything of doing anything. That was Eric. The only thing that kept the twitchy little tech sane was Suzette. “Fair enough. Just let me know when he’s back.”
“Will do!”
“Scorpion out,” Roberto said, and clicked off the device.
“And there they go,” Jake announced, his hands folded over the steering wheel, both boots flat on the floor mat. The disappointment was clear in his voice.
A group of people climbed out of War Wag Three and walked into the chilly mist. Their shapes were lumpy with backpacks and shoulder bags, their hands cradling longblasters and torches.
Roberto nodded at that. Smart move. Even the arc lamp couldn’t shine a beam around corners.
It took them only a few minutes to reach the bridge. Trudging to the nearest end, they stabbed the torches into the soft ground, then aimed crossbows upward and fired. The hooked quarrels arched high and sailed over the edge of the elevated roadway, only to slide off and come tumbling back. It took several tries before one of the hooks snagged something, but it was only a tire rim. A dozen tries later, the members of the crew hooked something strong enough to support their weight.
Divesting themselves of everything but rapidfires, they slowly climbed hand over hand to reach the top, and disappeared from sight.
“Okay, people, what do you see?” Roberto said into his mike. There was only static for an answer, and he increased the power to maximum.
“…epeat, can you hear us?”
“Now, we can. Proceed.”
“Okay, it’s a right mare’s nest up here, Chief,” a man replied, the radio crackling with static. The range was less than a hundred feet, and the megatons of nuke trash in the air still garbled the communications slightly. Anything over a mile and even the most powerful radio was useless these days.
“We’ve got cars and trucks piled three, four layers high,” the crewman continued. “And everything is covered with bird shit, and ivy, loose leaves and…wait a sec…”
A minute passed, then another.
“Nuking hell, the doomie was right!” the voice on the radio called. “We found a truck crashed into an ambulance, making a sort of natural shelter. Somebody used it as a campsite, there’s the remains of a fire, empty tin cans and the whole shebang.”
“What about the box?” Roberto asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice.
“It was right near a rusted-out old Caddy, and guess what? The name on the tires was Firestone.”
“Son of a bitch,” Quinn muttered, casting a furtive look at the doomie. But if Yates heard, or cared, there was no indication.
“What’s inside?” Jessica demanded into her own mike.
“Tell you soon,” the crewman replied. There was a brief crackle of static and the words were lost.
“Say again, what did you find?” Roberto demanded.
“Well, hang me for a mutie, Chief,” the man replied excitedly. “I’m holding the damn thing in my hand! It’s true. The legends are all true!”
“Well, get your butts back down here,” Roberto said, grinning widely. “I wanna see for myself!”
“Break out the good shine, we’re on the way…What the frag?”
There was no noise from the radio, but tiny flashes of light could be seen coming from on top of the bridge. Blaster fire!
“What the frag is going on up there?” Diana demanded loudly over the radio. “Jefferson, report, goddamn it! Have you been jacked?” But there was only a thick silence.
Then there came the dull thud of a gren, and a body tumbled over the edge to hit the misty ground with a hard thump.
“Holy shit, that was Jefferson!” Quinn cried out, standing at his station.
“All right, let’s go!” Jessica directed, grabbing an AK-47 and stumbling for the hallway.
“You stay!” Roberto boomed, gesturing with the hand holding the mike. “Jimmy, go get our people!”
Paused alongside the exit door, the woman radiated a controlled fury as the other crew members grimly streamed outside. Silently, the trader and his second in command held a private conversation, and she grudgingly limped back to her chair, an arm cradling her bandaged ribs. Just because he was right, didn’t mean she had to like sitting on her ass.
As the crews from War Wags One, Two and Three rushed toward the ropes dangling off the bridge, they could see more flashes on top and heard the telltale boom of another gren. The recce squad appeared, scrambling along the outside edge of the bridge, firing their rapidfires at something unseen above and behind them. The crewmen on the ground raised their longblasters, but there was nothing in sight. What the frags were the others shooting at, thin air?
Reaching the rope, the recce squad grabbed it one after the other and insanely dived off the structure, swinging wildly as they slid down the nylon length with smoke rising from their gloved fists.
As they got close to the ground, the first crewman released the rope and jumped away, the others arriving only moments later. Most landed hard, but came up running. However, one crewman went sprawling and there was an audible crack of breaking bone. Grimacing in pain, he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling for the wags. Pausing in their flight, two of his companions went back, grabbed the wounded man under the arms and hauled him along, their faces pale with fright.
“Vine puppets!” a running crewman yelled, his shirt covered with blood. “The whole fragging bridge is infested with vine puppets!”
The words sent cold knives into the guts of everybody present, and they looked up just in time to see a row of naked people appear along the edge of the bridge. Incredibly, the men and women simply stepped off the edge. But they did not fall. Instead, they gracefully eased downward as if gliding on invisible wings.
However, as they got closer, the crewmen on the ground could see the leafy vines embedded throughout their nude forms, the mouths slack and drooling, the wide eyes horribly alive and shrieking in wordless torment.
Snarling curses, the crew cut loose with concentrated blasterfire from the Kalashnikovs, the 7.62 mm rounds tearing the naked people apart. But instead of red blood, a thin green sap oozed from the gaping wounds, along with hair-thin tendrils resembling pale roots.
Then the puppets landed, and the tattered corpses began walking toward the norms, the flexing ivy still connected to the animated corpses.
As the crew hastily dropped back, the M-60 machine guns of Two and Three cut loose, the big .308 rounds chewing the bodies into pieces. Shaking off the lumps of flesh, the green vines snaked out after the fleeing norms, catching the crippled crewman in the back. Instantly he went stiff, his eyes rolling in unimaginable agony.
Releasing his arms, the other crewmen fired point-blank, blowing out the back of his head, the pink brain already full of wiggling tendrils.
