from downed guards, one gazing sightlessly at the sky, the other rolling around shrieking and clutching a shattered shin, out of the fight. Not a great marksman, he was firing both at once.
From the hip.
Normally there was no craftier fighter than the albino youth from the bayou. Not now. All the fury that had been building within him since he had watched his friend and revered leader fall into the Grand Canyon the day before boiled up within him and out his mouth in an unending scream of fury, and out the muzzles of the M-16s in uninterrupted streams of lead.
One of Red Wolf’s hawk-faced Plains chillers, riding a buckskin, charged Jak with a feathered lance. Jak stood his ground and blasted the mount with both rifles. The horse screamed in mortal agony as it reared, fountaining blood from a dozen holes, and fell over backward, trapping its rider’s leg and crushing his pelvis and the lowest three vertebrae of his spine. As he howled in his own death agony, a second Plains rider charged, raising a war club with a cast-iron ball for a head. He was already too close to take down with the M-16s’ lightweight bullets.
Having spent some time on his own ranch in New Mexico, Jak knew a thing or two about horses. Specifically, that a horse wouldn’t run over anything it thought could trip it. He knelt and ducked his head, making an X of the two longblasters before his face. The horse, disregarding its rider’s intentions, launched himself and jumped clean over the white-haired boy, who was dropping and rolling to his right even as the great shadow passed over him. From his back he emptied both magazines into the bare back of the rider. Uninjured, the horse ran on, eyes rolling, foam flecks flying from its nostrils.
A biker roared toward J.B., firing an Uzi over his T-bar handlebars. He didn’t hit anything, the way his ride was jouncing all over the place. More concerned with the imprint the front tire would make on his forehead, J.B. recoiled by reflex to a sitting position, firing the Beretta as fast as it would cycle. He wasn’t just spraying and praying. The biker went over the back of his postage-stamp-sized seat with the Uzi still blazing.
For another heart-stopping instant the heavy bike charged on. J.B.’s eyes got wide behind his glasses and he cocked himself for a wild spring to the side. The outlaw sled wobbled, toppled and slid toward him broadside, raising a big bow-wave of khaki earth and dried weeds. J.B. held his hands up before his face.
The bike stopped with its tires spinning inches short of Moredock’s corpse.
J.B. heard a familiar voice cry out. Reflexively he looked toward it—to see Mildred, in a perfect kneeling position, aiming her M-16 right between his eyes.
Chapter Six
Leading four of his bros, Hogan rode his bike back along the road toward the rear of the train. He realized the machine guns couldn’t reach them here. Laughing and shouting in triumph, he was firing away into the passenger cars, their metal skins too thin to stop the bullets from his Ruger Mini-14. He couldn’t tell if he was actually hitting anybody, but it didn’t matter. He was laying some hurt on the monster. It wasn’t invincible after all.
But neither was MAGOG helpless.
The bikers came to an armored wag. Fearing shooters firing out blasters, Hogan stopped busting caps himself, leaned low between his high curved bars and accelerated rapidly.
As a result, he was past the killing zone when a strip of four Claymore mines mounted along the side of the armored car were initiated remotely from within. They went off with a rippling, ear-busting crack that spewed the roadway with about ten thousand steel marbles. The four riders behind Hogan simply disintegrated in shreds of flesh and steel, blood and gasoline, that all instantly began cooking in a hell-stew on the road as the gasoline lit off.
That was enough for Hogan. He was braver than most, man or mutie, but he knew when his match had been met. He kept the throttle cranked and went rocketing along the rest of the train, past the armored wags at its tail, relying on speed and surprise to keep him untouched by the sprays of bullets and 40 mm grenades that hosed out after him, until he vanished safely through the smoke from two downed wags, all blazing away on the road barbecuing their occupants who hadn’t been lucky enough to bail, some of whom were still bitching about the fact with wild screams.
Of course, the bullets weren’t stopped by the smoke. And MAGOG’s gunners, who had a whole freight car full of them, didn’t stop shooting them blind. But as soon as he was well within the smokescreen—steering around the furnace wrecks by sheer road-weasel instinct—he cranked the bike ride and lit out cross-country, passing quickly between a low rise and getting clean away.
J.B.’S EYES WIDENED again as flame blossomed in four yellow petals from the flash suppressor of Mildred’s M-16. A vicious crack left his left ear hearing nothing but a loud ringing. Hot air stung his cheek like a red ant’s bite.
He turned. A squat man in a filthy grayish sweatshirt and baggy sweat pants loomed over him with a fire ax raised over his head in both hands. He had a weird bowl-shaped haircut and was looking cross-eyed at a small, neat blue hole right through the bridge of his nose. He collapsed at the tip of the Armorer’s boot, the back of his head missing.
J.B. blew out a long breath, then threw himself down behind Moredock again to take stock of the tactical situation.
Shots were still cracking in both directions. The heavy weapons still split the sky overhead. They mostly seemed to be working the far ridgeline, trying to hose off any snipers the Barrett gunners had missed. But nobody was charging.
J.B. grinned at Mildred and gave her the thumbs-up. She grinned and bobbed her head back. He dropped the empty mag out of the Beretta’s well, stuffed in one of the extras he’d gotten from the corporal, then shoved the weapon down inside the back of his waistband. He scuttled around Moredock and the bike that had almost run him over, to snag the machine pistol its rider had no further use for. J.B. had a particularly soft spot for that particular piece of Israeli ironwork, overly heavy as it was and shit-for-blowback besides. It was reliable, and it got the job done; he frequently carried one. He was pleased to find three full—he hoped; no time to count rounds now—magazines stuffed in the pockets of the coldheart’s vest.
“Jak,” he shouted, looking around through the smoke and dust that hung in the air. There was a breeze, as always, but the embankment and the train caused it to eddy right here and do a piss-poor job of clearing the air. “Jak, are you all right?”
“Fine.” The Armorer saw the youth staggering toward him through the smoke, holding a trench knife with a spiked knuckle-duster handguard in one hand and a baseball bat studded with cut-off nails in the other. He looked as if he’d bathed in blood, then rolled around in the dust to dry it off. Which was probably about what happened. It made him look even more menacingly unearthly than usual.
“Find a blaster and follow me,” J.B. called. “You, too, Millie.”
“Got him covered, John. Catch, Jak.” She tossed him a Marlin lever-action carbine with brass brads pounded decoratively into it, outlining the stock and foregrip. He dropped the bat and caught it deftly.
He led them up the railway embankment, which, while steep, was climbable. Bullets kicked up little spouts of dust near them, none near enough to pay attention to.
Once at the top he went to his belly and rolled right under the train. Mildred and Jak goggled. They looked at each other, shrugged and followed his example.
ROCKING IN HIS PLUSH CHAIR out of fear for his friends he couldn’t quite suppress, Doc watched the battle unfold on a bank of monitors mounted in the command
