been smoking wolfweed again, sir?” Another guard laughed.
“I said, open the fragging gate!” the sergeant boomed, a hand going to his blaster. “They have a pass from the baron himself! So move your asses, or you’ll go to the mines!”
That threat clearly startled the sec men, one of them dropping a smoking cig from his slack mouth.
“Yes, sir!” the first guard replied loudly, snapping off a proper salute. The second guard merely dashed into the thickening shadows.
A few moments later there came the sound of a gasoline engine sputtering into life, then rumbling gears, and the titanic gate slowly scraped aside, moving slower than winter ice.
“Be back soon,” Jak cheerfully lied, and shifted gears to casually drive through the widening crack between the gate and the wall. They were less than halfway through when somebody unexpectedly shouted for them to stop.
“Fake!” a sec woman shouted. “The pass is a fake!”
“Chill them!” the sergeant shouted at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth.
Instantly, Ryan triggered the Steyr, and the woman flipped over backward, her red life spraying into the air. As the rest of the companions opened fire at the sec men behind the sandbags, Jak stomped on the gas pedal and shifted into high gear. The engine paused as it revved to full power, then the armored bus shot forward with a roar, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipes.
Releasing the handle on the gren, Krysty threw it backward over the bus and it hit the ground to roll a few feet then violently detonate. A score of screaming people clutched their faces, blood gushing from the hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds.
Twisting the steering wheel hard, Jak guided the wag at an angle where the cannons couldn’t reach. One of the Napoleons thundered anyway, the cannonball humming past the rear of the vehicle and missing by the thickness of an atheist’s prayer.
“Move this heap!” Doc bellowed, holding down the trigger of the single-action LeMat and fanning the hammer with the palm of his other hand. The big-bore blaster fired a fast three times, and two more sec men tumbled into eternity, one of them discharging his own handblaster impotently into the sky.
“It’s a break!” somebody shouted on the wall, and a blaster boomed, sending out a thick cloud of dark smoke.
Something zinged off the roof of the bus, and J.B. responded with a short burst from the Uzi. A man cried out in pain and fell back into the ville.
“Hug the wall!” Mildred shouted, snapping off shots from the ZKR. “The machine guns in the towers can’t reach us there!”
However, a flurry of arrows shot down from the sec men on the wall and something crashed to the ground just behind the bus and exploded into flames.
“But their Molotovs can,” Krysty cursed, her hair flexing wildly. “We can’t risk going all the way around to the pass with those raining down.”
“No choice then. Head for the trees!” Ryan growled, acing a dimly seen figure brandishing another Molotov. The man fell and the bottle shattered, whoofing into a fireball. Standing upright, the man shrieked insanely, his entire body covered with flames. Ryan tracked the man as he dashed around madly, but didn’t waste a brass on acing an enemy who was already on the last train west. Hopefully, the pitiful screams would discourage the other sec men from following his example.
“That’ll put us into range of the machine guns,” Mildred reminded, hastily reloading.
“Got better plan?” Jak asked over a shoulder.
“No!”
“Then hold on to ass!” the albino snarled, and banked away from the safety of the wall.
As the wag streaked across the open grassland, everybody braced for the arrival of machine-gun fire. Nothing happened for almost a full minute, and the speeding bus was nearly at the trees when the ville gate began to lumber aside and out poured a dozen sec men on galloping horses, closely followed by a dozen more.
Chapter Three
Just then, the rapidfires in the guard towers cut loose with a rattling cacophony, the leaves in the trees over the bus exploding in an emerald blizzard.
“Keep the riders between us and the machine guns!” Ryan shouted, firing his longblaster twice. “They’re not going to ace their own people!”
With a cry, a sec man clutched his arm while the horse next to him buckled with a wounded knee. The riders were so tightly packed, the horses collided with one another, sending three more riders down in a tangle of limbs and cursing. However, the rest of the hunting party arched around their fallen brethren and kept coming, bent low over the necks of their horses, now even more grimly intent upon reaching the hated runaways.
As the companions sent hot lead at the sec men, Jak steered the jouncing bus into a swatch of shadows thrown by the ville wall from the setting sun. Once inside the darkness, he hit the headlights to see, then cursed and aced the lights. Their glow would only silhouette the wag and make them a perfect target. The teenager would have to do this the hard way. Shaking his head, Jak sent the sunglasses flying away, then squinted hard into the darkness ahead, starting to zigzag around what seemed to be bushes and tree stumps. Most villes kept the area around their walls completely clear so that an enemy would have nothing to hide behind during an attack. However, one good-size rain gully, or a tree stump, and the bus would be smashed, leaving them stranded and helpless at the mercy of the brutal ville sec force.
Reloading her blaster, Krysty started to aim at the riders once more, when she had the oddest sense of danger from ahead of the bus. Acting on impulse, she flipped on the headlights again, the beams showing a large griz bear sitting directly in the path of the racing vehicle eating a wiggling rabbit with too many legs. Triggering her S&W a fast five times, the woman wounded the giant beast, as Jak arched around it from the other side.
“Why do?” the teenager demanded angrily. A seasoned hunter, the albino teen didn’t chill animals for fun, only for food.
“Watch,” Krysty replied, reloading once more.
Seconds later, the riders encountered the bear. Bellowing a strident roar, it reached out with both paws and slammed two of the sec men out of their saddles to start mauling them. The other riders slowed for only a moment, then resumed their pursuit of the outlanders in the bus. But the gap between the two was significantly wider now.
The rapidfires in the towers spoke again, louder and longer this time, then stopped as the thick greenery of the forest closed over the companions, removing them from sight.
“Okay, give some cover, Doc,” J.B. snarled, biting the fuse on a pipe bomb in two, then flicking alive a butane lighter.
Surging to the rear of the vehicle, Doc yanked aside the locking bar and lifted the rear shutter, then fired the LeMat twice, the booming reports vomiting forth a dark cloud of gunsmoke. Safely out of sight of the riders for a single instant, J.B. quickly lit the fuse and simply dropped the bomb in their wake. Then both men ducked as a fusillade of blasterfire came from the riders, their assortment of handblasters, predark blasters, longblasters, scatterguns and zip guns making them sound like an army. The lead hit the louvered shutters like a hailstorm, rattling them hard and chewing the green wood into splintering ruination. More than
