The Core had found several trails that led down the cliff. However, most didn’t reach halfway, and several had crumbled under the weight of a single person, sending the Core member tumbling into the abyss. They sang a death song at the passings, and ran onward, fueled into a battle frenzy by the sheer grandeur of their blessed mission of revenge. Ryan and the others had to be killed. It was an edict from the gods of the sand. Spill the blood of the outlanders, or be damned forever.
A plaintive caw from above made Alar glance skyward, and he frowned deeply at the sight of a dozen huge black birds circling above the holy land. Already the buzzards had arrived, gathering their courage to swoop down and start feasting on the ancient ones. Their cries would attract others: cougars, stickies, other muties, and then the greatest destroyers of all, norms. Perhaps even too many norms for his people to stop. Their powers were great, but required the warriors of the Core to be very close together. Like wooden sticks bundled into a war club, each was strong, but together they were a deadly weapon.
Alar stopped at a sloping piece of stone, the desert sands trickling along the inclined plane like blood from a wound. The angled stone descended sharply, and seemed to end at a ledge fifty feet down. But after that there was nothing but a drop of countless feet onto a jagged pile of broken rubble, great metal beams rising like spears from the smashed stones coated white from the salt.
The leader of the Core slumped his shoulders, for the first time feeling despair. Perhaps the journey was impossible. The sinkhole was so huge! Larger than any seen before, and the sides were as sheer as a knife blade, sharp and smooth. But the warriors were still grimly determined to find a way down. They had to! A series of cracks that could be used as a ladder, a ravine they could crawl through, even a deep pool of hated water that could be jumped into from a height. Anything would do, but they had to enter the holy city and ace the outlanders.
It was beyond a necessity; it was a primal urge, fed by their will of the warriors and forged by sheer hatred.
FULL OF GRUBS and red ants, the tiny lizard was lying on the flat rock and showing its belly to the hot sun in total contentment. Then the ground began to shake, and the sky darkened as something radiating waves of heat blocked out the sky. Caught by surprise, panic seized the creature and it froze as the darkness rumbled overhead. Scrambling to its clawed feet, the mutie opened all three eyes and fiercely spit at the towering enemy. Anything larger was always considered an enemy. The acid spray hit with a sizzling hiss that usually marked the demise of the target, and its pea-sized brain reveled at the thought of all the additional food the kill of such a giant would yield.
Never even slowing, the huge studded tire rolled over the Gila monster, crushing it flat, pulsating intestines and blood spraying out on either side as the LAV 25 rolled on through the wide Texas desert. The splotch of deadly acid barely caused a minor discoloration in the resilient material of the preDark tires already marred by Drinker thorns, bits of glass, shattered bones, the broken wooden shafts of a dozen arrows and a swarm of small caliber bullets.
Crushing scorpions, rocks and anything else that got in the way, the heavy military tires of the APC flattened every obstacle in the irregular surface of the shifting sands, leaving behind a trail of compacted debris that stretched out of sight for miles. The LAV 25 wasn’t designed to be a stealth vehicle, but a battlefield juggernaut, heavily armed and armored, proof to toxic chems, radiation and most virus vectors, with pinpoint scanners, worldwide communication equipment, radar, radio scramblers, and yet big enough to carry six troopers and still be fast enough to escape anything larger that might prove to be a viable threat to the sleek U.S. Army leviathan.