Gaza found the access panel near the turret. Placing the flare on an empty seat, he managed to force open the panel with one hand, the other filled with the M-16 rapidfire. Casting the lid aside with a loud clatter, he grabbed the flare and held it up, soon locating the needed wiring harness. Yes! Carefully as possible, he gently removed the connections and wrapped the harness in a clean piece of cloth before tucking it safely away inside a pocket. Okay, back in biz.
Suddenly, there was a frantic thumping on the metal side of the vehicle. Rushing to the exit, the baron paused for a moment listening for danger before joining his wife outside. He was losing spouses at an unprecedented rate, but it was still better them than him.
Kathleen now had another LAW slung over a shoulder and a pair of pressurized tanks strapped to her back, a vented blaster of some kind attached to the larger tank with a flexible metallic hose.
“Rad-blast my ass, a preDark flamethrower!” Baron Gaza gasped in shocked delight at the find. “Does it still work? Fuel okay?”
Hurriedly, Kathleen nodded, but also held a finger to her lips for silence. Gaza frowned at that until he heard a noise coming that chilled his blood. A weird combination of sounds unlike anything he had ever heard before, partially masked by the crackling of the flames and the crash of falling masonry. A sort of whirring mixed a horrible hooting. Stickies!
Then coming around a nearby corner was a mutie fighting a machine—the sec hunter droid from before, or another that looked exactly the same. Could there be two? More? Dripping gore, the preDark machine was battling a stickie, the rubbery mutie charging at the droid uncaring of the whirling blades and snippers. Mindlessly, the feral creature seemed to be fighting on a visceral level, without much common sense of fear.
The stickie was missing an arm, the blood running thickly down its side. Trying to move past the mutie, the droid charged with its buzz saw extending and the creature was sliced in two, the pieces dropping to the filthy street. But as the droid started forward, more stickies appeared, stepping out of a brick wall and the corroded side of a crashed bus.
Thunder and lightning crashed in the sky as the muties raced over the corpses, their bodies changing color and texture, blending into whatever they were near. A startled buzzard brushed a stickie, and the thing’s arm became covered with black feathers. Another tripped in a pothole landing atop a desiccated corpse not yet eaten by the scavengers, and as it rose the stickie began to blend into the mummified norm.
Gaza couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and Kathleen edged closer to the man for protection. Camou stickies. They had heard rumors from outlanders about such things but never really believed them until this moment.
As the stickies attacked, the sec hunter droid slashed out with its buzz saw and scissors at the same time, striking in the opposite direction. The closest two stickies died horribly, and the gore splattered machine retreated again toward the convoy in the park. Sitting on the crumpled hood of a crashed car, a millipede hissed at the droid as it passed and was slashed apart by the flashing blades. Then more stickies attacked, slowing the machine by the sheer bulk of the bodies. One mutie got a good grip on a red lens and tried to pull it free, and the droid threw itself against a nearby truck, crushing the stickie’s head. As the dead mutie released its hold on the droid, it fell to the street, its skin rippling in different colors and textures, the suckers moving like gasping mouths, until the humanoid went still and the skin become a dull pasty white like a drowned man long deceased.
Longblaster in hand, Gaza sneered at the sight. Muties always seemed irresistibly attracted to machinery, fires, diesel engines and the like, but this time the machines were fighting back and chilling them in droves. The armored chrome of the droid was dripping with blood, feathers, pincers and a few suckers adhering to its blades as grisly trophies of combat.