Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny wasn’t the kind of operation that could make a roustie rich. Nobody in Deathlands was getting rich, except mebbe the barons. And the Magus. But the carny folk sure weren’t starving, and that set them apart from most other denizens of the hellscape. They had two square meals a day, a shelter over their heads and some regular excitement. Each chiller got a share of the profit, the share determined by the carny master. This was taken out in stolen property, allowing the rousties to occasionally upgrade their blasters and stabbers, and to maintain their jolt and joy-juice habits.
The chillers’ other options for gainful employment, given their skill base, were slim. They could work for a baron as part of a sec force, or work as solo robbers, ambushing and picking off the weakest individuals, or join a band of coldhearts that could occasionally tackle and overpower a small wag convoy, or attack a remote single-family cabin.
Furlong had tried the sec man job for a while. It didn’t work out. He liked to use the stick too much, and he liked to steal whenever the opportunity arose. In short order he had made enemies of the very ville folk he was supposed to protect. Personally, he considered the itinerant-robber lifestyle too dangerous, even in a band of coldhearts. Robber packs were usually only a half-dozen strong. When it came to chilling for a living, there was safety in numbers. Big numbers. In organization. In the kind of deception and cover the carny provided.
When the first crackle of blasterfire erupted from inside the carny tent, Furlong didn’t think anything of it. A few times before in other targeted villes, right after the gas had been released, when the folks in the front rows started foaming at the mouth, going into convulsions and dropping dead, some of the suckers at the rear had guessed what was going on. They had held their breaths and charged the exit with drawn blasters. What with the poison circulating inside the tent and the armed rousties in gas masks, the shooting had never lasted more than a minute.
This time the blasterfire didn’t stop.
It dwindled momentarily, then resumed in a frenzy of back-and-forth reports.
“Nukin’ hell!” Furlong snarled, even as his stomach sank to somewhere around his boot tops.
Something had gone wrong with the plan.
A few heartbeats later, bullets started slamming into the side of his wag that faced the tent. They passed completely through the Winnebago’s cargo compartment, thundering on the metal walls above the armor plate, punching ragged holes in the thin sheet steel. A looter caught standing at the rear of the box was hit by many slugs at once. The top of his skull exploded spectacularly as he was hurled backward, into and over the edge of a bin. His upper body was hidden, but his legs, which stuck up in the air, kicked reflexively as they absorbed more impacts from the hail of lead. The bastard couldn’t feel the slugs plowing into and ripping chunks out of his calves. What was left of his brains dripped down the side wall in a pink smear. The two other rousties working in the back managed to dive to the deck and the safety of the low wall of tempered-steel plate, covering their heads with their hands.
Furlong immediately dropped the louvered steel shades that protected the front and side windows of the RV’s driver compartment. Through the slats, amid the flurry of dust puffs kicked up by the waves of bullet strikes, Furlong watched his looting crew fall dead in their tracks, cut down by withering blasterfire from the rows of plant beds.
The head roustabout jammed the front half of his Llama 9 mm semiblaster through the driver’s-side window shade’s gun port and fired back. The opening was so small that he couldn’t look down the blaster’s sights. There was just enough room for the action to cycle. To aim the weapon, he had to peer through louver slit eight inches above the firing hole.
Because Furlong had put in a lot of practice shooting through the port, it only took him two bracketing rounds to find the range to the nearest occupied plant bed. The dirt farmer shooters crouching there had found him, too. Their bullets spanged harmlessly off the outside of the armored window shade. Grinning, Furlong pumped slug after full-metal-jacketed slug into the stand of nearly ripe corn, aiming at the muzzle-flashes that winked at him from between the densely packed stalks.