Dark Reckoning by James Axler

Circling around a large boulder, something crunched under its foot, and the mutie dived upon the ground, hoping it was a fresh bone. But the broken thing was only the skull of a norm. A colony of worms writhed inside, the gray meat of the brain all gone. Annoyed, the mutie threw the skull away. It knew better than to try to eat the little worms. Even if chewed into pieces, they didn’t die, and would eat their way out of a belly. That was a bad thing, because then nobody else could eat the body of the fresh dead, or else the little worms might also consume them. Thunder ruled the sky, rogs ruled under the dirt and the tiny worms ruled the dead.

The mutie paused as the word strangely resonated in its twisted mind. Born of distant human ancestry, the rad-blasted being felt questions about the odd life-forms start to form in the back of its lopsided head, but they faded before becoming fully formed. The shriveled lumps of its frontal lobes and anterior pons were utterly incapable of processing the simple data of a direct question.

Dropping to its hands and feet, the mutie start galloping toward the wrong-stone place. It could vaguely smell the two-legs and the fresh blood. There had to be much food to make such a strong smell, maybe more than fingers and toes combined. What a feast!

Then the monstrosity recoiled as another odor was detected by its single quivering nostril. Bad water, the stinky blood of metal-things-that-moved. Two-legs , were always near bad water. It made you sick many suns if drunk. But they guarded bad water like kin. Maybe they worshiped it? Bad water, also meant boom sticks. When a boom stick spoke, the mutie would feel pain as its body jerked and blood began to flow from a tiny mouth that hadn’t been there before. It couldn’t understand how the noise could do this, but the boom sticks hurt very bad. They were to be avoided whenever possible.

Thankfully, the boom sticks were the only defense of the two-legs. The food couldn’t see well in the dark, and barely heard anything. Grabbed from behind, the two-legs could only sing as it ate the meat and drank the warm blood. Two-legs were easy to kill.

The mutie smacked oversized lips, remembering when it had once gotten a small two-legs from the belly of its mother. The flesh was even more tender than a rotting corpse. Hopefully, there would be many of the wiggly two-legs, and it could take a couple back to the hive and trade them to the females for a chance to climb on top of them and thrust between their legs. That was the best of all things.

Clamoring down a short embankment, the mutie sloshed through a sluggish creek, the mud almost thick enough to walk on. Reaching the other side, it crawled up the bank and started slithering along the ground toward the wrong-stones. It could clearly see a huge gap in the stones, the opening filled with shiny-sharps and the thin humming vines that killed when touched.

Ducking behind the burned wreckage of a wag, the mutie burrowed into the ash and started to wriggle toward the waiting food. The smell of the blood nearly drove it mad, and it moaned in hunger, the guttural noise sounding almost exactly like the howling wind.

FOUR MUMMIES of cloth stood huddled before the wide gap in the stone block wall that surrounded the Tennessee ville. Oily rags were wrapped around their longblasters in an effort to keep out the windblown ash. The rags helped, but using the Kalashnikovs made them jam almost immediately. The ash got inside the breech mechanism through the barrel. Some sort of ribbed plastic covered the vented ends of the blasters, but after the first shot that meager protection disintegrated from the muzzle-blast. The sec men knew they could get off only one or two rounds before the fancy rapidfires would become totally useless. Sergeant Tucholka had suggested tying knives to the ends of the rifle barrels, but the guards refused. A knife on the end of a stick was what farmers carried as weapons, not sec men. Besides, if anybody got that close, they’d just use the knives properlya quick thrust into the belly, a slice across the throat and loot the body before anybody else arrived.