“Farmers,” the guard muttered and lit a cig off a wooden match. Why would anybody bust his ass to plow dirt, when a smart man got anything he wanted by working for a baron? Being a sec man meant all the food he could eat, a soft bed, clean clothes, women for sex whenever he wanted, and with these Ackyfortysevens the blues could chill any invader. Personally, he didn’t understand what Sheffield and Collette needed with the dish and Kite. A blaster in the hand was worth more than any predark sat.
Releasing a stream of white smoke, the sec man continued his patrol along the top of the thick wall. He remembered starting life as a farmer until raiders hit his town. In the midst of the fight, he saw the locals were losing and shifted sides to stay alive. He opened the ville gates and helped hang his own family. It didn’t bother him. Civilians, what the hell good were they? All the tasty food came from a can or an envelope. Raw stuff was crunchy and dirty. None of that shit for him.
A movement amid the stony dunes caught the man’s attention, and the guard slid the blaster off his shoulder. His thumb slid along the side, making sure the selector was set for full-auto.
He whistled softly, and another soldier stuck out his head from the kiosk at the front gate. The wall guard jerked a thumb toward the outside, then across his throat. Nodding, the private grabbed his blaster off a peg on the wall and advanced carefully to the gate. The steel bars were less than six inches apart and thicker than a soup can. Not even one of the APC wags could ram through the barrier. Damn thing had taken sixty slaves to move into positions, and four died hanging it on the massive hinges. Nobody could attack the ville from that direction. Muties, however, would and could attack from anywhere, usually when you least expected them.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of motion and the blue shirt fired from the hip, the bullets hitting a scream-wing that was gliding straight for the gate. The riddled corpse hit the bars and wiggled through before the blue could track his weapon on the animal again. This time the stream of rounds tore it apart, and the screamwing flopped on the green grass inside the ville, keening in pain, its leathery wings beating feebly as its thin lifeblood flowed from the riddled body.
When the thing finally went still, the sec man walked closer and shot it again in the head, then stomped the screamwing under his boot until its body was only a pulpy mass. Little fuckers were hard to chill, and often came back to bite your ass when you were positive they had taken the last train west. Kicking the dead mutie behind the wall, he jabbed it with a sharp stick and tossed its form into an empty fifty-five gallon oil drum half full of similar corpses.
“Welcome to Shiloh,” he snorted in wry amusement, then spun with a curse as a loud explosion ripped apart the night.
A fireball was rising skyward by the gap in the wall, the searchlights moving back and forth to focus on the chink in their perimeter. Sirens began to howl as squads of sec men rushed to the area. As they neared, the blues could see that the blast had cleared the hole of barbed wire for yards, the pungi sticks sheared off at ground level.
“Nobody move!” a sergeant ordered loudly, snapping the bolt on a Kalashnikov. “Wait for them!”
The men assumed a firing line just as a dozen humanoid muties shambled through the smoky darkness, the things dripping drool down curved tusks in their eagerness to reach the norms.
“Fire!” the sergeant shouted, cutting loose with a Kalashnikov at the grouped creatures.
The first staggered and tried to dodge behind the predark Army tank that filled the rest of the hole. Then the ground under its claws blossomed into fire as another Claymore detonated, the explosion hurling the limp corpse skyward in many grisly pieces. The concussion slapped the sec man like an invisible fist, the shotgun rounds peppering the tank and stonework. Hoots of agony could be heard in the billowing smoke, and the sec men fired short volleys seeking live targets. More cries of pain announced success, then there was a sudden silence.