“Rad me!” the blue shirt shouted, planting his other boot in the mutie’s throat to keep from being dragged any closer, and emptied the blaster at the scaly invader. The .45 slugs blew chunks off the creature’s head, and still it tried to haul him out of the wag, the grip on his boot tightening to a painful level. Dropping the spent clip, Campbell tried to slap in a fresh mag when the APC hit a bump and the clip went flying. The sergeant threw the blaster at the bleeding mutie and drew his Bowie knife. No stinking mutie was getting him alive!
Then a sec man jumped onto the belly hatch, slamming the armored slab onto the beast, knocking it sideways. Partially trapped, it released the sergeant and fought for its own freedom, screaming and thrashing like a demon from hell. Now they could see the gaping, lipless mouth in the palm of each clawed hand.
“Ready, set, go!” a sec man shouted, and pulled the hatch out of the way. In unison, the rest of the blues hosed the beast with their Kalashnikovs, the barrage of 7.62 mm rounds tearing its body apart, black blood spraying onto the walls. Cut to pieces, the mutie screeched and dropped out of sight. Instantly, the wag bumped a few times as the rear wheels crunched over the riddled body, ending the high-pitched yells of pain permanently.
“Bolt that hatch!” Campbell sputtered in rage, retrieving his blaster from the sticky floor. “Bolt every hatch!”
“Freeze,” a sec man whispered, and swung his blaster at the sergeant. Before Campbell could react, the man fired a short burst, black blood gushing from the side of his boot.
Weapon in hand, Campbell stopped in the act of squeezing the trigger when he realized he wasn’t hurt. Bending, he saw there was some sort of leathery sack attached to the side of his predark Army boot It was torn apart by the AK-47, but little squiggling things dangled from the base, dripping thick viscous fluid.
“Some sort of egg,” he growled, cutting it off with his knife. Then he scraped the residue off the blade with the sole of his boot and ground it flat on the rough metal floor. “Shit-faced little bastard must squirt out eggs when it’s about to chill. I heard tell of a mutie down Mex way that did that.”
“Cockroaches, too,” a sec man added, grabbing a ceiling stanchion against another lurch of the wag. Throughout the whole fight, the driver hadn’t stopped or even slowed. Probably just too damn frightened to decide.
Struggling to his feet, Campbell sat down again. “Okay, I want this freaking wag checked from top to bottom! You assholes miss an egg, and we’re in deep shit, so don’t fuck up!”
Over the next hour, the blues looked hard for any more of the black lumps, checking every nook and crevice inside the wag from under the dashboard to the speakers of the radio, and even inside the barrel of the 25 mm cannon. They found nothing.
“We’re clean,” a man said with a sigh, slumping into a wall seat. “Black dust, that was a nasty bastard. Sure hope it was a solo. Pack of those could chill an army of blues.”
“Shut up,” Campbell growled, gingerly massaging his throbbing ankle. It hurt inside, and he was frightened it was more than just a sprain. “And somebody make more coffee!”
WAY OUT OF SIGHT under the wag, attached to the armor flange, safe behind a wheel assembly, was a small leathery lump coated with a mucouslike substance. Speckled with tiny dots of black blood, the sphere pulsated steadily as it absorbed the excess heat radiating from the big diesel engines, growing larger and heavier by the minute.
WALKING HIS tired animal, Baron Henderson slowly proceeded down the predark street through the maze of ruins that surrounded Green Cove ville, the rising sun casting a reddish light over the skyscrapers and office buildings. The man felt as if he were being watched from a hundred different locations, and quite possibly he was, just not necessarily from the outer guards of the ville. Rats scurried underfoot. He had heard of outlanders who preferred to live in the ruins and warned the ville of approaching enemies to get a reward of the supplies when the invaders were chilled. The defensive weapons of Green Cove were as mysterious as they were known to be deadly. Henderson assumed it was merely some sort of poison gas, or snipers with silenced longblasters. But the local sec men would surely have nothing to fear from a lone rider.
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