Devil Riders

Scrambling over a rock, Tatters paused to catch his breath as a familiar sound caught his attention. That was waves lapping on a shore. They had to be near the Nasay River!

Endless crashing sounded behind the gang, as the war wags tried to force their lumbering way through the thick growth of trees. Machine guns hammered steadily, tracer rounds stitching through the air over the racing bikers as they took off on an angle following the sound of the water.

Then the bushes abruptly stopped at the edge of a crest and there was the Nasay! A wide span of clear blue dotted with tiny islands. Knowing the heavy war wags could never follow them into the muddy river, the coldhearts threw themselves down the sloping bank, tripping over exposed rocks and roots, a few losing their footing. Splashing into the shallows, the bikers hastily waded for the deep water, the current tugging at their limbs constantly trying to drag them down.

As they reached the midspan, harsh illumination crashed across the river from a sandbar upstream and the Devils cursed to see two predark Hummers sitting on the hard packed sand, brilliant halogen headlights fanning across the water.

“Get those lights!” Tatters cried, shooting his blaster. Then the handcannon jammed on a bad round and he bent to afford as small a target as possible while he struggled to clear the breech. Bastard reloaded bullet had blown, and the split brass had flowered in the ejector. Damn blaster was useless now.

Casting it aside, the teen abandoned the rest of his gang and dived into the water, trying to swim away while submerged. The chaos above became only flashes of light and muffled thumps. Hitting his head on a rock, the teen almost passed out and fought to stay underwater, trying to get around the obstruction, until his aching lungs forced him to surface. Gulping in a breath, Tatters saw a group of Devils cut to ribbons as the M-60 machine guns mounted on the Hummers cut loose, the heavy duty combat rounds chewing a path of destruction across the river until reaching the men. Red blood spurted from a dozen wounds, and one man flipped over backward, hit by multiple slugs.

Now the shrubbery along the riverbank was smashed flat as a massive war wag parked on the slope, bright headlights crisscrossing the water, its forward machine guns swiveling about for fresh targets. Then a box on the roof opened wide exposing a bank of rockets inside.

Rockets? Tatters couldn’t believe his sight. It was like the old war stories the wrinklies told about. Who the bloody hell was after the gang?

The last handful of the Devils scattered at the sight, each going in a different direction. Machine gun rounds chewed the river in sweeping patterns over and over again, as if supplied with unlimited ammo.

Diving under the water once more, Tatters tried to get across the swift current in the middle of the river, digging his fingers into the mud to crawl underwater until the teen thought his burning lungs would burst from the need for air. Then he felt weeds mixed with the mud and rocks and knew he had made it across. The sounds of battle were a distant murmur as the biker briefly raised his head to suck in a breath and continued desperately crawling into the reeds of the bank.

A broken slab of predark concrete jutted from the water, and the biker put that between himself and the war wags. Go slow, stay low, and he might just live another day. Squirming on his belly through the black mud, Tatters startled a frog before collapsing upon a dry path of dirt.

“Made it,” he wheezed softly, the sound broken by a strained laugh. “Nuke me, fucking made it out alive!”

“Not quite, feeb,” a woman’s voice said, followed by the racking of a scattergun.

Looking in that direction, the biker saw a tall woman in clean clothing, holding the biggest shotgun he had ever seen. His blaster jammed, knife lost in the current, and too weak to try to ace the bitch, the biker knew he was trapped.

“Don’t shoot!” Tatters begged, weakly raising both hands. “I—I’m an e-escaped slave!”

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