In a torrent of words that emerged as an almost incoherent jumble, the blonde had managed to spill the whole plot to Baron Al in a pathetic attempt to save her skin. The irony being that, in among the noise and confusion, and the fact that the window of his wag was firmly wound to shut out the dust, all the baron could see was a red-eyed, swollen-faced woman screaming at him. He looked at her in complete incomprehension.
“Bitch,” Claudette muttered, “I’ve been wanting to do this for hours.” She raised her blaster.
It was quick, but far from painless. She put two slugs into the woman’s knees, and Anita crashed to the ground with an ear piercing yell of agony. The next two shots were into her shoulders, making it impossible for her to do anything but lie there, immobile, wailing in pain and confusion.
Claudette and Ayesha made their way hurriedly back to the wag, Claudette pausing briefly to put a slug into Anita’s guts, blood spreading across the blonde’s dirty white blouse, her face contorted in pain.
Her death was quickened by a final slug that was put through her open, mewling mouth, blowing her head apart. Claudette then stopped to spare the astounded baron a wink before making her way back to the safety of the wag.
As she bounded in and slammed the doors, she said breathlessly, “I hope you can drive one of these things, girl, ’cause I sure as shit can’t.”
Chapter Twenty
“Man the guns!” Correll yelled. “We’ve got them chilled and buried—they can’t get out!” He whooped joyously as he brought the wag out of its dangerous skid-cum-turn, and the two airborne wheels hit the desert floor with a bone-jarring thud. He slammed the wag into the highest gear and ground his foot into the metal floor, hunching over the wheel as much as the metal box on his lap would allow him.
Ryan, Krysty and the other Hellbenders in the lead wag slid from their seats, balance still a little uncertain from the erratic passage of the wag, and positioned themselves behind the machine blasters that were mounted inside the wag, with the barrels protruding through engineered holes in the sides. Because these had been made and mounted before skydark, they were the latest in military sec tech from before the nukecaust, and had cameras and infrared mounts that relayed a view of the outside world, and the target area, to whoever was seated at the end of the mount.
Ryan settled his good orb against the sight, adjusting to the slight variation in quality between the image on the small eye screen and the reality around him. The age of the equipment was beginning to tell, even though Correll’s people had maintained all the wags as best they could, and the image that settled on his retina was slightly flat and two-dimensional, with a faded quality that wouldn’t help anyone to differentiate between wags and clouds of dust in the chaos outside. The broken digital image pixilated the outside world into little more than a series of shadows. But those shadows were enough.
“We’re closing,” Correll yelled. “Get ready to blast the bastards!”
Ryan shifted forward in his seat, his eye jammed up against the sight, the stock of the blaster hard against the cords of muscle on his shoulder. The rear wag of the Charity convoy came into view, and he was aware of moving shadows along the roof. Above the roar of the wag engine, a chatter of blasterfire could just about be discerned, and there was the high pitched scream of tortured metal as the shells from the Charity sec men’s blasters hit the outside of the armored wag and ricocheted off. Before he had the chance to squeeze the trigger and pick off some of the shadows, Correll had piloted the wag past at speed, and they were headed for the lead. It was obvious that Correll wanted the lead wag and the life of Baron Al Jourgensen, the man he had referred to as “Red, the son of a gaudy whore.” Behind them, he heard the throatier roar of a machine blaster from the next wag, as it attempted to take out the wag that had fired on them.