The noise of grating, grinding metal was such that it seemed to the occupants of the wag to completely overtake the other sounds from outside, filling the wag with an eardrum-bursting noise that made it hard to think.
And then, suddenly, the wing of the wag had passed beyond the rear of the vehicle it had been pushing against, that vehicle now pushed to one side, the occupants thrown across the interior and abandoning their blasters.
“Shit!” Ayesha cursed as the wag, suddenly released from the restraints of the metal bulk in front of it, shot out across the gap between the convoy and the wall of the rock arena. She stamped on the brake, making the vehicle skid on the uneven and loose surface, the suddenly locked tires searching for purchase on the shifting sands of the desert floor. The wag skidded in a circle, and she righted it in time to be facing the entrance at the rear of the Charity convoy. The only problem with this being that the path to the entrance was blocked by the circling wags of the Hellbenders’ convoy, with Correll in the lead, approaching at speed through the dust of the storm and conflict.
“Aw, fuck,” Claudette muttered. To get this far, this close to getting away, and then to get chilled by the very people who were supposed to be on your side… The dark-skinned girl watched openmouthed and wide-eyed as the lead wag closed on theirs, seeing through the grime and dust an equally surprised gaunt face as the driver jammed on his brakes and went into a skid, attempting to pilot his wag into the narrow space between the women’s wag and the convoy that still stood in the arena.
Ayesha mirrored the actions of Correll, swinging the wheel of her wag and risking crushing the wag against the rock wall.
The two wags swung violently away from each other, like two magnetic poles that repel, but it was too little, too late. The front wings of both wags locked together in a squeal of metal, the opposing forces of each powerful wag engine forcing the metal into ridiculous shapes, pushing at each other so that the steering wheels in each cab failed to respond to the drivers.
Ayesha found herself thrown across the wheel, the hard plastic jarring and bruising her chest and stomach, knocking the air from her and leaving her dazed and confused. She shook her head to try to clear it, and felt the need to violently vomit as a result, a need that was increased when she looked around to ask Claudette how she was, and found the dark-skinned girl staring at her from one lifeless eye, the other impaled with a long sliver of toughened glass from the windshield that had been worked loose from its frame by the twisting, distorting effects of the impact and had driven through her left eye and into the brain, lobotomizing her so that she died blissfully unaware of the pain it had caused her.
Ayesha puked over the dead girl, then heaved and spit out the bile that tasted raw in her mouth. She looked over the back seat. Some of the women were unconscious from the impact, but most were still able to move.
“I dunno,” Ayesha muttered, “we’ll just have to try and get out of the battlefield and wait for the result.”
“Some good you’ve been,” moaned one of the women, picking herself up.
Ayesha boiled inside. She’d tried, as hard as she could, and all she had was this?
“Fuck it, look after yourselves, then,” she spit before opening the wag door on her side of the cab and sliding out into the sandstorm.
Outside, the Hellbenders were pouring out of their wags, their circling assault action having been halted by the crash between Correll and Ayesha. The leader of the Hellbenders was one of the first to hit the desert floor, having given orders over the radio for his people to disperse and begin the fight on the outside. Correll grasped a Heckler & Koch in one hand, and in the other he had a long bladed saber that was of tooled steel and had been taken from the redoubt. Coming face-to-face with him, Ayesha stopped dead in her tracks, taken aback by the wild-eyed, gaunt man, and also by the fact that he had a long metal box strapped to his chest. Whatever was in it, it wasn’t just being used as armor, and Ayesha practically shrunk beneath his gaze.