James Axler – Judas Strike

Small children were running everywhere, and a pregnant cannie shuffled for safety behind a tree. Ryan’s blaster tracked their movements, but he didn’t pull the trigger. They were no danger. No sense wasting ammo.

Withering cross fire filled the air, chips of bark flying off the trees, and the cooking torso jerking in a ghastly pantomime of trying to escape from the spit. Just then, a woman dressed in dirty rags staggered from behind the killing tree and headed for the inclined ramp out of the crater. Ryan bolted across the open ground to catch her in his arms. Blood was pumping freely from a terrible wound on her chest; most of one breast had been torn away by a miniball. She tried to fight off Ryan as he carried her into the weeds. A chest wound. No way could he get a tourniquet around that, and he had nothing to use as a pressure bandage.

“Sorry,” he said, dropping a clip and reloading to fire into the thinning mob of cannies.

Clutching a ruined hand, one man just stood there, howling at the stars until Ryan shot him again and the noise ceased.

Several men dressed in gray charged from a tent into view, large clay pots with dangling fuses in their hands. J.B. swung the Uzi in their direction. No way he was going to let them do that smoke trick again. The Uzi spoke, and the gray men fell, the smoke bombs rolling away. Then there came a fast series of sharp bangs from above and each one burst apart, totally destroyed. J.B. nodded at the unseen women and moved on, firing single rounds to conserve ammo.

Dropping his spent brass, Jak reloaded and sent three booming messengers toward two cannies trying to sneak behind Doc. Both men fell as if hit with sledgehammers, the hollowpoint rounds tearing holes in their bellies the size of a fist. As the flintlocks hit the soil, the blasters discharged, sending the .75 miniball rounds randomly into the ville.

A gang of old women carrying axes came after them now, and J.B. used the rest of the clip to blow them away. The survivors ran for the ramp to reach the safety of the bamboo forest. But as they reached the top, Krysty and Mildred mowed them down in ruthless efficiency.

A spear sailed by overhead, forcing Ryan to duck. Then a trembling hand touched him, and Ryan briefly glanced at the dying woman. Her mouth filled with blood, she burbled something impossible to hear and went still. Then Doc fired again, and in the flash Ryan got a good look at her face. She was beautiful and badly scarred, but this woman was much too old, an adult, deeply tanned with pirate-style earrings.

“She’s still in the pit!” Ryan shouted through cupped hands.

That was all the others needed. J.B. stood and cut loose with the Uzi, mowing down the cannies with a deadly storm of the copper-jacketed 9 mm rounds. Darting out of the shadows, Jak flipped both of the 30-round mags into the campfire and dived for cover. In less than a heartbeat, the ammo started cooking off, the irregular series of detonations throwing hot coals and deformed lead everywhere. Clay pots shattered, a man fell, clutching his ankle, two more fell over lifeless, a tent hit with coals burst into flames and another cannie insanely rushed the campfire and struck at the exploding magazines with a war club. That close, he caught all of the next rounds and was torn apart. The corpse fell forward into the campfire, and the reek of burning hair soon mingled with the wretched aroma of roasting human flesh from the torso on the spit.

In raw terror, the last few cannie warriors broke ranks and dashed for a tent set off by itself in the ville. Going inside, a grisly cannie came back out with a flintlock rifle and a pouch of ammo. Jak shifted his position to get closer. That longblaster was trouble. As the warrior started to load the weapon, Jak aimed carefully and shot him with the Magnum pistol. His face gone, the hideous corpse fell backward into the tent, and the other men started firing their weapons from within the flimsy structure.