James Axler – Rat King

“You ain’t shown much,” Mac said shortly.

Jak shrugged, then turned his back and followed his companions. It left Mac with

a turning stomach and a foreboding that things weren’t perhaps to be as simple

as he had hoped.

Farther down the way, Tod had come to a halt. The giant waved the heavy blaster

in the general direction of the gap between the two sides of earth.

“Guess this is about the narrowest stretch,” he said, spitting over the edge.

“It’s no ravine at best, but this is as narrow as it gets.”

J.B. took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. He peered over the

edge and across at the far side.

“What’s to stop us going across first and then waiting to attack you on the

other side?” he asked.

Tod grinned lopsidedly, revealing a row of broken yellow teeth. “This…” he said

simply before turning and taking aim with his giant blaster at a small piece of

scrub that was twenty yards across the gap.

The blaster exploded with a deafening roar that drowned out the background howl

of the storms for a second. It belched blue smoke and flame as it discharged a

load of shot from the large barrel. The recoil from such a charge had to be

enough to break an average man’s arm if the blaster was held one-handed, as Tod

held it, J.B. thought.

The giant didn’t even seem to notice that the weapon had fired.

Twenty yards away the scrub disappeared in a puff of what might have been dirt,

but might simply have been the splintering wood of the bushes disintegrating as

the mixed load of the charge hit it with tremendous force. The width of the

barrel showed in the wide spread of the charge, which pockmarked the ground

around the small scrub area.

Some of the debris that made up the load could be discerned as pieces of metal

glittering in the weak sunlight that filtered through the dust and chem clouds.

Nails, pieces and shards of metal from other weapons, household objects from

predark times…anything that could be pared down to pieces small enough to load

in the blaster.

Dean whistled, low and soft.

“Point made,” J.B. said simply. He had deliberately asked the question in order

to try to provoke such an action. Casting an eye around the other captors and

their homemade and home-repaired blasters, he made a rough mental assessment of

their collective firepower.

It was always useful to know. There was never such a thing as wasted

information. You never knew when your life might depend on the minutest scrap of

knowledge.

“Cool,” Tod said, grinning inanely through his broken teeth as he plucked

another cartridge from one of the large pockets on his coat. He snapped open the

large blaster, which operated on a simple hinge, like a modified shotgun, and

pushed the cartridge into the breech. It was a lumpy concoction of metal wrapped

in bulging cardboard that shouldn’t, in all logic, have worked. J.B. figured

that one day the blaster would just explode in the giant’s face.

“Let’s cut out the target practice and showing off, and just move,” Tilly said

flatly, her eyes burning contempt from her layers of rags.

Krysty stared at her defiantly. “Lady, you’ve got a real problem. You’re calling

all the shots here, so why don’t you lay off? What is it with you?”

“Oh, shit, bad question,” Mac whispered to the other two men with blasters.

Still they didn’t break their silence, just shaking their heads sadly while

keeping their blasters ready and aimed.

“You want to know my problem?” Tilly roared, springing forward with a

suddenness, violence and grace that took Krysty by surprise. Before Krysty had a

chance to move, Tilly had thrust her face into hers.

Ryan stiffened, keeping his eye on the men with blasters. Mildred shook her head

almost imperceptibly.

She, for one, would be interested to see what happened. Like J.B., she believed

that all information was useful. It was just that sometimes she wanted different

information.

“You want to know what’s the matter with me? You really want to see why I hate

you and your kind?”