James Axler – Road Wars

They wore an indistinct mix of rags and tattered animal skins, and all of them were heavily armed. Each man had a single-shot hunting musket in his hands, as well as a brace of pistols stuck in his belt.

“Looks like we might get the job done for us.” Ryan shaded his eyes against the freezing wind. “Think they know the muties got the shitting sickness?”

J.B. half turned toward him, lips peeling back over his teeth in a cold, wolfish grin. “Soon find out,” he said. “If they stay outside, then they know. If they go into the camp, then they don’t know.”

It took less than five minutes to reveal that the trio of hunters wasn’t aware of the lethally infectious sickness that was ravaging the stickies’ settlement.

Two out of the first three shots were clean kills, knocking a pair of males off their feet, to roll and kick in the frosted mud. The third shot clipped another of the muties through the shoulder, kicking him off balance. He struggled, yelping, onto his hands and knees, one arm dangling uselessly, blood pouring into the dirt.

There was screaming and chaos, the hunters breaking from cover, running clumsily toward the ragtag camp. One of them paused by the wounded stickie and smashed the butt of his empty musket into the side of the angular skull. Even at a distance of fifty yards, Ryan and J.B. both heard the clear sound of crushed bone. The mutie slipped onto its face and lay still.

“Three done,” Ryan said quietly, keeping the Steyr ready at his shoulder.

The noise brought the other muties out of their shelters, the oldest of them holding a crude spear. He thrust it toward one of their attackers, but the hunter fired his pistol into his chest at point-blank range. There was the dulled explosion of the flintlock and a cloud of black powder smoke. The spear flew into the air, spinning with an infinite slowness before landing point-first in the mud.

“Four,” J.B. said.

The fifth and sixth stickie males were bludgeoned to death, sprawling lifeless in the shadow of the wall.

“Kid and the woman left.” It crossed Ryan’s mind to take out all three of the hunters, but he decided that he might just as well save his ammunition. Simply by breathing in the air of the cholera-infested camp the killers were fifty-fifty to take the last train west. If they got any closer to the muties, the odds would shorten to at least ninety-ten.

One of the norms grabbed the screaming child and cut its throat as easily and effortlessly as if he were gutting a rabbit, tossing the body away.

The woman had a knife and for a few seconds she held the trio of laughing hunters away from her. They circled around as she yelled and cursed, laughing at her, feinting to grab her arm, then pulled back out of range of the blade.

“One of them still got a charge in his blaster,” J.B. said. “Looks like they aim to have themselves some fun before they chill her.”

“Might as well jump in their graves and shovel the cold dirt in on top of themselves.” Ryan laid the Steyr SSG-70 down, easing the action.

The woman was dragged into the largest tent by all three men.

As soon as they were out of sight, Ryan crawled back into deeper cover and stood. “Might as well get going,” he said. “They won’t let her live. And they’ll have a fine, close-combat dose of dying.”

Snow was beginning to fall as they set off on the four-mile hike to the ville. The screams had stopped before they’d even traveled a quarter of a mile.

ANDY SHEPPARD and a dozen or so of other citizens waited for Ryan and J.B. as they walked along the main street of Mitchell Springs.

“Boy, oh, boy! What happened? You didn’t get to the camp? That it? That it?” A look of shock crossed his face. “You didn’t get anyplace inside the camp? In the camp?”

Ryan told the careful truth. “Found the stickles, like you said, by the ruins of the hospital. Eight of them. All looking real sick.”