It wasn’t just heat waves coming off the ruined asphalt.
At head height, dust motes glittered and whirled, quickly turning into a man-sized tornado. The Moonboy folk blinked in amazement, then hurriedly kicked awake their dozing friends. This was no ordinary dust devil. It sparkled as if it held millions of tiny fragments of mirror in its spinning funnel; with each passing second the glittering bits grew more and more distinct.
And brighter.
So bright, in fact, that the residents had to either squint or shield their eyes from the hard glare.
A powerful wind accompanied this apparition. It set road dust flying and scraggly beards flapping. There was a deep bass rumble below the wind’s howl, the building growl of some impossibly huge engine.
An earsplitting thunder crack rattled the corrugated steel roofs over the spectators’ heads. The shock wave vibrated up through the soles of their feet, through their legs, to their very bowels. In a flash, the tornado flew apart, and before their eyes, at the epicenter of the ville, the seams of reality split and peeled back.
A tall, humanoid figure in black stepped out of nothing and nowhere, out of the ragged slash in space, birthed full-grown into the middle of the road, accompanied by a nauseating, superconcentrated, petrochemical stench. The figure wore a suit of head-to-foot black armor, and the armor gleamed as if it had been dipped in machine oil. Like the carapace of some gigantic, rad-mutated insect, the suit was segmented over arms and legs, overlapping, contoured plates protecting the torso. The boots, shin guards and helmet were of the same material. An impenetrable, smoke-colored, wraparound visor concealed the face.
All eyes locked onto the blue-black blaster the creature gripped in its gauntleted hands. The weapon was of stubby, bullpup design. A styrene stock held three heavy barrels joined in a triangular configuration, and a single, claw-toothed flash-hider crowned all three muzzles. A massively thick, curving magazine extended below the stock just in front of the rifle’s buttplate. No one on the street had ever seen or even heard tell of anything quite like it. Though they didn’t know what mayhem the wicked-looking piece was capable of, in their hearts every man and woman lusted after it. Whether traded for jack or jolt, or kept as a personal side arm, such a weapon could make life in the hellscape known as Deathlands a whole lot easier to bear.
Before any of the folk could move to appropriate the blaster, there was another boom of thunder and a flash. A second, identical figure stepped from nowhere into the middle of the road. It, too, carried a magical blaster. It, too, was followed by a gust of foul wind.
The appearance of another armed, apparently mutated stranger galvanized Moonboy’s idlers, whose rule of thumb was always to kill first and ask questions later. A hodgepodge of handblasters cleared belts and hip leather on both sides of the street. The intruders stood stock-still, at a range of less than twenty yards. There was a rattle of gritty clacks as single-action hammer spurs locked back.
“Yee-hah!” someone shouted in glee. “We got ourselves a fuckin’ mutie shoot!”
The self-appointed firing squads took positions on both sides of the street. Aiming two-handed, the shooters thoughtfully angled themselves to keep from hitting their opposite numbers with near-misses or ricochets.
The figures in black armor responded by shifting position as well, standing back to back in the center of the road, each staring down a line of blaster muzzles. Oddly enough, the all-over armor plate they wore didn’t seem to inhibit their movement. The material bent and flexed with them. The strangers held their own weapons at the ready, but unarmed. As if either ignorant or disdainful of the mortal danger they faced, the pair calmly waited for the ville’s welcoming committee to make the first move.
They didn’t have to wait long.
No formal signal to fire brought on the withering barrage. When the first shot suddenly barked out, the rest of the blasters followed in short, ragged order. Volleys of pistol balls and buckshot rained on the standing figures. As the massed handblasters boomed and flashed, dense clouds of thick, white gunsmoke rolled from both sidewalks, fogging the street and partially obscuring the targets.