“I could have hit ’em with a rock from way up here!” Grub snorted. “How did all those triple stupes miss?”
Then, with cold deliberation, the newcomers shouldered their own weapons. As the homeboys and girls tried to scatter from the porches, the roachmen opened fire. And it was clear at once that the assault rifles they carried were as rad-blasted queer as they were.
Instead of the crack of single gunshots or the canvas-ripping clatter of high-rate autofire, the weapons gave off painfully shrill, whistling sounds. From out of their flash-hiders shot single, narrow beams of emerald-green light so intense that they could be seen in the midday sun. Everywhere the pencil-thin beams touched, they cut. And the slicing effect was instantaneous. The sprinting residents and spectators of Moonboy dropped, screaming as they were bisected, along with sundry chair backs, stucco walls, rain barrels and porch posts. The row of rickety roofs collapsed. Out from under the rising cloud of dust, human heads, cleanly severed at the neck, rolled downhill like runaway melons, bounding off the curb and into the gutter.
The battle, if you could call it that, was over in a few heartbeats.
Frozen in place, Grub and his female companion stared slack-jawed at the ruination below.
Though every member of the firing squad had been chopped in two, the screaming continued. A few people were still alive down there; Grub could see them thrashing in the dirt beside the collapsed roof. He recognized one of the survivors as Old Rupe, the man who did all the beer brewing for the gaudy’s saloon. Old Rupe’s detached legs and hand lay on the ground two yards from where he writhed. Despite his terrible injuries, he hadn’t bled so much as a drop. The stumps of his limbs looked blackened and scorched.
Grub and the slut flinched as thunder rolled again, and three more of the roachmen appeared out of thin air. They carried a different assortment of gear than their predecessors. Two of them wore heavy-looking, flat-black canisters strapped onto their backs. The third intruder pushed a squat, shiny black cube on big wheels.
With the initial pair providing cover, this new trio moved quickly from the middle of the road to where Old Rupe lay thrashing. Seeing what was coming his way, the brewmaster flopped to his stomach and desperately tried to drag himself to safety with his one good arm. His considerable effort was futile. One of the canister men blocked Old Rupe’s path; the other kicked him onto his back, and easily held him there with a boot heel on the throat.
The cube pusher drew something bright and silvery from his belt. It was a cylindrical, latticework metal cage, about two feet long, with a pistol grip. To Grub, it looked like an oversized, predark drill stand, complete with battery-powered hand drill.
Old Rupe flopped around on the sidewalk, trying in vain to get out from under the boot. The cube pusher jammed the business end of the silver device against the brewmaster’s chest, securely pinning him to the concrete. Then the device snicked sharply, steel grating on steel, and brutally ended Old Rupe’s torment. The mechanical cookie cutter plunged into his torso right over his heart, crunching through breastbone and ribs, and then snapped back with a fruit-can-sized sample of red, dripping meat, which was quickly dumped into the matching hole in the top of the squat cube. .
The pusher leaned over the cube, intently studying its LED readout. After a few seconds, the roachman looked up from the machine. Without a visible or audible command, the two with canisters began to move among the debris and the sprawled bodies. From short hoses connected to their back tanks, they sprayed creamy yellow foam over each of the downed human forms. Beneath their mounds of foam, the still-living and the newly dead dissolved, liquefying into sheets of bubbling brown goo that poured off the edges of the sidewalk and into the asphalt sand.
Grub heard a hissing sound quite close, and felt a sudden, warm wetness between the toes of his bare feet. When he looked down, heart thudding, he saw that he was standing in a quickly spreading puddle of urine that wasn’t his own. The gaudy slut beside him began to wail at the top of her lungs. He grabbed her by the arm and jerked her away from the window. “For nuke’s sake, shut your face!” he said, shaking her by the shoulders as he backed her across the room. “Do you want to put them mutie bastards on us?”