James Axler – Trader Redux

J.B. nodded, his glasses catching the last drop of half-light in the hallway.

“Trader?”

“Sure. Good luck.”

“Right. Meet up there. Here we go.”

Ryan ducked his head, folding his arms over his face, the SIG-Sauer in his fist, and ran directly at the window.

As he burst through it, there was a cataclysmic explosion and a dazzling burst of bright purple light that flooded the land for miles around.

Ryan rolled and came up on his feet, part of his brain numbed by the blast, deciding that one of their attackers must have been hoarding an implode gren.

But the more logical part of his mind told him that a massive chem storm had crept up silently from over the ocean, waiting over the center of the ville, with impeccable timing to release its nuke-born venom.

There was another flash of lightning, the thunder following on top of the brilliance, the air filling with the familiar sour taint of ozone.

It wasn’t a moment for thinking.

It was a time for running and killing.

In between the first and second flashes of chem lightning, Ryan heard the puny crack of a smoothbore musket, but he had no idea where the ball had flown.

He headed straight for the bushes, seeing a figure a few feet to his right. Ryan stood and got off a shot, feeling the blaster buck in his hand. The figure vanished as though it had been smeared from sight. Someone else, holding a long-bladed knife, raced toward Ryan. A second round from the SIG-Sauer punched the man to the ground, his face a mask of silver-black blood. The one-eyed warrior slipped, a trailing branch catching at his ankle, then he was up and cutting right, vaulting another hedge, landing on someone, clubbing with the barrel of the automatic, twenty-five and a half ounces pulping the cheek and splitting the eye socket. Trader was at the corner of his vision, swinging the Armalite by the barrel, like Davy Crockett on the crumbling, shot-blasted stone walls of the fortress of the Alamo. There was no sign of J.B. anywhere.

More lightning flashed, followed by a scream from someplace. Ryan shot a young boy, Dean’s age, no older, who sprang up out of the ground in front of him. He heard the boom of the Smith amp; Wesson from the left and saw a stout old-timer, gray hair pasted to his skull, fall back, both hands clutching the gaping hole in his guts where the flechettes had ripped the life from him. Someone went down behind Ryan, Trader? The old man got up again, lips torn back off his white teeth, looking crazed as he ran. A grove of tall willows. Was water nearby? Ryan dodged between the smooth silvery trunks, something splintering a hole in one of them, hip-level. More thunder, violet lightning, rain, torrential, a stream ahead of him that the one-eyed man tried to leap in a single bound but failed, combat boots slipping in fresh mud, landing knee-deep and wading out to the other bank. Farther, the noise falling behind him. The storm behind him.

Running, breath like a fire in his lungs, heart pounding, legs weary. Escaped. Alone.

THE WATER TOWER WAS deserted when Ryan reached it, struggling up the steep hill, the highway streaming like a river with the aftermath of the great storm that was now rumbling harmlessly away to the south.

Every few steps he turned around to see if anyone was coming after him.

Friend or foe.

But there was nobody, the blank street lined with eyeless houses, the moon breaking through and casting a baleful gleam over everything. Over the deserted suburb.

The door had been propped shut with a rusting girder, and Ryan had to set his shoulder to it, levering it open with a grinding crash. The inside smelled of urine, the moon darted through the holes in the crumbling brickwork, higher up. Ryan had the SIG-Sauer ready, but he could see immediately that the place was empty.

All he had to do now was wait.

Chapter Eleven

J.B. arrived less than fifteen minutes later, limping slightly after twisting an ankle breaking through the grove of willows.