Drawing a fat blaster from a shoulder holster, Baron Strichland pointed it skyward and fired. The weapon thumped, sending a sizzling rocket high into the night, then a small explosion occurred and sizzling light filled the sky as the magnesium flare started to gently drift to the ground on a parachute.
Caught between the flare and the searchlights, the muties swirled blindly, screaming their rage as the APC burped green tracers skyward, and the sec men steadily banged away with revolvers and longblasters.
Then a winged shape fell to the ground, impacting with a sickening crunch. The guards ignored the fallen creature, but swarms of old women and children charged out to savagely beat the mutie with baseball bats and lead pipes until it was utterly deceased.
A second mutie dropped to its death as another flare arced for the heavens. Then the searchlights traversed the air over the battleground, showing the winged monsters flapping back toward the ruins. A flurry of crossbow bolts arched after them, and one more tumbled from the sky, its body a pincushion of feathered shafts.
IN A GREENHOUSE, Ryan and Krysty watched the fierce battle while sipping some water and trying to ignore the ache in their bellies. This was the fourth greenhouse they had visited. The crude handmade benches lining the structure were filled with thick growths of bushy carrot tops on one side and plump cucumbers dangling from support sticks on the other bench. The smell of the fresh food was heady, intoxicating, but they knew what the dark loam in the stands was partially made of, and in spite of being hungry, the two could find no appetite for this food.
Moving closer to the wall, they watched the firefight near the tunnel, the stuttering flashes of the blasters and the searchlights.
Lying on the floor behind them was a bound sec man, tied hand and foot with strips of his shirt, a sock jammed into his mouth.
“They got it down to a science,” Ryan observed, “with ground crews mopping up the wounded.”
“I wonder if the sec men are really good,” she mused, “or if they’ve just fought the same battle so often they have it down to a science.”
“You think this was staged?”
“What better way to stay in power then endlessly save your citizens from a terrible enemy?”
Ryan considered the notion. “The local baron can’t keep control with the food supplies. If the people ever found out where the soil came from, they’d revolt.”
“Remember Mildred and Doc telling us about compost heaps? Wonder why they don’t boil their garbage until it’s sterile and mix that with the sand.”
“Mebbe they don’t know that trick.”
“But they can make alcohol.”
“Everybody has a still. That’s booze for partying and fuel for wags. A yard-long piece of seamless copper tubing is more useful than a thousand airplanes.”
Krysty’s reply was cut short by the sound of talking outside the greenhouse. The two quickly moved beneath the table in the center aisle seconds before the door opened and sec men entered, one holding an alcohol lantern, the other a tiny revolver. It was only a dinky .22, hardly fit to be a starter’s pistol for a race. But Ryan knew in the right hand and at the right range, it could kill as fast as a .50-caliber Desert Eagle. Shoot a man in the shoulder, and the little rounds would rattle around inside, bouncing off bones and piercing every vital organ before tumbling out his stomach. Nasty stuff.
“What crap,” one man said, walking along the aisles of plants, the lantern sizzling and popping. “Nobody is going to steal a carrot during an attack and risk going to the Machine.”
“Better than wall duty,” his companion replied. “You see how many we lost tonight?”
“Three or four. Pretty bad.”
“Aye.”
Reaching the end of the greenhouse, they turned and started down the other aisle. “Damn lucky the fat slut found a predark med kit…”
Instantly, Ryan was behind the man, the long curved blade of his panga tight against the sec man’s throat. “Don’t move,” he whispered hoarsely.
The other sec man stepped backward, drawing his revolver, and Krysty rose to slam a wooden stool over his head. With a sigh, the man crumpled to the ground.
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