James Axler – Zero City

Worse, outsiders come to loot the ruins—once cannibals, another time a predark war machine. And then there were the human muties who wandered in from the glowing red pits beyond the mountains, plus the local winged muties. Sometimes, even their own wolves turned against them for unknown reasons.

“Hold it!” Sergeant Benson cried, leaning out the passenger-side door. “Right here.”

The driver applied the brakes, and the truck slowed, squealing every foot of the way.

“Henders, check out that body!” the sergeant directed, pointing to a vacant lot. A sprawled form lay amid the wolfweed and wreckage. Lizards were chewing on his flesh, and what seemed like a perfectly good longblaster was in the bones of his hands. The triple-damn reptiles always seemed to eat the hands of the dead first.

“Sure, Sarge,” the private replied, puffing away on his pipe.

Strolling over, Henders used his bolt-action rifle to chase away the lizards, then pinched his nose shut against the stink of the decomposing flesh as he inspected the corpse.

“Nobody I know,” he reported, choking a bit. “Dead for a day, mebbe more.”

“Get the blaster!”

“Sure.” Bending over, the private picked up the rifle and felt the slightest tug from a string attached to the stock. His face registered curiosity, then horror for a full second before the lot was filled with an expanding fireball that vaporized the man, corpse and a hundred lizards, before reaching the sidewalk and dissipating.

Shrapnel peppered the truck, sounding like hard rain, and a man in the back toppled over with a cry, falling out of the vehicle.

“Skydark!” Benson roared, holding on to the sagging door of the battered truck and painfully lifting himself off the ground.

There was no need to recce the blast zone. Smoking shoes and a burning skull told the story. Henders was gone. The ground was a charred pit with flaming wreckage scattered for dozens of yards. Shaking his head to ease the ringing in his ears, the sergeant watched as the mushroom cloud of the blast rose into the cloudy sky. Damn explosion resembled a plas-ex blast, but nobody had any of that anymore. Not even the baron. Stuff crumbled over the passage of time, became unstable, then dried into a hard, useless brick.

“Hey, Sarge!” a private called, stepping into view from behind the truck. His empty hands were dripping blood. “Pete is dead. Got a chunk of rifle barrel right through the belly.”

In wordless fury, Benson glanced around the intersection at the movie theater, garage, pawnshop and office buildings. Nothing stirred—not a soul was in sight. But he knew the hunchback was somewhere near.

“Okay, Harold!” he yelled. “You got two of us with the trap! Well, enjoy the victory, ’cause you ain’t getting any more!”

Silence answered the comments, and drawing a knife from his belt, Benson stabbed it into the street. “You see that?” he asked, pointing at the knife. “There’s where I’m going to stake you out like a dog! Baron says we got to bring you in alive.”

The sergeant took in a deep breath, then bellowed, “But alive doesn’t mean with eyes! Or fingers!”

“Get moving!” Benson barked at the squad. “I want a five-block perimeter sweep of the whole damn area. Smash open every ground-level door that looks suspicious.”

Clutching their longblasters, the sec men rushed to comply, fueled by their own anger and hatred.

“No prisoners,” Benson growled, cracking open the top of his .44 Webley revolver and loading every chamber. The hell with rationing. “Shoot first, and we’ll loot the bodies afterward.”

“And find me that son of a slut Harold!”

THE BASEMENT of the government building was brightly lit, mirrors from the bathrooms on every floor now ringing the sleeping Dean on each side. Mildred remembered reading how Thomas Edison assisted the doctor operating on his mother by boosting the candlelight with mirrors, and the trick worked. If necessary, the physician had no doubt that she could do an operation on the boy’s spine. That is, if Ryan returned with the field kit.

Sitting on a plastic milk carton, Mildred was rubbing gun oil into the stiff leather of her new boots. They fit better every day, but still needed a bit more softening or else she’d have blisters on her heels for a month.