A scraggly woman in a sleeveless T-shirt expertly flipped her bike onto its rear wheel and charged for Ryan. With the engine giving her protective cover, he had no choice but to dive out of the way. The studded wheels spun past his head, missing by an inch. From the prone position, he triggered the SIG-Sauer upward and removed most of the biker’s throat with a single well-placed shot. She tumbled sideways and got caught angled in the spinning spokes of her wheels. The results were colorful.
Through a blasterport, Mildred fired twice, making an obscenely fat biker stagger, but not fall off. Dean blew the tires off another two-wheeler and the machine crashed into the end of a truck, the bike going underneath, the rider hitting it dead on. Blood sprayed out from the impact, and the limp body slid down the metal wall, leaving a horrid trail of teeth and eyes.
Leathering his gun, Ryan unlimbered the Steyr and worked the bolt. Area effect wasn’t doing the job. Time for big punch.
A sputtering chatter announced that Krysty was operating the Remington on full-auto, the .50-caliber rounds chewing the ground as she hosed men and machines with high-Caliber death. Two woofed into pyres. Mildred added the firepower of the port Remington. but the rest wheeled crazily about in a knot of confusion, making it impossible for them to get a clear shot.
Crouching behind her motorcycle, Amanda was hosing the lines of trucks and cars endlessly with her MAC-b as if bullets were free. When the machine pistol stopped, she dropped a clip and reloaded in a heartbeat. She didn’t appear to be doing any damage to the bikers, but if there was anybody hiding in the ruins, they would have been insane to chance rising into view.
Slowing his chopper, a beefy biker with a crew cut pulled something from within his jacket and tossed it at them.
“Gren!” Jak shouted, fanning his Magnum.
As the ball arched into the sky, Dean tracked it with his Mossberg, patiently waiting. As the gren reached the apex of its arch and slowed, he fired. The charge detonated, slapping them with a powerful concussion.
“Hot pipe! If that had been AP,” he cried, dropping the exhausted shotgun and drawing his Browning Hi-Power blaster, “the shrapnel would have aced the lot of us!”
Every blaster spit flame at the muscular biker, but he turned tail and took off into the distance.
“Excellent, one less to fight,” Doc rumbled, his back to the tank for protection, the LeMat .44 booming at the attackers. Ricochets zinged off the composite armor hull and the man flinched as a line of blood appeared along his cheek.
“Unless he’s going for more grens,” Ryan grunted. “That’s what I’d do.” His Steyr SSG-70 blasted hot lead death at a giant biker who was mising a spiked baseball bat. The big steel-jacketed slug went clean through the man, wounding a bald rider behind him in the chest. Cawdor shot again, and missed. “There’s too many, and they’re too bastard fast! Let’s finish this now!”
Struggling to regroup, the remaining bikers retaliated with their machine pistols, hosing the tank. Somebody inside the vehicle touched off the rear .40 mm cannon, adding their destructive bid to the battle zone. Blood pooled around burning wreckage. Jagged pieces of wrecked bikes covered the concrete and threatened to trip the friends at every step, and the bikers maintained a constant fusillade of incoming rounds.
Ryan shouldered his longblaster and drew the SIG-Sauer. The silenced 9 mm pistol coughed and a motorcycle fuel tank burst, covering a biker with gasoline that ignited as it dripped upon the hot engine. Running amok, the human torch screamed at the top of his lungs. His companions wheeled uncaring past the torch, and then mercifully his ammo cooked off and killed him.
Inside Leviathan, Krysty rammed AP shells into the front 75 mm recoilless rifles. “J.B., how you doing?” she yelled at the floor. The big blasters couldn’t traverse or swivel, only elevate. But if the bikers got stupid and slowed in front of the tank, they would never know what hit them. “J.B.?” she repeated. “Hey, J.B.!”
There was no answer.