Nearly falling into a pothole, Mildred shot a leg as it stabbed toward her, and it quickly withdrew. But another reached for Doc, and he hacked it off with his sword. Pouring forth blood, the stump withdrew and a different leg reached between the girders to slam the whitehair from behind. With a cry, he fell onto the cracked pavement and lay very still.
Searching for loose rounds in her bearskin coat, Krysty heard the odd sound again, clearer and closer this time. Some sort of a mechanical noise. Another PT boat?
The woman shouted a warning, just as the far end of the bridge violently detonated, the support girders screeching in protest as the bridge tilted to the side, the concrete cracking into a million pieces. The companions were thrown from their feet and hit the side girders hard. As they clung for dear life to keep from falling, the burning spider plummeted into the dark waters below, and Ryan cursed as he saw a Petey steaming through the moonlit waters, numerous flashes coming from its rocket pod.
“They found us!” he snarled, trying to reach the Steyr, tangled in the straps of his backpack and canteen.
“DO IT AGAIN!” Brandon shouted, leaning forward over the controls. “Launch them all! Everything we got!”
Fuses were lit, and the rest of the Firebirds rustled out of the pod spraying smoke and hot sparks in their wake. Fiery explosions dotted the entire length of the bridge as the rockets hit, tearing the rusty structure apart. The twisting metal screeching, the trestle fell away from the opposite cliffs, breaking apart as it hurtled into the choppy waves. The assorted tons of predark steel crashed down on top of each other for what seemed an eternity.
“They’re aced,” the pilot stated with a grin when peace and quiet finally returned. “Ain’t nobody coulda lived through that!”
The crew cheered in victory.
“Mebbe, but they have escaped us before,” Brandon growled, and the jubilation raggedly stopped. “Bosun, launch a torpedo at the wreckage. No, launch both of them. Afterwards we hit the island.”
“The island, sir?” a sec man asked, confused.
“The bastards were fighting a mutie to get to the other side of that bridge,” the lieutenant stated. “Not running away from us, but headed toward something. Hell, there might be more of them hidden in the jungle. I want half of the remaining Firebirds launched at anything in sight.”
“Ain’t nothing there but some ruins,” the pilot offered.
“We’ll start with those, then hit that tall mesa,” Brandon said, pointing at one surrounded by a flock of condors. “It’ll make a good base camp for a recce. Then at dawn, we’ll land and see exactly what those people were running toward.”
“Who knows? It could even be something the lord baron might have a use for,” the lieutenant added thoughtfully.
Epilogue
“Here they come again!” a sec man cried, firing his flintlock.
The rest of the sec men and civilians hacked at the muties scrambling through the smashed gate of Cold Harbor ville, but without any black powder for their blaster, the clubs and axes did little to stem the invading horde.
Once inside the ville, the stickies spread out, hooting wildly and attacking anything that moved with their stone clubs: horses, dogs, children, it made no difference. Red blood flowed along the muddy streets of the ville as the slaughter became absolute.
A small group of norms had taken refuge behind the sandbag wall surrounding the locked armory. While a blacksmith pounded on the lock with a sledgehammer, the rest valiantly fought off the stickies with crossbows, knives and crude spears. As the dead piled at the wall, a sec man cried out and plucked a sliver of bamboo from his hand. Trying to toss it away, the sec man discovered that he couldn’t open his numb ringers. Then a terrible cold flowed up his veins and into his chest. Breathing became labored, then impossible, and the ville guard fell with his mouth flapping, as if trying to chew air into his dead lungs.
More bamboo darts hit the last defenders and, as they fell, the stickies swarmed over the people in savage abandonment, their writhing tentacles tearing the norms into bloody gobbets.