Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels (34 page)
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ryan ducked as a burst of full-auto fire thudded into the thick masonry wall. A few bullets cracked in through the window over his head.
It was a long burst. When it stopped abruptly, he came up with his Steyr already pointed toward where he’d seen the woman with the M16, a block away.
Through the scope he saw that she had her head down and was fumbling to swap the magazine she’d just exhausted for one that was loaded. He drew a bead and fired.
Just as the trigger broke, he saw her look up, which meant that instead of hitting her on the crown of the head, the 7.62 mm bullet hit her smack in the middle of the forehead.
She had already fallen to the cracked and weed-grown sidewalk when he brought the longblaster back online. He promptly crouched back into cover of the stub wall as more bullets came his way.
They had been besieged since late the previous night. Fortunately, they’d found cover in the ruins of a sturdy two-story building standing by itself on a corner, with only rubble plots and patches of low weeds immediately surrounding it. The structure was small enough for the seven of them to keep an eye on the situation and lay down fire at need in all directions. Some of the second story was actually still standing, though the way the ceiling sagged in places didn’t make Ryan confident that it would stay that way for long.
“Who’s out there right now?” Krysty asked. She was hiding behind a wall at ninety degrees to Ryan. She had a lever-action .44 carbine she’d kept from their haul from the late Hizzoner’s arsenal.
Mildred called an answer from the other room. “We got the girl gang, the ones with the generic vests with the homemade logo that’s either a screaming head or a really badly drawn chicken and the Dead Elvises. What we did to piss those boys off I don’t know.”
“Perhaps the Elvises blame us for provoking the general internecine warfare that has overtaken the entire Rubble,” Doc suggested mildly. Then he straightened enough to fire a fast-aimed shot .44 round from his LeMat before ducking again. “Ha! Be banished, brigand!”
“Well,” J.B. said thoughtfully. He had his back turned to Ryan, shooting the other way as targets presented themselves. “They’re not exactly wrong.”
“Ryan, I’m getting low on ammo,” Krysty reported.
The one-eyed man grunted. He was running low himself.
“I thought your notion was to avert a war,” Mildred said.
“Hey. I reckoned, better a lot of little wars than one big one,” he said. “Just didn’t reckon on that particular wildfire spreading so far, so fast. Anyway, my main thought was getting our asses out of the ville alive.”
He glanced up, only to see yellow muzzle-flashes flickering everywhere in the early-morning sun.
“Got to admit I may’ve screwed up that last part, though.”
Jak came into the room with Ryan. “Girls fight Elvises now,” he reported.
“That’s good,” Mildred said, “because here come the Chickenheads!”
Ryan came up again enough to flash sight on a fat guy waving an ax over his head with both hands and drop him. Then he had to get down fast because the charging gang laid down such a withering return fire.
He was just wondering whether to swap to the SIG, which had a much higher rate of fire than the Scout, plus he had more ammo for it, when he heard the engine roar, accelerating hard and fast and getting quickly louder.
He risked a glance up. A skirmish line of a dozen gangers was approaching down the street, firing as they came.
Around the corner behind them came tearing a big old honking rhinoceros of a power wag, with gigantic knobby tires and firing ports in the armored box behind the cab. The Chickenheads turned in surprise and consternation.
The wag bore down on them. A woman leaned out the passenger-side window. She blasted away at them with an MP5-K held by fore and rear pistol grips.
“Get outta my way, you street rats!” Patch screamed.
The Chickenheads did their best. They scattered like actual chickens from a charging bull. Not all of them made it.
The wag barely bobbed as its tires drove over them.
“That’s a Unimog,” Ryan muttered. “You’d have to reckon he’d have himself a Unimog.”
Four other, less imposing, wags rolled around the corner behind the first wag. Fire flashes danced from their cabs and compartments as others sprayed bullets at the now-fleeing gang members. The monstrous lead wag braked to a squealing, bucking stop before Ryan and the companions’ hideout. Its tire cleats ripped up chunks of frost-heaved asphalt.
Patch still hung out the window, menacing the entire street with her machine pistol and her scowl. A black-haired head appeared above the far side of the driver’s compartment. White teeth showed beneath a dark mustache.
“Going my way?” Nikk, the scavvy boss, called cheerfully.
“So I take it our deal’s still on?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah. I keep my deals. ’Less I can’t. You know the drill.”
“Yeah.”
“What took you so long?” Mildred called, rising from her firing position in the ruined building.
“Hey, you know, it’s the Deathlands. Nothing ever happens on schedule. Also, you’re welcome for us saving your sorry asses.”
“We could’ve handled them,” Ryan said.
“Sure, sure,” Nikk said with an indulgent chuckle.
“What’s going on in the wider world?” Mildred asked, shouldering her pack and stepping into the street. She still held her ZKR 551 ready in case more attackers popped up.
Nikk threw a hand in the air. “This. Everywhere. Gangs are fighting each other all through the Rubble. Like packs of rabid dogs. Never seen anything like it. We got a power of blasting to do. And that’s before we even get to Windsor.”
“This is your fault, isn’t it?” Patch said.
Ryan shrugged. “Yeah.”
“You got to admit,” Nikk said as the rest of the party emerged from the building, bowed beneath the weight of their packs, “there’s a certain irony in our having to rescue you right after you signed on as extra sec on my caravan.”
“Go figure,” Ryan said.
Actually, he had. He had foreseen this might be happening when he made another side trip the night they had finally thrown in the towel on trying to find allies for the assault on Hizzoner. One he never did mention to Leto—need to know and all that. Which was why, when they returned to the giant blocky building near Angel Land, which they had since learned was a predark TV studio, to strike a deal with the very scavvies who had evicted them from it, he had specified a rendezvous at this previously scouted, easily defensible position.
“Don’t know why you bother with them, Nikk,” Patch said sullenly, slipping back inside. “We ran ’em off quick when they came to call.”
“Well, we had the drop on them, too, you might remember,” her boss said, slipping back down behind the wheel of the enormous wag. “And I reckon anybody who can face down the wrath of the whole Desolation Angel Nation and get away with all their parts has exactly the skills we need for the road ahead.”
Patch grunted and locked her eyes ahead.
“Does everyone hate you wherever you go?” asked Zander, a burly scavvy with a shaved head and a steel hoop dangling from the lobe of his left ear, who hopped down from the second wag to help the new members of the team load their traps aboard. Other scavvies had climbed out to pull sec.
“It’s a gift,” J.B. said.
“Scoot on over here,” Nikk told his second-in-command. “Climb in with us, Ryan. Her ass is skinny. You’ll fit fine.”
With poor grace Patch opened the door and slid over. “My ammo’s coming outta your pay!” she told Ryan as he clambered in.
For a fact the seat was wide enough they could mebbe have fit another person in without crowding, Ryan thought.
“What about our pal Leto?” J.B. asked through the window.
Nikk chuckled again.
“Seems like the shiny new boss of Angel Land found himself a shiny new mayor to do business with. By the time the sec men the last mayor had mustered just north of the Seven-Five came back and ran off all the dozen or so gangs that were laying siege to the place, the Desolation Angels and the City of Detroit, so called, were allies, joined at the hip for all eternity. And the new Hizzoner never even welched with his whole army right outside.”
“No surprise there,” Ryan said.
“Boy’s got a sound head on his shoulders,” J.B. observed. He resettled his hat on his head and turned to find a spot in one of the scavvy wags.
“So it looks like your boy Leto is liable to find himself and his Angels sitting pretty and posed to take over the whole dark-dusted Rubble after all,” Nikk said, grabbing the stick and thunking the wag into first. “If he pulls through the current shitstorm of crazy, that is.”
Ryan cast his eye out the window of the Unimog as the beast snorted and rolled onward. The bodies of fallen attackers crunched and squelched beneath its tires.
Blasterfire rattled, faint with distance. Then Ryan heard another quick burst from just a block or so away. Somewhere, a quarter mile or so to the west, a brown ball of smoke rolled suddenly into a sky that was clouding over. A moment later the boom of the explosion rolled over them.
“If,” Ryan agreed.
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460335109
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Victor Milan for his contribution to this work.
DESOLATION ANGELS
Copyright © 2014 by Worldwide Library
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