Borderlands: Gunsight (25 page)

Brick stood back from the wall enough to be hard to hit, but just close enough that he could still aim over the
battlement. He fired the rocket launcher; the technical took the blast on its shield and survived, but the shield was warping, and Brick had already fired again—even as return fire cracked at him from the vehicle . . .

The technical exploded. But others were raining a hail of fire on their position, so that Mordecai shrank back from the wall and looked for another firing position. Bloodwing flapped uncomfortably with his sudden motion. “Bloodwing—go on down to the outrunner and poop on that robot or something. I don’t want you flying around in this much gunfire.”

Bloodwing squawked in complaint.

“You’ll get your chance to help—now go on.”

She made a clucking sound of discontent, then flew down to the outrunner.

“Here come those worm things,” Brick said, carefully peering over the wall. “I’d like to get down there and smash ’em. They’re disgustin’. Don’t like ’em.”

“Don’t do it, Brick,” Mordecai said as he tossed a couple of grenades over the wall. “Those slugs spew acid and a glue out their mouths. They’d fry you or glue you into a ball and swallow you. Shoot ’em through the roof of the mouth if you get a chance. I’m gonna see if I can get a better shooting angle.”

Mordecai found a spot farther down where a narrow triangle piece of wall had been shot away by some errant blast from the arena. He knelt near the wall, slid his rifle barrel out, and edged a little closer.

Another two
thuds
shook the arena as the gate was hammered by shells from technicals; Mordecai could feel the support structure of the wall shivering under him. It wasn’t going to hold forever.

He could see a group of three Reamers on foot, weapons in their hands, just within the semicircle of the besieging enemy; he fitted the rifle butt against his shoulder, adjusted the scope, then let his hands settle the crosshairs on a target with the fine-tuning micro-adjustments that had become second nature to him. And he squeezed the trigger. A Reamer’s head exploded—an incomplete shield—and before the target’s body had even slumped Mordecai was aiming and firing at the man beside him, who was just turning to look at the first Reamer . . . and the second man went down, shot through the bridge of his nose. The third man was turning to run, and he had no shield on his back at all—he went down easily.

Brick was hurling insults and challenges at the Reamers, maybe trying to keep their attention on him so that Mordecai could aim. Mordecai took down two more men, then was stopped by a good shield on the third. He switched the rifle’s fire over to the small mortar-style rounds, and popped out four, in quick succession along the line of the enemy, then he lobbed two more into the technical that was even now lining a shot up on the gate. The blasts rocked the vehicle but its shields held, until a rocket from Brick hit it, followed by a grenade. The vehicle exploded like fireworks, spraying green and blue flame in every direction.

They pulled that coordinated punch off a couple more times, almost by instinct—Mordecai slamming outriders and technicals with his rifle’s explosive rounds, weakening the shields, Brick taking it to the next step, weakening the shield further and then detonating the target.

White-hot fragments of armor hissed through the air, followed by body parts with contrails of blood.

“Ha, you squirming skag puppies!” Brick shouted. “Come and get some! Come on, get some more, eat it up!”

And he threw four hand grenades at once, two prepped grenades in each hand, first one hand then the other, in the midst of the largest concentration of Reamers. Men screamed; bodies flew to pieces that spun from the fireballs, trailing smoke.

Bullets screamed just over Mordecai’s head, from withering return fire; more clattered into the wall, cracked into metal and smacked into synthawood. Splinters whizzed by.

“We’ve punched a hole through their lines!” Mordecai shouted. “Maybe we should make our move, Brick!”

When Brick didn’t answer, he looked over and saw that the big Vault Hunter’s face was coursing with blood. He’d taken a deep gouge from a bullet to the side of his head.

“Oh shit. Brick, don’t do the berserker thing now, man, we can’t afford to just . . .”

But it was too late for that. Brick was swelling up, his face contorting, mouth drawn back into a mad grimace.

“Oh shit . . . Brick, could you just—oh no.”

Brick was vaulting over the wall using his left hand, the right carrying the rocket launcher.

“YEAHHHH!”
he bellowed as he leapt down into his enemies.
“BRICK’S HERE! BRINGING THE PAIN!”

A spray of bullets made Mordecai jerk back from the wall—and he saw a severed human head fly up, higher than the edge of the wall, the still-living brain self-aware as it came cannonballing into the arena, the eyes alight with horror . . .

Mordecai had to duck to keep from getting a faceful . . . of face.

He heard Brick shouting—something about “
This is for Priscilla, you scum!
” He looked over the wall in time to see Brick, in full-on raging berserker form, wading into a group of Reamers, throwing them to the right and left like rag dolls, smashing one into another—but a SlagSlug was rearing over the big Vault Hunter, its mouth open, spewing acid.

Some instinct warned Brick, or maybe the thing’s rancid breath, and he grabbed a big man by the throat and held him up as a human shield. The acid hit the man’s torso; he screamed horridly and flailed . . . and melted away. Brick dropped what was left of him and turned to another man swinging an axe at his head. He plucked the axe from the surprised Bruiser’s hand, broke it over a knee, then ducked under the Reamer’s swing, lifted him up, and stuffed him headlong down into the rearing SlagSlug’s mouth—just as it was starting to spew its glue . . .

The glue formed around the jammed Bruiser—and along with the body it clogged the creature’s throat. The SlagSlug writhed, choking to death.

The second SlagSlug was rearing over Brick, who snatched a rifle out of the hands of a man rushing toward him, brained the onrushing Reamer with the butt of the gun, then, in the blink of an eye, turned and fired a full burst into the SlagSlug’s maw, the bullets ripping up through the roof of its mouth and into its brain. He stepped back as it collapsed at his feet.

Mordecai emptied his click firing to cover Brick’s back, then turned to shout at Extra, waiting in the outrunner. “Get ready! We’re going through the gate!”

He ran to the weapon box and grabbed a green submachine gun with a red ribbon tied around the muzzle. There
was a tag on the ribbon that read,
A MOXXI SPECIAL FOR MORDECAI.

“Isn’t that sweet,” he said, snatching up a box of ammo.

Screams and gunfire came from outside the gate—and it shuddered with another explosive impact.

“Moxxi!” Mordecai yelled. “Open the gate! Quick!”

He leapt down to the arena’s fighting ground, grimaced at the impact, but kept his footing. Encumbered with weapons he ran clumsily to the outrunner, tossed them in the back—except for the submachine gun—and jumped into the front passenger seat, shouting, “Go, robot, go now dammit!” as the gate rolled open. Bloodwing flapped to her place on his shoulder and the robot accelerated through the gate, out into the open.

There, outside the gate, was Brick, still standing but covered with blood, squeezing necks so that heads popped off shoulders, throwing the bodies at the men charging him.

“Oh hell,” Mordecai muttered. Then he shouted, “Brick! Jump aboard!” as the outrunner accelerated to him, skidded to a stop.

Brick vaulted into the back, splashing Mordecai with Reamer blood and some of his own.

“This is all very unwise!” the robot yelled, slamming the accelerator to the floor. They peeled off, weaving between gunmen, bullets and shells whining close overhead. An explosion rocked the outrunner but it kept going—and then Brick was up on the turret, snapping off explosive rounds at the enemy behind as they plowed through the ragged ranks of the Reamers.

Mordecai turned in his seat and fired at an outrider swerving up beside them, shooting the Reamers clinging to its
running boards with the green SMG’s acid rounds. The men squealed in agony and melted apart. The outrider spun away and was quickly left behind.

The brave little robot drove them full speed, off across the tundra, toward the Frostbite Highlands, and Gunsight.

E
arly evening in Gunsight and Daphne was crouching in the seared shell of a building, looking over the ragged edge of an old tavern. There were bodies lying about behind her, rank with decay. Smoke rose from the wreckage of the town; somewhere a man sobbed.

She kept low, hoping to avoid being seen by the men in the approaching trucks.

Daphne saw Jasper before he saw her. That wasn’t much comfort, since he had a lot of armed men with him. And she didn’t have much cover here. If they caught her . . .

They were coming into Gunsight in a ragtag convoy of five trucks, Jasper in the lead one, sitting to the right of his driver. The soldiers in Jasper’s livery, in the back of the trucks, looked half charred, bleary-eyed, some of them wounded. Jasper must’ve run out of med hypos.

The convoy had the look of a small force that had barely escaped some great catastrophe. The dented, scorched trucks bumped along over the debris in the streets, now and then crushing a body as they came.

Daphne had picked up scraps of news as she’d skulked stealthily from shadow to shadow, in the ruins of Gunsight. She’d heard the stragglers talking, coming back from the battlefield, telling the few survivors of the battleship attack on the town what had happened.

Jasper had gone to Corpse Crevice, expecting to catch Reamus there, unawares—and had been caught himself, ambushed by Reamus’s men and a dozen SlagSlugs. Most of Jasper’s army had been killed—and about a third of Reamus’s men, and he’d pulled back, trying to retrench.

Then word had gotten to him through frantic ECHO communications that Gunsight was under attack by some kind of juggernaut, an armored vehicle big as a small town—which had blasted and crushed his stronghold, crushed every defensive emplacement he had in town, and then had moved on, looking for fresh targets.

He’d come back to assess the damage, and Daphne could see by the blank, stunned look on his face that he was almost in despair.

“Good, you fat son of a hive,” she muttered. She still had the machine pistol and the shotgun, a couple of grenades, but there was no way she could take out all those men. She’d have to let them slide by.

Only, she hadn’t reckoned on Jasper’s scouts.

He’d sent men out on foot, ahead, to furtively check out the town, and they were coming back to meet the slow-moving convoy. One of them came through the building she was crouching in.

“Yo! Got a sniper in here!” the man yelled, coming up behind Daphne. “Boss! We got a—”

He didn’t get any more out—she’d jumped up, spun
on her heel, and shot him in the face before he said any more.

But it was too late—Jasper and his men had seen her.

The trucks screeched to a sudden halt and Jasper jumped out, pointing at her. “Get her! Get her and drag her here to . . . Oh no, no, keep it away from me!”

She turned to see what he was so scared of, and saw Bigjaws, bruised, one of the mutant’s arms broken, wounded, blackened, but the giant teeth were intact as he charged Jasper.

He shrieked and turned to climb into the truck but the creature was already upon him, the mutant’s head snapping forward in a snake-striking movement, his jaws closing shut over Jasper’s head—crunching it like an egg in a clenching fist.

Blood and gray matter spurted from between its teeth as it turned and dragged Jasper’s spasming body toward the ruins.

Multiple points of gunfire erupted from the convoy, centering on Bigjaws. The convergent fire tore the mutant apart . . . but it was too late to save Jasper.

His men walked over to inspect what was left of Jasper’s body. One of them laughed. Two others knelt and went through the dead boss’s pockets. There was an argument about something they found there. She caught the words “Divide it up later.” The men turned away from him and went back to their convoy. She supposed they were discussing fresh career options.

Daphne waited till the convoy drove away, and then picked her way through the ruins to Jasper’s body. She stared down at it. “What a mess. Wish it’d been me instead of Bigjaws, cracking your head open, you fat bag of skag diarrhea.”

The half-crushed head was a bag of broken bones with a face on it now. She bent over and tore the last shreds of flesh that tethered it to the body.

Then she dropkicked Jasper’s head into the muddy ditch.

She laughed softly to herself, then turned and hurried through the ruins, through the shadows, through the wreckage of Gunsight—heading for the edge of town.

•  •  •

“You really think we lost them?” Mordecai asked as he climbed up close beside Brick on the high boulder projecting from the plains. The morning sun was behind them and their shadows projected starkly across the tundra in the dawn light.