Moonfeast (17 page)

Lumbering on like an express train, the rhino crossed the forest clearing in only a few seconds, running directly over the campfire as if not even noticing the flames. But as it approached the muddy bank, the mutie abruptly slammed to a halt. Hesitantly, the rhino took a step forward, a squat leg touching the water. But it immediately withdrew and loudly roared in frustration, its double horns slashing the air wildly.

“See this, not believe,” Jak said, trying to figure out if the rhino was playing some sort of trick.

Once more, the rhino dipped a foot into the river and hastily withdrew. Radiating fury the way a furnace did heat, the mutie once more bellowed in unbridle rage and began to march along the shoreline, only yards from the cluster of people.

“Good Lord, the beast will not enter the water,” Doc whispered in amazement, lowering his two blasters. “Madam, how did you know?”

“Basic science,” Mildred said, massaging the back of her neck. “The creature is armor-plated, built like a tank. But it’s too small to have any real buoyancy, way too dense, which means it can’t possibly swim. Deep water would chill that thing faster than shoving it off a cliff.”

“But the water isn’t deep,” Krysty said hesitantly, securing the tape on the implo gren.

The physician smiled. “Yeah, but it doesn’t know that.”

“The mutie can smash through granite, but it fears water?” Ryan said slowly, almost lowering his fist.

“Of course! It was the pounding of the legs that reminded me of a documentary I once saw about elephants. It explained how they can swim, but just barely. Any heavier, and it would be impossible.” Mildred gestured with a palm. “And behold, there is your proof. Anything that could survive a pipe bomb in its mouth would have to be denser than concrete.”

Waddling over to one of the chilled sec men, the rhino started to noisily eat the body—boots, blaster and all going into the chomping jaws.

“Hold breath?” Jak asked, covering his mouth with a palm for no sane reason.

“No, the metabolism is too fast,” Mildred answered confidently, finally holstering her blaster. “See how fast it breathes? The mutie would suffocate under water in only a few seconds trying to supply oxygen to its heart. Too big, too muscled, too bad.”

Finished with the first corpse, the rhino glared at the companions huddled on the sandbar and stomped the ground a few times defiantly before going to the next body.

“What should we do now, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked, rummaging in his pockets. The man found two replacement brass and slipped them into the cylinder of the Webley, closing the blaster with fingertip pressure.

“Get to the other side of the river,” Ryan said, walking into the rushing water, “and start looking for those bastard horses!”

Sloshing to the opposite bank, the companions went to check the bodies of the chilled, while Ryan stood guard. Steadily munching, the rhino hatefully watched them from the other side of the shallow river, its piggy eyes never leaving the big man.

Untouched by the rhino, the blasters were in fine condition, just old and dirty. The sec men had been heavily armed and carrying a wide assortment of blasters, several of them crude affairs built from old lavatory plumbing and iron bailing wire. Since they already had better weapons than these, the companions concentrated on recovering any live brass.

“Keep the very best, dump the rest,” Krysty commanded. “We’re carrying enough deadweight as it is.”

“Never enough brass, though.” J.B. chuckled, pouring a handful of loose 9 mm rounds into his munitions bag. The jingling was music to his ears.

“Pity there was no black powder,” Doc rumbled, rotating the cylinder of the LeMat. Then he dry fired the gun a few times to check the action.

Along with the blasters and brass, there was an abundance of whips, knives and boomerangs, all of which was left behind. However, the companions discovered a host of other useful items: a small compass, a couple
of wax candles, beef jerky, beans and five more self-heats.

“Must have been saving these for something special,” J.B. said, tucking the cans into his munitions bag.

“What better celebration than their own demise, eh, John Barrymore?” Doc asked, carefully adding a copper percussion nipple to the LeMat before holstering the weapon. Now he was fully armed, with almost more ammunition for the two blasters than he could carry. It was a delightful feeling, and one that he wished to experience more often.

“No sign of the horses yet,” Ryan announced, resting a combat boot on a fallen log. “All right, make camp and let’s have some chow.”

“Right here, Ryan?” Doc asked askance, glancing at the bloody corpses strewed around. Flies were starting to arrive in droves, along with new swarms of mosquitoes.

“Don’t know about you, but I was hungry before this fight started,” Ryan replied, never taking his gaze off the rhino. “Now, I’m bastard famished. Besides which, it is getting dark and a campfire might attract the horses.”

“We’ll just move upwind,” Mildred added, “and build an extra fire between us and the dearly departed.”

Soon enough, the two fires were crackling away, and the air was filled with the smell of frying fish, coffee sub, bacon and beans from the self-heats.

“Ah, pure ambrosia!” Doc exclaimed, inhaling deeply. “A meal fit for a baron.”

“Just beans.” Jak grinned, adding a dash of shine to the bubbling legumes.

“My dear Jak, you seriously underestimate your skills as a culinary expert,” Doc said, smiling as he squatted down on his heels. “You could make even the best French chef jealous.”

“Prefer MRE,” Jak said honestly, taking a taste with a wooden spoon. Then he frowned.

“Needs some garlic?” Mildred asked with a grin.

“No, filia powder,” the teenager replied. “But good enough for now.”

Accepting the M-16 from Krysty, Doc took his turn as guard, and Ryan came back to wash and have dinner with the others. In the middle of the meal, Mildred replaced Doc, who dived into the meal with obvious gusto.

Across the river, the rhino snorted at the smells of the cooking food and pounded the ground to show its displeasure. The companions ignored the beast as much as possible.

As true night arrived, the companions could see a soft glow on the western horizon and the vague outline of a predark city, hundreds of lights twinkling among the crumbling buildings.

As expected, the horses individually started coming back during the night, and soon all five had returned, hungry, dirty, their manes full of burrs.

Tending to the animals, the companions gave them food, combed out the burrs and treated some deep scratches with witch hazel. The horses nickered at the sting of the antiseptic fluid, but clearly had been treated this way before, and none of them bolted.

“We were lucky and didn’t lose much,” Krysty stated, checking the contents of a saddlebag. “But now that we
are down a horse, somebody is going to have to pair up in the morning.”

“Millie can ride with me,” J.B. said, looking up from thumbing fresh rounds into an exhausted clip for the Uzi. “Plenty of room on my saddle.”

“I’ll say!” Mildred replied in a lusty voice that made the man blush and the rest of the companions roar with laughter.

Across the river, the rhino snorted in frank disapproval at the sound of merriment and went back to eating the dead.

Taking the first shift, Jak settled in with a rapidfire and a cup of hot coffee sub, while the others banked the two fires with extra wood. Crawling into their patched bedrolls, the companions were warm enough, and made sure that their weapons were close at hand. Just in case of trouble. At first, it was difficult for them to get to sleep over the steady munching from the other side of the river, but eventually their tired bodies yielded to the demands of nature, and soon a chorus of gentle snoring mixed with the nearby rush of the water and the breaking of bones.

In the morning the companions were pleased to discover that the rhino had departed. However, they felt sure he was still in the area, watching and waiting for them to make a mistake and cross the river into his part of the world. Suspiciously, the corpse of the fat sec woman was untouched, the blaster still lying in her outstretched hand.

Well-fed, curried and rested, the horses now accepted the companions as their new masters, and made no complaints as they climbed into the saddles. With the
loss of his stallion, Ryan took the next-largest animal, a barrel-chested mare with a reddish-brown coat and a thick black mane.

“Okay, let’s ride. But close to the river,” Ryan directed, sliding the Steyr into a gunboot set alongside his saddle. The leather sleeve hadn’t been made for this particular weapon, and the telescopic sight made it a snug fit. That meant Ryan wouldn’t have to worry about the longblaster bouncing free if they were chased over rough terrain.

“No argument there!” Mildred replied, wrapping her arms around the waist of J.B. while the man shook the reins and got his gelding into motion.

Staying at an easy pace, the companions rode on through the next few days, stopping only to cook meals, sleep and regularly check for any saddle sores. But the horses were in fine shape, and actually seemed to relish the relaxed pace of the ride, along with the steady supply of food. Each of them was starting to noticeably fill out a little, the gaunt look easing in their long faces, muscles swelling, a healthy shine returning to their coats.

There was no further sign of the rhino, but the companions wisely stayed close to the river anyway, until it snaked away to the south, with the predark ruins just to the north. With no choice in the matter, Ryan led the group away from the waterway, feeling steadily more vulnerable as it receded.

“What weapons got left?” Jak asked, his body moving to the motion of the horses as if he had been born in a saddle.

“Two pipe bombs, the two implo grens, a jar full of firecrackers and a dozen road flares,” J.B. answered.
“If that damn thing charges us again, you can fragging guess which I’m using first!”

Hearing the worried tone in his voice, Mildred gave the man a squeeze around the waist, and he replied by patting her hand.

At dawn the next day the companions reached the outskirts of the city. Traces of a paved road appeared sporadically under the thick grass, and occasionally the rusted remains of a mailbox would appear inside a clump of weeds. There was a large irregular hole in the ground alongside a tall sign announcing a gas station, and a U.S. Navy Hummer sat in the middle of a field of clover, the interior now, ironically, a humming beehive.

By noon, the ruins were coming closer together, the scattered remains of the suburbs giving way to office buildings and stores. There were a lot of cars scattered on the streets, and an APC rested amid the rubble of a smashed fountain.

None of the buildings rose more than ten stories. Palm trees grew randomly, often out of the wrecks of cars or store windows. A large building seemed to have a small rain forest thriving on the roof.

“Must have once had a rooftop garden,” Mildred guessed, using a hand to shade her face from the sun. “They made good insulation, and even better PR.”

“Better what, madam?” Doc asked, titling his head.

“Public relations,” Mildred replied, feeling sheepish for some reason. “A lot of business executives didn’t care how they made money, as long as they were liked by the public.”

“Scalawags.” Doc snorted in contempt.

She nodded. “At the very least.”

“Folks revolt and hang?” Jak asked, checking over the passing ruins.

“Sadly, no,” Mildred said with a sigh. “But sometimes, it sure would have been nice if they had.”

“Bastard odd place,” Ryan muttered, the Steyr lying across his lap for quick access. “The city looks like it was nuked before skydark.”

“It was,” Mildred answered. “Well, sort of, anyway. This isn’t a real city, but the training grounds for the SEALs to practice fighting in an urban environment. This was built to resemble the ruins of a bombed-out city.”

“They make like this?” Jak asked. The teen wasn’t sure if he was more shocked or offended.

“Deuced clever, I must admit,” Doc rumbled, riding past the marquee of a crumbling movie theater. “Albeit, a tad Draconian.”

“The only way to practice putting out a fire is to set something ablaze,” Krysty said pragmatically, her hair steadily flexing and coiling to show her unease. Ever since the companions landed on this island, she had the feeling of being watched, but never so intently as now. It was as if a thousand eyes were studying her every move.

“Something like that,” Mildred agreed. “Although the SEALs mostly practiced rescue operations, saving hostages, recovering stolen nukes and such.”

“Mostly,” Ryan said. “But not always.”

“Sometimes they did nightcreeps on terrorists,” Mildred admitted honestly. “Or at least, I think so. All of
their work was very hush-hush, burn-before-reading, that sort of thing.”

“Midnight soldiers,” Doc muttered, using his ebony sword stick to flick aside a rusty soda can from the top of a crashed jetfighter, the fuselage oddly marked with what appeared to be Cyrillic lettering. The can skittered along the cracked sidewalk and rattled around inside a pothole, the noise echoing slightly along the rows of artificially destroyed buildings.

Suddenly a fuzzy little monkey appeared in a window. Scarily larger than a sewer rat, its fur was a deep brown with a distinctive white belly and matching bib just under the jaw. It chattered nosily at the riders, clearly annoyed over the invasion, then hissed with surpassing volume, exposing dagger-like teeth, the front two dripping a greenish fluid.

Instantly, Ryan fired from the hip, the slug slamming the animal off the ledge and sending the corpse tumbling away.

“Acid,” Mildred cursed, thumbing back the hammer on her Czech-made ZKR target pistol. “The little bastard had acid-based venom!” The wood was rapidly dissolving where the venom splattered on the window-sill, tendrils of black smoke rising from the sizzling splotch.

“Hopefully, he was alone,” Krysty said, hefting the M-16 rapidfire. She was down to her last clip, the same as Jak. In short order, they would be back to their handblasters.

Just then there came a scrambling, scratching noise from the sewer and a second monkey appeared, closely followed by another, then a dozen or so more.

“Ace them!” Ryan yelled, cutting loose with SIG-Sauer. The first few rounds blew away the nearest monkey, then two more behind. But the rest kept coming, as unstoppable as the morning tide.

However, the rest of the companions opened fire, the hail of lead from the rapidfires chewing a crimson swatch through the howling monkeys. Immediately the rest of the tiny creatures changed direction, wildly jumping back into the sewers and drains. Some of them fled under the rusted wrecks of predark cars, or hurtled themselves through the smashed windows of stores in a frantic effort to escape. In only moments the street was clear of any live animals. A score of furry bodies were sprawled on the weedy asphalt, twitching into death.

“Little bastards afraid blasters,” Jak growled, pleasantly surprised at the reaction.

“Indeed, my young friend,” Doc muttered, easing down the hammer of his LeMat. “They must have encountered firearms before and the survivors of that experience informed the others to beware.”

“Well, they certainly have now,” J.B. snarled, glancing around. Scampering along the ruins on the corner, a dozen monkeys ducked out of sight.

“Stay razor, people,” Ryan added, turning his head to check his blindside. Sure enough, a monkey was crawling through the leafy vines growing over the hood of a burned-out ambulance. The man stroked the trigger and the 9 mm round plowed into the creature, throwing it backward to smack into a brick wall, leaving a ghastly stain of green venom and red blood.

“These little bastards like to jump at you from behind,” Mildred added, holstering the ZKR to haul
the scattergun from the boot. As she worked the pump-action, a monkey leaped toward her from the stained-glass window of a church. Instinctively the physician triggered the weapon. The blast shredded the tiny simian, and finished the destruction of the century-old window.

“We better find that part, then get out triple fast,” Krysty said, then she heard something scramble overhead.

Looking up, the woman cursed at the sight of a monkey scampering along a telephone cable stretched across the street. She fired twice, the first round blowing off the head of the animal and the second cutting the line. As the cable dropped to the ground, more monkeys rushed around on the roof of the apartment building directly alongside the telephone pole. Damn little muties were smart. Too damn smart for her liking!

“Make haste, Ryan. Where do we try for the part we need?” Doc asked, tucking the LeMat into his belt to crack open the Webley and quickly reload.

Brushing back his long hair, Ryan scowled over the pretend city, dourly noting the incredible number of monkeys that were jumping around the companions, always trying to stay behind the group.