The Wasteland Soldier, Book 3, Drums Of War (TWS) (17 page)

He slung the carbine over his shoulder and drew his revolver. The Shaylighters sprang at Rita, grabbing hold of her arms. Stone fired, a single shot, and planted the bullet through her head. He raced after Quinn and they emerged in an open air court.
He urged her in the direction of the narrow openings that led outside. The night air was cool as they ran, pushing their muscles hard, hurdling potholes and debris.
They bent and swerved, steel balls hissing all around them. They burst through the narrow tunnels.

They weaved through the sea of old vehicles, nipping around cars and vans and bikes, always folded over as they ran. Stone looked at her as they disappeared into the nearest street. She was strong, capable, but she’d taken a savage beating in the cage, face cut, one eye half closed, and she was already beginning to tire. Wordlessly, he gestured with his revolver and she followed him into a derelict building, pausing to catch her breath. Vegetation crept around the brickwork, silver in the light of the moon.

The building stank. The roof had collapsed. Stone forced a path through the debris and into another room.

Quinn placed her hand on his arm. “They’re in the street.”

He nodded, slowed, but kept moving. She followed him into a paved yard where wildflowers clawed through the cracks and wrapped around brittle metal poles. She could hear the shouts and running feet. Her thoughts turned cold. She focused her eyes on Stone and wondered why he’d come here. He had no noise box to detect any sickness. He was either stupid or very astute. She knew it had to be the later. She was banking on it. She watched him slip through a broken chain-link fence and into another building. He went gingerly through the rooms, the structure creaking and groaning as the wind ached through its fractured walls.

He stopped and waved her down. She waited amongst the dirt and the dust, heart thudding in her chest, gulping air, the dull ache of Jeremy’s betrayal rattling in her head.

Outside, a few rusted vehicles littered the asphalt, angled against crumbling tenement blocks. A steel tower, its cables of energy ripped from the sky, had flattened a bus with markings and shattered windows. The city pressed in on her, suffocating, seeping through her clothes, clawing at her flesh. In those long seconds, the agony of her life swirled round and round.

She looked at Stone. He continued to watch the street, slowly reloading the carbine, one ball after the other, not a sound from him, his face stoic.

Soirese had quelled the wild excitement of her warriors, urging for silence as she strained to detect her prey.

They went past, making barely a sound, glancing left and right at the ruined buildings.

Quinn slowly drew two knives. Stone wet his lips, finger on the trigger of the carbine. Dust filled his nostrils and he stifled a sneeze as the war-band moved further along the street.

Then Soirese turned and clenched her fists, veins bulging, and screamed.

Bare-chested warriors rushed the tenement building, yelling war cries. A tall youth appeared in a broken doorway, his arm pulled back, an axe in his fist. He swung and Stone fired, lashing a steel ball into his stomach, putting him down.
Quinn drove her blades into a warrior and jerked them free as he fell back. A brutish man slashed his spear at her and she lost her footing in the rubble. Stone shot him in the throat with the carbine. A blade whooshed before him and the weapon was knocked from his grasp.
He piled a heavy punch into the head of a warrior, knocking him sideways. More of them were climbing in through gaping holes in the walls, pouring into the cramped and gloomy space.

Quinn was pinned in a corner with two warriors sweeping blades at her. She ducked, feinted right, attacked left with her twin weapons, slicing through a thigh and a kneecap, then stabbing a painted stomach and chest.
A blade ripped along her arm and she cried out. A warrior thudded into her and she went down, on her back, gasping for air. The warrior leaned over her, spear raised, shiny tip poised. Stone, on the other side of the building, was too far away to help; clubbing Shaylighters with his fists, battering them as he fought to reclaim his dropped carbine.

The tremor was sudden, scattering them all like toys from a playpen. The ground tilted violently and they tumbled, fighting as they went. The street exploded.
Asphalt was hurled into the air. Giant chunks rained back down on the Shaylighters. A sinkhole appeared, widening and deepening, swallowing screaming warriors. Mosscar was angry and the tribe began to panic. Soirese was losing control of her men.

Inside the building it was chaos. Half of the floor above had fallen down. Quinn rammed her knives into bare flesh. A brown rusted vehicle spun in the air and rocked against the building, toppling a wall and crushing men. Stone coughed inside a billowing cloud of dust. A warrior piled into him. He desperately curled his arm around the man’s neck, holding him tight as he yanked his revolver from his belt. Punches jabbed at him. His attacker snarled and wriggled to free himself. Stone jammed the barrel against the man’s chin and squeezed the trigger. Blood and gore spattered his face.

The ground shifted once more as the tremor showed no sign of abating. He kept hold of the body as a trio of Shaylighters emerged from the gloom, firing carbines. They peppered the corpse and Stone returned fire with his revolver, deadly and accurate; three shots, three bodies. More warriors surged toward the ruined building. There was no end to them. Stone fired until the chamber of his revolver was exhausted.

He let the body slide down and drew his sword. He slashed, and gouged the tip of his blade through painted flesh, but the warrior he was fighting ignored the pain and chopped down with his axe. Another Shaylighter came at him but he flicked the sword and ripped a line through his throat.

“Quinn,” he shouted.

“Stone.”

He twisted violently as the ground beneath him continued to vibrate and weapons hacked and jabbed at him. Sheathing his sword, he wrestled a carbine from the gloom, fished into the ammunition bag worn across his chest and dropped in a clutch of steel balls.
He pumped the sliding mechanism and began firing, blasting the remaining Shaylighters and picking his way across the shaking rubble as he took them down.

She emerged from the choking dust clouds, filthy and blood stained. They ran through crumbling tenement buildings, the fury of the tremor pursuing them with equal verve. A second sinkhole opened up and the building they had fought in disappeared.

But more Shaylighters had streamed from the stadium. It was far from over.

They burst onto a wide avenue; gaping sinkholes and hanging clouds of dust and ash.

No more than blurry outlines, the Shaylighters continued to fire at them. Steel balls whipped through the air, without a single one even coming close, but the hissing sound as each ball pinged through the swirling dust clouds chilled their blood. They continued to flee, directionless inside the sprawling urban landscape. They vaulted over a low chain-link fence surrounding an enclosed area and slowed as oddly shaped obstacles loomed out of the dark. The ground was strangely springy, a carpet of artificial bark that appeared undisturbed. The two of them dropped behind a child-sized house of rusted metal. Panting heavily, they hurriedly reloaded the carbines they now both carried. The world was beginning to fall back into place and the cries of the Shaylighters were distant and muffled as the tremor finally ceased and the wind nudged at the dust clouds.

Quinn dressed her arm wound with a strip of cloth.

“They’ll keep hunting us.” She grimaced as she spoke. “They have to … to stop us from telling anyone they’re here. I can’t believe how many of them there are. They must have been hiding in Mosscar for years.”

She looked at him

“How did you know it was safe?”

He prodded the vegetation. “This wouldn’t grow.”

“You didn’t know that. Not for certain.”

She wiped her face.

“You risked your life coming in here. You’re fucking crazy. Is Nuria with you?”

“She’s in Great Onglee.”

“Then you’re a selfish bastard, as well as insane.”

He shrugged. “She said the same thing.”

“She’s right.”

They weaved through the enclosed area, edging past flora covered steps and slides and tunnels and boats and rockers. Stone felt his skin crawl as the rusted steel frames creaked in the wind.
He glanced toward Quinn; one eye half closed, the other drawn wide. She could feel the presence, too. It echoed with ghosts. This had been a special place, once, but the world had bubbled and blistered and now there were only whispers in the dark.

As they clambered over another chain-link fence Stone saw the Shaylighters had picked up their scent once more. He watched them loop around the enclosed area, even though it would have been much quicker to power through it.

Glistening with perspiration, they angled along a narrow concrete pathway that curved toward an underpass. Blackness smothered them. Faded graffiti covered the tilled walls. Boots echoed against the hard ground as they ran. Quinn glanced over her shoulder and swallowed hard as she saw a chasing pack of nearly twenty warriors.

The spearhead of the war-band was a tall, lean woman, arms and legs pumping furiously.

Soirese raised a single fist as she emerged from the underpass. Her warriors gathered around her, weapons ready.

Taut skin shiny, fists poised against her hips, she stood and listened, hearing only the rapid beat of her heart and the rustle of vegetation. The wind tossed her hair.
Her eyes roamed the length of a rubble filled avenue, left and right. Deserted. She knew they could not have outrun them. Quinn was moving slow after her beating and the stranger appeared to be limping, too. They must have taken refuge within a building once more. Here the structures were single-storey with blasted windows and large faded signs. There were alleyways nestled between some of the buildings but she knew them to be dead ends; weeds and rubbish and old rusted dumpsters teeming with disgusting black flies.

She broke her men into search parties. It would not take long to find them. They were close; she could almost taste them.

Soirese led one group onto a grass covered bank that fringed the underpass. It was an excellent vantage point. Her warriors were poking through buildings and alleyways but finding nothing. She paced, frustrated. Behind her a four-lane highway, choked with hundreds of vehicles locked in torturous lines, curved around towering buildings that reached toward the clouds. She had been born here. In the very bowels of the tallest building. She saw flickering lights in the darkness. She would capture these murderous insurgents for Essamon, for the people of the stadium and for the families of the towers. She would bring Quinn and the bearded man to the arena. They would face her fists and Mosscar would reverberate with her strength and power.

She peered into a few vehicles, dropped to her stomach and looked beneath them, but her prey was nowhere to be seen. She slammed a bunched fist against the roof of a car.
She scrambled down the bank and strode onto the street, waiting beside an immense vehicle that had rolled onto its side. It was the length of many cars and the height of several men. It was patched with brown rust and its giant wheel arches, thick with black grime, had long been stripped of their enormous tyres.

She glanced at it - once, twice - and sneered.

They had gone nowhere; they were inside the metal beast.

The back window was smashed open and she glimpsed broken seating inside. It was a good place to hide.

She whistled and her warriors surrounded the vehicle.

Squashed tight against his body in the narrow luggage compartment, Quinn held her breath as the Shaylighters scrambled over the coach.
The metal hatch overhead, in truth the side of the vehicle, she guessed, groaned as footsteps patterned across it.
Stone’s hip wound was stinging and he desperately wanted to scratch it but dared not move. The seconds dragged by as the warriors dropped inside the long vehicle and found no one hiding there. They heard the woman give fresh orders, clearly frustrated. There was the hammer of feet as the warriors jumped from the vehicle, landing back on the asphalt.

Minutes passed and they heard the woman lead her warriors along the avenue.

Stone shook his head.

Her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Rooted in the same position, Quinn felt her left leg turn numb. She tried to flex it but there was no movement. A dent in one corner of the hatch allowed a pocket of cool air to filter inside but she was feeling nauseous at the stench of the confined space.

There was the thump of horses and cries of Shaylighters. The patrol loitered for a minute or two before galloping away.

They waited for a long time. They knew it was impossible to remain hidden forever. Dawn would soon arrive and there would be no way out of the city then. They needed a blanket of darkness to escape. Stone wondered if Quinn had found her answers. He certainly hoped so. The size of the tribe deeply concerned him. She had described only a handful of road bandits but this was a small army, tucked away in place no one would ever look.