The giant fans of the redoubt’s HVAC system produced a slight overpressure. Air gusted outward as the great doors began to slide apart noiselessly—or at least with no noise that could be heard over the horrific bomb-blast concerto playing nonstop outside.
Night waited. But no stars. A roof of cloud or maybe smoke, lit by pulsing hell-glows of yellow and orange from below, from within by blue-white lightning novas.
As the doors opened wider, the air from outside eddied back in, stinging hot, bringing a swirl of gray ash soft as the finest fur. Ryan choked and gagged on the stink of sulfur and his eye watered. He staggered back, coughing.
After a moment he got the coughing fit under control and looked around at his friends. They were covering their mouths and noses with their hands to filter out the ash and dabbing at their eyes. “What’s the verdict, Mildred?” Ryan croaked.
“Just smells bad,” came the physician’s muffled voice. “If that was hydrogen sulfide we were breathing, we’d be in our death throes already with our lungs full of sulfuric acid.”
Ryan looked back outside. The brightest and most persistent glow seemed to come from his left. He guessed the main vent was off that way. Relief: they weren’t staring down the hellbore muzzle of the mountain, at any rate.
Then a handful of blazing light balls like giant meteors arced across his vision to spatter the slopes below and to his right with brief pulses of yellow fire, just to keep him from getting cocky. But the doors themselves were clear and the ground outside seemed unobstructed by rockslide or lava flow.
“Looks like we got us a road outta here, anyway,” the Armorer muttered from behind. Ryan nodded.
Doc stretched out an arm, long finger pointing. “By Jove! Look there!”
By the underlighting of the clouds they could tell they were looking out over a bowl-shaped valley many miles wide. Way, way off lay a sheet of something like black glass, with a jagged trail of crimson stretching out across it—a lake, it seemed, reflecting the fire plume of the erupting vent. Out in the middle of that black glass sheet, reflecting in it, was visible a scatter of faint lights.
“A ville,” Ryan said.
“Villes,” Jak said.
“He’s right,” J.B. agreed. There were at least half a dozen other small clumps of lights scattered across the valley, shimmering slightly in the ground effect.
“Pretty dense habitation, comparatively speaking,” Mildred said. She hovered protectively near Krysty, who stood on her own power but seemed at least halfway in a trance, from the infection that had taken root in her shoulder despite Mildred’s best efforts—just as Mildred had predicted—or from the forces of Gaia surging so mightily around them, or both. “There’s food here. And safety.”
“How you reckon that?” J.B. asked.
“Number of villes. Way they’re spread out, rather than all clumped up together in one big defensive perimeter. You wouldn’t get that kind of population in that kind of distribution without at least comparative peace.”
The Armorer grunted noncommittally. “Likely you’re right. But still, mebbe you aren’t. No guarantees in this life.”
“Things change,” Jak said.
“Tell me something new,” Ryan said with a winter smile.
GETTING TO THE CENTERS of habitation proved to be more than difficult.
With the Hummer’s independently suspended tires bouncing over lava rocks head-size or better and his partners, including the sorely injured Krysty, bouncing around in the cab like badly stowed luggage, Ryan wondered if he would even be able to drive them off the fire mountain. It would have been vicious enough going in the dark with nothing but the jagged terrain to cope with.
The mountain was spewing. Away off to their left fountains of fire arced red across the sky. The one thing to be thankful for was that their path, such as it was, led steadily away from the eruption.
A scarlet glow shone on the hood in front of him. He leaned forward, eye straining up, trying to figure out where it came from. Suddenly a fang of rock not thirty yards to their left seemed to explode in a yellow flash. The wag rocked. The cab filled with voices crying out in surprised alarm. Impacts thunked off the Hummer’s steel and Kevlar carapace like hail. J.B., standing upright with his Uzi in lieu of the missing mount-gun, ducked into the cab with a yelp as a handful of glowing yellow embers spattered across the hood.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the fuck was that?”
“Bomb,” Doc said. Since the coldhearts had chased them off their idyllic mountain camp into the redoubt, he had been totally lucid, showing no sign of the madness that sometimes overtook him. Somewhat to Ryan’s surprise, he remained entirely calm in the face of whatever had just happened.
“You’re kidding, Doc,” Mildred said, hunching down in back, looking up and out, trying to fathom what had happened. “Somebody’s attacking?”
“Only the gods in their wrath,” Doc replied blithely. He rode in the back seat with Jak, who sat clutching one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives like a talisman in both hands. Mildred was in the aft cargo compartment tending to Krysty, who lay on a mat laid on top of their baggage, such as it was. “That was a lava bomb. A bubble, if you will, of molten rock, filled with lethal gas. If one lands too close to us we are undone, to say nothing of what should eventuate were one to strike us directly.”
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered. He straightened reluctantly, poking his head beyond the dubious protection of the cab. Almost at once he yelled, “Right, Ryan! Crank hard right!”
Ryan obeyed. The Hummer heeled over alarmingly to the left as the wag turned sharply. The one-eyed man almost left his teeth in the steering wheel as the front bucked up. And then the engine was straining, whining in anguish as it struggled to push them over a boulder in their path. The wag climbed, almost stalled, then pitched forward. Ryan gritted his teeth as the wag’s belly scraped over the sharp-toothed lava rock. But the rugged vehicle neither dropped its guts nor hung. It ground over the top and down. Mildred cursed as the top of her head hit the ceiling.
Ryan cranked his head around to see a yellow glowing worm of lava force its way over a dam of rock and slop down in a shower of sparks, right where the wag had been before the Armorer had shouted his warning.
A long breath escaped Ryan’s lungs. J.B. shoved his face back down the well of the blaster-mount. “At least we’ve shown we can take the bastard best the mountain has to throw at us!” the Armorer called.
The Hummer rocked to an impact that sank it on its springs. Two curving white blades, spaced a hand span apart, suddenly protruded downward from the Kevlar roof.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. A dark jet suddenly spewed from each curved blade. Jak and Doc cried out in alarm and flattened themselves against the doors.
From almost directly overhead came the ripping roar of J.B.’s Uzi, loud even over the ceaseless bellow of the volcano. With a rending, wrenching sound, the curved blades were yanked out of the vehicle’s roof.
“Snake…” the Armorer shouted, a sudden crackle of noise like skyscraper-size firecrackers going off drowned most of his words.
“What?”
“I said, it’s a bastard rattlesnake, the biggest bastard snake I ever saw!”
Ryan stuck his head out the window and craned his neck around. Silhouetted against a demonic sky, a head as wide across as Ryan’s own shoulders reared up ten or a dozen feet above the Hummer on an impossibly thick body. Ryan wondered for an endless interval between one heartbeat and the next whether the creature was actually that huge or whether its size was an illusion produced by the glaring, ever-shifting light.
The head split open into a vast flame-yellow mouth. Its fangs, each as long as one of Ryan’s arms, unfolded like the blades of a lock-back knife. As Ryan slammed the accelerator home, the head darted forward with dizzying speed, fangs thrusting ahead of it like spears.
Mildred screamed in fury more than terror as the fangs stabbed down through the roof, one gleaming ivory scimitar missing her head by inches. Gathering the now semiconscious Krysty into her strong arms, Mildred rolled herself and the redhead to the side of the cargo compartment, away from the reeking, fuming venom that spurted in pulses from the fangs. Then she turned back to hammer at the nearest fang with the heel of her fist. It had no effect.
“A fascinating adaptation,” Doc remarked in as calmly conversational a voice as the others had ever heard him use. “Clearly the serpent soaks up heat from the ambient rocks, allowing it to move and hunt as freely at night as in the daytime.”
“That’s great, Doc,” Ryan said, “but how do we kill the nuke-blasted thing?”
Despite the wag’s wild bucking, J.B. popped back up through the vacant gun mount with his Uzi. He emptied the magazine at the creature in three long ragged bursts as it coiled yet again to strike.
Ryan saw a relatively clear stretch of slope, if steep, and sent the wag bucketing down it amid a baby avalanche of loose rubble. The impacts slammed his lower jaw into the upper and threatened to shake his joints apart.
“We’re getting away!” Mildred shouted.
“We better,” J.B. said, dropping back down into the passenger seat to change mags. “I might as well be pissing at the bastard. I’m not sure any of my rounds even penetrated.”
The monstrous snake launched itself, not in a strike but slithering down the slope parallel to them, flowing sinuously over jagged steaming black rock and gray boulders like a living avalanche. It caught up with them, lunged again, this time as if trying to bring its terrible mass crushing down on the wag. Ryan spun the wheel right. For a terrifying fraction of a second the vehicle slewed sideways in the scree, heeling way over toward the bottom of the slope, threatening to break away at any instant and go rolling down the smoky like a loose boulder, battering itself to pieces and churning its occupants to lumpy red puree. Then the vast cleated run-flat tires bit and thrust the wag forward across the slope, no longer in danger of tipping over but still not clear of the snake.
Ryan heard loud reports from close behind, dared a look over his shoulder. From one window Jak was cranking shots from his Python handblaster, from the other, Doc was booming away with his venerable LeMat. The pistol rounds, like the 9 mm bullets fired by J.B.’s Uzi, were almost certainly as futile as spitting at the rattlesnake, but Ryan had to grin approval of his comrades’ fighting spirit.
The thing was right after them, writhing with incredible speed. On a flat, on anything like a decent surface, the Hummer would’ve left the horror in its dust. On this evil broken slope, the snake had every advantage.
“I can’t even slow the bastard, Ryan,” J.B. yelled, blitzing off another magazine. “Dunno if even your Steyr could hurt it.”
“Nor, it seems, can we outrun it, had we Hermes’s wings to speed our heels,” Doc Tanner murmured.
“Then, like Trader used to say, when all else fails—cheat,” Ryan said grimly.
“I thought that was Samantha the Panther,” J.B. said.
“Whoever.” Ryan spun the wheel left. His companions yelled in alarm as the wag bounced right and cut across the giant snake’s path. The rattler, surprised by its prey apparently turning on it, reared up hissing. It struck. Anticipating the attack, Ryan had cranked the wheel and taken off at a tangent. The Hummer still rocked as the monster’s head glanced off the wag’s rear bumper.
Ryan was hammering the wag right across the mountainside, back toward the spewing vent—back upward toward the river of living fire that had almost trapped them before.
“Ryan,” J.B. said from the gun mount. “Ryan, lava—”
Lava it was, yes, running down the mountain at them in a racing flow of glow, red and fast as water. For his part Ryan was racing to meet the stream. It spurted out over a shelf of rock as if reaching out for the puny skittering thing. The snake raced after them, blunt nose almost prodding their tailgate. The fires of Hell danced in its slit-pupilled eyes.
The liquid rock-stream splashed down behind a boulder in a shower of glowing gobbets. J.B. cried out in pain as a droplet of yellow-glowing lava brushed his cheek. Another burned right through the roof and struck, hissing by Ryan’s right boot as the Hummer jounced across the lava stream’s path with the rattler in mad pursuit.
A vast, fiery wave of lava broke over the boulder and thundered down onto the snake. The monster reared back, emitting a shriek that threatened to rupture the companions’ eardrums. A huge cloud of steam bellowed out as the molten rock flash-boiled the snake’s body fluids. A terrible stench, like burning hair magnified a millionfold, enveloped the wag. Mildred puked noisily in the back.
“Dark night!” J.B. yelled.
The rattler’s head reared out of the lava. The molten rock fell away from it in burning rivulets. For a terrifying moment it seemed as if the monster would continue its hellhound pursuit, shedding the lava like a duck’s wing shedding water.
Then it collapsed, to sink steaming and reeking into the already crusting lava pool.