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“Hella!”

  “Chain mail caught a stray round. I’m fine.”

  Flames twisted inside the guard post and reached for the sky. Evidently the rocket that had struck it had carried an incendiary secondary payload. Dead men inside the ruined structure tightened up as the heat caused the ligaments to contract. Hella had seen a lot of bodies left by a fire. The ones that weren’t totally burned up were always left looking like people getting ready to box, their clenched fists raised before them.

  She had some luck, though. Thrown free by the blast or lost by someone standing outside the guard post, an XM25 grenade rifle lay on the catwalk. The rifle was squat and ugly, designed with a bullpup configuration that placed the six-round magazine behind the trigger to help provide better balance. The weapon weighed fourteen pounds but felt like an anchor as Hella tried to stay behind cover and lift the XM25 at the same time.

  With the grenade rifle settled over her shoulder, Hella took a quick breath then popped up and swiveled so she faced over the wall. She squeezed the trigger slightly and activated the laser rangefinder.

  Stampede had taught her to use weapons, all kinds of weapons, and she knew more information about weapons she still had yet to see. Weapons were important for survival, but they were even more important to use for barter. Rifles and pistols, things that could be easily carried by travelers, were constantly in demand. Gunsmith knowledge, which she also had, was highly prized.

  The Sheldons were still seventy meters out but closing fast. The trade camp’s gates were open, and getting all the people to safety was going to be a near thing.

  With the rangefinder locked in, Hella squeezed the trigger at the onrushing armadillo bikers, shifted targets immediately five meters to the left, and fired again without waiting to see what the first round did. She moved to the third target and kept going till she’d launched all six grenades.

  Once the laser rangefinder had the distance locked in, the twenty-five-millimeter grenade measured the flight through the number of turns it made then exploded in midair. Judging from the flames that covered the six different groups of Sheldons, the rounds had been thermobaric. The fuel-air mixture had spread more than five meters and dropped a layer of fire onto everything it touched.

  Armadillo bikers dumped their rides and screamed in fear and rage as they beat at the flames covering them. Their hides and shells were proof against a lot of bullets and edged weapons, but fire burned them. When they pulled their heads or feet into their shells for additional protection, they only pulled the flames in after them. Several of them stewed inside their shells, and their burned corpses relaxed out of hiding as they hit the ground.

  A wave of bullets drove Hella back behind the wall, but by then other guards along the catwalk had regrouped. Heavy sniper rifles cracked all around her; then mortars thumped as they hurled shells into the advancing ranks of bikers.

  Crawling on her stomach while dragging the XM25 after her, Hella searched the dead bodies on the catwalk. The second guard had five spare magazines for the grenade launcher in a messenger bag. All of the magazines had colored tape on them, evidently shorthand code for the man using the weapon, but the only one she knew for sure was red because that matched the one inside the weapon.

  She dumped the empty magazine and inserted a fresh one, also marked with red, though it was the last one, shoving it home with a click. She scrabbled on hands and knees, got to her feet, and sprinted twenty meters down from where she’d been.

  One of the guards flipped around and dropped to grab another magazine from his chest rack. Blood, some his and some from someone else, judging from the amount of it, stained his face and clothing. He nodded at her and smiled. “Great shooting, kid.”

  “Thanks.” Hella stood just tall enough to reach over the wall again.

  The battlefield had changed drastically. Before it had looked as if nothing could stop the Purple Dragons, but holes had opened up in their lines. The fallen motorcycles became hazards for the motorcycles following too closely, and most of them were.

  The motorcycles were within forty meters of the trade camp.

  Hella emptied her borrowed weapon into the center mass of the biker gang. Three gas tanks on motorcycles blew up, launching the bikes, riders, and passengers into the air. Only scorched earth, exploded motorcycles, and corpses remained.

  Hella dumped the empty magazine and popped in a fresh one, noting the blue tape. At the tents maintained by Pardot’s expedition, two hardshelled security guards held on to Colleen Trammell and tried to get her to safety.

  “Stampede! Colleen’s in the open!”

  “I see her, Red. Got my hands full.”

  At the gate, a small group of Sheldons engaged the security team. Stampede and Faust fought shoulder to shoulder, just as they had in the past. Hella guessed the Purple Dragons had sent a crew in at night and set them up in tents to blend in with the other campers. They’d lain in wait till the gates were open.

  An explosion suddenly blew a gap in the security force. From the limited but certain devastation, Hella thought one of the Sheldons had triggered an antipersonnel device. Shell-shocked, the security people fell back, and the Sheldons surged forward again.

  One of the security guards aiding Colleen went down suddenly, keeping his grip on her and bringing her down with him. She threw her arms over her head, lay there for a moment, then tried to get up. The surviving guard attempted to aid her, but one of the armadillo bikers who had gotten into the camps threw himself off the machine and tackled him. Both of them went down.

  Hella didn’t think twice, though she thought about it a lot later. She gathered herself and jumped over the wall. At the bottom of the five-meter drop, she landed on relaxed legs, sank to the ground, and rolled to her feet with the XM25 up in front of her. She ran for Colleen, leaping over the bodies of camp visitors who hadn’t been prepared for the onslaught.

  “Fire in the hole!” The yell didn’t belong to Stampede, but it came over his comm link.

  On the heels of the warning, the ground around the campsite erupted into a ring of explosions that threw Sheldons high into the air and left smoking craters.

  Faust shouted curses that came over the comm link. “You like that? Electronic mine field. My idea and Carnegie went along with it. Figured it would be a last-ditch effort for us if we ever got attacked en masse like this.”

  Smoke and dust burned Hella’s lungs by the time she reached Colleen. The woman looked dazed, and Hella was sure that was as much from the drugs Pardot was giving her as the attack.

  “Colleen!” Hella started to help the woman up, but a motorcycle closed on them fast. She lifted the XM25 in both hands and aimed point-blank, hoping that they wouldn’t get caught in a backlash of whatever the blue tape meant. She squeezed the trigger as the rear rider pointed a shotgun at her.

  The grenade exploded just as Hella turned and dived on top of Colleen, burying them both in the ground. A swarm of fléchettes turned the two Sheldons into chopped meat, wrecked the motorcycle, and took out three more riding teams.

  With the sound of the explosion still ringing in her ears, Hella grabbed Colleen’s arm and yanked her up.

  They’re going to kill us! We’re going to die!

  “No, we’re not.” Hella didn’t know if she’d spoken or not because the near explosion had left her almost deaf, but Colleen seemed to calm down a little and became more pliant. She held on to the woman’s arm and pulled her toward the gates.

  A trio of Sheldons raced at her. The armadillo bikers were smoking from the minefield. Embers flamed in their clothing and on their leathery skin. Hella lifted the XM25 but didn’t fire because the Sheldons were too close to her. She dropped the grenade launcher and morphed her free fist into a .50-caliber weapon, but it would be too late.

  “Hella, get down!”

  Recognizing Stampede’s voice, Hella wrapped her arms around Colleen and took them to the ground again. The rough earth tore at her skin, leaving bruises and abrasions. Helplessly she st
ared back at the approaching riders.

  Then, out of the whirling chaos at the gate, from the mire of frightened people struggling to get in at the last minute and the guards trying to shut the doors, Stampede stepped into the open. He held his rifle loosely in his arms and didn’t try to bring it around. Instead he lifted his left foot and brought it down—hard.

  A seismic shock ran through the ground, jarring Hella as she held on to Colleen.

  They’re going to kill us!

  Hella watched as the quake bowed the earth in front of the armadillo bikers. The tremor leaped from the ground and into the bikers, scattering them like leaves in a stiff breeze. One of the motorcycles shot by Hella and took down a small dome tent before crashing onto its side.

  The Purple Dragons struggled to get to their feet, but by that time Stampede was on them. His fists, aided by his seismic power, smashed into his enemies and broke their bones, killing them with sheer concussive force.

  One of the bikers tried to blindside him. Hella raised her hand, but before she could fire, a gout of flame turned the Sheldon into a fireball.

  Eyes burning, body covered in flames, Silence took the battlefield and gazed at Stampede.

  Stampede gripped his rifle. “Not bad, Sparky.”

  Silence grinned, flexed his arms, and shot upward on a pillar of fire. Then he spit another fireball that engulfed a second group of bikers.

  Stampede raced over to Hella and Colleen. He hoisted the woman up into his arms as though she were a child and ran back toward the closing camp gates. Hella followed, providing cover fire from both blazing hands.

  “Hold those gates!” Faust leaped to one door above the heads of the struggling crowd, gripped the door’s edge in both left hands, and fired into the arriving mass of armadillo bikers with guns gripped in both right fists. His bullets tore through the front line of the Purple Dragons, and he kept firing despite the fact that bullets drummed the heavy, metal doors.

  Hella stayed close to Stampede, no more than an arm’s reach away, and he bulled through the mass of frightened people.

  “Close the gates!” Faust flung himself through the air, flipped over the heads of the people, transferred his pistol to his left hand, and dropped onto his two feet. He reloaded his weapons, and a bullet ricocheted from his Kevlar helmet while two others thudded into his vest and drove him backward two steps. “Close the gates! Now!”

  Hella fought clear of the crowd, found a nearby ladder, morphed her hands back, and practically ran up to the catwalk. As soon as she hauled herself onto the catwalk, she morphed her hands back into weapons and joined the other defenders at the wall.

  Below, all of the campers who remained alive had managed to make it into the trade camp. However, a large knot of Purple Dragons smashed up against the closing doors like waves breaking against a reef. Hella fired blindly down into them and regretted the loss of the grenade launcher.

  Gradually, though, the withering fire broke the line of armadillo bikers. They’d fought to get inside because they were afraid of retreating back across the no-man’s-land that remained of the campsites. In the end, though, there was nowhere else for them to go. A few broke away at first; then they retreated en masse, like the tide going out.

  Sharpshooters picked off all they could, but when she looked at all the dead strewn across the ravaged field that lay around the trade camp, Hella didn’t have the heart for it. Silence flew after them for a short distance before gunners chased him back. He spit fire at the retreating bikers and succeeded in roasting several of them.

  “Don’t give up killing them.” The guard to Hella’s right glared at her as he reloaded his sniper rifle. “The ones we don’t kill today, we’ll have to kill tomorrow. They’ll be back when they get desperate enough.”

  Hella ignored the man and returned to the ladder. She morphed her hands back, gripped the ladder, and slid to the ground. When she got there, Stampede was still holding Colleen in his arms. The woman lay still as death.

  Hella couldn’t see any wounds. “Is she okay?”

  “Yeah. Passed out.” Stampede rolled his head and grimaced.

  “You okay?”

  “Bruised and banged up. You?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You took a risk diving off that wall, Red.”

  “Didn’t stop to think. I just saw Colleen in trouble and knew I had to get to her.”

  “Your choice?”

  Hella shook her head. “She didn’t even know I was there. She had no control over me. She was so scared—or drug addled—that she couldn’t save herself.”

  Stampede growled. “I’m going to have a word with Pardot. He’s not going to continue to make her like this. In this state, she’s a liability.”

  “Pardot’s not big on listening.”

  “He’ll listen now. I’m going to make him.”

  CHAPTER 11

  As she walked through the dead, Hella turned off her emotions. She concentrated her attention on taking salvageable goods from the armadillo bikers, leaving the other corpses to family and friends who would claim them and take care of their burning. If she didn’t touch the fallen campers, the sadness and the loss didn’t linger, didn’t become attached to her.

  As part of the defenders, she and Stampede had salvage rights to the dead enemies. Anything—gear or weapons that could be saved—was theirs to claim when she found it, as much of it as she could carry back to the camp. Stampede was working out details with Pardot because they were leaving in the morning.

  Despite the number of the dead lying around her and the number of salvagers working them, Hella moved slowly and carefully. She took her prizes methodically.

  She was on her second trip back through the battleground, skirting a still-smoking crater, when she realized Riley had fallen into step with her. “What are you doing?”

  “Came to check on you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Riley looked tired and anxious. His restless gaze wandered around the dead and all the destruction. “About what you did to save Dr. Trammell—”

  “I was just doing my job.” Hella didn’t want to talk about the woman. If she did, she was afraid that she would unload on Riley for helping keep the woman drugged. “Just part of the service.”

  “No, it wasn’t. That was a brave thing.” Riley shook his head. “I don’t know if I would have dived over the wall and gone down into that bloodbath.”

  Pride and embarrassment warred within Hella. She was glad that Riley had noticed her helping rescue Colleen. She liked the idea that her actions had made an impression on the man. And she was at once irritated at feeling that way. She didn’t like not being in control of how she felt or what she thought.

  Hella knelt and fished a bandolier containing three magazines from under a file of dirt near a crater. The magazines held rounds that Stampede could use in his rifle. She hung the bandolier over her shoulder and stood again. “Stampede was the one that rescued Dr. Trammell and me. We wouldn’t have made it out of there without him.”

  “If you hadn’t reached Dr. Trammell, Stampede would never have gotten there in time. A handful of my men have told me that. I don’t mean to take anything away from Stampede, and I’ve already thanked him. So has Dr. Pardot.”

  “I wish I hadn’t missed that.”

  Riley grinned in the shadows of the open face shield. “Yeah, well it doesn’t happen very often, I can promise you.”

  “Why are you working for Pardot?” Hella kept walking and Riley kept pace. “Isn’t there someone else you can work for where you come from?”

  “I’m a security guard, Hella. That’s what I was tasked to do while I attended school. But I wanted to see more of the world.”

  “You went to school?”

  “Sure. Didn’t you?”

  Hella smiled at him and shook her head. “You seen many schools while you’ve been out here?”

  Riley sighed and shook his head. “No. They don’t have schools here?”

  “Not
many in the Redblight, no.” Hella pointed back at Blossom Heat. “Trade camp’s got a school, but probably not like you’re used to. You can’t learn to be a security guard there, but you do learn how to defend yourself when you travel the trails or stand post inside the camp. If you don’t learn, you die.”

  “Then what do you learn?”

  “How to work at a trade camp. They teach you to read and write, some math, and maybe some kind of skill. Repair work mostly. Or maybe you get taught how to build buildings, furniture, stuff like that.”

  “How did you learn to be a scout?”

  “On the trails. Same as every other scout. There’s no other way to learn, and your marks come hard and quick. You fail, you get burned. If you were around long enough, your friends feel sorry you’re gone. If not, they just burn you to prevent disease.” Hella spotted a bit of shiny metal under an armadillo corpse, which didn’t appear to have been moved yet. The body covered another magazine. She knelt again and slipped a small skinning knife from her boot.

  With quick, deft movements, she sliced through the dead biker’s pockets and emptied the contents, checking her haul before she slipped it into a leather bag that hung around her neck. The take wasn’t much. A worn pocketknife, a couple of rings that didn’t look silver and held glittering stones that looked artificial, a few ancient coins that really didn’t have any worth anymore, and a green and white disk. She read the writing on the disk.

  “Blue Skies Casino.”

  “That’s a poker chip. From a gaming center that probably stopped existing shortly after the collider imploded. Where did you learn to read?”

  Hella knew what a gaming center was. Gambling went on in trade camps and along the trails as well. She’d never been drawn to the games. Staying alive every day was gamble enough. She didn’t know why other people didn’t recognize that. “Stampede taught me.”

  “He knows how to read?” Riley couldn’t hide his surprised look.

  Hella shook her head and snorted. “He couldn’t have taught me any other way, now could he?”

  “Why did he teach you?”