Tainted Cascade

“We’re not gonna make it!” J. B. Dix shouted, glancing over a shoulder.

“Yes, we are!” Ryan Cawdor yelled back, pointing straight ahead with his bolt-action longblaster.

Squinting hard against the wind and the airborne granules, the six riders could only make out a blur in the distance. Then as they crested a low sand dune, an oasis came into view, a tiny patch of blue water smack in the middle of the scorched hell of the vast salt desert. A few palm trees grew alongside the shimmering pool of water, their abnormally long fronds bending all the way down to hesitantly touch the surface as if trying to sneak tiny sips when nobody was watching. Bizarrely, a predark mailbox jutted from the damp sand alongside the pool, the metal sandblasted to a mirror-like sheen over the long decades, but the shape was unmistakable.

“Thank Gaia!” Krysty Wroth exhaled with a grin, reining in her mount.

In the far distance, a large black cloud crested the horizon. Skimming low and fast over the salty sand, the cloud moved with singular purpose, heading straight for the six companions, as unswerving as a laser beam.

“Here they come!” Mildred Wyeth yelled, bringing her horse to an abrupt halt alongside the pool.

“Into the water!” Ryan commanded, sliding off his stallion and dropping into the water. The man grunted with annoyance as the water only reached the top of his combat boots. Fireblast, he thought, this wasn’t going to offer us any useful cover. No other choice, then.

“Ace the horses!” Ryan shouted, firing a single 9-mm round into the left eye of his mount. The horse recoiled from the trip-hammer blow of the copper-jacketed lead and reared high on its hind legs, whinnying loudly. The big brown eyes stared accusingly at the man, then the horse collapsed onto the damp sand, twitched and went still.

With grim expressions, the rest of the companions followed suit, arranging the bodies in a crude barricade around the small pool. Wary of where they put their boots in the shallow water, the companions put their backs toward one another to stand in a defensive circle. Now, they were covered up to their chests, which gave them a fighting chance for survival. That still wasn’t much protection, but it was better than nothing.

Reaching out, Mildred took J.B.’s hand, and he squeezed back, the couple savoring the touch for a single precious moment, the gesture saying in volumes what no words ever could. Breaking free, J.B. slid the S&W M-4000 shotgun off his shoulder and passed it to the woman. Mildred nodded her thanks, removed a fat red cartridge from one of the loops sewn into the strap and slid it into the belly of the scattergun.

“Never heard of stingwings hunting in a pack before,” J.B. stated, working the arming bolt on his Uzi machine gun. Short and wiry, the man was wearing a battered old leather jacket and a fedora that had seen better days. Wire-rimmed glasses were firmly tucked into place on his nose, at his side hung a leather satchel, home to various bits and pieces of munitions in addition to several sticks of dynamite.

“If this is our last day, so be it, my friends!” Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner stated in a deep stentorian bass, cocking back the hammer on his massive LeMat revolver.

Dressed as if he came from another century, which he had, Doc wore a long frock, a frilly white shirt and cracked knee boots. His hair was a silvery white, but his thin face was lined.

“Not dead yet,” Jak Lauren drawled in forced calm, a Colt .357 Magnum blaster clutched in his right hand, the left fist holding two throwing knives by the blades. A true albino, his hair was the color of fresh snow and his eyes as red as rubies. Sweat poured off his face to disappear into the collar of his camo jacket. More knives were sheathed on his gun belt, and the handle of a stiletto jutted from his left combat boot.

“Too true, Mr. Lauren. Vini, vidi, vici!” Doc declared boldly, even while trying to control his pounding heart. Moving with exaggerated grace, as if he had all the time in the world, the old scholar tucked the blaster into his gun belt and drew his ebony walking stick. Twisting the lion head of the stick, Doc pulled out a long steel sword, the razor edge glinting in the harsh desert sunlight. He drew the blaster again and stood ready, his shoulders hunched, his eyes riveted onto the ever-approaching cloud.

“Stuff it, ya old coot,” Mildred growled, hefting the shotgun along with a Czech-made ZKR target pistol. Short and stocky, the predark physician was wearing a red flannel shirt, blue jeans and a U.S. Army jacket and combat boots. Slung across her back was a patched canvas satchel bearing the faded lettering M*A*S*H. Fear was a metallic taste in her mouth, and Mildred tried to spit it out. Then the physician recoiled at the sight of the blood from the chilled horses oozing off the bank to spread out in a crimson cloud across the pool. She prayed to heaven the sight was not prophetic.

“Must have gotten thirty or forty of the bastards,” Krysty said, replacing the round in her S&W Model 640 revolver spent acing the horses. Her animated red hair flexed and curled around her face in response to her heightened emotional state. A truly beautiful woman, the redhead was nearly as tall as Ryan with a well-proportioned figure. Krysty was dressed in a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off and patched denim pants that were tucked into the top of her blue cowboy boots.

The cloud was noticeably closer now, and the companions could once again hear the flapping of the leathery wings of the muties. There were so many of them that the flock of stingwings was as black as pitch, a patch of midnight flying fast through the noontime sky. The companions had escaped once before, but their horses soon became exhausted, forcing the companions to make a last-ditch stand.

“Let’s see what I can do about thinning them out,” Ryan stated, lifting his Steyr longblaster and working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Tall and leanly muscled, the man radiated a sense of raw physical strength that was almost palpable. His long black hair was tied off his face with a rawhide thong, a leather patch covering what had once been his left eye. Ryan was wearing a ripped denim shirt, military camo-colored pants and combat boots. A SIG-Sauer pistol was holstered at his hip and a curved knife known as a panga was sheathed on the other.

Ryan held the Steyr in both hands and looked carefully through the cracked telescopic sight, delicately adjusting the focus. It took the one-eyed man a moment to locate the roiling flock of muties, then he chose the biggest creature leading the flock and gently squeezed the trigger. The 7.62-mm copper-jacked hollowpoint round plowed into the head of the hideous mutie and came out its rear, carrying along a wealth of blood and organs. As it fell, several of the other muties dived to the ground to start feasting on their fallen member, but the rest kept coming, as unstoppable as the tide.

Again and again, Ryan carefully aimed and fired, slamming home rotary clip after another, trying to chill as many of the winged monsters as he could before they arrived in force.

“Not bad, old buddy,” J.B. growled, releasing the Uzi to hang by its canvas strap while he rummaged about his munitions bag. “But watch this!” A moment later, the Armorer unearthed a pipe bomb and a precious butane lighter.

Flicking the flame to life, he lit the fuse until it began to sizzle. Tucking the lighter into a pocket, J.B. then whipped the pipe bomb forward at the end of a rope. Soon, the man had the explosive charge spinning around his head in a blur, steadily building speed as the fuse burned down quickly. When it had almost reached the bomb, J.B. released the rope, and the pipe bomb sailed high to gently curve back to the ground and violently detonated in the air.

Half of the flock vanished in the fireball, several more dropping from the sky, their leathery bodies riddled with shrapnel.

“Well done, John Barrymore!” Doc boomed, slapping the man on the back. “Once more, sir, and with vigor!”

“Can’t, no more rope,” J.B. said, swinging up the Uzi again, his fist tightening around the pistol grip.

Instantly, Jak turned to the nearest horses and started cutting off the reins.

“Too late. Here they come!” Ryan growled, louder than he expected, triggering the Steyr twice more, then shouldering the longblaster to draw the SIG-Sauer from his gun belt and jack the slide.

Screaming their wild keen, the stingwings spiraled down from the sky toward the huddled companions. Instantly, J.B. and Mildred aimed skyward and cut loose with their weapons, the Uzi and S&W shotgun blasting a huge hole in the flock. But the rest of them kept coming, the inhuman faces distorted in a feral rictus of savage hunger.

Then the smell of fresh blood reached the stingwings, and the slavering muties flowed away from the huddle of people to attack the dead horses, plunging in their needle-sharp beaks and nosily slurping the warm blood, their wings beating so fast that the air hummed. Taking advantage of the brief distraction, the companions ruthlessly gunned down as many of the muties as they could, firing and reloading with frantic speed.

Nothing stopped a stingwing but death, so the huddled people made every bullet count, taking an extra half second to aim and placing their shots with desperate accuracy.

Unable to reach a horse through the feasting of its brethren, a young stingwing dived for the nearest companion. Firing from the hip, Ryan blew off a wing, and as the mutie tumbled, he swung out the panga. The long curved blade neatly severed the mutie’s head, pale blood gushing out to sprinkle into the salty pool.

But at the death cry of the nestling, the rest of the muties turned their deadly attentions from the cooling mounds of flesh to the living, breathing companions. Screaming, the stingwings surged forward, eyes as bright as diamonds, mouths full of needle-sharp teeth.

In a ragged cacophony, the companions cut loose with every blaster, mowing down the first wave of the muties, the riddled bodies splashing into the pool, their lifeblood tainting the water a cloudy pink.

Triggering the second barrel of the massive LeMat, Doc annihilated four of the muties with a shotgun blast from the oddball weapon. The gun smoke was still pouring from the barrel when Doc started to move the selector pin to fire the main cylinder. He caught a blur of motion out of the corner of his sight. Cowardly dastard! Smacking the Civil War blaster across the head of the inhuman thing, Doc heard the breaking of bones, but unsatisfied, he slashed out with his sword, the razor-sharp steel removing the head of the creature like blowing the foam off a beer.

Blaster and knife moving in determined patterns, Jak wailed at the air, pale mutie blood sprinkling the teenager constantly. One stingwing landed on his collar to try for the albino youth’s vulnerable neck, then the mutie shrieked as its legs came off, severed by the cluster of razor blades hidden along the collar.

Kneeling down to reload the shotgun, Mildred heard a flutter of wings from behind and shoved the buttstock backward as hard as she could. There came a satisfying crunch of bones, and she rose, firing the weapon just in time to annihilate another stingwing, its deadly claws just missing her face by the thickness of a prayer.

Triggering her blaster several times in rapid succession, Krysty heard a creature scream in rage, and jerked to the side just as a mutie dived straight for her back. Smacking the blaster across the back of the mutie, Mildred sent it spinning away, then blew it apart with a perfectly aimed discharge.

“Flare!” Ryan bellowed, dropping the spent clip from his blaster and shoving in a fresh one.

Still firing the Uzi, J.B. reached into his munitions bag and unearthed a waxy cylinder. Thumping the bottom of the military flare on a raised knee, he saw the top erupt into a hissing rush of magnesium flame. Instinctively, the stingwings moved away from the fire, and J.B. waved the flare about, the sizzling stiletto of chemical flame clearing a good yard of space above the pool. The companions reloaded fast, trying not to think about how little brass was left in their pockets.

Unexpectedly, the flare sputtered and died. Casting it away with a curse, J.B. rummaged for a replacement. A small stingwing streaked low across the still water, coming in at groin level. Dropping the flare, J.B. swung up the Uzi, knowing he was a nanosecond too slow, when the scattergun roared. The muzzle-blast pounded his eardrums and almost dislodged his glasses. But the stingwing was blown into its component parts, blood gobbets soaring everywhere.

“Thanks!” J.B. shouted, over the stuttering machine gun.

“Anytime!” Mildred replied, unleashing hot lead death.

Firing the SIG-Sauer nonstop until its clip was empty, Ryan holstered the blaster while he swung up the deadly panga. The wicked blade took the creatures apart, removing wings, legs and heads with ruthless efficiency. Pale blood splattered everywhere, and soon the man’s clothing was soaked. A gush of intestines caught him full in the face, blocking his sight. Fireblast! Taking a deep breath, Ryan threw himself into the shallow pool, the salty water stinging every cut and abrasion on his body. Rising from the water, rivulets streaming down his face, Ryan braced for a new attack, but the stingwings now arched around the man as if he were invisible.

“Get underwater!” Ryan yelled on impulse, sheathing the panga and quickly thumbing loose brass into the empty clip for the SIG-Sauer in case the ploy faded. “Do it now!”

Although they had no idea what he was planning, the others trusted the man with their lives, and Krysty went first, then Jak and Doc, closely followed by J.B. and finally Mildred. Surrounded by a screaming cloud of the deadly muties, Ryan tried to watch for an attack from every side, but the creatures were no longer interested in him. In fact, several of the winged muties landed brazenly on the dead horses and noisily began to feed once more, ripping away chunks of the warm flesh to reach the juicy morsels deeper inside.

Rising from the bloody water, the other companions shook their faces clear and watched for the next rush. But the stingwings were paying them no attention, almost as if the companions weren’t there.

“It’s the blood,” Krysty whispered in astonishment. “There’s so much of their blood in the water they can no longer smell us!”

“Not smell, not find,” Jak stated confidently, brushing back his sodden hair. “How long last?”

“Probably until the first time we sweat,” Mildred muttered, as if the volume of her voice could reveal their presence to the feasting creatures. “Only primates have isotonic traces of ammonia in their sweat. They must zero in on that.”