End Day

“Stopped base of hill, mile ahead. Circled wags, make camp.”

“We’ll hide the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to take control of the high ground above them. Me and Ricky will circle around behind the hill and come down over the crest. When we attack, we attack from all sides at once. Everyone has to be in position before we lose the light. We have to be able to see these bastards. We can’t have them coming at us out of the dark. If there’s no wind, belly crawl in, close enough to pitch the grens into the middle of the camp. If there’s any breeze, come at them from downwind so the enforcers don’t sniff us out.”

“If we’re that spread out, how will we know when to attack?” Mildred asked.

“You’ll be in position long before we will,” Ryan said. “Watch the hillside above the camp. I’ll blink my flash once. Wait a count of twenty so Ricky and I can close in from above, then let it nukin’ rip.”

Krysty stepped up to him, slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a long, lingering kiss. “That’s not a goodbye,” she said as she drew back a little. “That’s a see-you-later, lover.”

He looked into her emerald eyes and saw concern in their depths. It was mirrored by her mutie hair, which had contracted into a mass of tight curls. For sure, it was the last night on earth for somebody—at this point it was a coin toss who or what that somebody was going to be, them or Magus.

“It’s never goodbye,” he told her, gently brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers.

Waving for Ricky to follow, Ryan turned for the hills and didn’t look back. They set off at a brisk pace, beelining across the plain to the foot of the nearest saddle. With Ryan in the lead, they climbed the crumbling slope using scrub and boulders for handholds. As evening fell, the sweet scent of the sage seemed to grow stronger and stronger. The scattered saguaros cast long, skinny shadows across the slope, and the air temperature began to drop.

At the base of a giant cactus, a mutie jackrabbit with a hairless face as pink as a newborn baby stared at them, its body frozen like a statue. Its foot-and-a-half-long ears stood erect.

“Muy sabroso,” Ricky hissed through clenched teeth, drawing a slim throwing knife from his sleeve. Arm cocked back, eyes locked on his target, he held the blade by the tip.

The teenaged boy seemed to be growing bigger by the day, and he was always hungry, always thinking about his next meal. “Not now,” Ryan said in a low tone. “Jackrabbits scream. Focus. Tune out distractions.”

Once they had crossed over the saddle and began to traverse the shadowed far side of the mountains, he stopped worrying about noise giving away their approach. The view east under a cloudless sky was of another, even wider stretch of desert plain, which ended at the horizon in staggered rows of desolate, ruddy hills.

That they had ended up here—bodies sun-blasted, throats parched, with sand in their boots, on the verge of closing the book on Magus—was the result of a singular chain of coincidence. It had started in the relatively fertile valley on the other side of the eight-thousand-foot mountain. Steel Eyes’s handful of human sec men had slipped away from their camp for some recreation and joy juice in the nearby ville’s tiny gaudy house. They had gotten so drunk while waiting in line to be serviced by a lone slut, who was puffing away like the little engine that could, that they’d blathered on about their employer, the convoy and the direction they were all headed next. A day later, when the companions showed up at the gaudy house en route to points north, the sec men were long gone and the slut so sky-high on jolt she was talking nonstop and tap-dancing in a puddle of her own piss.

After verifying her Magus story—the gaudy master had overheard it, too—the companions traded an assortment of extra gear, including one fully functional, single-shot 12 gauge with a broken buttstock, for six skinny swaybacked horses. They picked up the convoy’s trail just outside the ville and followed it up a steep, winding, predark mountain road. The going was slow because they had to stop often to let the horses rest. They spent one sleepless night beside the disintegrating tarmac.

By Ryan’s reckoning, they were two full days behind Magus when they reached the edge of a broad meadow bordered by tall pines and a small stream. According to the gaudy master, Magus’s likely next landing spot was just the other side of it. Continuing on the ruined road would have led them directly to the ville but cost them the element of surprise. Ryan guided them a ways into the meadow, then stopped the single file of riders with a raised hand. He listened hard, but there was not so much as a bird tweet or a bug chirp.

From her perch behind him on the horse, Krysty pointed at the thick, waist-high grass to their right. She said softly in his ear, “Something there. It’s moving...”

Jak was already standing tall in his stirrups, eyes fixed in the same direction.

Ryan signaled for the albino to dismount and circle around behind, drew his panga from its sheath and quietly swung down from the horse. He had walked no more than twenty feet when he saw something bright red among the green. He thought he glimpsed a stout black body beneath. Whatever it was, it turned to the left and disappeared. He followed, wading through the lake of tall grass.

Jak was moving toward him, the sun reflecting off white hair and skin. He had his arms outstretched, and he was smiling.

When Ryan took his next step, it was met by a burst of noise from in front of him. A blur of angry birds with flaming red heads, thick black-feathered bodies and flapping, four-foot wings, shot from cover. As the buzzards rushed past him, scuttling away like gigantic swarthy chickens, he instinctively swung the panga, smacking one of them on the pate with the flat of the blade. Stunned, the bird sat down hard, beak gaping, wings spread and twitching. It stank like a slaughterhouse; there was fresh blood smeared on its chest feathers. Its stomach was grossly distended, the contents so densely packed and heavy that, like its brethren, it couldn’t fly.

That didn’t bode well.

He waved for the others to dismount. They left the horses to graze in the meadow and, spreading out, weapons at the ready, advanced to the edge of the clearing. Nestled among the trees, the nameless ville had once looked like something out of a predark storybook: tiny central square with bandstand, on either side of which stood a school, city hall, church with tall steeple, movie house, stores. Because of its remote location, it had survived Armageddon pretty much intact. And had apparently provided sufficient protection to a support a limited population.

Past tense.

The central square and surrounding street was littered with bodies. It looked as if it had rained dead people and dead dogs. Many of the corpses were torn into pieces: arms, legs and heads ripped off and flung. The buzzards had been hard at the best bits—the eyes and tongues—leaving three gory craters in every upturned face.

Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.

In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn’t ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.

At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul’s wearing his guts for garters!”

The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?

In the end the reasons didn’t matter. What was done was done.

Only this time there would be payback.

After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.

“Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”

Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout’s scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.

Ryan didn’t give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.

He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr’s 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape’s large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.

A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.

“Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.

With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.

The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they’d find: a redoubt’s vanadium-steel door.

The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.

With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”

He wasn’t looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:

SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY

LETHAL FORCE

TURN BACK NOW

Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.

“Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.