Playfair's Axiom

A big-busted, slim-waisted woman with long slender legs knelt on a pile of busted brick and concrete, firing a snub-nosed hammerless revolver with two hands. Brilliant red hair was curled into a tight cap at her nape. When he’d glanced that way a few moments before it had hung past her shoulders.

J.B. was also on one knee, looking down at his fallen glasses. Nearby, his fedora lay upturned on a round-edge chunk of concrete. Behind him a nearly naked man with hair and beard fringing his face like a brown dandelion was spinning down in reaction to being hit by Krysty Wroth’s .38-caliber slugs. Apparently he’d just hit J.B. from behind with a thrown chunk of pavement.

Another figure reared up from behind a waist-high broken section of wall at the top of a slope of rubble. Ryan snapped a shot at him from his 9 mm Sig Sauer. The man’s head jerked as the bullet smashed the outside of his right cheekbone.

But he shook himself, shedding blood like a wet dog, then resettled his grip on the improvised spear he was about to hurl. Ryan shot him again. He went down out of sight with blood spurting in a red tubelike arc from his throat.

Ryan sprinted back the few paces to where J.B. was still on all fours shaking his head. He held the SIG out ready at arm’s length. Behind him he heard the boom of Doc’s big black-powder blaster, then the louder crash of the short-barreled shotgun mounted beneath the huge LeMat’s barrel. Somebody screamed.

It didn’t sound like anybody Ryan knew.

“Got move!” Jak shouted. “Rad suckers everywhere!”

“You all right?” Ryan shouted.

“Oh, yeah,” the Armorer muttered. “Just fine.”

“Then grab it and go!”

Ryan jammed J.B.’s hat onto his head. The man fumbled his glasses onto his face, then seized his fallen shotgun. He may have been dazed, but he had the presence of mind to jack a fresh shell into the chamber as Ryan hauled him to the feet by the collar of the bombardier jacket he never surrendered, even to the sweltering heat.

The sun-baked rubble mounds and wall stumps on all sides seemed to be lined with gibbering oddly shaped people.

A rock glanced off Ryan’s shoulder. On a concrete shelf at the base of a yellow brick wall he saw one of the skulkers bent over as if it had just thrown something. She, judging by the pendulous dugs that dangled in front of knobbly knees in her follow-through.

On the run Ryan shot at her twice. She screeched and fell onto her back. He couldn’t tell where he hit her, but she stopped moving at once.

“J.B., rearguard,” he shouted. “Mildred, you cover left.”

Krysty already covered the right, hastily opening the cylinder of her Smith & Wesson and reloading.

Having emptied both the fat cylinder of his big handblaster and the shotgun barrel, Doc had reholstered the antique weapon and drawn his sword from his silver lion-head walking stick. As Ryan glanced his way, sprinting past, he saw Doc fend off a thrown sharpened stick with the sword, then deftly stab an attacker lunging at Krysty’s blind side.

“We gotta keep moving!” Ryan ran for the front to support Jak. The best way to deal with an ambush, he knew, was assault into it and do your best to blast through. Since they were already surrounded, straight ahead looked like as good a way to go as any.

Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python boomed twice from where he stood on a low brick mound in a gap between walls. The painfully loud reports echoed throughout the area. Ryan accelerated his run as Jak smashed an attacker across the face with the ribbed six-inch barrel, hot from the friction of high-velocity 125-grain hollowpoint rounds. The wiry attacker sat down hard on a canted concrete block.

Jak shot him in the face. A saucer-size chunk of skull blew out of the back of his head, to the accompaniment of a bloody spray of gore.

Evidently they were moving through the ruins of some largely fallen building. Since leaving the mat-trans gateway, they had struggled across fields of rubble so random and comprehensive it was largely impossible to tell what had been street and what had been structure before the big nuke. They headed south simply because from Mildred’s recollection of late-twentieth-century St. Louis the densest concentration of big buildings had stood north of where they were. Where, indeed, a few surviving buildings still loomed or leaned against gathering clouds that began to move rapidly and take on an ominous orange tint.

Once they got clear of the rubble they could at least move faster and with less chance of turning an ankle in some hidden pocket of debris. They might even stand a chance of finding shelter against the likely coming of corrosive rains.

If they got clear. These scrubby, stinking ambushers didn’t seem inclined to let them do so.

Attackers sprang at Jak from either side even as he spun to face a third, whipping out a hunting knife. Ryan snapped a shot first at the right-hand assailant, then the one to his left. The right-hand ambusher went down. The one on the left, though, only went briefly to a bare bony knee. Then she stood up and with a screech attacked again, something slim and glittering jutting from the bottom of the fist she held over her head.

And the slide of Ryan’s SIG had locked back. Its high-capacity magazine was empty. He’d had to fire too many shots to keep attackers’ heads down. And now he had no time for a combat reload. Nor could he risk fumbling a magazine full of precious 9 mm cartridges away by trying to reload on the run.

Instead he whipped the panga free of its sheath with his left hand. He screamed like an eagle to attract the ambushers’ attention away from the slim white-haired teen.

The woman he’d shot looked his way, then she lunged for him. He saw that she held a simple sliver of broken glass with some kind of hide wrapped around one end to keep it from slicing her hand. It was primitive even by the standards of postdark improvised weapons, and liable to break on any kind of contact with a target. But it could kill you just as dead as a megaton nuke warhead.

Or just wound you badly enough to slow you down, which in an ambush like this was the same thing.

They both swung at the same time. Despite her wound, the woman had triple-crazy speed. But Ryan’s backhand cut was panther-fast and as precise as a needle. The panga hit the inside of the woman’s knife arm just beneath her wrist. Backed by the weapon’s considerable mass, the edge, which Ryan kept honed to razor keenness, parted tendon and bone almost as easily as skin. The hand spun away on a geyser of red, still clutching the crude glass shank.

Odds were she was out of this fight. Out of this life, if she didn’t get her arm bound before her adrenaline-frenzied heart pumped her lifeblood out the stump. Ryan hacked her across her twisted screaming face on the forearm return anyway. He couldn’t leave his own knife-arm swinging in the breeze. And he had learned as a mere stripling when he was running with trader’s crew that it never hurt to make sure.

Jak straightened from the body of the ambusher he’d just gutted with his big-bellied Bowie. “Clear,” he shouted as Ryan came up beside him. “Move!”

“Go!” Ryan said. He tracked his good eye left and right and saw no more figures emerging from the rubble. As Jak sprinted forward, the bits of sharp glass and metal he’d sewn to his camo jacket flashed in the sunlight.

Krysty came through the gap. Flashing an “I’m okay” smile at Ryan, she knelt to cover to the right. A moment later Mildred appeared, all but towing the scarecrow figure of Doc like a sturdy little tugboat. She let go and took up position to cover left.

Ryan reloaded the SIG handblaster, stuffing the empty magazine in a back pocket of his jeans. The mags were nearly as precious as cartridges. Without them a semiauto blaster was a single-shot weapon as slow and clumsy to reload as a crossbow.

With a parting boom of his shotgun J.B. passed through the gap as Ryan momentarily transferred the SIG to his left hand so he could properly sheath the panga with his right.

“Don’t hang around gawking, boy!” the Armorer shouted as he jacked the slide and turned to run. “This ain’t a vacation resort!”

Laughing a silent wolf’s laugh, Ryan took his SIG in his right hand and followed his companions at a slogging run.

Chapter Two

“One thing you gotta say for a ruined city,” J. B. Dix said. He had his hat lifted to mop his forehead with a dirty blue handkerchief. No sooner had he made a pass than more sweat sluiced down his sallow skin. “’Specially here hard by a big river. It sure does hold the heat in.”

“Wow,” Mildred said. Her words came out between heaving breaths. “Looks like Busch Stadium mostly survived.”

Without much interest Ryan looked at the stubby cylinder the freezie physician had pointed out. Several hundred yards to the west, it looked to be made up of tall, open arches supported by columns, and ramps that ran up behind them. He had unslung his longblaster and hunkered down, cradling it, hoping that if the hairy naked crazies chose to keep pursuing he’d get some shots into them at long range.

“Went to a game there once,” the stocky physician said. “Cards versus Cubs.”

She smiled with fleeting nostalgia. “That was a rivalry.”

“We don’t want to get too close to that thing,” J.B. said. “Who knows what’s nesting in there now?”

“Speaking of nesting,” Krysty said, “there seem to be a lot of flying things starting to swarm around the top of that really tall building.”

Jak turned his ruby eyes that way. It was easy to see which one she meant. It was easily the tallest standing as far as the eye could see. And Ryan saw twenty or more flyers orbiting high up.

“Screamwings,” he said.

“Never saw them big as that one before,” Ryan said. The giant flyer now orbited the tall ’scraper with the lesser ones surrounding it.

The albino youth just shrugged.

“Yeah,” Ryan said after a moment. “Don’t mean much, right? Always coming across something new.”