immediately to her as it always does with the Children: she began to burn up. It was like whatever was stored up inside her went at once, potential energy going kinetic. By the time she hit the pavement, about as dead as dead gets, she was already smoking like a bag of burning shit. Some crazy blue fire erupted inside her and her flesh liquefied like hot tallow, steaming and sputtering, her face sliding off the bone and her blackened skeleton trembling in the street for a moment, than crumbling away.
It happened that fast.
But by then there were other Children.
I never saw where they came from, maybe from under the rusting wrecks of cars or out of sewers and cellar windows, spilling from chimneys and skittering down the brick facades of buildings like spiders. No matter, they were in the street. A dozen of them and more on the way.
They ringed the front of the machine shop, chattering and squealing with delight, eyes shining and mouths opening and closing like eels sucking air, skeletal fingers all pointing at me while each and everyone of them made that high, keening noise that I knew meant, there, there he is, one of the different ones, the alien in our midst, kill him, kill him, kill him…
They started to close in, a ragged and emaciated band, heads tangled with matted hair and faces contorted and vicious.
“Motherfucker,” I heard Carl say, “it’s the goddamn brats again.”
He kicked out what remained of the window and by then Texas was at my side, a Browning. 45 in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other like some death-crazy guerrilla that wanted to die hard with smoking pistols in both fists.
The Children, maybe twenty or thirty of them, swarmed at us like insects, hopping and jumping, screeching and droning. I dropped three of them and Texas four others. Carl cut two of them nearly in half. And it was sheer pandemonium, the dying ones sending up great clouds of ash and greasy smoke and the living ones pouring forth right over the tops of them.
But none of them made it through the volley of fire.
A few got within three or four feet of us and we blew them away, opening skulls and perforating chests. I put my last two rounds in the belly of a little boy and he actually stumbled and fell almost on top of me, impaling himself on a shelf of jagged glass, burning up right in front of me. Carl kicked his carcass back outside before we asphyxiated on the fumes.
And about the time the others started to pull away, the street out there blazing bright like the mouth of a crematorium, somebody hit us from behind. I heard Janie cry out and then somebody knocked me and Carl aside and the next thing I knew, the crazy lady we’d captured was diving through the missing window, rolling across the sidewalk and coming up on her feet, hands still tied behind her back. Carl reloaded and was about to put her down, but he didn’t get the chance.
A half dozen of the Children fell on her, taking her down effortlessly, putting their hands all over her and suctioning themselves to her with those lamprey mouths. The woman screamed and shook, but she couldn’t throw her riders. They clung on, incinerating her, reducing her to a smoldering, insane thing that vomited out loops of cremated entrails.
We shot through her to get the Children.
And then they were all blazing and smoking and writhing, curling up and sputtering like bacon on a hot skillet. One of them broke free in its death agonies and shambled maybe five or six feet in our direction, then collapsed to the sidewalk, shuddering and flaking away, finally puking out some black and bubbling mass before going still.
And that was it.
We’d survived another attack by the Children. We just stood there, gasping and shaking, twenty or more Children lying in the street, fused into some blackened, steaming mass of bones and bodies.
“Those are some mean little shits,” Carl said.
“We better get out of here,” Janie said, refusing to view the carnage. “Those bodies are burning hot.”
So we went down into the cellar and waited for dawn.
There wasn’t much else we could do.
5
It was on those glaring, overcast days where the world was sank in a saffron haze that you could never see danger until it was right upon you. Sometimes when the dust storms came we were caught out in the open. It always started the same way with a silence that was heavy and sullen, a stillness that would make your flesh crawl. Then the wind would come howling like banshees, screaming through the streets, engulfing the world in a whipping tempest of radioactive dust. If you couldn’t get to cover and fast, the wind would scrape your skin right off and the radiation would roast you from the inside out.
I had once seen a pack of ragbags out picking through the gutters get caught in a storm like that.
They didn’t make it ten feet before the wind nailed their coffins shut. When it lifted and the dust had dispersed, the roentgens dropping away to near-normal, there was nothing out there but six bodies laying in the street. They were blistered and baked, brown as old shoe leather, tendrils of smoke rising from them with a nauseating stench of burning flesh.
Regardless, Gary was desolate.
About what you’d expect a year after Doomsday. The Geiger was reading fifty micro-roentgens per hour, background radiation, which was warm but certainly not hot. Livable. Other than that, it was more of the same: deserted streets blown with rubbish, smashed vehicles, burned-out houses. Lots of rubble from the last days when Martial Law was declared and the Army tried to put down all the private militias.
Gary was no worse than any other city, of course, but I wasn’t for hanging around and either were the others. We needed a dependable set of wheels. We needed to be free and mobile. We needed something else, too, but we weren’t talking about it.
Carl, being military-minded, wanted a Hummer with a mounted fifty-cal. Texas Slim wanted a hearse. Janie didn’t care either way and I just wanted something dependable. Gremlin, of course, had no opinion. He’d bitch whatever we got.
With a third of the human population wiped out in thirty-six hours and millions more dying from fallout in the weeks and months following, you’d think autos would be easy to come by.
Not so.
“C’mon, you piece of shit,” Carl said, turning into a crowded avenue that was strewn with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. All the tires had been stripped away for fires. Most of the windshields were shattered. He had to snake his way through them and it was no easy bit with that wheezing old bus jerking and stopping and flooding out all the time. “Cocksucker…fucking cocksucker.”
Texas Slim giggled. “I like that. I like how he does that. Swearing like a sailor.”
“Kiss my ass,” Carl told him.
“See? He keeps doing that. It’s hilarious.”
Texas Slim was a little odd. He wasn’t from Texas at all. Somewhere in Louisiana, he claimed, but Carl called always called him Texas and so did we. He was good with a gun, good with scavenging, good with doing what he was told without question. He was just a little off sometimes and it was often hard to tell whether he was serious or just laughing his ass off at everyone and everything.
“Hey, you suppose they have any willing ladies around here?” he wanted to know. “Or even a few that aren’t so willing?”
“You just keep fucking your hand and shut up,” Carl told him.
Janie sighed and I leaned back in the rear seat, thinking about what we would have to do once we got some wheels and who we might have to do it to.
“Hey,” Gremlin said. “Check it. We got some local action here.”
There were a couple old ragbags in their tattered salvation army coats picking up dead rats and dumping them into potato sacks. Once upon a time before the world went mad, they had been bums, homeless people, but in this brave new scary world there were no more bus stations to sleep in and no soft tourists to panhandle. Now
