I lay the Uzi on my lap in case a mad boy decided to make a move. It was a good compact submachine gun, modified to fire a heat-swath plus bullets, frying anything within a twenty yard range. Lumo, infrared scope for night fight and laser lock, cool smooth barrel, compact hand stock—I liked the lighter feel, its quickness to slide off the shoulder and into the hands.
The throb in my knee had receded to a dull ache, that or I’d gotten used to it. Nevertheless, I up-ended the last of the pain pill-bottle I’d pulled from Starrunner into my gullet. Seemed I was about due for another dose. I glanced down at the pit: a stark, baking hole with crumbling earth on all sides. No soul would ever guess a hidden workshop lurked down in that abyss holding a Class A starship and stocked with tools.
I shook my head with an amazed grin, hardly aware that I was starting to doze off.
I awoke to the drop of something in my lap, a black-leathered figure crouching before me with a wry smile.
“Must have drifted off.”
“Dangerous place to do that,” Wren admonished, dropping the handful of pebbles she’d been tossing.
I gave a careless grunt, rose to my undignified half crouch, squinting in the obnoxious glare.
“Boring over there hauling water,” she bantered. “Thought I’d bug you instead.” She squinted down at me. “You serious about taking me with you, if the old man fixes the ship?”
“Why not? I’m generally not a liar. There’re things to discuss first. Like business. Not just a free ride here; work to be done.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s cross that bridge when the time comes.”
A stiff silence came over us and I could see her pouty frown moving across her fine lips, so it prompted me to mellow somewhat.
“Listen, I’m sorry for what I said back there.”
“About what?”
“About saying you had a butch cut.”
She laughed. “Well, it’s kinda true, isn’t it? Though I’m no butch.”
“Think you’d look a lot prettier with a whole head of hair though, instead of a few bristles like a porcupine. Not that you aren’t pretty. Just saying.”
“Opinion noted,” she said dryly. “This brush cut is more for practical reasons than anything. It’s cooler on the skull.”
“Those leathers sure aren’t.”
“They’re for protection, Rusco. In case I run into some dervishes. Their pincers are deadly.”
Voices drifted from down the path and a scuffling of moving figures.
TK, Billy, and the mummy-ish Toog came trundling up the hot sand, with the old man wearing a worried frown. His two scorpion friends scuttled at his heels.
“Bad news,” he said. “Mad boys are on the prowl. Saw ’em skulking up the ridge farther on. This is the closest they’ve come to this area.” He gave a brusque flourish. “Let’s get into the workshop.”
“Don’t need to convince me.”
We were hardly down the crude stair and moving across the pit when a ghost of motion caught my eye.
I gave a choked cry, shielded my eyes from the sun’s glare up top the pit.
TK lifted his head, swearing a wicked curse. “Into the workshop!”
Shapes came prowling around the edge and began to drop at our feet. Crapola! Our tracks must have led them right here.
“Get down!” I hissed.
Too late. I blasted one as they threw metal spikes at us and I lunged in the same motion. Another tried to gut stab me with a chunk of metal. I whirled, grabbed my knife from my belt, and slashed it soundly across the chest. Steel ripped up to its chin.
Dark blood sprayed over my open shirt and a white pulpy face fell flat at my feet. I kicked away the grotesque corpse.
More malformed shapes gathered in numbers. Wren crouched in attack, fired a spray of bullets into the faces of swaying, reaching mad boys. “Die, you bitches!” she cried. Billy uttered some Neanderthal sound and scrambled back behind the old man.
I tossed Toog the extra weapon in my belt. He opened fire with a bloodthirstiness that seemed uncharacteristic of his mild manner.
Limbs parted and mummy shapes rolled in the sand with mewling sobs. Fresh blood dripped on the sand.
Silence. Heat. The shimmer of an unnatural stillness. The cry of a carrion bird echoed overhead.
Swarms of crazies crawled everywhere, peeking over the rim like feral spectators. I lifted my weapon and opened fire, peppering any I saw. Somehow the presence of Starrunner had lured these ghouls here. And somehow the old man had known they would come.
Hordes of them dropped down on us like monkeys, only the whites of their eyes showing in ghostly, blotched faces partially hidden under brown, cowled hoods.
TK’s two sand dervishes scuttled down the path after the cloth-wrapped zombies, their stingers raised. A pincer clipped out to clamp on a brown-garbed leg, then a stinger fell and arched into a rag-garbed neck.
I blasted two between the eyes but a slinking shape crawling at my legs got hold of my weapon and yanked it out of my grasp. “Motherfucker.” I pulled my knife out, only to reel as a chunk of pipe came angling for my skull. I dodged back, but the thing ended up thunking on my shoulder. I cried out in pain. Wren was yelling at the top of her lungs. She blasted mummy flesh left, right and center.
Shoots of agony rippled up my arm, but I recovered, grabbed my spare glock, slashed out with its butt end and kicked the gnashing scavenger away in the fleshy part of the gut, before blasting open its skull.
“Get to the ship,” I cried.
TK and Billy fought in a wild muddle of bodies. Wise thing that I had given the old man that R3A, else he and his world would have come to an abrupt end.
I slashed a
