He wondered which gun to use first. He looked in front of himself again and saw that there were literally hundreds of different blasters. Right by his boots was a stocky silenced Sterling Parabellum submachine gun. J.B. didn't recall having noticed that one before.
A pair of elegant rifles were propped against each other — a Ruger M-77 and a Steyr-Mannlicher, each with a polished walnut stock and a scope sight. Hunting guns.
J.B. couldn't remember where they'd come from. From some of the other dead, he supposed. But as he looked around, the Armorer realized that all the bodies had disappeared, both norms and muties. The land around him was full of blasters and empty of anything else.
The army of stickies was advancing slowly toward him, their bare feet shushing through the hot sand.
He couldn't make up his mind as to which blaster to use to defend himself. Something old, like the jumble of wheel lock and flintlock pistols? Or the long .50-caliber Sharps? Maybe its classic rainbow trajectory was what he needed to begin picking off the muties at long range.
If only his head didn't hurt so much! It was making it difficult for him to think straight.
J.B. closed his eyes and let his head sink forward onto his chest. He tried to steady his breathing, fearing he was going to start throwing up.
When he opened his eyes again the stickies were across the river, pouring up the steep valley toward the ruined church where he was hiding. The sky was darkening fast, and he wondered whether night would fall quickly enough to help him.
"Time to start throwing some lead," he said to himself.
He picked up the nearest blaster from the polished steel racks in front of him. It was a Parker-Hale M-94, equipped with a folding bipod and a Smith & Wesson Startron 800 passive vision night sight. The Armorer worked the bolt and steadied the rifle on the sill of a broken stained-glass window. The sight brought the nearest stickie almost within touching distance. J.B. gently squeezed the trigger.
And heard the dry click of a misfire.
He dropped the blaster and snatched up the Nambu, hearing the same hollow, empty sound.
The French rifle, the same result.
A Walther PPK, plated with a thin layer of pure gold. Misfire.
J.B. dropped the last of the useless, malfunctioning weapons and turned to face the doorway of the church. The headless remains of a crucified man hung above the lintel, one leg missing. The stickies came silently walking through the dark entrance. Creepily they weren't hurrying, and some of them seemed to be smiling.
They reached out toward the helpless man with their spread, suckered hands, ready to draw the skin from the flesh, the eyes from the sockets, the flesh from the bones.
The life from the body.
The churning pain in J.B.'s head was close to unbearable. It was like having the needle tip of a scalpel drawn slowly around the inside of the skull, slicing tiny wafers of tissue from the brain.
The Trader stood near the shattered remnants of the altar, watching as the muties surrounded J.B. for their butchering.
"Help me," J.B. croaked, licking his dry lips.
The suckered hands were everywhere, bringing a sucking blackness.
"Help me?" J. B. Dix looked toward the gaunt, remote figure of the Trader.
"No."
Dr. Theophilus Tanner beamed as the puppy came bounding up the dusty street toward him, its tail wagging furiously. A speeding brougham bowled by, driven by a liveried negro, narrowly missing the eager animal. Doc glimpsed a beautiful, cold-faced woman, sitting back on the maroon velvet cushions, ignoring the common people.
The dog went to him, and he stooped to pat it. "Friendly little chap, isn't he, Emily?"
"He is, my dearest," Doc's pretty young wife replied.
The dog began to tremble. Emily Tanner backed away from it, lifting the hem of her skirt. She turned a worried face to her handsome young husband. "What's wrong, dear?"
The dog rolled on its side, legs jerking as if it were trying to run on the air. Its eyes were open wide, and it made an alarmed, whining noise.
"I guess it's hungry," Doc replied. "Best leave the animal, or someone could come along and set it ablaze. Happens all the time." There was a moment of sickening blackness. When it cleared away, Doc was strolling down Fifth Avenue with Emily on his arm. She was pushing a wicker perambulator that held baby Rachel. Emily was heavily pregnant. It was a beautiful summer morning, and the street bustled with horse-drawn carriages and cabs. A hansom had lost a wheel on the corner of Thirty-Second, and a sweating, swearing Irish policeman was struggling to clear the jammed traffic.
Doc took out a kerchief with a swallow's-eye design and dabbed at his brow. "By the three... something. Hot."
"When do we leave for Omaha, my prince among men?" Emily asked.
"Dog has too many heads, my dear. Cerberus by name and Totality by nature."
She smiled up at him, infinitely gentle. "Don't leave me, Theo."
"Of course not. Never and a day. Safe here, aren't we, Ryan?"
The one-eyed man was walking on the far side of the pram. He wore a patch over his left eye, but the other socket welled with black blood.
"Today's not safe, Doc," he replied. "Tomorrow's worse. Only safe place is yesterday."
The picture of nineteenth-century New York trembled and Doc fell to his knees, holding his head and rocking back and forth. The pain was appalling, swirling around inside his mind. Dark shadows sucked at all of his memories.
"Yesterday's safe," he muttered.
Emily, the baby, the pram... they'd all vanished. There was a gleaming horse tram, with walls of turquoise arma-glass. People were inside it, sitting upright and facing the front: a woman holding a little baby near the rear; a man in a hat and a young boy with stark white hair, carrying a puppy in his arms; a tall woman whose hair blazed like a New Mexico sunset. All were moving away from him.
"Come back to yesterday," Doc shouted, starting to run toward them.
But a swordstick of demonic agony tore into his head and he fell down, blood coursing from his nose. The blood ran over the sidewalk, which was built from patterned tiles that made up a star-spangled banner.
A mop-headed youth holding a battered guitar patted him on the shoulder. "Something's happening and you don't know about it. I'll let you be in my past if you'll let me be in yours."
It seemed like a good offer to Doc, but by the time he'd struggled to his knees the boy had vanished.
"Someone dug the dog a tomb," Doc said, nearly weeping from the sickness and his own weakness.
Emily kissed him on the cheek. "Stay here with me forever, my love."
"Yes," he whispered as the blackness enveloped him.
Krysty Wroth could usually control what happened to her mind when she was sleeping, or when she was making a mat-trans jump. The training that she'd been given by her mother, Sonja, back in her home ville of Harmony, meant that she possessed a variety of arcane skills. But even her mind was torn into the ether by the third, faulty jump.
She knew that the lover in her dream was Cort Strasser, knew him for one of the most evil beings to blight the Deathlands. Jordan Teague had been Baron of Mocsin, a notorious frontier pesthole, with festering alleys, gaudies and bars. To control somewhere like Mocsin meant "no more Mr. Nice Guy." But Teague couldn't have done it alone. He needed a sec boss who would be ten times more vicious and cruel.
Cort Strasser.
Krysty lay back in the soft, warm bed and moaned as he touched her. His long, strong fingers sought out the hidden places of her body, making her writhe with an overwhelming sensual delight.
She clasped the tall, gaunt figure to her, reveling in the lean tension beneath the corded muscles. He rolled above her, spreading her thighs with a brutal jab of his knee. One hand gripped her wrists and held them effortlessly still above her head. Sweat beaded the near-bald head. Thin eyes stared deep into her face, thin lips peeled off broken teeth.