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water and land at their disposal, the settlers began cultivating crops for
profit.
They used remnants of Highways 80 and 15 to build their trade routes.
Charlie Doyal was neither farmer nor merchant. His talents lay in his unique
"people skills." He had moved into Skull Valley at the head of a band of
heavily armed, no-mercy blackhearts. With brutality and intimidation, he had
quickly turned the disorganized squatters into his agricultural slaves and
crowned himself baron. After taking over the outlets for beans and corn that
the farmers had established, Doyal changed the nature of the business. Instead
of selling com for food, he boiled it down for its sugar, which he used to
distill a highly alcoholic beverage. In Deathlands, where any escape from the
hardship and terror of daily life was greatly prized, his joy juice was a high
demand, high profit item.
Over the years, Doyal also perfected his own version of jolt. He started by
cultivating opium poppies, then traded the black-tar heroin he manufactured
for a stockpile of predark pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals the makings
of crystal methedrine. His jolt recipe was a super addictive combination of
narcotic
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and stimulant, with a little Mindburst mushroom thrown in for its
hallucinatory effects. The rad-mutated fungus was one of the few living things
that thrived inside the thermoglass monolith. The success of this product had
earned Doyal the nickname of "Baron Jolt."
To service and expand his operation, he maintained a fleet of gas and diesel
powered vehicles, which weren't cheap to maintain. The distribution of the
goods and collection of the profits required a standing army of sec men.
Minutes ago, it was one of the largest and most far reaching enterprises in
Deathlands.
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Now it was history.
In the feeble, flickering torchlight of the concrete tunnel, Baron Doyal ran
for his life. He ran past seeping walls lined with barrels and crates, his
suddenly useless cache of arms, ammunition, joy juice and jolt. Capo Waslick
was right behind him. At the mountain end of the corridor, a steel ladder led
up through a vertical tunnel hacked into the rock. It was a long climb in
darkness to the sealed hatch at the top of the shaft. Doyal turned the small
locking wheel, shoved the hatch open and scrambled out into the bright
sunshine, followed by his second in command.
Five hundred feet below their position, the black flying machines hovered
above the casino, spitting shrieking bolts of green light. The aircraft had
twin rotors, a large one on top of the fuselage, and a slightly smaller one
spinning perpendicular to it, at the tail.
Waslick nudged the baron, pointing out the two sec men slinking along the back
side of one of the outbuildings. Both carried fully extended, olive-green
rocket launchers. Reaching the building's corner, they shouldered the LAWs,
stepped out and fired upward at nearly point blank range. The pair of rockets
got within
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ten feet of their stationary targets, then abruptly veered off, corkscrewing
away, and exploding harmlessly out in the green and pink poppy fields of Skull
Valley.
One of the gyroplanes immediately broke off its attack on the casino, banked
in a tight circle and swooped down. The unsuccessful rocketeers dumped the
spent
LAW tubes and took to their heels, back the way they'd come.
They didn't get far.
As the flying machine swept over them, a black net dropped from its belly,
scooping them up, then dragging them along the ground. Meanwhile, another of
the gyroplanes stopped firing and abruptly climbed, heading straight for the
baron and his second in command.
"They've seen us!" Waslick cried. There was no cover among the low boulders.
Doyal turned and dashed up the narrow mountain trail. Before he'd climbed
seventy feet, a dark shadow passed over him, followed by a gust of wind and a
fall of stinging mist. When Doyal looked up, he saw the glittering spray
jetting from a nozzle at the rear of the aircraft. As he ran on, he covered
his nose and mouth with his good hand and tried not to breathe. It didn't make
any difference.
After a few steps, he became tanglefooted. Then his legs gave way beneath him
and he hit the ground, hard. He lay there fully conscious, heart thudding in
panic, but unable to move his arms or legs, or raise his head. The flying
machine returned, its propwash whipping his back as it slowly descended. A
mechanical claw reached down and caught Doyal by the ankle. It jerked him up
and deposited him in the waiting net. Moments later, both he and Capo Waslick
were unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the casino parking lot.
It took twenty minutes for Doyal to recover the full use of his limbs. By that
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time, all of the surviving sec men and agri-slaves had been rounded up, either
by gyroplane or ground forces, and deposited in the parking lot. Close to one
hundred captives sat cross legged on the ground. Most of them kept their eyes
downcast, afraid to look at the inhuman black figures that surrounded them.
Though Doyal was afraid, too, more afraid than he had ever been in his life,
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he had to see and understand what had brought down his hard won enterprise.
Almost all of the attackers were over six feet tall. Their outer covering,
which he had first taken for a mutie insect shell, on closer inspection looked
more like some kind of synthetic full body armor. The black material was
segmented to allow free movement of arms, legs and torso; the hands were
protected by gauntlets made of the same stuff, the feet by overlapping plates.
The smoke colored, wraparound visors on the fronts of their helmets concealed
their faces from view. There was no way to tell whether they were norm or
mutie. Their massive looking longblasters were a bullpup design, with a single
claw toothed flash hider over the muzzles of the three barrels. The weapons
either weren't heavy, or these creatures were superstrong.
Doyal estimated there were at least seventy-five of the bastards. More than
enough, considering their firepower and defenses. As terrifying as the light
weapons were, it was their defensives that shook his mind to its core.
Experience told him that bullets couldn't be deflected without first striking
a solid object, nor could LAW rockets for that matter. What he had seen with
his own eyes made no sense.
As he sat there, trying to puzzle it out and failing, two more enormous black
wags rolled up to the parking area. They towered over the attack vehicles.
Their single trailers were longer than a triple semi, and their tractors were
the size of
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earthmovers. The combined weight of the two trucks cracked the ancient [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]