Chapter Eight

Giggly Jane's jungle boots made no sound as she scampered over the broken ground of outer Moonboy. What the nukecaust hadn't swept away, human scavengers had long since torn asunder. The concrete foundation slabs of the upscale executive homes every one a 3,500-square-foot palace fit for a baronhad been painstakingly cracked and plundered for their metal pipes and wiring. The resulting rubble had been left in scattered heaps, or dumped out of the way into the craters of waterless swimming pools.
Giggly Jane and her fellow pack members moved quickly, single file, from rubble heap to rubble heap. Just ahead, beyond the last piles of concrete, shanties of all sizes spilled out from the sides of the handful of surviving buildings. Some were cozy lean-tos for one made of a single piece of corrugated steel; others were flat-roofed and big enough to sleep a dozen or more.
As they drew closer, Giggly Jane could see the rude dwellings were deserted. Though no tangles of corpses decorated then- packed dirt floors, the air hung thick with a maddening perfume of death.
Irregularly spaced, six-foot-long blotches of brownish slime stained the earth; in other places, much wider areas were discolored. From these patches rose the dizzying scent. She felt a powerful urge to throw herself down and roll on them like a dog.
The Right Reverend Gore signaled for the group to split up, then moved off to the right with the scoped longblaster. Spadecrawler and Egregious Jones continued straight on, while Giggly Jane turned left, according to plan, cutting through the empty lots until she reached the remnants of a street.
Despite what the scrounger had told them about the chill capabilities of these muties, Giggly Jane had no fear of what lay ahead. Her bravery was due partly to the wormholes the oozie protein had already bored in her infected brain, and partly to her excitement at the promise of blood and booty. She already knew what she was going to do with her share of the spoils. True to the freewheeling, gather-no-moss, cannie lifestyle, Giggly Jane planned to use every crumb of it to trade up for better blasters and bigger knives.
At the edge of the ruined street, she carefully placed her .36-caliber handblaster beside a big chunk of concrete. She wasn't going to need the reproduction Colt to play her role in the assault. Though she was an excellent shot, her real forte was diversion, which would allow her three comrades to get into perfect position for an ambush. She shrugged out of her dress and let it fall around her boot tops. The sun blazed against her bare back, buttocks and legs. As she stepped out of the garment, her dirt-and-sweat-edged breasts swayed, and their silver nipple rings and antiqued death's-head ornaments tinkled sweetly.
Hell's bells.
After fishing the Tactical One-Hander knife out of a dress pocket, she concealed the serrated blade in the top of her right boot. It was the only tool she requiredGiggly Jane had never learned to eat with a fork. Naked but for the boots, she set off down the lane of asphalt sand, following its sharp curve to the right until the center of Moonboy came into view.
In the middle of the street, some three blocks away, she saw the collection of strange machines and counted five figures in black. They weren't holding any weapons. Though their eyes weren't visible through the smoke-colored visors, the figures appeared to be looking at her, so she stopped in the middle of the road and did an impromptu little dance. Hands held high over her head, torso wriggling, legs spread wide, Giggly Jane bubbled over with laughter as she pumped her hips enthusiastically.
Of course, her wild, erotic contortions were a total sham. She had zero interest in performing actual sex with anyone.
Ever.
Because cannie girls just wanted to have fun.

THE SUN REFLECTED OFF the nasty, lopsided patch of white scar tissue on top of Spadecrawler's head. The damned gruesome thing looked as if it was getting bigger, Egregious Jones thought as he shadowed four steps behind, spreading like a rad cancer.
Over the years, he'd heard different stories about how the man had come to be so horribly disfigured, with that skanky little ear, all shriveled and puckered like an albino bat's butthole. Some said that his own mother had done it to him, shortly after his birth. Held him by his heels and dipped him into a bucketful of acid rain she'd collected, trying to chill him. Some said that he had done it himself by accident when he was stoned on jolt. Passed out and fell into a bonfire. Some said that norms had caught him bloody-handed and stacked hot coals on his head, trying to melt his murdering cannie brains. For his own part, Spadecrawler never said a single word about it, one way or another. Whatever the ugly truth was, it didn't matter a blood drop. From the nose up, the man was largely fucked, and he'd stay fucked until the day his running buddies ate him, nasty scar and all.
Assuming there were buddies left to do the job.
The way Gore was leading the show, nothing was for sure anymore. He'd started the day with a couple of dozen cannies, the biggest, meanest pack of man eaters this side of the Shens, and in a few hours there were only the four survivors. To Egregious, it was no mystery why things had gone so sour so fast. Terminal oozies had old Gore by the coattails. The way his hands shook, pretty soon he wouldn't be able to keep hold of a blade, let alone use it to cut free a nice loin chop.
He turned his head to the side and spit into the dirt. Thanks to the pecking order of cannie culture, he was going to have to let Gore take the best stuff from this raid, which had the makings of the score to end all. The juicy bits were sorely wasted on the Right Reverend. The kindest thing, to Egregious's way of thinking, would be to put a .58-caliber lead ball through both his lungs, then finish the job with the man's own stag-handled, guthook skinner. Tough, stringy meat, for sure, but while chewing it, at least he'd know that he'd seen the last of Gore. By right of succession, he was scheduled to become the next leader of the pack. Or what little remained of it.
Spadecrawler entered a narrow dirt lane between shambling squatters' huts, his weapon at the ready. Built on an Italian reproduction, the rifle-stocked carbine had an eighteen-inch, octagonal barrel. The ex-tralong barrel added some distance to the .44's range, without making the blaster hard to handle in close quarters.
If the "Cowboy Carbine" was made to order for the job this afternoon, Egregious's blaster wasn't. As he followed Spadecrawler into the shantytown, he thumbed back the twin hammers of his Kodiak Express longblaster to half-cock. The black-powder big-game rifle had enough power in either barrel to bowl over a buffalo at seventy-five yards. The shooting distance would be about a hundredth of that, if things went right.
He and Spadecrawler were supposed to filter through the shacks without being seen, get as close as possible to their targets, and then when Gore opened fire with the scoped blaster, charge in and finish off the wounded at point-blank range. The success of the scheme depended on Gore's accuracy with the Steyr. Egregious would have felt a lot better about the deal if the pack leader's hands had been steadier.
As it turned out, he was worrying needlessly things never got to the charge-and-finish-them-off part. Neither Spadecrawler nor Egregious saw the minefield until it was too late.
With the sound of rattraps snapping shut, more than twenty dirt-colored spheres the size of hens' eggs leaped from the ground. They jumped to various heights around Spadecrawler, all in a midchest-to-knees strike zone. As the mines rose in the air, they started to spin, and as they spun they chittered like a flock of sparrows. Invisible to either of the startled cannies, around the equators of each of the little spheres were alternating laser firing ports and tiny mirrors. When the mines reached their designated maximum altitudes, the lasers fired in a precise sequence. They weren't targeted at living trespassers; they were aimed at the mirrors of the mines spinning opposite, which created a cat's cradle of zigzagging, reflected green light beams.
Egregious watched as Spadecrawler stumbled through the fluttering, interlacing rays. He might as well have fallen into a web of band saws. Bloodlessly, he sizzled and came apart.
The light show lasted for a second or two at most. As if on cue, all the spheres dropped back to the ground and were still.
Egregious stood rooted to the earth, barely daring to breathe. Spadecrawler lay chopped into hundreds of pieces on the path in front of him. Even though he knew damn well the mines were on the ground around what was left of the man, he couldn't pick them out from the other rocks. He also knew if he didn't figure an escape plan, and quick, he was going to be down there in pieces, too. The only jump-up mines he'd ever seen had had trip-wire triggers. Assuming these chirping bastards were no different, the way he'd come in was clear; if he could just retrace his path, he'd be safe.
But these mines were different. There was nothing so crude as a trip wire. And some were set to go off at second, third or fourth contact, instead of the first. Egregious took one step backward, and it was his last.
As rattraps clattered shut all around him, and the triple-deadly, spinning spheres jumped up, he managed to get one word out.
"Shit!"
And it hung in the air longer than he did.

CROUCHED BEHIND A PILE of rubble about one hundred yards from the mutie camp on Main Street, Gore did a quick inventory through the Steyr's scope.
And he liked what he saw.
By itself, the fully functional, all-terrain vehicle would bring enough jack to spell easy retirement for a cannie with late-stage oozies. No longer would the Right Reverend have to hunt down his own dinner. After today, he could afford to buy his meat, have it brought in live and on the hoof.
He put the cross wires on one of the armored figures. The scope had a built-in range finderdistance could be estimated by fitting the target between the horizontal marks, which were calibrated to the height of an average man at ranges from 100 to 800 meters. At the distance indicated by the finder, the Steyr's 7.62 mm x 51 round was a flat-shooting son of a bitch.
The muties did have a slight numerical advantage, but Gore was counting on the longblaster to change that in a hurry. The scrounger's story about firing squads of Moonboy's finest failing to drop these muties, even if true, didn't really concern him. After all, there was a huge difference in muzzle velocities and knockdown powerbetween black-powder pistol balls and a slug fired from a metal-cased, military rifle cartridge. Gore figured that head shots with 173-grain, M-118 boattails would open up the backs of those greasy black helmets as if they were paper bags full of mashed yams.
Because of the view angle he had, which was straight up the street, Gore couldn't see where Egregious and Spadecrawler were hiding, but he had a perfect view of Giggly Jane as she sidled, jaybird naked, down the other end of Main. When all five muties turned to look at her, he had the jump on them, and he took it.
The Steyr bucked hard against his shoulder. He rode the rifle's recoil wave, immediately bringing the scope back on target. The shot was a clean miss! He marked the dirt puff, wide to the right. Cursing, he ejected the hull and chambered another round. Lucky for him, the triple-stupe muties were just standing there, like they didn't get the picture. He was about to give it to them, in full color. Snugging the rifle tight to his shoulder, Gore adjusted his aim point for the degree of miss and fired again.
On the other side of his target, the bullet kicked up dirt.
Gore looked at his trigger hand. It wasn't shaking. It was rock steady. And there was no wind to push the bullets off track. Something had to be wrong with the scope's zero. Maybe the tube got bumped. Glad to see that the muties still hadn't moved, Gore halved the distance of the last miss and squeezed off another shot.
The slug veered to the right again, as if the bullets were being diverted around their intended target.
That couldn't be fucking happening, he thought as he frantically worked the bolt.

AS SOON AS the shooting started, Giggly Jane's job was done. Laughing hysterically, she dashed across the street and down a path between the shanties. She laughed even louder a few seconds later when she stumbled onto the three-dimensional puzzle that was all that was left of Spadecrawler and Jones.
She was still laughing when the rattraps snapped and the jump-ups rose. A beam of green light flicked across her forehead and cut completely through her skull just above the ears, slicing her brain in two. Before her dead body could fall, fifty other laser beams, reflected back and forth off the spinning mines, transsected her torso and limbs in countless, crisscrossing ways.
Most of her hit the ground in neat two-inch chunks.