Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [41]
Stampede gripped his rifle. “Not bad, Sparky.”
Silence grinned, flexed his arms, and shot upward on a pillar of fire. Then he spit another fireball that engulfed a second group of bikers.
Stampede raced over to Hella and Colleen. He hoisted the woman up into his arms as though she were a child and ran back toward the closing camp gates. Hella followed, providing cover fire from both blazing hands.
“Hold those gates!” Faust leaped to one door above the heads of the struggling crowd, gripped the door’s edge in both left hands, and fired into the arriving mass of armadillo bikers with guns gripped in both right fists. His bullets tore through the front line of the Purple Dragons, and he kept firing despite the fact that bullets drummed the heavy, metal doors.
Hella stayed close to Stampede, no more than an arm’s reach away, and he bulled through the mass of frightened people.
“Close the gates!” Faust flung himself through the air, flipped over the heads of the people, transferred his pistol to his left hand, and dropped onto his two feet. He reloaded his weapons, and a bullet ricocheted from his Kevlar helmet while two others thudded into his vest and drove him backward two steps. “Close the gates! Now!”
Hella fought clear of the crowd, found a nearby ladder, morphed her hands back, and practically ran up to the catwalk. As soon as she hauled herself onto the catwalk, she morphed her hands back into weapons and joined the other defenders at the wall.
Below, all of the campers who remained alive had managed to make it into the trade camp. However, a large knot of Purple Dragons smashed up against the closing doors like waves breaking against a reef. Hella fired blindly down into them and regretted the loss of the grenade launcher.
Gradually, though, the withering fire broke the line of armadillo bikers. They’d fought to get inside because they were afraid of retreating back across the no-man’s-land that remained of the campsites. In the end, though, there was nowhere else for them to go. A few broke away at first; then they retreated en masse, like the tide going out.
Sharpshooters picked off all they could, but when she looked at all the dead strewn across the ravaged field that lay around the trade camp, Hella didn’t have the heart for it. Silence flew after them for a short distance before gunners chased him back. He spit fire at the retreating bikers and succeeded in roasting several of them.
“Don’t give up killing them.” The guard to Hella’s right glared at her as he reloaded his sniper rifle. “The ones we don’t kill today, we’ll have to kill tomorrow. They’ll be back when they get desperate enough.”
Hella ignored the man and returned to the ladder. She morphed her hands back, gripped the ladder, and slid to the ground. When she got there, Stampede was still holding Colleen in his arms. The woman lay still as death.
Hella couldn’t see any wounds. “Is she okay?”
“Yeah. Passed out.” Stampede rolled his head and grimaced.
“You okay?”
“Bruised and banged up. You?”
“I’m fine.”
“You took a risk diving off that wall, Red.”
“Didn’t stop to think. I just saw Colleen in trouble and knew I had to get to her.”
“Your choice?”
Hella shook her head. “She didn’t even know I was there. She had no control over me. She was so scared—or drug addled—that she couldn’t save herself.”
Stampede growled. “I’m going to have a word with Pardot. He’s not going to continue to make her like this. In this state, she’s a liability.”
“Pardot’s not big on listening.”
“He’ll listen now. I’m going to make him.”
CHAPTER 11
As she walked through the dead, Hella turned off her emotions. She concentrated her attention on taking salvageable goods from the armadillo bikers, leaving the other corpses to family and friends who would claim them and take care of their burning. If she didn’t touch the fallen campers, the sadness and the loss didn’t linger, didn’t become attached to her.
As part of the defenders, she and Stampede had salvage rights to the dead