James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 2 - 2 Squealing Skirmish
🕑 Added 2022-09-23 17:01:02 +0000 UTCClay and Alex found an old stack of broken-down cardboard boxes in the GameStop back room. Those would make excellent kindling, but they wouldn’t keep a fire going long or hot enough to cook anything. Joe suggested the particleboard shelving around the store, but Clay shot that down out of the gate—they were already going to eat the Mac’n’Spam, they didn’t need to cook it over a fire full of formaldehyde and adhesive.
“There’s plenty of standing dead wood outside,” Clay said, thinking of the overgrown landscaping. “If you let me borrow Bertha, I’ll go cut up something that won’t poison us.”
“Well…okay,” Joe said, in the heartfelt voice of a martyr sacrificing himself for their souls. He picked up Bertha, patting the saw on its bright orange casing. “Now, you be a good girl for Uncle Clay. No getting pinched or kicking back, hear me?” With a fond sigh, he handed it over. “Take care of ’er for me. Don’t let her get sassy on you, because she’ll do it. Yessir.”
Clay took the old Poulan Pro without comment. A lifetime with Joe as his brother had taught Clay that sometimes keeping your mouth shut was the easiest way to handle people. He headed outside, Alex following behind him.
The greenery around the strip mall had probably once been carefully curated to look like an oasis in the desert, but after twenty-plus years left up to its own devices, the decorative foliage was reclaiming the area with a vengeance. Palm pups were erupting through chunks of asphalt in the parking lot, and the grown trees hadn’t been pruned in so long that masses of dried-out fronds hung down from their tops like unkempt mullets.
While Clay cut enough wood to get them through the next couple days at the GameStop, Alex hauled armloads inside and stacked them where they would make a decent barrier if they had to defend the place. The work was too noisy to talk much, but it was good to hang out together for a while, just the two of them. Traipsing through the wilderness as a group, fighting wasteland creatures, and constantly watching each others’ backs didn’t leave much alone time.
When the job was done, the half bean-and-corn juice, half-water was just starting to steam inside. Clay returned Bertha, picked up his M4, then suggested he and Alex head back out until supper was ready.
“Maybe somewhere out of sight of the storefront,” he suggested, once the door had shut behind them.
“Well, all right.” She stretched up onto her toes for a kiss. “But only because you looked so manly felling trees and cutting logs. It’s a nice combination with all your nerdy studying.”
He laughed and picked her up. In spite of having the strength of a three-headed giant, she was still only five foot tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet, so carrying her wasn’t any more strain than packing around a post-apocalyptic Barbie doll.
They were just ducking into a denser stand of decorative grasses when a buzzing, whirring sound made the hair on the back of Clay’s neck stand up. He’d heard that sound before, in Jordan during Operation Hell Gate. Except this time the drone was coming toward them, not heading away to check on the rogue Incant they’d been hunting.
“Well shit.” He set Alex down and pulled his M4 into his shoulder pocket, searching the sky. “We’ve got drones incoming.”
“Of course, right when we’re about to get some alone time.” She craned her neck. “Think there’s any chance it hasn’t spotted us and we could ride it out?”
“Not likely.” Clay cocked his head toward the sound. “Listen—it’s circling back.”
Alex scowled. “One of these days, that dickhead’s going to pay for this.”
With that threat hanging in the air, she turned on a heel and sprinted into the GameStop to warn the others.
Clay kept his eyes on the sky, praying they would move fast enough. The whirring was growing louder. He felt naked standing out there without his Cinderscale cuirass, which offered him +2 to Strength, +1 to Constitution, and a passive +18% Fire Resistance Bonus. He’d taken it off earlier after settling in to read—it wasn’t exactly the sort of comfy clothes you lounged around in—and there just wasn’t time to go back for the armor.
On the horizon just over a quarter mile away, he saw the first glint of brass. It was one of Gearhead’s bombers, coming in from the west, using the afternoon sun as a backlight to blind him. Credit where credit was due, the Aussie sure knew how to hunt.
Clay raised his M4, tracking the drone down the sights. He’d always been a good shot, but hitting a moving target at that distance would’ve been impossible without the leg up from the Aussie’s dex potions. Kind of ironic, if you thought about it.
Adjusting for the stormy breeze and anticipating the drone’s trajectory, he squeezed off a trio of shots that echoed off the concrete and asphalt of the ruined strip mall.
A second later, two of the three shots slammed home into the bomber, knocking it out of the sky.
The GameStop door chimed.
“—can’t believe this!” Joe ranted, stirring the pot of Mac’n’Spam savagely. Bertha was in the holster on his hip. “I hope Lynes is happy, because this is going to completely ruin the texture.”
“Will you quit worrying about dinner and move?” Alex snapped. She had all three of their rucks slung over one arm, Clay’s Cinderscale cuirass draped over her back, and her Mossberg in her free hand.
In the split-second between their bickering, Clay heard more buzzing.
Griff was a step behind them, a ball of arcane energy already formed in his leathery hand.
“Which way’s it coming from?” the old weed asked, swiveling his good eye to Clay.
“West.” Clay snagged his bag and armor from Alex. He took a second to slip the armor on then slung his ruck over his shoulders. “I shot it down, but it wasn’t alone.” He turned in a slow circle, searching for that telltale glint of metal. “We need to move out asap.”
“This way.” Griff jerked his head toward an open manhole cover out on the cracked street. “Saw it when I was scouting. We oughta be able to travel a while down in the sewers.”
They made a beeline for the manhole. Clay and Griff stood guard on either side, eyes roving, while Alex climbed down to clear out any threats that might be waiting for them below.
“We’re good,” she yelled up.
Chonk scampered down, then Joe followed, cussing up a storm at having to ditch the Mac’n’Spam so he could hold onto of the rungs.
“Sure, let’s just leave this delicious treat for Gearhead!” he ranted as he climbed, voice echoing through the tunnels below. “And we’ll give him all the stuff we’ve looted! And our dignity! And our rights as citizens of the wasteland!”
“Just go, Joe,” Clay snapped. “Griff.”
The old weed shook his head. “Fragility before beauty, lad,” he replied, a wry grin twisting his scar-crossed face. “Go ahead. A direct hit won’t kill me unless it wipes out alla my Health at once.”
Clay let his M4 hang on its sling and started the descent. He’d barely gotten his lower body into the manhole when two more drones buzzed around opposite corners toward them.
Griff launched an arcing ball of arcane energy at the closest. The drone veered wildly, narrowly whipping out of the way of the attack.
The second dropped its payload on the GameStop. The explosion rocked the street, a fireball lighting up the night.
And the other drone was whirling around, preparing for another attack.
Clay grabbed the edge of the manhole and swung himself down and out of the way. He landed hard, water splashing as a jolt from the impact rose up into his knees. Thankfully, he managed not to twist or break anything.
“Jump down,” he yelled up to Griff. “You’re clear!”
The old weed threw another arcane attack to keep the drone from taking a potshot, then hurried down the ladder. He fumbled and his boots slipped on a rung, and Clay had a second of wondering whether trying to catch the old man would injure them both or save Griff a broken hip before Griff caught himself and scrambled the rest of the way down.
“Thataway,” the old weed said breathlessly, pointing down the south side of the junction.
They took off at a sprint, sloshing up roostertails of stagnant sewer water as they ran. Another explosion rocked the tunnels and a plume of heat and light billowed after them.
The manhole and most of the street caved in, but the drones didn’t relent. As they ran, Clay could hear them raining down ordinance on the street above. The two mechs couldn’t follow the sewers in every direction at once, so instead they were carpet bombing everything they could in a slowly widening radius.
Alex was at the front, leading the way with the dark vision she’d inherited from Katotes, but she was about to turn down a tunnel in the drones’ direct path.
“No, go left,” Clay yelled. “They won’t swing back around that way for another few seconds.”
She pivoted, and the others followed. A heartbeat later, the bombs dropped, collapsing the tunnel they’d almost taken.
As they ran, Clay strained his ears to make sure the drones were still following their widening path and called out directions for them.
Before long the explosions and cave-ins faded behind them, and they were able to slow to a walk. Griff and Alex seemed to see fine in the darkness, but Clay clipped a light to the barrel of his M4 so he and Joe wouldn’t be helpless.
“Be on your guard,” Griff warned them, taking a swig from a stamina potion. “We’re not out of danger yet. Like as not, all that ruckus stirred up everything living down here.”
Alex pointed her Mossberg down a short dead end on their right.
“What sort of stuff lives in these sewers?” she asked. The alcove was clear, so she continued ahead.
“Massive fifty-foot alligators for one,” Joe said. “The great-great-great-great mutant grandbabies of those pet alligators people flushed down the toilets back in the 2070s.”
“That was just an urban legend,” Clay said, taking a swig from a stamina potion of his own.
“Oh yeah?” Joe shot a condescending look at Clay over his shoulder. “If sewer gators don’t exist, explain to me how people go missing without a trace in all major cities with sewer systems.”
Clay snorted. “Every major city in the US has a sewer system.”
“And people disappear all the time,” Alex said. “Kidnappings, mob hits, homeless get lost in fires and other disasters where rescue crews didn’t realize they were holed up. Some people even intentionally disappear so they don’t have to pay their taxes or, like, drop their old identity and create a new life somewhere else.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Joe said.
“They who?” Clay knew he shouldn’t get sucked in, but he was actually kind of interested.
“Big tech,” Joe said with supreme confidence. Chonk scampered across the ledge and hopped into Joe’s arms. “That’s why I never had a cell phone and always had to borrow your guys’.”
“Well, I don’t know much about tech,” Griff drawled, clearing a tunnel to their left, “but I do know you don’t hang around down in these kinds of places if you can avoid it. We’ll want to get outta here before nightfall.”
“What happens then?” Clay asked.
“The heavier hitters start coming out. Night aligned folks like common crocturnals and dark slimes and such as don’t like the light. Few of ’em even get burned by bein’ in the sun. Strong as hell after dark, though.”
That cut down on the chatter in a hurry. They kept moving, checking every shadowy junction they had to pass through. As they moved, Clay idly wondered whether he could Control Lights to change his flashlight to give off UV rays just in case something nasty attacked.
Now and then, light shined down from above through cracks or potholes run rampant in the city streets. Clay kept an eye up, but didn’t spot any signs that Gearhead’s drones had figured out which way they’d gone. Looked like they were in the clear, at least for now.
It was getting dark, however. Through a sinkhole ahead, Clay could see the Evening Star hanging in a darkening orange sky.
“As much as I hate to say it, we should probably go back topside.” He glanced at the sky again and tried to gauge how long it had been since the drone attack. At least a couple hours. “We should also keep moving overnight then find somewhere to hole up before morning.”
Wearily, the four of them scaled the sunken asphalt back up onto the street. They ate a cold dinner of some jerky on the move. By then they were too tired for much banter, not to mention, Clay suspected, too frustrated and tense from the constant threat of another Gearhead attack.
When an ungodly squealing tore through the otherwise quiet evening, all of them went immediately on high alert, hunkering down behind a crushed and burnt-out car. What the hell was going on now?
“You’re making a mistake!” someone screamed. “You will regret this, you fools!”
Clay shut off the flashlight on his M4 and searched for the person screaming. Alex racked her Mossberg and Joe pulled Bertha from the hip holster. Griff pulled his sword and buckler, most likely not wanting to call attention to their hiding place with the light from his arcane energy attack.
A horde of monsters rounded the corner on the street ahead. Annoying little kokopelli-shaped shadowmen, bopping along like tiny jazz musicians listening to the world’s creepiest music. Gangly valbats taller than Clay with veiny half-wings hanging from the underside of their arms. A pack of desert grims—huge black-scaled, red-eyed gila monster-dog hybrids—that roamed the wasteland.
Instead of attacking each other, the disparate creatures seemed to be after something.
“Get back, you savages!” that voice shrieked again. “I tell you, I am not what I seem! You should be bowing to me!”
Through a break in the horde, Clay caught a glimpse of a tiny black and pink lump.
“Was that—” He leaned forward to get a better look. He was pretty sure he hadn’t seen that right. Must’ve been a trick of the light.
“Ohmigosh!” Alex’s gasped and grabbed his arm.
He winced. “Easy, Katotes.”
“Clay!” Her voice jumped up two octaves, the way it did when she saw a cute kitten or puppy. “It’s a teacup pig!”
Clay shook his head. So his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him after all. As he watched, the little oinker juked a valbat and sprinted between the squat scaly legs of a grim, the whole time squealing about being more than it seemed.
“What’s a delicious little pig doing running around the wasteland?” Joe wondered.
“We’ve got to save it,” Alex said.
Clay laughed. Except Alex wasn’t laughing, too. Her face was dead serious. He squinted at his wife.
“You want to fight a dozen rabid monsters for livestock?” He glanced out at the scampering piglet. “We’ve still got plenty of jerky if you’re hungry. We don’t need to risk calling Gearhead to our location just to go after the runt of the litter.”
“It’s not just meat, Clay. It talks.”
“This is the IZ,” he shot back, “half the stuff out here talks!”
“No, Clay, shortstack is onto something,” Joe said, starting toward the street. “You never turn down free bacon. That’s a sin against nature.”
“No.” Alex stabbed a finger at Joe. “Teacup pigs are not food. They’re malnourished little designer pets, and this one needs our help. And let’s not forget I talked Clay into letting you keep Chonk. You owe me this. We’re going to rescue it, end of discussion.”
With that, she spun around and broke into a run toward the melee.
“And then we’ll eat it,” Joe said, hefting Bertha onto his shoulder and heading after Alex.
Chonk scampered off behind him, chittering out an animal war cry and revving his little hedge trimmer arm.
“Welp?” Griff fixed his gaze on Clay.
Clay grimaced and shrugged. “I guess we’re saving a pig.”
“That’s about how I figured it,” Griff replied, stowing the sword and buckler.
With barely any transition time, the old weed lobbed a handful of blue fire at the throng like a grenade. It landed with a boom, taking out a desert grim with its fangs about to snap shut on the pig’s round little gut.
Alex hit the outer ring of monsters like a wrecking ball. A simultaneous elbow strike and back kick sent a grim crashing into its buddies and folded a gangly valbat in half at its newly stove-in ribs. The weird bat-creature raised a long-fingered hand to hurl a spell in retaliation. Luckily, Joe was coming in right behind Alex, batting clean-up. He gunned Bertha and brought it swinging around in a wide arc. Green valbat blood flew as he took the spell-slinger’s head off.
Chonk’s hedgetrimmer whined in answer. The little mechacoon bobbed and weaved through the crowd, slicing ankles and hamstringing anything that got in his way.
The rat-tat-tat of Clay’s assault rifle joined the cacophony of sound. Regular bullets would do all of jack shit against the koko’s but they worked just fine against the rest of the flesh and blood mobs swarming the pig. The muzzle belched flame and vomited out hot lead as Clay deliberately picked his shots and carefully squeezed the trigger. Brass casings rained down in rapid succession, clinking on the pavement. Even as a kid, he’d always been a helluva marksmen and the Marine Corps had turned him into a sharpshooter with unparalleled aim and accuracy.
But even that was nothing compared to what he could do now.
After raiding Gearhead’s stash of attribute-enhancing potions, Clay had managed to permanently bump his Dexterity up to twenty-three—technically twenty-five when he had on the Stat-augmenting Cinderscale. From everything they’d been able to gather during their time in the IZ, a base stat of ten seemed to be standard for a normal adult human, while a score of twenty was gold-medal, Olympic athlete caliber. Anything above that was edging into the realm of humanly impossible. With a Dexterity score of twenty-five, Clay was fast, agile, had the reflexes of a cat and the aim of an online bot in a first-person shooter.
And never mind that he wasn’t an Incant.
He could do things he never would’ve dreamed of just a couple months before. He could put a round center mass and in the black at a thousand meters without blinking an eye or breaking a sweat. Hell, he could key-hole every single shot without even trying. Nowadays, the precision and accuracy of his weapons were the biggest limitation. At this range, though, he couldn’t miss. Every time he pulled the trigger, a round found its target. Grims fell, half their face suddenly turned to pink mist, even as Clay effortlessly picked swooping valbats from the sky.
He ran dry and popped his first mag out, securing it in a drop pouch at his hip, before sliding a fresh mag into place and racking the bolt back. He’d only had two mags on him, and even though he never missed, sixty rounds didn’t go as far as most people would think. Especially not when most of these mobs took two or three well-placed rounds apiece to put down for keeps. That was probably the worst part of fighting something that survived based on Health points instead of its internal organs, getting used to taking off half their head and still having to shoot them two more times. Clay couldn’t wait until he had a little magical firepower at his disposal—that would go a long way toward leveling the playing field.
From the opposite side of the horde another handful of Griff’s magical blue fire flew. It smashed into a thick knot of the slavering creatures, sending chunks of asphalt and flesh flying.
Closer to Clay, the teacup pig screamed as a koko’s shadow arms elongated and grabbed for its hind legs. Its tiny hooves scuttled on the asphalt, scrambling to change direction, but it wasn’t going to make it.
Since his bullets were basically useless against the shadowmen, Clay let his rifle drop and pulled his Lesser Wand of Inferno.
“Shut your eyes,” he hollered to Alex, Joe, and Griff, then he fired off the first of his eight shots for the day.
The blazing Inferno Lance streaked across the parking lot, lighting the street up like the whole city had been dropped onto the surface of the sun. Through squinted eyes, Clay watched the lance slice harmlessly through the koko before blasting apart the grim galloping in behind it. He cussed under his breath. That shot hadn’t done any damage to the koko, either. At least it had distracted the little freak from its prey. The pig put on a fresh burst of speed as it escaped, still squealing at the top of its tiny lungs.
The koko turned its empty face to Clay, the pig forgotten.
The bobbing, dancing shadowman pulled out a flute darker than a black hole and blew a reedy tune that set Clay’s teeth on edge and made the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention. Flashing orbs appeared in a variety of desertscape colors—red sand, burnt sienna, midnight teal. Each one wove through the fight and attached itself to Clay, Alex, Joe, and Griff. A smaller, piercing yellow one even found Chonk and followed the mechacoon’s ground level rampage.
The air seemed to buzz as the sky filled with a cloud of locusts. Each of the nightmare bugs was as large as Clay’s fist, with jaws like bolt cutters and legs spurred with wickedly curved razors.
The locusts descended, following the dancing orbs.
Alex, Griff, Joe, and Chonk had been doing a decent job of taking out the valbats and desert grims—those might be bigger than the kokos, but when you dealt damage to them, they felt it—but when the locusts hit them, things went south fast.
They flew too close for the Wand of Inferno or Clay’s rifle to do any good. They swarmed inside Bertha’s reach, attacking Joe. The bugs’ chomping mandibles tore through skin and the spurs on their legs opened gashes wherever the overgrown grasshoppers landed. Down below, Chonk spun around like a furry tornado, chittering and swinging his hedge trimmer in a wild flurry. Clay ripped the locusts off, smashed them, bug-stomped them, but for each one he killed, fifty more took its place.
Griff blazed, surrounding himself with a halo of blue fire, maybe figuring he could burn them off, but that only served to draw the locusts to him like junebugs to a porch light. With nothing else to do, the old weed had to extinguish his flames and switch to a notched-up old shortsword and buckler.
Alex was fairing slightly better than the rest of them, but only because she healed a hundred times faster than they did. She whipped the spiked ball and kama of her kusarigama until the chain was wrapped tight around her arms and the weapons were in her fists, then she went to town, throwing a series of lightning-fast punches and chops. With the Ettin strength, every locust she hit exploded on impact, but there were too many of them.
While the locust minions tore them apart—slow death by a thousand bug bites—the kokos surrounded the teacup pig and snatched it screaming from the ground. The shadowmen didn’t have any facial features to make expressions with, but Clay swore he could feel smugness radiating off the little creeps.
The flashing burnt sienna orb that was following him around flashed as it darted past his face. With renewed fury, the locusts attacked him.
The orbs. Griff’s fire. The locusts weren’t obeying the koko’s music, they were following the bright lights, attacking whatever living creature was closest.
Clay froze. Focusing while a swarm of flesh-eating grasshoppers were chowing down on you wasn’t easy, but he forced himself to home in on the one cantrip he knew so far—Control Light. Concentrating for all he was worth, he made the cast.
In the corner of his eye, a purple Magicka indicator appeared, fancied up at the edges with ornamental scrollwork and filigree. Every drop of his Magicka disappeared.
But the flashing balls of light strobed out new colors—camo green, bluegill blue, Old Crow orange, and the rich red brown of a redbone coonhound. It was like some kind of redneck rave. With a thought, Clay sent the lights dancing and pulsing toward the kokos.
The swarm of locusts ceased their relentless assault and fell still, entranced. Joe, Alex, and Griff immediately went on the offensive, smashing the little critters with furious abandon, but the bugs seemed to have forgotten about them completely. Instead, a million tiny eyes turned to follow Clay’s stolen lights.
