Chapter 3

As soon as Blue and Molly could see beyond the cab, their world erupted with sound, light, and motion. Gunfire from a score of weapons greeted them with all of the grace and tact a whole damn tribe of birdman bandits could muster. The pair dove backward, deeper within the cab again, cursing the avians and the few burns a handful of glancing blows had left upon them. Molly patted down a smoldering slit on the arm of his jacket.

“So holy shit, right?” Blue hollered over the discharging firearms – mostly energy weapons, judging from the relative quiet of that many guns going off at the same time and the singed skin and clothing. “No wonder the bastards were so quiet out there, they were waiting on their cousins!”

Molly, laying beneath Blue, checked the reddened marks that streaked one of her arms and shoulder as she got to her feet. “They’re firing weak shots at us.”

She looked at the stripes and nodded, touching one streak in particular. “Burns like bitch, but this one should be messy. Guess they’re serious about the whole slaver-carjacking thing.”

“I’m not going anywhere with any body, and neither are you,” Molly said, pushing himself back up to his feet as well. The first bird man invader crashed headfirst into the cab, rolled into a crouch, and leveled a beam rifle at Molly, who promptly dropped two rounds from his heavy handgun into the bandit’s chest. He craned his neck toward the front of the truck and shouted, “And no one’s taking my damn truck anywhere, either!”

After a few moments of the two looking more lost than not, Blue finally said, “There’s way too many of them out there, Molly,” and with a defeated look, she added, “I think we really do need a plan here.”

“Bit late for that now, I think, but you were right the first time,” he responded, “There’s only one way to go, and that’s through the flock outside. What we do need is some Boom-factor. Cover the cab, and keep ’em interested.” She nodded, and with that, Molly started to hustle back toward the armory, shouting “And don’t get yourself stunned out, I’m not raiding a damn bandit nest for your hide, you hear me? Mutie skins ain’t selling for shit!”

With a shake of her sky-blue head and a smile, Blue put her eye to the sights of her rifle and chuckled an “Asshole” under her breath before she peeked forward into the cab and took a few shots for effect. She thought she might’ve actually tagged a bird, even, and spat a venomous “Ha!” at the intruders.

As he passed into the armory, Molly stopped, and pulled a double-take into the room where he’d left Edgar. The metal man was gone, and Molly couldn’t do much beyond raising his eyebrows. He really didn’t have the time to investigate any further, but he knew that sometime very soon, he’d either be chalking up a victory due to the latest set of autonomous repair protocols and tools he’d installed for Edgar, or he’d be chalking up a loss due to leaving a gaping, albeit tight breach in the side of the Truck unattended and letting his cyborg companion get robot-napped. Either way, he figured a fistful of explosives wouldn’t hurt his chances, and he hustled back to the racks and started fishing clips out of his pockets and replacing them with a smattering of devices of very different descriptions. Some of the bits and bobs he grabbed were small spheres, no bigger than a classic cherry bomb, rounded and chromed to perfection with unlit LEDs. Another was a sawed-off chunk of corroded metal pipe with something like clay caps on both ends and a wick-like fuze that peeked out from one side. He picked up at least one grenade for sure, a green, banana-clipped oldie with a big, fat F-R-A-G stenciled on the side.

And, without a doubt, Molly “the Hatchet” Thatcher had dynamite in his Truck. And you’d better believe that a bound-up bundle of the stuff found its way into the satchel hanging at his side.

“Sweet Edgar, if you can hear me,” Molly said as he looked up and around, looking for all the world like one of those religious types talking to a higher power, “when you hear the booming start, we could use some serious ground support. And keep on your toes, big guy – I won’t keep you waiting.”

Molly wasn’t lying, either. He made his way to the cab, gave Blue a comradely pat on the ass that brought a sharp swat from the woman mid-burst on her carbine, and pulled a grenade from one of the pockets of his cargo pants.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” she said.

A short tchick-ching-and-toss later, the first in a string of explosions sounded amongst the roar of an angry, hurt, and terrified band of bird people. The break in low-grade gunfire told Molly and Blue that their enemies had scattered, or at least taken a moment to find cover – but a moment was all the duo needed.

Blue led the charge out of the cab, carbine pressed to her shoulder, bursting in tight intervals. She moved with a ruthless sort of grace; she was a predator in her element on the battlefield, and her feline poise was punctuated by her stalker’s step and the reflected flash of muzzlefire sparking from her pointed canines. She was smiling, and because of it, so was Molly as he walked behind and beside her. He didn’t have that soldier’s sang-froid, but his blood ran cold all the same; as Molly fired round after round from his reloaded hand cannon with his main hand, his offhand was fishing the three small spheres from another pocket. With a practiced toss of his gambler’s hand, the three balls flew from his fist in a fanning arc without ever breaking the steady cadence of punishment flowing from his firearm. Their quiet, staccato beeping didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of being heard over the munitions and curses being thrown about the valleyed roadside, even in triplicate. Molly was fine with that, though; whether the bandits heard them coming or not, the poppers would do their saucy little number all the same.

When the small spheres got around to detonating, the upheaval was monumental, even if they didn’t do any real damage to the offenders. After all, by the time Molly’d thrown the bombs, the birdfolk had already begun taking to the wind like so many ashes – at least, that’s how it looked. Through the clouds of dust the explosions had kicked up, Molly and Blue found themselves circling each other, scanning for more targets that just didn’t seem to be there. After several orbits about one another, the two slammed their backs together a few dozen paces away from the Truck.

“That couldn’t’ve been it, Molly,” Blue grated out between gritted teeth and cleared her throat. Her voice had gone hoarse in a hurry; she probably choked down some of the dirt in the air, Molly figured.

“No way in Hell,” he agreed. “That many slaver bird people don’t up and vamp when shit gets tough.”

“We should get back to the truck, then.”

“Yep.”

It didn’t work out that way for Molly and Blue, however, but at least they kept their heads about them, so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Instead of breaking into a run for the Truck like the birdmen thought they would, the duo moved as they stood, back to back, with their eyes and their guns up and at the ready. A wedge of bandits toward what would’ve been the pair’s rear just kind of walked out from between the ground and the sky, it looked to Blue, and they had their guns up and at the ready too. Theirs were even more ready, in fact; the birds shot first, and they scored a handful of hits onto Blue before she could return fire.

She gasped as the first bolt slammed into her abdomen and burnt a hole through her tanktop and blistered the skin of her stomach. As the second hit her chest, she began a scream that got cut short as the third bolt struck and clenched her jaws, her diaphragm, and the rest of her muscles. Her arms clamped her rifle tight to her body, and her fingers made terrible, tight fists on the weapon’s barrel, grip, and trigger, of course; Blue’s convulsions sent erratic volleys of bullets spraying in every direction, which got Molly’s attention and cost the birdmen another few lives. Molly whipped his head around in time to see Blue succumb to the series of stunbolts that followed, her rigid body giving way and crumpling to a moaning heap.

“Son of a bitch,” Molly spat as he brought his handgun to bear on the birds, crouched, and grabbed Blue by her belt. He kept low as he dragged her backward and fired twice before his weapon went empty. “Son of a bitch!” he roared and threw the heavy revolver at his enemies in frustration. He reached toward the back of his pants and pulled the smaller, semi-auto backup he’d brought and fired more lead at his attackers. He only managed backpedaling a few yards before he caught his heel on something spongy – he wasn’t sure if it was a lump of bird-body or if it was the lip of a trench freshly-tilled by one of the explosions – and kissed the dirt with the seat of his pants.

“Fuck me!” Molly was shrieking now as he shot; as soon as he lost his footing, the adrenal thing that wrapped its roots around his veins blossomed fully into a pallid terror. His frustration melted away along with his resolve and his determination. Molly looked down at Blue’s burned and still body, then back up at the charging bird men with their stun blasters raised and aimed. They were coming for him, and Molly was absolutely panicked.

Time began to slow for Molly then. It seemed he had all the time in the world to look around the roadside field they’d been fighting in. He was surprised and puzzled to realize that there was only a sparse scatter of corpses still on the ground – perhaps only four or so, all told – and those bodies were the ones that had been head-shot. Only seconds before, he could’ve sworn there were more along the lines of fifteen downed enemies. And when he looked back to the oncoming rush of the slavers still standing, his confusion deepened when the host that’d been stampeding toward him before his glance around had also shrunk to a mere five soldiers. His eyebrows crunched down and his mouth opened as if he were about to ask a question – maybe if he asked them, those bird guys would tell him what was going on – but before he had the chance, all of that extra time he’d had to think paid back out with interest. It was like whoever had hit the half-speed button on the monitor of his life decided to slap the reel into fast-forward on a whim, and in a blur of motion, burning, and muscular betrayal, Molly didn’t so much experience his own subduing as he did simply comprehend it. He, too, was bombarded by a hail of low-powered stunner fire until his body locked up and he lost consciousness.

Molly didn’t really see the whole “getting tagged and bagged” part of the process, but his unconscious mind knew it was coming. The slavers took stock of their dead, collected their weapons and left them where they lay, and slapped a beeper on the Truck. They’d be back for it; the first order of avian business, though, was getting the two marks under lock and key – and these particular marks were going to need some serious locks.

With a parting look around, the birdmen took Molly and Blue – now masked for respiration and sealed up tight within vac-packed sacks – off to where their slender buggies were cached.

And Sweet Edgar watched it all from beneath the truck.

His systems were still repairing themselves; Molly’s autonomous recovery protocols were working like a charm, they were just taking longer than expected. But it wasn’t so surprising to Sweet Edgar. The depth and complexity of his inner workings were a mystery to everyone outside of his own head – even Molly, his creator, had no idea how vast the yawning chasm of his consciousness had become. And it would only continue to stretch as Edgar learned and grew. The result of this, however, was a system that would take far, far longer than anticipated to restore. What should’ve taken minutes, in Molly’s mind, would still be ongoing hours later. Edgar wouldn’t even truthfully recall what it was he must do, or why he must do it, until his man-and-machine body’d already been stalking the birdmen of its own volition for the better part of the day. And when it struck him, he broke from his loping cantor into a pneumatic sprint that hurled clouds of dust roiling out from beneath his heavy feet.

The birdmen’s buggies were quick, but so was Sweet Edgar when he ran reckless. And they had to navigate far to round the narrow chasms and gorges that ripped at the parched landscape’s surface, unlike Edgar. He came to one such rend in the earth and, instead of stopping, slammed one foot into the dirt with enough force that it crumbled a crater into the ground and sent his mostly-metal body sailing cleanly over the gap. He landed easily, and his run resumed without so much as a misstep.

Sweet Edgar wasn’t exactly sure where the slavers were taking Molly and Blue, so he had no way of knowing where it was he was going, exactly, but the instruments in his head gave him a decent idea based on the avians’ travel trajectory, the suitability for either major or minor outposts amidst the surrounding terrain, and constraints due to the availability of necessities, especially water and fuel, placed upon the bandits by their scanty travel preparations. They were a slim people, and their dune dodgers didn’t have much cargo space; they couldn’t have had much with them, because they simply didn’t have the room for it. They couldn’t go too far, was Edgar’s conclusion, and as lightning split the darkening sky above his head, he knew they wouldn’t be spending in their open-cage buggies overnight. They’d need some real shelter, and the mountains he was hauling his robotic caboose toward would be the quickest, most accessible cover for miles.

No, he had no way of knowing exactly where they’d be going, but he knew the odds were in his favor that they’d cross paths.

And when they did, Edgar wouldn’t be too sweet about it.