Desert Kings by James Axler Read Free Book Online

plants. Two wags smashed together, a plastic toilet seat, a length of chain dangling off a cracked block of concrete.
    Pieces of dark asphalt appeared here and there among the plants, and Daniel used them as a guide through the suburbs and into the ancient city. He had done this sort of recce many times before and knew what to look for.
    Soon, the fledgling trees gave way to vertical walls of thick moss, and vines extended in every direction. Bright red umbrella bushes stood like fiery giants amid the greenery, clusters of tiny birds fluttering about inside the tangled maze of twisted branches. Delphi knew the strange bushes were not a mutation, but simply vegetation indigenous to Puerto Rico. How it got to North America was anybody’s guess. Most likely, there had been a few samples in the college greenhouse, and after the nuclear war, they began to spread. Delphi had seen lions in Texas and elephants in Maine. When humanity tried to kill itself, the zoos of the world were left alone, neglected. Some of the starving animals weren’t eaten and managed to escape and breed in the wild.
    Which unfortunately did not explain the howlers, Delphi thought. Those mutations were not listed on any of his files or records.
    Howlers were not genetic experiments designed to survive a nuclear war, or biological weapons, organic killing machines created by the military to combat the growing mutant population. No, they were something else. Something different and unknown. Privately, the cyborg feared they were true mutations, Mother Nature’s savage response to the atomic rape of the planet. Someday, they would have to be eliminated, or else humanity would find itself embroiled in another war for survival.
    More and larger buildings could be seen among the thick carpeting of moss, along with the occasional upright door or intact window. A gleaming white satellite dish thrust up from an ivy-covered building, the fire escape festooned with gently waving flowers.
    The progress of the war wag slowed from the amount of debris on the old streets. More than once, the armored prow slammed into a bush only to discover a fallen-down bridge behind the growth or corroded remains of some large vehicle. Delphi recognized a few of them as Abrams battle tanks. Clearly, somebody had known what was going on inside the quiet college, but had arrived far too late to do anything about it. Just like sex and comedy, the cyborg mused, even in combat, timing was everything.
    As the war wag reached an open area, Delphi called for a halt. Only a few yards away was a weed-encrusted fountain, the legs of a bronze statue rising from the amassed plants to end in ragged stumps above the thighs.
    “This will do,” Delphi directed, unbuckling his seat belt and standing. “We make camp here. There’s good visibility in all directions. Nothing can get close without us seeing.”
    “You expecting trouble, Chief?” Bellany asked, rising to take a Kalashnikov assault blaster from the gun rack. Expertly, the troopers checked the load in the clip, then worked the arming bolt to chamber the first 7.62 mm round.
    “No,” the cyborg stated, taking down an AK-47 for himself. “Just preparing for it.” He was wearing better weapons than this, but it would be good for morale for the others to see him armed like them. People were such fools.
    “What exactly are we after here, anyway?” Bellany asked, slinging the longblaster over a broad shoulder and stuffing his pockets with spare clips.
    “Shine, sluts and slaves?” Daniel asked hopefully, turning off the engines. The diesels sputtered a little then went still. On the dashboard, a second set of gauges and meters came to slow life, using the power from the nuke batteries inside the floor. Fuel for the motors was difficult to acquire outside of a redoubt, but the nuke batteries supplied electricity for decades before burning out.
    “Hardly,” Delphi corrected with a disapproving grimace. “There is a lot of old tech here