GunBarrel Gauntlet: The Last Bronze II

27. Falling Star.

By the time that the water tanker driver and his co-pilot had recovered their breath from rebounding off the console, the Nomad descended from the trailer to the cabin roof with a crank rifle in hand. Prying the sunroof hatch open, he had the barrel levelled over the driver's greasy cropped hair at the crown of his head.

"Get out... now."

Lifting their eyes to the black hollows of the rotary barrels, the co-pilot smirked before he spoke.

"You can only shoot the one of us before you reload..."

The Nomad kept the rifle aim on the head of the driver.

"I know; I've already decided."

Metal tapped on the glass window outside the passenger door. Creeping his vision toward its origin revealed the angry smile of Shamrock with another recovered rifle.

"Out."

Complying with the command of the voice from the roof hatch, the two Skin Pirates opened their respective doors and stepped down from the cabin.

"An leave yew'r boots thar, both of yew." Shamrock pointed with his rifle at their feet.

In the background, Carrion and the others were gathering around the Kenworth hauler, appraising it for any damage sustained in the chase.

"We'll take her. Sabotage the other rig so they can't follow us after we leave." The trucker said as she climbed into the cabin.

Her hand brushed the underside of the steering column, reading the jagged profile of a rusting rabbit trap's jaws loaded around the ignition switch. Taking up a tool from the cabin's floorwell, she tapped the plate within the jaws, biting the haft as they sprang shut.

Turning over the engine, the exhaust stacks sent out a puff of carbon as the chassis shook back to life.

"We have to get outta here, immediately! You weren't supposed to take the tanker, that wasn't part of the plan!" Scratch told the trucker as he came to sit beside her in the cabin.

"I don't remember being shot and betrayed as part of it either?" The cigar wobbled in her mouth as she spoke.

"This is not good, not good at all. What happens when Zeus or Hercules learn about all this?! We're dead men. God help us, we're all gonna be dead men. We gotta go back and warn them, now! Before the Skins get there..."

* * *

Against the mauve pastels of dusk, they could see the pyres of Junkyard in the final miles before their arrival, streaks of amber flames twirling in the night wind as they returned with the water tanker.

The outer walls had been torn down and dragged to ruinous pieces in the immediate area around the massacre, catching the light of the burning bodies that had been doused in accelerant, many of them crushed with imprints from the wheels of the Skin Pirate's war machines.

Speechless as they exited the cabin, Carrion and the others stumbled in blank shock through the trails of burning butchery as though it were a scene from hell's bowels. Some of the remains told their story from where they lay; cables round the severed heads and ankles at opposing ends of thrown offal, the charcoal of an adult holding onto a smaller blackened body in a final embrace.