Take the All-Mart! - By J. I. Greco Page 0,1

for two dozen donuts outside of Indy.”

Rudy went sheepish. “Did I?”

“Yeah. In the future, let’s just assume we’ll need ammo more than food and not trade it away.”

“But they had sprinkles.”

“Even for sprinkles.” Trip twitched his left eyebrow to have the Wound avoid the burnt-out husk of a semi cab, then smirked over at Rudy. “You wouldn’t want to throw yourself out the window, would you? If you tuck and roll, maybe you’ll knock a couple over. Probably won’t stop them, but it’ll give me a much needed chuckle.”

“May I suggest a rail gun?” came a clearly fake English-accented voice from the back seat.

Trip huffed. “Yeah, that’d be nice. Too bad we don’t have a rail gun.”

“No. But we do.”

Trip and Rudy looked at each other in surprise, then back at the Higgins, bound in electrical tape and smiling smugly at them from the back seat. The WOLFpack’s hub, he was done up like a proper, prissy English gentlemen about to set off on a jungle adventure, complete with a fraying safari outfit and pith helmet. A pair of extra-long whip antennas grafted onto his temples stuck up through holes crudely cut in the helmet’s brim.

“You ain’t got no railgun,” Trip said, then raised an eyebrow at Rudy. “Do they?”

Rudy shrugged. “I didn’t see any...” His side-view was long-gone missing in action, so to check he had to poke his head out the window, clamping a hand over his fez to keep it from flying off.

In the rear of the pack, a female Magnum was unslinging a long, thin-barreled rifle from her back. She tossed it to a short Filipino Magnum bobbing in front of her. He in turn tossed it to the Magnum in front of him, and so on. The rifle worked its way up through the weaving pack, tossed from Magnum to howling Magnum, finally arcing through the air at the back of the burly, toothless Magnum at the head of the pack. At the last possible moment, the leader spun, clutching the rifle out of the air, and continued spinning, leveling and aiming the rifle at the Wound as he completed the three-sixty.

Rudy pulled his head back in, his face serenely grave. “Looks like a Norwegian special action stock with a knock-off Israeli straight-bore accelerator.” He twisted around to ask the Higgins: “What are they using? Tungsten slugs?”

The Higgins smiled at him. “What else?”

Cig dangling from his lips, Trip looked at Rudy. “Think they’ll be able to get through the armor —”

He cut himself off as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Higgins suddenly jog his head to the side. Trip had just enough time to duck himself before the —

POP!

Where the Higgins’ head had been a second before he moved, a half-inch hole had just simply appeared in the armor scaling over the rear window, the edges of the hole glowing white hot. A matching exit hole had appeared almost instantaneously in the windshield, right under the rear-view.

“Vishnu’s aunt Patty.” Trip stared at the hole in the windshield as he sat up. “That missed me by way too little.”

Staring back at the entry hole and past the grinning Higgins, Rudy reached under his t-shirt to give his left nipple a good twist, turning the flow of THC-analog from his belly factory all the way up. “Too late to go to Rehoboth, isn’t it?”

Trip gave him a curt smirk, then twisted to sneer back at the Higgins. “Go ahead, be all smug. They could have hit you, you know.”

“They know exactly where I am,” the Higgins said. “That’s how this works. My pack sees, hears, feels and shares every thought I have.”

Rudy balled a fist and punched the Higgins in the eye. “How’d they like sharing that?”

The Higgins shrugged it off, chuckling even as his eye socket began to redden and his eyelid puffed up.

“What’s so funny?” Rudy asked, kissing his knuckles and shaking his fingers out.

“I’m telling them to put the next one between your shoulder blades.”

Trip took a long suck of his cig, titled his head back to blow smoke at the duct-taped patched ceiling. “Rudy, I’m going to need a moment to think. Alone.”

Rudy nodded enthusiastically and grabbed the stun baton off the dash. “Goodnight, you prince of mind-sharing freaks,” he said as he twisted around and jammed the baton into the Higgins’ neck, triggering it on contact.

The Higgins convulsed with a gurgled yelp, eyes rolling to white before he gave a final shudder and went limp, unconscious. Rudy