Free Hell's Maw by James Axler

fat and bright white teeth of a teen—popped his head out of the cab and looked back. “I’ll slow but I’m not stopping, Kane,” he shouted over the roar of the straining engine. “We’ve lost too many people on this stretch of road already.”
    â€œGood enough,” Kane spit, his eyes fixed on the mechanical colossus on the horizon.
    As the driver spoke, his partner was clambering out of a roof hatch to operate the machine gun that was mounted just behind the cab. The man was slender with gangly limbs and a prominent Adam’s apple, his shoulder-length hair decorated with twisted ribbons. Wedging himself behind the cab, the man swung the heavy gun around until it pointed to the rear. Then he squeezed the trigger. “I can’t make the distance,” he said with evident irritation as he watched the shots fall short.
    Kane glanced at him, then back down the road. “Get behind it,” he instructed to the driver, indicating with a circling motion of his hand. “Get behind it!”
    With a shifting of grinding gears, the wag pulled up a slope to the side of the road and the driver began scanning for a clear route on which to comply with Kane’s instructions. “You better not be getting us killed, Kane,” the driver shouted as he fought with the steering wheel. “Ohio won’t never forgive you if you do that.”
    â€œI’ll do my best to avoid it,” Kane shouted back as he watched the mechanical marvel stride closer to Domi’s wag. It was still charging, blasting another red beam of light ahead of it. Between that and his wag was the other wag—the one that Brigid Baptiste was guarding.
    Kane raced through the possibilities in his sharp mind, narrowing down his options. He was a veteran of combat, but at that moment, watching the heat beam carve another slice from the rearmost wag, he couldn’t help feeling that they had brought a knife to a gunfight.
    * * *
    I N THE MIDDLE WAG, Brigid Baptiste had scrambled across the flatbed to operate the twin tripod guns located just behind the cab. She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, dressed in a black, skintight cat suit—in fact ashadow suit like Kane’s—over which she wore a quarter-length denim jacket and thigh-high leather boots with a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol holstered at her hip. She had long, luxuriant red-gold hair the color of sunset, green eyes like twin emeralds and the slender, perfectly defined figure of an athlete. She had a high brow that spoke of intelligence and full lips that promised passion, but in reality Brigid held both of those aspects and many more besides. An ex-archivist from Cobaltville, Brigid had become caught up in the same conspiracy that had seen Kane exiled and her removed from her post, a move that had landed her with the Cerberus organization. Brigid was well versed in hand-to-hand combat and a crack shot, but it was her eidetic—or photographic—memory that was her greatest asset, and the one that had got her into so much trouble back in her archivist days. Like Kane, Brigid was one of the high flyers of the Cerberus operation, and she had been instrumental in a number of their scientific advances. She had partnered Kane more times than either cared to count.
    Brigid swung the guns around, watching as the lumbering, artificial behemoth came striding across the uneven terrain toward the rearmost road wag.
    The boxy bulk of the unit was long and narrow, curved along its sides with the opening aperture located dead center, the twin railguns situated to the sides, slightly below the center—presumably geared for ground-based attacks rather than air assaults. There was a bank of windows above the heat-ray aperture through which Brigid could see several figures silhouetted. Beneath the cab was a cylinder running the length of the box, welded beneath it and bulging along its length in a series of metal rings. Brigid guessed