Borderlands: The Fallen Read Free Page A

helmets, sat in small saddles on the upper backs of the Primals. The Midgets were hooting and giggling and shrieking with murderous delight as they approached, flourishing their throwing hatchets.
    The Primals were six-limbed creatures native to Pandora, reminding Roland of the enormous jungle anthropoids of the homeworld, in rough outline, but larger,far more savage, and each with four large forelimbs that sometimes acted as additional legs … and sometimes, when the creatures reared on their hind legs, became arms. Their clawed forelimbs had opposable thumbs; there was armor across their sides, catching the sunlight as the creatures splashed through puddles in the lowland. Metal embossments on their head indicated mind control devices.
    Psycho Midgets were puzzling little muties. Encounter a screeching, sprinting Psycho Midget in the field and the little SOB seemed completely insane—muscular, rabid, unable to focus on anything but killing. Hard to imagine one working on electronic devices—but they seemed to have periods of relative rationality, and in those they’d mastered the Primal Beasts, using them as mounts and living catapults. The catapult analogy came to mind as swiftly as the boulder that was now hurtling through the air toward the outrunner, thrown by one of the rearing Primals.
    Half a ton of boulder was flying directly at him.
    Roland put the outrunner in gear, floored it, spinning the steering wheel, and the boulder smashed into the slope close behind them, spraying sand. The turret gun rattled as, cussing a blue streak, McNee brought it around to fire at the Primals and the Psycho Midgets riding them.
    The repetitive high-pitched
zing-BOOM
of Crannigan’s Eridian rifle projected a bubble of destructive energy in front of the outrunner. Roland veered hard left to keep from giving Crannigan a clean shot at him. He glanced over his shoulder—saw the mercenaries withdrawing over the crest, Crannigan sending him a final mocking salute.
    “Bastard!” Roland muttered. “Mess with the bull andyou get the horns! And you’ll get mine, Crannigan, right through your gut!” But how was he going to get at Crannigan any time soon? He might cut right, over the crest—draw the Psycho Midgets and the Primals that way and just maybe they’d attack the mercenaries.
    An explosion to his right bucked the outrunner up on two wheels, almost overturning it. Twisting the wheel, he just managed to bring the vehicle down safely with a jarring crash. He looked over his shoulder at the Primals—saw one of them was throwing some kind of stubby metallic cylinder at them. He’d seen those explosive barrels before. Bad news.
    “Where the hell they get that blasting barrel?” McNee yelled. “It’s like the damn thing pulled it out of its ass!”
    “Strapped low on their backs! Come on, McNee, time is bullets! Spray ’em and slay ’em!”
    McNee let go another strafe with the outrunner turret as Roland tried an evasive maneuver, swerving left, right, and left again.
    Another barrel came arcing through the air, thrown by the enormous Primal—a two-hundred-kilo object flung the way a man would throw a football—and it exploded just behind the racing outrunner. Roland’s shield protected him, though it flashed with shrapnel impacts.
    Roland heard a yell of pain, twisted in his seat to see McNee slumped over the turret gun, his head a mass of bloody shreds. Shrapnel had blown the top of McNee’s skull off.
    Should have got that shield fixed, McNee.
    Seething inside, Roland turned away and jerked the outrunner to the right. Revenge would have to wait.
    He blamed Crannigan for this—Crannigan had hemmed them in so the Primals would go after them.
    But there was no hope of leading the Primals back toward Crannigan’s mercs now. The Psycho Midgets had fixated on the outrunner—they hated outrunners, as settlers had used them to run the little killers down whenever they got a chance.
    Roland veered hard left, sharply as he