End Program

by James Axler

  “I guess I do,” Ryan agreed. He had been a trader once himself, part of the legendary crew of the man known as The Trader, in fact. Trading in the Deathlands was one way to obtain what you needed to survive, and it notched up a lot less dead bodies than the other way, which was taking. But traders lived by their wits. They were very often seen as the haves in this world of have-nots, which meant it wasn’t difficult to find people willing to take a shot at them in hopes of getting their hands on the stock. Trader had protected himself by traveling from ville to ville in the armored War Wag One and surrounding himself with the best crew of chillers he could find. Other traders survived in other ways. Sometimes a trader set up a base that he fortified, using it as a trading post, maybe even setting himself up as its ruling baron. “Are these people going to let you in, Trevor?”

  “They got no beef with us, Ryan,” the farmer assured him. “We always treated them fair when we traded and I dare say they paid us the same courtesy. Made the trip there annually, occasionally more often.”

  Ryan nodded, peering off into the distance as something caught his eye. Down the road a little, he could see another farmhouse, this one burned-out like the one they had found. Ryan tapped into the magnification system of his new eye, focusing on the distant building. It looked as if it had been burned-out weeks, if not months, ago.

  “Crops can be kind sometimes,” Trevor was explaining. “With a lot of hands or a store, you can wind up with too much.”

  Ryan nodded. “You know this place?” he asked, indicating the burned-out farmhouse.

  Trev nodded grimly. “Yup.”

  As they trudged past the fire-blackened farmhouse, Ryan noticed a number of the adults pause and cross themselves solemnly. He recognized the gesture as a religious sign, an affirmation of faith.

  “Friends of yours?” Ryan asked as he saw Trevor do the same.

  “Good friends,” Trevor replied.

  “What happened?”

  “Same thing as you saw today, more or less,” the farmer explained. “Three months ago a group of people came in the night, burned the place down while the Dodsons slept in their beds. Terrible thing—three generations of their family died, including eight children.”

  “You have any idea why?”

  Trevor shook his head. “Is there ever any reason for hate? It just perpetuates and it sweeps wrong ones up in its fury.”

  Ryan looked around at the scene surrounding the burned-out farmhouse. Here, as at Trevor’s, the surrounding fields has suffered too. A circle of crops around the building had burned down to stubble, a mosaic of ash carpeting the ground even now, all this time after from the destruction. An outhouse had survived, but its walls were streaked black with smoke, its door hanging awkwardly from metal hinges that had been melted into new shapes.

  “Someone doesn’t like farmers, I guess,” Ryan said.

  “Or eating,” Trevor added grimly. “Once all the farms close down, there won’t be anything left here—no reason left for people to stay.”

  That was a good point, Ryan realized. He had seen a lot of stealing in his travels across the Deathlands, understood the use of force to get property and goods. And he had seen wanton destruction too, but it was usually territorial when you got right down to it. This however? From what Trevor seemed to be saying, there was no real reason behind it—not one he knew of anyhow.

  Close to the farmhouse, Jak found a tree that was still standing and he placed the blade of his knife against it, carving a line there. It was a marker—hardly noticeable but enough for J.B. and Doc to follow if they got here.

  The group trekked on. They were already two miles out from Trevor’s burned-out farmhouse, but Ryan’s team kept a wary eye fore and aft for any possible attack. Those bikers had been a strong group determined to raise hell. Figuring the reasons why could wait.

  As they walked, Jak showed Ryan a path that took them out of immediate sight. Ryan commanded the group to stay close and together they followed the track, a snaking dirt line through a patchy forest made up of lemon trees and some mutie breed of apple that seemed to double-bud in Siamese couplings.

  * * *

  AT THE WRECKAGE of the barn, a few tufts of flame were burning, littering the ground like tumbleweed while the fields billowed dark smoke into the sky. Little of the barn itself remained, just struts here and there, a beam that had somehow survived J.B.’s attack.

  Around the farmhouse and the barn, the bikers arose, struggling from the ground where they had been tossed by explosions or racked by blasterfire. Some were dead, some had lost limbs, but fully two-thirds remained alive, staggering through the stinking curtain of black smoke.

  “What the black dust happened?” Niles, the leader of the bikers said from his sneering blood-caked mouth. His mouth always showed that sneer, ever since the surgeons had rebuilt his face after the accident that had changed his life. He was a tall man with brown hair down past his collar, dressed in a scuffed jacket and pants made from some Kevlar-leather weave. The jacket had a logo painted across the back: an old restaurant managed by celebrities back before the nukecaust that was now not even a memory.

  Beside Niles, his partner, twenty-three years old with hair as golden as the burning corn, wiped soot from her pretty face as she shook her head. “Some kind of funting explosion, Niles,” she said, staring around in bewilderment. She too had been victim to that accident, where Niles’s bike had hit a patch of rough ground on a cliff path and veered into hers, sending them both over the edge of the cliff.

  They had been lucky to survive; lucky and something else maybe, something planned. Now the woman wore metal down her right side, a perfectly tooled curve of stainless steel to replace her shattered hip and three metal ribs resting below her right breast, covered in synthetic skin that looked identical to her own, but that never took a tan no matter how much sun she showed it. There was another line of metal twisted up through her arm, attached to her right shoulder to give her the same freedom of movement she had enjoyed before the accident, only now it gave her strength too. Her name was Amanda, and that, at least, had remained unchanged after the accident that had chilled her once.

  There was a litter of metal and wood scattered around the two of them. Their colleagues were strewed all about on the scorched ground, struggling in the tall stalks of corn like discarded rag dolls, as if a toddler had knocked over his toys on a colossal scale. Some people were picking themselves up, checking where they had been hit or had fallen, while others lay unmoving as black ash washed over them like a shower from Hades. Metal shone here and there from beneath their torn skin, prosthetic limbs, a metal plate in the skull, other parts, random but cruelly effective.

  “Explosion is right, Amanda,” Niles said, and he spit a gob of bloody saliva onto the smoke-black ground. “Someone ambushed us.”

  He looked around more warily, holding his hand over his eyes where the ash lashed at his face. The ash felt hot, the way spicy food tasted hot. He and Amanda had been some way back when the barn blew, their bikes running side by side as the explosion ripped through their colleagues. He had fallen into hers, his bike ramming into her front wheel and flipping both of them up and over the handlebars. The bikes were somewhere among the pileup of fallen wrecks, tossed across the dirt track and the fields that ran to either side. Thoughts of the crash reminded Niles of that day when he and Amanda had spun out on the cliff top. He would rather not remember that; it felt like another man’s life now, like something he had only encountered in his dreams.

  Niles wiped at the ruined flesh on the left-hand side of his face, where a line of brass rivets showed. He had been rebuilt once, after that other bike accident months ago that had taken away a whole chunk of his once-handsome face and the life that went with it. The rebuild had been exemplary, but it had left him with a puckered sneer that wouldn’t leave his face, not even when he smiled. It didn’t muc
h matter—weren’t nothing worth smiling about out here anyway, except maybe Amanda’s tits with their dappled suntan on synthetic skin, patterned like a giraffe.

  Others were struggling with a chorus of groans. Niles scanned them, seeing two figures standing close to the smoldering farmhouse and counting eighteen more emerging from the black-smeared stubble of the corn and wheat. Some were already testing their bikes. He switched his right eye to infrared vision, drawing on another of the enhancements that the people of Progress had gifted him, searching for more warm bodies amid the debris as more of his gang joined them from the far side of the property. There were three more of his crew still alive, struggling beneath the wreckage of the barn as well as a farm survivor, who had to have been making a run for it through the fields. He ordered his men to go find them, pointing them out where a human eye would have missed them. His troops chilled the farmer, blasting his brains out as he screamed at the pain he was in—it was what passed for mercy hereabouts.

  * * *

  J.B. AND DOC left the fields, drawing a wide semicircle around the burning crops until they reached the westernmost side of the property. It was there that they found the first marker that Ryan and the others had left. The marker was nothing more than a notch in a tree trunk, roughly the height of J.B.’s belt. The mark was an indent at eleven, twelve, or one o’clock to indicate the direction Ryan’s group had taken. It was barely noticeable, yet easy enough to decipher if you knew to look for it. The first mark was at the eleven o’clock angle, indicating that they needed to track to the left and follow what path they found there. A road waited that way, a dirt track with pools of cloudy water that stunk of pollutants—that would be the way that Ryan’s group had gone.

  J.B. and Doc followed the road indicated, wondering how far behind the others they were. They said little, keeping their thoughts and concerns to themselves, and also saving energy for the unknown trek ahead. Their hearing had come back, but tiredness was setting in with the comedown from adrenaline.

  J.B. stopped at the side of the road that ran along the edge of the farmland, pulled out his mini-binoculars and held them up to his eyes, scanning the farm and the barn beyond.

  “Bastards are moving,” he told Doc after a moment. “Lots of activity. I can’t make out the details, but it looks like we took out fewer than we thought in that explosion. Either that or they had friends nearby.”

  Doc shook his head in weary disbelief. “Cockroaches do have a knack of surviving,” he stated, “no matter how hard you beat them down.”

  “There had to be thirty in that ‘roach army,” J.B. said. “Figure twenty-plus are still walking. Their machines mebbe didn’t do so well.”

  Doc smiled grimly. “You call them an army, J.B.,” he said.

  “That many people coming to chill folks is a militia,” J.B. reasoned, “no matter whether they wear a flag or salute one.”

  “We should keep moving,” Doc said.

  His companion nodded, pulling the binoculars from his eyes. The road ahead looked bleak.

  Chapter Twenty

  Twenty-four bikers survived the explosion, including Niles and Amanda. Niles grimaced at that. They had taken unexpected losses here. The farmers had to have set the ambush, but they had lost everything in the process. Even their own equipment was nothing but scrap now, but so were a lot of the bikes.

  As Niles was making his observations, one of the crew mechanics drew his attention from where he knelt, examining a scratched-up bike. Nicknamed Hog, the man was rotund and wore a bandana over his bald head, covering the place where the surgeons of Progress had replaced the front of his skull with a metal plate after they’d messed with his brain.

  “Lotto d-d-damage on the bikes,” the mechanic said. “Can mebbe get nineteen or twenty up an’ r-r-running in time, but—blast! Nuke-shittin’ ash!” He swatted away the ash as it stung against the exposed skin on his forearms like an insect.

  “Twenty rides?” Niles asked, bringing the man back to the present.

  “Yeah,” Hog said, nodding thoughtfully. “It’ll take a while to get all of them up ‘n r-r-runnin’ but we got plenty of p-p-parts to scavenge from.”

  Niles nodded, surveying the litter of broken bikes. “Get what you can running and we’ll head back,” he said. “Those farm hicks won’t get far, not on foot. They’ll keep. We’ll take what we got, refuel and go hunting.”

  Hog let out a cheerful whoop at that, stuttered by the shitty job the surgeons did on his brain.

  Amanda could ride with Niles until they could patch up something for her. They had come here to burn, and they wanted to get back on the road.

  Amanda strode over to join Niles, the leather pants encompassing her long legs black and slick like an insect’s shell. She reached for Niles, placing her hand behind his neck and pulling him into a savage, forceful kiss that he reciprocated in kind. “Are we going to ride, lover-mine?”

  Niles smiled, the curl of his lip sneering where the brass rivets held his new jaw in place. “There’s nothing left for them here now,” he said, “so they’ll head for Heartsville. That’s the only pesthole left. That’s where we’ll find them. That’s where we’ll chill them. All of them.”

  They were indestructible, Niles and Amanda—metal shells wrapped in their original, outmoded flesh. And the drive burned inside them—the drive to chill.

  * * *

  THIRTY MILES, RYAN thought as he assessed his fellow travelers. On this terrain that was a two-day trek. Mildred had done what she could to patch up people, but at least three of the farm survivors would be classified as walking wounded, and there were kids to consider—kids who slowed them.

  His own people weren’t in much better shape. Jak was still coughing up junk after his excursions into the heart of the inferno, and Krysty had recovered but she looked pale, perhaps a reaction to the blighted landscape all around them. He knew how attuned to nature she could be.

  They weaved along the trees that dotted a gentle slope, made their way onto the flatland beyond that had once been a feeder road. It was overgrown now, a yellow-green veld, populated here and there by road signs, the occasional roof of a truck or Greyhound bus poking through where they had been abandoned a hundred years before.

  An orange grove waited at the edge of the road, the trees reaching for the sky, oblivious to the horror that had been unleashed just a few generations ago. Ryan’s team moved through it, weapons ready in case of ambush.

  “Stick together,” Ryan ordered. “No stragglers.”

  Behind him, Jak was marking another tree with one of those eleven-twelve-one-o’clock ticks, showing J.B. and Doc in which direction they had gone.

  * * *

  DOC AND J.B. made it to the Dodsons’ farm just before the first of the bikers appeared on the road behind them. The old man had been searching around for the next marker while J.B. checked his maps, resting on a low wall that acted as the house’s perimeter. The wall was smoke-stained black just like the rest of the old house.

  “Klamath, Klamath...” J.B. muttered, following the snake of the old river as it wended past a few long-since destroyed towns.

  “Found it.” Doc cheered as he located the mark Jak had left on a nearby tree. There had been twenty trees to choose from, finding the right one felt like something of an achievement.

  Looking up, J.B. tipped two fingers to the brim of his hat in acknowledgment. Then he heard the noise—engines approaching, nearby and getting louder. “Doc?” he called.

  The old man was peering down the haphazard path that ran between the trees, judging how far they had to go and whether they might be closing in on Ryan’s group. He turned back and recognized the grim look on J.B.’s face. “Trouble?”

  “Coming fast,” J.B. replied. “Come on, Doc, let’s get to cover.”

  With that, J.B. strode swiftly into the tumbl
edown remains of the burned-out farmhouse, drawing his mini-Uzi as he ducked beneath the lintel. Doc followed, scrambling across the road, one eye on the bend in the road from which the sound of engines buzzed, back where the burning farm still churned smoke into the air in black shadows painted across the sky.

  A moment later the two men were inside the farmhouse. It was a grim affair; fire had gutted the place, top to bottom, leaving just a vestige of what it had been before. Everything that remained was blackened and melted or twisted in on itself with the horrendous heat that had swept through the property three months earlier. Daylight shone through the house from high up in the rafters where a great gaping hole rent the roof, casting its beam down into the lobby like a spotlight on stage.

  J.B. and Doc took up positions close to the front door, blasters ready, scanning the road. They waited there in silence as the first bike appeared, followed by two more. Their riders looked as if they were part of the bikes—barely human, great metal machines with pistons and gears and belts that whirled as they steered the handlebars and bumped over the rough track.

  “Are they...automatons?” Doc wondered in a haunted whisper.

  J.B. shook his head. “Don’t know,” he admitted. “That blast mebbe took some skin off them, showing us what’s underneath.”

  J.B. couldn’t be sure. Both men could see human parts mixed in with the cybernetic sections, here a beating heart exposed but kept safe behind a plastic screen, there a set of lungs that had been augmented with a bellows where one lung had collapsed.

  “Neither human nor machine,” J.B. said. “Either way, they’re programmed to chill.”

  Doc gripped the handle of his LeMat tighter, waiting for the bikers to pass.

  “I figure they’re scouting for survivors,” J.B. suggested, and Doc nodded. “We get into it with them, my guess is more will come. A lot more. ’till we’re chilled.”

  Doc agreed with the Armorer’s assessment. For now, all they could do was hide and wait.