End Program

by James Axler

  * * *

  IN SHORT TIME, Ryan’s group was through the orange grove and out onto an open plain. The plain was bisected by the wide strip of blacktop that was cracked and overgrown with weeds and bushes. A hundred years before, this had been a major highway through California. Now it stood as the forgotten remnants of a civilization that had tried to finish itself in a blaze of nuclear fury. Road signs slunk down close to the ground, their metal legs warped and broken, names of long-forgotten destinations still clinging without hope to their bent and rusted placards, faded by the sun.

  The companions stepped out onto the overgrown plain that had once been a highway.

  “Trading post is that way,” Trevor said, pointing off to the west. “Day’s walk. Should have got us a horse.”

  Ryan didn’t like this. He felt too exposed out here, with only the road signs for cover. “Keep moving,” he said. “No stragglers.”

  Despite Ryan’s advice, Jak held back, eyeing the sky, his nose wrinkled. His clothes and pale skin were dark with smoke, but otherwise Jak seemed to be fine now. His cough had gone and Mildred had checked him over twice as they moved away from the carnage at Trevor’s. Jak’s makeshift shirt-turned-gas mask had done enough to keep smoke out of his lungs, although his hair and clothes reeked of it.

  “Not gonna make it,” Jak said, holding his position.

  “What’s that?” Ryan asked.

  “Storm,” Jak said, pointing to the south.

  Ryan looked where the albino pointed. The sky was the dark purple of a bruise, a sign of too many pollutants kicked up in the wake of the nuclear exchange all those years before. The weather could be deadly in the Deathlands, and Ryan had heard tell of men being stripped right down to the bone when acid rains hit, had in fact seen it happened.

  “How long do you reckon we have,” Ryan asked, “before we need to get under cover?”

  Jak scratched at his head absently, dislodging soot from his usually pale hair. “Hour, mebbe less,” he said.

  “Not long,” Ryan mused. He looked back at the sky, then ahead to where Trevor had said the ville was. “Anywhere closer than this Heartsville?” he asked.

  “We come off track a little,” the bearded man replied thoughtfully, “but ain’t nowhere I can think of. Quickest by road.”

  “Be bad,” Jak said, referring to the rain. “Smell bad already.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said, raising his voice and his hands to get everyone’s attention. The group was strewed across the undergrowth, moving in twos and threes, clumped but not tightly the way a military unit would have been. “I know you’re all tired and having a shitty day already, but we need to get to cover now.”

  The kid with the dark bangs asked why. “Is there more bike men coming, mister?” he said.

  “No, but my friend here says it’s going to rain,” Ryan told him, “and rain hard.”

  Already the sky above had become darker, the purple expanding as it reached for the place where the companions and their charges were poised.

  Ryan could smell it now too, that dry tang in the air that promised acid rainfall. It caught in the back of his throat as he inhaled.

  The rain was as black as a vampire’s kiss and had a pungency to it, a cloying fruity tang like the smell of spilled gasoline. It was the smell of toxins and death and restless souls, a hundred-thousand bodies turned to ash by the nuclear bombs that had almost wiped the United States off the map a hundred years before. People turned into ash, and ash become darkness in the black rain, wafting over the lands they had once believed to be the home of the free. The rain rushed across the heavens in darkened clouds, purples, blues and greens in their depths where the pollutants thrown up by the nuclear exchange continued their endless race through the atmosphere, circling the planet again and again, like the story of Sisyphus and the boulder.

  Mildred, Ricky and Krysty scouted for cover on the ruined highway. There were automobiles hidden among the overgrowth, smothered by weeds, their tires rotted away to leave them resting on their wheel rims.

  “It’s partly buried,” Ricky said, trying a door.

  “Get it the door open,” Ryan said. “Everyone! Find a car, find a partner, get the doors open and get as many people inside as you can. The metal roofs should protect us.”

  * * *

  DOC AND J.B. watched as the last of the bikers sped away. They had hung around outside the burned-out farmhouse for a few minutes, ten at most, but during those minutes the sense that the two allies would be discovered was palpable. Eventually, the bikers had raced farther down the road, shouting and whooping, leaving the space around the burned ruin clear.

  “Let’s get moving before they come back,” J.B. said.

  Doc stepped outside and stopped. He didn’t like the look of the sky—it was too dark. Something wasn’t right.

  “Doc?”

  “Smell the air,” Doc said.

  J.B. sniffed. “Brimstone.”

  “Look,” Doc added. “There were birds in those trees not ten minutes ago. Now they’ve gone to ground.”

  “Think they know something we don’t?” J.B. asked.

  “When animals hide, it’s wise to take their cue,” Doc told him.

  J.B. looked back into the soot-stained lobby of the burned-out house. He didn’t like to lose ground, not with Ryan so far ahead, but Doc was right. They would wait. Whatever storm was coming, it could be deadly to get caught in it.

  * * *

  THE BIKERS FOUND a farmhand cowering beneath the burned wreck of a harvester. The man had dark skin the color of cocoa, and he wore the wide-eyed expression of someone unable to take anything in. His men held the farmhand’s arms as Niles studied him. It was something to do while Hog fixed the bikes up, at least.

  Up above, the sky was turning darker as clouds raced across it. The farmhand was babbling something about “being merciful.”

  Niles shook his head, ignoring the man.

  “Bikes are ready,” Amanda said. “We should go.”

  “Yeah,” Niles agreed. “We’ll leave soon.”

  The farmhand looked ready to bolt when Niles turned back to the men who held him. “Tie him down,” Niles said. “Find a rope or something. We’ll leave him here. The fires will chill him, just like everyone else.”

  “You dirty boys,” the farmhand spit. “Let me go, I don’t do nothing to you.”

  * * *

  RYAN’S CREW HURRIED to find cars buried by the madness of vegetation, urgently hacking and digging their way to doors and sunroofs, pulling at them until they could make their way inside. In total, the group found four useable cars in the space of twenty minutes; not much, but somewhere to shelter when the rains struck. Some vehicles still had skeletons inside them, wedged into the driver’s seat from when the nukes had struck, flash-fried as they drove to work or from it, or traveled to see family or friends or a million other inconsequential reasons. Their lives had come to an abrupt halt a hundred years before, hands stopped on the clock as civilization came to a halt.

  Ryan kicked rust from the jammed side door of an old Chevy, pushed the overgrown brambles back so that he had room to open it. Around him, the other companions did likewise, clambering into automobiles defined by rotted upholstery and melted dashboards. By the time the rains hit, everyone was inside a car, watching through the foliage that webbed across the windshields.

  The rain smelled of sulfur and it hissed like a snake where it landed. Anyone unlucky enough to be caught out there would have blistered skin where the rain struck them, Ryan knew. The world was ruined. Whatever the people in Progress thought in their towers, there wasn’t much left to save.

  * * *

  THE BIKERS CHAINED the farmhand at the side of the road, lashing him to the stump of a fence with the fires still burning in the distance. He struggled there, sh
irt torn open to expose his bare chest as the fires cut across the field. He watched in horror, screaming for mercy as the fire drew closer. Niles and his gang walked away, pacing just far enough to watch without getting burned.

  And then the rains came, the ugly sky opening up and unleashing its foul-smelling torrent in a downpour as black as night.

  The farmhand whooped with delight as he saw the rain put out the fire. For a moment he thought he was safe. But he had misjudged his fate.

  The hellwater smelled of sulfur and misery, and it burned against the farmhand’s skin like steam from a kettle. The man began to cry out, begging once more for mercy as the burn took a hold of his chest, his arms, his face.

  “My eyes!” he screamed. “It’s in my eyes!”

  Niles gestured to his gang, and they stalked over to what little shelter remained amid the burned fields, amassing under the few trees that had grown along the roadside.

  The gang made bets on how long the man would last. He continued to plead for help, closing his eyes against the onslaught. Then the rain became heavier, turning from a downpour into a torrent. It was like being dipped in acid, countless different pollutants, the result of a thousand nuclear missiles, feeding that precipitation so that it had the potency of fire against the skin.

  The farmhand’s screams turned hoarse. Then, disconcertingly, he saw the black rain again and the trees where the bikers huddled and laughed. His eyelids were searing away, leaving him no protection from the downpour.

  The last thing the farmhand saw before he blacked out was the effect the rains had on Niles and his leggy female companion. Where it touched them, finding a path through the clawed web of branches above, it seemed to strip their flesh away, revealing strips of metal beneath, revealing faces that only appeared to be human.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The rain came, black like tar. It hammered against the roofs of the parked automobiles, stranded amid the jungle of wild plants that had overwhelmed the highway.

  Ryan and Krysty shared a Chevy with three of the farmers, while Mildred, Ricky and Jak distributed themselves in the other cars, hiding from the lethal torrent with the survivors of the farm massacre.

  The rains lasted through the day and half the night, their drumbeat against the metal roofs of the cars like a mutie orchestra tuning up for chaos. With nothing else to do, Ryan, the companions and the surviving farmers grabbed what sleep they could in the automobiles.

  * * *

  CATNAPPING IN a grounded SUV, Jak was awoken by a wail. He opened his eyes, sensing the change in atmosphere. In the front seat, a woman was crying, dragging a bundle of clothes toward her, trying the vehicle’s door handle in the dark.

  “Don’t,” Jak told her, reaching ahead to stop her from opening the side door. It was then that he saw the rain slick on his jacket’s sleeve, felt its coolness there. The SUV had a sunroof and even in the darkness Jak could see the crack running through it—just a small, angled line, but enough to let in a slow trickle of water as the rains continued. The tinted plastic of the roof was bowing inward, struggling under the weight of that relentless rain.

  Around the car, the other sleepers—a hardy-looking farmhand and a woman with prematurely graying hair—were waking up to the commotion. The farmhand jumped in his seat when he saw the water pooling on his shoulder.

  “My Jessica,” the woman in the front seat cried, clutching the bundle of clothes to her chest. She was wet with rain, Jak saw, face and chest glistening with water in the faint moonlight that seeped through the roof panel past the clouds, and so was the bundle of rags she held. He remembered now—the bundle contained a child, a baby not more than a week old.

  “Dry here,” Jak said. “Climb through.”

  The crying woman shifted in her seat, tried to turn around. “I can’t. Oh, heavens—” She reached for the door handle again, about to open it.

  Jak could see she was starting to panic so he reached through for the baby. “Pass me,” he said calmly, keeping the urgency out of his voice.

  Above them, the sunroof buckled, more water pouring in through the crack and around its seal. It came in thin streams, like barely open faucets, bringing the smell of sulfur into the vehicle.

  “Oh shit,” the man in the front seat said as the foul-smelling water splashed against his face. “Oh shit, oh shit!”

  “Baby,” Jak ordered, prioritizing the child. “Quick.”

  The woman reached around and, with a little effort, managed to pass the bundle of rags between the seats to Jak’s waiting hands. The bundle was wet, and the dampness stung Jak as he grasped it.

  Then the roof finally gave, dropping a cascade of black water into the SUV. The farmhand and the woman shrieked as it struck the front seats, drenching them with the toxic brew.

  “It burns,” the man gasped, and he worked his door handle and—nonsensically—stepped out into the full fury of the storm.

  “Wait!” Jak cried but it was already too late.

  They heard the man screaming as the full force of the rain lashed against him, its black curtain enshrouding him. Jak watched through the windows as the farmhand started to run away from the SUV, placing his arms up over his head as he tried to find shelter. Then, his dark silhouette was lost to the blackness of the rain and the night, and all they could hear was his pained scream echoing back to them across the plain.

  The two women were crying, muttering about getting outside, away from the rain. Jak shushed them.

  “Safest here,” he said.

  “But the rain...?” the woman in the front seat pleaded.

  Jak handed the baby to the older woman who had been sleeping next to him, then hunkered down in his seat until his shoulders met with the curve between seat and upright. Then, legs up, he kicked out at the sunroof, striking it firmly with the heel of his boot. The sunroof tilted in place, dropping a tirade of water into the front of the car over the dashboard. The woman in front screamed as a little of the black water splashed her, drawing her legs as far to the side as she could to keep out of the stream as it cascaded over the curve of the front shelf.

  Jak kicked again, striking the sunroof a second time, wedging it back up into its seal. With the third kick the roof seemed to lock in place, and the torrent became a stream that, after a few seconds, became just a slow drip nudging through the crack.

  Jak reached down then, hands scrambling on the floor until he had pulled up the mat that lay there. The mat was loose and made of some kind of rubberlike substance, and it had originally been used to protect the carpet of the SUV. Jak hauled it up and placed it over the sunroof. It was not a perfect fit, but it was enough to cover the crack and about two-thirds of the panel, effectively protecting the woman in the passenger seat. Jak adjusted it slightly, then took out four knives from his stash of throwing blades and used them to secure the mat in place. He hammered them hard through the mat and into the roof until they held it firm.

  “Will that hold?” the older woman with the graying hair asked.

  “Long enough,” Jak said, hoping it would.

  * * *

  AT ONE POINT, Ryan awoke to discover he had been trying to strangle Krysty in his sleep. He could not remember what he had been dreaming about, it might even have been about her, and yet his hands were pressed against her throat with enough force to awaken her.

  “You okay, lover?” she asked as he drew his hands away, shaken.

  “Are you?”

  * * *

  DOC AND J.B. waited out the storm in the confines of the Dodson farm. The roof leaked and the windows were missing, but there was enough cover to keep them dry, plus a few unfortunate rats who fell victim to one of J.B.’s traps and made for a meal when they were boiled in water over a fire. The water had come from the meager supplies that Doc and J.B. carried—there was no way they would have consumed t
he poison-laden gunk that was pouring from the skies.

  They got a little sleep, taking turns to keep watch while the rain hammered against the walls like a lunatic in a padded cell and the wind made everything bluster and creak. They saw no further sign of the bike gang, who presumably had the sense to get under cover while this storm from Hell rallied its anger, and no one came looking for them.

  The rain finally started to ease off before dawn, switching from downpour to irritating drizzle. Eventually it petered out entirely, the clouds moving across the sky like bruises on the skin.

  Keeping watch, J.B. woke Doc and told him they were moving now, before something else delayed them. Doc agreed, snatching up his sword stick and checking his LeMat—a daily ritual necessary for survival—before making his way to the door.

  “I do not think I was really asleep anyway,” Doc admitted. “Not properly.”

  “Catnaps,” J.B. said, picking a piece of rat meat from between his teeth with the nail of his index finger. “Wake up more tired than when you went to sleep.”

  Both of them felt cold, that cold down in their bones that felt as though it would never go away. It was the effect of their tiredness and of sleeping in a cold building during the storm. There was nothing they could do about that now. They just had to keep moving, and hopefully find Ryan and safety.

  The two men stepped outside. In the storm’s wake, a heady smell, cloying and acrid, remained—evidence of the awful pollutants that were rife in the atmosphere all these years on from that terrible nuclear exchange. The dirt road was littered with vast puddles, some as big as a train carriage, and the trees lining the road had suffered a battering from the assault.

  Doc scanned the trees, searching for the mark he had seen the day before. “There,” he said. “Due west.”

  “Mebbe we can catch up with Ryan before something else catches up with us,” J.B. said.

  “Fortune favors the brave,” Doc replied.

  * * *

  RYAN AND HIS companions emerged from the grounded automobiles, clambering from doors wedged closed to protect them from the vicious downpour, some of them climbing from cracked sunroofs whose tint had done nothing to protect their original inhabitants against the rockets’ red glare a hundred years earlier. Now those same sunroofs had protected against black rain that mixed ash with water, like a joke in a crematorium. All except the one in Jak’s SUV.