by James Axler
He moved the bottle on to Doc, who also drank. The old man was the last member of his group seated by the fire. Jak had wolfed his beans-and-bunny and vanished into the night to prowl beyond the circle of parked wags, as usual.
Bass sat brooding with his bearded chin on his chest, but his eyes were focused away from the fire until Morty, who had taken a long swallow, elbowed him to give him back the bottle.
The merchant blinked, then smiled and thanked his brother as he accepted it back. Ryan glanced around to see where his employer had been looking; the young woman who had taken passage with them at the last minute. Olympia sat by herself on her pack, eating deliberately and seemingly looking at nothing in particular. She was located at the very edge of the wavering, irregular patch of light thrown by the several fires, but not near any of them. Nor the circles of guards and drivers who had gathered beside them.
For a while after their exchange right before and after the stickie attack outside Menaville, Ryan had been concerned she’d turn out to be the chatty type of woman. Instead she said nothing to anybody that circumstances didn’t demand. He reckoned she had to have talked a bit more to Jak and Ricky when they went out scouting together, although owing to the differing speeds of their rides, it probably wasn’t much either.
It said something, also, that none of the unattached males, drivers or sec men, approached her where she sat. Ryan thought that pretty smart of them. He’d seen her fight.
When he looked back at the fire, he caught Morty giving their paying passenger a hungry eye. Ryan’s lips tightened a fraction of an inch. There was trouble coming from that direction, too.
There wasn’t a thing he could do about it, so he passed it from his mind.
The others were talking about their journey so far. In the two days since leaving the ville, they’d made what he reckoned pretty decent time. Most of the journey had been over back ways, especially to steer well clear of the Fort Smith nuke hot spot. But Croom had picked solid wags for his epic journey, and for a fact none of the paths they’d taken, even the ones little more than game trails or parallel wheel ruts, had been scaly. The worst impediment they’d encountered before the earth-opening rift had been big trees fallen across their path, which J.B. had happily blasted a way through with some of the C-4 plastique and initiators their boss had thoughtfully stocked for just such purposes. All of which went to show Croom knew the roads hereabouts more than a little.
Of course that also confirmed that the crack in the ancient superhighway was a new thing. Ryan wondered what other surprises the trader had in store.
Then again, there were always surprises on the road. That was one of the reasons Croom had hired the companions.
“I mean to keep going north or northwest tomorrow,” Bass said. They had run a few more miles on the blacktop after Olympia showed them a path around the fissure. Then Croom had taken them off north-northwest along a smaller road that was still paved in stretches. They had made deliberate progress, about thirty miles, before pulling off and striking camp for the night.
He stood and took another long pull of the bottle. Noticing it was mostly gone he offered it to Cable. His sec boss shook his head. Without asking anyone else Croom tucked the bottle under one arm, told the group good-night and ambled off for his command wag, where he slept across the backseat.
Cable stood and stretched exaggeratedly. “Reckon I better turn in. Need my rest if things’re really gonna start getting tough here, soon. Then again, like they always say, the only easy day was yesterday, right, Cawdor?”
“Some say that, yeah.”
He gave one final hard look at Ryan and walked off. His sec crew followed. To Ryan’s relief Morty left, as well.
“What is wrong with that dude?” Mildred asked. “Cable, I mean. Not Croom the Younger. He’s just an asshole.”
“I wonder that, too,” Krysty said. “Cable seems physically quite brave, yet somehow at the same time he seems filled with fear.”
“He fears a meaner dog will topple him from the top of the pack hierarchy,” Doc said, gazing into the fire. The flames underlit his long face and turned their crags and furrows into a wasteland. “He perceives, quite correctly, that our Ryan is such a dog.”
“I have no intention of doing any such thing, Doc,” Ryan said in some irritation.
“Crazy old coot’s right for once,” Mildred said. “Cable sure thinks you are.”
When the other grown-ups had left, Ricky had come over to stand hovering just back from his companions. He regarded them as his family and tended to gravitate toward them. That was fine with Ryan. They’d taken the kid in, so they were family. Just like they were to him.
“You could take him down, right, Ryan?” Ricky said.
Ryan glared at him, but the kid continued on obviously. “You could show him who’s boss and that would take care of everything!”
“Best not, son,” J.B. said. “See, you’re right. I reckon Ryan would win.”
Ricky nodded eagerly. His dark eyes shone.
“Then again,” J.B. went on, “I mind the old saying, ‘when two tigers fight, one dies, the other licks his wounds.’ Thing is, Ryan’s got more than his own safety to look out for. Namely us. And there’s no telling how Cable’s people would react if their boss and Ryan went at it. Triple so if Ryan won.”
Ricky’s face fell. Ryan put hands on thighs and stood.
“Guess I’ll turn in,” he said. “Got the midnight watch. You all can do as you please, but I’d suggest resting up, too.”
He frowned, rubbed the crisp stubble on his chin, then grinned.
“No matter what kind of hard-on Cable has for me,” he said, “I got to admit my gut tells me he’s right. I think the last easy day was today.”
As he walked on to where he and the companions had laid out their bedrolls beside the parked .50-caliber blaster wag, he felt as much as heard Krysty rise and follow.
Mebbe I won’t get much sleep before my watch, after all, he thought. And mebbe that’s not a bad thing.
* * *
THE LAND LAY BEFORE THEM, overall flat as an eatery’s tabletop, yet somehow giving the impression of writhing in torment: the surface parched and cracked, dotted with rare clumps of spiky, dead-looking growth, here and there gnarled as if long wounds had scarred over. The land had a bad, strange baked-orange look to it.
So did the sky, which roiled with clouds as far as the eye could see to the north and west, in shades that varied from flame-colored to mustard. Lightning stabbed forks like dazzling purple sidewinder tongues at the horizon from a layer of clouds that were almost black.
Ryan took it all in. He felt a muscle on the side of his mouth twitch, near where his own old scar ran from brow to jawline.
The convoy had halted on the edge of the desolation. Croom, Cable and most of their people had come forward to stare at what awaited them as the next stage of their journey.
Doc stepped out in front of the silent crowd. Pretending to doff a top hat, he swept a low theatrical bow before them.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared, “I present to you, the real Deathlands! And now our show begins in earnest!”
Chapter Twelve
The acid rainstorm hit them as fast as a rattler strike, and just as hard and deadly.
J.B. saw the danger right before it came on them. Guided only by the Armorer’s minisextant and Bass Croom’s faded USGS maps, the convoy rolled over mud flats that had dried into hard ochre plates, and threw up thin puke-colored dust at the passage of their wheels. It looked as if it had never felt rain of any sort despite the clouds that had constantly seethed across the sky, like a stormy orange ocean upside down, since they had set forth across the true Deathlands.
From his perch in the front sandbag nest strapped to the top of the dormitory school bus, J.B. saw a new cloud mass r
ushing from the west, a brown so dark it was almost black and seeming to boil. Lightning bolts sizzled purple within it, giving it the look of a bad bruise that had somehow become self-luminous.
He sat cradling the M-4000 in his arms. Immediately he put it to his shoulder and fired four blasts into the hideous tortured sky, as fast he could pump the action, hating to waste the shells as if he bled them. Thankfully Croom had stockpiled ammo.
Positioned as the bus was in the middle of the convoy, the shots could easily be heard to its farthest extents. At once the wags began slowing. Four blasts was the signal to halt now.
He cupped hands over his mouth. “Cover up!” he bellowed up the line of now stopped wags. “Acid rain!”
Then he turned back to see the face of the sec man who rode in the nest behind him, fixed on him and white as a fresh-bleached sheet. “Got your tarp, Benny?”
The sec man nodded and began to fumble with something by his legs. J.B. had made sure that each of the so-called “hardpoints” atop the wags had a tarp rolled up inside or strapped down tight right next to it, large enough to cover the occupant or occupants. Cable had rolled his eyes. Croom had simply ordered them provided as requested, even though it meant breaking out some he’d evidently meant as trade items.
And this was why. Acid rain was coming. Fast.
Coming now. Something stung the back of J.B.’s left hand as he unfastened his own tarp. Ignoring the brief pain, he whipped open the rolled yellow tarpaulin, pulled it over the nest securing it to the bags with short lengths of nylon rope that were wound around them for the purpose, and huddled under it. Then he set about unpacking something from his own backpack, which he had brought up with him and carried along despite the fact it crowded the small nest.
A gust of wind hit the tarp like a giant boot. That was the prelude to what sounded like somebody blasting a stream of gravel against the tarp. The rain was coming down fierce and hard. J.B. hoped that meant it would blow over fast. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it could come down like that for days. If that happened here they were fucked, likely. So he put it out of his mind. Nothing he could do about it.
J.B. heard the screaming as he finished writhing into his blue rain slicker. Deliberately he pulled the set of old plastic swim goggles, their long-rotted elastic straps replaced with leather, down over his eyes. Then he pulled the blue hood over the frayed baseball cap hat he had crammed on his head in place of his fedora. Last he donned a pair of canvas work gloves. It took time while the agonized shrieking went on and on.
But it required time to suit up properly, so J.B. did. This was a bad acid downpour, which was obvious before the screaming began. He wouldn’t do anybody any good if he went out half-baked and poorly protected. He was like as not to wind up incapacitated himself.
There were times J.B. acted without thought or hesitation. Those were the times he had to, to preserve the lives of his companions or his own skinny ass. When the situation called for it, he acted with the deliberate speed he did now. He was a man devoted to doing what it took to do the job, whatever that was.
When J.B. was covered, he loosened one end of the tarp and slipped out.
The wind spit acid into his face. The cap brim, goggles, and the scarf he’d wound over his mouth under it would keep the worst off long enough.
A steel folding ladder was bolted to the side of the bus, a means of carrying it for whatever uses may be asked of it as well as of allowing the sec crew to get up and down. It was a good multipurpose design of which J.B. approved. Now he climbed down like a man who knew how: fast, but without rushing.
The screams came from a few places back in the line of stalled wags, atop the fuel tanker. As J.B. trudged toward it, bent forward with his face averted from the acid-laden transverse wind, he realized it was the front nest.
He climbed up the rungs. Fortunately they were on the left-hand side of the tank, which put his back mostly to the wind blowing from the west.
When he got to the top he saw a person writhing in an open sandbag nest. Apparently the occupant had been caught in the midst of trying to affix his tarp over himself when the first wind gust had hit. Now the tarp flapped off the right side off the tanker, just held by ties on that side. The man it was supposed to protect writhed on his back batting ineffectually at the searing droplets with fingers already half skeletonized.
Bad one, J.B. thought.
From the shelter of the rear tarp a female voice screamed, “Help him! For mercy’s sake, please do something!”
J.B. glanced back. The woman huddled in the temporary shelter was a driver named Bukowski. While most members of the crew had primary jobs, Croom set it up so many rotated through most jobs, which seemed to help keep everybody fresh. He even took occasional turns as sec or driver of another wag than his own armored wag.
Bukowski tried to stretch a hand toward J.B., then snatched it back. A glance told the story; it was reddened and covered in swelling blisters. She had tried to help her comrade. The acid rain had driven her back.
As it should. Had she persisted, unprotected as she was, the convoy would have lost two crew members instead of one.
J.B. rose and looked down at the man in the open nest. He was a sec man named Horwitz, J.B. remembered. There was no recognizing the eyeless half-melted mass of a face that the poor bastard lacked the body control even to turn away from the acid onslaught.
A Winchester lever action lay propped half out of the sandbag nest. Somehow the doomed man’s agonized thrashing hadn’t dislodged it. The acid was discoloring the blue barrel as well as the shiny metal of the tanker itself. No permanent damage would result as long as the downpour didn’t go on too hard too long, especially if they could find fresh water to pump up to hose off the wags. But that was for the future, which wasn’t here yet.
J.B. picked up the blaster.
Help him, the woman had cried. For mercy’s sake.
For mercy’s sake, there was but one thing to do. Fortunately it was the only practical course, as well. Taking hasty aim, J.B. put a .44 bullet through the side of that steaming disfigured head. Then carrying the blaster, he made his way back to the intact tarp shelter to do what he could for the injured woman there.
It’d go easier, he reflected, if he could get her to stop her screaming....
* * *
“WHY TAKE hard?”
Mildred saw heads turn to Jak. Ryan had told the young albino to stick close tonight. He hadn’t seen fit to explain why. Jak obeyed, though he clearly chafed under the restraint.
“Yes, it’s pretty clear they’re all upset,” Krysty said. “Mr. Croom just sits by the fire and drinks.”
“He’s a good man,” J.B. said. “He cares about his men. Should be more like him.”
“If he doesn’t hit the bottle too hard,” Mildred said. “Does anybody else thinks our boss has been getting moodier the longer we spend on the trail?”
“The demeanor of Mr. Cable concerns me more,” Doc said, “given his consistent animus toward Ryan.”
“Why would he be so upset?” Ricky asked. “I mean, yeah. It was one of his people, but sec men die. It’s part of their job. I know some have been chilled working for Bass—for Mr. Croom. Dez— I heard some of them talk about it.”
“New circumstances,” Ryan said. “New surroundings. They’ve fought for Croom in the ville, and even on the trading road. But they don’t know the heart of the Deathlands. Now they’ve come hard up against it.”
“That’s what they have us for,” J.B. said.
“So it’s the circumstances that put Cable off-center,” Mildred said. “That and it’s a triple-hard way for one of your people to die.”
“Not every sec boss gives a pinch of sour stickie shit about his people,” J.B. said. “Gotta hand that to Cable.”
“He’s good at his job,” Ryan said. “When he doesn�
��t let pride get in the way.”
“Do you think he’ll blame J.B. for chilling poor Horwitz?” Mildred asked.
Ryan shook his head. “He saw him, same as we did. J.B. did what a good boss would have for him. Or his best friend.”
Ricky’s eyes went wide at that. Mildred could tell he was imagining his own new friends in the awful, hopeless state the unusually virulent acid rain had left the sec man in. As hard as he was visibly trying not to, he was also struggling with the notion that he might one day be called upon to give the same mercy to one of them.
He probably wasn’t envisioning they might have to do the same for him. He was still at that age when he was immortal.
“Anyway,” Ryan said, “his hard-on’s for me. He’s smart enough to see we’re good. He even said up front they needed us.”
“Do you believe he will force the issue he perceives between you?” Doc asked.
Ryan grunted. “Hope not.”
“You know what Trader always used to say,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with his shirttail. “Put your hopes in one hand and your crap in the other, see which fills up first.”
“You’re always such a nuking comfort, J.B.,” Ryan said.
Chapter Thirteen
The sound of someone’s boot soles scuffing on the rungs of the ladder on the side of the tanker startled Ricky. He was sitting in the forward sandbag nest, his whole being fiercely focused on staring out into the night. It helped keep him awake, although it also gave him a tendency to see phantom enemies in random shadows. He had learned the hard way by getting yelled at by his new friends several times to hold off giving the alarm unless he was at least sure something really was out there.
Ricky turned, reflexively bringing the DeLisle’s fat barrel up to bear on the sound, and he almost died of mortification when Dezzy’s pale face appeared above the steel edge.
She didn’t even react to finding herself staring into the little hole in the front of the suppressed blaster. Ryan and J.B. said Mr. Cable’s crew were good, Ricky thought as he hastily lowered the weapon. But what kind of gun-handling skills did they have if that didn’t bother her?
