by James Axler
The cool assessment didn’t stop him getting all hot in the cheeks, dropping his eyes and mumbling an apology even he couldn’t understand.
She ignored that. “May I come up?” she said.
“Sure!”
He was unsure how to proceed from there, so he gripped his carbine in both hands and turned his attention to the surrounding darkness. The moon had set an hour before. The light of the stars from a sky blessedly free of clouds showed a black landscape that was flat except for the occasional stunted spike of vegetation.
He felt her come and slip into the nest. A thrill shot through him as her hip brushed his. In the cool spring air her body heat was like furnace air washing over him. He felt it especially on his cheek.
For a while she just sat beside him. He didn’t dare look at her directly; from the corner of his eye he saw her slim legs were drawn up, her arms around them, her achingly pretty face propped on her knees by her chin.
“Ever seen somebody die?”
The question took him so off guard that he actually turned and stared briefly at her. Her dark eyes seemed fixed on the blackness and didn’t so much as twitch in his direction.
“Sure,” he said. The question surprised him. Even with what he now saw as his seriously sheltered upbringing in the peaceful, prosperous seaside ville of Nuestra Señora, people died. From accident or attack, and not infrequently boats put in seeking aid for mortally injured sailors. And he had killed.
“Somebody close, I mean?”
“Um.” He swallowed and blinked back hot, sudden tears. The images of the shark-headed mutie Tiburón and his sec men murdering Ricky’s parents in front of his eyes flashed into his mind with horrid impact. Instantly he felt a sudden wash of shame. Yami! I have not forgotten you, my sister. I will find you and rescue you. Some day...
“Yeah,” he managed to say, turning his face away so he could dab at his eyes with the cuff of the long-sleeved flannel shirt he wore against the cool air.
She said nothing. When he looked at her again, the starlight glittered off a trail of moisture down her right cheek.
“Ever chilled anybody yourself?” she asked.
“Huh?”
Part of him wanted to answer, “lots of times,” which would be true. But all of a sudden he remembered he didn’t always feel good about that fact.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “You?”
“Sure,” she said. “Lots of times.”
Somehow that rang false in his ears. He didn’t have the courage to call her on it. Even though she was older than him, and pretty, she lacked Krysty’s goddesslike beauty and presence, or Mildred’s sometimes bullheaded bluntness. But...she was still a girl.
And he was a teenage boy.
That meant, naturally, that he had a raging boner. And, naturally, what that mostly meant was that he blushed ferociously, glad all over again she wasn’t much looking at him. And especially she was pressed to his side and couldn’t feel its insistent hardness.
So he held her and savored and suffered the experience in equal measure, until she abruptly rose and departed without a word of warning and farewell.
He watched her as her head disappeared beyond the steel horizon of the fuel tanker whose former shininess was now tarnished by the acid.
He stared into the hole she had left in the night, then turned his face forward.
He wouldn’t have any more trouble staying awake, but he did have trouble concentrating until his raging adolescent hormones at last began to subside.
* * *
“WHY THE HALT?” Ryan asked, walking forward along the convoy.
“Something up ahead,” a sec man named Marconi said. He pointed toward the west.
The land stretched fairly flat in front of the stopped convoy. They were still in the Great Plains but nearing the western edge. The land around them showed green growth and fewer signs of acid-rain ravaging. Best of all, a jagged blue line above the far horizon, just visible, indicated the relative nearness of the Rocky Mountains.
In front of the Rockies, rising up almost to obscure them from view, was a low brown cloud that seemed to stretch across the whole horizon from north to south. Seeing that, Ryan grunted. “We’re going to need you to swap blaster wags,” he called to Bass Croom, who stood nearby with a black Stetson hat pushed back on his head, hands on his hips, and a puzzled frown on his face behind his beard. “Bring the big blaster up front.”
Bass look at him quizzically. “Sure,” he said.
Glaring, Cable took a few steps toward Ryan. “Who are you to be giving orders to the boss?”
“The man he hired to get you all across the continent as safe as possible,” Ryan said calmly.
And, since the loss of Horwitz to the acid rain storm just beginning to cross the Deathlands, which even Ryan had to admit was ugly, they had. Despite a few more acid showers, which caused no casualties among the crew, they’d had no more serious downpours. Otherwise they had avoided trouble to a surprising degree. Or trouble had avoided them.
Twisters had stalked the torture-scarred land but never come close to do more than elevate heartbeats. Twice coldheart bands had been rash enough to make plays at them. The first group had broken and run from behind the makeshift barrier of an old trailer loaded with rocks and broken concrete chunks they had dragged across a stretch of blacktop at the first snarl of the M-249 in the lead blaster wag. Jak had warned the convoy well in advance, having spotted the barrier without apparently being seen himself.
A band of coldhearts had streamed down from some low hills on motorcycles. Fortunately J.B. had been manning the big .50 on the trail wag when that happened. He had blasted four of them to sprays of disassociated parts, both flesh and metal, and one into a blossom of yellow flame when they were still a good five hundred yards off. The rest had turned tail promptly and fled back the way they came, leaving their wounded behind.
In the unlikely event there were any. Those .50-caliber bullets made a mess of a body.
Leaving aside the incident of the giant Gila monster, which was too slow to pursue them, and rapidly left behind, there hadn’t really been many other incidents of note. They had been lucky so far.
And now their luck, clearly, had changed.
Well, Ryan thought, it was only a matter of time.
“At ease, Dace,” Bass said, turning back from passing the order along to his assistant, Sandra Watson.
The sec boss gave Ryan one last glare, then turned on one boot heel and stalked away.
“You’ll probably want to get the gawkers back in the wags,” Ryan told Bass. “We may need to roll fast and on a moment’s notice. Not you, J.B. You stick with me.”
He added the last to his friend as the man joined him. The Armorer was looking at the brown cloud, which seemed to be growing perceptibly larger. He nodded.
“Big one,” he said.
“Triple big,” Ryan agreed.
“What?” Bass asked.
Over the grassland between them and the mysterious cloud came Ricky Morales, riding hell-for-leather bent way down over the handlebars of his little dirt bike.
“Monsters!” he shouted, braking so hard he almost threw himself over the bars. “Big shaggy brown monsters with huge heads and horns! Hundreds of them!”
Chapter Fourteen
“Aw, bullshit,” J.B. heard a man say behind him. He recognized the voice of Marconi.
He chuckled. “Buffalo bullshit, for a fact,” he said. “And plenty of it.”
The lead blaster wag gunned its engine and spun up some grass and sod as it lit out for the rear of the convoy. The driver was obviously aching for the chance at a little speed, given their usual glacial pace.
Bass frowned at J.B. and Ryan. “What’s up ahead, exactly, again?”
“Buffalo he
rd, Mr. Croom,” Ryan said.
“Or to be correct,” Doc said, “American bison.”
He stood with hands on hips blinking at the cloud. It really was getting larger now, and J.B. thought to make out a sort of surging brown line at the base of it.
“At least that is one pleasant consequence of Armageddon,” Doc declared. “Good to see their numbers have so resurged, as severely depleted as they were years ago.”
Cable shook his head in disbelief. J.B. wasn’t sure of what, strictly. But his boss laughed in relief.
“So it’s not monsters, then,” he said. “Just natural animals.”
“Likely,” Ryan said. “But see, that’s the good news.”
“And the bad?”
“As you can see for yourself, that’s a mighty big herd up there, Mr. Croom,” J.B. said. “And they’re headed straight for us.”
Bass nodded, then went pale as the import of the words hit him.
“Oh,” he said. “Shit.”
* * *
THE GALLOPING HERD of buffalo looked like a moving range of shaggy brown mountains with horns, although short and curved enough so they’d be the least of your worries if you tangled with them. Individually a buffalo was a formidable beast: one or two thousand pounds of muscle, stink and bad attitude. Ryan and J.B. had realized right off that this was a big herd, numbering in the hundreds.
Whatever had stampeded them, they showed no sign of slowing. The buffalo would smash the convoy into ruined metal chunks leaking blood, and the herd as a whole would never miss a step. They wouldn’t mean to destroy the wags and their human occupants; they just wouldn’t be able to help it.
Side by side, J.B. and Ryan were riding the scrambler bikes balls-out, straight at the onrushing herd.
Ryan Cawdor was a brave man. He was comfortable with the fact. But if his heart hadn’t been beating almost hard enough to explode out his rib cage, and his mouth and throat dry as if he’d been gargling sand, he wouldn’t have been a man at all, but a cold robot.
When they were less than a hundred yards from the irresistible flood of flesh and bone and head-crushing hooves, Ryan raised the AK-47 he’d borrowed from one of Cable’s sec men. It was one of the few fully automatic personal weapons Croom had brought along, though most of his sec crew and drivers made do with bolt actions or lever blasters.
Ryan thumbed off the safety, feeling more than hearing the distinctive “AK clack.” The sound of thousands of pounding hooves was like the rumble of an erupting volcano.
When he triggered a one-handed blast skyward, Ryan did hear that.
The herd closed in on him, showing no reaction to his presence.
J.B. hurled a string of homemade firecrackers ahead of him. They were big, as loud as hell and smoky. Nobody in Ryan’s crew knew exactly what Croom wanted with them; his assistant Sandra assured him they were popular trade items, as were fireworks of all sorts.
The first cracker went off, louder than the drumfire artillery barrage of the hooves and the yammer of another burst from Ryan’s Kalashnikov. Dirt thrown up by the blast bounced off Ryan’s left cheek.
J.B. started firing his M-4000, Ryan emptied his 30-round banana mag in a final shuddering blast. The buffalo in the first rank nearest to where the riders were approaching began to falter. He saw animals behind scramble on top of those slowing as the ceaseless pressure of all the beasts behind them drove them forward.
Good start, but not enough.
“Turn around for another pass!” he shouted to J.B.
As Ryan put his bike sideways in a dirt-digging turn of the front wheel and a boot down on the grass, J.B. cruised by. He had let the scattergun hang by its sling and was lighting the twisted-together fuses of another cluster of a half dozen double-size firecrackers.
Ryan realized the rest of the first string had to have gone off. After the first explosion right beside him, he’d been too focused on the task—and the herd—to notice the shattering blasts.
J.B. hurled the sparking string of crackers into the lowered faces of the stampeding buffalo. Ryan was afraid he couldn’t turn fast enough. He accelerated back east toward the convoy, following cautiously a quarter-mile back, but as soon as he could he torqued his head around to see his friend’s fate.
J.B. was following, a tight grin on the face thrust forward low over the handlebars, his fedora somehow miraculously stuck to his head, riding flat-out. That fear alleviated, Ryan feared instead that the buffalo had stomped out the firecracker fuses.
Then the black powder minibombs went off in a sort of jittering thunderbolt.
Chaos. The boom and flash and smell of fire utterly panicked the buffalo nearby. Some shied away into their brethren to left and right. At least one reared right up and was trampled straight down by the creatures behind it. They couldn’t stop, or even slow, but plenty tripped. A pile of thrashing, bellowing bodies built up around the spot where the blasts had happened. The herd began to split left and right like water flowing around a big rock.
“Yes!” Ryan pumped the AK in the air.
Luckily the bison were built for power, not for speed. As inexorable as their charge was, they galloped with a certain majesty rather than awe-inspiring velocity. Ryan was already a hundred yards away again.
He turned the bike, halted long enough to drop the spent mag and slam home another from the special ammo vest he wore instead of his coat for the occasion, and rode the bike back at the jam of bodies.
He ripped the next magazine load off in three rapid bursts. By that time J.B. was riding parallel with him about fifteen yards away. He fired off four more blasts from his shotgun, then both wheeled away again.
For their next pass J.B. left the M-4000 hanging, switched hands and picked up the Uzi cross-slung on the other side of his body. Then he and Ryan emptied new magazines blazing away as they rushed toward the herd.
By this time the job was done. The herd had decisively split into two masses that angled away from each other. They simply hadn’t had a choice: already there were dozens of animals down, some thrashing and bellowing, some barely stirring.
It was hard times for those animals. Ryan wasn’t happy that they had to suffer. He wasn’t a cruel man, he was a man who did what had to be done.
J.B. split left, Ryan right. By darting at the herd, shooting, waving their arms, and shouting, they encouraged the herd to keep splitting wider and wider.
Then Ryan saw open prairie stretched unimpeded all the way to the still distant Rockies.
They’d opened a passage for their friends and the wags. It should be safe enough.
Safe as anything got in the Deathlands.
The two turned back. They’d continue to ride the sides of the gap until the herd passed.
* * *
AS THE CONVOY ROLLED forward, and the two living waves rolled past a hundred yards to either side, Ricky uttered a whoop of excitement from his perch on the back of Bass Croom’s improvised armored command vehicle.
He looked at his friend Jak. As usual the albino sat impassive, his ruby eyes gazing keenly ahead, white hair streaming in the breeze of passage. But his chalk-white cheeks showed unusual spots of color. Try as he would to hide it by keeping his expression impassive, his face still betrayed the fact that he was a young man and just as excited as his young friend.
Ricky had been unable to keep the disappointment from his face when Ryan and J.B. commandeered their bikes. But now he understood the necessity. They’d had to divert the herd from the wags before the tide of moving flesh swamped them, and they’d had the knowledge to pull it off.
And the balls. Ricky thought he’d had total respect both for his mentor J.B. and his unquestioned leader Ryan. But now he found his respect ratcheting even higher.
He sucked in a deep breath and immediately regretted it. His own goggles kept the
dust thrown up by the hooves of the stampede from blinding him, but nothing came between his nose and the dust. To say nothing of the stench of hundreds of hairy, musty bodies. And the urine, feces and farts they left behind.
He felt bad about the suffering of the wounded animals who had been trampled by their frenzied fellows. Fortunately Ryan and J.B. had opened the way wide enough for them to steer around the moaning, kicking animals. But he knew that his friends had had no choice. If they hadn’t acted, not only would there still be a mound of unfortunate broken-bodied buffalo writhing in terminal agony from the heedless hooves of those behind them, but Ricky, Krysty, Ryan, Mr. Croom, and all the rest, along with their vehicles, would be at the bottom of it.
And Dezzy. He couldn’t forget the black-haired sec woman with the white bangs. Nor the warmth of her body in the chill Plains night. Not that he tried very hard.
He heard a shout from somewhere and looked ahead. His heart seemed to seize up in his chest. A half dozen of the giant beasts had broken off from the others to the right and veered straight back toward the vehicles’ path.
Right off Ricky grasped the real danger. It was bad enough that a collision with one of those half-ton or more bodies could wreck a wag. Maybe even topple the school bus or even the tanker’s tractor. But the thing that caused a thrill of horror to run through his whole frame was the prospect that others would follow them, that the living tsunami would roll over them all despite J.B.’s and Ryan’s heroic efforts. And with safety visible not a quarter mile ahead.
He willed the convoy to roll faster, but it couldn’t. The grass was torn up by all those hard, sharp hooves, and the ground underneath. Ricky didn’t know how Croom’s drivers managed to stay more or less at the same speed but through some wile of his they did. Their speed now wasn’t more than twenty miles an hour. If they went any faster, they’d risk collision, or a wag breaking an axle, either of which could bring disaster, with the herd still to both sides.
