Desolation Crossing

by James Axler

  J.B. looked up the incline of the pit. Eula had been right. It was steep, but not impossibly sheer. He would still need both hands free until he reached the lip, and that made him triple vulnerable. He had to trust her. Until half an hour ago, he wouldn’t have. But adversity could change things.

  Enough, he hoped…

  “Anything puts its nose over the top of that ridge, shoot first ask later,” he said.

  “What if it’s one of ours?” Eula questioned.

  J.B. grinned. “If any of my people are triple stupe enough to do that without precautions, I’d shoot them myself.”

  Then, pausing only to see that she had a blaster in hand, the Armorer turned to the steep and slippery incline of the pit. The soil was dry and powdery, making it hard to find anything remotely approaching a handhold. He had to dig deep with the toes of his boots, putting in more effort than the rewarded upward movement should warrant, feeling the abrasive soil scour at his skin as he dug in his fingers—his whole hand—and pushed upward. He didn’t look up, didn’t want to. There was jackshit he could do about anything that might come from above his head. He just had to hope that Eula would cover him adequately, and keep moving up as swiftly as he could.

  Breath came in short gasps, vision colored purple and red as the effort made his lungs ache and his temples throb. He wanted to puke into the soil in front of him, but knew that he couldn’t afford the precious seconds it would take him to stop and heave. Instead, he kept going until he reached the lip of the pit, hauling himself over the edge and onto the flat, reaching for the holstered mini-Uzi as he rolled, hoping that if anything was near enough to get him, then a moving target would present just enough of a problem to deter them until…

  He rolled and pushed up, coming to his knees, starting to move 180 degrees, rising onto one foot as he did so to pivot with greater ease and speed.

  He was lucky. The fight was going on away from the pit. As he scrambled to his feet and backed toward the lip of the pit, he could see that the container wags and the other armed wags had managed to pull up short of following the lead wag into the trap. It was a testament to the skill of the wag jockeys, and perhaps to the foresight of the friends who had been stationed in each wag. Now the battle was taking place heading toward the shanty ville from which the pack had diverted the convoy.

  Mildred and Krysty had left the safety of the cabs on the refrigerated wags. It was a calculated risk on their part. There was little they could do unless directly attacked, and like all of those who had traveled with Ryan and J.B., they carried Trader’s indirect lesson that going on the offensive was better—drive the bastards back and put them on the back foot, not you. J.B. could almost hear Trader’s voice.

  Jak, Ryan and Doc had left their wags and were taking the battle into the heart of the enemy, joined by Cody and the huge frame of the dreadlocked warrior Raf. While the pack was being driven back by broadsides of rockets and machine-blaster fire from the two armed wags, the warriors on foot were going for the inhabitants of the ville, who had followed in the wake of the pack.

  Part of J.B.’s brain tracked the logic of what had happened. The pack had to be maintained and bred by the coldhearts who lived in the shanty ville, then let loose to corral any stragglers on the blacktop, luring them here so that they could be plundered. Maybe that was why LaGuerre wanted to run straight through with no stopping—to cut down the risk. In which case it was a bad call. But if it happened before, then this bizarre idea of the trader’s was suddenly made clear.

  And, looking at the coldhearts who followed in the wake of the pack, hoping to make for easy pickings, it was obvious why they should raise such a herd and use them in such a manner. The men and women—maybe children, too, except that some of the adults were so stunted as to make the difference between adult and child impossible to distinguish—were misshapen, and used trolleys and wags to aid their speed. They had good weapons, which bespoke of the quality of plunder over the years. But they had little skill, which more than evened the odds. Particularly as much of their poor marksmanship was making inroads in thinning out the pack. Moreover, with fire coming in from both directions, the creatures were becoming confused and panicked, starting to scatter rather than follow the bloodlust with which they had been trained. And as they dispersed, they became both less of an obstacle and less of a threat to the convoy crew.

  All of this came to J.B.’s attention and ran through his mind in less than a flicker of an eye, but it was still long enough for Eula to yell from the pit.

  “Dix…”

  It was an imprecation part puzzled concern, part angry order. It served its purpose, and the Armorer directed his attention to the pit.

  “You get up okay?” he called down.

  “Some of your holds are still there, probably take me,” she said. “I can hack it the rest of the way…mebbe not as quick as you, though.”

  “No present danger. Just be sure,” he barked back at her.

  J.B. backed up to the lip of the pit, casting regular glances behind to check both the far side of the hole, and also the woman’s progress, in between keeping the mini-Uzi focused on the battle in front of them.

  The combined force of the convoy crew was halting the incoming, on the verge of turning the tide. The need for speed was lessened, and he called, “Take it easy. You’ve got time.”

  “I’ve got minor injuries, I’m not a fucking cripple,” she gasped as she pulled herself up to the edge of the pit.

  “Listen, you’re no good to anyone you tumble back down and really injure yourself,” he said, crouching and offering her his arm for support as she hauled herself the last few feet.

  “Screw you, you fu—Sweet blaze of glory!” she exclaimed as she took in, for the first time, the scene unfolding in front of them.

  “Yeah, we’re lucky they were on it so quick. Imagine those coldhearts on top of us…”

  Without any further discussion, J.B. set off at a trot to where the main body of action was taking place. Eula was a few paces behind, having been taken aback by his turn of speed. Despite his aching head, the Armorer knew that he was fit enough to take part in the firefight, and there was no way that he would shirk his duty when he was needed. He could hear Eula at his rear, dropping farther back, her step irregular. The damage to her ribs was slowing her, and in truth the effort to get out of the pit could only have added to her discomfort. But she was willing, he had to give her that.

  The fighting had become localized, and the ville inhabitants had been driven back to their dwellings by the relentless push of the convoy crew. The land between the convoy vehicles and the ville itself was littered with the stinking corpses of cattle, dogs and things that resembled people but had—with the combined force of inbreeding and rad mutation—developed into something that bore a scant resemblance to the human race.

  J.B. had seen isolated villes like this all over the rad-blasted lands, and although the variety of mutation and fleshy distortion had some variety from hotspot to hotspot, from gene pool to gene pool, there was little that could shock or repulse him. Besides which, the people and animals around him had bought the farm, and were of no risk, therefore of no concern.

  Maybe it was the concussion that affected him; that made him just that little bit less than a hundred percent. It was not like the Armorer to charge through a field of corpses without the due caution that some may be less chilled than others. A caution that had kept him and his friends alive where others had perished.

  Maybe, just for once, J.B. had made a bad call in risk assessment. He had judged himself to be fit to fight when it was not necessary. Was he really needed? Could he not take the time to clear his head before joining the fray?

  Had he really not noticed that one of the coldhearts lying on the cold dustbowl dirt wasn’t as cold as the ground that surrounded him?

  As J.B. charged on, one of the corpses at his rear began to move. Slowly, then with gathering speed, a legless woman bleeding from a wound in the left side raise
d her torso from the earth. Propped on one elbow, she produced a Glock that, with her free arm, she leveled and trained on the departing form of J. B. Dix. The wound was bleeding freely, and the arm was not as steady as it would once have been, but she had time and a target who was unaware that he was such.

  Or so she thought.

  Fate was a strange and fickle beast. Eula’s attitude toward the Armorer had been curious but hostile for so long, before adversity had pushed them together in the need to escape and stay alive. Now she had an attitude that was, if anything, even harder to define. If J.B. had known what went through her head at the moment she saw the mutie woman raise herself and her blaster, he would have been even more confused than he had previously been. But none of that mattered in this moment. Right now, Eula, following slowly and painfully in the Armorer’s wake, had to make a decision.

  She chose.

  “Dix…down…” she yelled, leveling her own blaster at that moment, ignoring the sharp pain in her own side as her protesting ribs scraped and moved yet again. She winced, waves of red and purple washing across her vision as the head wound and the cracked bones told her not to exert. But she had to; for reasons that she, herself, would be hard put to explain coherently.

  J.B. heard her voice. Without thinking, he threw himself to the ground. He wouldn’t have trusted her until that moment. Maybe it was the way in which they had worked together to get out of the trapped wag. Maybe it was something in her voice; some quality of danger, sincerity, something between the two. Whatever it was, he trusted her implicitly at that moment.

  Eula and the mutie woman formed a tableau in which each echoed the other: the mutie woman, lower because she was little more than a torso, bleeding profusely from one side, supporting herself on her right arm while her left trembled under the weight of the blaster and the need to keep a steady line. Eula, higher against the night sky, her side aching from ribs that threatened to spear her vital organs unless they were strapped, bent awkwardly against the pain to try to keep steady. Her arm extended, blaster shaking from the weight and the weakness of the pain in her side and in her head, vision blurring as she felt the blood thumping in her temples, threatening to open the wound in her head once more from the pressure.

  They could have been there for a second. They could have been there forever. It would seem that way to both of them as they tried to summon the energy and will, from inside the pain, to squeeze. Ahead of both of them, J.B. seemed to go to ground in slow motion. Would he be too slow?

  The mutie woman tried to muster the strength to fire before he was flat to the earth, Eula, to summon the strength to fire before the other could beat her to the punch.

  J.B. hit the ground with a thud that jarred his already aching head. Waves of light swarmed in clusters across his vision, and his guts felt as though they wanted to exit through his mouth. He had to give in to the urge to puke, the bile spilling from his mouth in an acrid pool around his head. In the middle of this, he heard the roar of a blaster closer to hand than the distant chatter of the firefight.

  “It’s okay now, Dix.”

  J.B. raised himself, used his shirt to wipe the mess of vomit and dust from his face, and spit the last bitter remnants onto the ground. Turning, he could see that Eula was moving forward to stand over a mutie woman who was sprawled on the ground. Unlike those around her, she was ripped to pieces by blasterfire, blood still dribbling from fresh wounds. A Glock lay a few feet from one outstretched arm.

  “Careless of you, Dix,” Eula said as she poked the mutie woman with her foot. The lifeless bundle of rags and flesh barely moved, and the young armorer nodded her satisfaction.

  J.B. walked over to join her, casting a glance around him that was informed by the knowledge that he had screwed up.

  “Figure she was the only one who hadn’t rolled over and chilled,” Eula said, observing him.

  “Should have spotted it,” he replied shortly. “That was my ass, and you had it. Thanks.”

  “That’s okay. We all make mistakes.”

  “Yeah, but mistakes get us chilled. I don’t make mistakes.”

  She leveled a gaze at him. Her eyes were shielded, but there was something there that he felt he should understand; something underneath the words she spoke.

  “We all make mistakes, Dix. No one’s perfect. Not even you. You’ve made mistakes before. It’s just that you haven’t had to pay for them.”

  “Mebbe,” he said after a pause for reflection. For a moment he felt that he’d got close to figuring her out; to understanding why she had this fascination for him that teetered on hate; to knowing why she was so damn familiar and yet someone he had never met before.

  But if such revelation was to come to him, it was not destined to be in a place like this. As J.B. and Eula stood, staring at each other over the bloodied corpse of the anonymous mutie woman who had unwittingly bound them together, placing the Armorer in Eula’s debt, it seemed for a moment as though they were isolated from the world around them. The undercurrents that had swept between them were to surface, and her reasons for wanting the friends to join LaGuerre’s convoy were to become clear.

  This moment vanished in the ground-shaking blast of the main fuel store for the shanty ville going up under attack from one of the armed wags. While one had maintained guard on the refrigerated wags, to cover any attack that may be mounted as a last-ditch by the ville dwellers, the other had followed in the wake of the combat party as they forged forward. While they had decimated the population, and driven away the remnants of the pack, there was still the obstacle of the shanty ville itself to overcome.

  It was true that there were now very few of the muties left, but once they had been driven back to their ville, they had the shelter of the buildings. That gave them the advantage as they had cover, and also the possibility of unknown weapons stores contained within. Meanwhile, the combat party advancing on them had no cover that they could use to counter.

  It hadn’t taken much for Ramona, deputed to stay behind and man the wag that she had been traveling with Raven, Doc and Ryan, to figure that out. Seeing that the pack had dispersed, and that the muties were either chilled or driven back, it didn’t take much in the way of initiative to figure that she could be more use if she followed up the combat party. Taking the wag to within firing range of the ville, she had slewed the vehicle sideways-on so that the rocket launchers were dead-on to the shanty buildings.

  Her plan, as she seated herself at the launcher, was to try to pick off the biggest buildings first, figuring that the muties would want to band together, and that the biggest buildings were the likeliest to house the biggest armories.

  There was no way she could have expected to hit the jackpot first time. The building she chose as her first target was the fuel store for the ville, and it was obvious that they had been storing their plundered fuel for some time.

  The sky was momentarily as bright as day, a wave of heat sweeping over the combat party as it approached, scorching as the shock wave accompanying it threw them to the ground. The wave was so fierce that they were pinned to the ground, unable to see the chain reaction as the blast area flattened the shanty buildings nearest, causing their own smaller supplies of fuel, explosives and ammo to go up. In turn, these smaller blasts acted as a chain, catching the buildings nearest to them. And so the whole of the shanty ville went up in smoke and flame, lighting up the skies afresh as the initial fire began to fade.

  The cries and screams of those muties who had made the cover of the shanty ville were lost to the roar and crackle of the buildings as they detonated. By the time that the combat party was able to look up, the initial bursts of light had faded, leaving only the residual glow of a ville that was now little more than a series of rapidly burning ruins.

  Unlike the rest of the combat party, J.B. and Eula had been just far enough away to witness the detonation without being thrown down. Now they watched as the party began to rise from the dustbowl floor.

  “Guess we won’t have
to check that out quite so thoroughly,” Eula said to the Armorer.

  J.B. looked at her. She was grinning.

  “No, not likely to make a mistake on that,” he returned, his own grin part relief and part exhaustion. “But I tell you something. LaGuerre’s gonna be pissed that we’ve left him down there.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  J.B. wasn’t far wrong. With the inhabitants of the ville already beginning to bloat up in the first rays of the morning sun, and the remnants of the pack now scattered across the dustbowl to escape the smell of chilling that their less fortunate companions had left in their wake, it was a relatively simple matter for the armored wag to be pulled from the pit. Simple after the matter of pulling the trader from the pit, that was.

  Although the pit was several yards deep, it had been dug in a conical pattern, so that the sides were not sheer. Sure, they were steep, but those who had engineered the trap had their own concerns in the construction. From the look of many of them as they lay scattered across the dirt, it had been difficult enough for them to move around on a flat surface, let alone cope with the climbing that may be involved in both the construction and the execution of such a trap.

  As a result, it gave the convoy a relatively simple task. The rear of the armored wag presented an easy access for block and tackle, for tow ropes and for the chains that were used to secure one vehicle to another. They were also fortunate that they were in a convoy that was using the refrigerated wags and the large cabs to pull them.

  Under the direction of Raven and Ryan, old Ray used his cab to pull the armored wag from the pit. Detaching the cab from the refrigerated section, the wag jockey moved to the edge of the pit while Raven and Ryan scrambled down with chains, ropes and block tackle. Taking no chances on any of the connections severing and allowing the armored wag to fall back into the pit, they evenly distributed their chains, ropes and tackle, making sure that they secured the ties while distributing the weight to avoid any one connection taking too much strain. The ties were attached to both the top and bottom of the wag, under the chassis and on the bodywork. Wherever they could find a secure spot to attach a tie, they did it until they had run out of chains, ropes and tackle.