by James Axler
J.B. touched it, too, and had the same reaction. “Wag’s on fire!” he exclaimed “Fuel from the Molotovs must have dripped down inside.”
The 6x6 absorbed yet another flurry of blistering direct hits.
Mildred envisioned the piles of rags on the cargo bed above their heads, the cargo bed loaded down with leaky fifty-five-gallon drums of highly flammable liquids and stacked ammo crates.
The smoky air under the wag suddenly became almost too hot to inhale.
“Run!” J.B. shouted to the others. “Run, quick! Before the bastard blows!”
As the companions scrambled out, he helped Mildred drag Junior from under the wag. Then they grabbed the cannie by the armpits and half carried him away from the raging heat at their backs.
Ahead, wide puddles of fuel burned out of control. Dead folks lay facedown in them, their clothes melted away, their flesh charring to ash. Smoke and flame spewed from wags all around the ring. Even as the crew resumed shooting, more Molotovs slammed on target.
Mildred sensed the wheels were about to come off.
And in the next second they did. Literally.
The 6x6 exploded with a horrendous boom as hundreds of gallons of gas and booze detonated almost simultaneously. The fuel ignited in a withering fireball, which expanded to fill the interior of the circle. Before the wall of flame swept over them, J.B., Mildred and their bound captive were flattened by the shock wave, and momentarily knocked unconscious.
The blast saved their lives.
Mildred came to on her stomach, her beaded hair still sizzling as the wags parked on either side of the 6x6 began to explode in a chain reaction, like a string of five-hundred-pound firecrackers.
In a flash, a third of the defensive perimeter was wiped away.
And then it began to rain.
First came the heaviest debris: truck wheels, engine blocks, armor plate, axles, wag frames, transmissions, car seats. All crashing down from the dark. Then came the lighter stuff. Pieces of broken metal, glass, plastic. And finally, mixed in with the dust and smoke, a mist of sulfuric acid from the wag load of ruptured car batteries.
“Keep your head down!” Mildred cried to Junior as she shielded her own eyes with her hand. J.B. was wearing a hat and spectacles, so he was well protected.
Others in the fat trader’s band weren’t so lucky. Blinded by the falling acid, shrieking in pain, they blundered stiff-armed into the flaming pools of gasoline and the spray of bursting bombs. Wild flurries of bullets crisscrossed the circle as Mildred, Junior and J.B. reached the far side. The blasterfire wasn’t incoming; it was homegrown. But the cook-offs from the wags’ burning ammo stores had exactly the same effect—they chopped down the helpless crewmembers where they stood.
Then the Molotov barrage abruptly stopped.
The flesheaters had either run through their stockpile of fuel bombs, or somewhere in the dark, cannies were popping out of holes in the ground, sprinting for the breach they had made in the perimeter.
There was no time for a look back.
Bullets kicked up the dirt at their feet and whined past their ears as Mildred and J.B. steered Junior along the inside of the ring to the convoy master’s Suburban, where the others had gathered to make a stand.
Doc stepped forward, his Le Mat raised in a one-handed dueling stance. As Mildred, Junior and J.B. ducked under his outstretched arm, Doc cut loose, sending forth a yard-long tongue of flame and a billowing cloud of smoke. Over her shoulder, not ten yards away, Mildred saw two cannies go down hard, their heads hamburgered by bits of steel shrap and shards of broken glass.
The perimeter was leaking cannies like a sieve. They poured through the breach; they jumped from between the wags and crawled out from under them, darting around the lakes of fire.
Jak, his teeth bared, his ruby eyes flashing with cold fury, dealt death with his .357 Magnum revolver. He punched out careful shots, aiming center body, blowing the running enemy off their feet.
Krysty fired her Smith & Wesson .38 from a kneeling position, two-handed. The left sleeve of her shaggy coat was singed and smoking, her prehensile mutie hair drawn up in tight red curls. About ten feet away, Harlan Sprue touched off both Desert Eagles at once, raining .357 Magnum slugs on cannies as they leaped through the curtains of flame.
J.B. swung his M-4000 up to his hip and joined the fray.
Behind Mildred, Ryan dived through the back doors of the Suburban. A second later he appeared in the hole cut in the roof. He swiveled the M-60, shouldered the stock and opened fire on the perimeter gap, trying to turn back the tide.
It was a hopeless task. The cannies were in their midst, the disintegration of the convoy’s defenses nearly complete.
Then another wag exploded, sending a section of steel plate hurtling across the circle like a giant scythe. It slammed into the side of an armored Winnebago, rocking it on its shocks.
“You’re done here, Sprue!” Ryan yelled down to the convoy master. “You can’t hold out. This is going to be over in minutes.”
The bearded man furiously reloaded his pistols with fresh 9-round mags. His life’s work was burning to the ground. He resumed firing, alternating left and right hand shots.
Ryan shouted for the others to get into the SUV.
Mildred shoved Junior ahead of her, through the open double doors. Tying him to the bumper wasn’t an option this time. She laid him out flat on his belly, then she and J.B. sat on him to keep him pinned. Krysty, Doc and Jak scrambled in after them, pulling the doors shut. No one complained about the presence of the cannie or his necrotic aroma.
Ryan abandoned the M-60 and crawled forward toward the steering wheel. Before he could reach it, the driver’s door opened and Harlan Sprue squeezed in. He tossed his smoking, locked-back-empty handblasters onto the front passenger seat.
“I ordered what was left of my crew to bail,” he announced as he turned the key in the ignition and gunned the big engine. “It’s every son of a bitch for himself.”
For most of the hellscape’s traders, that’s what passed for a code of honor. Everything boiled down to cost versus benefits. There was nothing to be gained by dying here tonight.
The convoy master switched on the SUV’s powerful headlights, cut the steering wheel hard over and, spinning all four wheels, accelerated away from the spreading conflagration.
Almost immediately there came a solid thump of impact.
Sprue bellowed in triumph. Then he swerved left, sending the companions sliding into the wag’s opposite wall. Another thump. This time followed by a double bump as front and rear left side wheels bounced over an unseen object.
“Nailed ’em!” the convoy master cried.
Cannies were trying to nail him back. Bullets hammered the Suburban’s armored hull. Bullet fragments flew through the wag’s view slits.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed as a shard of rifle slug exploded the right shoulder pad of his frock coat, turning it into a fluffball epaulette.
“Some of your guys made it out,” Krysty shouted up to the driver. “We’ve got two wags following us.”
When she turned back to the rearview port, the two sets of headlights were gone; the plain behind them pitch-black. “Gaia, they just vanished!” she exclaimed.
“Mebbe they crashed down into the catapult pits,” J.B. said.
“Their bad luck,” Sprue snarled out of the corner of his mouth. He had no intention of going back to find out for sure, or to try to rescue any of his surviving crew. Gas pedal flattened, he skidded the SUV back down onto the highway’s shoulder, then headed up-valley at tremendous speed.
The companions rode in silence, still tingling head to foot from the adrenaline rush.
After a shuddering, jarring, two-mile sprint, Sprue slowed the wag to a stop. He shut off the headlights, opened the console and took out a pair of bulky Soviet-made night-vision goggles.
“Where are we headed?” he said over his hairy shoulder.
The question hung in the a
ir, unanswered.
Chapter Eight
Ryan climbed over the Suburban’s console into the front passenger seat. As he did so, he picked up the pair of Desert Eagles and set them on his lap. “Better reload these,” he told the driver.
Sprue pulled a couple of full mags from a bibfront pocket and handed them over. “You didn’t answer my question, Cawdor,” he said. “Where are we headed?”
“Just stay on this road until I tell you to turn off,” Ryan said. “Doesn’t get any simpler than that.” He slapped the mags in the gun butts, released the slides and uncocked the hammers. Then he put the handblasters on the floor between his boots.
“I want my blasters back,” Sprue told him. “Feel naked without three pounds of steel tickling my pits.”
“Not gonna happen,” was Ryan’s reply.
“What’s with that? I’m your prisoner now?”
Krysty reached around the headrest and pressed the muzzle of her .38 Smith & Wesson behind the convoy master’s right ear and thumbed back the hammer.
“So that’s the way it’s gonna be?” Sprue said, his irritation barely under control. “After what we’ve been through together? Wasn’t for this wag of mine you’d all be dead.”
“Do you think we’re dimmies?” Krysty said. “We know hardly anything about you.”
“And what we do know isn’t so rad-blasted wonderful,” J.B. added. “For example, you just left your crews hung out to dry.”
“If you’re a good boy and do what you’re told,” Krysty told the convoy master, “don’t worry, you’ll get your blasters back.”
She didn’t explain what would happen to his blasters if he wasn’t a good boy. She didn’t have to. It was immaterial. Blasters were useless on the last train west.
“You’ve got the upper hand on me,” the fat man conceded. “I’m outgunned and outnumbered. Even though you don’t trust me, I’ve got no choice but to trust you.”
“You’re right about that,” Ryan said.
“I’ve got nothing up my sleeve,” Sprue assured him. “No tricks. No plan to turn the tables on you. How could I? You saw my crews get wiped out. I’m on my own. Just me. I can be a righteous team player. I’m willing to work to earn your respect. I’ll do what I’m told. Like it or not, from here on we’re all in this together.”
That was true, at least for the moment.
“Don’t screw up,” Ryan warned him.
“Do you mind, Red?” the convoy master said to Krysty. “It’s gonna be hard to concentrate on my driving with a cocked handblaster shoved against my head.”
She pulled back her pistol.
Sprue turned to Ryan and said, “My eyes are watering and I’m about to hurl. How about getting that goddamned stinking cannie out of here?”
“We can’t tie him to the bumper,” Mildred said. “You’ll drag him to death.”
“Then tie him to the fucking roof.”
It wasn’t such a bad idea. They had a long way to go.
Junior bleated in complaint as J.B., Jak and Ryan roughly hauled him out the SUV’s rear doors. They hoisted him up onto the roof, then lashed him, belly-down, behind the roof’s gun port.
“Much better,” Sprue said as they climbed back in. He pulled on the night-vision goggles, then shut off the SUV’s dash lights. The wag’s interior was so dark the companions couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.
Above them, Junior moaned pitifully.
“How about some road music?” Sprue said as the Suburban again picked up speed. A second later a tape machine started up.
A primitive, raucous beat blared from the stereo speakers. An electrified guitar, bass and drums created a wall of sound, above which a thin male voice sang about a woman “with legs” who knew how to “use them.”
The insistent repetition of this theme puzzled the time-trawled Victorian. “Is the singer attempting to argue that a woman who can walk is preferable to one who can’t?” Doc asked over the loud music.
“It has nothing to do with walking,” Mildred said. “It’s about the objectification and sexualization of a female body part.”
“As in ‘Lips so sweet’?” Doc ventured.
“Uh-huh. Or feet. Or toenails.”
“A lengthy paean at the altar of toenails would indeed be a challenge for the poet and for his or her audience,” Doc countered. “Its lyrical shortcomings aside, I must admit I find the rhythm of this selection somewhat infectious.”
Jak agreed wholeheartedly. “Play again…” he said.
The companions and their prisoner rode north, listening to a pirated audio tape of a band whose name had been lost to history, who had gone the way of culture, religion and politics. Vaporized by nukestrikes. Smothered by skydark’s frigid shadow. Rendered irrelevant in a world of new peril.
If not entirely forgotten, entirely misunderstood.
ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Islandcity ville, Sprue eased back on his hell-bent-for-leather pace.
“Why are you slowing down?” Ryan asked him.
“Got a ville berm coming up fast. Old highway runs right through it. Should be seeing the lights of the gate about now.”
“When’s the last time you were this far up the road?” Ryan asked.
“Been almost two weeks.”
“We came through here the day before yesterday. Take my word for it, there aren’t gonna be any lights on the gate.”
“Cannies?”
“What do you think?”
Sprue pushed the night-vision goggles on top of his head, then turned on the SUV’s headlights and hit the high beams. “Shit!” he exclaimed as he slammed on the brakes.
Through the view slits, the headlights lit up the facing wall of a high dirt-and-rock berm, about forty feet in front of them. There was no one manning the gate. There was no gate to man. On either side of the rutted track leading into the ville were fifteen-foot-tall wooden poles, from the tops of which hung gruesome scarecrows. The stripped, blackened human skeletons were held together with remnants of their own sinew and tendon. Their arm bones were stretched out and tied to skinny crossbeams, as if they’d been crucified. Knowing cannies, the crucifixions had come postmortem.
“Did you see any evidence the bastards were still lurking around here?” Sprue asked.
“Nothing for them to eat,” Ryan said. “No one left alive. Bastards chilled them all—men, women and children.”
“Then mebbe we should get out and stretch our legs for a minute,” Sprue said.
Stopping for a stretch was something Ryan was about to suggest anyway. The companions needed to talk in private. “Park the wag closer to the opposite gate,” he said.
When Sprue had done so and shut off the engine, Ryan took the keys out of the ignition and yanked the night goggles off Sprue’s head. He handed the goggles and the Desert Eagles to Krysty.
The companions climbed out of the back of the wag and Mildred made sure Junior’s lashings hadn’t worked loose. It smelled real bad inside the berm. Junior-bad times one thousand. From their previous pass through Islandcity they knew what was causing it.
Corpses.
Lots of corpses, left half eaten and unburied. Like wolves, cannies sometimes chilled for sport.
“Stay here with Junior,” Ryan ordered Sprue. “Don’t move away from the taillights. Krysty’s got the night sight. She’ll run you down in a hurry. If you try anything, anything at all, this is the sad shithole where you’re going to die.”
The companions moved away from the SUV, out of earshot. It was decision time.
“Are we going to take Sprue with us?” Krysty said, laying out the question in front of them. “He claims he’s been to Louisiana more recently than us. Mebbe he can help us find La Golondrina. If we take him, we don’t have to rely one hundred percent on what the cannie tells us. And he’d be an extra gunhand.”
“Know Louisiana, too,” Jak said. “Not need deadweight. Take wag, leave fat man here.”
“We do that and cannies will get him,
for sure,” Krysty said.
“And your point is?” J.B. countered.
“Be kinder to just shoot him,” the redhead replied.
“If Sprue finds out how to use the mat-trans system,” Mildred said, “he’s going to exploit it to the max. That’s guaranteed.”
“Just because we take him along doesn’t mean we have to give anything up,” Ryan. said.
“I trust you are not proposing that we commit murder after we get what we want?” Doc said with distaste.
“No, I’m not,” Cawdor assured him. “All we have to do is blindfold the fat man nice and tight before we take him into the Hells Canyon redoubt. Make sure he never even sees the entrance. We keep the blindfold on while we make the jump, hopefully closer to Louisiana than we already are. If his blindfold comes off during the jump, he’ll wake up in the mat-trans chamber but he won’t know where he is. We blindfold him again before we take him out of the chamber. When he steps out into Louisiana, he’ll know we pulled off something bastard unreal, but he won’t have a clue how we managed it, or how to find out what it was.”
“We’re going to have to blindfold Junior, anyway,” J.B. added. “We sure as hell don’t want cannies using the system.”
“Something could easily go afoul with such a plan,” Doc said. “If we lose control of either of them in transit…”
“We’re talking about Mildred’s life here,” J.B. countered. “It’s a risk we’ve got to take.”
“I am not suggesting that we should not proceed exactly as you say, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “I was merely pointing out a possibility.”
“Possibility noted,” Ryan said. “We’re going to make triple sure everything goes right. Now let’s find us some blindfolds.”
In the glare of the Suburban’s headlight beams the companions rooted barehanded through the ville’s trash heap. Ryan and J.B. found some discarded plasticized grain sacks. The empty bags were big enough to fit over heads and shoulders with room to spare.
When the companions returned to the rear of the Suburban, Mildred climbed up on the roof. Kneeling, she pulled one of the grain bags over the cannie’s head and cinched a cord loosely around his neck, so the hood couldn’t slip off. Junior’s response was to giggle uncontrollably.
