by James Axler
But given the circumstances that cannies were flocking to La Golondrina, probably not norm.
Junior confirmed this when he started to cry out for help. Before he could make a sound, Jak stepped up and punched him straight in the face, dropping him hard on his behind.
“Cut Sprue’s hands free,” Ryan told J.B. “Give him back his blasters, Krysty.”
Chapter Twelve
The flatbed wag sent up a swirling cloud of dust as it roared along the ruined highway shoulder. Krysty, Doc, Mildred and Sprue scattered for cover among the jumble of fractured concrete blocks, taking up firing positions on either side of the breach.
Jak grabbed hold of the dazed Junior and dragged him by the collar through the gap to the far side of the barrier. He quickly tossed the sack over the cannie’s head and cinched it closed. Then, pinning the cannie facedown with a knee, he tied his ankles together so he couldn’t wander off.
As the wag closed on the fallen overpass, Ryan jumped up on a slab of concrete and started waving his arms for it to stop. His hands were empty. His longblaster was slung, his SIG-Sauer tucked in its holster.
The one-eyed man smiled as he waved. He was just another cannie brother, looking for a free ride.
Squeaking and groaning as it bounced over the ruts, the oncoming flatbed didn’t slow down. The dented wag had once been light blue, now it was mostly rust-colored. Its headlights were held on with overlapping strips of silver duct tape. Its front bumper and grille were missing; the buckled hood was held shut with loops of baling wire.
The driver saw Ryan waving and honked his horn.
Through the cracked, dirty windshield, Ryan counted six bodies crammed into the cab. The cannies were sitting on one another’s laps. One of them half hung out the open passenger side window. In the wag-bed were at least twenty more cannies. A bunch stood clustered behind the cab, looking over the roof at him. They all had blasters, but they weren’t taking aim.
Not yet, at least.
The driver slammed on the wag’s brakes. Dust thrown up by the locked rear wheels rained on the bed’s occupants. The wag came to a stop below and to the left of where Ryan stood.
“We’re full up,” the driver said as he leaned out the window. He was grizzled, weepy-eyed, with snaggly yellow teeth. “Can’t squeeze in another body.”
“Then let’s make some room,” Ryan told him.
J.B. popped up over the top of a concrete slab right beside the wag. He cut loose with his 12-gauge as he broadjumped the distance between slab and wag hood. His first blast spiderwebbed the windshield in front of the driver. A fraction of a second later, his bootsoles landed on the wag’s hood. He ejected the spent brass and fired, angled down this time. The spread of the second blast overlapped the first, sawing a ragged hole in the safety glass above the steering wheel. Blood and skull fragments splattered the inside of the windshield. Standing with his feet spread and short legs braced, J.B. pinned the trigger and pumped the slide. Every time the slide locked closed, the firing pin snapped and the 12-gauge bucked and boomed in his grip. Overlaid patterns of double-aught buckshot blew out the windshield from right to left. They also blew out the cab’s rear window. The cannies inside died where they sat, heads exploding, torsos ripped by dozens of .31-caliber lead balls.
Before the stunned cannies in the back of the wag could bring weapons to bear, Krysty, Doc, Mildred and Sprue opened fire with their handblasters. The wag’s passengers had no cover and no place to run. The companions poured bullets into the packed mass of cannies. As bodies toppled, some where they stood, some falling from the bed and crashing limply to the ground, the survivors jumped down to the road and took off in a full sprint back the way they had come.
Mildred, Krysty and Doc quickly ran out of ammo and had to stop to reload; Sprue continued to blast away with his Desert Eagles, his bullets kicking up puffs of dust all around the fleeing cannies.
Jak rushed through the gap and brought up his Colt Python in a two-handed grip. He squeezed off a single, carefully aimed shot. The magnum slug hit one of the running targets at fifty yards, taking the cannie down in midstride, driving him into the dirt. Jak’s next two shots went wide.
“Too far for handblaster,” he said over his shoulder.
Ryan had already figured that out. Scrambling higher on the rubble pile, he shouldered his scoped longblaster. One by one, he nailed the madly dashing cannies, punching out seventy-five- to one-hundred-yard, center-torso chill shots. It finally dawned on the last pair of survivors that the road wasn’t safe. As Ryan cycled the Steyr’s bolt action, they darted over the levee. Crashing through the brush, they plunged headfirst into the brown water.
Maybe they thought they could dive under the surface and make the sharpshooter miss, but the water only came up to their knees.
When they dived in, their backs still showed.
Ryan fired twice more, 7.62 mm slugs slapping into wet fabric and warm flesh. The cannies thrashed their arms and legs, trying to swim or to stand or to breathe, then they stopped moving. Both floated facedown in spreading films of red.
Transfer of the flatbed’s ownership took less than three minutes, start to finish.
Doc and J.B. pulled open the wag cab’s doors, dragged the bodies out of the cab and dumped them unceremoniously on the ground. They stripped the coats from two of the chills and used them to sweep out the broken glass and wipe away the gore.
Mildred, Krysty and Jak used their bootsoles to propel the bodies off the rear of the wag bed. That done, Jak went back to retrieve Junior. He untied the cannie’s ankles, jerked him to his feet and shoved him forward.
“Hitch him to one of the eyebolts,” Krysty said as Sprue and Jak shoved Junior onto the bed, then climbed up after him.
Ryan slipped in behind the idling wag’s steering wheel and shut the driver’s door. “Take that blindfold off,” he told them through the missing rear window. “Junior needs to see so he can tell us where to make the turn.”
Sprue pulled off the grain sack hood and pointed at the tangle of corpses laying around the wag. “Who were they?” he asked the cannie.
“Pilgrims,” Junior replied. “On their way to La Golondrina to get the cure.”
“How do you know that?”
“They were all last gaspers. Otherwise they would’ve put up a better fight.”
“Hard to put up worse,” Krysty said.
“Piss poor,” Jak agreed. Then he spit.
Mildred and Krysty jumped down from the bed and joined Ryan on the cab’s bench seat.
“It’s gonna be mighty breezy without a windshield,” the redhead said.
“Mebbe it’ll blow out some of the stink,” Ryan said, screeching the tranny as he hunted around for first gear with the floor shifter. It turned out to be a compound low. The wag crept through the gap in the overpass with its engine howling blue blazes. Ryan shifted after ten yards, again grinding the tranny. Second gear got them going a bit faster, then Ryan popped it into third. The wag’s steering was sloppy, its front suspension shot. There was no speedometer, just a round hole in the dash where it had been ripped out. The fuel or oil pressure gauges were missing, too. None of that mattered to Ryan. He planned to drive until the wag ran out of gas or oil, then they would dump it and continue on foot.
Sprue leaned down and spoke through the broken rear window. “Big wags still using this road,” he said. “Can tell by all the fresh ruts.”
“You mean, wags like this?” Mildred said.
“No, I mean semis and 6x6s. In convoys.”
“What traders would be dumb enough to try to do business in cannie country?” Mildred said.
“Not norms, that’s for sure,” Ryan said.
“Cannies are organizing their own transport?” Krysty asked.
“Got to be.”
“Doin’ on-the-fly road maintenance, too,” Sprue said. “Filling in the deep, axle-busting holes with rock as they go. Digging ditch drains to bleed off standing water.”
“
Gaia, what are they up to?”
No one had an answer to that. If Junior knew why, he kept mum, despite Sprue’s well-placed kicks.
Ryan drove west along Interstate 10, stopping the wag in front of a Holiday Inn. The single-story, white, American-Colonial-style building had been set on fire at some point, but hadn’t completely burned. It had lost its roof. The hotel swimming pool, once overgrown with bougainvillea and azalea creepers, had been cleared of vegetation. Now human bones, bleached white by the sun, lined the long rectangle.
“Bones could be from the neutron strike,” Krysty suggested.
“There aren’t any skulls,” Mildred remarked. “I see ribs and long bones, but no skulls.”
There were no live folks in sight, either.
But there were animals.
A quartet of scrawny, timid pigs ducked into one of the roofless, doorless rooms. Chickens pecked for bugs along the edge of the bougainvillea. A ram sheep stood watching them from the collapsed portico.
“You bastards never eat livestock?” Sprue asked the cannie. “Not even in a pinch?”
“They give us the triple squirts,” Junior said. “Sometimes we chill ’em for fun…”
Ryan drove on, through the wasted landscape. On a low hill, surrounded by water, was a cemetery. All the above-ground crypts had been broken open, the bodies taken. Cannies built nothing, Ryan thought. They grew nothing. They were exclusively human predators. Sooner or later there would be nothing left for them to eat. They would have to move on or truck in their food. Ryan couldn’t guess where the supply chain was coming from, but he had no doubt what it was carrying.
“Look up ahead,” Krysty said, pointing through the empty windshield at the edge of the road.
A line of shabbily dressed, but well-armed men and women waved and yelled from the right-hand shoulder. There were no children among them. There were never any children. Cannies ate children first, even their own.
“Hitchhikers,” Mildred said. “They’re looking for a ride to La Golondrina.”
“Let’s give them a ride to hell, instead,” Ryan said.
As he approached the hitchhiking cannies, Ryan reduced speed to minimize the wag’s bouncing. Instead of mowing them down, Sprue-fashion, and maybe missing one or two, he let his passengers do the job. The companions opened fire all at once, shooting through the empty windshield frame, the passenger window and from the bed.
Their withering fusillade chopped down the cannies where they stood. Gutshot. Head shot. Heart shot. They were either blown off their feet or dropped like ragdolls.
Ryan continued on without stopping.
There were ten fewer flesheaters to worry about.
JUNIOR SIGNALLED for Ryan to make the turn before they reached the next town. The narrow cutoff road headed south and doubled-back east. A century or so ago it had been a tidy, two-lane blacktop. Now it was more of a patchwork affair. The potholes and wash-outs in the road bed had been repaired with gravel and rock and sheets of metal. The large, upheaved plates of tarmac had been broken into wide bands of rubble to level out the pavement and to make the road passable.
A hot and dusty ride.
It was early afternoon, the sun still hadn’t come out, but the air temperature was well over 100 degrees. Even with the steady breeze through the missing windshield, it was sweltering. Ryan, Krysty and Mildred sweated into the bench seat. Perspiration dripped from their chins and rolled down their arms and legs. At Mildred’s prompting, they sipped from a water bottle and swallowed a few salt tablets.
Doc, Jak, Dix, Junior and Sprue sat on the wag bed, heads lowered, breathing shallowly.
With the ten-foot-tall walls of briar, mangrove and brambles bordering the sides of the road, it was like driving in a green ditch. There was no way to tell how far the scrub land stretched to the east and west, or whether it was broken by swamp or drowned in sink holes. The road ahead was flat and straight, all the way to the next turn, which was about a mile and a half away.
As Ryan motored along, another wag popped into view around the distant bend and came barreling toward them.
“Swamp buggy,” J.B. said through the rear window.
The wag had about four feet of ground clearance, thanks to its huge knobby tires. The roof over the passenger compartment had been cut away, and there were lots of folks packed inside.
The one-eyed man spoke over his shoulder. “Get Junior up, quick,” he said. When the cannie’s face appeared in his rearview mirror, he demanded, “Who the fuck are they?”
Junior smiled. “Direction they’re coming, looks like cured brothers and sisters returning from their pilgrimage.”
The distance between the converging wags narrowed rapidly.
“We gonna chill them?” J.B. asked Ryan.
“Have to stop to do that,” the one-eyed man replied. “But if we stop, we risk having more cannies roll up on us while we’re wiping them out. I think we’d best take another tack.”
Ryan honked the horn repeatedly and waved out the side window. “Wave and smile,” he told the others. “Just wave and smile.”
They all did as he asked.
The Chevy Blazer full of cured flesheaters waved back as they zoomed by. The swamp buggy didn’t slow down. It just kept on going.
By that time, the flatbed was almost on top of the dogleg left. As Ryan braked for the turn, another much bigger wag appeared around the bend, traveling at high speed. He didn’t have time to honk a greeting. The wind of its passing nearly whipped the flatbed off the road. Then the companions’ wag was into the turn, and the monster wag was out of sight.
“Damnation!” Doc exclaimed, rubbing the grit out of his eyes. “What in God’s name was that?”
“Ventilated trailer, for hauling cattle,” Sprue said. “Pulled by a honking big tractor. It was running empty. Already dumped its load.”
“They’re sure as shit not hauling cattle,” J.B. said.
“You got that right, Four Eyes,” Junior said with glee. “It’s long pig for the big luau.”
The wag engine suddenly lost power. Ryan tapped the gas pedal as they slowed sickeningly. The wag accelerated with a lurch, but immediately lost power again. It coasted a few yards while Ryan pumped the pedal hard. Once more it lurched to life but much more feebly this time, then the engine stopped. The wag glided along in silence.
“Shit!” Ryan said. “That’s it. No more gas.” He steered the wag onto the narrow shoulder.
“Guess we’ve got to walk from here,” he told the others as he braked. “Let’s get this thing off the road.”
Ryan left the tranny in neutral and the emergency brake off. Jak untied Junior from the eyebolt and shoved him off the bed. Working together, the seven noncannies pushed the wag off the shoulder, nose-first into the bordering brush. There was water in there. Or quicksand. The front end of the wag sank down over the windshield; the rear stuck up in the air.
“How far do we have to go?” J.B. asked Junior.
“Mebbe fifteen or twenty miles,” was the vague response.
“Not enough daylight left to cover that much ground,” J.B. said.
“We’ll go as far as we can, then slip into the boonies,” Ryan said. “Nasty spot to pitch camp, but we’ll make do.”
They left the wag and continued down the patched road. The air was blistering hot and dead still. From the dense undergrowth, ten billion insects sang. Mosquitoes and no-see-ums swarmed around their heads; the companions couldn’t move fast enough to escape them, and swatting soon became too much of an effort.
In the space of an hour, three more wags drove by, coming up from the south. The drivers and passengers all waved. The companions waved back, each time growing more confident that they weren’t going to be attacked by the occupants of passing wags. After all, this was cannie country these days. No norm in his or her right mind would be out in the open, caught on a long, deserted stretch of road. It didn’t hurt that they were dragging Junior behind. Seeing him all trussed up around a tree li
mb, the cannies driving by probably thought he was their dinner.
Ahead, the road rose in a slight incline as it cut across a low dome of higher ground. The dirt under the tightly packed, waist-high scrub looked dry. Again there was no telling where the dry land ended and the surrounding swamp began. In the distance everything was the same monotonous green.
Jak had point. He moved quickly up the road, searching the bracketing stands of vegetation with his blood-red eyes, his ears pricked up to catch the slightest sound.
But it was the lack of sound that froze him dead in his tracks.
The bugs’ mind-numbing hum had stopped as if cut off by a switch. Jak handsignaled a halt.
Something was very wrong.
“Fan out!” Ryan cried.
As they turned, blasterfire roared at them from the road ahead and the road behind.
Chapter Thirteen
Caught in a crossfire, bullets freight-training over their heads, the companions dived for the only cover at hand—the wall of low brush beside the road. Junior tried to duck in after J.B., but could only get his head and shoulders into the scrub. The stick thrust through his arms effectively held him out. Like a cork in a bottle, his body kept Mildred from following the others.
She pulled the pole free, then booted him in ahead of her. The waist-high, stunted trees were so thickly intertwined at their tops that she had to fall on hands and knees and crawl for her life.
Volleys of longblaster slugs swept through the vegetation, clipping off leaves and small branches, raining down dust and fine debris. The attackers from the road above and below had joined ranks to finish the job.
Junior Tibideau couldn’t crawl for beans with his hands tied behind his back. His halting progress was slowing Mildred down, big time. Fearing she would lose the companions in the stand of brambles, she reached up with the point of a sheath knife and deftly slit his bonds.
Even though she and the cannie were following the path Ryan and the others had made, the going was tough. The low, springy branches that sprouted from the skinny trunks blocked every foot of ground. They were too flexible to break off. And there was no room to swing a panga. It would’ve taken a chain saw to clear the way. The companions had to twist over or around the branches to advance.
