Hell Road Warriors

by James Axler

  Tag pushed back the hood of his robe. He preferred clothes of flowing homespun. Pants and tight clothes chaffed and tore at his affliction. Around his neck he wore a gleaming silver coin. “It’s not a new tactic, and it’s not Six. Six never wanted to leave Val-d’Or. He thinks the mission is foolish. That’s part of his problem. It undermines his strategy.”

  “Oh?” Mace’s face flushed redder. “We’ve been picking away at the bastards for weeks. I mean nuke it! We could have taken them the last time out if we’d pushed it. Yesterday we had them dead to rights. I was about to pull the men back and let the bastards lick their wounds for another week when that third war wag came out of nowhere and rained on us like a chem storm!”

  “They weren’t part of the convoy,” Tag asserted.

  Mace stopped walking. “Oh?”

  “You saw. Toulalan’s people can barely drive those iron wags, much less fight them. The people in the third came out of that bunker coldhearted and knowledgeable. Took out our scouts, flanked us and rained on us.”

  “So how’d they get into the bunker in the first place?”

  “I don’t know.” Tag shook his head. “It’s anomalous.”

  Mace raised his left eyebrow a hair higher than normal. “Don’t give me the big words, Tag.”

  Tag smiled. Despite the mutated flesh studding his face, it was surprisingly charming. Beneath it he was undoubtedly a very handsome man. “Don’t know. Don’t like it.” Tag leaned in conspiratorially. “Tell you this, though.”

  Mace leaned in. “What?”

  “The newcomers got a mutie among them. I felt it.”

  There was nothing charming at all about Mace Henning’s smile. “Interesting.”

  Chapter Seven

  The convoy rolled north. Krysty was positively giddy behind the wheel of the big rig. It was a warm afternoon. The windows were open, and the wind of their passage ruffled her red hair. She was a beautiful woman. In the pink light of Canada’s shimmering skies her beauty was heartbreaking. Krysty could drive a wag, but a big rig was something else entirely. Ryan was proud she was picking it up so quickly. He dragged his eye back to business. He stood in the machine-blaster hatch and scanned backward through his Navy longeye at the distance they had put behind him. There was nothing there, but Ryan’s gut was speaking to him and he always listened to it. He saw Six standing in one of the outriding pickups. Ryan clicked on the radio. “Six, Ryan.”

  The big man sounded distracted over the static. “What?”

  “I think we’re being followed.”

  Six made a noise. “I guarantee it.”

  “Want to do something about it?”

  Six considered this for several long seconds. “Why not?”

  The iron-skinned pickup closed up with the convoy and pulled alongside the semi. Six scowled even more mightily than usual at the sight of Krysty grinning behind the wheel. He shouted over the cacophony of engine noise. “What do you propose?”

  “Get us two of the bikes!”

  Six got on the horn, and two of the motorcycle scouts headed back in.

  Ryan slid down into the cab. “Keep her straight.” The one-eyed man took up his rifle as the vehicle came alongside, and he jumped into the pickup bed. Six thumped his hand on the roof and the driver brought the pickup to a halt.

  Six got back on the horn. “Seriah, Krysty is driving the truck. Why don’t you ride with her for a while?”

  The little wrench’s voice came back. “You got it, Vinny!”

  Six made another noise. Seriah’s attitude seemed to be eternally sunny. The two bikers pulled up. “Oui, Six?”

  “Ryan and I are going for a ride. Give us your bikes.”

  The two riders didn’t look happy about having their rides usurped, but Ryan was quickly getting the impression that no one in the convoy other than Toulalan and perhaps Seriah ever gave Six any lip.

  Ryan threw a leg over an ancient Honda Nighthawk that looked as though it had been rebuilt from stem to stern more than once. He gave the ’Hawk some gas and began tooling down the road the way the convoy had come. Six followed, and Ryan could feel the big man’s eyes burning into his back. He ignored the sec man and thought like a coldheart. The land was low and rolling, and the road wound between the hills and stands of forest. There was no way for the convoy to hide its tracks.

  The one-eyed man looked back, and the convoy’s dust plume rose into the sky like a giant pointing finger. All of the convoy’s vehicles had been modified. Beefed-up suspensions and offroad tires gave them the ability to traverse the raddled, broken and often overgrown Canadian roads, but they had few genuine offroad vehicles. The symbolism was obvious. The convoy was a herd. A dangerous herd, as it had horns, but like a migrating herd it stayed on its route. The coldhearts were a wolf pack, which could strike wherever and whenever it wanted. Chipping away, picking off stragglers, just the presence of a few of them in the distance would keep the convoy on the razor’s edge, day after day, wearing them down.

  Ryan was pretty sure they were close.

  He pulled off the road and drove up a steep green hillside, followed by Six. Ryan reached the top of the hill and stopped. On a hill opposite them to the east a coldheart stood dismounted and was watching the convoy’s dust. He didn’t seem particularly cautious.

  Six’s voice was bitter with frustration. “This isn’t the first time they’ve done this.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, my second in command, a man named Guy. He doubled back to find our trackers. The situation was much like this. He and his team gave pursuit.”

  Ryan thought he knew the answer. “And?”

  “And we used to have six motorcycles,” Six said bitterly. “Now we have two.”

  “They drew Guy into an ambush.”

  Six scowled across the rolling grassland separating him from someone he desperately wished to kill. “Guy was brave, and strong, but impulsive. I have since forbidden hot pursuit of the enemy.”

  “So they pick at you, waging a war of attrition.”

  “Yes.” Six glowered. “Look, he has seen us.”

  “No doubt,” Ryan agreed. Quicksilver flashed in the pink, late-afternoon light on top of the far hill. “They’re signaling with mirrors. He’s got more behind him.”

  “I can see that.” Six turned his glare on Ryan. “Somehow I thought you had a plan.”

  “I do.”

  “Oh? I would very much like to hear it.”

  Ryan lifted his chin toward the other hill. “We kill that guy.”

  “Oh?”

  Ryan looked at the laser range-finding binoculars Six wore around his neck. The one-eyed man almost never carried battery-operated devices himself, simply because in the Deathlands the rads, electromagnetic anomalies and the nearly universal lack of recharging facilities made them a dangerous crutch to become dependent on. However, since Six happened to be carrying one…

  “Yeah, range me.”

  “Ah, your magic rifle,” Six scoffed, but raised his optics to his eyes and pushed a button. The laser aligned with the glass gave him an exact distance. “The range is nine hundred and seventy-five meters,” he reported dryly.

  Ryan dropped prone and deployed the Scout’s internal bipod. The blaster had proved to him it could unleash lightning during the boar attack. Now it was time to see if it could hurl the thunderbolt. Ryan tilted his cheek into the stock of his rifle. At 2.5 power, the magnification was low and at nearly a thousand yards the range was long. The man on the opposite hill was still doll-size in Ryan’s scope. The Deathlands warrior considered his target very carefully and raised his aim until it barely occupied the lowest visible point of his crosshairs.

  “You think you can hit a man at a thousand meters, in this light, with that—�
��

  Ryan’s fingertip gave the trigger a slow kiss and the Scout bucked against his shoulder. The man on the other hill jumped in alarm.

  “A miss!” Six spit.

  Ryan flicked the bolt and fired again.

  “Miss! You are wasting your am—” Six suddenly shifted his binoculars. “No! Hit! Hit!”

  “Six!” Ryan put a final round into the other man’s bike. The coldheart didn’t dare try to jump on as bullets kept cracking against it. “Get him!”

  Six jumped onto his bike as the coldheart broke and ran. The big man popped a wheelie and tore across the grassland separating him and his prey. Ryan snapped his bipod shut, slung the Scout and got in the saddle. The Nighthawk snarled and spit blue smoke.

  The Quebecer flew over the hill and disappeared. Ryan came to the crest and spun to a stop. The sec man quickly caught up with the coldheart. His longblaster flashed in his trademark big spin. The running man turned only in time to scream and take a big .45-70-caliber bullet through the sternum. Six swept past the fallen man and turf flew as he spun in tight circle.

  Ryan unlimbered his longblaster once more as massed engines rumbled like thunder in the distance.

  Six knelt over the man and drew his huge bowie knife. Despite the slug in his chest, the coldheart managed a thin scream as Six scalped him. Ryan looked at the coldheart’s motorcycle. The tailpipe was torn, tufts of wool batting stuck out of the bullet hole in the buckskin seat. Ryan had hit the tank, and he could smell the home-stilled alcohol the coldheart had been burning for fuel. Ryan took a precious butane lighter out of his pocket, then pushed the stricken bike over with his boot. In the Deathlands you didn’t mess with another person’s ride. Most likely it was the same in Canada.

  This was war.

  He took a rag from a pocket, touched the flame of his butane lighter to one end, then tossed the rag onto the bike. Pale blue flame played across the engine block.

  “Six!” Ryan shouted. The big man leaped onto his bike and rode back to the top of the hill and spun to a stop next to Ryan. From their vantage the one-eyed man saw a mob of motorcycles cresting the next row of hills to the east. He took out his Navy longeye and extended it, counting about a dozen. The two forces stood and regarded each other over the half mile between them. A thin plume of black smoke rose from the burning bike beside Ryan. Six slowly held aloft his grizzly trophy. The scalped man was a bloody rag lying between the contenders. Ryan waited for the cavalry charge and hoped for it. If the coldhearts were hot for revenge, they would roar down in a swarm, and Ryan and Six would drop prone and shoot the riders out of their saddles as they came on.

  The coldhearts didn’t take the bait.

  Ryan was pretty sure they had taken note. Six had made his bloody mark, and the one-eyed man had made his point. Stalking the convoy had turned into a much rougher game. Unfortunately the enemy had made a point, as well.

  For roving coldhearts they had a sense of discipline that Ryan didn’t care for at all.

  BARON MACE HENNING wasn’t pleased. He sat on his camp tool with his cluboss his knees like a samurai warlord. “What’s that you say, Shorty?”

  Shorty scuffed the toe of his boot into the ground nervously. “Said Jimmy Pickering’s been chilled.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jimmy had been one of Mace’s better scouts. “How’d that happen?”

  “Old Vinny scalped him.” Shorty cleared his throat. “Burned his bike.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Saw after. Old Vinny was up on the next rise. Wavin’ Jimmy’s scalp at us.”

  Mace’s eyes went to slits. “So what’d you do about it, Shorty?”

  Shorty started paying intense attention to his boots again. “Nothin’…”

  “Nothing?”

  “Vinny was up on that hill, like I said, ’bout a klick away with that big shiny blaster of his and nothin’ ’tween us and it but a lot of real open ground. And there was another guy with him. I saw him real good. Through my ’noculars. Guy was one-eyed and had some kind of funky-lookin’ carbine. I don’t think he’s from around here, or Val-d’Or neither. Real coldheart-lookin’ prick. Lookin’ like he might even give old Vinny a hard time. ’Cept they was standin’ side-by-side and Vinny was smiling. We had ’em numbered, Baron, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that stranger or his blaster, and I sure didn’t like the smile on Vinny’s face.”

  Mace stared at Shorty. It was undoubtedly the most intelligent thing the sec man had ever said. Mace looked to Red, who was one of his sons. He was nowhere near as big as his father; indeed he took after his mother in being short and thin. Mace neither denied Red nor acknowledged him, but the red hair, green eyes and ugly features were absolutely unmistakable. When Red had first come to his father and asked for a job as a sec man, he didn’t bring up his blood. Mace had told him to go to a rival ville and bring him three ears. Red had come back with ten. He was unlikely to ever win a stand-up club or tomahawk fight, but Red was a nightcreeper extraordinaire, a decent shot with a blaster and could think on his feet. The chunk of change he wore around his neck was proof. “Red?”

  “Like he said, Baron. Those two just stood there waitin’, and Jimmy all laid out on the killing ground between us with the bedsheet pulled off his skull. No one sneaks up on Jimmy. That means they picked him off at range, and that says somethin’ right there. Some of the boys wanted to go straight in. Shorty said no.” Red met his father’s eyes. “I backed him.”

  Mace had been working very hard the last few years to instill some sense of tactics into his men. It had taken some head cracking, but it was starting to pay off. Baron Henning still wasn’t ready to start handing out compliments. “Don’t suppose anyone retrieved Jimmy’s change?”

  “No.” Red flinched. “Vinny’s got it. Added it to his collection.”

  Mace slowly rose. His club hung loose from his wrist by its thong. Tag rose behind him. His gaudy-house fancy autoblaster wasn’t quite pointing at anyone in particular, yet. The baron looked at the arc of men arrayed in front of him on the other side of the campfire; his eyebrow permanently cocked in judgment. The men stared back, mentally laying bets on whether Shorty, Red or both would get their skulls crushed and lose their change. Would Mace really put his club through his best friend’s brain? Or his own redheaded bastard son?

  Baron Mace Henning bellowed like a bull and shoved his club skyward. “Who wants to winter in Val-d’Or?”

  Shorty shouted first. He’d seen Mace rally the troops before, and he was ecstatic his skull was still intact. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”

  The baron let the lack of protocol go. “Who wants to winter down in that underground gaudy palace they got? Heard they got central heating!”

  More men took up the chant. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”

  “Who wants to winter sleeping on bearskins, smoking hemp and eating poutine? Heard they’re growing taters in excess!”

  The chant grew. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”

  “Who wants his own blond French slut to chew his boots this winter, and slobber on anything else a man has a mind for?”

  The chant grew to a roar.

  Baron Mace Henning’s riding skins creaked as he slowly sat and once more laid his club across his knees. “The way I figure it, Vinny owes me about fifty dollars now. Who’s going to bring me back all that jack?” Mace leaned forward. “Who’s going to bring me a black ear?”

  Every man shoved a club, tomahawk or blaster toward the shimmering Northern Lights and shook it. They whooped and shoved one another, each man shouting out how he was the one who would take down Vincent Six.

  “Boys?” A silver coin appeared in Mace’s hand. He held it up to gleam in the firelight. “Who’s going to earn himself a silver Voyager?”

  The whooping stopped and the assembled sec men stared at the coin that
only a few ever earned. “I want Vinny’s ears. I want Yoann Toulalan alive and in condition to give me the codes to the bunkers and the keys to Val-d’Or. I want his sister Cyrielle bent over my bike.”

  Guffaws broke out around the assembly.

  The baron grew serious again. “I don’t care if everything else burns, but I want the big rig and I want that wrecker LAV, intact.” Mace rose once more. “Each of you who ain’t on picket duty tonight, you can draw one ration of maple hooch. Check your blasters, check your rides, make sure your blades are sharp and bright. I want them nicked and bloody tomorrow. We’re gonna burn ahead of the convoy hard. They gotta head north to hit the Trans-Canada. We’re gonna drop that overpass we marked right in their way. We don’t let them circle up. We stop that convoy cold, and then we take it. No more messing around. Tag will give each of you your jobs tomorrow.”

  The men nodded and the circle began to break up.

  “One more thing boys.” The men gasped as a second silver coin appeared between Mace’s fingers. “I want the other eye of that Cyclops son of a bitch.”

  Chapter Eight

  “You see!” Six threw the scalp at Toulalan’s feet. “I told you! It is Henning!”

  “Henning?” Toulalan had stopped smiling. Ryan could tell this was an argument they’d had before. “I see a man’s hair, Vincent. My father allows you these excesses, but you know I don’t approve of you taking such trophies.”

  “I don’t take scalps as trophies,” Six rumbled. “I take scalps as a warning.” Six reached into his sheepskins and pulled out a leather necklace with two coins dangling from it. He threw it on top of the scalp. “When I want a trophy, I take these!”

  People around the council circle gasped. Seriah stood next to Ryan, and she looked very upset. He spoke quietly while French started flying fast and furious between Toulalan and Six. “What’s that?”