Hell Road Warriors

by James Axler

  Blasterfire streamed down from the hatch. Ryan reached into his coat and pulled out a gren, a 76 mm from the LAV’s quad dischargers. They were mostly used for sending out obscuring smoke and tear gas. The planners at the Diefenbunkers had obviously worried about hordes of hungry citizens and also added loads of M-99 Blunt Trauma rounds. At 66 mm in size and over one-and-one-half pounds, the gren was too heavy and awkward to throw any safe distance, and nothing was designed to shoot it but the quad launchers of an armored vehicle. That hadn’t stopped J.B. from removing its propulsion charge and reducing its pyrotechnic fuse from 4.5 seconds to two; and it wasn’t too heavy and awkward for Ryan to lob up into someone’s attic. “Step back!”

  The one-eyed man dropped to a knee and slammed the base of the gren into the floor to arm it, feeling it hiss and vibrate in his hand with ignition. Ryan rolled the gren off his fingers in an underhand pitch right up through the hatch. They heard a shout of alarm upstairs. “Gren! Gren! Gre—”

  The deadly orbs detonated.

  The audio stimuli clapped with a thunderous 170-decibel bang and the visual stimuli was a several 1000-candle power flash of lightning. Within the blinding and deafening display 140 .32-caliber PVC balls expanded outward in a body hammering blunt-trauma cloud. “Timms! Blacktree!”

  The loadmaster’s mate took station beneath the hatch and even he grunted as Blacktree climbed him. Jak scrambled up the human ladder and Ryan followed with the rest of the team. Ten pirates lay stunned and blinded on the floor. Tamara and Goose finished them off with their knives while Ryan and Jak hauled Blacktree’s huge frame up the hatch. “Pay out more cable!” Ryan called.

  The ladder to the third story was still down, and Ryan was pretty sure he knew why. He clambered up and put his shoulder to the hatch. Grimacing, Ryan shut his eye as sand that was still steaming hot sifted down on him. He slammed the hatch back. A dozen men lay smoldering and steaming on the floor. A few were still twitching. The bare-chested, bald men looked like they had been rolled in sugar and then cooked alive. The three machine blasters that had hammered the LAV hung in their firing slits unattended. Ryan stared at the hatch to the roof. The ladder was still down. The men above had heard the screaming below and had wanted no part of it.

  Hunk’s voice soared with victory over the radio. “Seventh chain down! We’re through!”

  Ryan climbed the ladder and hooked the winch cable through the handles. He readied a second gren. It wouldn’t be as effective this time. The open top of the tower would dissipate a great deal of the thunder, and daylight would have a similar effect on the flash. Ryan stepped away. “Winch!”

  “Winch away!” Timms bellowed from the bottom of the tower.

  The cable took up slack and tore the hatch right out of its frame. Everyone jumped back as a waterfall of boiling soap sheeted down into the second story.

  “Sons of bitches!” Tamara cursed.

  “Yup,” Boo agreed.

  Ryan slammed the gren on the floor and tossed it up the dripping hatch. He clicked his tactical communicator. “Hold fire on tower top! We’re hitting it!”

  “Holding fire!” McKenzie called. “Loud Elk is on the shore!”

  The M-99 detonated and men above screamed as the .32-caliber rubber balls beat them. Ryan surged up the ladder, but his free hand and his boots slipped and skidded on the soap-scalded rungs. “Fireblast!”

  A huge hand slammed into the seat of Ryan’s pants, and with a bellow of effort Boo Blacktree just about shot-putted the one-eyed man up through the hatch. A bullet whined and cracked an inch from Ryan’s head. He returned the favor and put three rounds in the offending pirate’s chest. The range up on the tower top was spitting distance. The blunt trauma round had taken the pirates down, but they were not out. Most of the pirates were armed with muzzle-loaders or single-shot blasters. Scalping knives, war clubs and tomahawks slid free. Jak popped up through the hatch borne on Boo Blacktree’s brute force. He shot a pirate in the face with his Colt Python and gave another a sliver of steel with a left-handed throw. The beating, sound and light made the pirates a step too slow, and even at short range clumsy and inaccurate.

  Ryan emptied his SIG into three pirates who were crowding into one another and pistol-whipped a fourth screaming over the edge of the tower. Donnie Goosekiller showed he knew something about slaughtering men as well as waterfowl as he hamstrung one pirate and slit the throat of another. Tamara’s ancient C-7 rifle had an equally ancient bayonet, and somewhere along the line she had learned to hang it on the end of her blaster and use it. A pirate screamed as she buried the bayonet in his bladder. The man behind him lived just long enough to gasp as Ryan’s panga slid up beneath his sternum to chill his heart.

  The tower top was taken by the time Blacktree carefully and laboriously got his bulk up the soapy ladder. Tamara’s left arm was swelling like a balloon from a glancing club blow. Goosekiller had two black eyes but insisted he could shoot. Ryan contacted the captain and reloaded. “We own the tower. Taking the lock. Give me covering fire.”

  “Right!” McKenzie kept insisting on shouting over the link. “Dr. Tanner! Covering fire!”

  Large objects began tumbling in huge arcs from the stern of the Queen. Ryan crouched and checked his demo charge.

  Now came the hard part.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Doc’s stentorian voice challenged the heavens. “Starboard catapult! Loose pitch!”

  The loadmaster yanked the trigger rope and the arm of the mangonel slammed up against the padded stop. The entire catapult bucked like a mule and jumped its chalks with the expended energy. The crew pulled it back onto the smeared chalk lines. The stern promenade was a perilous clutter of red-hot caldrons, burning pitch, piles of huge stones and wooden engines that could crush bones and tear the limbs off the unwary. Doc stalked to the port rail and shaded his eyes as the cask of pitch sailed over the southernmost of the two midcanal, island lock towers.

  “Hmm…” Doc thumbed his tactical radio. “Captain, would you be so kind as to turn the boat three degrees to port?”

  McKenzie broke into a fit of profanity. The Queen was trying to hold position against the current and now Doc was telling him to the give the current more of the vessel to push against. Nonetheless he roared orders. The Queen’s boilers chugged, and the smokestack belched black ash as the firemen gave her more coal.

  “Excellent.” Doc looked at his watch. “Loadmaster! Port catapult! Load pitch!” Sailors groaned and heaved and cursed as the boiling hot keg seared through the rags wrapping their hands as they put the cask in place. “Light fuse!” Doc stalked to the rail and lifted a pair of Diefenbunker laser range-finding binoculars as the punk was applied. Doc pressed the button and the binoculars told him the range was 107 meters. “Oh, now that really shines!”

  The loadmaster called with some urgency. “Fuse lit!”

  “Port catapult!” Doc cut the air with his swordstick decisively. “Loose!”

  The mangonel’s arm thudded against the frame and J.B.’s witches brew of pitch, soap and diesel catapulted through space. Doc lowered his binoculars and leaned over the rail to watch its progress. A bullet whip-cracked past his head, but he was oblivious as he mentally compared his math to the actual arc of flight. His mind was utterly absorbed by the geometry of siege craft. The canal had two islands. The southern island formed one-half of the big gate. The keg of pitch hit the southern tower top and sluiced across it in a puddle of fire.

  “A hit!” Doc crowed. “A most palpable hit!”

  The catapult crews cheered.

  Burning men hurled themselves from the tower top. Most hit the ground of the island and bounced like bundles of burning rags. A few hit the water and none of them resurfaced. Doc’s cheek ticked as he became aware of what his calculations had wrought. “Oh dear.”

  McKenzie’
s voice boomed across the link. “Rad-fire, Doc! Good shooting!”

  Doc gave the black smoke billowing up from the tower top a leery look. “Yes…well…”

  The LAV on the forward promenade fired occasional bursts of cannon and coax fire at pockets of resistance or against the firing ports of the towers to keep them honest.

  “The log-chains are down!” McKenzie was eager. “If I advance the Queen, can you still give fire?”

  Doc shook his head as ugly shivers shook him. He clutched at his sanity. “No, Captain! The catapults will overshoot beyond this range with everything except the heaviest stones! I recommend we hold position! The catapults will engage in suppressive bombardment of the northern island and the northern shore fort while J.B. and the ballistae give Ryan’s team covering fire along the southern gate!”

  “Very good! Maintaining position! Fire at will!”

  “Oh, well, very kind of you, Captain....” Doc gazed between the two mangonels. They were his instruments of destruction. He gazed at the burning tower top and the burning men who had stopped moving atop it.

  “Doc?” the loadmaster called.

  Pangs of guilt and horror began nudging Doc’s damaged psyche. His swordstick shook in his hand. He opened his mouth and closed it. He could feel “it” coming on.

  “Doc?” The loadmaster gave him a desperate look, “Doc!”

  The old man tamped down his guilt and fear.

  His friends needed him.

  Doc shouted with a certainty he didn’t feel. “Starboard catapult! Turn sixty degrees! Burning sand! Port catapult! Pitch! Keep your eye on the southern canal tower! On my signal!” Doc raised his binoculars and checked the range again. Without a shadow of a doubt, Ryan Cawdor was a dear friend. It was his show now. The Queen would break the Soo Lock or be sunk by the success or failure of Ryan’s efforts. Doc flung friendship, honor and duty into the face of madness.

  He would give Ryan a fighting chance. “Loose!”

  RYAN WATCHED THE SECOND CASK of burning pitch shatter and sluice across the south island tower. It would be worth any pirate’s life to open the hatch and step out into the inferno. Doc called across the radio. “Now, Ryan! While the fire is still hot!”

  Ryan unslung his Scout and leaped to the catwalk. It took dozens of oxen to open the gate but only the current to hold it shut against all comers. Beneath the tower squatted a blockhouse encasing a capstan the size of a windmill without any sails. Half of the curtain of palisade was fixed into the river bottom, and it was fixed on the island side. The swinging gate overlapped the fixed one with six cut-out sections like the teeth of an old-fashioned key. Ryan had to shatter the six overlaps and the current would do the rest. Doc had smeared the southern island tower top with fire, but the catwalks, rope bridges and island shacks behind the gates were still pirate infested.

  Tamara’s longblaster began cracking on rapid semiauto. “Go, Ryan!”

  Ryan charged across the top of the lock catwalk that J.B. had busted and blackened with the LAV’s autocannon. Blood, limbs and burned timber were everywhere. Jak and Blacktree were right on his heels. McKenzie’s voice came across the link. “We see you, Ryan!”

  A half dozen pirates burst out of the top of the tower ahead and braved the burning pitch to bring down Ryan and his team.

  J.B.’s voice spoke wisdom across the link. “Down!”

  Tamara joined the save-the-demo-men crusade. “Down!”

  Blasterfire raked the top of the tower. The pirates never made it ten steps toward the catwalk. They fell wounded or dead into the puddles of fire.

  Ryan’s link echoed with J.B.’s urgency. “Go!”

  Tamara’s guardian angel voice rang from behind. “Run, Ryan! Run!”

  Ryan ran for it. A pirate swung up from the rope bridge below, and the one-eyed man shoved out the Scout and fired it point-blank into the pirate’s screaming face. Another pirate swung himself up into Ryan’s path with club and blade in hand, screaming. Goosekiller’s swarm of buckshot smeared away the pirate’s head and sent him toppling into the canal below. Ryan slung his rifle. Jak uncoiled a knotted rope and made it fast to the top of the wall.

  Tamara shouted over the sound of her own longblaster. “Make it fast, Ryan! You’re attracting attention!”

  Ryan pulled on elk-skin gloves, filled his mouth with nails and went down the rope. He stopped just as his boots hit water and put his boots on one of the knots. A bullet smote splinters a foot away from his arm. The one-eyed man ignored the bullets seeking his life and pulled a hammer from his belt. He leaned his weight against J.B.’s satchel charge and hammered the explosive pack into the wet wood of the gate. Ryan yanked the cord holding the satchel closed on top and reached in to arm the detonator pin. He looked down as something nudged his right foot.

  A huge, goofy-looking, almost eellike fish was awkwardly nuzzling at his boot. Its blue eyes looked up soulfully at Ryan. It rolled over as it pushed up out of the water to try to reach Ryan’s calf and revealed a round, jawless maw like a giant, inflamed, thorn-filled rectum.

  Ryan snapped the toe of his boot into the lamprey’s teeth and it fell back in the water. “Haul up!”

  Blacktree hauled him up to the next gate overlap. “Charge!” Jak dropped down a charge and Ryan caught it. He hammered it into place and armed it. “Haul up!” Blacktree hauled him up another increment and Ryan pounded in another charge.

  “Ryan!” Jak shouted.

  Tamara shouted in warning. “Ryan! Get out of there!”

  The one-eyed man looked to his left. The top of the tower still burned, but the men on the floors below were very much alive. They didn’t have any firing slits facing the inside of the great gate, but someone had tattled on Ryan and what he was doing. Pirates flooded out of the bottom of the tower faster than Tamara and Goosekiller could knock them down. Ryan hung midgate like a very exposed spider—a spider several dozen pirates intended to squash once and for all.

  Jak fired his Colt Python as fast as he could pull the trigger.

  Blacktree hauled on the rope and waited for Ryan’s order.

  The one-eyed man hammered in the charge and shouted into his radio. “Six!”

  Six’s voice was a welcome boom across the link. “I see you! We have you!”

  Ryan risked a glance to his right. The LAV splashed to the edge of the water right next to the great gate capstan. Mr. Smythe was perched behind the machine blaster, and it ripped into life. A dozen of Loud Elk’s men clustered around it, firing their blasters into the pirates. A dozen more spilled onto the top of the southern gate tower and began firing with Tamara.

  “Haul up!” Ryan called. “Charge!”

  Jak dropped Ryan another charge and he nailed another satchel into the string of explosive. “Haul up!”

  Ryan repeated the process twice more as an occasional bullet smacked wood nearby.

  He hung six feet from the top over the last overlap with the last charge. “Get out of here!”

  “Ryan!” Jak protested.

  There was nothing left for Jak or Blacktree to do except to stand on the catwalk and get shot at. “Go and cover me!”

  Jak and Blacktree ran for the cover of the shore tower. Ryan hammered in the last charge. He snarled and kicked away from the timbers as a hand reached out for his face from beneath the catwalk.

  Ryan examined his opponent for the heartbeats he had while he swung out into space. It was fish-belly white like a stickie but more robustly built. It was also wearing a pirate vest and breechclout. Unlike a stickie it had hair that had been shaved into scalp braids. The sharklike black eyes, the needle teeth and the suckers on its outstretched fingers and palm bespoke some grotesque and undoubtedly nonconsensual crossbreeding. It clung to the bottom of the catwalk with one hand and its bare feet.

 
Ryan swung back in and gave the hybrid both boot heels in the teeth. The stickie flopped vertical, held to the bottom of the catwalk only by its suckered feet. Ryan cracked it between the eyes with his hammer and its feet released. The stickie fell to the dark water of the St. Marys River. Lampreys began churning around it.

  About half a dozen of the hybrids were crawling along the bottom of the catwalk from both sides of the shore. Where they had been hiding was a moot point. Ryan had a problem. He hauled himself up the rope to the catwalk as the muties scrabble-sucked themselves toward him in their all-too-fast upside-down progress. Ryan pulled the detonator from his coat.

  A hand wrapped around his ankle and yanked him flat.

  The detonator clattered to the catwalk.

  A voice cackled out of the smoke from the burning, midcanal tower top. “You know who I am, boy?” Ryan slid as the suckered hand began dragging him back down. Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer and three hollowpoint rounds separated the sucking hand at the wrist. The voice bellowed. “I’m Thorpe! The pirate king! You come here to break my locks, boy?”

  Ryan shoved his blaster toward the tower top, but Thorpe had ducked down behind the crenellations. A suckered hand shot out from beneath the catwalk and vised around the one-eyed man’s forearm. The spatulate hand contracted like a noose and the blaster fell free. Ryan slipped his panga from its sheath and returned the favor across the veins and nerves of the mutie’s inner wrist. Ryan ripped his hand free and drew his second SIG.

  Thorpe shouted gleefully. “How you like my stickie men, boy?”

  A stickie pirate rolled up onto the catwalk, and Ryan shot it three times in the face. The Deathlands warrior rolled over and shot the one behind him with a double-tap to the forehead. Four more rolled up on the catwalk in front and behind him. Covering fire tapered off as Ryan’s friends were afraid to shoot into the melee. A dozen voices on the link and on the tower shouted out.