by James Axler
Krysty abruptly went boneless and Doc just caught her as she fell. “Mildred, take Krysty into the cab and lock the door. I’ll go get J.B. and have him radio Ryan.”
“You’d better rouse out Hunk and his islanders. This could get ugly.”
Doc looked eastward and silently urged Ryan to greater speed. It was already far too ugly for his liking.
Ryan arrived with the dawn. The storm had stopped. It looked as though a new one was brewing. The convoy had turned into a lopsided pair of armed, angry and clearly delineated camps. The big rig and the fighting LAV formed the smaller camp. The two wags were surrounded by Hunk and his island sec men. J.B. sat in the LAV’s turret top, and the autocannon was pointed at the rest of the convoy. The rest of the convoy was circled up. More than a few men with blasters had their eye on the LAV and the semi. Ryan smelled coffee and bacon coming from the convoy. Hunk and his men were eating, chewing cold pemmican and glaring across the fifty yards of no-man’s-land between the two camps. Ryan noted not all of Hunk’s men were present.
The Deathland warrior’s voice was as cold as the oncoming Canadian winter. “Six, take command of your people.”
Ryan rode to his own companions, followed by Jak and Tamara.
Mildred walked out of the back of the LAV to meet him. Ryan didn’t dismount and his Scout was out of its scabbard. “How is she?”
“She’s all right. Sleeping. She and Doc were the ones who did all the damage.”
Ryan eyed Mildred. She looked exhausted. J.B. hadn’t elaborated over the radio, but Ryan gathered she’d had a hard night. “What happened?”
“You and Six were gone, Yoann was fevered up. J.B. was working in the LAV and Jak was out in the dark on patrol. Sebastien and his asshole buddies Michel and Roland showed up in the night with bad intentions.”
“And?”
Mildred shook her head. “I’m afraid I didn’t handle it too well. They got the jump on me. Luckily, Doc stepped in and started handing out some beat down. Sebastien was about to blow his head off when Krysty went all Gaia on them.”
Ryan knew how that usually turned out. “How bad is it?”
“She killed Sebastien and beat Roland stupid. Definitely brain damaged. I stabilized him, but if I had to bet, he’s going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.”
“What about Michel?”
“Multiple broken bones and contusions. I took care of him. The son of a bitch is over there lying his ass off and preaching death to muties and anyone who loves them.”
“Not good.”
“Get’s worse. Yoann died in the night. You know that big guy, Patrice?”
Everyone in Canada seemed to be big, but Ryan knew the blond, bearded blaster man. “The driver of Six’s sec wag?”
“Yeah, him. He says he’s leader of the convoy now.”
“What about Cyrielle?”
“She’s in bad shape. Hasn’t left Yoann’s camper, and hasn’t said word one about the situation.” Mildred squinted up at Ryan. “So, what are you going to do?”
Ryan took a long breath. “Guess I’ll ride over there.”
Hunk charged up with Kagan, Kosha and Quinn at his heels. “Ryan! I—”
“You’ll stay here.”
Ryan rode over to the convoy. Most of the convoy had formed a mob behind Patrice. Only the big woman who had lost her lover to the thunderbirds, Marie-Laure, stood with Six. Patrice was speaking French, but Ryan could tell Patrice was giving his former boss a genuine ass-ripping. The thickly accented word mutant figured early and often in the conversation. Michel lay on the med-wag’s gurney cheerleading and posing as Exhibit A. Despite the desperation of the situation, Ryan almost had to smile. It would have been far better for Patrice if Six had been roaring in rage and brandishing his big blaster. Instead the sec leader took in Patrice’s increasingly inflammatory tirade like a man gazing at a very small dog that was barking and lunging at him. Patrice seemed hopped up on his new position of power and mob mentality and blissfully unaware of his impending mortality.
The mob’s muttering and Patrice’s oratory ceased as Ryan rode up. “I’m in command of this convoy until Cyrielle says different.”
Patrice’s head stopped just short of exploding. “You? You are a mutie lover! Yoann is dead! Six is a traitor and—” Patrice’s head stopped just short of flying off his shoulders as Six hit him. His eyes rolled back in his head as he rubbernecked and fell unconscious. The mob stared mutely at their fallen spokesman. Six spoke conversationally to the closest man to him. “Lenard?”
Lenard backed up a step and bumped into the man behind him. “Uh…oui?”
“I need every man, so when Patrice wakes up, tell him I’ll forgive his impertinence, this once. Next time I take his hair.”
“Uh…oui, Six.”
Michel began caterwauling from his gurney in apoplectic French. Six walked over and examined his sec man. He judiciously peered at Michel’s splinted left forearm. Six reached down, grabbed the thumb sticking out of the splint and snapped it. Michel’s face went white with shock. Six’s voice was almost fatherly. “Best for you to be quiet now.”
Six whirled on the mob, and his fury poured forth like thunder. “Now! I am in command of every Québécois in this convoy! Hunk is in command of his Islanders! Ryan commands his Deathlanders, and Ryan commands us all as long as one wag still has wheels! Who disputes this?”
The mob recoiled before Six’s wrath. They stared warily at Ryan as he sat his horse like the Fourth Rider of the Apocalypse.
No one disputed it.
Ryan spoke quietly. “We’re heading on for the last bunker. Anyone who wants to leave can take your blaster and all the food and ammo you can carry. The wags stay with the convoy.” Ryan glanced back over his shoulder as he spun his mount. “Anyone who wants a horse can apply.”
No one applied. No one left, either, but fear and suspicion were tearing the convoy apart, and only force of personality was holding it together. Ryan held a sitdown with his companions. Mildred had just returned from setting Michel’s thumb and checking Patrice for concussion. She gave Krysty a long look. The beautiful redhead had never looked so miserable. Mildred knew part of it was that using her Earth power left her drained, and part of it was a hawberry brandy hangover.
The council was mostly quiet. The question was to stay or go.
Neither option held much appeal.
Six walked up and joined them. He looked at Ryan and smiled to reveal his gold and silver teeth. “Bonjour, Ryan.”
“Well, bonjour to you, too, brother-man,” Mildred quipped. “And just who the hell is minding the convoy?”
Six shrugged. “Patrice.”
“Patrice! How the hell can you trust him?”
“Patrice will do exactly what I tell him to.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because, Mildred—” the ugly smile widened “—Patrice knows what’s best.”
Vincent Six was big, black, bad, brutal, bald and ugly, and Mildred had to admit he was growing on her. “I suppose he does.”
“Forgive my temerity, Ryan,” Six continued, “but if you still lead us, I think we must move. Our fuel runs short, our time shorter. We must reach the next bunker.”
Ryan looked at Krysty. She rose without a word. Everyone in the group had a say in what they did, but they would follow her lead on this one. If she broke for the LAV, they were heading south. If she went to the semi, they were still heading west. Krysty turned on her heel, clambered up into the big rig’s cab and slammed the door.
“Headin’ west, eh?” Hunk grinned.
“Yeah,” Ryan replied. “Six, how is Cyrielle?”
“Crushed.”
“What’s the mood in the convoy?”
�
�Distraught. Yoann was much loved. His father, the baron, is old. Val-d’Or does not accept a female baron. There is no heir. When we return, there will very likely be a fight over the succession. It will tear the ville apart. Many want to go home now, and, in my heart, I’m one of them. I should be beside my baron. He told me to protect his son. He made me promise.” Six stared bitterly into the middle distance. “I’ve failed.”
“But you’ve decided to go on.”
“I must. We must seize the prize. Returning with the reactors will give me the power to enforce the baron’s will, and have a say in which faction takes power.” Six’s face darkened. “And who takes Cyrielle’s hand and the ville.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Manitoba
The convoy pressed on across the Canadian prairie. Compared to the Deathlands, Canada had gotten off fairly lightly when it the sky had fallen in fire, but several of her provincial capitals had been lit up. The needle of the rad counter pinned to Ryan’s coat began to move out of the safe zone as they approached the quadruple craters that had been Winnipeg. Here the going got very hard. The overpasses had fallen, and erosion had taken its toll on the on- and off-ramps. This close to the capital was by the thousands had been abandoned on the roadways, some with the skeletons of their original passengers still strapped into their rotting seats, killed during the initial millisecond of the radiation wave during detonation.
Alain, Sebastien and édouard were dead, which left Six the only convoy man who could handle a LAV. Ryan and J.B. switched over to the engineering-recovery LAV and with winch, dozer blade and crane they cleared the path. It was slow, ponderous work, working wreck by wreck, roadblock by roadblock. Outside Transcona they met with heartbreak. The hulks of Canadian Land Force Leopard tanks blocked the Trans-Canada and the surrounding roads. They had long ago been stripped of their machine blasters and anything of use, but their rusted turrets pointed west toward Winnipeg. Beyond them makeshift roadblocks, poured concrete fighting positions and the rusted girder tripods of tank barriers formed more obstacles. That told Ryan that despite a direct nuke hit, something within the blasted city had required containment. Whether the Canadian Military had succeeded or failed was ancient news. The iron fact confronting them was that the Engineering LAV couldn’t move a tank.
And it got worse.
The prairie ended abruptly to form dark formations of thick, radiation-twisted trees with black bark that bled white, weeping sap. They crowded and choked everything that wasn’t covered in pavement in all directions. The trees were as thick as oaks, and their purple leaves were jagged like cannabis. Doc had no idea what their original species might once have been. The tall grass refused to grow within two hundred yards of the forest, forming a strange, sere, no-plants-land leading up to the ancient tank formations. From the top of the semi Ryan’s Navy longeye showed the black forest forming a ring around the craters of Winnipeg like a walled city.
Ryan stood atop the semi with Six and a Diefenbunker map, eating creamed corn out of the can. Rations were running low. If they didn’t reach the next bunker soon, they would be down to hunting and pemmican. The one-eyed man looked southward, and not without some longing, toward Deathlands. “It’s clearer to the south. We can backtrack, swing wide and come up around the other side on Highway 2, mebbe back road it up to meet up with the Trans again.”
Six shook his head. “No, our path lies north. There is no time for detours.”
“North?” At every pause, around every campfire, all talk in the convoy revolved around how late it was in the season and how the hard freeze would be descending upon them like an avalanche from the north. No one made it sound pleasant. “No one’s going to like that announcement.”
Six shrugged. “We can’t push past those tanks. Going south will cost us days with no way of reaching the 6 north except by looping all the way around Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis. That could cost us weeks.”
Ryan looked at the map and gazed hard at the bridge of land between the long, Canadian lakes and Highway 6 that ran right up the middle. Getting to it meant cutting through the dark wood. “So we go through the trees.” Ryan frowned. “No one’s going to like that announcement, either.”
“I know, but a klick or less of forest is the short way. The long loop around the lakes will take close to nine hundred.” Six gave Ryan a wry look. “And they will do it if you tell them to.”
Ryan was swiftly transforming from a leader who was respected and admired to one who was obeyed out of fear. It was his least favorite method of leadership. “Thanks.”
“De rien.” Six shrugged.
Ryan received no thanks for it but he gave the order, and the convoy went to work. Short of grabbing men in their branches and crushing them, the trees fought back. Their roots coiled around center dividers and when their branches weren’t intertwining with one another, they wove their way through the hidden hulks of abandoned wags and any other wreckage they could find. People instantly found out that the white sap burned and stung the skin. The leaves were sharp enough to cut bare skin and cotton, and hooked into thicker garments with the tenacity of nettles. The men wore gloves, makeshift hoods, their winter leggings, leather shirts and Diefenbunker goggles and bandannas across their faces as armor.
When a tree finally gave in and fell, it released its sap like a dead man releasing his bowels, and the stench was twice as horrid. Beneath the canopy the humidity was horrific. The coffee-dark duff of the forest floor was the consistency of rotting flesh, and the spurting lakes of white sap churned it into the consistency of plasma. In places, men sank in knee-deep. It was a slogging, slow-motion war between plant and animal.
The animals fought back. Many of the men of Val-d’Or were miners, and they all knew what to do with a pick and a shovel. The men of Manitoulin were sailors from birth and understood ropes and tackles; and for that matter there wasn’t a man alive in Canada who didn’t know which end of a felling ax was which. The double-bitted blades rose and fell in grim determination.
Sap spurted. The twisted trees fell.
It was backbreaking and sickening work. Winching the LAV atop the promenade of the Queen had been simple in comparison. Human muscle alone would have sickened and failed long before any path to the northbound Highway 7 could have been cleared, but the men of the convoy had one advantage. As they carved their way into the dark forest yard by poisonous yard, they slowly made room for the engineering LAV to move. In Ryan and J.B.’s hands, Winnipeg’s dark garden of evil found itself invaded by a voracious, nonlocal pest it had no answer for. The LAV craned away fallen timbers, winched out stumps and the dozer blade simply sheared away the smaller saplings at ground level.
Once they were within the forest Ryan didn’t want to stop. By night they worked on by wag lights and torches. Men worked until they collapsed or were relieved. Ryan, Six, J.B. and Jak were like a captain and his officers on a ship at storm. For them there was no rest. One advantage they had was that no man or woman in the convoy wanted to stop during the day or night in the eerily silent, bleeding, palpably hostile forest.
The ball-busting ceaseless work provided a side benefit. It gave the convoy members no time for grumbling or internal division. It also gave them common purpose and a common enemy. Mildred was kept busy but it wasn’t bad. The brutal, dangerous nature of the day and night work produced mostly bruises, strains and some broken bones. Nearly everyone had first- and some had second-degree chemical burns from the sap, and that put a dent in the med wag’s topical ointments. There were only two causalities. The first morning the mess-wag driver, a woman named Betts, had disappeared without a trace. In the med wag someone left Michel unattended for a few moments to go and relieve himself and returned to find his gurney empty. Blacktree had scouted for them, but found no footprints, no sign of any disturbance and no trail.
After that anyone not employed road blazing
was on top of a wag with a blaster ready, and anyone sleeping was in a wag that was buttoned up. Ryan instituted random recce by blasterfire into the forest as well as the random firing of flares ahead. Whatever lived in the forest, whatever Winnipeg’s radioactive death throes had birthed, found itself unwilling to lock horns with the convoy directly.
On the third morning they broke through to the north. They found the no-plants-land, and they found Highway 7 stretching north. It was congested with the wag hulks of those who had fled south back in the day and either abandoned their wags or had fallen to Winnipeg’s glowing craters, but it was free of armored vehicles. Despite the pressing need to move on, Six quietly requested a day of rest for the convoy and Ryan granted a halt and a day of light duty. People bathed their wounds in the clean water of the southern-flowing Red River and ate their first hot meal in days. The forest sap ate fabric and leather, and people sewed, patched and mended. The sap and mulch mix of the forest floor had done the wags’ tires much like it had human skin. Nearly all the convoy’s wags were festooned with spares, but they went through more of them than Ryan would have liked.
The next day the convoy pressed north up the corridor between the lakes and caught Highway 6.
Every mile north they went the land grew more open, hard and severe. The Northern Lights grew more lurid until the sun was an obscured lamp behind bleeding sky murals. The wind began to blow cold and straight from the north. Here the giant grass was already withering. No breed of tree survived this far north other than wind-twisted and cold-cramped stands of pines that the hard freeze had bent into phantasmagorical shapes.
They came to a headland, and Ryan could see Lake Winnipeg to the east and Cedar Lake to the west. Route 6 came to a dead end and the convoy came to a halt at the Saskatchewan River. Ryan clicked his CB. “Six, where are we?”
“Grand Rapids.”
Ryan glanced at his map. “Grand Rapids is across the river.”
