Hell Road Warriors

by James Axler

  Six strode into the med facility. “We have a window. This storm system has passed.” He looked down at Marie-Laure on the gurney. “How are you?”

  Marie-Laure looked at Six, looked at her crippled hand and bit her lip to stifle a sob. She was a big woman, and ugly. She had compensated for it by becoming sec. She and her lover had bargained with Six to give them children so that other men would leave them alone. She knew the beautiful Camille had been the bait. Now her lover was dead, and she was a sec woman with only one good hand. Tears burned unbidden down her cheeks as she looked at Six and her future in despair. “Six, I am…mutilated. Camille is…dead… I am… You do not have to honor your commitment. You may…”

  “Marie-Laure—” it was the first time Ryan had ever seen Six smile with genuine warmth “—you are my number one sec girl.” He nodded toward her left hand. “It takes but two fingers to steady a long blaster, and that hand will do most elegantly to hold the hand of my son, when you teach him to walk.”

  Marie-Laure sobbed. So did Mildred and Krysty. Six took Marie-Laure into his arms and held her as she cried and murmured to her in French.

  “Six, how soon do you want to mount up?” Ryan asked.

  Six gave Marie-Laure a squeeze. “We’ll be ready to leave in half an hour.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The convoy cautiously crawled out into the Canadian winter. Many of the stunted pines had exploded, but many more had miraculously lived through the supercooling of the giant superstorm’s cyclonic center. The supercooling in the eye allowed water to remain in a liquid state despite being below freezing. The second the eye passed, the rain and snow instantly solidified into crystalline structures of startling geometry and size like snowflakes blown to gigantic proportions.

  A minority of the convoy had changed into the available Diefenbunker-issue arctic clothing. Most had exchanged moccasins for fur-lined mukluks and leggings and wore blanket-cut capotes. Ryan wore his buffalo robe, his scarf wound around his head like a turban, and was tolerably warm. Krysty looked the perfect ice princess in her bear coat, ushanka and muff.

  The semi rolled out with its precious cargo tied down and tarped over in the bed.

  Ryan was worried about the crystalline sculptures cutting tires, but they were ephemeral and shattered apart easily at the engineering LAV’s dozer blade. The morning was bright and blissfully calm and clear after the superstorm. It was too clear, and it was still far too cold for Ryan’s liking. He was very worried about what any wind-chill factor at all would do the wags’ fuel lines, much less human flesh. They had rolled out of a nice warm bunker with the vehicles all primed. They had jumper cables, the mighty batteries of the LAVs, and warming units but Ryan still feared that many of the wags would never start again once stopped.

  The ice sheathing Highway 6 was as slick as glass and despite the engineering LAV crunching the path, sliding was a problem and the convoy’s speed was dangerously reduced. The good news was the land was tolerably flat, they had already blazed their path through the wreckage, and any vehicle that slid off course and even off the road was easily winched back in line by the LAV. Everyone constantly threw wary glances backward. There was never just one storm. They swept across Canada in a brutal, marching succession. They were best survived behind thick walls or underground with roaring fires in every hearth.

  The convoy rolled south. They didn’t stop. Refueling was done on the move.

  It was noon when the 84 mm recoilless rifle round punched through the engineering LAV’s dozer blade. The high-explosive–antitank shaped-charged warhead sent a lance of superheated gas and molten metal shrieking through the engine compartment. The driver had no time to scream as his body was incinerated except for his head sticking up out of the driver’s hatch, and it rolled smoking down the side armor. Six’s leather leggings were smoking as he leaped from the commander’s hatch, jumping from the burning armored vehicle as it slewed off the road. Half the convoy slammed on the brakes and slid perilously on the ice in all directions. Ryan downshifted, and sparks flew off both fenders as he swerved and threaded between two hulks rather than crushing the wag in front of him. “J.B.! Return fire!”

  “I see him!” the Armorer replied. The fighting LAV’s turret turned toward a stand of the giant, twisted bonsai trees. Smoke from the recoiless’s back blast rose into the frigid air. The 25 mm blaster slammed on slow autofire. Whatever mutation allowed them to survive the supercooling failed as high-explosive incendiary rounds burst their trunks and leveled them. Two motorcycles burst from the grove, their nailed snow tires hurling rainbow prisming arcs of ice crystals behind them as their riders clawed for purchase and raced for the easy ice of the highway. J.B. slowly traversed the turret like the iron hand of fate. The 25 mm blaster popped once, and one motorcycle and its rider were blown to pieces. He kept traversing and suddenly the coax blaster snarled off a burst and sent the other bike and rider slewing sideways into a violent sleigh ride into the next copse of trees.

  Six was up and shoved one of his riders off his bike and headed for the fallen. Tamara was on a bike and right behind him. The man rose and Ryan saw his flaming hair as he tried to push himself along with his arms alone. It was Red. Hunk shouted from the back of a wag. “Kagan! Kosha! Quinn! Man fetch!”

  The giant poodles coursed across the intervening ground as Red tried to pull himself into some kind of cover among the trees.

  Ryan turned to Krysty. “Take the wheel.” The one-eyed man slid out of the cab and started walking as the convoy slowly reassembled itself. He hurried to the ambush sight and found the broken bodies of the recoilless team. Their limbs were at unnatural angles, their wounds frozen over and their faces smeared away into abstract art of blood, bone and glittering rime. The tube blaster was torn and bent. Ryan shrugged his buffalo robe up higher and walked on. The one he had heard described as Mace’s number one sec man, Shorty, lay with his parts intermixed and steaming with the parts of his cycle.

  Ryan snapped away his silver coin and walked on.

  Red lay in the second copse of bent pines. His legs were as twisted as the trees. The giant dogs stood over him growling and snarling. Tamara and Six stood over him. Six nodded at Ryan and turned his attention back to Red. “I see you wear the voyageur, mon ami.” Red flinched as Six ripped it from around his neck. “Did you do your papa, proud?”

  Red glared upward and said nothing.

  “How did you earn it?” Six smiled without an ounce of warmth. “Worming the Queen, no?”

  Red knew he was dead. There would be no mercy here. Between the dogs and Six, there was no happy ending. All that mattered now was how he met it. “Something like that.”

  “Now, you and I shall talk.”

  “I don’t talk to Frenchmen.” Red spit on the leg pinning him down. “Much less black ones.”

  Tamara removed her bayonet from her longblaster. “I’m gonna cut off his balls.”

  Six held up a restraining hand. “I would never send a man to his grave without his balls.” Six bent, flipped Red’s broken body over with childlike ease and seized him by his flaming red locks. “But his hair…”

  Red screamed as his scalp came off.

  “Now,” Six said, “you will talk to this black Frenchman.”

  Ryan had leaned hard upon man and mutie to get information required for the survival of his friends, but he wasn’t a torturer. He could mostly get what he wanted through fear and intimidation. Red was as tough as they came, and Six would have to be brutal to get what he needed from his enemy. Ryan left the little frozen stand of pines and walked back to the semi. Krysty leaned out of the cab smiling, “Hey, lover, you catch—”

  Red screamed as Six did something.

  “Get back in the cab,” Ryan advised.

  “What’s going on?”

  Ryan clambered into the c
ab and turned on one of the CDs of country music Krysty had taken from the bunker recce room. Some predark woman named Emmylou Harris sang with heartbreaking sadness. “The Canadians are working things out among themselves.”

  The convoy sat motionless for about twenty minutes. In the end, Red gave up everything. In the end, beneath Six’s and Tamara’s knives just about all Red kept were his balls. The pair walked back to the convoy stone-faced, with spattered blood on their clothes. Six angrily boomed out orders in French.

  Ryan opened his door and leaned out to Tamara. “What happened?”

  Her M-16 snapped up to cover Ryan and Krysty in the cab. “You just stand down, sex machine.” The convoy instantly turned on the Deathlanders.

  Doc had heard the orders in French and was appalled. “What is the meaning of this! Why, I…” He was quite befuddled to find his arms pinned behind his back by Patrice. J.B. and Mildred found blasters pointed at their heads. Six marched on grimly to the fighting LAV. Jak leaned his head out at the commotion and found Marie-Laure pointing her blaster in his face with her good hand. “What—”

  Six’s right hand hit Jak like a thunderbolt and dropped the young man like a bad habit. The sec leader stepped inside the troop cabin and Seriah screamed. Tamara’s muzzle never wavered from Ryan’s face. “You just sit tight.”

  Six walked out carrying a flailing and crying Seriah by her hair and the back of her belt. He shoved her down the ramp. Seriah tumbled onto the ice-sheathed road, sobbing. Six raised his voice and spoke in English. “She is the traitor.” He glanced down at the weeping wrench in the snow and ice without an ounce of pity. “It is she who has been giving Mace Henning our position since we crossed the Ottawa.”

  “No!” she cried.

  Her denial was cut off by Six’s brutal boot to her ribs. Jak was starting to push himself up, and Marie-Laure put a foot between his shoulder blades and pushed him back down. “Stay down, Jak.” Six gave Seriah another brutal boot.

  Tamara whooped. “Stomp a mudhole in her, Six! Walk it dry and…” Tamara didn’t so much take her eyes off Ryan, as slightly divide her attention. It was enough to find herself staring in amazement at the 9 mm blaster that had appeared like sleight of hand in her face. “Um, Six?”

  Jak spun beneath Marie-Laure’s boot and slammed his arm into the back of her knees. The rolling chop block left the sec woman facedown in the permafrost with Jak’s blade at her throat.

  “Six?” Ryan inquired in the sudden silence. “What’s going on?”

  “Seriah is the traitor. Red told me everything. She left them a Diefenbunker radio in Borden. As chief mechanic, she had access to the radios in both LAVs day and night, the knowledge to erase their logs, and to turn the suspicion onto me. She has betrayed our every step.” Six stood implacably over the little woman. “Tell them. Tell everyone why you betrayed us.”

  Seriah stared at the frozen ground. “I’m a mutie.”

  Angry muttering rippled through the convoy.

  Seriah’s voice was a dead whisper. “So is the baby inside me.”

  Patrice spit on Seriah. “She’s a mutie. She’s a traitor.”

  Cyrielle stepped beside Six and looked down coldly at the broken woman. “Chill her.”

  “No,” Ryan said.

  Six slowly slid out his bowie knife. “My lady is right. Seriah is a traitor to Val-d’Or. She deserves death.”

  “The only reason she’s a traitor is because Val-d’Or would’ve turned her and her baby out in the snow, and look what that bought you.”

  Cyrielle’s face was unreadable. Six spent several moments glowering over this. “You want mercy for her?”

  “At the moment I want to know what Mace’s plan is.”

  “It is simple enough. He plans roadblocks,” Six replied. “With the engineering LAV destroyed, he will delay us at every turn. Felling trees, using black powder to bring down bridges and leave ramps impassable. All will have to be cleared by hand, and at each one snipers, booby-traps or ambush.”

  It would be a war of attrition that Mace could very well win. Ryan considered the frozen landscape they were passing through. “How did he survive the hard freeze?”

  “There is only one way to survive the freeze in the open. One must dig pits, deep ones, cover them with branches and set roaring fires within. The earth insulates, and channels the heat upward against the cold. It is risky, often the roof catches fire, sometimes the fire isn’t hot enough to hold off the freeze or the roof is ripped off by storm, sometimes men smother in the smoke, and Mace must make an attempt to preserve his vehicles in a similar fashion without destroying them.”

  It was an ugly gamble for both sides, a running battle as both sides ran south before the storms.

  Lady Cyrielle ignored Seriah for the moment. “We can go back to the Diefenbunker, winter there. Come forth in spring.”

  Six scowled at Seriah ferociously. “Oui, but Mace now has the entry codes. He could winter in the ruins of the hydroelectric plant above and bid his time until he decides to break in. Or he could just use his blasting powder to seal the bunker doors against us, lock us in, and come back for us with a new army and dig us out come the thaw.”

  Ryan gazed north. He couldn’t see the next storm, but he could feel it out in the distance. “Mace doesn’t want to try and survive too many more storms. He doesn’t want to winter here, and he doesn’t want to seal us in and hope we’re still here next year. He’s going to try to win, now, while we’re out in the open.”

  Six was of the same mind. He looked at Ryan hopefully. “You have a plan?”

  “Yeah, but not a good one.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Am I still in command?”

  Six looked at Lady Cyrielle. Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded minutely.

  Ryan looked at Seriah. “I need her to make it work.”

  “No,” Six said.

  “Then I leave, and I take her with me. Good luck getting to the lakes without the LAV, and good luck making it back to Val-d’Or without a mechanic.”

  Cyrielle put a hand on Six’s arm. “The lives of my people are more important than her death.” Cyrielle lifted her chin. “What do you propose?”

  “We’re going to force Mace to make a choice.” Ryan looked to the big rig and its cargo. “The convoy, or the reactors.”

  “MACE!” TAG SKIDDED breathlessly to the edge of the uncovered fire pit. The baron sat below on his campstool roasting a sausage and toasting a chunk of hard biscuit over the embers of the bonfire that nearly singed off his beard and eyebrows but had saved his life when the eye of the storm had swept over.

  “Yeah?”

  “The mechanic. She’s made contact.”

  “What’d the little mutie bitch have to say this time?”

  “She confirmed the engineering LAV’s been knocked out.” Tag’s voice lowered respectfully. “She also confirmed Red and Shorty are dead. The fighting LAV blasted their position apart. Six still took their hair, and their voyageurs. He wears them proudly.”

  Mace smeared bear grease onto his biscuit and chewed meditatively. Shorty was an old friend but he had never been smart; and while he had never shown it, Mace had been pleased with his bastard son Red. Of course he had dozens of bastards, and he intended to make more, starting with Cyrielle Toulalan and One-Eye’s flame-haired mutie. Red and Shorty had volunteered to earn their silver, and they’d earned it the hard way. Losing the 84 mm Carl Gustav was a genuine fucking shame. “You didn’t run here just to tell me that.”

  “The convoy has split up, Mace.”

  Mace rose. “What?”

  “Word is One-Eye took the rig and the reactors east off the 6. The rest of the convoy is still on course heading south to pick up the Trans-Canada.”

  Mace wolfed
down his sausage and bread and hauled himself out of the pit. He looked at the ancient, plastic-paged map of Canada that Tag held. “Well now, that is interesting.”

  Thorpe walked up with Grizz in tow. Camp was already buzzing. “Is it true?”

  “Seems that way,” Mace admitted.

  Thorpe shook his head. “Gotta be some kind of sacrifice play.”

  “Nah,” Mace countered. “He knows we can’t afford to split our forces. He’s making us make a choice, and I don’t see One-Eye running without nowhere to go.”

  Thorpe peered at the map. “Heading west? He’s taking old roads. He’ll be going slow. His only choice is to try and pick up the 8 south at Riverton, but he’s too far north. We’ll intercept him long before he can reach it.”

  A slow smile spread across Mace’s face. Men looked around in alarm as the baron threw back his head and laughed. “You know, Thorpey? Your problem is you think like a landed pirate.”

  Thorpe considered this for long simmering moments, but he couldn’t see where this was going. “The lakes are frozen over. I am a landed pirate.”

  “That’s just it!” Mace roared. His green eyes twinkled with a piratical gleam of his own. “The lakes are frozen over! He ain’t heading for the 8! He’s heading straight for the Winnipeg! Give him a two hundred klick run, frozen over and flat as glass!”

  “He’s gonna wag the lake? In that rig? Fully loaded?” Thorpe goggled at the idea. “Will the ice hold?”

  Mace shook his head and admired the gall of it. “Mebbe, mebbe not, but rads, thunder and fallout, that Cyclops son of a bitch is gonna try it! And that leaves us with a pretty choice. We’re running low on juice. We either make our move on the convoy, and have a showdown with Six, that fighting LAV and every last person makin’ his chilling last stand, and that without the Carl Gustav mind you, or we risk everything, and try to catch One-Eye on his ice run, take the reactors and worry about the convoy and Cyrielle’s cherry later.”