Thunder Road

by James Axler

  The wag continued until it looked as though it was prepared to drive right through them. J.B. kept to his course, kept his nerve and hoped that his judgment was sound. As the roaring, whining engine approached them, and the dissipating clouds of dust started to reach them in choking waves, the Armorer wondered momentarily if he’d picked the wrong moment to make a bad call.

  But no. At the last, the wag skidded on the sandy soil and turned side-on, the braking throwing up even larger, denser clouds of dust that temporarily blinded them, making them choke. In the rear of the covered wag, Jak, Mildred and Doc were partially protected from this, but were still denied the clear sight they needed.

  The reason for the move became obvious when the dust settled. Between tear-filled, blinking red-eye stares and coughs that yielded dust-flecked sputum, both Ryan and J.B. could see that two men had emerged from the wag. One was standing in front of it, pointing an AK-47 directly at them. The other was half-hidden by the turret of the wag, from which his upper torso projected. He was holding them in the sights of a scattergun. He was older than the man with the AK-47, with a gray beard covering his grizzled face, a dusty stovepipe hat topping his long, gray hair. The younger man had no beard, and his long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Both men had the same long, hooked nose and protruding front teeth. They had to be kin, probably father and son.

  Their clothes were old and patched. Their blasters looked pretty much the same to J.B.’s practiced eye. Because of this, and because of the way they had turned the wag side-on, the Armorer figured that however they had laid hands on it, they either hadn’t got ammo for the mounted blasters, or else they hadn’t maintained the ordnance properly and it no longer worked.

  Which was good. If they were the only two in the wag, then it more than evened the odds.

  “G’afternoon, gentlemen,” the older man said with a twang in his voice that told them that, like themselves, these were not natives of the area. From farther south, Ryan would guess. Not that it mattered. Coldhearts were coldhearts, and from the shrewd stare he was getting, Ryan knew these men for stone chillers.

  There was a long silence. The older man had obviously been expecting a reply, maybe even a capitulation.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Ryan and J.B. could outwait any bastard they encountered. And so it was this time. The silence hung too heavy for the old man.

  “So mebbe I was thinking that you were gonna be in the least bit curious as to why we’ve stopped you like this,” he said. “Mebbe you are. Mebbe you’re smarter than two dudes trying to cover this land with horses have any damn right to be. Mebbe you’re mute retards who can’t speak ’cause you got no tongues. Makes no difference to me.”

  He waited again for them to break their silence. When they remained silent, he sighed and carried on.

  “See, me and my boy here—” he indicated the younger man “—we been traveling across this here stretch of useless shit for some time, and we’re running a little low on the necessities of life. To be blunt, gentlemen, we ain’t got shit in the way of water or food. And when we saw your wag in the distance, we said to ourselves, what kind of damn fool is gonna be rumbling across this land at that speed? And we kinda knew what the answer might be—a damn fool who’s at least smart enough to make sure that they’ve got enough water and food to stop themselves from buying the farm halfway across.

  “And so you see, gentlemen, we want you to hand over everything you’ve got. Now, we ain’t nasty types. We ain’t gonna chill you. We’re fair men. You hand over your blasters and your supplies, and we drive off, and you take your chances out there. Now, I’ll admit that it ain’t much of a chance. But it’s better’n being chilled.

  “Course, you don’t wanna do that, then we got no choice other than to blast the living shit out of you right now and just take it all anyway. See, either way you lose your blasters and your food and water. But do it our way, and at least you get to live a little longer…mebbe a lot longer.

  “So how d’you want to play it, gentlemen?”

  Ryan and J.B. exchanged glances. It seemed to them that these coldhearts were bluffing. No one was given a chance in these kinds of circumstances. The blasters had to be empty, and they were desperate enough to try to con what they wanted. From the way that the old man spoke, it was also pretty clear that there was only those two traveling in the wag. So perhaps they could just bring up their blasters and fire now, calling that bluff. Sure, there was a chance that it could backfire and they could get fired on, but…

  There was no need for that. They had three blasters in the back, just waiting to spring. This was going to be somebody’s lucky day, and it wasn’t going to be the two men facing them.

  “Okay,” Ryan said simply, “we’ll take our chances. That we can survive, and that you won’t just chill us anyway.”

  “Boy, you can take my word on that,” the old man said in a voice that sounded sincere.

  Yeah, sure. Sincere because they were right. The two men wouldn’t fire on them because they had no ammo. This was going to be easy.

  Ryan shrugged. “Take your word for it. We’re going to throw down our blasters on the count of three, then start to unload. That okay with you? You got the cards.”

  Don’t overplay it—he could almost feel J.B.’s thoughts. Too easy to give in, and these coldhearts would be suspicious. There was still the chance they weren’t bluffing.

  The old man nodded his agreement, and Ryan counted out loud. On three, both he and J.B. took the Steyr and the mini-Uzi, holding them barrel-first, and threw them past the horses so that they landed with a dull thud in the sand, puffing up dust around them. They waited until that dust had settled.

  This was the crucial moment. If the younger man collected the blasters before they had a chance to move—to clear the shot for the trio of blasters at their backs—then there was a chance he might be able to snatch at one of the blasters on the ground and return fire before he had been chilled.

  Ryan’s eye locked with the old man. An almost imperceptible nod as a signal, and Ryan took this as his cue to turn toward the rear of the wag. This was the moment when he figured that, if they really meant to chill them, the younger man would make his move.

  J.B. anticipated his friend’s action. He delayed his own turn the merest fraction of a second, enough to see that the younger man darted forward for the fallen blasters.

  “Now!” he yelled, diving off to one side and rolling under the wag, his arm shooting out as he did so to push at Ryan, give him more momentum.

  The one-eyed man was grateful for that. Not very often would he be glad to fall face-first into a pile of less-than-soft sacks, but this time was different. He heard and sensed, rather than saw, the action above his head. He felt Jak brush against him, heard the deafening roar of the .357 Magnum Colt Python, so close to his head that it drowned out even the elephantine roar of Doc’s LeMat.

  As J.B. fell sideways, and Ryan fell in front of them, the three friends who had been listening from the back of the wag took their cue. Regardless of whether the men in the wag had been bluffing, they knew they only had one shot. One shot, one chance: the difference between life and a long time chilled.

  Jak was nearest to the younger man, had been able to tell this by the sound of movements across the sand. Even as he was rising from his position crouched in the back of the wag, he was bringing up his blaster and drawing a bead with one fluid motion, his finger already squeezing on the trigger. As the blaster exploded, the recoil made him rock on the wag’s unsteady wooden floor; but it didn’t affect his aim. The powerful slug took off the side of the young man’s head as he bent down, an eye socket, an ear and part of his skull exploding in a mulch of blood, brain and bone. The slug continued into his shoulder, gouging out flesh and bone. Not that he felt it. The initial impact had taken away all consciousness and life.

  The older man would have been shocked by the sudden chilling of his son if he had been given the chance to even register it. Instead, he
was hit by a double blow. A dead shot from Mildred’s ZKR drilled a small hole between his eyes, neatly piercing his brain. That was followed in less time than it took to blink by a hail of shot from the LeMat, which obliterated not just the neatly drilled hole, but most of his head. His body, topped only by a bloodied mass of pulp, slumped in the turret of the wag. If, by chance, there had been anyone inside, they would have been trapped by the inert corpse.

  As the burst of fire echoed and evaporated over the wasteland, there was a moment where no one dared to move. Then it became apparent that the threat posed by the two men had been eradicated, and Ryan and J.B. rose to their feet.

  The one-eyed man jumped down from the wag and joined the Armorer as he collected their blasters from beneath the body of the son. As the others dismounted and joined them, they strolled over to the armored wag. The tension in the air had dissipated with the blasterfire, and they now felt at ease. If anything, they felt better than they had for the past thirty-six hours. Now, perhaps, they may have found themselves a faster form of transport.

  First, though, they had to check over the wag, which meant moving the old man’s corpse. It was difficult, as his deadweight had slumped in such a way as to jam him in the hatch. Doc and J.B. shifted him after a lot of sweat and more cursing. The Armorer then descended into the body of the wag, still cautious lest anyone be lurking.

  In truth, all that was lurking was the stench of filthy bodies, excreta and the remains of rotting food. It was all he could do not to retch. How the previous owners had managed to bear it was beyond him, and he was a man who considered he had a strong stomach.

  Swallowing hard and biting down on the bile that rose from his gut, he adjusted his eyes to the interior gloom. There had been a light in the cab of the wag at one time, but the bulb had long since blown, and these stupes either didn’t have a replacement, or had been unable to work out how to fit it. No matter. As his eyes grew used to the feeble light, he was able to make out the control panel of the wag without too much effort. So, if necessary, they could drive without any extra illumination. However, there was no point straining his vision unnecessarily. He took out his flashlight and switched it on, directing the beam in a slow sweep over the interior.

  It was much as his nose had told him. The floor of the wag was sticky with something that could have been shit, could have been blood, and was probably a mixture of both, along with other bodily fluids. Not necessarily those belonging to the chilled coldhearts, either. The sweet and heavy stench of decaying meat that had hit him was explained by the pile thrown into one corner. Some of it was animal, the fur, heads and paws still attached in places, empty eye sockets filled with dark masses of flies that buzzed greedily and possessively around their prize, their low hum becoming clear to him only when he could see them. The heated interior of the wag was buzzing with metal expansion and contraction, and he had unconsciously attributed all noise to that.

  Some of the meat was patently not animal in origin. Pale skin showed on some roughly hacked pieces, skin that had not been shorn of fur. Bone showing through with jaggedly cut edges had shape that came not from a quadruped. J.B. didn’t want to touch the rotten, diseased pile, but he had to know. Gingerly, with a tentative prod of his boot, he shifted the bulk of the pile. It moved with a slithering, sucking sound that made him gag, and the flies hummed and buzzed angrily when disturbed at their task. In the slithering morass, a hand fell out, the fingers limp, blackening at the ends, the skin grayer than other human-seeming chunks. The hand was small, though: it was difficult to see if it had been that of a child or a woman at that advanced stage of decay.

  The Armorer turned away. He had seen things that were in some ways worse than this—people burning alive, tortured and slowly chilled, disemboweled while still conscious. Yet somehow this was worse. It wasn’t just that someone who had once had a life, however hard it had been, had been chilled and then chopped up for meat. It was that the sicko crazies who had done this had then carried it with them: living, sleeping, shitting and breathing next to it as it started to rot away; and then casually eating it as though it were nothing more than the jackrabbits and rats that it lay with.

  It was the simple matter of the hand lying limp next to the empty-eyed stare of a rotting jackrabbit as just another game tidbit that made him lose the contents of his stomach, the acid bile splashing on the floor of the wag, hot stink rising as it mixed with the fetid layer of mulch on the floor.

  Taking a deep breath—and regretting it as the stench made him gag again—J.B. hawked up the last of the bile and phlegm and spit it out, sparing a mouthful from the canteen of water he carried with him to rinse the taste away before spitting that out, also.

  Dark night! he thought. The wag had better be worth cleaning out after this…

  He turned the flashlight and his attention toward the control panel of the wag, dismissing the images still seared on his retina, and instead focusing on the matter in hand.

  The wag was a military vehicle, as he had known. The control panel was mostly useless, the equipment to which it had been connected taken out to give an optimum of interior space. The steering system left in place was sturdy and in good repair, considering who had been in charge of the wag of late.

  It would take some cleaning to get the interior into a condition where they could all comfortably sit inside, but there was space. And when he checked, there was a good fuel supply and an air con system that coughed into life when he switched it on. It would use fuel, and would be wasteful over a long distance, but would be useful in the short term to drive out any remaining stink.

  Like all such wags, there were sluices for cleaning, and these looked as though they would be relatively easy to clear of any blockages. And there was plenty of water. These coldhearts hadn’t been so crazy that they hadn’t provided for themselves after their own fashion. They might have wanted to scavenge from the friends, but their need had—and no surprise here—been nowhere as desperate as they made out.

  Water was one thing of which the friends were short, but the notion of using it for anything other than cleaning out the wag stayed with him for only a second. Just a moment’s thought of what the crazies they had just chilled may have done in the water supply, and where they may have got it from, dissuaded him of this notion.

  Finally, J.B. was ready to climb out of the cab and tell the others of what he had found. As he emerged from the snub turret of the wag, it was obvious to all of them that what he had seen down there had been appalling. His face, in the bright light of the sun, was pale and drawn, and his eyes had the puffy, strained appearance of one who has recently vomited heavily.

  Before he even began to outline what was within the wag, they could guess. He finished his report and added his own views on cleaning and using the wag.

  “We’d take a few hours to clean it out so that it’s usable, and mebbe we think that’ll be wasted time. But once we start, the speed we’ll gain will more than compensate,” he finished.

  Ryan gave a wry grin. “Just got to keep patient while it’s being done,” he said with a dry humor, knowing that he would be the one most likely to need keeping in check.

  “It sounds less than ideal in there, and we will have to take our time, I know, but the benefits accruing will be more than worthy of the delay,” Doc mused.

  “Shit, understand half that. Getting better, Doc,” Jak murmured. It was the closest to humor that the dour albino would ever get, and was a reflection of the manner in which their mood was beginning to lift.

  Not wanting to waste any more time than was necessary, they began the task of clearing and cleaning the wag. With the flies already beginning to gather on the corpses of the coldhearts, it was time to get busy. Doc volunteered to clear the rotting meat from the interior. With a grimness that he tried to hide behind a jaunty mask, he reasoned that he had seen things far worse in his time—had been treated almost as badly as he imagined the people whose remains now littered the wag’s interior had suffered. He
was still alive. There were times when he regretted it. But it meant that although a feeling of being scared could overtake him in panic, he no longer feared anything. It was distasteful, but that was all.

  As Doc began his task, Ryan and J.B. took the corpses of the coldhearts and dragged them across the sand, leaving two blood-soaked trails, until they were bundled together. They would form the basis of a fire. There was little chance of anyone noticing out here in the wastes, but such a store of raw decaying meat would surely attract predators and call attention to their trail. The last thing they wanted was another encounter with anyone other than their target.

  When the interior had been cleared, Doc—at J.B.’s behest—took a can of fuel from the store of the wag and poured a little of it over the rotting pile, touching a flame to it and watching it catch in black, gasoline-assisted smoke. The smell was appalling to begin with, but the gas and the acrid odor of burning fur began to swiftly eclipse the fatty, sweet tang of flesh.

  This dealt with, Jak and Mildred clambered into the wag’s cab and used the water inside to wash as much of the filth from the floor and other surfaces as was possible. Again, a little of the gas helped to shift some of the encrusted dirt. The smell of the gas also, despite its own sharp tang, aided in covering the charnel house smell of decay in the enclosed space.

  While the interior of the wag was cleaned, Ryan and J.B. unloaded the friends’ supplies from the covered wag and carried them to the armored wag, ready to be loaded when the cleaning had been completed.

  The horses, unhitched, wandered only a few yards away, and watched the proceedings with bland disinterest. As with everything they had seen since they had first been hitched to the wag, they seemed unconcerned almost to the point of catatonia. It had been a positive when they had been hitched to the wag, but it didn’t bode well for their survival. Would they wander off in search of food and water, or would they just stand there until they died slowly of torpor as much as starvation and dehydration?