Nemesis

by James Axler

  The sole of Ryan’s right boot thudded against the flat-muscled chest left bare by Speaker’s buckskin vest. He flew backward and vanished down the gap between the front of the tanker and the tractor’s overcab compartment.

  Ryan almost lost his own balance on landing. Fireblast! he thought. Wouldn’t this be a dip shit way to die? But he caught himself and turned right down to see how his friend fared.

  Not well. Two Stones were holding J.B. by the upper arms from either side. While just beyond him, Pit Bull, grinning like a stickie with a can of gasoline and a lighter, raised one of his hatchets high over his head for the chilling stroke.

  Ryan heard a sharp pop, that rang with supersonic harmonics.

  Pit Bull roared in pain and reeled back a step. Lifting the hand he’d clapped to his belly, he stared at the palm in horrified shock. He had a fresh hole in his ample belly and it was hosing blood.

  J.B. kicked him in the balls, and he fell off the back off the tanker.

  Ryan was already in motion, drawing his SIG left-handed from the waistband of his jeans. He threw the handblaster to the full extension of his arm, lined up the sights and squeezed two quick shots, aimed at the blurred image of a head propped like a balloon atop the front-sight post.

  Despite the close focus Ryan saw bright fluid spray from his target.

  As he snapped his vision back to take in the scene with clarity, and switched the blaster toward J.B.’s captor on his own left, he saw that figure double over.

  The Armorer had driven the muzzle of his shotgun into that Stone Nation biker’s lean belly. As neatly and business-like as if he were chopping wood, J.B. raised the longblaster and brought the buttplate down hard on the exposed back of his opponent’s neck.

  The nomad dropped flat on his face. That blow had sounded like an ax splitting wood, too; his neck was broken.

  The body slid backward and dropped off the side of the tanker. Ryan didn’t see whether J.B. had helped the man along with a nudge of his boot.

  The nomad Ryan had chilled had fallen, too. They were alone atop the long steel sausage. J.B. slipped into his sandbag nest, sat, and began feeding fresh brass and green-plastic shells into the receiver of his shotgun.

  “Sit down and stop admiring your handiwork,” J.B. said. “You’re making yourself a target.”

  He was right, but Ryan frowned as he heard a sound: the powerful snarl of a Stone Nation motorcycle engine, rising to distinguish itself from the general roar of engines, blasters and voices raised in anger and pain.

  He saw something streak up the dirt flank of the ridge that still rose to the tanker’s left—the west side of the road, which continued to unwind north, straight as a blaster shot.

  It was Morning Glory, riding her huge outlaw sled full-throttle. A figure slumped against her broad back: Speaker. He looked semiconscious—he’d probably banged his head on his fall between tractor and trailer. But he wasn’t rag-doll limp, meaning he wasn’t yet chilled.

  Ryan began reeling up the sling of his Scout. He meant to take care of that.

  It’d be a pure shame to chill a warrior as brave, skilled and resourceful as Speaker was, but shame wasn’t an engine that exerted powerful motivating force on Ryan Cawdor’s life. Not compared to survival.

  Ending their capable and charismatic leader probably wouldn’t cripple the Stone Nation. It wasn’t even likely to cause them to call off their vendetta against the convoy.

  But if putting a 7.62 mm boat-tailed hollow-point bullet through Speaker bought Ryan and his friends even a minute more of life, well, he valued that minute a thousand times more than the Stone Nation chieftain’s whole heroic life.

  Before he could even get hands on the longblaster the Peterbilt tractor swerved left.

  For a moment Ryan froze. He was unsure whether the trailer would run up on the tractor and jackknife, or whether the whole rig would turn sideways and simply roll over. Neither of which would be good for the continued health and well-being of the two men atop the giant can of highly inflammable—indeed, explosive—fuel.

  The swerve corrected. The Peterbilt tractor’s coffin snout turned straight north along the road again. A fresh motion snagged Ryan’s gaze and pulled it down to the ditch, where a pale form was rolling and flopping over the grass. The face was a mask of blood, he could see that, but the long braid of hair, almost white-blonde before the blood had dyed much of it bright red, told Ryan the whole story. That was Randi, the convoy’s chief wrench since the death of her boss Dan Hogue a couple hours before.

  She’d been driving the big rig, which meant a nomad now held the wheel of the fuel tanker.

  Ryan looked back at J.B., who was hitching his backpack over his back.

  “Time to go,” the Armorer said.

  * * *

  AS RYAN CLAMBERED down the rear rungs on the right side of the fuel tank, a nomad woman swung her bike close. She had a Mohawk spiked with grease, and her hawklike features, painted black, were contorted in a scream of rage as she cocked a spear to impale the one-eyed man.

  Hanging from the same rungs a few feet above him by his right hand, J.B. swung up his Uzi with his left. He fired a 3-shot burst, aiming high so as not to damage the bike that Fate had conveniently provided.

  J.B. didn’t believe in Providence, but he took all freely offered gifts, regardless of the source. He saw the spurt from the woman’s right shoulder, left bare by her sleeveless black top, indicating at least one bullet had struck home. The big Harley veered, then wallowed on its suspension as the full weight of Ryan and his heavy-laden backpack landed on the seat behind the driver. As the sled headed for the ditch he pitched the injured nomad off, then humped forward onto her seat.

  Grabbing the handlebars, he easily got the bike controlled once more.

  By the time J.B. had let his short but hefty machine pistol hang again and finished climbing down, Ryan had the long, low machine purring along beside him. A quick hop and J.B. was safely ensconced behind his friend.

  The bike, as powerful as it was, was slowed perceptibly by the combined weight of the two men and their gear, but it still accelerated past the big rig, which the Stone Nation driver was smart enough not to crowd too fast on the uncertain pavement.

  Ryan had the bike over to the margin of the blacktop as they cruised past the rig.

  J.B. saw two blue eyes staring out of a crimson-painted raccoon mask on the pale face turned toward him. For just a moment. Then the face burst into an undifferentiated red mass as J.B. gave him a full charge of double-00 from his shotgun held up one-handed.

  The biker’s ruined head landed against the steering wheel. The tractor veered toward the eastern ditch as the motorcycle’s engine roared and the overloaded bike surged away up the road.

  As they separated, J.B. looked back over his shoulder just in time to see the big rig, now fully sideways to its original motion, tip over majestically to slam onto its side.

  The rig wasn’t traveling fast enough to keep rolling, but capsizing was enough to breach the tank. Fuel gushed as momentum kept the fallen vehicle and its tons of gasoline sliding forward along the road.

  J.B.’s brows furrowed as sparks sprayed upward from friction points at the front and rear of the big tank. Results are all that matter, he reminded himself sternly.

  He reached up to clamp his hat on his head against the wind of their progress.

  Whooping, bikers converged on the fallen tanker even before it ground and squealed to a halt. The sparks stopped without lighting off the spilling gas.

  The nomads began to halt their bikes and swarm up it. They completely ignored the wag that swung wide across the ditch and rolled past the wreck, jouncing wildly and kicking up dust. It was the chuck wag. J.B. felt a certain relief to see the distinct mop of black hair belonging to his young protégé flying in the breeze from the sandbag nest atop
the box. He seemed to be alone now.

  Also, it was only wag escaping the now distracted Stone Nation. So the cargo wag back there had been lost.

  “Is it time?” Ryan called over his shoulder.

  J.B. reached in a pocket of his jacket. “Just about,” he said.

  * * *

  RYAN BRAKED the big bike. It pulled a little left. He used that to coast it into a full-on broadside turn and stopped.

  More motorcycles converged on the fallen tanker. They were swarming down from the ridges that flanked the road now, too. With Speaker out of the fight—however temporarily—it seemed as if the nomad bikers had forgotten their vengeance quest. Their outlaw instincts were taking over.

  In the face of such prime plunder, it was almost hard to blame them. But then, Ryan didn’t much bother his mind with blame, either.

  A single figure appeared on the side of the long, squashed-cylinder tank that was now its upper surface. It brandished two hatchets over its mostly shaved head. Sunlight, filtered by volcano smoke as well as high clouds, glinted off their steel heads.

  “It’s just a .32 ACP,” J.B. said apologetically. He was speaking of the hideout blaster with which he’d belly-shot the Stone Nation warrior and subchief. “Probably just bounced off his body wall, slid around inside some without reaching his chitlins.”

  “Probably,” Ryan said. “I’d say that means it’s time.”

  J.B. took his hand from his pocket. He pointed the small flat object it held at the wreck and pressed a button.

  During the first part of their flight, between escape and the inevitable ambush, the Armorer had set boobies in case the fuel wag got captured by their enemies. While Ryan had faith they’d work—for J.B. had a true master’s touch with that sort of unpleasant surprise—the convoy’s supplies didn’t just contain some blocks of plastic explosive and blasting caps.

  Bass Croom may not have managed to swing full-on radios for the convoy, not even talkies, but he had scrounged up a working remote radio detonator.

  Seeing his fleeing prey halt, Raven held his hatchets straight up to the sky and gave them a threatening shake. He may have been caught up in the celebration, but he hadn’t forgotten the real purpose of this chase, which for him, Ryan reckoned, included at least a few live captives to torture.

  From the top rear of the wag Ryan saw a little white flash. In less than the time it took his eye to blink and fully reopen, a second flash occurred from near the same spot. Almost instantaneously it blossomed into a giant orange fireball, so bright Ryan had to narrow his eye. In a literal flash it enveloped not just the gloating Raven but dozens of bikes and riders.

  As the roar of the explosion arrived, followed by a shock and blast of hot air, several figures staggered from the five-story bonfire. They were like moving statues of flame, and managed only a few paces before they fell to the pavement.

  Ryan nodded in grim satisfaction.

  Simply blowing up the tank would’ve probably accomplished little. On its own, gasoline burned like water. It was the fumes that caught fire. Or, under the right circumstances, exploded.

  The first, smaller charge set off by J.B.’s thumb on the button had been a breaching charge, to crack open the fat tank, still more than half full of gas, and fill the air with fumes for the second, larger charge to set off in a full-scale detonation. It was a triple-huge version of the myriad tiny blasts in the cylinders that made the engine in their stolen motorcycle run. That created a classic two-stage explosion.

  As it happened, of course, the tank was already breached by the crash; the first charge had been unneeded. But that was J.B. all over. He left as little as humanly possible to chance.

  “You’re an artist, J.B.,” Ryan said, sparing a brief thought for the people killed by the blast.

  The Armorer had put the command detonator back in his pocket. Now he took off his glasses and began to polish the round lenses with his hankie.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  The chuck wag had driven well clear of the explosion. It had turned back across the ditch and was just climbing back when the blast went off. Surprised, the driver drove clear across the road and almost into the other ditch before correcting. But he did, and came barreling in pursuit of the rest of the convoy.

  Ryan gunned the big bike’s engine and looked back along the road. Even before stopping he’d confirmed that the wag with Krysty and Doc pulling sec up top was still alive and rolling, and that his friends were still functional. Now he set his ride in motion. Up the road, the Stones that had been attacking Croom’s command wag and the other cargo wags came streaming back down both flanks of the road.

  “Get ready,” he called to J.B. He felt the man shift behind him as he unlimbered one of his blasters. The Uzi, Ryan reckoned.

  But the Stone Nation bikers passed them without a sideways glance. Now they were totally focused on helping their brothers and sisters who had gathered by the fallen fuel wag.

  J.B. grunted. “Looks like they’ve lost interest in us.”

  “For now,” Ryan said. He leaned forward and opened the throttle. The overloaded motorcycle roared and accelerated.

  “They won’t stop until they get what they want,” he called over his shoulder, “until the last Stone’s chilled. Or the last one of us.”

  “Well,” J.B. said cheerfully, “we know which that’ll be.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Their pursuers brought the convoy to bay against the Upper Snake River.

  The snow had already begun to melt up in the mountain heights. Spring runoff filled the grassy banks with churning, noisy water, red with silt. The road they had continued to follow led right up to it and stopped, in between pungent marshy meadows already filled with cattails and clouds of biting gnats. There was no bridge, nor sign one had ever been built across the river.

  By that time the Stone Nation had been on their trail again for an hour, dozens of bikes, as if the losses the convoy had laid on them amounted to nothing more than a handful of flea bites.

  Standing by the front of the Land Cruiser in its homemade armor plate, hearing the pinging of the long-abused engine cooling slowly beneath its dented hood, Ryan watched the nomad horde close in. The surviving wags, the chuck wag and two cargo wags, were parked in a sort of defensive semicircle in front and back of the command wag, with the rushing river as a backstop.

  “Why do they have to draw it out like this?” Mildred muttered in disgust from behind him. Her face was puffed out of shape as if she’d gotten crosswise of a whole hive of bees, and the bruises on it had begun to turn a rainbow of fascinating color. Her right eye was hidden behind windings of bandage, as her brow had gotten split nearly to the skullbone when she got tossed from the blaster wag.

  “Got no reason to hurry,” J.B. said from her side.

  “It’s not like we’re going anywhere.”

  “They want to draw out the moment as long as they can,” Doc declared, as if he were teaching a class on the subject. “They have the innate love of pageantry and drama as such simple nomadic people often do.”

  He shrugged. “No doubt they will do their best to make our inevitable demises as protracted and...colorful as they can.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen, so much for comforting me,” Mildred said.

  The Stone Nation had particularly little reason for haste because the way west and east along the riverbanks was already blocked.

  To the west, a quarter mile off, waited a mass of bikes interspersed with wags of various sorts, though running strongly to dune buggies and pick-’em-ups. They were garishly and imaginatively painted: some like peacock tails, others with rabid wolf eyes, or dancing skeletons. Their riders were no less colorfully bedizened, nor were their weapons.

  “Absaroka,” Ryan said, turning to look at them. “Sparrowhawk Nation.”

&
nbsp; He gave his head a single shake. “Remember them?” he said to J.B.

  J.B. rubbed his jaw. “Too well,” he said. “Not triple eager to renew our acquaintance.”

  “Coldhearts?” Sandra Watson asked.

  The master merchant’s mousy-looking chief assistant looked in better shape than her boss. For all that, her short nondescript-colored hair looked as if starlings had been plucking at it to make their nests. She stood at Bass Croom’s elbow a few feet from Ryan’s left.

  Bass himself stayed silent. He slumped so hard it was a wonder he stayed upright. Ryan had never seen a man deflate like that.

  “Not really,” Ryan said, hitching a thumb under the sling of his Scout where it was commencing to chafe the front of his shoulder. “They’re like the Stones. Little rough around the edges, but if you treat them with respect they shoot square.”

  “And if you get on their bad side?” asked García. The muscular, middle-size young man with the black mustache was the last remaining member of Dace Cable’s original crew.

  Throw in a couple of thoroughly dispirited drivers, huddled back in the largely illusory shelter of the wag half-circle, and you had all the survivors of Croom’s outfit that had rolled out of the gates of Menaville what seemed like decades ago. Just them, the boss, his younger brother, and the companions.

  And their mysterious passenger, Olympia, standing by herself in the grass out front of the other end of the armored car. She had her arms folded beneath her small breasts and her braid uncoiled and thrown over her left shoulder. Despite the bruise on her right cheek and the bandage on her left wrist, and the general blood and grime ground into her tan whipcord jacket and pants, she somehow managed to give the impression of remaining neat.

  “I’ll tell you,” Ryan told the sec man. “See that volcano yonder?”

  “Are you kidding?” García asked. “Hard to miss that bastard.” He ended in a cough.

  The stink of sulfur cut into the membranes of Ryan’s nose and throat at every inhalation. That and the ash that collected on everything would have had them all griping up a storm if they hadn’t had more immediate things to worry about.