by James Axler
He realized why he had been doing this, and without pause hauled the heavy steering column around so that the old school bus was headed straight for the center of the cacti. As they neared it, he could see that the plants were much larger, much taller than they had appeared from a distance. The actual span of the patch had to have been about 150 yards, and the plants themselves had thick bases at least six feet around. They needed them, if they were to support the branching arms of thick spikes that sprouted on all sides, reaching upward in mute supplication.
Despite the distances and sizes involved, there was no way that he could get the bus through the maze they made without crashing into them.
Good. That was his plan.
“Away from the windows,” he yelled.
Considering they were about to engage the enemy, it may have struck his people as a strange thing to say. One glance ahead told them why. They were in the aisle of the bus within moments.
Ryan slewed the bus into the middle of the cactus patch. The big yellow bus hit big yellow and green stalks that were as hard as wood. The front fender crunched, the headlights splintered, but the bus barged through, knocking some cacti over at a drunken angle, toppling others completely. Sap spurted and dribbled from branches taken off by the impact of the large wag.
The old school bus left a path in its wake, but one that was scattered with spikes like nine-inch nails, trails of sap and listing and fallen trunks.
The wag on their tail had been gaining all the time. The driver was hunched over the wheel, trying to keep a steady path so that the two blasters on either side—both manned—could lay down a barrage, which they had started to do as soon as the school bus had come in range. Their fire had taken out what was left of the back windows, and peppered the hide of the bus with dents and small holes. But they hadn’t accounted for the fact that the old buses were built like tanks, for long and hard use. The main body of the vehicle could stand a lot more pounding than most nontrading wags the machine blasters were used to firing on.
Inside, stray shots ricocheted, and the din of the slugs on metal was dimmed only by the sounds of the cacti as the wag collided with them. The old bus was taking a lot of punishment, and the companions were huddled in the aisle, unable to risk firing back.
The blaster-mounted wag hit the cacti patch close, now, on the tail of the school bus. Close enough to catch the splinters of cactus trunk, the spines like nine-inch nails and the sprays of sap.
The way in which the side panels and roof of the wag had been cut away to accommodate the mounting and firing of the machine blasters was ingenious, and skillfully executed. In normal circumstances it was to be admired. But these were not normal circumstances, and all it did in this situation was to leave the three inhabitants of the wag wide-open to the furies of the cacti.
The big heavy splinters of trunk wood took out the windshield of the wag, making the driver swerve erratically as he tried to avoid the stationary trunks, the flying wood, and still see where he was headed. His driving veered violently to the left as a splinter the size of his fist drove a hole in his shoulder, making him scream in red-hot agony.
But that was nothing next to the pain suffered by the exposed blaster firers. Leaning out of the vehicle on specially constructed bucket seats that took them directly behind the sights of the blasters, they were open to the sap and spines that flew freely in the wake of the old school bus.
The spines were razor-sharp, and flying at speed. They flayed and cut at the exposed flesh of the two men, driving into their arms and ribs with the drive of a knife being thrust home. One man got a spine right in the eye, punc turing the orb and allowing the viscous fluid to ooze down its length as it kept on going, through into his brain. A flicker of bright white light as the optic nerve shorted out, and he was gone, falling from his seat to roll lifeless on the hard earth, picking up stray wood and spines like a pin cushion.
The other man wasn’t so lucky. He thought, at first, that he was. He had avoided the spines and spikes, more through luck than any attempt on his part to take evasive action. He had not, however, been so fortunate in avoiding the sap that was splashing the side of the wag. It touched his skin—just the forearm—and felt cool. He looked down, and could see that the coolness was caused simply by its burning through the surface nerves before they had a chance to register pain. The skin had melted from his arm, and already the corrosive liquid had stripped down to the bone. He made to scream, and another blob of sap caught in the air was sucked into his mouth as he drew breath. No scream issued forth as the coruscating liquid took the flesh from the roof of his mouth, continuing down his throat to strip his larynx. The effects also traveled up, eating into his nasal passages. His own blood began to drown him, although he was beyond noticing by this point, driven mad by the agony of being eaten alive by the acid sap.
As the second man also plunged to his doom, the driver was still attempting to pilot his vehicle through the carnage caused by the school bus. It was a losing battle as the pain from his shoulder injury rendered it useless, and his reflexes grew slower with every enforced turn of the wheel. As darkness engulfed his senses, he drove the wag into the base of one of the cacti. Already weakened by a collision with the school bus, it wavered then slowly tumbled forward, down onto the wag, igniting the fuel in the tank and engulfing cactus and wag in sheets of flame.
The enemy had been vanquished, but Ryan’s main concern was getting the wag out of the cactus patch without any further damage. The labyrinthine path through the patch had seen him turn back on himself many times to try to squeeze the wag into gaps, and so he was no longer sure where the road lay, or indeed where the end of the patch itself could be found. He felt as if he was driving in dizzying circles, growing more and more confused, until he caught a glimpse of clear land beyond. He straightened the wheel and gunned the engine as much as he dared, foot down and headed for empty space. The interior of the wag echoed with the crash of cactus against metal, but there was no other apparent damage done as the wag crashed out and onto the flat, dry earth.
Ryan let the wag come to rest, the engine gently ticking over, and looked around. The cactus patch behind them was partially ablaze as the fire from the blaster wag spread. The road was to their left. The wag was pitted and scored by the impact of bullets, shafts of cacti trunk and spines, some of which had penetrated the roof of the wag, partially visible.
But the friends were intact. Gathered in the aisle, only now straightening and standing, they were in one piece. Wordlessly, they left the wag to survey the carnage. J.B. began to check the wag, noting the scoring away of paint and the stripping to bare metal where the acid sap had hit. Damn lucky it didn’t hit any of us, he thought, tentatively approaching the scored sections of the wag body.
It was Doc who broke the silence.
“I wonder what it was that they actually wanted?” he wondered. “If it was to take our women, then it was a very strange way to do it…to blast us all to annihilation.”
“Mebbe it wasn’t that at all,” Ryan mused. “Mebbe just sport. Mebbe the feeb we got this from thought it was still his. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we get some distance between us and that pesthole.”
He joined J.B. at the side of the wag. “Any damage?”
The Armorer shook his head. “Not anything more than surface. That bastard cactus juice is strong, though,” he added, indicating the acid-eaten patches.
“Then we got lucky it never got inside,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope we don’t have to ride that luck.”
In a subdued mood, mindful of how close they had come to being overpowered by both man and nature in tandem, the friends boarded the bus. As Ryan clashed the gears and guided the vehicle back to the road, they sat detached from one another, each lost in his or her own thoughts. They hardly noticed that their driver elected to follow the line of the road, but not to actually venture onto the crumpled blacktop. The shoulder was rough, but actually less damaging than the potholed road surface it
self.
They made slow, steady progress for more than ten miles, putting plenty of distance between themselves and Stripmall. The old highway seemed to stretch out before them like an endless ribbon, disappearing into the heat haze that was still heavy, even though the afternoon was wearing on. Some of it should have burned off by now, but out here the sun was so intense that any burn was minimal.
Which was why the sudden intersection of another blacktop took them by surprise. It seemed to snake from nowhere and cut across the one they drove beside. Ryan pulled the bus up to a halt at the junction and turned to J.B.
“What do you reckon?” he asked simply.
The Armorer screwed up his face in concentration as he looked out of the shattered windows in both directions. He stood and, without a word, got off the bus, pulling the minisextant from a bag slung across his shoulder. He looked up at the sun, then took a reading before surveying the short distance available before the horizon blurred.
“That way’s west,” he drawled, indicating with his hand. “We were coming from the southeast to begin with, and the way I figure, there’s more habitation to the west.”
Ryan nodded. “West it is, then.”
J.B. got back on board, and Ryan heaved the old wag toward the west. It was the first time since they had got back on the road that he had been compelled to put the wheel on full lock. As the wag groaned around, the steering became unsteady, and a whining, grinding sound began to come from beneath the vehicle. It veered sharply, and then tilted forward as a snapping, abrasive screech came from beneath, throwing all those within violently forward.
“Fireblast!” Ryan breathed as he managed to get the air back into his body that had been expelled by the sudden impact against the wheel. “What the fuck…”
“I would wager to suggest that perhaps we were not as lucky as we had assumed,” Doc commented mildly, pulling himself up and ignoring the pain in his ribs.
“Yeah, Doc’s right there,” Mildred said with a sardonic tone. “Always knew our luck couldn’t go on.”
J.B. was already out of the wag and examining the damage. His head appeared in the doorway. “Nothing good to say.” He shrugged. “Guess some of that sap shit must’ve got underneath, and turning the wag sharply hit the weak spot. It’s sheered right underneath.”
“No chance of being able to fix it?” Ryan asked, more from blind hope than anything else.
The Armorer allowed himself a ghost of a smile. “Not unless you got a torch and mebbe a replacement axle hidden somewhere in here.”
It took them a few minutes to gather themselves and assemble outside, in the baking heat, where they could survey the damage for themselves.
“Shit, we gave our food and water for that,” Krysty said as she looked at the irreparable damage, voicing the thoughts of all of them.
“We’ve just got to hit the road and hope we reach a ville before we run out,” Ryan said. “No sense in heading back. May as well keep going west.”
“You say that like we’ve got a choice,” J.B. said, amused.
They gathered their packs, and were ready to begin when Ryan noticed that Jak had become distracted. The albino teen shook his head.
“Trouble. Wags coming from west, heading straight here. Heavy shit, should eyeball soon.”
Ryan didn’t doubt him. Even as he spoke, the sound of a convoy became audible from the distance. In normal circumstances, visual contact would have occurred first; but with this heat haze still rendering a false horizon, normal was a changed thing.
Ryan breathed heavily. “At least they’re not from Stripmall. They might be friendly, or at least inclined to ask first, fire second.”
The old bus still had some use. It was a big vehicle, and could at least offer a degree of cover that was sorely lacking in the surrounding environment. The friends adopted positions around the bus that covered them from the oncoming convoy. As it broke through the haze, they could see that it was at least five wags strong, with a heavily armored vehicle at the front. They would have expected it to either fire on them from a distance—a “make-sure” defensive measure—or to approach them close up, knowing that the armored wag offered protection.
It did neither. Instead, the wag pulled up about a thousand yards away, the rest of the convoy coming to a halt at its rear. It sat there, immobile, for some time.
“What’s his game?” Mildred asked.
“An interesting one,” J.B. replied. “Is he trying to draw our fire?”
“Bastard strange way to do it,” Ryan countered.
And then, just when they’d started to grow weary of the waiting, something happened. The offside door of the wag opened, and a squat, muscular man emerged. Dressed in a black vest and camou pants, with heavy boots and a khaki bandanna, he was holding a white cloth above his head. Slowly, he began to walk toward them. As he got closer, they could see that he was wearing the bandanna out of vanity for his bald head, although the rest of him was hairy, down to the bushy black beard flecked with gray that flowed onto his chest. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored aviator shades.
“He triple stupe or something?” Jak spit.
“Or triple smart,” Ryan countered. “We’re not going to fire on him when he’s unarmed but has all that firepower at his back. That’d be like saying please chill me.”
“Might be mutie stupes,” Jak said. “Still taking big chance.”
“Looks like the kind of guy that’s based his life around taking chances,” Mildred returned. “You don’t get a trader with a wag like that unless you’re prepared to walk the line.”
As she said this, both J.B. and Ryan’s thoughts turned to their old mentor, the man known simply as Trader. The one thing he’d taught them, above all else, was that life was a risk so you always had to weigh the odds with great care.
“They’ve got us covered,” Ryan said decisively. “Must have.”
“Probably long-range, mebbe they’ve even got one of those working infrareds or heat-seekers so they can see how many of us there are. We make one move, and we’ve bought the farm before he even needs to duck and cover,” J.B. stated.
They laid their weapons at ease, as Ryan indicated. By this time, the heavyset man was in hailing distance.
“Looks like you’ve got trouble, there,” he began.
Ryan and J.B. exchanged puzzled glances. No ultimatum? The lone man continued.
“I’m thinking that mebbe you could use some help.”
Ryan paused before answering, “That’s good of you to offer help, especially to strangers. But it’s not the way things usually are. People in these parts usually come in blasting first, asking questions second. That’s if there’s anyone left to ask.”
The heavyset man shrugged. “True. But there are some people I’m looking for in these parts, and I figure you may be them.”
“How come?” Ryan looked along his people. Their faces echoed his own suspicion. They were rarely welcomed, or sought for anything other than retribution.
“I heard tell that a certain group of fighters were in these parts. I know their reputation. I know that they were last heard of in Stripmall, and that no one who isn’t gaudy or paying mark is welcome there for long. And I know that there are six of you using that wag as cover.”
“You’re certain of a lot of things,” Ryan yelled in return. “Means you must have good information and some serious tech.”
“You’re damn right I have,” the man replied, his tone taking on a kind of pride. “I didn’t get to be the best trader in these parts of the land without having a nose for useful shit. I like useful. I like good. And you people have a rep as being the best.”
“How do you hear so much?” In truth, Ryan didn’t care, but he’d ask anything to buy some time—time to figure out how they could cover themselves against the armored wag when they were either pinned down behind the old bus or completely in the open. Either way, it wasn’t good.
“Tell ya something. I got this armorer, and she’s obsess
ed by stories about you people. She’s also got a nose for the ordnance like you wouldn’t believe. She’s got two big goals in her life, much as she’ll let me know. One is to have the best armory of any trader. The other is to work with you guys. I trust her word on how good you are. But listen, don’t just take my word for it.” Slowly, so as to show that he had no concealed weapon, he lifted his right hand until it touched the side of his face. “Eula, get your ass out here, but slow.” He carefully put his hand down, then continued. “Something she scoped out for me. Some old tech equipment that enables us to communicate without having to carry a lot of shit. See, she’s good. But don’t take my word for it. She’s coming.”
From beyond the heavyset trader, they could see someone exit the armored wag and start to walk slowly toward them with a purposeful stride, and a gait that suggested she was not to be trifled with. She was barely more than five feet tall, and slight in build. She was dressed in black: vest, skirt and leggings, with heavy boots that seemed too large for her. Her hair was also raven-black, tied in a ponytail that whipped behind her with every stride. She was carrying a 7.62 mm assault rifle that seemed too large for her.
When Eula was level with the trader, she stopped. She didn’t bother to look at him, but spoke unbidden.
“Been looking for you people for a long time, if you’re who I think you are. Got a lot to learn from you. We all have. Especially J. B. Dix. Met him once. Remember him well.”
Behind the bus, Mildred looked at the Armorer. “You know who she is, John?”
The Armorer looked puzzled. “She doesn’t look all that old. If it had been recent times, then all of you would know her, too. But, if I do know her, then it must’ve been when she was real small. Don’t recognize the name, either.”
“Well, she knows you,” Mildred replied. “What’s more, that fact looks like it may save our asses for now. So you’d better remember, in case she gets pissed at the fact that you can’t.”