by James Axler
Doc had disentangled himself with some alacrity. “Madam, unhand me, I implore you. The task is barely begun, and this is no time to be wasted in premature celebration.”
“Doc’s right,” Ryan breathed. “Look.”
Ramona stopped, and followed the line of Ryan’s finger as it pointed out beyond the ob port.
“Aw shit,” she whispered, all joy drained from her as the smoke cleared and she could see the size of the pack that was gaining on them.
“They’ll be too close to fire on with this before too long,” Doc mused. “Why don’t we increase speed?”
“Bet your ass J.B.’s already thought of that,” Ryan murmured.
“Yeah, and he would have gotten a no for his trouble,” Ramona said. “Listen, hon, these wags can go a whole lot faster than this, but those refrigerated trailers are shit heavy, and even though the cabs are powerful, they can’t go much above this. Never mind the bullshit about wanting to go nonstop for the time. Fact is that if he’s gonna deliver before the generators on those rigs give out and the trade is ruined, then he’s got to push it nonstop.”
Ryan nodded. It made sense, now. This insane desire to run nonstop had a concrete cause that lay beyond just extra jack for quick delivery. If only the slippery bastard had been more honest with them. J.B. would be counting on a speed increase, and only finding out now, when it was the worst time for the fact to be revealed…
Ryan knew how his old friend would react. Speed and efficiency was now of the essence. The one-eyed man tapped Doc on the shoulder. The old man looked up from his perch behind the ordnance mount, and instantly read the expression in Ryan’s eye.
“Of course, of course,” he muttered, sliding out from his seat and allowing Ryan to replace him.
Catching Ramona’s questioning glance, he smiled and addressed her. “My dear lady, strange as it may seem to relate, but even with just the one eye, friend Ryan is a far better shot than I could ever hope to be. Indeed, when one comes to consider the question, does one need more than the single orb in order to effect the chilling shot?”
“Uh, I’ll just have to take your word for that,” Ramona stammered in a tone of voice suggesting that she wouldn’t need such an explanation, given Doc’s mode of expression, to believe such a thing.
It was then that Ryan, cutting everything behind him out of his focus, heard J.B.’s imprecation, and made his reply.
As the pack closed, Ryan sited on the nearest cattle and dogs to the rear wag. He’d seen Cody shoot, and trusted that the man was as good as himself or J.B., at least in a situation such as this. He’d have to be: the speed at which they were closing gave them next to no time in which to make every squeeze of the trigger count.
The smell of the pack permeated the wag, the stench making the metal shell of the wag seem to close in on them. Ryan tried to shut this out of his mind as he sighted and squeezed.
The chatter of machine-gun fire, overlapping into an echoing and overlapping rhythmic pattern, cut through the sound of the wag engines and the baying of the pack. Up so close now that he could see the dark heart of their eyes, expressionless except for the blank lust to chill, the pack stood little chance of avoiding being hit. Cattle and dogs stumbled and fell as shells ripped into their flesh, tearing at the scaly hides and biting into the lank, matted fur. Bones splintered, organs ruptured and the sudden halt or erratic change to their impetus dictated by the impact caused them to career into their fellows. The carefully orchestrated pack progress, the group mind, was broken for the briefest of moments, and it seemed as though the group would tumble into disarray as their momentum was interrupted. For that moment, it seemed as though the convoy had been victorious, and the danger was averted.
It was a false dawn. The line of cattle and dogs nearest to the convoy—those decimated by the first rounds of machine-gun fire—went down and hit the ground. The very front runners hit the hard shoulder at the side of the blacktop, bringing home how close they now were to their target. It should have been the turning of the tide.
Just as Ryan was prepared to take a deep breath before picking off the fading stragglers, the dream was shattered by the breaking through of a second rank of pack animals, trampling over the fallen, paying them no heed except to use this as a spur for a further challenge.
“Fireblast and fuck,” he whispered softly. If they were this determined, then there was going to be little or no way of stopping them. And where would that lead them all?
Meantime, he had to keep firing into the onrushing pack, just as J.B. and Cody had to keep up their barrage. Even if they were unable to halt them completely, they could at least thin out their numbers so that they were fewer when they reached the convoy, and could wreak less havoc.
A steady stream of fire rained into the pack from each of the three armed wags, but seemed to make little difference to the onrushing numbers. As cattle and dogs stumbled and fell under the hail of shells, their blood making the dust beneath them churn into red mud, splattered with flying blood on the flanks of those that came in their train, so it seemed that those very creatures replacing them were part of an endless and unstoppable onslaught.
Looking down from the cabs of the refrigerated wags, armed only with small arms that were of use only in close combat, both Mildred and Krysty were appalled and yet awed by the size of the pack, and the relentless group mind with which it kept coming forward. They felt helpless, as though they were watching some old vid in which they could not take part, and in which they had no real interest. And yet, as the pack spilled off the dustbowl and the hard shoulder, and began to run parallel to the convoy on the blacktop, it became apparent that this would soon involve them in a very direct way. The thought was made real by the shuddering shock of some of the cattle hitting the wheels of the container. The screech of pain showed that those in contact had paid, possibly with their lives, for the attack. Yet it had enough force to make the container swerve and buck at the rear of the cab. Both Reese and Ray had to wrestle with the steering wheels of their wags, the old man surprising Krysty by actually ceasing to speak. The veins on his forehead stood out as he sought to keep his rig straight. More impacts at the rear made the degree of swerve in crease, the swinging of the containers making the wags seem that they could jackknife at any moment.
Ryan, still grimly firing into the mass of scaled hide and matted fur that came closer with every second, wondered in some part of his mind how the pack could survive out here and grow so large. He had the suspicion that the answer was in some way significant. But not for now. It was all he could do to keep blasting into the mass as the cattle repeated their attack on the containers, spreading their attention to the wags between, using the same simple tactic.
Except that the wags in which the rest of the crew rode were closer to the ground, and lighter.
Ryan was thrown off his seat as the wag was hit by a phalanx of cattle, a staggered impact that caused the wag to veer with a bone-jarring shudder on the road. Raven swore loudly as she wrestled with the steering column, the wag zigzagging wildly as she tried to right its path, only to be met with another collision that twisted the wheel in her hand. Her wrists felt as though they’d been dislocated by the violent pull against her instigated by the wag moving contrary to the direction of the wheel.
As the one-eyed man tried to rise to his feet, Ramona leaned over to help him. Another shuddering hit threatened to knock the wag onto its side, and Ramona tumbled over the prone warrior as his own balance was thrown once more.
Doc slid into the seat behind the mounted blaster. His face set in grim determination, he angled the blaster so that it was pointed downward as far as the mount and the slit in the side of the wag would allow. Forcing it as far as he could, he rose off the seat as he commenced firing, the shells from the blaster raking almost along the side of the wag. It was a ridiculous and stupid angle. The chances of hitting anything under normal combat circumstances would be next to zero, and there was always the danger that one of the shells wo
uld actually cause damage to the wag itself. But these were far from normal circumstances, and called for desperate measures.
In this instance, Doc’s gamble proved correct. The shells ate away at the wall of scaled hide that pushed against the wag, chopping some of it to the blacktop, driving the rest of it back far enough for Raven to right the steering without further impairment.
Ryan and Ramona were both back on their feet, staring out of the ob port at the trail of devastation Doc had left in their wake, and at the bodies of chilled cattle and dogs left by the other wags.
“Shit, man, how many of those nasty fuckers are there?” Ramona whispered, looking to the mass of flesh that still tracked them.
“Too many for my liking,” Ryan murmured. “How come there’s so many? How do they live? Unless…”
He didn’t get a chance to finish. Doc’s urgent cry cut short his musing.
“Ryan, they don’t want to wipe us out. That’s too easy. They’re moving us, directing us where they want us to go.”
Ryan frowned, then cast his attention to an ob port on the other side of the wag. Here, with no obstructive wall of flesh, it was easier to see exactly what Doc meant. They were moving from the middle of the road over to the hard shoulder. He could see the snaking line of the convoy ahead of them, moving inexorably to the right. LaGuerre’s wag was already off the hard shoulder and into the hardpacked ground that lay beyond. It was heading into the night, clumps of cacti black against the starlight darkness. Where it was heading was a guess that Ryan did not want to make. He only knew that the pack had some purpose in sacrificing themselves in this way.
“DARK NIGHT, where are we headed?” J.B. asked, almost to himself as he looked past the still-impassive Zarir and out of the front of the wag at the dustbowl night as it engulfed them.
“You tell me,” Eula replied in a neutral tone.
“And how the fuck am I supposed to know that?” he snapped.
She shrugged. “You asked first.”
J.B. looked at her, and then at LaGuerre, who was still seated in the same position, his eyes unreadable behind the shades.
“You don’t seem too worried,” J.B. said slowly. “Could be you were expecting something like this?”
“It was always a possibility,” LaGuerre replied with a shrug. “But that’s why we wanted your people. It’s your job to get us out of any trouble this is leading to.”
J.B. shook his head. “You’re one stupe fucker…or just plain crazy.”
LaGuerre’s face split into a grin. “You have to be, to do this,” he said simply.
J.B. looked out into the night.
One way or another, it was going to be a long one.
IT SOON BECAME obvious that the pack’s group mind had a simple and immovable objective: to herd the convoy as their ancestors had once been herded themselves. In the interests of preserving ammo for whatever may lay ahead, J.B. had ordered that the pack should now only be fired on if it encroached far enough into the convoy to present a threat. Which was not something it showed any inclination to do. It would appear that the pack was content with having changed the direction of the convoy, and was gently prodding them in exactly the direction it wished.
And so it was a bizarre sight that wound across the dustbowl night, drawing farther and farther away at an acute angle from the ribbon of the blacktop. The convoy drove straight, unimpeded by the pack, which ran beside it. Although heavily depleted, there were still more than enough cattle and dogs to stretch out in an unbroken line several bodies deep, discouraging the thought of trying to break through and double back toward the road.
Similarly, the notion of turning in the opposite direction had been dismissed by the Armorer for the simple reason that to try to turn the big rigs on treacherous ground and then outrun the pack would, in all probability, make a bad situation infinitely worse. Better to conserve energy and ammo until they reached whatever their destination may be. That was when they would need to be on triple red.
IT WAS MILDRED, seated high in the cab of the first refrigerated container wag, who saw it before anyone else. They had been driving into the night for more than half an hour, with nothing but the dirt and a few patches of mutated cacti to mark their path. The land was curving, the movement beneath the surface in the upheaval of nuclear winter having left this part of the land not only arid, but undulating in bizarre twists that made the curve of the earth lose its plane and become subject to an almost random law.
Maybe this was why it seemed to loom out of nowhere. Maybe it was that the lights of the shanty ville that appeared as if from another dimension had all been extinguished, dormant until the noise of the approaching pack and convoy had alerted the residents to the new arrivals. For whatever reason, lights flickered on to reveal a settlement of a dozen huts. The flicker may have been oil lamps, or it may have been an erratically firing generator. Whatever, it now revealed that there was life where there had been none before.
And the pack was nudging them straight into the arms of whoever was waiting in those buildings.
“John, can you see that up ahead?” she almost whispered into the open comm mic. “Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help think that they’ve been waiting for us.”
“Figuring on that myself, Millie,” the Armorer replied. “It sure as hell would account for why the pack is able to keep up its numbers.”
“Farmed and trained to bring home prey,” Mildred stated flatly.
Ryan’s voice joined them on the comm. “Been wondering how come there could be so many of them when there seems to be so little out here…Is this how these coldhearts keep themselves alive? Plunder convoys using the animals they farm?”
J.B. turned to LaGuerre. “You knew this could happen.” It wasn’t a question. LaGuerre didn’t answer. Eula did.
“There are rumors. Nothing more than that. How could there be? Anyone that gets taken isn’t likely to get out alive.”
“So why didn’t you tell us?” J.B. demanded. “How the fuck can we be prepared for something like this if we don’t know it could happen?”
Eula raised an eyebrow. As ever, she was calm, so frustratingly that J.B. could gladly have taken out his mini-Uzi and dropped her in his fury. But that would achieve nothing, even if her next words made his anger all the more acute.
“Face it,” she said simply, “would you have wanted to join us so readily if you knew this was likely? Even being stuck where you were could have seemed a better prospect than this. Besides, why tell you? Your reputation suggests you can cope with anything—mebbe even better when it hits you without warning.”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t one of those things you want to put to the test too much,” he said, turning away to look at the approaching ville. What he saw caused him to frown.
It didn’t make sense.
Through the windshield of the armored wag he could see that, instead of keeping to the course they had previously maintained—one that would take them into the heart of the shanty ville—they were drifting toward the east, away from the ville itself. The deviation had been slight to begin with, but as with their previous direction changes, the angle had become incremental. As before, it was as if the pack had nudged them, the desire to keep safe distance unconsciously pushing the wag drivers onto a different course.
But why would the pack be directing them around the ville, and not into it? Had their assumption been wrong? Was the ville just a clutch of shanty huts that stood in the way of the pack, a happenstance and inconvenience? Or was it that—
“Dark night! Stop, stop the fucking wag now,” the Ar morer yelled at Zarir. At the same time, he whirled to the open comm mic, and repeated, “Stop! Stop all wags now. Chill those bastard engines.”
“Why—” Cody’s voice began.
“Ask later—just do it,” J.B. barked.
Even as he spoke, he was aware that the armored wag had not decreased its speed. He turned back to the impassive and seemingly unresponsive wag jockey.
&nbs
p; “Chill the engine, stupe. Stop the wag—”
But it was too late. The wag jockey was so wired on jolt, so focused on his primary task, and so responsive only to the voice of LaGuerre that it was doubtful J.B.’s words had even impressed themselves on what passed for his consciousness. Zarir had not slowed the wag by a single mile.
Which was why they sped across the dustbowl surface at such a speed that it took a hundred yards before the crumbling earth beneath them gave lie to the trap beneath. By then it was too late for the wag to be thrown into Reverse. Even if Zarir had been quick enough or reactive enough to do so, the weight of that portion of the wag that was now overhanging an empty space was enough to pull it forward and down.
A bastard simple trap, and one he should have seen coming. A pit, nothing more: carefully covered, and aided by the darkness of night. The pack had been not just a means to drive them there, but also a distraction—keep your eye on them, and you miss that which is right in front of you.
Dark night, J.B. thought, he’d been a stupe. The lead wag would crash into the pit, and the others would either follow, or career into one another in their haste to stop in time. Either way, it made it easier for the coldhearts of the shanty to come out and pillage.
The fact that his barked orders may have stopped those behind from repeating his mistake was little consolation as the steep incline of the wag threw him forward and into the dash with a force that knocked the breath from his body. Eula and LaGuerre followed, slamming into the dash and windshield, the trader screaming in agony as he hit the driver’s seat on the way.
The interior lights of the wag went dark as the electrics cut out on impact, and J.B.’s brain followed suit as his head cracked against the reinforced glass of the windshield.
Even the pain was lost in the blackness.
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
The Past
Careless. Reckless. Just plain stupe. These were not words that Hunn thought she would ever have to use when she was talking about J. B. Dix. But all of them fitted him right now—all these and more. Not that she could talk about it. She could only think it and keep the anger bottled up inside. That was chilling her slowly. Hunnaker was not the sort of woman who could contain her anger, as a litter of the maimed and chilled that stretched across the Deathlands could attest.