Wasteland Blues

by Scott Christian Carr

  “I still think we could take those guys and get out of here,” said Derek.

  “What’s the point?” asked Leggy. “Maybe we could overpower those two, but how bad are we gonna get hurt doin’ it? Besides, there’s gonna be a war right on the road we want to take.”

  “So what then?” said Derek. “Just hole up here?”

  Leggy shrugged. He pulled his blanket from his pack and made himself comfortable near the fire.

  “But what about the crawler?” demanded Derek.

  “What about it? It’s been requisitioned, as we used to say.”

  “But—” began Derek.

  Leggy cut him off. “But what? Go steal it back? While it’s in the middle of a firefight?”

  Derek clenched his fists and stared down at Leggy, but the reality of their predicament overcame his anger.

  Leggy fussed with his blankets. “I said I wanted to sleep with a roof over my head tonight. Looks like I get my wish.” He lay back and closed his eyes.

  Derek snorted. He paced around the darkening cabin as the others shook out their own bedrolls and drifted off to sleep. Eventually he slumped into a wooden chair and joined them.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  They were woken by the sound of distant gunfire. It was nearly dawn, and the sharp crack of rifle shots slashed through the chill air. They were quickly joined by the chatter of automatic weapons.

  “Guess they’re startin’,” said John, rubbing his eyes.

  Quickly the individual reports of the weapons blurred into an explosive haze of noise, like constant thunder or the fireworks that Leggy talked about from the Bomb Day festivities in Moses Spring. The fight was getting hot.

  Derek got up from his chair and opened the shutter. The moon had set, and the sky was a dark purple, waiting for the sun to rise. The guards weren’t there.

  “Hey,” said Derek. “They’re gone.” He moved to the door and opened it.

  “Slow up,” said Leggy, slithering out of his blankets. “Maybe they’re around back.”

  Derek shook his head. “Why would they be around back? This is the only door. I bet they went to help their friends.” He stepped out into the yard and walked over to where their own weapons were piled. “Hello? Hello?” he called. “You guys around?”

  No response.

  Cautiously, the others joined him. They stood in the dooryard in a tight group. The sounds of the battle were clearer out here.

  “C’mon,” said Derek. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  The others agreed. They moved quickly in the chill morning air, rolling up their bedding, gathering stores that Jordan had left behind, and strapping their packs to Minna. Teddy helped Leggy mount up on Afha.

  The gunfire was joined by bigger explosions. They saw flashes of white and red light on the horizon, like distant heat lightning.

  “Which way should we go?” asked John.

  “We gotta give that firefight a wide berth,” said Leggy. “And I mean wide.”

  “We could head north,” said John, “toward the place where Burrell said they had their homesteads.”

  “I don’t know that that’d be any safer,” said Leggy. “I’ll bet they left a rifle or two with the women and children and instructions to shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “So what then?” asked Derek. “Go south and loop around that bunker?”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Leggy.

  “Then let’s roll,” said Derek.

  Leggy patted Afha the donkey. “I ain’t lookin’ forward to this,” he said. “And I bet you ain’t, either. I miss that crawler already.”

  At that moment a huge explosion lit up the dawn. A few seconds later a blast of air struck them. Afha snorted and reared as Leggy flung his arms around the beast’s neck and buried his face in the animal’s hide. The others cowered, their hands flung over their heads. A cloud of sandy grit raced past them, slashing at bare skin and coating them in dust. Above them, the leaves of Jordan’s tree hissed and rattled.

  When the shockwave had passed, John scrambled over to Leggy and the donkey.

  “What the Hell was that?” he shouted, steadying Afha.

  “Bomb. Musta been a bomb,” said Derek, patting dust from his clothes. “A goddamn big one.” He pointed to the horizon, where a pillar of fire lit the sky in a false dawn.

  They fetched water from the well to clear their mouths and clean the dust from their faces and then stood in the dooryard once more.

  “You think we should check it out?” asked Derek. “I’m guessing that blast means the battle’s over.”

  Leggy stroked his chin. “I don’t hear no more gunfire, so you’re probably right. Still though, we don’t know who won. I’d hate to walk right into Chulo’s hands.”

  “The size of that blast,” John looked at Leggy, “You really think there’s a winner?”

  Derek spit. “Well, wait here then.”

  Once again he shimmied up the tree. The others watched him disappear into the topmost branches. He was down again just as quickly.

  “Bunker’s gone,” he said, tucking his spyglass into his pack. “Just a hole in the ground now. Couldn’t make out much else on account of the fire and smoke. But I’ll wager that whoever was in that bunker is just a dirty smudge on the ground now.”

  “Still though,” said Leggy.

  “C’mon,” said Derek. “We’ll be careful. We’ll approach nice and slow.”

  “Why are you so eager to go there?” asked John.

  “’Cause maybe we can get our crawler back,” said Derek. “It’s ours and they took it. I want it back.”

  Derek would not be deterred.

  Leggy gave his assent, and the group made their careful way toward the pillar of flame.

  ***

  “I feel like Moses,” said Derek as they walked. “Ain’t that in the Good Book, John? Wanderers led by fire out of the desert and into the promised land?”

  “That’s right,” said John. “The Hebrews. A column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.”

  Derek chuckled. “Now all we need is a sea so I can part it. I got that one all figured out.”

  “Oh yeah?” asked John.

  “Sure,” said Derek. “Just load up Teddy with a couple cans o’ beans and let him rip. He’ll split that sea as neat as you please. Ain’t that right, Ted?”

  “Fart,” yelled Teddy.

  Samuel giggled, which spurred Teddy to imitate a long, wet expulsion.

  “There it goes,” said Derek. “Just follow the dead fish to the other side, you Hebes. But don’t forget to hold your noses.”

  “Pee-yew,” shouted Teddy.

  “No need to blaspheme,” muttered John.

  “Take it easy,” snapped Leggy. “We’re supposed to be on guard here.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Derek. He elbowed his brother, and the two continued to giggle quietly to themselves.

  But their laughter stopped as they crested the final rise in the road.

  Three quarters of the bunker had been obliterated by the blast—only a skeleton wall remained. It stood precariously on the edge of a crater, out of which rose yellow and orange flames. Bodies lay scattered all around the hole. Above them vultures hovered, ready to descend and gorge.

  The group walked on, slowly. Suddenly Samuel cried out and pointed. A head and torso lay in the sand near their feet, flung there by the blast.

  “Must’ve been one of Chulo’s men,” said Leggy grimly.

  What remained of the body was decked out in black armor, rebreather and a helmet—little good it had done for its wearer.

  Soon they came upon other body parts, Chulo’s and Burrell’s men alike, intermingled with chunks of broken concrete and twisted me
tal. Scraps of burning paper and ash swirled in a feeble breeze. Granules of glass and plastic crunched underfoot.

  As they neared the epicenter of the battle they saw other horrors. Burrell’s men had been torn apart by bullets and mortar blasts. A yellow powder dusted other corpses. They lay in frozen postures of agony, their hands clawing at their eyes or tearing at their own throats.

  Then Teddy shouted. Two men were hobbling along the road toward them. They moved wearily, dragging their rifles on the ground behind them. The men stumbled along, heads down, arms around each other’s shoulders, supporting one another. They stopped when they saw the travelers.

  Leggy was the first to recognize them—the men that had guarded the house.

  “What happened here?” asked Leggy.

  “Can’t you see?” said the first man. “We won!” Then he began to laugh, a high, hysterical sound.

  “Where’s the others?” asked Derek.

  “They had chemicals,” said the man. “And when they saw that we were close to taking their stronghold, they doused us. Hector here was lucky,” he said, nodding with his head toward the man he held alongside him. “He only got a small dusting.”

  The man called Hector lifted his head. His eyes had been burned away, leaving empty sockets. Where his nose had once been were two singed, mucous-filled holes. His lips had been scorched off to reveal nubs of teeth shielding a blistered tongue. The dusted man gurgled his agreement. They’d been lucky indeed. Everyone else was dead.

  “Where’s Burrell?” asked Leggy, looking away from the ruin of the man’s face. “Did he make it?”

  “And where’s the crawler?” demanded Derek, his grim eyes searching the battlefield.

  “Gone. Both gone,” said the man. “The captain took it on a suicide mission. He packed it full of manure and moonshine and drove it through the gate, smashed it into the fortress.” The man turned and looked at the still smoking hole. “Chulo never knew what hit him. Must’ve been a Hell of a lot more explosives inside the bunker.” He laughed. “Sheep shit and corn liquor don’t blow up like that!”

  Derek said nothing, but his cheeks flushed red and he clenched his fists.

  The men stumbled forward, and the travelers parted.

  “Long way home,” said the man. “Have to tell the homestead we won.” He spit blood in the sand, and then the two victors hobbled away, leaving the travelers to stand amidst the carnage and smoldering ruin.

  ***

  John leaned heavily against a pile of rubble. Words failed him. All he could do was watch the remains of the fortress smolder. No one else spoke. Samuel sat cross-legged, apart from the others, staring down at the ground. Even the animals seemed unwilling to break the sullen silence. Finally, it was Derek who interrupted the funereal melancholy.

  “Goddammit!” He swung his foot hard, kicking at a short length of broken tread—debris which more than likely had come from the sand crawler—sending it hurtling into the air in a plume of ash and sand. “This is bullshit. Fuck this shit!”

  Derek was near tears. John wanted to say something, to defuse the rage, but could think of nothing.

  Magdalena touched his shoulder and ever so slightly shook her head. “Let him,” she whispered. “He needs to let it out.”

  “Goddamn you!” Derek shook his fists at the sky.

  As if in answer, a chill breeze broke the heat and brought the acrid odor of burning fuel and manure from the crater that was once a fortress.

  “Fuck you all to Hell!” Derek roared at the Heavens.

  The only reply was the wind. Another sandstorm was brewing in the distance, turning the pillars of smoke into odd, twisted forms and thinning them out—covering the violence with dust and sand, burying secrets, and selling the lie of passing time and natural erosion.

  ***

  Derek felt a wet nuzzling at his hand. “Get away!” He batted angrily at the dog, “Get lost, fleabag.”

  But it wasn’t the dog, or Minna or three-eyed Afha. It was one of Chulo’s people-pets, which had miraculously survived the blast. Half-naked and bound in leather straps, shuffling about on all fours and licking his hand. Derek yelped in sheer revulsion of the pathetic thing—it was a man. At least, it had at one time been a man. Its face had been horribly mutilated, its ears trimmed to feral points, teeth sharpened. Scars from beatings or worse covered every exposed inch of flesh. The creature smiled, and tried again to nuzzle Derek.

  “Can we keep him, Der? Can we?” Teddy lunged forward and ruffled the creature’s patchy skull. “His name’s Woofy. Says so on his tag. Leggy says he used ta be a person, but now he’s not. Can we keep him?”

  “Fuuuuuuck….!” Derek’s scream lengthened into a long coughing rattle. He fell to his knees and then slumped resignedly between Leggy and John.

  Chapter Thirty

  For the longest time, the group sat in silence.

  They’d hiked into the night, trying to put as much distance between them and the battlefield as they could, before throwing together a quick haggard camp and surrendering themselves to unconsciousness. They woke with the sun, and Leggy boiled some water, warming the last of their coffee over the embers of the previous night’s fire.

  The wind rose to a shrill gale and then receded to what, for the Wasteland, might be considered a comfortable zephyr. In the distance, a sandstorm made the grit and dust turn in strange arabesques, but the dance went unnoticed by the sullen band of travelers.

  Derek removed his spyglass and scanned the horizon. Endless desert and broken highways as far as the glass eye could see. No signs of life, no signs of civilization. Leggy had called this barren stretch the gateway to the Blasted Lands. Only sand and crumbling tarmac littered the shattered highways, punctuated with distant dust devils, and heat lightning.

  Then Derek’s glass caught a slight movement to the south. A man. No, two men—the second had been dwarfed by the enormous girth of the first—were scavenging through the rubble of what might once been a small market or a villa, but was now little more than a dry-rotted abutment of broken adobe and rubble.

  For a while Derek watched them scavenge. They were at such a distance that he had no fear of being spotted. The larger one might even surpass Teddy in size—surely he was a mutant of some sort. But, strangely, Derek felt no threat from them. Rather, there was a sense of unspoken kinship, a mutual feeling of…survival communicated over the empty miles between them.

  They might never meet in person, but Derek could sense that they too were survivors. The giant and his skinny little brother—Derek decided with strange certainty that they were brothers, not so very different than he and Teddy. Only these two were not lucky enough to have gathered a group around them, or perhaps they simply preferred traveling alone.

  Derek shivered, lowering the spyglass to his crossed legs. For the first time since the beginning of this insane quest, he realized that he was indeed grateful for his traveling companions. Though he knew he would never tell them so—any of them—he also knew that without them he and Teddy would never have made it this far. And without them, he might never make it to New York.

  He brought the spyglass back up to his eye. The distant travelers had given up on the ruined market, and dejectedly headed out into the wastes, following the cracked path of their own heat-twisted highway. Derek watched as they hiked farther and farther away. He watched until they became mere dots on the horizon. He watched as the distance between the two grew and grew—the small one lagging behind, and the larger, stronger one trudging ever onward. And Derek watched as the little one fell to his knees in exhaustion and hunger, unable to take another step and his brother went back for him. The giant pulled his brother up onto his shoulders, turned, and then marched out of sight trudging with all the weight of his brother on his back, marching directly into the fiery sunset sinking into the blasted horizon.

/>   Tears that Derek couldn’t explain suddenly filled his eyes. He hadn’t felt a thing when he’d slowly cocked his shotgun and, despite Teddy’s tears, put down his brother’s infernal half-man, Woofy. But now, thinking of the brothers carrying each other out there in the Wasteland, alone, but not alone…. Suddenly, Moses Springs seemed impossibly far behind. And New York? New York had never seemed so far away.

  About the Authors

  Scott Christian Carr lives on a secluded mountaintop deep in New York’s Hudson Valley. He spends his time writing novels and stories, producing for film and television, and enjoying the country life with his kids. Carr is the co-creator of The Learning Channel TV series Dead Tenants, and has produced television for such networks as MSNBC, Discovery, The Hallmark Channel, A&E, and others. His fiction & nonfiction have appeared in Shroud Magazine, Withersin, GUD, Horror Quarterly, Pulp Eternity, Weird N.J., and assorted anthologies. His novels Champion Mountain and Hiram Grange & the Twelve Little Hitlers are currently garnering favorable reviews. His recent accolades include The Hunter S. Thompson Award for Outstanding Journalism, Scriptapalooza TV: 1st Place Best Original Pilot, and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award nomination. He is the author of the upcoming novels Hiram Grange & The Twelve Steps and Matthew’s Memories (illustrated by Danny Evarts).

  Andrew Conry-Murray is a technology writer and editor. He is the author of the book The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security and the novella Fei the Hero. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons.

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