by James Axler
“Then let’s get a move on,” Cawdor said. “We’ve already lost most of the day. We’ve got to find cover we can defend before sundown.”
With Jak in the lead, the companions and their bound captive turned their backs on the ruined ville and headed north, along the newly christened stretch of the Red Road, the Highway of Blood.
Chapter Five
A rifle slug whined a foot over Ryan’s head, slamming with explosive force into the underside of an uptilted slab of road bed. The one-eyed man instinctively averted his face as he ran on; flying shards of concrete stung the back of his head and smacked his shoulder.
Then came the gun crack.
From the time delay, the cannie shooters were five hundred or more yards away. They were firing from well-concealed, hardsite positions on the slopes above the highway. The snipers had the kill zone zeroed in, but because of the distances involved they couldn’t predict exactly where their targets were going to be when the bullets landed downrange.
The companions were doing their best to complicate the problem. They zigged and zagged along the rutted wag tracks on the shoulder of the ruined highway. Their advantage was in speed and in erratic movement, in being someplace else when the slugs hit. Highway 84, itself, was impassable to wags and an obstacle course for foot traffic. The jumble of fractured concrete plates and eroded asphalt was the result of earthquake, flooding and a lack of maintenance or repair for more than a century. To run the highway proper would have been suicide. The companions couldn’t move quickly enough over the tangle of rubble.
Ten feet in front of Ryan and five feet behind Krysty, who was running ahead of him, another heavy-caliber rifle slug plowed into the concrete, sparked and whined off into the trees.
It was like being the turkeys in a turkey shoot.
Ryan and his companions handled the danger the only way they could, by blocking out the possibility that the next incoming round had their name on it and by concentrating on giving the snipers the most difficult targets. Seasoned fighters all, they sorely hated holding fire when under attack. But they knew they had to conserve their ammo and use it only when kills were absolutely assured. The only one with the firepower to reach out and touch their harassers was Ryan. And given the cover of the enemy and the distances involved, even he couldn’t be certain of a lethal hit with his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle.
The cannies’ use of snipers was a switch from the tactics and behavior Ryan and the others had come to expect. Flesheater packs usually chilled up close and personal, this so the chillers could battle over and take their respective shares of the spoils. Snipers who scored a hit from half a mile away would lose out to their brethren hiding much closer to the roadway. It was an unworkable situation unless the cannies were sharing the bounty in a more highly organized way, a way not based on brutal dog-eat-dog dominance. A real army instead of a gaggle of loosely knit bands.
Ahead was a testament to the effectiveness of this new strategy. A string of waylaid wags dotted the highway’s shoulder. The convoy was made up of crudely armored minivans, pickups, SUVs and RVs. The burned-out, overturned hulks were pocked with bullet impacts. Strewed along the ground were stripped, charred human skeletons, obviously cooked on the spot. No other convoy had passed this way in a while. The wrecked wags hadn’t been shoved out of the ruts to clear the path for traffic.
Cannies were picking apart the trade route, and doing a bang-up job of it.
Their cannie prisoner stumbled along near the end of the file. Doc acted as a rear guard and pacesetter, poking and whacking the flesheater with his sheathed swordstick whenever he started to lag behind. From the determined, head-down way Junior Tibideau ran, Ryan got the impression that he wasn’t sure his cannie kin would free him if given the chance. He was helpless, already trussed up, prime for spit-roasting.
Ryan had no doubt that cannies hid among the dense stands of fir trees above the highway. They were keeping well back from danger, letting the long-distance chillers do the work. If one of the bullets struck home, and the companions abandoned the unlucky victim, they would sweep in like cockroaches for the feast. Their bottomless appetites were balanced by a healthy fear of destruction. Darkness increased their courage and magnified their hunger pangs. The degenerate humans had largely become nocturnal hunters; that was when their chosen prey was the most vulnerable. Night blind. Sleepy. Easily approached. When cannies committed to an attack, day or night, they were almost impossible to turn back. Like cougars or jaguars, once switched on, once they had a target selected, nothing less than a bullet in the brain would switch them off.
The highway shooting gallery was the fastest and safest route to the Hells Canyon redoubt. It was the best of the bad choices available to them. Ryan could have led the others on a more direct forest route, shortcutting up and over the mountains, but the chances for a close range ambush there were too great. The trees were too tightly packed. Slopes too steep. Progress too slow. And it was perfect terrain for concealing deadfall and pit traps. Or antipers mines. Cannies weren’t fussy about picking their dinners out of the branches.
Besides, Ryan had mentally mapped this road on the descent; he didn’t know anything about the mountains. He had already selected the best defensive sites. There was no hope of reaching the spot where they had spent their last night on the highway and successfully turned back the cannies. They had gotten too late a start to make it all the way there. One of the secondary sites was going to have to do. A dead-end side canyon, mebbe. Mebbe a cave. A place with a single opening they could defend until dawn.
Daylight was already starting to fade around them, the sky edging from azure to brilliant turquoise to lavender.
Ryan sensed movement behind the dark trunks and thick branches of the trees on both sides of the road, but saw no targets. They were being tracked by more and more flesheaters; a gathering storm shadowed them. The intermittent rifle fire was the dinner bell ringing.
Fifty yards ahead, an enormous hump transected the ruined roadway from shoulder to shoulder. It looked as though a gargantuan tree root had torn through the pavement. On the way down they had made a detour around the partially heaved-up, ten-foot-diameter culvert.
Jak was within fifteen feet of the hump when heavy slugs slapped the earth; not one at a time, but in an un-godly hail, sending dust, bits of rock and bullet fragments flying. It was a triangulated crossfire from rifles stationed on the ridgetops on either side of them. These weren’t bolt guns; these were semiauto longblasters with 30- or 40-round magazines, all working in unison to frame and seal off a predetermined kill zone.
The albino youth ducked through the roiling dust and skidded down into the wide mouth of the culvert. It was the only hard cover close enough for them to reach. Krysty, J.B. and Mildred disappeared inside after him. Ryan followed, striding into the knee-deep, standing water. Doc and the cannie made it safely, as well, although Junior tripped and slid headfirst into the stagnant slop. Doc grabbed him by the collar and jerked him back up, dripping. The bath might have done Junior some good had the surface not been topped with a dense mat of bright green scum and floating human bones.
The clamor continued for a full minute as the cannie snipers poured fire onto the exposed top of the massive, corrugated steel pipe. It was ineffective in terms of penetration, but the roar of bullet impacts was deafening. They shook loose the crusted dirt from the top of the pipe; it fell on the companions’ heads and rained down into the water, making it hard to see and hard to breathe without coughing.
Then the shooting stopped.
Gradually the dust settled and the ringing in their ears faded.
“Everyone okay?” Ryan asked, looking from face to face.
There were nods all around.
“Not going to be so lucky for long,” J.B. said. “If they can keep us pinned down in here until sundown, we’re dead. Cannies can come at us unopposed from three directions.”
Krysty stared into the darkness that led under the highway. “This pipe is me
bbe a hundred feet long,” she said. “Could be open at the other end, or ruptured someplace between here and there with a hole big enough for cannies to slip through.”
“Wouldn’t have to be that big,” J.B. said. “Just big enough to drop in a few grens, and we’d be their next meal.”
“Wonder why didn’t they spring this trap on us on the way down?” Mildred said.
“Trap not set,” Jak said.
“Mebbe they learned something when we slipped past them on foot the last time,” Krysty suggested.
“While it’s still light, I’ve got to do a recce up the pipe,” Ryan said. “If there’s no holes and if other end is blocked off, we might be able to hold out from here—we’ve got ourselves a ten-foot-wide shooting lane, if we mass our fire we can control the entrance and keep the bastards off us. If there’s another way in, we’re going to have to make a break for it.”
“Come, too,” Jak volunteered.
Ryan trudged ahead, sloshing through the vile water. He advanced with his handblaster drawn in case they already had company in the culvert. The deeper they went, the darker it got. The smell of death and corruption couldn’t have gotten worse. Again and again, Ryan nudged aside unseen floating objects with his knees.
After fifty feet, it began to get brighter and brighter, until he could make out a wide shaft of light piercing the gloom, illuminating a charred rib cage that bobbed in the slime.
“Bad luck,” Jak said as they looked up at the wide rent in the steel cylinder. The split ran from the top of the pipe halfway down its side. It was easily large enough for a man to slip through.
Ryan holstered his SIG-Sauer and passed Jak his longblaster, then he climbed up into the split and pulled himself out on his belly, crawling into the shadows beneath a shelf of uptilted concrete. After scanning the tree lines above them, he retreated back down the hole.
“No point in going all the way to the end of the pipe,” Ryan told Jak as he took back his Steyr. “We can’t stay the night here. Go back to the entrance. Draw some fire from the snipers so I can pinpoint their hides.”
Without a word, the albino teen turned and splashed off into the darkness.
Ryan crawled back out into the softening light. He squirmed into a comfortable prone position under the angled slab and dug in his elbows. Downrange, a wall of trees loomed in front of him. The snipers could have been hidden anywhere. He opened the rifle bolt and snicked it back an inch, making sure a round was chambered. Then he flipped up both of the scope’s lens caps. With the setting sun behind him, he wasn’t worried about a reflection off his front lens giving away his position.
Ryan didn’t sight through the scope. He needed as wide a field of view as possible to locate the targets. But he did drop the Steyr’s safety and snug its butt firmly against his shoulder. While he waited for Jak to make his move, Ryan listened to his own heartbeat and consciously relaxed, breathing deeply to slow it. He smelled the forest. Clean. Green. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Ryan stretched out the pause between heart-beats, getting the rhythm right, finding the null, the shooting space.
From far behind him came a clatter of boots as Jak jumped out of the end of the pipe.
The snipers were waiting for just such a move.
Bullets screamed over Ryan’s head, then came the flurry of sharp reports. Multiple, tightly spaced shots made the blasters easier to find against the dark curtain of trees. Ryan caught the faint orange wink of a muzzle-blast as Jak continued to draw sustained fire. The hide was a stand sixty feet up a fir tree. Ryan looked through the scope and rested its crosshairs below the erratic flash, adjusting his aimpoint for the distance and the forty-five-degree uphill shot. Then, with his cheek against the stock and his finger curled lightly around the trigger, he concentrated on his heartbeat.
Thud. Pause.
Thud. Pause.
He steadily tightened down on the trigger, taking up the slack, bringing it to breakpoint.
Thud. Pause.
Thud—
With a thunderclap roar the 7.62 mm slug sailed away.
The Steyr punched Ryan hard in the shoulder. Tensing his muscles, he rode the recoil, swinging the scope back on target. In the field of view, fringed tree limbs shivered as a body fell heavily through them. Then they were still.
The other two long blasters continued to rage. Jak’s odds of being hit increased with every passing second.
Cycling the Steyr’s action, Ryan quickly located the second target up the highway to his left on a high outcrop that jutted like the bow of a vast black ship from amid the tall trees. A more difficult shot because of the solid cover.
Ryan settled into position, adjusting his aimpoint through the scope. As his finger tightened on the trigger, as he was about to ice the crossfire and open the way for the companions’ escape, he heard crunching sounds coming toward him.
Footfalls.
Hard, running footfalls from the other side of the highway.
Swinging the rifle barrel down, he looked over the scope and saw three figures dashing along the hump, straight for him.
He snapfired and hit the lead cannie in the midsection, blowing him off his feet and flat onto his behind.
As Ryan worked the bolt to eject the spent shell, handblasters blazed and bullets chipped the concrete rubble on either side of him. The cannies were trying to reach and control the hole in the pipe.
Ryan fired again and the 173-grain, M-118 slug blew through the flesheater’s chest, taking most of his heart with it. The cannie’s momentum sent him crashing, spread-armed onto his face.
The third cannie was undaunted by the deaths of his pals. On the run, he dumped an empty mag. As he slapped home a fresh one, he stumbled on a loose bit of rock. It took only a second for the cannie to regain his balance, but by the time he snicked his blaster’s action closed, Ryan had cycled another live round into the Steyr’s breech and pushed up to his knees.
Before the cannie could bring his blaster to bear, Ryan shot him in the front of the throat, just under the chin, taking out three inches of his spinal column. Instant chill. The body dropped rag-doll limp, its head connected to torso by glistening threads of muscle.
Concrete exploded ten inches from Ryan’s nose, peppering the side of his face. As he ducked, he heard the hollow boom. The sniper up in the rocks was now targeting him, trying to pin him down. At the far end of the pipe, he could see more cannies filtering out of the trees. Swarms of them. They knew where he was, too. Their bullets zinged all around him.
Under concentrated fire, Ryan backed down the hole and hit the water running.
He shouted the bad news to his waiting companions. “They’re closing in quick. Light’s fading. We’ve got to break out. It’s now or never. Move fast, move low. Jak, you take the point.”
J.B. rammed his fedora tight onto his head and pushed his spectacles against the bridge of his nose. “Let’s do it,” he said.
As Jak lunged for the culvert entrance, the distant crash of steel on steel, of breaking glass, and the screech of bending metal stopped him in his tracks. Then from down the highway they heard the rumble and roar of powerful wag engines.
A second later came the unmistakable, full-auto, rolling thunder of an M-60 machine gun.
“It would appear we have company,” Doc said.
Chapter Six
Ryan led the others out of the pipe. They peered over the top of the concrete rubble as the chatter of machine-gun fire and the howl of engines got louder. This while cannie return fire dwindled to nothing.
The wag convoy lumbered uphill toward them. Huge, hulking forms bounced over the ruts, headlights off in the gloaming. The M-60 atop the second wag swept the far side of the roadway, streaming white hot tracers over their heads.
“Keep down,” Ryan warned the others. “They might mistake us for cannies.”
With nothing to distinguish them from the enemy, rescuers could quickly turn into executioners.
It turned out not to be a problem.
; The convoy crews had already assessed the situation and singled out the good guys from the bad.
The lead vehicle was a dually tow truck with a high cab and a wedge-shaped steel snowplow attached to its front bumper. Overlapping steel plates protected the cab and windows. The tow truck pulled past the culvert entrance and stopped, giving the companions cover with its broad flank. Then the driver and passenger cracked the armored doors and opened fire over the hinges at fleeing cannies with night sight-equipped, Russian SKS semiauto longblasters.
From the clatter of the sustained gunfire, their rescuers had deduced what was going on up the road. As a rule, cannies didn’t wage all-out war on one another. The wag crews knew what an unfolding ambush sounded like.
A gray-primered Suburban 4x4 rolled up behind the tow truck and parked. The Suburban’s chassis was jacked up for two feet of additional ground clearance. The windows, grille, hood and wheel wells were covered by crudely welded sections of steel plate; gaps left between the plates served as view and firing ports. A hole had been cut in the roof amidships, providing a gunner access to an M-60 mounted on a circular track. The 7.62 mm machine gun’s arc of fire encompassed an unobstructed 360 degrees.
A vehicle for the serious, postnuke entrepreneur.
The back doors of the SUV popped open and a burly giant of a man jumped out. He shouldered the RPG he carried and took aim at the edge of forest on far side of the road.
With a blistering whoosh the rocket launched and seconds later came the whump of explosion. Trees along the opposite shoulder fireballed. In the hard flash of light Ryan saw cannie silhouettes cartwheeling through the air and the survivors scattering like rats low and fast into the forest.
The tow truck crew continued to peck away at cannie wounded and stragglers. The crews from the other wags joined them, raining fire on the enemy caught out in the open. The convoy was the usual jumble of predark makes and models, but they all had horsepower to spare. Serious muscle was required to move the weight of cargo, armor and personnel over the wasteland.