by James Axler
“Look at the bastards run!” the RPG shooter said with pleasure.
He was a mountain of a man, nearly as tall as Ryan, but a hundred pounds heavier, solid muscle covered with a thick layer of jellylike blubber. Most of his weathered face was hidden by a full brown beard. He wore stained, denim bibfronts and a black leather vest with no shirt underneath. He didn’t need one. The layers of fat and the mat of hair on his back, shoulders, arms and chest provided plenty of insulation.
“You the convoy master?” Ryan asked, checking out the man’s personal armament. The twin, well-worn, bluesteel .357 Magnum Desert Eagles in black ballistic nylon shoulder holsters looked like peashooters tucked under his massive arms. The mountain reeked of joy juice, stale tobacco and gasoline.
“Harlan Sprue’s the name,” he said. “You look mighty familiar to me. Mr…?”
The one-eyed man hesitated a moment. “Ryan Cawdor.”
“Not the same Cawdor what used to run with Trader?”
“Same.”
“I locked horns with you and your old crew once, back east,” he said. “We had ourselves a little disagreement over ownership of some predark knickknacks. You probably don’t recognize me now. I was quite a few pounds lighter back then.”
“I remember you, Sprue,” Ryan said. “You weren’t any lighter in those days and as I recall, you lost the argument.”
“Memory is a funny thing. I recollect just the opposite.” Sprue looked over the other companions. When he got to J.B., he stopped and grinned broadly. “Four-eyes was with you then, too,” he said. “One mean, sawed-off little bastard.”
“You got that right, fat man,” J.B. said, shifting the weight of his pump gun on its shoulder sling. “Only I got even less patience nowadays.”
When Sprue took in Junior Tibideau, his hairy smile twisted into a scowl. “You caught yourselves a cannie?” he said incredulously. “Looks like a sick un, too. Are you out of your rad-blasted minds? That’s like taking a mutie rattler into bed. For a thank you, he’ll bite you in your ass first chance he gets.”
“He isn’t going to bite anybody,” Ryan said.
Then a single sniper round skipped off the Suburban’s hood and whined into the trees.
Which drew a volley of answering fire from the wag crews.
When the shooting stopped, Sprue said, “We’ve got to move a ways up the road before the bastards regroup. You can pile in the 6x6 at the end of the line. All of you but that cannie. My crews won’t share a wag with a goddamned, oozie-drippin’ flesheater. They’ll blow him out of his socks soon as look at him. If you want him to keep on breathing, you’d better tie him to the back bumper and let him hoof it.”
To lead a wag convoy through the hellscape, to deal with Nature run amok at every turn, to face coldheart robbers and mutie attacks, a person had to be one hard-headed, pedal-to-the-metal son of a bitch, the kind of leader who never buckled, never bent, who kept on pushing until he or she got where he or she wanted to go.
For Ryan, looking at Harlan Sprue was like seeing himself in a distorted, carny show mirror.
There was only one way to argue with that kind of man, and that was with a well-aimed bullet.
This wasn’t the time or place for that kind of an argument.
The companions trotted down to the idling 6x6. J.B., Jak, Krysty and Doc scrambled up onto the armor-sided cargo bed. The Armorer threw Mildred a coil of rope he found inside, and she slipped it around Junior’s waist, and, leaving about fifteen feet of slack, tied him to the wag’s back bumper.
“You could take this tree limb off my back, Mildred,” the cannie said. “Make it easier for me to keep up.”
“Yeah, I could, but I won’t. Making your life easier isn’t way up there on my to-do list.”
“How far are we going?”
“We’ll both know when we get there.”
Doc leaned over the bumper. “Best step lively, cannie,” was his sage advice.
As the wags at the head of the file started moving, Ryan climbed up on the 6x6 cab’s step. He spoke through the louvres melted through the side window’s steel plate. “Take it easy,” he warned the driver, “you’re towing a prisoner on foot.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure and do that,” a hoarse-voiced woman replied. Then she gunned the engine and popped the clutch.
The big wag lurched ahead. Ryan had to hustle to swing up beside Mildred and the others.
No way could the cannie keep up. He fell after a dozen steps and was dragged across the dirt on his belly. Lucky for Junior Tibideau, progress was stop and go as the heavily loaded wags in front maneuvered around the route’s deepest ruts. Before Mildred could hop down to help him, before the wag could roll on, Junior jumped back to his feet, grinning fiendishly.
“Piece of crap,” was Mildred’s terse assessment.
To Ryan, she still seemed normal. On top of her game even. He wanted to make sure.
“You all right?” he asked her.
“No problems as far that I can tell. Got my fingers crossed.”
So had Ryan.
Behind him, a propane lantern swinging from a roof strut cast a wildly shifting light over the interior. On either side of the truck bed were battened-down fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline and joy juice leaking fumes, and smaller drums marked “Drinking Water.” Between the barrels were stacks of car batteries, long wooden crates of ammo and unmarked boxes of other trade goods. The enclosed space—windowless except for rifle firing ports—smelled like a bear pit. Wag crews had been camping out in back of the truck for months, perhaps years. Five pairs of eyes stared back at Ryan with suspicion and disdain. The other three crewmembers were so disinterested in the newcomers that they had already curled up and gone back to sleep on their rag pile beds among the crates.
The howl of the 6x6’s engine and the groans and shrieks of its springs as it jolted over the track made conversation as well as rest impossible.
For about half an hour, the convoy continued along the shoulder of Highway 84, stop and go. Occasionally a rifle round or two would spang into the truck’s side armor, but there was no concerted attack, no enemy regrouping of any consequence.
When a horn up front honked, the wags slowed to a crawl and circled for the night. Virtually bumper to bumper.
Ryan jumped from the truck bed. The convoy had parked on a flat field of hardpacked earth. The stars were out in force.
Junior Tibideau nowhere in sight, but one end of the rope was still tied to the bumper. Cawdor squatted and peered under the wag.
The cannie cowered on his knees behind the rear axle. He knew how much danger he was in. “You gotta protect me, brother,” he insisted. “If you let me get chilled, your woman friend is gonna die hard.”
Ryan didn’t need the reminder.
When he straightened, some of the other wag crews were already closing in on the 6x6 with burning torches in hand. Their faces were hard and scarred by struggle.
The companions jumped from the cargo bed and closed ranks, barring access to the cannie.
“Looks like we got ourselves some entertainment tonight,” one of the male drivers said as he peeked under the wag with his torch.
“You don’t wanna mess with our fun,” his shotgun-ner advised the companions.
The 6x6 driver put in her two cents. “Let’s soak the cannie in gas and light him up,” she said. “We can take bets on how many times he makes it around the circle.”
“Slice him open and feed him his own guts,” was another suggestion.
“Stake him outside the circle,” said a skinny crew-man in his late teens. “Use him as live bait to draw in his kin. We can nail a bunch of the bastards that way.”
Ryan understood the depth of their hatred; he shared every millimeter of it. The crews wanted to exercise their power over this pure evil creature. Not just for vengeance’s sake. In a situation of terrible, unknowable threat, there was nothing like a little mindless brutality to take the edge off one’s fear.
�
�You better stand aside quick, One-Eye,” the 6x6 driver warned, her hand dropping to her holstered Beretta 92.
“Back off, now!” Sprue shouted, clearing a path for himself by shoving the intervening bodies aside. “Cut this droolie bullshit. That cannie ain’t yours to play with. You all got work to do. Set up the defensive perimeter and get dinner a-cooking. Move it! It’s gonna be another long night.”
The would-be disembowelers drifted away without comment. The fat man didn’t have to touch the butts of his Desert Eagles. None of his crew had the guts to try to take him out. Their continued survival depended on his experience and judgment.
A couple of the men set up an iron tripod in the middle of the circle. While one of them built a roaring fire under it, the other began pouring ingredients for supper into a big metal caldron—water, dried beans, root vegetables, wilted tops and all, and unidentifiable chunks of meat and bones. He then dumped handfuls of seasonings into the pot and stirred them in with a long spoon.
Sprue noticed Ryan’s interest in the fixings. “Don’t worry, it ain’t human,” he joked.
It took both cooks to swing the fully loaded pot onto the tripod over the flames.
The convoy master set out a couple of shabby folding lawn chairs upwind of the fire. “Come over here, Cawdor,” he said. “Have yourself a seat while we wait for dinner to boil. You and me need to parlay.”
“Don’t worry about the flesheater,” J.B. assured Ryan. “We’ll hold the fort here.”
As Ryan walked over to Sprue, the convoy master picked up a blue plastic antifreeze jug and twisted off the cap.
“Go on, sit,” he said. He offered his guest the jug. “Swig?”
Ryan sniffed at the contents and frowned. “About ninety octane, I’d say.” He passed the jug back without sampling it.
“How about a nice cee-gar, then?”
Ryan declined, then said, “Your folks look mighty jumpy.”
Sprue’s crew scurried to complete their assigned tasks. They set out extra weapons and ammo, and manned the perimeter, some crawling to firing positions under the wags.
“They’ve got good reason for that,” Sprue told him. “Over the few last weeks, the situation in these parts has been going downhill fast. Cannies have been hitting us almost every night. Half my crew sleeps during the day so they can fight all night. The other half tries to get some rest at night so they can go all day. We’ve kept the bastards out so far, but I gotta tell you it’s starting to wear us down.”
“Where are they coming from?”
“Hard to say for sure,” Sprue answered. “But they’re following the same trade route we are, between here and Slake City. We’ve caught them riding around in wags, just like norms—except for the goddamned sides of smoked meat packed in the trunks. These ain’t no dum-bass muties, for sure. They fight just like us, with blasters. They learn from their mistakes. That’s something a stickie can’t do. Stickie follows instinct, even if instinct says to jump off a cliff. Cannies use their brains.”
The convoy master took a deep swallow from the blue jug, gasped as the alcohol burned its way down his gullet, then shuddered and said, “I want to hear the whole story about your pet flesheater.”
The whole story was something Sprue wasn’t going to get. Ryan had no intention of mentioning their destination, the Hells Canyon redoubt. The companions kept such things to themselves. It’s what gave them a leg up on the competition.
“Have you ever heard of a queen of the cannies?” Ryan asked the bearded fat man. “Down Louisiana way?”
Sprue paused to scratch his chin. His hand disappeared up to the wrist in the tangle of coarse hair. “Can’t say that I have, but it’s been a couple years since I run wags there,” he admitted. “Louisiana norms are good folk for the most part, but they’re shitpoor. Not enough jack thereabouts to make me wanna go back. Don’t like the humidity or the gators, neither.”
“Incoming!” someone shouted from the perimeter.
Suddenly everyone took up the cry. “Incoming! Incoming!”
Ryan and Sprue vaulted from the lawn chairs as streaks of light arced in from the darkness. Streaks of light that hissed as they fell almost lazily into the convoy’s midst.
Crashing to earth, the Molotov cocktails bloomed orange, their explosions sent flaming fuel flying in all directions. It sprayed over wags and a few unlucky crewmembers. Men and women screamed and batted at themselves as they ran and burned. Their comrades immediately caught them and knocked them down. They smothered the flames with blankets and dirt, then dragged the still-smoking, still-screaming victims to cover beneath the wags.
Gunfire roared around the defensive perimeter. Every blaster was cutting loose at once. The din was tremendous; the chill zone a complete circle.
But the gasoline bombs kept falling, turning the center of the ring into a lake of fire.
“It’s all flat ground out there,” Sprue snarled into Ryan’s ear as they crouched beside a van. “There’s no cover for 150 yards in all directions. The throwers should be chopped down by now.”
He was thinking arm toss; he was thinking short range.
He was thinking wrong.
“Catapults,” Ryan told him. “The cannies are using catapults.”
Chapter Seven
As the Molotovs rained down, Mildred stuck to Junior Tibideau like grim death, her fingers gripping the back of his trouser waistband.
Krysty, Jak, J.B. and Doc had also taken cover under the 6x6. On either side of them convoy crew was firing longblasters through gunports and gaps in the wheel well armor. The clatter in the narrow space was earsplitting.
J.B. crawled up against the steel skirt and had a look for himself. He immediately turned on the nearest of the two riflemen. “What the hell are you shooting at?” he shouted. “You can’t see anything out there!”
The prone crewmembers ignored him. He and his pal continued to rattle off frantic, full-auto bursts from their AKs. They had plenty of ammo to burn. Rows of 30-round mags were laid out beside them.
From their panic, Mildred guessed they hadn’t encountered a cannie attack like this before. Up until now Convoy Master Sprue’s strategy for surviving the night had been to pick a campsite he knew they could defend. The response to attacks had been to hunker down and fight back until dawn. Unless the present situation changed radically, by dawn the circled defenders would all be dead. The only option was to pull up stakes and make a run for it before the fires took their toll. But there was a big problem with that. Running could put them in an even worse position in a hurry. The road ahead could be mined. Or blocked by an impassable obstacle. In the dark, strung out without room to circle, the wags would be easy pickings for the cannies.
“Flares! Put up some bastard flares!” the convoy master bellowed to his crews as he ran the inside of the perimeter.
The rest of the companions squirmed up to the 6x6’s steel skirt so they, too, could see downrange. Still holding on to Junior’s pants, Mildred peered under the rear bumper. A few seconds later, 100,000-candlepower illuminating stars burst over the battlefield and slowly floated down on their deployed parachutes.
In the ghastly white light, the companions stared out at a flat expanse. A plain of nothing. No big rocks. No trees. Not so much as a blade of needle grass decorated the pale dirt.
The wild blasterfire around them faltered, then ceased.
Even the hair-trigger crew could see there was nothing for them to shoot at.
The illuminating stars hit the ground, one by one, sputtered and began to wink out. At the edge of the flares’ dying light, a tiny yellow dot arced silently up into the black sky. To the right and left, two more dots shot skyward. They climbed higher and higher until the companions lost track of them as they passed, whistling, overhead.
Then gasoline bombs burst in the center of the circle.
J.B. came to the same conclusion Ryan had. “There’s no sound, no flash when the fuel grens are launched,” he told the others. “They’re u
sing some kind of mechanical launcher. They’ve got them dug in below ground, out of the line of fire. There’s no way to hit and break the Molotovs with small arms before they’re catapulted. They aren’t even visible until the throwing arm swings up, and by then it’s too late.”
“What about RPGs?” Krysty said. “Couldn’t they use those?”
“The cannie targets are only visible at the instant of launch,” J.B. said. “And then they’re just pinpoints of light. Hell of a trick to lob an RPG into a hole in the ground 150 yards away in the dead of night.”
A cluster of Molotovs exploded directly above their heads, making the 6x6 shudder, spilling liquid fire down its metal flanks and onto the dirt around it. Intense heat and the stench of burning fuel engulfed the companions.
“The cannibal bombardment appears to be coming at us from all sides,” Doc said.
“There’s no telling how many launchers they’ve got out there,” Mildred said.
“Cannies knew this was a favorite overnight spot for convoys,” J.B. said. “Probably got their butts kicked here a bunch of times before they figured out a way to attack it. Catapults would be easy to hide in excavated positions. Cover them with mats and dirt during the day. Uncover them after dark with the ranges already zeroed in.”
J.B. didn’t have to point out that gasoline bombs were a highly effective homemade munition, and they had the double advantage of pinning down the targets and lighting up the kill zone for longblasters. A perfect tactical choice under the circumstances.
As if underscoring that conclusion, the 6x6 was again rocked by overlapping explosions and blasts of heat.
“They’ve locked in on us,” Krysty said.
“Biggest wag, biggest target,” J.B. said.
Even as he spoke, a different sort of smoke began to filter under the wag. Blacker. Thicker. Chokingly abrasive.
Jak put his palm against the undercarriage, then immediately jerked it away. “Hot!” he said in surprise.