Hell Road Warriors

by James Axler

  Mildred screamed.

  Ryan fired three 9 mm hollowpoint rounds through the dead boar’s head.

  The boar’s skull broke apart, spewing broken lengths of black worm. The porcine behemoth staggered but didn’t fall. Fresh worms waved forth from the shattered cranium and snout as if tasting the air. The boar corpse tottered toward the humans. Ryan holstered his SIG-Sauer and spun the Scout off of his shoulder. He flicked the bolt as he backed up. “Fireblast…”

  The entire fifty-strong herd of giant, newly dead, mutie wild boars began rolling over and rising up.

  “J.B....” Ryan kept backing up. “Get to the LAV. Load HE. Jak, get behind the wheel.”

  It took a lot to shake up J.B. The Armorer’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates behind his glasses as he backed up alongside Ryan. “Right.”

  “Run!” Ryan roared.

  J.B. ran. Jak was already gone.

  Six’s guide gun thundered as he put a .45-70 shell into the hog’s sagging skull. The pig kept coming. Ryan raised his rifle. “Forget the head!” The Scout bucked against the one-eyed man’s shoulder, and the pig formed a porcine tripod as the bullet shattered its shoulder blade. He flicked the bolt and his next bullet crushed the hog’s opposite collarbone. The undead pig went snout-first into the dirt. “Take their wheels!”

  “Oui, Ryan!” Six flicked the lever of his rifle and blasted apart a corpulent, pulsating sow’s femur. “Everyone! Back to the convoy! Allez! Allez!”

  Humans ran.

  The pigs shambled forward. There was no squealing. The only noise the dead animals made was the thud of their huge hooves in the soft soil and the sickening crackle of their muscles, joints and fascia as their corpses were manipulated from within. Mildred and Doc began shooting pig knees. Ryan flicked his bolt and fired with mechanical precision. “Yoann! Get your people in the wags! Button up!”

  Toulalan shouted to his people in French and they scattered. Six and his men kept shooting. Ryan fired his clip dry and clawed for a fresh one. “J.B.!” A thousand-pound pig tottered toward Ryan, worms waving out of its eyes like flesh-detecting divining rods. “J.B.!”

  The closest hog burst like a balloon as it took J.B.’s 25 mm high-explosive shell broadside. “Everyone! Up on wags! Go! Go! Go!” The firing line ran for the convoy as J.B. cut loose. The LAV’s automatic cannon slammed in slow, aimed fire. Hogs exploded in sprays of blood, bone and black worms. Ryan leaped up into the bed of an ancient Toyota Tacoma jacked up on off-road wheels. He pulled Krysty up after him. The pickup had a MAG machine gun mounted on a post. Ryan got behind it and racked a round into the chamber.

  Doc stood in front of the march of the monster hogs with his LeMat forgotten in his fist. He stared at the oncoming creatures quizzically and discoursed to no one in particular. “I have never seen nor heard of such coordinated effort among an invertebrate species. Well, bees, ants and some other social species, yes, but among annelids imbedded in a host animal? Truly this species is—”

  “Doc, get out of there!” Ryan roared.

  Doc suddenly seemed to notice a pair of pigs lurching toward him for the first time. “Ah! Yes! Right! Very good!” Doc turned as Ryan began putting bursts into the offending animals. Doc pulled up short as another pig tottered between him and Ryan. “Oh bother.”

  “Here!” Mildred shouted. She stood on the hood of an old police cruiser covered with hillbilly armor with Six twenty yards away. “Here!”

  Doc hightailed it with his coat flapping behind him. Six grabbed him by his collar and heaved him to the roof. The pigs were among the convoy. It was too close for cannon work. Jak sent the LAV rolling forward and ground several hogs into hamburger under the LAV’s eight massive road wheels.

  “Six!” Toulalan shouted from the top of his camper wag and pointed at the engineering LAV. “Le LAV! Le LAV!”

  Six shoved his rifle into Mildred’s startled hands. She shook her head in horror. “No! Six! Don’t—”

  Six jumped from the hood and ran for the other LAV. He wove through the hulking, undead horrors like a fullback breaking tackles. He literally ran up the engineering vehicle’s dozer blade and jammed down the driver’s hatch. The engine roared into the life and the dozer blade rose with a whine. Six followed Jak’s example of pitting 34,000 pounds of steel against half-ton worm-controlled meat puppets.

  Steel won.

  The people of the convoy huddled on the hoods and roofs of their wags and fired down into their attackers. A vast amount of the fire was doing little good.

  “Toulalan!” Ryan bellowed over the sound of battle. “Get the wags rolling! Pull away and let the LAVs finish it!”

  “Oui, Ryan!” Toulalan jumped from the top of his wag and slammed the driver’s door closed seconds behind the snapping tusks of a sow.

  He shouted to Cyrielle on top. “Hold on!” The air horn blared the signal to pull out.

  Ryan was nearly knocked from his feet as the pickup beneath him lurched. A huge hog had lowered its head against the passenger door. The pickup slewed. The behemoth boar lowered its snout beneath the chassis. Worms extruding out of its ears pointed at Ryan and Krysty almost in accusation. The chassis creaked and lurched again.

  The pig was going to roll the pickup.

  Ryan tilted the machine gun down and dropped the hammer on the hog. Bones splintered and shattered. Metal-jacketed bullets pulverized the pig’s shoulders into masticated meat. The creature fell forward, its legs shattered.

  “Krysty! Drive!”

  The woman limboed through the driver’s window and slid behind the wheel. The engine roared and the pickup bucked as she rolled over the fallen hog’s head with a crunch. Krysty drove the pickup a good fifty yards away from any carcass moving or not. The convoy pulled out of its defensive circle, leaving the remaining creatures suddenly milling around in a lost fashion. Only Doc and Mildred stayed on the roof of their wag. Neither seemed eager to jump down and start the car. But they were a lone island now rather than part of a confused melee.

  Jak and Six descended like ironclad guardian angels. The two men seemed to be in race to see who could reduce the most pounds of pork flesh into mulch. J.B. stood in the turret watching the perimeter as the destruction derby wound down.

  Ryan tapped the roof of the pickup. “Let’s get Doc and Mildred.”

  Krysty rolled up to the old sec cruiser. The field around it was a butcher’s morass. Ryan held out his hand. “Mildred, Doc, jump here in the back. I’ll drive that one.”

  The two men handled Mildred across. Ryan held out his hand to Doc, who was looking at the strip of ground between the two vehicles. The broken worms seemed to have no life left in them but many were still whole. Ryan watched as those that were burrowed into the soft dirt.

  “Ryan.”

  “Yeah, Doc?”

  “I think we should only eat food from the Diefenbunkers, or dried goods.”

  “Right.”

  “We should boil any water we drink,” Doc added.

  “Right.”

  The two men watched as the last of the worms disappeared into the earth, leaving nothing but steaming flesh and crushed bone behind.

  “No one should sleep on the ground.”

  Ryan was losing that loving feeling for Canada right quick.

  Chapter Five

  “Did you see that!” Mildred was incensed. She was outraged and paced in circles, waving her arms. “Goddamn Night of the Pigging Dead!” No one got her reference, but everyone took her meaning. The convoy was almost half a mile away. They had left behind camp gear and equipment, a heartbreakingly sizable spread of food and a sea of spent brass. No one wanted to wade through the swathes of goop rotting in the sun or risk what might be squirming beneath in an attempt at salvage. Ryan and his friends were having a private pa
laver behind their LAV. “I’ll take good old-fashioned American deserts, rads and stickies any day of the week!”

  Ryan pulled the chain of his flexible cleaning rod through the Scout’s barrel. The new longblaster had been baptized the hard way and seen him through. Ryan shook his head. He’d seen more horrors than he cared to think about in his travels. That last bit had been bad. “J.B.?”

  The Armorer was on the same page. “That was bad.”

  “Doc?”

  “The coordinated effort of the annelids, particularly once their porcine hosts were obviously postmortem, clearly bespoke some sort of collective intelligence,” Doc enthused. “Really quite extraordinary. I would be curious as to—”

  “Jak?” Ryan asked.

  “Bad,” Jak agreed.

  Mildred had already spoken her mind. It wasn’t something she ever had much problem with. Ryan looked at Krysty. She sat at the top of the LAV’s ramp door and hugged her knees. Her good feelings for this land had been rocked like everyone else’s. However her connection to the earth left her a little more sensitive to abominations.

  Ryan wiped down his weapon, loaded it and put the cleaning kit back in the recess in the stock. “So, jump? Run south? Keep going?”

  “Either of the later.” Doc sighed. “But you know I will jump if it must be.”

  “I know.” Ryan nodded. “Thanks.”

  J.B. finished running a rag over his M-4000 shotgun and began loading fléchette and slug rounds. “South.”

  “South?” Krysty sighed. “Alone? It’s four hundred miles to anywhere we’ve been, much less heard of. Got coldhearts to the north. Those…things to the south. Mebbe there’s safety in numbers. Mebbe the plains will be better. Mebbe we should head west with a convoy a bit more before we break and run south.”

  It was a lot of mebbes, but she had a point.

  “Jak?”

  “West,” Jak replied.

  Mildred’s lips quirked. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with a little grease monkey in coveralls?”

  Everyone looked over at the engineer LAV. A short girl with curly brown hair covered by a bandanna was perched on top, half in and half out of the engine compartment wrenching away. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but her big brown eyes, full lower lip and dimpled chin were something to look at. She currently had a smudge of grease on the tip of her nose. For the past twenty-four hours Jak’s ruby-red gaze often strayed to whatever wag she was working on, and she seemed to work wags 24/7. He lifted his chin at the mechanic.

  “Name’s Seriah. Yeah.” Jak nodded at Ryan again. “West.”

  “Mildred?”

  “What the hell, west. The weather’s nice. The food is good. The people seem friendly.”

  J.B. stared hard at Mildred. “Six seems real friendly.”

  Everyone stared at the Armorer’s comment.

  Mildred stared in wonder. “J. B. Dix, are you jealous?”

  J.B. snatched up his shotgun and stomped away without another word.

  Ryan looked around the circle. “We got five votes west. In a while I’ll—”

  “It’s unanimous.” The Armorer stomped back just as quickly. “West it is.”

  Mildred stepped toward him. “J.B.?”

  “Doc?” J.B. reached into his pocket and held out what appeared to be six beige wine corks.

  Doc took the objects and exposed his gleaming white teeth. “These are suspiciously of a 16-gauge conformation.”

  “They’re high explosive. Those pigs got me thinking. Can’t just shoot them full of holes. That’s an ounce of HE. Should shatter some bones.”

  “Thank you, J.B. I shall refit myself this instant.” Doc set about reloading his LeMat.

  “J.B.?” Mildred questioned.

  “Walk?” he asked.

  Mildred slid her arm in his. “I’d love to.” The two of them walked off in a circuit of the wag camp.

  Ryan took Krysty’s hand. “Let’s sign up.” They walked back to the circled wags. People were checking loads and prepping to go. Toulalan watched the proceedings. His sister Cyrielle and Six seemed to be doing most of the directing. Toulalan stood by his personal wag. It was a Chevy Silverado, lovingly maintained, with a camper mounted in the bed. Unlike a lot of the vehicles it was almost miraculously free of bullet strikes.

  Ryan had taken an informal survey of the convoy’s vehicles. They currently had twelve wags rolling and four motorbikes. The big rig, the engineering LAV and Toulalan’s home on wheels were the most spectacular. Ryan counted three armed wags—a pair of pickups and an El Camino, sheathed in sheet-iron chicken armor with post-mounted machine guns in the truck beds. An old ambulance was stuffed with Diefenbunker med supplies. Six’s jacked-up Crown Victoria was almost unrecognizable under the added-on plate. The rest of the vehicles had been repaired, rebuilt and remodified so many times the lines of their original pedigree had been lost. The convoy consisted of about seventy-seven souls at the moment, not counting Ryan and the companions.

  “Impressive collection,” Ryan said.

  Toulalan smiled delightedly. “Merci. We’re quite proud of it!”

  “Is your next destination another bunker?”

  “Indeed.”

  “So how come no one has cracked these Diefenbunkers before?” Ryan asked.

  “Long before skydark, there was the cold war. You’ve heard of it, no?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, well, the Diefenbunkers were built for the cold war, but when she was won, they were deactivated. They became museums. After skydark, why go to a cold bare hole in the ground? The few who did, found the massive blast doors locked to them. The Diefenbunkers were placed out in the countryside. There was no time for historical expeditions when most were simply trying to live one more day.”

  “But you cracked one.”

  Toulalan smiled slyly. “My father did. Would you like to hear the story?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Val-d’Or means ‘Valley of Gold.’ We were a mining town, and in our valley far from the horror that fell. Of course, regardless, in the nuclear winter, many died, the ville contracted. But being a mining town we knew construction. The ville was also fortified. We dug a system of tunnels beneath the ville to survive the winter. Again, many died, but still many lived. Our forests were thick with timber and thick with game. Rivers and lakes abounded. Come the new hard freeze, huge herds of animals migrated south before it. There is always a great culling and smoking of meat. We survived on that, in some ways better than other villes farther south. We were far enough north not to take much radiation or be faced with the horrors it brought with it, but south enough that we could reap the benefit of the freeze without being hit by it, except only once every few years.”

  “But you cracked your bunker.”

  “My father found a cache of papers. They were—how do you say?—eyes only, for the mayor of Val-d’Or and few of the civic leaders. There was a flurry of activity at the Diefenbunker, construction, top secret, right before skydark, but the local people were never aware of it. That convinced my father there might be something down below the earth besides empty desks and concrete.”

  “How did you get in?”

  Toulalan thumped his chest proudly. “The men of Val-d’Or have always been miners! My father figured the bunker must be like, oh…” He pointed at the LAV. “More heavily armored on the top than the bottom. A thick foundation, yes, but not hardened against the nukes like the top, no? He sank a shaft down and came up underneath. It took three years of effort, whenever that effort could be spared, but in the end my papa broke inside! I was with him!”

  “What did you find?”

  Toulalan kissed his fingertips and grinned. “Potatoes!”

  Ryan blinked. “Pota
toes?”

  “Seed potatoes, actually, preserved for the future. There was a vast storehouse of them. The people weren’t pleased. Oh, there were blasters and medical supplies, a machine shop and much that was useful, but the men of Val-d’Or had survived since skydark as miners, hunters and fisherman. We weren’t farmers. Many said we couldn’t afford the time to take up the plow. Our spring and summer were for catching as much meat and fish as possible and smoking it for the long winter.” Toulalan smiled in happy memory. “My father joked that we lived half our lives underground like potatoes anyway. In the end he convinced them. We planted. There was trial and error, but that first season there was a crop. The seed potatoes had been modified, with the conditions of the new world in mind. They were hardy, resistant to the cold and matured quickly to take advantage of the brief warmth.”

  “And suddenly you had a surplus,” Ryan surmised.

  “Yes, no longer were we dependent upon hunting, fishing, trapping and the always uncertain migrations. We had a food staple, and we now had time for other things. We built more. Learned more. The seed bunkers also contained a number of other vegetables, and more importantly, hemp. It grew like, well, a weed in the short spring. We cleared forest and planted that, too. With that we had hemp seed oil and seeds to supplement our diet, textiles and paper. Hemp oil can be used directly to fuel diesel engines. We’re very busy underground during the winter, spinning, pressing manufacturing. We still hunt and fish, but now we mine once again, as well. Val-d’Or has gold, silver, zinc and lead. Whoever stocked the Val-d’Or Diefenbunker had put a great deal of thought into local survival.”

  Ryan glanced back at the Borden Diefenbunker. “No seeds in that one.”

  “No, instead there were bays for armored wags, and equipment and spares to repair them. There were also many, many blasters.” Toulalan shot Ryan another pointed look. “And a strange chamber of glass.”

  “We saw that.” Ryan shrugged. “But it was the beer and pizza that grabbed our attention.”

  “Mmm.” Toulalan nodded, but his eyes were seriously trying to read what Ryan was really thinking.