by James Axler
Better men had tried and failed. Ryan changed the subject. “So each of the bunkers seems to have been stocked differently.”
“So it seems. We have used the radio at Val-d’Or and tried the Borden one, as well. No other bunker responds. The computer links between them fell long ago. We don’t really know the disposition of the other bunkers. But whatever their function, they must be a treasure trove. We decided an expedition west would be the best course. We would head for Borden. If successful there—” Toulalan grinned again “—we would make an attempt for Shilo Diefenbunker in Manitoba.”
Ryan did a little math with the maps he’d recently seen. “That’s a long haul.”
“Indeed.” Toulalan didn’t seem overly concerned.
Both men knew the other wasn’t revealing all his cards. “And those coldhearts?”
“We have you to thank for bloodying their noses. I suspect they won’t be back. Also, according to traders, the farther west you go, the flatter and more open the land becomes. Also, villes in the center are increasingly farther apart and increasingly more primitive. I believe we will be able to roll past them, using their awe at our trade goods and the offensive power and majesty of our convoy.”
“And if this hard freeze of yours hits before you’re back in Val-d’Or?”
“We have lost a bit of time, that is true, but once we hit the central plains it should be, how do you say, a straight shot.”
“And if we get caught with winter coming on?”
“My friend, I have considered that. You have seen the inside of the Borden Diefenbunker. The one in Val-d’Or also had the same stocks of frozen food. I assume the one in Shilo does, as well. If we reach Shilo, we’ll give the weather a hard appraisal. If we know we won’t make it, we turn back. Either way, should worse comes to worst, we can winter in either bunker, warm, safe and fed until spring. Should you not wish to winter with us, as I say, you can always run south for your warmer Deathlands.”
There were more than a few major “ifs” and question marks involved, but exploration was risk personified. In the end Ryan had to admit it wasn’t a bad plan. He wanted to see more of this land that was new to him.
“And, so?” Toulalan inquired.
Krysty spoke first. Ryan knew her reservations and was glad she did. She stuck out her hand to Toulalan. “We’re in.”
Toulalan ignored the proffered hand, and Krysty’s body stiffened in shock as Toulalan kissed her on both cheeks. Only the fact that he seemed so smiling and pleased, and Ryan had seen that the rest of convoy behaved this way, kept the one-eyed man from challenging the man. To Krysty’s horror Toulalan started to lean in to give her lover the same treatment. Something in Ryan’s single blue eye made Toulalan stop short at the last moment. He shoved out his hand awkwardly between them. “Well…good! Very good! I’ll tell the others. They’ll be most pleased to have you among us.”
Ryan shook the man’s hand, and he and Krysty walked back to tell their friends. Krysty’s cheeks were flushed red and not because she was blushing. “If he does that again I’ll kill him.”
Ryan grinned. “Not if I get to him first.”
THE CONVOY WAS READY to roll. Ryan’s LAV would be positioned roughly in the middle. Except for the big rig it was high enough to shoot over all the other wags. The armored wag’s huge, aggressive off-road tires would allow it to break formation to either side and rush forward or back if need be. The two off-road armed wags formed outriders on the sides. The ancient El Camino sheathed in chicken armor was on point, and the engineering LAV’s armor and machine gun protected the rear.
Cyrielle Toulalan approached the LAV. “Ryan!”
The one-eyed man nodded from the turret. “Yeah?”
“A word, please.”
Ryan hopped down. “Yeah?”
“You have driven a…” Cyrielle’s English wasn’t as good as her brother’s. “Big rig?”
“Yeah?”
“Mmm.” Cyrielle walked over to the semi and Ryan followed her. She pointed at a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield.
“You lost your driver,” Ryan surmised.
“Oui.” She nodded.
Ryan sighed. Krysty walked over. “What’s up, lover?”
“They need me to drive the semi.”
Krysty’s green eyes narrowed. “We need you in the war wag.”
“We’re part of this convoy now. Big wag like this takes know-how. I got it. Jak can drive the LAV and J.B. can fight it.”
Krysty didn’t blink. “I need you in the war wag. With me.”
“The convoy needs someone who can drive this rig.” Ryan gave Krysty an experimental smile. “And I need someone to ride shotgun with me.”
“I don’t have a shotgun.”
“We’ll find you something.”
Krysty sighed and slid her hand into Ryan’s. “Let’s take a look at her.”
Cyrielle clapped her hands.
Ryan examined his new ride. It was a Kenworth. It had been extensively modified with giant off-road tires and a new suspension. A hatch in the roof over the passenger seat opened onto a ring-mounted machine blaster. Ryan suspected it was a Diefenbunker special, and it was just about cherry, save for the slightly ominous bullet hole in the driver’s-side windshield patched with a piece of scrap metal. Krysty’s hands slid out of his and they climbed into the cab through opposite doors. There were some cracks in the plastic dash, and whatever ancient leather had once upholstered the cab had been replaced with deerskin. The driver’s seat had dried bloodstains on it. There was what looked like a functional hot plate, chem toilet and a bunk in the back.
Krysty ran a finger over the laced leather of her armrest. “Plush wag.”
It had been a while since Ryan had been behind the wheel of a major cargo wag. Toulalan walked up and waved. “You like?”
Ryan hurled a shrug back at the Quebecer. “It’s okay.”
Toulalan kissed his fingertips, popped his lips and walked away.
The biggest problem with wags in the Deathlands was the lack of batteries. That usually meant cartridge or crank ignition. Seriah walked up and pulled the crank handle from the rack above the bumper. She grinned and shoved the crank spoke through the hole in the grille.
Ryan leaned out the driver’s window. “Light it up!”
Seriah hurled her tiny frame against the crank handle and spun it in a huge circle. Ryan tapped the gas pedal lightly at the apogee of the crank. The turbine turned over, whined and trembled on the first attempt. Seriah jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “Très bien!”
Ryan pulled the horn chain and the Kenworth bellowed like a twentieth-century dinosaur into the postapocalyptic Canadian sky. The people of the convoy hit their horns, leaned out of their windows and clapped and whistled in response. “Ryan! Ryan! Ryan!” they called. Their enthusiasm was infectious. Krysty’s full lips twisted in a smile. “I’ll go tell J.B. he’s in command of the LAV.”
Chapter Six
“Hey, Mace! Lars is wormy, eh!”
Baron Mace Henning glowered out of his hammock at his sec man. “Baron to you, Shorty.”
Shorty lived up to his name. He made up for it with an almost artistic appreciation of violence. They had been partners as sec men until Mace had led a coup and made himself baron. Shorty had backed him. Sometimes when Shorty got excited he forgot protocol and flashed back to the old days. “Uh, sorry, Baron. Lars is like, definitely ’fected. Too bad, he’d just earned his loonie.”
Henning rolled out of his sleeping sling and walked over to the campfire. Shorty heeled after him like a faithful dog.
Mace Henning was a huge, sagging bull of man. His short curly red hair and beard were shot through with gray. Green eyes peered out of a nearly permane
nt squint. Even in his youth no one had ever accused him of being handsome. A badly set broken nose and the dent in the ride side of his face from a fractured cheekbone hadn’t helped matters. Scar tissue beneath his left eyebrow raised it up a tad higher than his right. It made it look like anyone or anything he laid his gaze upon was being weighed, measured and found wanting.
He or she usually was.
He had sixty-eight armed men in the saddle. He’d had seventy-five but the tide of yesterday’s battle had turned into a costly and unpleasant surprise. His best men greeted him as they rolled up hammocks, wolfed their breakfast of jerky and pine tea or prepped their bikes, wags or weapons. A sizable crowd of his new-hire coldhearts was gathered in a circle beyond the campfire, morning maple-liquor ration in hand and watching the entertainment.
The circle parted for the baron. Mace turned his gaze on Lars. The buckskin-clad sec man was red-eyed and lunging at the chain tethering him to a motorcycle lying on its side. He’d shown worm-sign just before dark the night before. Sometimes other maladies could be mistaken for early worm symptom, so they had chained him and waited while he begged and pleaded and screamed he’d just eaten something bad.
Lars was definitely infected. His muscles rippled with Herculean effort and infestation. The man’s fingers curled into claws as he lunged again. The motorcycle weighed around five hundred pounds. Each lunge dragged it a few inches along. The baron stood unconcernedly a bare meter out of range of the filthy clawing hands. In his hand Mace carried his badge of office and the source of his nickname. It was a blackthorn club about two feet long. The root ball at the end was as big around as a large apple, and he had drilled out its center and “hot-shotted” it by pouring in molten lead to give it killing end-weight.
“Hey, Baron?” Shorty asked.
Mace heaved a sigh. Shorty combined the traits of not being particularly bright but also being something of a ponderer. Mace didn’t take his eyes off Lars and his carnivorous, worm-fested carryings-on. “What?”
“What do you think goes through a man’s mind? I mean, you know, like, when the worms get to his brain and stuff?”
Some of the sec men muttered in amusement. Shorty’s ponderings didn’t exactly soar up into rarified intellectual heights. Mace moved with the sudden, stunning speed most of his opponents never expected. He whipped his club up and around like a tennis serve and sank it through Lars’s skull. The scout dropped to his knees and fell face-first into the dirt. The sec men gaped. The baron shrugged carelessly as he pulled his bludgeon free of Lars’s brainpan. “Probably not much more than that.”
The men roared.
The baron reached down and snapped a leather thong from around his former scout’s neck. An old, predark, Canadian dollar coin—known as a loonie for the waterfowl on one side—hung from it. Mace closed his fist around the coin. Shorty was right. It was too bad, but Lars wasn’t from around here, and it looked like he hadn’t heeded the warnings. And even if you took every precaution, sometimes the worms found a way. Mace jerked his head at the corpse. Filth was already squirming into activity in the shattered skull. “Butch, Ledge.”
Butch and Ledge were twins. The two lanky, ponytailed young men came forward unlimbering their clubs. Theirs weren’t as fancy as Mace’s. They were just well-turned, tapered lengths of hickory each with a gaff hook imbedded in it. Butch and Ledge were local boys. They knew what to do from long experience and weren’t squeamish about it. They quickly broke Lars’s knees and elbows. Lars started twitching as worms writhed beneath his dead flesh. Arms and legs were levers, and denied the fulcrum of the knees and elbows, the best the worms’ contractions could manage was some awkward heaving and flopping. The two men expertly shattered Lars’s jaw to keep him honest and his collarbones to keep him armless. They gaffed him through the armpits, and the other sec men shoved out of the way warily as the twin exterminators dragged Lars’s twitching corpse over to the campfire and heaved him into the flames.
Mace went for a walk while his men oohed and aahed in fascination as Lars’s carcass slowly twisted and burned and worms snaked out of his body in a panic only to wriggle, blister and burst in the flames. Mace jerked his head at a man in passing. “Tag.”
Skin Tag rose and followed his baron. The mutie’s name said it all. Skin tags a half-inch long covered every inch of his exposed body. They covered his head like hair. The only place he didn’t visibly have them were on his eyelids and the palms of his hands. Mace had never cared to look, but it was rumored they covered the rest of Tag’s body, including his dangle. Rumor was some women liked it, but even Shorty wasn’t dumb enough to ponder it in Tag’s face. Mutie or not, Tag was just about the most dangerous man Mace had ever encountered, and one of the smartest. But beyond his skill with blaster and blade or his ruthless cunning, it was something radiation and mutation had set inside his skull that made him a gold mine.
Tag could sense other muties, even ones that outwardly appeared perfectly normal.
When Mace had first met him, Tag was making a living out of it. He would appear at the gates of villes that were known to kill or drive out muties. What had been central Canada had taken the least of skydark’s damage. Human muties were a lot rarer there and often more feared and reviled than in the Deathlands or what was left of Canada’s coasts. Tag would appear at the villes on the plains and throw back his robe. Seconds before they shot him he would shout out that unclean as he was, he could detect the unclean among them. Mace had been a sec man in such a ville in Saskatchewan when Tag made an appearance. Mace’s first instinct was to crush Tag’s fleshy-headed mutant skull for the charlatan he was, but the baron was obsessed about keeping the gene pool clean and demanded a demonstration. Tag had walked straight toward a sec man named Voor. Mace had known Voor for years, but Tag pointed a melodramatic finger at Voor in judgment.
“Mutie.”
At the baron’s order Mace and the other sec men had grabbed Voor, howling and struggling, and had stripped him. The crowd had gasped at the pale baby fingers protruding from Voor’s underarms. Mace didn’t give a dark night one way or the other about muties, but he’d crushed Voor’s skull instantly and without being asked, much to his baron’s rabid approval. Tag found two more victims. Afterward he had been given food, jack, ammo for his blaster, and at his strange request, allowed to take any books of his choice from the ville if the ville had any of the rare items. The baron generously allowed Tag to sleep in the ville that night. In a bed.
That night the baron had decided to keep Tag around for the sake of the ville’s genetic hygiene and ordered Mace to kneecap Tag and chain him. Mace had bigger plans. He found Tag in his room, and instead helped Tag to escape and proposed a partnership. It was simple. They went from ville to ville. Tag would go first and perform his act and receive his reward. However, if he found several mutants, he would allow one or two to escape undetected. The next day Mace would come to the ville posing as a trader. That night he would inform the undisclosed muties of their impending discovery and relieve them of everything of value that Mace could put in his pack.
It was a profitable racket and went on for several seasons. Finally they had come all the way east to Ontario. There they found a ville on the brink. Tag pulled his act but Mace stayed on. The ville was prosperous, but the baron was old, he had no sons and his sec men were already forming factions for the succession. Mace had joined up, ingratiated himself and become the baron’s right-hand man. Mace recruited a small, very hard-core corps out of the various factions, starting with Shorty. Meanwhile, Tag lurked. It was something he was very good at.
One night Mace and his picked cadre silently slaughtered the baron and his family, but let his two daughters live. The ville had awakened to find Mace Henning enthroned, entrenched in the hall. Though well bruised and abused, the old baron’s daughters acknowledged Mace as heir. It had almost turned into ville civil war until Mace pulled his a
ce card. Tag appeared out of nowhere. He pointed at Mace’s main rival and said the dreaded word.
“Mutie.”
It didn’t matter that the man showed no sign. The people of the ville had seen Tag ferret mutants out earlier in the spring. The accused’s own men turned on him. Strangely enough, over the course of the next few days, most dissenters or loyalists to the old regime found themselves declared mutie and found themselves summarily shot. Strangely enough, after the coup, Baron Mace Henning discovered a tolerance for human muties as long as they were useful and fell short of outright abominations, and they began flocking to him and his ville in a slow, steady and extremely loyal trickle.
Tag had been Mace’s right-hand man ever since, and the only man he let call him Mace, though even then only in private.
Mace and Tag hadn’t stopped at usurping a backwater ville. They had turned their former blackmail victims across Canada into a web of informants. Knowledge was power, and Mace had waxed strong. Half a dozen villes paid him yearly tribute, and word of what was going on in other villes he had yet to conquer or intimidate was nonetheless whispered in Mace’s ear.
Mace had had his eye on Val-d’Or for some time.
The previous year Tag had pulled his act in Val-d’Or, and what he had discovered had been a game-changer in Mace’s dreams of conquest, and his plans for the ville.
Tag followed the baron on a slow walk around the raiding camp. “Mace?”
“What do you think, Tag?”
“About the battle?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t like it.”
Mace snorted and spit. Yesterday had hurt. “Pulling out that third armored wag, like an ace in hole. I didn’t expect that out of Toulalan. Oh, he’s smart, mind you. Too smart for his own good, a damned intellectual, but he ain’t battle clever. Not like us. He’s shown us that more than once. Him switching tactics like that stinks of something. Maybe he’s finally started listening to Six.” Mace’s ugly face flushed angrily. Six had been a thorn in his side for years. “And why none of the boys can seem to put a bullet in that son of a bitch is beyond me.”