Hell Road Warriors

by James Axler

  Ryan spoke quietly. “I’m not going to fight you, Six.”

  Six’s hands stayed exactly where they were. There wasn’t a tremble or tic to them. They just eerily hung in space over his weapons. “I’m very glad to hear that, Ryan.”

  “I’m taking my people. I’m leaving.”

  “Mildred stays.”

  Ryan was getting very tired of being threatened this morning. “I’m taking her with me.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  “I’ve seen you, Six,” Ryan stated. “I’m faster.”

  “I’ll still take you with me.”

  Ryan’s burning gaze went dead. “You’ll try.”

  Doc sighed heavily. “We are all on the same side. We have mutual enemies. Cannot there be some form of compromise?”

  “I’m not compromising Mildred,” Ryan stated.

  “No,” Jak agreed.

  “Then let us come to an agreement,” Doc suggested.

  Cyrielle’s voice was tight. “Six doesn’t demand Mildred for himself, but for my brother’s life.”

  “I know that,” Ryan acknowledged. “That doesn’t change anything. I’ll make it simple. You want to run the locks, I’m in command. You want your convoy to make it to those reactors, I’m in command. I’ve been in fights on the water, on the land, in the air and below the ground. I’ve led convoys. Six, you’re tough, and you’re smart, and I’ll give it to you. The day I try to nightcreep Val-d’Or, there’s a good chance you’ll take my hair. But that’s just it. You’ve been thinking defensively the entire time. We’re going on the offense. Lady Cyrielle, you take charge of your people, but all military decisions are mine.

  “Captain, you’ve fought pirates in canoes. I’ve fought ship to ship. You run your crew, but all naval decisions are mine. No discussion. If you don’t like it, me and mine leave. If you don’t like that, we kill each other now.”

  Goose and Boo seemed to appear out of nowhere. They fell into formation behind Ryan. Goose looked around sincerely. “I’ll tell you something. Not all First Nations tribes agree or get along. But in bad times—I’m not saying we give up our rights or laws or nothing—we elect a war chief. Give him command to get us through. Me and Boo are First Nations. Lady Cyrielle, you and yours are French. Captain McKenzie and his are Canucks and sailors. Ryan’s people are Deathlanders. I’m not saying anyone gives up anything, but I nominate Ryan war chief on the water and war chief on the land until we get what we came for, and part ways. Laden with profit.”

  McKenzie spoke with gravity. “I’m captain of the Queen. You want to be captain? It’s easy. Kill me. Then you’re captain. If the crew’ll have you. But as long as I’m captain, I’ll accept Ryan as war chief upon the waters.”

  Cyrielle took a deep breath.

  Six shook his head. “My lady! I beg of you! For your brother’s—”

  “Ryan is convoy commander.”

  Ryan’s eyes never left Six. As far as he had seen, the huge sec man had never expressed any emotion other than rage or scornful bemusement. He wore his heart on his sleeve now, and it was breaking apart. His hands dropped limply to his sides as he turned away. His mighty shoulders sagged as if the weight of the entire nuked planet was pushing them down.

  His voice was a ghostly rasp of its normal boom. “As you wish…”

  The big man walked away, and Cyrielle followed, speaking in rapid French. Six wasn’t listening. He waved her away.

  Ryan shook his head. “This isn’t good.”

  Krysty gave his hand a squeeze. “Tell you something else that isn’t good.”

  “What?”

  “Six is in love with Cyrielle.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Heave!” McKenzie hollered from the promenade. “Heave, you scurvy, rad-blasted bastards!”

  Crew and convoy heaved and groaned on the docks; timbers heaved and groaned on the beach; the capstans groaned; ropes groaned; the cranes groaned and bent dangerously. A LAV 3 swung perilously in the air. It was a madly dangerous operation. The Queen’s two cranes worked in conjunction with a newly hewed tripod-winch of mast-size timbers. Between them the LAV slowly oscillated over the loading ramp like a seventeen-ton pendulum. The capstans ratcheted another notch and stopped. The men on the capstan spars moaned with frustrated effort. The men on the tripod ropes bit through their lips as they strained to the utmost. Immense weight met human will and hung in the balance by mere ounces of effort.

  The LAV would go no farther.

  The native population of Manitoulin Island thronged the docks and watched with the fascination of people waiting for something absolutely terrible to happen. The capstans were jammed three men per spar. There was no more room. Only coils of tripod rope remained. As Ryan shrugged out of his coat, Krysty put a hand on his shoulder. “Lover, someone’s going to get herniated, and it had better not be you.”

  Ryan stripped off his shirt and spit on his hands as he strode up the line to the end coils of the winch rope.

  McKenzie hollered once more. “Heave! Heave, you bastards! Heave till your hearts break! Heave till your balls burst! But heave, you bastards! Heave!”

  Ryan wrapped his callused hands around the rope and roared in response. “Heave!”

  The men hurled themselves against the horrible, inexorable, dead, iron-clad weight of the LAV as their new war chief joined the line. They shouted with renewed effort. “Heave!”

  Ryan heard his joints pop and crackle with strain. The LAV jerked up another foot.

  “Heave!” McKenzie thundered.

  Ryan and the pullers shouted back and pulled. “Heave!”

  The LAV jerked up another foot.

  Momentum began to gather.

  Blacktree walked up pulling off his doeskin shirt and took anchor behind Ryan.

  “Heave!” the captain called.

  Boo Blacktree’s strength stopped just short of being inhuman. Ryan felt him taking up slack and heaved to meet it. “Heave!”

  Hearts hammered. Blood pulsed in men’s temples. Backs threatened to give way. Flesh threatened to fail. But suddenly every man knew this thing might be done.

  McKenzie hurled his voice to the heavens. “Heave!”

  “Heave!” the call came back.

  Six strode shirtless up to the rope line. His torso was an ebony tree trunk of power. He stepped in behind Blacktree and took rope into his mighty hands. “Men of Val-d’Or!” he challenged. “Show these Canucks what Québécois can do!”

  “Heave!” McKenzie shouted.

  Even in quiet conversation Six’s voice sounded like distant thunder. Now the storm broke out in French. “Tirez!”

  Every Quebecer convoy man roared and pulled with smooth and sudden power. “Tirez! Tirez fort!”

  The LAV lurched upward.

  “Heave!”

  The Quebecers roared in a storm of strength. “Tirez!”

  “Heave!”

  Everyone man took up the call and response as blood, sweat and sinew worked as a unit against unforgiving iron. Ryan felt the power of massed humanity in motion, and he bellowed from the pit of his belly as he heaved.

  The loadmaster screamed at his men up top. “Pull it in! Pull it in! Pull it in!”

  The loadmaster’s crewmen pulled on the guy ropes and brought the LAV teetering over the promenade. “On the plate! On the plate! On the plate! Now! Lower! Lower! Lower! Lower easy, you bastards! I said—”

  The men on the capstans and Ryan’s crew on the winch rope made horrible noises of effort as they reversed course and tried to lower the LAV without dropping it through the promenade, the vehicle deck, the bilge and into the dark water below.

  The loadmaster screamed with consternation and excitement. “Easy! Easy!
Easy! Easy I said—” Men fell forward as the LAV settled onto the deck and the heartbreaking weight disappeared. More crewmen rushed to chalk it in place. For just a moment there was no sound other than the gasps of the crowd on the dock and the rasping breaths of the capstan and linesmen shuddering with suspended effort.

  The loadmaster’s voice was the first thing everyone heard, and even he was awed by what had been wrought. “Well, fuck me running with a pitchfork…”

  Tuques sailed skyward.

  The docks erupted into cheers.

  Ryan rose from where he had fallen from the sudden slack. Boo Blacktree wrapped his hands around Ryan’s biceps and heaved him skyward, laughing, shaking him and whooping war cries.

  Ryan restrained himself. “That’ll do, Boo.”

  Boo dropped him.

  “Get drunk tonight, boys!” McKenzie bawled. “’Cause when the Queen sails tomorrow she sails as a ship of war!”

  The dock burst into genuine bedlam.

  Ryan found himself being pounded on the back by Six. “Sacre bleu, Ryan! We will win this! We will win the locks!”

  Ryan wasn’t quite willing to claim victory yet. But they had left Henning behind, beaten his worm bomb, and a LAV 3 sat on the promenade like an avenging angel of death. They had done it. The Queen of the Lakes was a ship of war. The one-eyed man knew victory begat victory, and momentum was a flame that needed to be fanned. Their palms popped as he slammed his hand into Six’s. “Fireblast it, Six! Me and you! We’ll go right down their throats and see if they got the stomach for it!”

  Six scooped Ryan in his arms, lifted him off his feet and kissed him on both cheeks. Convoy and crew surged around Ryan roaring and cheering. Sailors pounded his shoulders on all sides with bone-rattling force. More French Canadians than Ryan wanted to think about slobbered on his face. He found himself elevated onto the men’s shoulders and being paraded around the docks to the cheers of all Manitoulin and a shower of tuques.

  Ryan endured it all gracefully.

  “Canadians,” Doc observed. “I believe they are as cute as buttons.”

  “A worm bomb?” Baron Oliver Poncet was an enormously fat man. His chair creaked beneath him. Hawberry wine and lamprey pie seemed to agree with him a little too much. He was clearly part First Nations, and between his braids and his burgeoning belly he might have almost seemed ridiculous. There was nothing ridiculous about the fear and deference his people showed him. He wasn’t pleased at all with what he was hearing. “That’s coldhearted. And you say he was sending it my way?”

  Ryan sat at the baron’s table along with J.B., McKenzie, Mr. Smythe and Six. Cyrielle had stayed by her brother’s side aboard ship. “It was meant for us,” Ryan said.

  Poncet wasn’t having it. He stabbed a fat finger at McKenzie. “First time the Queen’s been on the Huron in years! Gonna finally give Thorpe and his pirates their due, and about rad-blasted time if you ask me, and Henning goes and sticks that broken beak of his in it! Nearly fucks up the whole thing!” Poncet’s vast bulk sagged back in his chair. “Mace Henning…” he mused. “I knew him when he was just a wandering sec man with nothing but his war club to his name. Now he calls himself a baron.” Poncet shook his head. “About time someone had a real up close and personal chat with that boy.”

  “Henning will be dealt with. Our current priority is Thorpe and his pirates.”

  “Thorpe,” Poncet said, “used to be one of ours. Manitoulin man. Bastard son of a gaudy slut, and not a particularly good one. Didn’t impress anyone enough to make sec man, and with no family or connection he scraped by picking berries, mending nets and hauling in other people’s catch. I remember giving him hell a few times.”

  “Why?” Ryan asked.

  Poncet grunted. “Probably because he was breathing and had a pulse. I was meaner when I was skinnier. Anyway, one day Thorpe upped and stole a blaster and a canoe and paddled west. They say he paddled all the way to the Michigan, then all the way down it. That’s where most Lake pirates like to winter it. Chicago? Waukee? Green Bay, they get hit hard, still some bad rads down there and decent folk stay clear.”

  “And came back a baron,” Ryan said.

  “Calls himself a king, actually.” Poncet suddenly sighed. “That was something this morning. Seeing that iron wag raised. I swear I wanted to waddle my fat ass down and haul on that rope, but my wives wouldn’t let me.” Poncet craned his head around at three buxom young women quilting at a side table. “Would you!”

  The clearly dominant of the trio gave her baron the glad eye. “We need your fat ass here, Ollie. We need you rested. You need more sons.” The other two giggled.

  Baron Poncet shook his head in disgust. “I used to be a warrior. Now look at me!” He jigged his vast belly. “Soft! Every part of me! Every part except one.” He craned around to give his wives another sour look. “And they lead me around by it.”

  The baron’s wives smirked and continued sewing.

  “I wish I was going with you. Give Thorpe and his crew a good chilling. But who needs a beached Beluga in a blaster fight?” Poncet muttered into his wine. “That is for anything except cover.”

  Ryan suppressed a smile and cut himself another wedge of lamprey and mustard pie. “The captain tells me you were the wrestling champion of the Huron back in your day. I still wouldn’t want to tangle with you.”

  Poncet flushed with pleasure and tried to cover it with a scowl. “Now you’re greasing me, Ryan. Not that I don’t like it. Tell me. How many’d you lose to the worms?”

  “Fifteen dead,” McKenzie said. “Mostly sec men and sailors, about a dozen more bit up bad, including the baron’s son.”

  “You’ll be wanting to recruit men, then.”

  McKenzie nodded to his mate. “Mr. Smythe?”

  Smythe unfolded a blanket. A gleaming Diefenbunker C-7 blaster lay on it as well as a SIG.

  Ryan took the ball. “We’ll give you ten of each for the right to recruit on your island. Each man who volunteers gets a blaster just like it, with seven full mags, belts, mag pouches and bayonet, plus a handblaster with an extra mag and ammo.”

  Poncet eyed the predark blasters. “I’ll give you thirty men. Can’t spare no more. Plenty of work around here still needs seeing to before winter. And any man who lives through the fight—if you win—gets a hundred in First Nations jack as bonus.”

  Ryan looked at McKenzie. The captain nodded. “Done.”

  Six leaned forward. “If we break through, I want them to stay and help sec the convoy. Are you agreeable?”

  Poncet frowned. “The Soo Locks? They need cleaning. If I order my men to do it, they’ll do it. But sec’ing your convoy west of the Superior this close to winter? That they get the choice of volunteering for.”

  “Fair enough,” Six agreed. “Convoy duty will pay a second rifle and another hundred in First Nations jack.”

  “Sounds fair.” Baron Poncet raised a finger. “But I’m sending one of my sons along, to get some experience.”

  “Three barons’ sons on one boat.” McKenzie grunted. “Normally I’d say that’s a recipe to get someone chilled.”

  “Hunk!” the baron called. “Get over here!”

  Hunk Poncet lumbered over to the table. He was huge, blond and blue-eyed, almost all arms and legs in his long shirt, breechclout and leggings, and very earnest-looking. All eyes turned incredulously on the baron.

  Poncet shook his head. “I know, I know. He doesn’t look nothing like me. Sired him off one of those Minnesota Viking-cult bitches I took in a raid years ago.” Poncet’s eyes grew far away in memory. “Dagmar. Rad blast it, I miss that woman. She had sand.” Poncet shook his head and returned to the present.

  “Hunk, you’re going to take thirty men and go with our guests to clean out Thorpe and the locks.”

 
; Hunk nodded eagerly. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll pick the men for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, you pick them. Time you learned.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Poncet nodded at Ryan, McKenzie and Six. “You do whatever these men say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fight hard. Don’t shame the island.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take some of the dogs, three of them. Assuming you get past the locks, you’re going to sec for the convoy. If you go, I think the rest of the men will, too, and the dogs might come in handy once you get dirt under your moccasins.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and try to get back before the freeze.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And try to bring some of the men back alive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Baron Poncet reached beneath his garment and pulled out a blaster. Ryan recognized it as a Glock. The slide was pitted and missing most of its finish from hard use. Its plastic grips and frame had failed in the intervening century, and a blacksmith had forged a new grip and lower receiver out of iron. The baron tossed the weapon to his son casually. “Here, take this. It was my first blaster. Now it’s yours.”

  Hunk caught the weapon. He looked at his father and his lower lip started to tremble. Poncet swallowed the frog in his own throat and snarled over his own emotion.

  “And eat something before you go, would you? Look at you, you got a frame like an oak, but I swear when you turn sideways you don’t cast a shadow.”

  Hunk flushed red. “Yes, sir.”

  Poncet’s sec men pounded the table in approval of Hunk’s elevation in status. J.B. waited for the applause to die down. “Been thinking.”

  “Dangerous occupation,” Poncet opined. “Or so I’m told.”