Downrigger Drift

by James Axler

  “Attracted by—” J.B. began.

  “Heat. Jak, run now!” Ryan didn’t wait to see if the albino teen listened, but was already heading toward the front of the war wag, planning to jump off and head for the hopefully leech-free ground outside the underpass.

  He had just taken his first large step when the deluge came down.

  In a heartbeat, the air was filled with hundreds of the leech-creatures. Although many of them had filled their air bladders to float down at their leisure, just as many had taken the quicker route, falling from the ceiling in hopes of landing on a meal. Moving between them was like trying to dodge big, black, hungry raindrops.

  As he moved, Ryan kept his head down, mainly concerned about his eye. Just one of the things blowing into it could seriously injure, or even blind him. He would have closed it, but he still had to get off the wag, and jumping blind would invite a sprained or broken ankle or worse. And the one thing he knew he didn’t want was to fall into the layer of bloodsuckers on the ground. He waved his arms around his head, feeling his hands bat several of the things away, and at least three latched on to his fingers, instantly sending burning pain through his hands as they went to work on him.

  Reaching the edge of the wag, Ryan slid down the front, aware he was both crushing and picking up more as he went. His boots thudded on the ground, turning dozens more to paste under their treads. He tried to run, but nearly fell over, and only saved himself from toppling with a supreme effort. Everywhere he looked, he saw little black bits in the air, dozens of bloodsucking paratroopers zeroing in on their objective—him. More settled on his head, moving around in his hair, seeking the warm, blood-filled scalp. He felt them land on his shirt, on his shoulders, on his pants, everywhere they could get to him. He tried shaking them off, but they clung like they were coated with glue.

  Ryan Cawdor didn’t scare easily, but this onslaught would have made even the strongest man break as the dozens of slick, black leeches came at him, each one seeking his warm blood. He burst from the dark tunnel into the sunlight, tearing off his shirt and flinging it away as he did so. The greedy parasites on his hands were the first to go, torn off with scrabbling fingers. Next he ran his hands through his hair, sloughing off at least a half dozen of the creatures and whipping them onto the ground. He saw J.B. out of the corner of his eye, cursing and capering as he swatted away his own army of attackers. Ryan couldn’t waste time spotting Jak, but was sure he was in the same boat.

  “Hold still, Ryan—on your back!” As he heard the words, Ryan felt a sting as a pair of them latched on, their greedy mouths scraping through the skin. They’d landed right in the small of his back, and Ryan was about to draw his panga and scrape them off, cuts be damned, until J.B. ran over and tore them loose, flinging them to the ground and stepping on them.

  Having cleared his head and hands, Ryan moved to his arms, dislodging each leech he found and stomping on it. He checked J.B. as well, finding one that was about to head south down the back of his pants. Grabbing it between two fingers, he threw it away. The sight made him immediately check his own fatigues, which were thankfully leech-free.

  “I imagine you’d know right away if one of those fuckers went after your privates,” J.B. said, giving Ryan a last, careful once-over. “Thanks.”

  Jak had joined them, as well. His arms and neck weeping blood from several wounds. His hands blurred as he found the leeches and ripped them off his body “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “Got that right.” Even though he was pretty sure he was safe, Ryan kept checking his arms and legs every few seconds, thinking he could still feel one or two crawling on his skin. “Never wanted a hot bath more in my life.”

  “Yeah, with a heavy dose of salt—that’d take care of the little bastards.” J.B. had finished scraping the last ones off his trusty fedora, which had once again saved him from suffering the worst of the attack. One last check of everyone found a straggler lodged in Jak’s armpit, swelling to triple its normal size as it gorged. Whipping out his knife, the teen impaled the parasite on the tip, sending a spurt of dark crimson onto the ground. He flicked it away, letting the blood run down his side.

  “Didn’t you feel it?” J.B. asked.

  Jak shrugged. “Too busy dealing with dozen others.”

  “Did you clear the exhaust pipe?” Ryan asked.

  “Think so. Course, all comin’ down coulda plugged again.”

  “Yeah, mebbe.” Ryan walked back to just outside the shadow cast by the tunnel. He noticed that none of the leeches on the ground had ventured onto the sunlit ground. “Krysty?”

  “Yeah?” Her voice was muffled by the wag’s thick armor. “Where are you?”

  “Outside the tunnel. Got some leeches on us, but we’re okay now. Start the wag and drive it out.” Ryan wasn’t about to head back underneath that overpass if he could help it.

  “All right.” The engine turned over, then fired up with a roar, echoing loudly in the confined space. Ryan, J.B. and Jak stepped to one side as the vehicle slowly emerged from the darkness, clumps of leeches clinging to it. Grabbing his dirty shirt, Ryan cleared the hatch and brushed more of the creatures off. The hatch opened, and Krysty poked her head out. “Why are you— Gaia, what happened?”

  Ryan pointed at the overpass. “Big colony of the bastards must have blown in with the storm. They fell on us while we were cleaning the exhaust—”

  “While I cleared exhaust,” Jak broke in.

  Ryan continued. “So we ran out here, got cleaned off fast as we could. All of us got a few bites taken out.” Ryan looked at his hands, which still oozed blood. “Don’t seem to be stopping as fast as I’d like.”

  Krysty got out, making room for Mildred, who had grabbed the first-aid kit, stocked with additional items she had pulled from the redoubt. “Not surprising, considering the little bloodsuckers probably have an anticoagulant in their saliva, to keep dinner flowing faster.” She handed tape, cotton, alcohol and gauze to Krysty. “Clean up, Ryan, and I’ll handle the other two.”

  “Probably should start with the pair on my back.” Ryan turned, aware of a warm trickle down his spine.

  “Ryan!” Krysty admonished while wiping up his blood.

  “Hey, as I recall, none of us asked to get covered in leeches and have our blood sucked out.”

  “I know, I know, it’s just—never mind. You just seem to find more trouble than Job himself. Find a stick or something. This’ll sting a bit.”

  Ryan almost turned to see if she was kidding or not. He couldn’t imagine cleaning the bites would be more than a minor nuisance. When she swabbed the bites with the alcohol, he learned her prediction was correct, although he manfully tried to control his wince. She bandaged the wounds on his back, then moved to his hands.

  “You’re going to be some sight after all this.” Krysty swabbed and bandaged and taped until Ryan was dotted with patches over all his wounds. J.B. and Jak were similarly bedecked, the three of them looking exactly like what they were—survivors of a very odd skirmish.

  Krysty, Doc and Mildred stared at the trio until Ryan couldn’t stand it any longer. “What the hell we standing around here for? Let’s get moving.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  With the storm quickly outpacing them to the east, Ryan was able to drive without incident on the highway for another hour. Occasionally they had to detour around broken sections of the road, but for the most part, they kept heading due southeast.

  The sun blazed high overhead when they stopped for lunch and to give the engine a rest, pulling into the overgrown gravel driveway of one of the long-abandoned farmhouses that dotted the countryside. After sweeping and clearing the area, Mildred and Krysty laid out a spread of cold meats, cheese and a loaf of bread, and everyone enjoyed thick sandwiches, along with a jar of clean-looking water that Ryan purified anyway, just to be sure.

  After lunch and cleanup, Doc and Jak lay underneath towering oak trees for a nap—Jak due to tiredness from the previous night, and Doc simply
because he was Doc, muttering something about the “pastoral locale and Little Boy Blue.” Krysty and Mildred wanted to poke around in the tumbledown house and barn, and J.B. settled down with his maps to plot the next leg of the journey, conferring with Ryan on the best route.

  “How solid you think Brend’s information was on Madison?” the one-eyed man asked as he sucked on a hollow tooth.

  “Depends. It’s not like they get out much, so info’s always second-and thirdhand. Don’t see much use in convoys misleading the ville, so it’s probably got some truth to it.”

  Ryan scrutinized the map, tracing the red line of the highway they were on as it led into the vicinity of three lakes where the onetime state capital had sprung up. “If we turned off here—” he tapped an intersection of Interstate 90 and State Road 60 “—we could avoid the city altogether and keep heading east. Maybe check out this place—” He pointed at a patch of green labeled Poynette St. Farm Home. “Might be a good place to hole up for the night.”

  “Seems like we got plenty of those places around right now. Just pick a farm, and you’re good to go. Can’t count on everybody bein’ as friendly as the last ville.”

  “Never do. We’ll give the sleepyheads another half hour, then get back on the road. Let’s check out that farm place anyway. It’s far enough away from Madison that we shouldn’t have to worry about any cannies.”

  Carefully folding the map, J.B. regarded him. “How’re your bandages?”

  “Itch like hell, but I’m not gonna give the women the satisfaction of seeing me scratch them. You?”

  “Same. Feel like my luck hasn’t been all that great the past few days.”

  Ryan shrugged. “Bound to turn soon enough.”

  J.B. frowned. “Damn well better. If it gets any worse, it’s liable to kill me.”

  The two men went to find their respective women, who were returning from their recon of the ruined house. Mildred and J.B. went to relax a bit before they hit the road again, leaving Ryan and Krysty to walk around the barn and through one of the overgrown fields, as much to steal a moment together as to get the lay of the land.

  Finding a small hillock, they climbed it and stared out at the gently rolling hills around them, which were slowly baking brown in the summer’s heat and dotted with the crumbling ruins of farms that had once sustained a long-ago nation. Ryan didn’t give the landscape more than a passing glance, but when he turned to Krysty, he noticed her staring out at the hills absently, her eyes unfocused, as if lost in thought.

  Carefully he approached her. “What’s going on?”

  She shook her head, crimson hair fluttering in the light breeze. “Oh, nothing—for a moment I thought of Harmony ville in summer. It looked much the same as this—the hills parching under the summer sun, fields tended to begin the harvest soon. Just—took me by surprise to be reminded of it like this. It seems like a lifetime ago since I was last there.”

  “Yeah.” Ryan didn’t bring up how they’d had to rescue Krysty’s home ville from a small gang of killers who had blown into town last time they were there, or how her childhood lover had been killed during the trouble, as well.

  “You think we’ll ever settle down somewhere someday, Ryan?”

  “Mebbe, if we ever find the right place. Don’t think this is it, though.”

  Krysty nodded, staring at the ground. “I was watching you at dinner last night. You were like a wolf among pet dogs. Difference clear as night and day.”

  He shrugged, walking close to her and putting his arm around her shoulders. “Some folk are born to grow and create. Some aren’t. You know which side I fall on.”

  “I do. Good thing you tend to leave most places we pass through on the better side.”

  “When possible.” He turned her gently back toward the wag and their campsite, unwilling to admit he’d also entertained the thought of holding still recently. “When the time and place are right, we’ll know.”

  She looked up at him, her expression neutral. “Will we?”

  Ryan didn’t have an answer for her that time.

  AFTER A QUICK CHECK of the engine, they fired it up again and set out, heading south until they found the crossroads to take them due east.

  The surrounding landscape was more of the same, the bright sun painting the hills vermilion and purple through the violet sky. Along with the farms, they passed several deserted small villes along the highway, and one larger one that had a strange collection of tall, curved pipes that rose dozens of feet into the air, some broken and bent, some still upright. Since there weren’t any signs of life, they didn’t stop to investigate.

  Ryan found the country roads to be in overall better condition than the highway; although rough and rutted, they weren’t falling apart like the asphalt and concrete road. Route 60 was straight and level, enough so that he edged up to around fifty miles an hour on one stretch, just to see what the Commando could do. He didn’t keep it there long, however, not wanting to stress the engine. He was pleased with the vehicle’s speed, however, since it ensured they could outrun just about anyone they might encounter.

  About an hour before dusk they stopped again, J.B. wanting to check the wag’s coolant levels. They all grabbed a bite and discussed pressing forward or finding a place before night fell. J.B. estimated they were about ten miles from the ville of Poynette on the map, and could probably reach it before dark fell, although if there were folks there, they might not like seeing folks approach after dark. Ryan thought they could press on a bit farther—if they didn’t make it, no doubt they could find a suitable camping spot without too much trouble. “Besides, we haven’t seen a soul for the entire day, so its not like we’re on a well-traveled path out here.”

  In the end, the decision was made to keep moving, and a few miles later, when Ryan saw smoke rising into the sky to the north, he called back to the rest of the group. “Looks like a settlement to the north. Might as well check it out.”

  A few hundred yards farther, he came to the intersection of what J.B. said was Route 51, which would take them right into Poynette. At least, that was what the hand-carved sign said by the side of the road. Ryan turned left, and headed up the well-maintained road.

  Five minutes later, they came to a checkpoint, lit by blazing torches and manned by several guards—six on the ground and another six on horseback—all armed with longblasters. Ryan downshifted and pulled to a stop about fifty yards away again. Scooting out of the driver’s chair, he called out, much like he had done at Toma.

  “Hello the guards!”

  “Hello yourself. Where you coming from?”

  “West, over the Big Muddy, near Toma. We’re headin’ farther eastward.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “Trade, mebbe a place to stay the night if you have a place.”

  “Sure, but you’ll have to leave the wag outside of town. Elders’ orders.”

  Ryan’s eyebrow went up, but he went along with it for now. “All right.”

  “Some of the boys here will escort you to a place you can leave it, then they’ll take you to a house you can stay in. In the morning, we can do some trading.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “That was a bit odd.” Ryan turned to see J.B. wearing the same skeptical expression he’d had. “No toll for coming inside the ville?”

  “Maybe these people are overflowing with the milk of human kindness, and do not see the need to tax visitors for the privilege of walking their streets,” Doc suggested from the back.

  “Mebbe, but everyone keep your eyes open regardless,” Ryan said, waiting for the gate to open. A quartet of horsemen had formed up on the other side, a pair on either side of the road, standing at quiet attention. Another one galloped off toward the ville in the distance.

  Krysty nodded in appreciation of the horses. “Well-trained. They’re not even spooked by the engine noise.”

  “Not care well trained. Machine gun burst to chest would do ’em.” Jak said.

  “Let
’s not get trigger-happy unless they give us a reason,” Ryan said. Once the way was clear, he proceeded forward, finding the lights on the wag and flipping the switch to illuminate the road. Next to it was another hand-carved wooden sign: Poynette—Pop. 174.

  “Certainly take pride in their ville,” J.B. noted.

  The riders escorted them to a side road a few hundred yards north of the guard post, pointing them into a grassy field where Ryan parked the wag. “J.B.”

  “On it soon as we’re outside. Weapons?”

  “The usual. They’ll probably have a place for us to hold them at the boardinghouse.” Ryan grabbed the bag of goods to show, then got out, grabbing his Steyr and slinging it. The rest of the group followed suit, with J.B. disappearing underneath the wag again.

  “We’ve sent for a wag to take you into town. What’s your friend doin’?” the lead rider asked.

  “Wag runs a little hot. He’s just checkin’ the water level.”

  “Haven’t seen one of those kind in a long time. Usually only steam wags comin’ through.”

  “Had this one awhile, been lucky enough to find gas here and there. Don’t suppose you folks have any?”

  The rider smiled without showing his teeth and patted the neck of his horse. “You’re lookin’ at the main vehicles here, friend. They eat just ’bout any crops we grow, and don’t require nearly as much upkeep.”

  “Probably right.” Ryan stepped forward, holding out his hand. “Name’s Ryan.”

  “Caleb.” The rider introduced the rest of his group, and Ryan did the same, first names only. When they were finished, a wooden wag, drawn by a team of four horses, pulled up, driven by a boy barely into his teens, his eyes widening when he saw his passengers.

  “’Zekiel? Take our guests over to Grandma Flannigan’s house. Let her know they are guests of Poynette this evening.” He nodded at the group. “Enjoy your stay.”