by James Axler
THE SEARING, NOONDAY SUN beat against the battered, rusting four-wheel drive, highlighting every streak and imperfection scarring the old, broken windshield. Doc sat comfortably in the passenger seat, watching the light playing across the cracks. Beside him, Charles Torino held the reins, urging his tired horses onward with occasional words of encouragement. They were somewhere still in Tennessee. It was scrubland here now, where once farms and thriving towns had been. Crows flew above, cawing discordantly to one another, swooping down to perch on the struggling saplings that had emerged from ashlike soil. When they landed, the soot-feathered crows seemed so heavy as to almost topple the scrawny, young saplings. The crows waited, watching the convoy of wags pass like a jury deliberating its verdict on the accused as they were paraded before them.
Doc closed his eyes, feeling the yellow warmth of the sun beating down through the cracked windshield, painting patterns on the inside of his eyelids. The heat was good, a simple delight harkening back to a more innocent age. Charles was saying something beside him, speaking to his horses, but Doc ignored him, tuning out the man’s throaty voice. Behind him, in the back of the wag, Mildred and Mary were talking about the wildlife, about favorite things, foods and beverages, meaningless stuff to pass the time. Baby Holly snuffled now and then in her sleep.
They were getting slowly closer to Babyville, and its mythical pool of rejuvenation.
Doc thought back to the conversation he had had with Ryan that morning, after he had finished shaving in the dingy bathroom of the inn, and then back to the discussion in the trading post with its tethered goats and tethered dancing girls. The conversation played out in his mind’s eye, Doc himself trying to justify his need to pursue the promise of Babyville.
DOC WAS EXPLAINING Croxton’s proposition to his companions, but J.B. kept dismissing his words, waving his hand in front of his face as though swatting at a fly.
“Nobody’s getting any younger, Doc,” J.B. said gruffly.
Angered, Doc looked around the table for support from his other companions. Ryan Cawdor’s single blue eye seemed to stare right through him, noncommittal. Mildred was shaking her head apologetically and, beside her, Krysty Wroth had her hands in her mutie hair, brushing at it as though disinterested in the whole discussion. As he watched, Doc saw chalk-white dust falling from her hair, peppering the table like the falling snow.
Doc turned to the last seat at the table. A beautiful blonde woman sat there, gazing back at him, affection and devotion in her crystal-clear blue eyes. Beautiful and shapely, the woman was still so young, a child’s innocence characterizing her face.
“I believe you, Doc,” the woman said, her voice holding that musical quality that he thought he had forgotten. “I’ll follow you.” Lori Quint.
“Not like I follow Keeper,” the blonde woman—Lori—said. “I follow because you’re so good to me.”
Without even realizing, Doc was reaching over the table then, reaching for Lori, pulling her toward him, enveloping her in his arms. It had been so long since he had seen her. Why was that?
But she wasn’t Lori now. She was the old-young girl from the convoy, Daisy, smiling up at him with her round, puppy-fat face.
“I believe in you,” Daisy-Lori said, gazing at Doc with wide, innocent eyes, her long hair falling across her face.
With tenderness, Doc pushed the sun-yellow hair out of the girl’s eyes. As he did, he saw his companions watching him, disapprovingly.
But they were no longer the companions he knew. These were older, skeletal, no skin left on their bones—just fleshless, dead things. Fleshless dead things with staring, judgmental eyes boring into his. Krysty’s red hair fell away from her white skull in clumps as her bone hands brushed through it. Mildred slumped in her seat as her neck bones crumbled to dust with the way she was shaking her head back and forth in disagreement. J.B. Dix’s jaw worked up and down, up and down, saying nothing, only the noise of creaking bones wearing against one another, crumbling to powdery dust.
And then there was Ryan, his face a skull, an eye patch beside an empty socket.
Doc turned back to the girl in his arms. Daisy seemed older now, her cheeks hollow, dark rings under her eyes, her fine hair becoming patchy. There were things in her hair now, too; living, squirming things—maggots and worms, the purifiers of the dead.
“I believe you, Doc,” Daisy said, her voice still young. “We can grow old together. Arm-in-arm.”
And a dog started barking, the noise loud in his ear.
SUDDENLY, DOC’S EYES snapped open. Beside him, Charles Torino was coughing, hacking up a thick crust of phlegm, his cough sharp and loud as the barking of a mongrel dog. Torino spat out a wad of phlegm through the open side window, and turned to Doc, an embarrassed smile on his face as the old man was startled awake. “The sooner we get to this miracle pool the better, huh, brother?” he said.
Doc nodded his silent agreement, still feeling the icy tendrils of his horrifying dream. Lori was dead, he reminded himself. She had been dead a long time.
The train of wags continued bumping along the old country lanes and broken, ruined highways, lurching and halting as though they were suffering epileptic seizures. Eyes open, Doc watched the countryside pass them by, keeping his thoughts to himself.
THEY JOURNEYED THROUGH emaciated fields and beyond, traveling into waste ground and through skeletal forests of deadwood trees, evergreen pines now ever dead. The wags kept up a steady pace, the weary horses looking miserable as they breathed in the exhaust from the lead trucks. The roads were patchy at best, and Doc described them to Mildred as “hit and miss, though most often miss, I fear.”
In the late afternoon, as the white winter sun dwindled in the sky, they found some improved roads that hadn’t just survived the ravages of the nuclear Armageddon, but looked to have been repaired in the interim. Jeremiah Croxton turned the wide steering wheel of his wag and bumped up onto the sturdy-looking tarmac.
Beside him in the cab, Jak eyed the road ahead. It was surrounded by bushes and a smattering of anemic trees, their branches overhanging the road, but the strip of blacktop itself looked empty and clean. A little way in the distance, he could see a small ville, but there were no lights coming from it and it was hard to tell if the place was inhabited or deserted. Jak peered at old man Croxton as he urged the wag along the smoother strip of tarmac.
After a few moments, Croxton became aware that Jak was watching him. “You got a problem, boy?” he inquired, turning to pierce Jak with a blue-eyed glare.
“Not like,” Jak explained, nodding to the open strip of road.
“Me neither,” Croxton said, “but someone’s laid this thing so we may as well use it since it’s here.”
Jak shook his head. “Easy route never easy,” he assured the old farmer.
The train of wags continued onward, getting closer to the ville. The ville itself appeared to be an old, predark town and Jak, though not the best reader in Ryan’s party, spotted a tumbled road sign that identified it as somewhere called Tazewell. He wondered what the hell a Taze was and why it would be well. From a distance, the settlement seemed deserted, with a few old, dilapidated farm buildings on the very outskirts, well-weathered and falling apart with age.
As they closed in on the little town, Croxton’s wag seemed to suddenly lose pulling power, the engine whining harshly as the vehicle puttered forward.
Jak looked at Croxton as the older man downshifted gears. “Problem?” the albino asked.
Croxton wrestled with the gearstick, grinding the gears until the engine picked up speed once more. “Lost traction for a second there,” Croxton explained, “like we was going uphill or something.”
From behind them, Daisy yawned and peered over the seatbacks. She had been asleep for most of the afternoon, wrapped in a patchwork woollen blanket. “Where are we?” she asked, her breath smelling of sleep.
“Taze’ll,” Croxton said.
Daisy glanced up at the view through the windshield, pe
ered out of the dust-smeared windows to either side. “Seems fucking lonesome,” she said.
Just then, there was a groan from the engine and the wag shuddered to a halt. “Dammit!” Croxton spat, pulling his hands off the wheel and clenching them angrily into fists.
Jak watched as the old farmer turned the ignition key, his foot pumping the accelerator. The engine turned over but, after traveling just a few more feet, began howling in complaint.
“Switch off,” Jak instructed in an emotionless monotone. He had already unholstered his Colt Python, flipping off the safety.
“What are you talking…?” Croxton began, but he stopped, realizing that Jak wasn’t listening.
His hand on the door handle, the albino teen had pushed the door open a crack and was peering at the low buildings at the side of the road. Jak’s red eyes were working back and forth, his senses on high alert. There was no one about or at least no one that he could detect. He turned back to Croxton and Daisy, catching them with his penetrating stare. “Stay,” he instructed. “Keep down.” Then he shoved open the door and dropped out of sight, down to the road surface, just the trails of his white mane of hair visible as his figure disappeared below the level of the windows.
Agitated, Daisy asked Croxton what was going on.
“Engine’s stalled,” Croxton explained. “But something ain’t right here.”
“You said we had enough fuel,” Daisy said anxiously.
“We do,” Croxton said. “Sure of it. But the engine just ain’t pullin’.”
Outside, Jak stood close to the truck cab, blaster raised, scanning the surrounding area for signs of movement. Rapid footsteps came from behind him, and he turned to see Ryan and Krysty approaching. Both of them were brandishing their own blasters and they looked warily around as they raced up to join with their companion. Ryan was no longer carrying his Steyr rifle, Jak saw. Presumably he had left it in the wag he was tasked to guard. At the far end of the wag train, Jak could make out the figure of J.B., now standing guard beside the final wag.
“Told the others to stay put,” Ryan said. “What’s going on, Jak?”
Jak pointed to the wheels of the wag, and Ryan saw that they had sunken almost to their midpoint into the tarmac. “Quicksand trap,” Jak explained.
“Mebbe the tarmac just got laid,” Krysty suggested doubtfully.
Jak scented the air. “No one around.”
Ryan looked down the road, peering at the darkened buildings. They were still on the outskirts of town; the final wag wasn’t even up to the first building where the devastated remains of Tazewell began.
“We’ll go back,” Ryan decided, and he jogged around the front of the wag and clambered up the ladder at the driver’s side. The tarmac beneath his boot heels compacted, feeling mushy and soft, definitely spongy beneath his weight.
Croxton opened his side window. “What’s going on, Ryan?” he asked.
“The tarmac here is freshly laid,” Ryan explained. “It’s got caught up in your wheels. You’ll need to reverse.”
Croxton cursed. “Knew it was too good to be true, seeing a road like this,” he snarled. “You think I can just back out?”
Ryan looked down at the half-buried front wheel, back up to Croxton. “Worth a try.” He shrugged. “If not, we’ll use some tow cables. I take it you have some.”
“We’ll manage to rig up something,” Croxton grumbled with a sigh of resignation. Then he started the engine up and shoved the wag into Reverse, while Krysty instructed the other wags to move back and give them some room.
Clinging to the side, Ryan felt the cab shudder as power chugged through it. Croxton held the emergency brake down, letting the revs build before he tried to move. While he did so, Krysty worked her way back to the other wags to pass on the instructions.
“What’s goin’ on, tall and slim?” Paul Witterson asked as Krysty explained what they were doing to the driver of wag two.
“This road’s no good,” Krysty said.
Nisha, who was now sitting in the driver’s seat with her husband, Barry, in shotgun, looked concerned. “No good how?” she asked.
“It won’t take the weight of the wags,” Krysty explained before moving on down the line.
The people were agitated, Krysty realized. Night was falling and they were starting to get jumpy. Not good at all.
Once the roadway behind the foremost wag had been cleared—the others having backed along the road by twenty feet or so—Croxton took off the emergency brake and let the wheels free. The truck cab lurched back with Ryan standing at its side, pulling away from the spongy tarmac for a moment. Then its wheels began to spin as it lost traction, and Ryan saw that the back wheels were sinking into the tarmac as they spun.
“Fireblast,” Ryan snarled, holding his hand up in clear instruction for Croxton to halt.
Croxton switched off the engine and looked out the window hopefully. “No good?”
“You’re jammed both ways,” Ryan told him. “We’re going to have to tow you out, after all. Otherwise it’s just going to get worse.” Ryan didn’t like it. Night was descending rapidly now, and he wanted to either be moving or, preferably, holed up somewhere safe before some kind of crazy or other came at them from out of who cared where.
From the other side of the cab, Ryan heard Jak hiss for his attention. Ryan looked at him, a querulous expression on his face.
“Company,” Jak stated, pointing along the blacktop strip toward the center of town.
Ryan looked down the road, sighting the horizon and peering at the darkened buildings on either side of the road. He couldn’t see anything, and all that could be heard was the wind and the occasional popping and ticking of Croxton’s engine as it cooled. But, as Ryan watched, he became aware of a noise carrying from the distance. It sounded like an engine.
Instantly, Ryan pulled his compact SIG-Sauer blaster into his hand, waiting to see what was coming. He called up to Croxton, his voice adopting an authoritative tone. “Turn off your engine and keep hidden,” he said.
Gradually, the rumbling became louder until the silhouette of a wide wag could be seen making its way along the blacktop from the far side of town. The wag was trailed by a cloud of exhaust and trundled along at a pace not much faster than jogging.
Holding his blaster casually at his side, Ryan glanced across to Jak. The albino youth was standing, his own blaster clenched in his right fist, masked from the approaching vehicle by his body. Ryan nodded, then walked forward, leaving Jak alone beside Croxton’s wag.
Ryan walked down the road toward the slow-moving wag, his blaster held loosely at his side. The wag was a fixer-upper. Once upon a time it had been a combine harvester. It had large wheels and a belching smokestack. Something glowed in its heart, a fire raging like one of the old-fashioned ovens that Ryan had grown up with back at Front Royal. There were two seats, placed high up to either side of the burning ovenlike tender, and Ryan saw the figures of a man and woman sitting there.
“Can I help you?” Ryan called as the wag trudged closer.
With a defiant splutter, the wag belched another cloud of smoke and slowed, shaking as it pulled up beside Ryan. The man peered down from his high seat, an ingratiating smile on his lips. He was thin and scrawny, with the beginnings of a beard on his chin and the patchy sprouts of hair of the rad-affected. He looked perhaps thirty or forty, but it was hard to tell in the dwindling light. “I was about to ask you the same question,” the man said, his voice warm and friendly.
Ryan watched in silence, keeping pace with the vehicle as it slowed.
“Thought you might be needing a ride or a place to stay,” the man continued. “Or mebbe you want to negotiate a towing.” He chuckled, his teeth glinting with the glow of the hearth beside him as he reached for something that rested at his side.
Ryan’s arm snapped out then, grabbing the man by his lower leg and yanking him down from his seat. The driver fell, yelping as he crashed to the hard tarmac of the ground, a rebuilt Colt
Anaconda six-shooter tumbling from his grip. “Hey, what th—?” he began, but his words were cut off abruptly as Ryan rammed the heel of his boot against the man’s throat.
His foot held against the base of the man’s throat, Ryan leaned forward, pointing the muzzle of his blaster at the man’s forehead. “Yeah, let’s negotiate,” he snarled.
Chapter Six
“Black fire!” the scrawny excuse for a man gasped as Ryan pressed his booted foot against his throat. “What the devil has gotten into you?”
Ryan looked at the man beneath him, his expression tense. “Did you set this up?” he demanded, the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer never wavering from the man’s forehead.
The man screwed up his eyes as Ryan’s foot pressed harder onto his windpipe, sputtering out a rasping cough. “No, sir,” he said, his voice straining to be heard.
Suddenly, over the sound of the steam-powered truck’s engine, Ryan heard a shotgun being cocked in readiness. He turned his head, ducking a little and training his blaster on the other rider of the truck. He saw now that it was a woman, and she had climbed out of her seat to stand on the metal bridge beside the belching, ovenlike engine. As thin as her companion, with straggly long hair, she held a sawed-off Mossberg M9200A1 shotgun pointed at Ryan. The 12-gauge weapon was over a foot in length, and could blow a hole clean through a man. “You want to get the fuck off my husband, sweetheart?” she demanded.
“You think you can shoot me before I break his windpipe?” Ryan countered, pushing his toe deeper into the man’s throat until the fallen driver groaned in pain.
As the woman considered that, a whistle sounded up ahead. She looked up and saw J.B. holding his M-4000 scattergun on her from the head of the wag convoy, with Jak and Krysty standing to either side of him, leveling their own blasters at her. J.B. strode forward, the hefty scattergun trained on the woman, never wavering, his expression grim.