by James Axler
"Doc risked…" Ryan began, gritting his teeth so hard that it made his jaw ache.
Krysty held up a hand, facing Lori. "You live around the Deathlands and you get to see a lot of shit behavior. Every now and again you see someone do something really brave. What Doc did to try and save your miserable skin is one of the bravest things I ever saw. A little steel needle against that mutie monster there!"
"Grace under pressure," Rick added, trying to wipe sweat and dirt off the lenses of his glasses.
"I've heard that," J.B. said. "Read it someplace, years ago."
Krysty ignored the interpretations, glowering at Lori. "You hear what I'm saying?"
"Yeah. But it was Ryan and you lot chilled the snake."
"You'd have been dead if Doc hadn't jumped in when he did," Ryan said, finding that the tide of his anger was ebbing slowly away, leaving him feeling irritable and dissatisfied.
"Drop it, my loyal comrades," Doc whispered. "The child's overwrought and doesn't mean what she says. She could do with a rest. We all could."
"Don't want another night out in the open. Not with rattlers as big as war wags sliding around the brush. We gotta push on toward the ville, wherever that is. The smell of gas is stronger, and there was that air wag. We got to be close."
Ryan knew what he'd said was right. J.B. backed him for moving on. But the reality was that Lori and the freezie weren't in good enough shape to keep on trucking through the fading light.
So they compromised. They had seen that the edge of the arid mesquite region was fairly close. It was agreed that they would trek on for that and then find a place to camp, posting guards against the hazards of the night.
RYAN CURLED UP alongside Rick, hoping to find out a little more about what the freezie had done in his highly classified past.
"Wanna talk, Rick?" No answer. "Rick? D'you wanna talk some?"
The faint snoring and the heavy, regular breathing answered the question.
A violent chem storm raged during the night and some chunks of nuke debris came shafting from deep space, the detritus of the abortive Star Wars project of the 1980s that had finally circled back to its home planet, burning up in streaks of brilliant magnesium light.
The wind brought the heavy odor of gasoline from the greener land that lay ahead of them for the next day.
Ryan fell asleep thinking about a ville that owned so much gas. And so much power. It could be one hell of a place.
Chapter Fourteen
RICK GINSBERG DREAMED during that second night of his awakening.
During his student days at UCLA, he'd dropped some "farmies," as the new hallucinogenics were known. They took you one step sideways from reality, but you still kept in touch. Unless you got an "oily," as bad trips were called. He couldn't remember why they were known by that name. Something lost in the mists of the past.
Ever since he'd blinked his sticky eyes open in the chemical cold of the cryo center, Rick had felt like he was in the middle of the worst oily that anyone had ever known. His brain simply would not keep still. It had no stability. No sense of what was "then" or "when" or "now." During the brief battle against the huge thrashing snake, it had been like a psycho-dream. The six men and women were now his comrades. Maybe they were his friends. He sure as green earth hadn't ever had any friends like Ryan and the others before, assuming they weren't a figment of his own fervid brain.
That confusion ran through the muddle of his dreams.
A rabbi was talking to him, both of them sitting on bright green transparent chairs that floated in a huge swimming pool, the walls making everything shimmer and echo. The rabbi was fully dressed, but Rick was in a torn suit.
"The question, my son, is this," the rabbi said, smiling with an infinite wisdom. "Are you a man dreaming that you are a butterfly? Or are you a butterfly dreaming that you are a serpent? That is the eternal riddle, wrapped in mystery, shrouded in an enigma. What is the answer, Richard?"
"I am, therefore I stink."
"Wrong. Why do you flagellate me like this? What have I done to deserve it?"
The rabbi segued into his mother, weeping as she leaned on the enormous walnut sideboard that Uncle Maurice had given them.
Rick moaned and rolled over on his back, starting to snore. Ryan reached and nudged him into a half-waking movement, edging him into another dream.
Now he was in a dusty cornfield with his cousin Ruth. But Ruth had a tumbling mane of bright crimson hair, and she was leaning over his naked groin, her lips brushing at his swollen erection. In the background Rick could hear a brass band playing the theme music from Paladin.
"This is biblical evil," he said to Ruth, and she stopped, looking up at him, lips full, ripe and glistening.
"No. It's easily done, Richard. You just pick someone and then you pretend that you've never, ever met."
The freezie sighed, his hand fumbling toward his own cock, but the next dream interrupted him.
He stood outside the big brownstone block where his parents had lived, the one that a famous film star, Marilyn Monroe, had once lived in, they claimed. The sun shone very brilliantly and he could hear traffic on East River Drive
, horns sounding and the far-off wailing of a fire siren, like the death wail of a demented dinosaur.
His mother and his father and all four of his grandparents stood in a formal row, all wearing Victorian clothes. Frock coats and frilled gowns. They were all nodding to him and smiling, as if he'd done something very clever.
His grandmother, Agnes Laczinczca, beckoned to him, crooking her finger. The bezel of the intricately cut diamond ring flashed.
"When you go to the store, Richard Neal," she said, "you must make sure you are wearing your overshoes."
"It won't rain," he squeaked.
"Not for the rain, babushka. To stop your feet rad-rotting when the missiles come. They'll kill us all. Mr. Kurtz, he already dead."
"In another country, Grandmama," he said.
"Shut noise and eat self-heat," Jak said, shaking him into a muscle creaking wakefulness.
"EVERYONE READY to go?" Ryan asked. "Cans buried out of the way? Good."
They didn't tidy up after themselves out of some inherited desire to maintain the environment. There were some kind of muties, particularly packies, that would follow anyone traveling through the Deathlands, trailing their discarded cans or packets.
"I'm feeling a bit better," Rick told them. "Not so stiff."
"You could use some new clothes," Krysty observed, pulling at a loose thread that dangled from the shoulder of the freezie's suit.
"Yeah. My Fifth Avenue
's smartest doesn't stand up well to Sierra rocks and desert cactus. Should have bought a heavier duty cloth."
"Mebbe find something in the ville. Find something to trade."
"What's the money in Deathlands? Guess my American Express gold card isn't going to say more about me than dollars ever can. I heard you talk about 'jack.' What's that?"
"Jack changes from ville to ville. Lotta barons stamp their own coins. Print notes. Mostly only used in that ville. Some big barons got together and agreed their jack could be used in each other's villes." The Armorer thought for a moment. "Your times…jack was the same all over the country?"
"Right. A dollar was a dollar. That reminds me. When you found my clothes, did you find a wallet?"
"What's a wallet?" Lori asked.
"A kind of bag for your money, cards and driving license and… And my Filofax? Hell's bloody bells! My Filofax has gone! I can't live without my fax. What am I going to do? Come on, guys."
All of them, even Doc Tanner, gazed blankly at him. Jak asked the question for them all. "What's fullafacts? Some blaster?"
"No. Nobody could live without one in my day. And mine's gone forever."
"What was IT, Rick?" Ryan pressed, fascinated by this glimpse into the lost past.
"Kind of a book that contained the names and addresses of my friends, phone numbers, appointments and all kinds o
f vital stuff."
"Why did you need a book to be telling you whose your friends are?" Lori asked.
"Because…1 guess… I don't rightly remember that, Lori. And since there's now only six friends in the world, I don't need their addresses or names, do I? Guess not."
"DARK NIGHT!" J.B. exclaimed. "The smell of gas is getting double-strong. Got to be pumping it. Not just a big dump."
Ryan agreed with him. Faintly, carried on the wind, he thought that he'd caught the sound of drilling rigs. When he'd driven once across the east-west blacktops of what had been Texas, he'd seen the wrecks of the old oil pumps, perched across the dead prairies like the skeletal remains of ancient birds.
Jak, who was scouting at point, called back to them. "Blacktop here. Looks used. Kept good. Safe come on."
It headed in from the northwest, in the rough direction of the Pacific, looping to run eastward, toward where the scent of gasoline was strongest, toward where they could, at last, make out the smudges of buildings.
"There's a sign," Doc observed. "Perhaps we might go to peruse it."
Snakefish. Population two thousand and growing all the time. Gas sold and traded. Outlanders welcome.
Under that last part, someone had added, in a maroon acrylic paint: If they behave good.
"Better make sure we behave good." Rick grinned. "Looks like some things haven't changed. Strangers are fine, as long as they walk the line."
"Wrong," Ryan said. "Not many villes welcome outlanders. Doesn't matter how they behave."
"Xenophobic capital of Deathlands, you mean?"
Ryan didn't understand him, so he didn't bother replying.
"Someone's coming!" Krysty said suddenly. "Wags. That way." She pointed to the east.
They could hear a thin keening, humming sound, which was far off, but approaching fast.
"Air wag? "Jak asked.
"No. Different sound. Some kind of gas wag," Ryan replied, head to one side, considering what their best course of action might be.
"Two-wheeler," Lori said unexpectedly. "Had vids back in my redoubt. Keeper used to look for them. They was some of his faves. They was about two-wheeler wags. That's what the noise is being."
There weren't many two-wheel wags around Deathlands. They used up precious gas and you couldn't carry supplies on them or mount a blaster. A man on a two-wheel was about as vulnerable as a skinned armadillo.
"Lot of them," J.B. observed, as laconic as ever. "Take us some cover?"
Ryan looked around. The desert stretched behind them, dry and faded, the brush high enough for them to hide. But if they were tracked, then their chances would lie somewhere between zero and one on a scale of one hundred. The thought of what a single match could do with a breeze behind it was terrifying. Ryan had seen some bad fires in his life and didn't much want to find himself at the center of another one.
"We'll stand," he decided. "Keep ready, but nothing unless I give the order. We're travelers. Wag broke down three days ago, far side of the mountains there. Keep it vague."
The buzzing sound became louder. Krysty saw them first, with her heightened mutie vision. "Group close together," she said. "Around a dozen. Lot of sun-flash off metal."
It wasn't long before they could all see them, riding down the center of the blacktop, where the white line would once have been.
"Keep together," Ryan warned quietly.
The motorcyclists came closer, and they could all see the morning sun bouncing off steel and polished chrome. They were riding in an arrowhead formation, and their leader held up a gloved hand when they were about a hundred yards off. He slowed, and the rest of the group swerved to left and right, ending up in a half circle around the seven friends, about twenty paces away from them. The riders kept their engines revving, twisting the throttle grips, giving Ryan and the others ample time to look them over.
Automatically the one-eyed man weighed the newcomers up as potential enemies. The odds were they wouldn't prove friendly: eleven, all males, aged from about eighteen to forty-five. Most were overweight, which was unusual in the Deathlands. Many were bearded and had long hair, tied back with ribbon. All wore heavy boots and blue denim in varying stages of filthy decay, with badges and patches painted or stitched on.
But the important items were the blasters. Most had either hand-built pistols, based on old Saturday night specials, or weapons with parts grafted together from other old blasters, .32 the most common caliber. Two had sawed-off scatterguns of uncertain vintage slung from their shoulders. Their leader packed a Smith & Wesson Model 29, with a nine-inch barrel, .44 caliber. From the battered appearance of the piece it looked like it had been used to hammer in nails and stir a caldron of mutton stew, neither of which would stop the killing punch of the blaster, if the man carrying it knew how to use it.
None of the bikers made any obvious threatening moves. Hands rested near bolstered pistols while eyes raked the companions. The leader finally lifted a hand again and everyone cut their engines. The sudden stillness was deafening.
The two groups stared at each other for several long seconds, nobody wanting to break the silence. Finally Ryan spoke.
"Nice two-wheel wags," he said.
"Not wags, you straight double-stupe mother! They're our choppers."
"Choppers?"
Rick took a hesitant step forward. "Either my brain has now completely fallen apart in little splinters of sugared candy, or…"
" What? "Krysty asked.
"Or these guys are real, live Hell's Angels."
The man with the Smith & Wesson heard what he said. "One of you's got some sucking brains! Yeah! We're Hell's Angels. Snakefish Chapter of the California Motorcycle Gang. We call ourselves the Last Heroes. Riding the road and keeping the good word alive for today and forever."
"What's a Hell's Angel?" Lori asked, sucking at her thumb in a coquettish baby gesture.
One of the other riders answered her. "Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of the dead, we fear no evil. Because we're the most evil mothers that ever walked through the valley of the dead."
Ginsberg nodded. "I did a sociology thesis on these guys. Well, I mean, not these guys. These guys weren't going to be born for fifty years when I wrote 'The Social Phenomenon of the Motorcycle Gangs: Macho or Myth?' I decided that they were about ninety-nine percent myth."
"What you saying about us, you four-eyed straight mother?"
Ginsberg stepped closer. "You've got the colors and… chopped hogs. Sissy bars. It all comes back to me, Ryan," he said excitedly.
"How come you know so much? You ain't from around these parts. You seen other chapters of righteous brothers, someplace else?"
The long-barreled Smith & Wesson was sliding slowly from the tooled holster.
"No. I read about you back in—"
"Enough, Rick," Ryan interrupted quickly. "Let's cut the talk. We're traveling through. We lost our wag three days back. Heading for Snakefish. There going to be some sort of problem here?" Ryan's hand rested on the butt of his automatic rifle.
"Problem, straight? Outlander comes in looking like he's in charge of a gang of mercies. Snakefish doesn't like mercies."
Ryan figured they could take all eleven out, but not without a minimal body count against them.
"Mercies?" Rick whispered.
"Hired blasters," Krysty replied. "Short for mercenaries."
"Wrong. We aren't mercies. I asked you once. I'll ask you one more time. Do we have a problem here?"
Now the Smith & Wesson was jerked clear of the holster. The leader of the cycle gang smiled at Ryan, showing a mouthful of broken teeth. "Problem? What the fuck do you think?"
Chapter Fifteen
"I THINK if there was a problem, there'd be some blood spilled," Ryan replied calmly.
"Could be right. Not mercies, you reckon?"
"No."
"What d'you want in Snakefish?"
"Bed and food for a couple of nights. Then I guess we'd be moving on."
> "We're sec patrol for the ville."
Ryan nodded. "Figured that."
The Smith & Wesson was put back in the holster.
"You got names?"
Ryan introduced his six friends. The leader of the bike gang looked like he was concentrating hard. "You got all those?"
"Sure. Don't read or write much, but I got total recall." To prove it, he repeated the names of the group faultlessly.
"You got names?" J.B. asked.
"Yeah. I'm Zombie. Little guy with the beard's Priest. Fat brother's Riddler. Rat next to him. Mealy next."
Ryan looked at the faces behind the names, faces you saw in a dozen villes across the land. He'd read some about tunes before dark day, and had seen some faded vids. Old photos. Here they were. The same faces from the old pix. Brutish, redneck faces. Good old boy, shit-kicking faces. Narrow eyes that would never look friendly and would often look coldly vicious. Most had their names emblazoned across the backs of their denim jackets: Harlekin, Dick the Hat, Vinny, Freewheeler, Ruin, Kruger.
After the introductions there was an uneasy silence, which was broken by Doc.
"I would be most awfully grateful, gentlemen, if you could see your way clear to conveying a tiny piece of information. What's the distance to the nearest metropolis?"
"What?" Zombie gaped.
"How far t'ville?" Jak translated.
"Why dinne say so?" mumbled the Angel called Rat. "Stupe-straight!"
"Mile an' half," Zombie told them.
"Gas smell is strong," Ryan said. "You got a big plant in town?"
"Just outside the ville in an old fun park."
Rick Ginsberg coughed. "I used to be interested in theme parks and funfairs. Magic Mountain, Six Flags, Elitch Gardens and… what was this one called?"
"Sierra Sunrise Park. You know it?" Zombie looked suspicious.
"Heard of it. Built very late in the nineties. Nothing special."
"Special! It's where our chapter has its home!" exclaimed the rider called Dick the Hat. Since he rode bareheaded the name was something of a puzzle.
"Yeah. Last Heroes redoubt. You stay a few days in the ville, you could come see it," Zombie offered, addressing his words specifically to Lori. Who grinned at him. "Who's the baron?" Ryan asked. "Baron Brennan, Edgar Brennan. Old guy. Been baron more years than anyone can remember."