Thunder Road

by James Axler

  “We were scattering. Some were firing as they ran, but we were spooked like horses. I guess most of the shots went into our own people. Nothing seemed to hit the rider. Calm, like nothing was happening—I saw him, like a stupe I couldn’t take my eyes away—he turns around to the bike and reaches into the packs. Had this strange little blaster he took out, looked like it had tin cans in it. He pulled his goggles down, then fired the little blaster over our heads. It hit one of the buildings, side-on. Exploded like a gren, bits of wall flying all over us, but it was more than that. Gas—no, like gas but not like it. It was like there was gas but with liquid in it. Orange. Stained the walls, spread like an orange mist, and as it came down it burned those it fell on. Most of those burned by it have bought the farm, but some are still living. Better off chilled, if you ask me, but you can’t just let them…”

  She paused again, gathering herself. “I got lucky. The first gren of orange mist fell away from where I was standing. Shit, when I saw it burn, I ran. No way did I want that on me. I managed to get to cover, watched the rest. I shoulda done something, but I didn’t know what. And I was scared. Like some fucking madman, he just stands there, saying nothing. Real careful, like he was totally in control, he fires at all the buildings, picking those on the corners of the streets with the most people jammed in ’em to start with. People falling over each other, pissing themselves with fear. Easy meat…

  “When the mist is falling, and people are burning, and there’s brick and stone and shit raining down, with all the buildings on fire, he takes the long-barreled blaster again and starts to pick off men at random. Then he stops, nods to himself like he’s just been told to stop and gets back on the bike.

  “No one’s fired back, One-eye. No one. Can you believe that? All so…frightened? Froze in fear? I dunno…He just gets on the bike, revs the fucker up and rides out. Weaving past the bricks, the chilled, the orange shit on the ground, just like none of it’s there. Just like he hasn’t just taken out our entire ville.

  “So he’s gone, and we have to pick up the pieces and try to fix it as new.” She laughed bitterly, hawked and spit.

  “You wanted to know what happened? That’s what happened, One-eye.”

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the center of the ville, Mildred and Krysty had been able to start making some small difference. The path between the debris had also been improved by small teams under the direction of J.B. and Jak. They had only children to help them, the women being occupied in the infirmary, but the youth of the ville were wiry and strong. Doc, meanwhile, had continued his single-minded pursuit of his task, and his white hair was plastered to his scalp, his coat long since discarded in a heap, shirtsleeves rolled up.

  Ryan paused for a moment, looking at the carnage with a fresh eye. The mystery rider had done this with no help, and with an armory that could comfortably be carried on a bike—a big bike, admittedly, but still one smaller than a wag. His words, which had seemed as so much stupe trash to the woman, made a kind of sense to the one-eyed man. The guy was crazy, sure. But crazy with a hell of an armory. That made him a triple-red threat.

  Thing was, could they take him on? He hadn’t promised the woman that they’d go after him, but if they were offered a reward? They were in no position to turn down jack or supplies. Moreover, Ryan had felt his instinct for self-preservation tugging at him. They’d already encountered the rider once, and by the sound of it they’d got lucky. Mebbe they wouldn’t be so lucky a second time, and there was inevitably going to be a second time. Trouble followed them, there was no denying. So mebbe it would be for the best to hunt it down and face it before it came up behind and caught them unawares.

  His reverie was interrupted by Jak.

  “Ryan, careful orange dirt,” the albino said without preamble. “Look…”

  He held out his hand. There was a smear of orange mud against the white skin of his palm, and showing around the smear was a red weal, blistering at the edges.

  “Get Mildred to look at that,” Ryan said.

  Jak grinned. “Gonna—not before show you, though. Some chem shit, stays burning a day after going off? Not seen before.”

  “Just got the story from her,” Ryan said softly, indicating the woman who had returned to joining Doc’s quest to deliver water. “Fill you all in later. This was our rider, and he’s one mad coldheart by the sound of it.”

  Jak gave the briefest of nods, turned and went across to the infirmary. Ryan took his place in clearing rubble and caught the expression on Mildred’s face as she examined Jak’s chem burn.

  There would be much to discuss later.

  BY THE TIME THE SUN had sunk and the cold night chilled their bones, the companions were exhausted. They went back to where they had tied up the wag and horses.

  Almost everyone else had stayed in the center of the ville. A few stragglers returned to their homes; most wanted the security of staying close together. The house where the wag was tethered remained empty. Whether the occupant had been chilled, they did not know.

  And it didn’t matter, except that it gave them the privacy they needed to talk about what had happened, and how it affected them. Ryan began by repeating what the woman had told him. They listened in silence. When he finished, and without comment, Mildred added her opinion of the burn she had seen on Jak’s hand. She told them about napalm, and how she had felt when they first entered the ville.

  When she finished, no one wanted to be the first to speak.

  “I suppose the real question here is, do we see ourselves as knights errant,” Doc said eventually. “I suspect that is what has been playing on your mind, Ryan.”

  “You’re kind of right, Doc,” the one-eyed man replied. “I feel like we need to go after this coldheart before he comes after us. And I feel like if we do that, we can mebbe get what we need from here…the things we came here for in the first place.”

  “There’s not much left in the way of provisions,” Krysty said quietly. “From here, the next ville is who knows where? We couldn’t get far.”

  J.B. took off his spectacles and polished them. It was a habit, an indication that he was thinking. Eventually, he perched them back on his nose and started to speak.

  “We got two separate problems here. First, we’ve got nothing in reserve, so we can’t move on unless we trade with these people in some way. Now, they got jackshit, too. The only way they’re going to give us what we need is if we can offer them something they want. Like revenge. Second problem is that this stupe is riding ’round at random, blasting the shit out of villes. Who knows where else he’s been? Who knows where he’ll stop? We stay in this area for any time, chances are we’re going to run into him. So, do we do it now, or later?”

  The Armorer paused, then looked steadily at Ryan. “Seems to me that the only way we solve one problem is by solving the other. That simple.”

  “Nothing to do with wanting to get your hands on his armory?” Ryan murmured.

  A grin split J.B.’s face. “There could be that, too.”

  IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS to help get the ville back into something approaching a functioning order. After the second day, the friends were offered food and water, so they could preserve their own. No mention was made of any condition. Rather, it was taken as payment for the work they were doing, which suited them fine at that point. The work was hard, and there was little demand beyond the immediate.

  Soon the time was drawing near when the friends would want to leave. Question was, would they leave with renewed supplies and a mission?

  The answer came on the fifth night. By now, the survivors had adopted a more communal style of living, pooling as they were their resources and their skills. It was while they were eating in the building that they’d adopted as their communal dining hall that Maggie, the woman Ryan had questioned on the first day, stood to address them all.

  “You know what we all been through,” she began with a halting tone, “and you know that these people—” here she indicated the friends “—ha
ve been a lot of help. But there’s something else. Something some of you know about ’cause we’ve discussed it among ourselves.

  “Ryan,” she continued, “you said you’d help us get the coldheart bastard who did this if we’d help you with what you wanted. You still stand by that?”

  “I do,” he said slowly. “We all do. Happens that this mystery rider coldheart of yours might be a threat to others, might be a threat to us. That’s no reason to go looking for trouble, but mebbe it’d be better to find it before it finds us. As well, you’ve been fair to us, feeding us while we’ve worked for you, so I figure you’ll be reasonable about what we ask.”

  “Depends,” the woman said, glancing at those around her.

  Ryan’s face twisted into a wry grin. “It isn’t much. You know that when we arrived here we were looking to trade, pick up supplies as we were running low. You pay us in goods to go after this coldheart, and we will. We’ll need more than we’ve got now if we’re going to make a real job of it.”

  “How do we know you won’t just go in the opposite direction fast as you can, forget about the rider as soon as you’re outta here?” The speaker was one of the older boys, emboldened by the silence of expectation that had descended over the hall.

  “You don’t,” Ryan said simply. “But you know what we’re like. You’ve seen us work. We didn’t have to do that. Weak as you are, we could have just taken what we wanted and already be long gone. So you think about that. Then you say yes or no to our terms. It’s your choice.”

  Chapter Three

  No choice at all. The people of the ville agreed to their terms. The companions loaded their wag and set off the next morning, before the sun was too high in the clear sky.

  “I never thought I would wish for the toiling colors of a chem cloud, but then there are many things to which I thought the word ‘never’ would apply,” Doc said sadly as he stared at the sky.

  “Don’t talk shit, save energy, drive,” Jak muttered from the back of the wag. Doc, first on driving duties, spared himself a small smile and coaxed the horses onto the road out of the ville.

  They could have taken a motorized wag, one that would have negated the need for food and water for the horses, one that would perhaps have been more reliable. But J.B.’s recce of the ville’s resources the night before had revealed that their wags were old and in poor repair, and that their supplies of fuel were low. To take what was needed from them would have left the ville with next to nothing, while at the same time taking a big risk on being stranded in the middle of the sandy dustbowl that was their chosen route.

  The lack of speed shown by the two stringy creatures pulling their wooden wag was a small trade-off against these risks.

  But that was not the only reasoning that Ryan was using. The rider had seen them once before, using this wag. That time he had been friendly. If he saw them again in a motorized vehicle, would he be more likely to perceive them as a threat? If he saw them with the horse-drawn wag, would he recall seeing them once before and passing by? These questions were important. He was one dangerous coldheart, and to attract undue attention and hostility in tracking him was the last thing Ryan wanted.

  Although they set out along the route by which they had entered the ville—tracking back along the trail left by the rider almost a week before—they had no intentions of blindly following it and hoping that they might just, conceivably, run into him along the way. It was purely that it was the only road in. After all, the rider was faster than them, and had days of start on them. The problem here was how to try to find him.

  Wherever he was currently based, he could only travel as far as the fuel tanks on the bike would take him. A return journey, at that. He had, by all accounts, left the ville by the same road he had entered. So his base of operations was more likely to lay back in the direction from where he had come than it was to lay on the road on the far side of the ville. If he was triple smart and didn’t want to be followed, Ryan thought, then he may have doubled on himself and circled the ville. But that notion didn’t tally with their encountering him a day’s wag ride along that return line.

  Trying to get inside the mind of a triple crazie had given Ryan a headache. He’d discussed the options with the others, and it had left them with a headache, too. Most crazies were easy to figure out. When he thought of all the madmen they’d come up against, it was clear that for most of them there was always one driving obsession that was at the center of their craziness. You find that, and you find the key to how to deal with them. Strategy was easier when you had something to go up against. But what did they have with the mystery rider?

  Mildred and Doc were the most likely to have some idea of what might be going on inside the head of the rider.

  “The things of which he speaks are very much concepts from before the nukecaust,” Doc had mused. “There has been very little to survive that could have fully informed him of such notions.”

  “Particularly if he was out here living in it,” Mildred added. “Let’s face it, a lot of our notions about the law and justice lasted squat once we actually had to adjust and survive.”

  Doc gave a quiet chuckle. “True, my dear Doctor. Truer than you know…or maybe not.” He gave her a quizzical stare. “We were soon disabused of such notions, even if we kept knowledge. Yet our mysterious friend seems to still have an intrinsic belief that such a thing is possible. Now that shows a peculiarly muddled sense of reality, does it not? Yet he seems quite rational in other ways.”

  “Doc’s right. The rider has the ability to function to a high degree,” Mildred mused. “So how could you get that combination? That isolation, and that knowledge, that would enable you to still function, yet have no real idea of the world in which you lived?”

  “Lori…” Doc said softly.

  Mildred looked at him, brow furrowed. Lori was before she had joined them, but she had heard tell of her. A glance around the others confirmed her suspicions—Lori Quint, the tall blonde with the short skirt. She’d been Doc’s companion for a short while, until she bought the farm. She had been born and brought up in a redoubt, never seeing the outside world until Ryan and the others had landed in the redoubt by sheer chance.

  “You think he may live in a redoubt? There might be one around here?” Ryan questioned.

  “Perhaps. Not necessarily a redoubt, but maybe a base of some kind? Somewhere that would be protected against the nukecaust. Somewhere people could interbreed without ever having to go outside.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time we’d found crazies living like that,” Krysty mused. “But as you say, people rarely go outside.”

  So they reached a kind of conclusion. It wasn’t much to work on, but it was the best they could come up with and it did give them a place to start. If there was a limit to the fuel his bike could carry, and he had a base somewhere along a line from the ville to where they had first seen him, then it might be possible to narrow the search by drawing a circle that could encompass other villes in the area, and working in from there.

  They had little in the way of maps to work from, but J.B. was an excellent navigator and plotter. Some judicious questioning of the people from the ville gave him the names and rough locations of other villes in the area, along with an indication of distance by the time it usually took to travel between them. Using old predark maps of the area leading to the Grand Canyon and New Mex that were among the papers he always carried with him, he was able to prescribe a rough circle, within which lay three other villes. It would take them several days to visit all of them, and the reception they would receive was a variable to be met with caution, but it was a plan that gave them somewhere to begin the search.

  J.B.’S MAP AND ROUTE PRESCRIBED an arc that would take them a round 360 degrees back to their starting point. Along the way, they would hope to pick up more information about the mystery rider that they could use to pinpoint his base of operations. It would be a long, arduous task, but there was little else they could do to make it any ea
sier.

  As they made the tedious journey, under the boiling sun or the freezing moon, they looked across the desolate landscape for any sign of the rider, or for his tracks. There was none before they came to the first ville on their route.

  Station Browns ville had no old predark rail depot from which it could have derived its name. There was little in the way of old railroad that had even traversed this section of the Deathlands, as they knew too well from past experience. The origin of its name was a mystery, except that it rang some distant bell in Mildred’s youth.

  It was of no matter. Like the ville they had originally stumbled upon, Station Browns was, in effect, little more than a way station for passing trade. And as there was little that passed this way, it was as dirt poor as its neighbors. The little they had gleaned about it indicated that it was little more than a pesthole ville, with a gaudy house that paid its way and a nice line in home brew that traveled well. There was a kind of rivalry between Station Browns ville and a ville called Casa Belle Taco, which had a similar trade. But there was enough distance between them for horny and thirsty convoys and travelers to keep both in business.

  On the third day out, both Jak and Krysty felt prickles of unease within them.

  The albino, his hunting senses as sharp as they were, could find no reason why he was feeling that way. There was no scent, no sound that he could put a name to, yet he could feel that out there, somewhere just beyond the limits of his senses, there was someone—something?—watching them.