by James Axler
“While most of us train, there’s going to have to be volunteers for a recce party to scout Charity. I managed to get word from our spy in Charity about the meet, but Jourgensen has got the shape and size of the party well and truly sewn up. We need to get someone close enough to the ville to see what’s going on.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Lonnie rose to his feet. “I’ll go,” he said simply. The Native American woman rose to her feet, casting a hostile and suspicious look at the companions as she did.
“Count me in,” she muttered.
Correll shook his head. “No way, Jenny. You’ve got to oversee the armory, and I’ll need you to work with J.B.”
“Shit, Joe, can’t someone else do that? I don’t want to work with them,” she added, spitting out the last word as she glared at the companions.
Correll’s face hardened—if that was possible in a visage that was so gaunt to begin with. “I know how you feel. Lance was a good man, and it was sad to see him pass. But that’s fate. These people were defending themselves as we were. There was no malice, and we hold none against them.”
Jenny turned and looked directly at Correll, her eyes meeting his with a blaze of defiance and anger. She matched him for a few moments, then looked down. “Okay,” she mumbled, “if that’s the way it’s got to be.”
“It is,” Correll said softly. “Sit down and let’s see someone else.”
She reluctantly sat, and others rose to take her place. The recce party would consist of the lean, crop-haired Lonnie; Mik, a small, lean-faced man with several piercings and sardonic gaze; Tilly, a woman with large brown eyes and mouth set in determination, and the whip-thin boy in spectacles who had caught Dean’s gaze the evening before. His name was Danny, and it seemed that he was the youngest member of the community.
“I think we shouldn’t forget our friends,” Correll said when he had approved the volunteers. “It would only be reasonable to send someone from your group on the recce,” he added directly to Ryan.
The one-eyed man wasn’t keen on the idea. He would have preferred to keep his people together at this time. He didn’t believe that Correll had any notions of chilling the group, but he figured that the man was unpredictable and possibly insane, driven beyond reason by his cause. But what could Ryan do? To dissent would be to cause a problem that was, at this stage, unnecessary and undesirable.
“Mebbe,” he said slowly. “You want me, J.B. and Mildred here, right?” Correll nodded. Ryan continued, “So you take your pick out of the rest.”
Correll eyed Ryan, the sunken orbs boring into the one-eyed man.
“Okay,” he said finally, “I’m reckoning that Jak is the best tracker and hunter you’ve got, and I’m also reckoning that your boy Dean—if he’s anything like you—will be good to have in a firefight. I’ll pick them.”
Ryan nodded agreement, looking to Dean and Jak. Both assented, and seemed happy enough.
“I’d like to go, as well,” Doc said suddenly.
“Why?” Correll asked. “No offence intended, but you don’t seem the most physically able to undertake such a mission.”
Doc gave a sly grin. “That’s precisely why. You see, my dear sir, I would consider that you are, quite reasonably, testing us in some manner. If that is so, then the onus is on me, as the most physically frail seeming of the group, to prove that we will—every last one of us—be able to pull our weight when the time comes for action. Therefore, what better way to do this than to take part in such a mission.”
Correll said nothing for a moment, instead levelly gazing at Doc. Finally, he spoke. “You use a lot of words to say something, but when you get there it makes sense. Okay, Dr. Tanner, you can join the recce party.”
It was a two-day trek from the redoubt to Charity, and as soon as the meeting was concluded, the party began to prepare. To get there, scout and return would take a total of five days, leaving them with only the sixth day to rest, recuperate and report before the attack.
It would take two days to make the trek as they would be going by foot to avoid detection by any sec patrols or passing wags on their way to either of the villes. Even in the wastelands they would traverse, it would be easier to hide on foot than if they were in a wag. The objective was to avoid attracting attention, either by being noticed or by having to chill any passing wag, which may then be missed and spark an alarm.
So it was that the three companions who joined with the four Hellbenders found themselves being kitted out for desert survival by Jenny, the Native American who was in charge of both the armory and stores. She gave them self-heats and water canteens, and each had an individual tent made of a lightweight material with a thin, tubular metal frame that folded up into a light backpack.
“This is a most splendid thing,” Doc commented as he unraveled and examined the tent, pointedly ignoring the hostile stare he received from the Native American woman. “I must admit, I’ve never come across anything like this in any of the other stores.”
Jenny gave him a quizzical look, the hostility momentarily dissipating. “You’ve seen other places like this?” she asked.
Remembering that Ryan had said nothing of the other bases, allowing Correll to draw his own conclusions about where they came from, Doc refused to be drawn. “We’ve seen many places,” he commented elliptically, “and perhaps if you had seen what we have, then you may have a more tolerant attitude to what happens,” he chided.
The Native American stopped for a moment, considering what Doc had said, before nodding to herself. “Okay,” she murmured to the older man, “you and me can talk more about this when you get back. Mebbe you can make me see your point of view.”
Doc joined the others in the party, who had already been kitted out by the redoubt’s quartermaster. Jak and Dean weren’t surprised by what Doc had achieved, but the four Hellbenders were amazed.
“Tell you something,” commented the wiry and small Mik, sniffing as he spoke, “that’s a rarity, that is, getting her to crack her face and stop being so sour.”
Lonnie pulled an amused face. “Yeah, but you only say that ’cause she won’t let you fuck her.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Mik retorted with a dirty laugh.
“Yeah, laugh now, ’cause this ain’t gonna be much fun,” interjected the nervous, wiry teenager Danny.
The conversation died, and the other three Hellbenders stared at the youth.
“Well, it’s true, ain’t it?” he said defensively. “This is not going to be fun, y’know?”
“We know, but you don’t have to make a big deal of it,” Tilly said, her dark eyes flashing anger. “You’re always on such a down, boy.”
“Never mind that now,” Lonnie said calmly. “We need to get going.” He turned to the three companions. “We’ll take a route that leads us down the far side of the rock, and then circle the hot spots.”
“Hot spots?” Dean queried.
“There’s two kinds out there. Some of them are still holding a lot of rad blasting in there, and there ain’t shit that lives in those. And the others are sun hot spots, where it just gets too hot to move, and there’s no cover. Ain’t no way that we could even carry enough water to make up for the amount of dehydration we’d get there. It makes it a kinda roundabout route, but it’s got less danger attached.”
“But always danger,” Jak added. It was a statement rather than a question.
Lonnie made no comment, but led the party up to the top level and then through to the sec doors leading out to the rock face in which the entry door to the redoubt was housed. After punching in the code and pressing the lever, he led the seven-strong party out into the harsh glare of the late morning. Jak shielded his pink albino eyes from the brightness, while the others took in the vista that lay beyond the ridge on which they stood. The door closed ponderously behind them.
The cloudless blue sky was tinged with a pink that bespoke of high chem residue that floated in the upper atmosphere. Below, the two sta
rk blocks of plateaued rock that they had seen the previous night while disposing of the chilled bodies stood a rich red stone against the pale, sandy soil that stood at their respective bases. Some sparse scrub and a few Joshua trees stood weakly, attesting to the lack of moisture in the soil. Beyond the barely nurturing shadow around the rock, out into the relentless sun, little was visible but a semi-dust-bowl desert.
Lonnie led them up the rough road, with its few surviving traces of blacktop, that seemed to take them away from their intended direction and up around to the rear of the small mountain.
The air was dry and rasped at their lungs, the prickling heat making them break into a sweat before they had even reached the apex of the road and rounded the rock.
“This is a trifle ominous,” Doc remarked, gasping in breath.
“Don’t worry too much,” Tilly replied in between gasps of her own, “this is deceptive…wrong time of day for this height, this heat…”
“Don’t talk, save it,” Lonnie snapped.
He was right. They needed to conserve and work on their breathing, pacing themselves to make the top of the road without losing too much water.
The road leveled out and bent around the side of the mountain. They were able to ease their effort, knowing that they would soon be into the descent around the far side. The curving surface of the road was shadowed by a sheer ascent of rock wall, shielding their view of the far side until they actually turned into the first dip downward. When they did, the companions understood why the redoubt had been safe.
Coming around the side of the mountain, there was almost a compulsion to huddle against the sheer rock wall beside them to fight off the feelings of emptiness that the facing landscape engendered. Where, on the side of the mountain facing the redoubt, there was at least some kind of scrub, or some rock formations to break up the endless emptiness, on this side there was nothing. The mountain on which they stood fell away, the rock plunging down, taking the remains of the blacktop on a steep ascent that—it immediately occurred to Jak—would make a descent by wag difficult to control. Perhaps, he thought, this was part of the reason why the Hellbenders disdained wags so much, and yet also why they had been so secure in their position.
But this was only a passing thought. What really occupied the minds of the three who hadn’t seen this view before was how desolate and dead it seemed. For miles, stretching to a horizon tinged pink by the distant reflection of chem deposits in the equally empty sky, there was nothing except flat, dull dust bowl and sand. No lichens or scrub broke the emptiness, no creatures moved—even the slightest movement would have been detectable against the deadness that surrounded—and there were no other outcrops to break up the unremitting, bland sameness of the land.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc gasped, “this is surely hell. I have seen many things across this land, but the unrelenting tedium and lack of any life…”
“Yeah, this is basically where the real shit rad-blasting begins,” Mik replied, even though Doc had made more of a statement than a query. The small, rat-featured man flashed Doc a wry grin. “One of the reasons this is such a good place to have base, ain’t it? We’re on the edge of total extinction—who’d ever look for us there?”
Doc conceded the point with an inclination of his head, and the party responded to Lonnie’s gesture to move on down by beginning their descent.
As they stumbled down the rocky road, Dean, Doc and Jak were all thinking along similar lines. The remaining blacktop surface under their feet was crumbling as they touched it. Given that wags very rarely ventured around this side of the mountain, and it was only the Hellbenders themselves who used to it to access their base in the redoubt, the road was extremely unsafe. It was perfect for keeping out strangers. No one even having the misfortune to stumble around the dead side of the mountain would have the seeming idiocy to take a crumbling road to nowhere, but it didn’t bode well for when the assault parties left the redoubt to mount the attack on the trade convoys in a few short days.
Stray rocks and stones gave way under them, gravel and dirt making the surface unsteady. The road down the mountain was only just wide enough for most wags, being about twelve feet from the sheer rock wall on one side to the sheer drop on the other. They had kept close to the wall as the uneven surface tended to pitch and yawl underfoot, causing them to stumble.
They descended with Lonnie and Mik in the lead, as surefooted as it was possible to get on this surface, with Jak and Doc following, sandwiching Tilly between them. Danny, who traveled as nervously as his mannerisms would suggest, hung back and took the descent with a nervous care. Dean also hung back, fascinated by the teenager.
“You okay there?” Dean asked as Danny stumbled on yet another decaying stretch of road and pitched forward onto his knees. Dean took him under the arm and lifted, assisting him back to his feet.
“Yeah, guess so,” Danny mumbled. “This ain’t my idea of fun, though.”
“So why did you volunteer for it?” Dean asked.
Danny shrugged, pushing his spectacles back onto his nose. “Don’t know, really. I’m not cut out for all this, I should have stayed back at base, fiddling with the old tech and trying to make some sense of it.”
“You use the comps?” Dean said, wondering if he had found someone from the Hellbenders whose interest would mirror his own.
“I try,” Danny replied with a shrug. “When I was a little kid, I lived in Charity. My dad was on sec there, and where Baron Al had some of the old stuff, then I’d get to mess around on it. I suppose it was all the pretty lights when I was small,” he added in a sardonic tone, with a grin that Dean echoed.
“You mean to say that the baron actually had some of the old comps up and working?”
Danny waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I wouldn’t exactly say that. See, as much as I can remember it—and I’ve been here for what seems like years—part of Charity is built on what used to be some kind of place where they made stuff like that. So they had generators of their own, and lots of the old stuff in different stages, like different parts of the process of putting it together, y’know? Sometimes Baron Al’d fuel up the generator and run some of them, try to make sense of them. There were still papers in all the old offices that probably tell you how it all works, but the dumb fuck couldn’t read at all and didn’t trust anyone else.”
“So how come you got to use them?” Dean asked, wondering what, then, had caused Danny and his father to leave Charity.
“Wasn’t supposed to, but my dad had to look after me and work for the baron on sec. He was a really good sec man at one time, and then when my mom died there was no one else to look after me, so he got detailed on all the jobs where he didn’t have to go so far. Then he could take me with him. It wasn’t s’posed to be that way, and Baron Al didn’t know shit about it, but Joe was chief sec then, and he and my dad got on. It was harder once he got banished, and Dad had to sneak me in.
“He got to be sec on all the things that Baron Al thought were important, but weren’t under direct threat from outside—which, I guess, more or less meant all the old tech he’d got and was hoping to use. I’d be in there sometimes looking at stuff and he’d turn up with some other guys, and then I’d have to hide. That was easy, ’cause it was always Dad that did the search. But I’d hear Baron Al talking about the stuff to these other guys, and he figured that he could make himself ruler of all the if he could figure out how to use it.”
Dean took all of this in as they neared the bottom of the mountain road. It seemed to him that Danny knew more about the old tech than he perhaps even realized, and if together they could find some way into Charity and get to see, or mebbe steal, some of those papers, then that could be even better than getting the old tech itself. Dean figured that it was the paperwork that held the key to how the tech operated, and that was the real secret, the real treasure.
“So how did it all come to an end?” Dean asked as they leveled out from the steep descent and hit the soft des
ert soil at ground level.
Danny shrugged. “I got too involved in the comps one day, didn’t hear anyone coming until it was too late.”
“How come the baron didn’t chill you?”
Danny grimaced. “It was kinda more complicated than that. The baron was with someone—I think it was some trader who claimed he knew something about the old tech. They were right on me before I heard them, and although I hid, I guess the trader heard or saw me just getting out of sight. Dad did the search and left me alone, but just as Baron Al was about to start talking about his plans, coming on like he always did, the trader stopped him and came right over to where I was hiding.
“Course, that really fucked things over. Baron Al didn’t recognize me, but he was really pissed at Dad for not finding a kid, and real pissed at being shown up like that. He had a blaster on Dad and was about to chill him and me on the spot. Dad went for his, and I guess he wanted to end Baron Al’s reign and worry about shit afterwards. But it didn’t go that way ’cause the trader thought it would be a good opportunity to try and steal some of the old tech stuff. Stupe bastard actually tried to palm some radio stuff that didn’t work—I know ’cause I’d tried it out before—and Baron Al caught sight of him.
“It was chaos. Baron Al chilled the trader, and as he moved he put himself just out of line for Dad’s shot, which took him down but left him alive. Course, all that noise brought all the sec out of the woodwork, and Dad had to steal a wag and head out to the desert with me. He knew Joe was out here somewhere, and just had to trust to us finding him, or him finding us, before Baron Al caught up with us or we ran out of water or food—what little we were able to grab.”