Thunder Road

For the wag on the horizon was getting closer with every second.

As the horses wandered off, and they took up their positions, J.B. squinted through his spectacles at the approaching vehicle. It struck him that it was making one hell of a noise for something that seemed so small. It wasn’t a tricked-out war wag; neither was it the kind of old predark truck that was still used for transporting goods within a short distance range.

“What is that thing?” Mildred asked to no one in particular. “I haven’t seen anything go like that since NASCAR.”

“What?” J.B. questioned absently.

Mildred gave a brief, bitter laugh. “Long time ago, John. Way, way before your time.”

“Heads up, people. He’s closing way too quick for my liking,” Ryan stated.

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL DAY for Thunder Rider. A one-man crusade against the forces of darkness was never going to be an easy task, but already he felt that he was making progress along his thunder road. More towns had been cleaned up: more scum had felt the scything sword of justice within the time between sunup and sundown.

Now to return to the secret base, where he could rest and recuperate in peace and security before venturing forth once more. Of course, he knew there would come a time when he would have to venture so far afield that it would be impossible for him to return home with the sun. Then, he would have to establish mobile bases that would serve as a secure haven while he rested. Perhaps in time he would be able to recruit others to his cause. There were good people out there, tired of being under the oppressive heel of the scum, who would join with him once they had a figurehead, once they knew they were not alone. He knew there were others from the communications that had been monitored at base since before he was fully trained. It was only a matter of finding them.

Though the dust streamed behind him, he had a clear view from all other angles. As darkness fell in such a barren environment, there was likely to be danger all around.

Like over to his right, and ahead of him. It was nothing more than a dot on the horizon to begin with, but as he approached, he could see that it was a horse-drawn wagon, with a small, hunched-over man driving it. It was covered, and he could not see within, but it was unlikely to be harboring danger. Those who would oppose him were not the sort to be driving a humble horse-drawn wagon, after all.

Nonetheless, he took one hand from the bar of the bike and flexed his fingers. He could find the .44 in a fraction of a second if necessary.

Perhaps it would be. He furrowed his brow as he watched the wagon pull to a halt. The small man leaped nimbly down and unhitched the horses, who wandered off. From each end of the wagon, men and women came forth. They were armed, he could see that, though not even his keen vision could make out their ordnance at such a distance. If he had worn the enhanced vision comp-visor that was a part of the bike’s setup, then he would not have this trouble.

It was an oversight. He had been lax. That would not happen again.

Meanwhile, he fixed his eyes on the wagon in the distance. The people were adopting defensive postures. They were not looking for a fight, but rather they were responding to his approach. Oh, irony, they thought that he was one of the bad guys.

He determined to show them that all was well. Easing the throttle, he turned the bike toward them, slowing slightly. Raising one hand, palm up and out, he showed that he was unarmed. He could imagine the puzzlement on their faces as he approached them. What was this all about? Why was this powerful man not attacking them?

As he came within view, he could see them behind and around the wagon. Not enough to be able to identify them should they ever cross paths again, but enough to know that his gesture had achieved its intended effect. Their guns were not raised to him.

Perhaps they would recognize him. Surely the news of Thunder Rider had already spread far and wide. He could imagine the look of delight on their faces when they realized who he was; or, at least, that he was friend and not foe.

Perhaps in time they would join him.

He was past them in less than a moment. Righting his path, he opened up the throttle once more, the pulse engine responding to his deft touch. He returned both hands to the bars and sped on, once more, for home.

“HE’S COMING RIGHT FOR US,” J.B. said incredulously. “Tell me I’m not imagining what I’m seeing.”

“Oh no, freak boy’s for real, John,” Mildred whispered in tones that mixed awe with astonishment.

They could see that the vehicle was massively powerful. Wide and squat-bodied, it was obviously an engine-driven bike rather than a wag; yet its bulk suggested that it should be a trike, which would also account for its stability. Yet astonishingly, as it turned side-on to them, it became apparent that it was only dual-wheeled, the tires being of an immense width and thickness. And there was no trail of exhaust fumes to mingle with the dust in its wake. No smell of wag fuel that would have been so familiar and expected.

The most bizarre thing of all was the way in which the rider on the bike waved to them. There was no other word for it. He took one hand off the bike’s steering and waved, as friendly as if he was an old friend greeting them after a long absence.

It was apparent that he was not going to attack them. As one, they lowered their blasters, watching in collective amazement as he turned away and roared off into the distance.

“Triple-good bike,” Jak commented. “Weird bastard.”

“Very succinctly put,” Doc murmured.

“What was powering that thing?” Krysty asked.

Ryan looked at J.B., who returned his questioning gaze, then shrugged. “Don’t know. But if he’s that friendly to any old stranger who passes, then he’s headed for a whole lot of trouble.”

“Mebbe not,” J.B. mused. “Anyone with wheels like that is going to have one bastard of an armory on board.”

Mildred shook her head. “Yeah, well, there’s too much weirdness there. Thank God he’s headed in the opposite direction.”

“Agree with that,” Krysty added.

Chapter Two

When the sun went down, the companions pitched camp for the night. They had changed their direction, figuring that a ville lay on the line cut through the desert plain by the man on the bike. It was still in line with their original course, and a detour couldn’t hurt if it gave them a chance to collect more supplies. Particularly water. They were on too tight a ration for the heat they had to endure during the day, and it was a primary concern.

Jak was on edge, senses straining for the return of the bike. What if the stranger hadn’t attacked simply because he was on his own? What if he had been on a recce, and was now on his way back with other riders, heavily armed?

Ryan felt much the same, although without the heightened senses to give him warning. He did, however, have something that may have been even better than that: Krysty.

It was obvious from the way that she sat, staring into the fire, that something was bothering her. She was preoccupied. He could tell from the way that her flowing, prehensile hair had flattened itself, curled around her like a shield. Usually, the tresses were wild and free. The opposite could only mean one thing.

“Problem?” he asked her quietly. Jak was himself preoccupied, Doc was sleeping and J.B. and Mildred were some distance off, grabbing themselves a little privacy. None of them had noticed Krysty’s demeanor, and the one-eyed man was unwilling to draw their attention to it unless it became a necessity.

“Mebbe, lover,” she replied in an equally soft tone. “Could be I was just spooked by that rider. Could be that there was just something that seemed odd about him.”

“Man riding by on such a machine that doesn’t try and blast the fuck out of you is weird enough these days,” Ryan said with a small, tight grin.

Krysty gave a short bark of a laugh. “Yeah, true enough. But mebbe there’s just this feeling that he wasn’t as harmless as we thought. I can’t say what. You know what this is like. It’s like there was a scent of danger left, and I can’t get the bastard out of my nose.”

“Usually it’s a good thing that it stays there,” Ryan said, moving closer to her. “I trust that sense of yours. And this time it’s backed up by Jak, and by something in my gut. Couldn’t say what, just that I know the fucker’s there.”

Ryan left her to begin patrolling the camp’s perimeter. He looked at his wrist chron by the light of the fire before moving any farther: an hour remained until his watch was over and he could get some sleep. Time then to wake up Doc. Jak was also supposed to be getting some rest, but the albino couldn’t sleep. Ryan knew him too well to counsel otherwise.

Moving away from the light and warmth of the fire, he shivered as the cold and dank of the darkness draped itself over him. J.B. and Mildred were on the edge of where the light petered out, and he skirted them, unwilling to disturb them. The Armorer and Mildred were on last watch before sunup. They had plenty of time yet.

AS THEY SET OFF next morning, the subject of the motorcycle rider wasn’t mentioned. He was long gone, in the opposite direction to that in which they now traveled, and there was no sign of his return. The only way in which he was relevant to their journey now was in the hope that his path of the day before would lead them to a ville.

It was a hope that was realized within a few hours. Before the sun had risen more than forty-five degrees in the sky, they sighted a distant ville.

They could tell it was only a small ville by the fact that there were only a few columns of smoke rising into the sky.

“Oh, boy, do I have a bad feeling about this,” Mildred remarked heavily.

“Don’t need a doomie sense for that,” Krysty agreed.

It took an hour for the slow, horse-drawn wag to get close enough to the ville to make out anything other than the smoke. It was a journey that seemed as though it would never end, the horses seeming to go slower with every step. The lack of water was beginning to tell: problem was, would there even be anything left in the ville when they got there? Right now, they expected to find nothing more than smoldering ruins.

A smell in the air wafted toward them on the light desert breeze. It was, in part, horribly familiar—the smell of burned, charred and roasting human flesh. There was something else mixed in with it, a sweet smell with a bitter undertone. It was foreign to all but Mildred. She had no firsthand knowledge, but it reminded her of something she had read about when she was a child back in predark days.

Could it be napalm? Surely not. They had never come across much evidence of this surviving skydark, in all the time they had spent crossing the Deathlands. But if not that, then how had anyone come up with a hybrid that was so close?

Ryan stopped the wag. “We go on foot from here,” he said shortly. “Triple red.”

Jak tethered the horses to a fence post on the perimeter of one of the fields, and they began to move in on foot, along the trail that led to the center of the ville.

The smell hung over them like a pallid cloud, heavier than the smoke that rose to the skies, more oppressive. As oppressive as the quiet. The ville was only a small collection of residential dwellings. Some were cobbled together, and some were the remnants of predark adobe houses, patched badly over the years. Perhaps at some time this had been a small mall on the outskirts of a larger town. But it didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was that they were drawing close to the center, and the quiet was replaced by the faint noises of people moving, people talking and people in pain, the small whimpers of those who had no fight left in them, and were hovering close to buying the farm.

The columns of smoke they had seen from a distance were now easily identifiable as coming from a small area in the center. The friends spotted scorch marks on some of the buildings, and debris that suggested some kind of explosion.

More than that, there was an orange tinge that spread over some of the walls and impregnated the dust on the sidewalks and roads that were, in themselves, little more than dirt tracks.

“What is that?” J.B. asked. His tone bespoke an almost professional curiosity. There was little about ordnance that he did not know, yet this was a new one.

“I fear, my dear John Barrymore, that it may be a portent of terrible things,” Doc said with a quiet solemnity.

Ryan stayed them with a raised hand as they drew close to the center of the ville. “Keep it frosty, people. Anyone who can handle a blaster is going to be trigger happy and jumpy as jackshit after what must have happened here.” He signaled for them to take whatever cover was possible as they approached.

So far, they had seen no one. That was strange. First thing anyone with any sense did when under attack was secure defensive positions. Ryan had expected to encounter at least one defensive sec patrol or lone blaster as they advanced. The fact that there had been none did nothing but fuel a dread of what may have happened here. Whatever had attacked this ville, its consequences had to have been severe.

But nothing could prepare them for what they saw as they entered the few streets that constituted the center of the ville.

The buildings were blackened, with orange streaks that ran across the blasted surfaces. Gaping holes pitted the frontages, with rubble strewed across the streets. Some of the buildings were little more than smoking piles of rubble, and in a few there were fires that still burned in small patches of red and orange flame.

Corpses littered the streets, bloated and gaseous in the heat. Some of them were burned and charred, which accounted for some of the smell. Others were beginning to stink of putrefaction, their sickly sweet odor adding to the olfactory overload. They were all male. And there were a lot of them. Ryan stopped counting at thirty, figuring that he now knew why there had been no sec or suspicious and paranoid ville dwellers to meet them. This was a small place. That many men had to have accounted for a good proportion of the ville’s population.

The rest, he figured, if they were still alive, were in one of the burned-out shells, along with any other casualties. He could see from where he stood that this building, on the far side of the ville’s central block, was full of people. Probably everyone left standing. Mostly women and children. They were clustered on the ground floor of what may have been the infirmary before whatever had happened here, but if nothing else had been converted to that purpose now.

“What happened here?” Mildred asked softly.

“Swift, sudden and brutal,” Doc murmured, shaking his head sadly. “A veritable feast of carnage.”

Ryan signaled to them to lower their weapons. Maybe not holster any blasters, in case someone over there got an itch to fire on them, but certainly at ease enough to avoid giving a hostile impression.

It looked like these people had seen enough of hostile to last them for some while.

Picking his way over the rubble, Ryan led the friends across the debris-strewed sidewalk and road. “Hey,” he yelled, “what happened here?”

Some of the women and children looked up from their tasks, many with fear in their eyes.

All the while the friends had been moving closer to the building, its front an open wound. At least it allowed easy access, which was probably necessary. Women moved in and out, intent on their tasks: water, rags, something that looked like medical equipment, or could at least pass for it…Looking past them, Ryan could see where the soft cries of pain had originated from, and also why. The ground floor of the building was littered with makeshift cots and beds, crammed in no order except that which would make use of available floor space. Some of the things that lay on the beds bore little resemblance to anything human. He guessed that these were probably corpses, and that they were there only because there had been no time to clear them when they had given up their tenuous hold on life. Those that more closely resembled human beings were the ones who made the noises, the mewling, whimpering or weak-throated screams changing in proportion to how human the figures on the cots looked.

Some of them were women, most were men. Most were barely recognizable, at any rate, their hair burned off, skin either blackened or blistered a raw red. Some had wounds that were visibly weeping; bleeding that could not be completely stopped and that seeped through makeshift bandaging.

One of the women spoke as they approached.

“Mister, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. None of us do. If you want to chill us all, if you think there’s anything worth taking here, then just do it. But if not, then just leave us in peace to try and deal with what’s happened to our menfolk.”

“Shit, if we coldhearts you be chilled for that,” Jak said, echoing the thoughts that ran through them all. For the woman to speak that way to armed strangers, for the rest of the women and children to ignore them, bespoke of a tragedy that had driven them beyond the bounds of normal caution.

“We don’t have an argument with you, and we don’t want anything,” Ryan said simply. “We’re just passing through. Mebbe we can help a little.” All thoughts of bartering for water and supplies left him at that moment. That could come later. Right now, it was time to perhaps earn that favor. And perhaps just time to act with a little civilization, a rare enough thing in the Deathlands.

Mildred and Krysty holstered their weapons and joined the women tending to the sick and dying. Each in her own way had skills that could help the ville women. Krysty’s upbringing in Harmony had supplied her with an extensive knowledge of herbal medicines, and the natural healing properties that may exist in anything to hand. She had an expertise that was hard to come by.

Mildred’s training as a doctor in conventional medicine in predark days was on shakier ground in this environment. She could administer and prescribe only those medicines that were available. In a ville like this, that wasn’t exactly going to leave her with much in the way of options. It soon became clear that there was little medicine that she could use, but she had one invaluable skill: her diagnostic technique allowed her to prioritize the use of the medicines. As painful as it was to make some decisions, she assessed how bad each patient was, how much chance he or she had of pulling through, and how much of a waste or a benefit the administering of medicines would be. That enabled her to maximize the use of limited resources. Furthermore, she was able to work with Krysty in identifying the problems of each patient, so that the Titian-haired woman could also maximize her skills.

It was long, arduous and tiring work. They kept going for longer than they could keep track of time, and only realized the passing of the hours when lamps lit their path around the makeshift infirmary, rather than the sun.

While they worked, the others made themselves busy. The constant need for water had to be attended to. There was some rudimentary plumbing in the buildings, but all of this had been ruptured and rendered useless by what had gone on. Now, the water had to be carried in buckets, in anything that could be used as a container, from the more outlying buildings that were still serviced by the water system. A lot of the water was also going to waste, spilling out of ruptured and broken pipes, and it was vital to fix the ruptures and conserve as much as possible. J.B. and Jak set to this task with alacrity; Doc, being less practical in such matters, was only too glad to lend his strength to the constant relay of buckets and containers. He looked old and infirm, but as the women of the ville were soon to learn, that was deceptive. He may have been wrinkled and almost as whip-thin as Jak, but beneath his frock coat he was wiry, and the whipcord muscles that his occasional stoop served to disguise were soon brought into play. He felt, in some ways, useless. Mildred and Krysty had medicinal skills; J.B. and Jak were mechanically and practically minded; but Theophilus Tanner was, and would always be, an academic at heart. His skills lay in the mind, and were of little call in such a circumstance. He therefore determined to make himself of whatever use he could, working tirelessly.

Which left Ryan a little space to ease up on his part in the chain. Not from any desire to avoid work, but rather because he wanted to take the time to find out what had happened here. He had an uneasy feeling in his gut that it was connected with the stranger on the motorcycle who had passed them the day before. They had followed his trail, and the coincidence was too much. But how, exactly, did the two connect? Had one man been able to do this much damage? How?

It took him some time to gain the confidence of the woman who had initially spoken to him. She had shown them where they were to collect water, and formed part of the chain with them, if for no other reason than to keep an eye on them, lest they should prove to be an enemy. Not that there was much she would be able to do. Nonetheless, Ryan understood and appreciated her attitude.

For some time, her answers to his questions were noncommittal, which made progress seem next to impossible, particularly as his questions had been less than direct. He figured from her attitude that an outright demand to know what had happened would not achieve any result. So he had been cautious. But he was starting to run short on patience.

Eventually, he tired of it all and decided to go for broke.

“Fuck this not asking what we need to know,” he said, taking her arm to stop her as they walked back from the water collection point. She looked down at his hand on her arm, then up into his eye, leveling her gaze with his. For a moment, he could see the fear in her eyes. Then it dissipated, replaced with acceptance.

“Okay, I figure by now that you don’t mean us any harm, mister. So where do I begin?”

“I’m figuring that a man on a big motorcycle has something to do with it.”

“You know him?” For a second, the alarm flared up once more in her eyes.

“Kind of,” Ryan replied quickly, then told her of their brief encounter with the mystery rider the previous day.

When he finished, she laughed bitterly. “You got off lightly, mister. Shit, you don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Was he on his own, or were there others?”

She fixed him firmly with a stare. “You won’t think it right, mister, but there was no one but him. No one. I tell you, there’s no one left living here who’s ever seen anything like it. Or would want to again.”

Ryan whistled softly. “Coldheart bastard must have one hell of an armory on that bike. Tell me everything you can, from the beginning.”

“You sayin’ that you’re gonna get him for us?” she asked with what was a palpably sardonic tone.

“No, I’m not saying that. I won’t lie to you. But mebbe he’s like a mad dog that needs chilling before it bites anyone else. We’ll see. Tell me everything, first.”

She nodded firmly. “Fair enough. But bear in mind that no matter how hard it is to believe, I ain’t making any of it up. Or exaggerating, either.”

And she began to tell him of the previous day.

“DAYS AROUND HERE GO much the same, no matter what. Guess they change with the seasons, mebbe even with the weather, but other than that there ain’t much to disturb us. This ville’s been here since skydark, and we ain’t rich in jack, like some. Nor have we got much in the way of growing stuff. But we get by ’cause we can trade a little.

“And we don’t get no trouble, either. A lot of these places, they got people buying the farm every day, people blasting each other for no reason. Now that’s their business, if they want to chill each other for no reason, but we’ve always kinda stuck together here. When there ain’t much to go around, you tend to look out for those next to you in case you need them to look out for you next.