Hell Road Warriors

“Here!” Mildred shouted. She stood on the hood of an old police cruiser covered with hillbilly armor with Six twenty yards away. “Here!”

Doc hightailed it with his coat flapping behind him. Six grabbed him by his collar and heaved him to the roof. The pigs were among the convoy. It was too close for cannon work. Jak sent the LAV rolling forward and ground several hogs into hamburger under the LAV’s eight massive road wheels.

“Six!” Toulalan shouted from the top of his camper wag and pointed at the engineering LAV. “Le LAV! Le LAV!”

Six shoved his rifle into Mildred’s startled hands. She shook her head in horror. “No! Six! Don’t—”

Six jumped from the hood and ran for the other LAV. He wove through the hulking, undead horrors like a fullback breaking tackles. He literally ran up the engineering vehicle’s dozer blade and jammed down the driver’s hatch. The engine roared into the life and the dozer blade rose with a whine. Six followed Jak’s example of pitting 34,000 pounds of steel against half-ton worm-controlled meat puppets.

Steel won.

The people of the convoy huddled on the hoods and roofs of their wags and fired down into their attackers. A vast amount of the fire was doing little good.

“Toulalan!” Ryan bellowed over the sound of battle. “Get the wags rolling! Pull away and let the LAVs finish it!”

“Oui, Ryan!” Toulalan jumped from the top of his wag and slammed the driver’s door closed seconds behind the snapping tusks of a sow.

He shouted to Cyrielle on top. “Hold on!” The air horn blared the signal to pull out.

Ryan was nearly knocked from his feet as the pickup beneath him lurched. A huge hog had lowered its head against the passenger door. The pickup slewed. The behemoth boar lowered its snout beneath the chassis. Worms extruding out of its ears pointed at Ryan and Krysty almost in accusation. The chassis creaked and lurched again.

The pig was going to roll the pickup.

Ryan tilted the machine gun down and dropped the hammer on the hog. Bones splintered and shattered. Metal-jacketed bullets pulverized the pig’s shoulders into masticated meat. The creature fell forward, its legs shattered.

“Krysty! Drive!”

The woman limboed through the driver’s window and slid behind the wheel. The engine roared and the pickup bucked as she rolled over the fallen hog’s head with a crunch. Krysty drove the pickup a good fifty yards away from any carcass moving or not. The convoy pulled out of its defensive circle, leaving the remaining creatures suddenly milling around in a lost fashion. Only Doc and Mildred stayed on the roof of their wag. Neither seemed eager to jump down and start the car. But they were a lone island now rather than part of a confused melee.

Jak and Six descended like ironclad guardian angels. The two men seemed to be in race to see who could reduce the most pounds of pork flesh into mulch. J.B. stood in the turret watching the perimeter as the destruction derby wound down.

Ryan tapped the roof of the pickup. “Let’s get Doc and Mildred.”

Krysty rolled up to the old sec cruiser. The field around it was a butcher’s morass. Ryan held out his hand. “Mildred, Doc, jump here in the back. I’ll drive that one.”

The two men handled Mildred across. Ryan held out his hand to Doc, who was looking at the strip of ground between the two vehicles. The broken worms seemed to have no life left in them but many were still whole. Ryan watched as those that were burrowed into the soft dirt.

“Ryan.”

“Yeah, Doc?”

“I think we should only eat food from the Diefenbunkers, or dried goods.”

“Right.”

“We should boil any water we drink,” Doc added.

“Right.”

The two men watched as the last of the worms disappeared into the earth, leaving nothing but steaming flesh and crushed bone behind.

“No one should sleep on the ground.”

Ryan was losing that loving feeling for Canada right quick.

Chapter Five

“Did you see that!” Mildred was incensed. She was outraged and paced in circles, waving her arms. “Goddamn Night of the Pigging Dead!” No one got her reference, but everyone took her meaning. The convoy was almost half a mile away. They had left behind camp gear and equipment, a heartbreakingly sizable spread of food and a sea of spent brass. No one wanted to wade through the swathes of goop rotting in the sun or risk what might be squirming beneath in an attempt at salvage. Ryan and his friends were having a private palaver behind their LAV. “I’ll take good old-fashioned American deserts, rads and stickies any day of the week!”

Ryan pulled the chain of his flexible cleaning rod through the Scout’s barrel. The new longblaster had been baptized the hard way and seen him through. Ryan shook his head. He’d seen more horrors than he cared to think about in his travels. That last bit had been bad. “J.B.?”

The Armorer was on the same page. “That was bad.”

“Doc?”

“The coordinated effort of the annelids, particularly once their porcine hosts were obviously postmortem, clearly bespoke some sort of collective intelligence,” Doc enthused. “Really quite extraordinary. I would be curious as to—”

“Jak?” Ryan asked.

“Bad,” Jak agreed.

Mildred had already spoken her mind. It wasn’t something she ever had much problem with. Ryan looked at Krysty. She sat at the top of the LAV’s ramp door and hugged her knees. Her good feelings for this land had been rocked like everyone else’s. However her connection to the earth left her a little more sensitive to abominations.

Ryan wiped down his weapon, loaded it and put the cleaning kit back in the recess in the stock. “So, jump? Run south? Keep going?”

“Either of the later.” Doc sighed. “But you know I will jump if it must be.”

“I know.” Ryan nodded. “Thanks.”

J.B. finished running a rag over his M-4000 shotgun and began loading fléchette and slug rounds. “South.”

“South?” Krysty sighed. “Alone? It’s four hundred miles to anywhere we’ve been, much less heard of. Got coldhearts to the north. Those…things to the south. Mebbe there’s safety in numbers. Mebbe the plains will be better. Mebbe we should head west with a convoy a bit more before we break and run south.”

It was a lot of mebbes, but she had a point.

“Jak?”

“West,” Jak replied.

Mildred’s lips quirked. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with a little grease monkey in coveralls?”

Everyone looked over at the engineer LAV. A short girl with curly brown hair covered by a bandanna was perched on top, half in and half out of the engine compartment wrenching away. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but her big brown eyes, full lower lip and dimpled chin were something to look at. She currently had a smudge of grease on the tip of her nose. For the past twenty-four hours Jak’s ruby-red gaze often strayed to whatever wag she was working on, and she seemed to work wags 24/7. He lifted his chin at the mechanic.

“Name’s Seriah. Yeah.” Jak nodded at Ryan again. “West.”

“Mildred?”

“What the hell, west. The weather’s nice. The food is good. The people seem friendly.”

J.B. stared hard at Mildred. “Six seems real friendly.”

Everyone stared at the Armorer’s comment.

Mildred stared in wonder. “J. B. Dix, are you jealous?”

J.B. snatched up his shotgun and stomped away without another word.

Ryan looked around the circle. “We got five votes west. In a while I’ll—”

“It’s unanimous.” The Armorer stomped back just as quickly. “West it is.”

Mildred stepped toward him. “J.B.?”

“Doc?” J.B. reached into his pocket and held out what appeared to be six beige wine corks.

Doc took the objects and exposed his gleaming white teeth. “These are suspiciously of a 16-gauge conformation.”

“They’re high explosive. Those pigs got me thinking. Can’t just shoot them full of holes. That’s an ounce of HE. Should shatter some bones.”

“Thank you, J.B. I shall refit myself this instant.” Doc set about reloading his LeMat.

“J.B.?” Mildred questioned.

“Walk?” he asked.

Mildred slid her arm in his. “I’d love to.” The two of them walked off in a circuit of the wag camp.

Ryan took Krysty’s hand. “Let’s sign up.” They walked back to the circled wags. People were checking loads and prepping to go. Toulalan watched the proceedings. His sister Cyrielle and Six seemed to be doing most of the directing. Toulalan stood by his personal wag. It was a Chevy Silverado, lovingly maintained, with a camper mounted in the bed. Unlike a lot of the vehicles it was almost miraculously free of bullet strikes.

Ryan had taken an informal survey of the convoy’s vehicles. They currently had twelve wags rolling and four motorbikes. The big rig, the engineering LAV and Toulalan’s home on wheels were the most spectacular. Ryan counted three armed wags—a pair of pickups and an El Camino, sheathed in sheet-iron chicken armor with post-mounted machine guns in the truck beds. An old ambulance was stuffed with Diefenbunker med supplies. Six’s jacked-up Crown Victoria was almost unrecognizable under the added-on plate. The rest of the vehicles had been repaired, rebuilt and remodified so many times the lines of their original pedigree had been lost. The convoy consisted of about seventy-seven souls at the moment, not counting Ryan and the companions.

“Impressive collection,” Ryan said.

Toulalan smiled delightedly. “Merci. We’re quite proud of it!”

“Is your next destination another bunker?”

“Indeed.”

“So how come no one has cracked these Diefenbunkers before?” Ryan asked.

“Long before skydark, there was the cold war. You’ve heard of it, no?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, well, the Diefenbunkers were built for the cold war, but when she was won, they were deactivated. They became museums. After skydark, why go to a cold bare hole in the ground? The few who did, found the massive blast doors locked to them. The Diefenbunkers were placed out in the countryside. There was no time for historical expeditions when most were simply trying to live one more day.”

“But you cracked one.”

Toulalan smiled slyly. “My father did. Would you like to hear the story?”

Ryan nodded.

“Val-d’Or means ‘Valley of Gold.’ We were a mining town, and in our valley far from the horror that fell. Of course, regardless, in the nuclear winter, many died, the ville contracted. But being a mining town we knew construction. The ville was also fortified. We dug a system of tunnels beneath the ville to survive the winter. Again, many died, but still many lived. Our forests were thick with timber and thick with game. Rivers and lakes abounded. Come the new hard freeze, huge herds of animals migrated south before it. There is always a great culling and smoking of meat. We survived on that, in some ways better than other villes farther south. We were far enough north not to take much radiation or be faced with the horrors it brought with it, but south enough that we could reap the benefit of the freeze without being hit by it, except only once every few years.”

“But you cracked your bunker.”

“My father found a cache of papers. They were—how do you say?—eyes only, for the mayor of Val-d’Or and few of the civic leaders. There was a flurry of activity at the Diefenbunker, construction, top secret, right before skydark, but the local people were never aware of it. That convinced my father there might be something down below the earth besides empty desks and concrete.”

“How did you get in?”

Toulalan thumped his chest proudly. “The men of Val-d’Or have always been miners! My father figured the bunker must be like, oh…” He pointed at the LAV. “More heavily armored on the top than the bottom. A thick foundation, yes, but not hardened against the nukes like the top, no? He sank a shaft down and came up underneath. It took three years of effort, whenever that effort could be spared, but in the end my papa broke inside! I was with him!”

“What did you find?”

Toulalan kissed his fingertips and grinned. “Potatoes!”

Ryan blinked. “Potatoes?”

“Seed potatoes, actually, preserved for the future. There was a vast storehouse of them. The people weren’t pleased. Oh, there were blasters and medical supplies, a machine shop and much that was useful, but the men of Val-d’Or had survived since skydark as miners, hunters and fisherman. We weren’t farmers. Many said we couldn’t afford the time to take up the plow. Our spring and summer were for catching as much meat and fish as possible and smoking it for the long winter.” Toulalan smiled in happy memory. “My father joked that we lived half our lives underground like potatoes anyway. In the end he convinced them. We planted. There was trial and error, but that first season there was a crop. The seed potatoes had been modified, with the conditions of the new world in mind. They were hardy, resistant to the cold and matured quickly to take advantage of the brief warmth.”

“And suddenly you had a surplus,” Ryan surmised.

“Yes, no longer were we dependent upon hunting, fishing, trapping and the always uncertain migrations. We had a food staple, and we now had time for other things. We built more. Learned more. The seed bunkers also contained a number of other vegetables, and more importantly, hemp. It grew like, well, a weed in the short spring. We cleared forest and planted that, too. With that we had hemp seed oil and seeds to supplement our diet, textiles and paper. Hemp oil can be used directly to fuel diesel engines. We’re very busy underground during the winter, spinning, pressing manufacturing. We still hunt and fish, but now we mine once again, as well. Val-d’Or has gold, silver, zinc and lead. Whoever stocked the Val-d’Or Diefenbunker had put a great deal of thought into local survival.”

Ryan glanced back at the Borden Diefenbunker. “No seeds in that one.”

“No, instead there were bays for armored wags, and equipment and spares to repair them. There were also many, many blasters.” Toulalan shot Ryan another pointed look. “And a strange chamber of glass.”

“We saw that.” Ryan shrugged. “But it was the beer and pizza that grabbed our attention.”

“Mmm.” Toulalan nodded, but his eyes were seriously trying to read what Ryan was really thinking.

Better men had tried and failed. Ryan changed the subject. “So each of the bunkers seems to have been stocked differently.”

“So it seems. We have used the radio at Val-d’Or and tried the Borden one, as well. No other bunker responds. The computer links between them fell long ago. We don’t really know the disposition of the other bunkers. But whatever their function, they must be a treasure trove. We decided an expedition west would be the best course. We would head for Borden. If successful there—” Toulalan grinned again “—we would make an attempt for Shilo Diefenbunker in Manitoba.”

Ryan did a little math with the maps he’d recently seen. “That’s a long haul.”

“Indeed.” Toulalan didn’t seem overly concerned.

Both men knew the other wasn’t revealing all his cards. “And those coldhearts?”

“We have you to thank for bloodying their noses. I suspect they won’t be back. Also, according to traders, the farther west you go, the flatter and more open the land becomes. Also, villes in the center are increasingly farther apart and increasingly more primitive. I believe we will be able to roll past them, using their awe at our trade goods and the offensive power and majesty of our convoy.”

“And if this hard freeze of yours hits before you’re back in Val-d’Or?”

“We have lost a bit of time, that is true, but once we hit the central plains it should be, how do you say, a straight shot.”

“And if we get caught with winter coming on?”

“My friend, I have considered that. You have seen the inside of the Borden Diefenbunker. The one in Val-d’Or also had the same stocks of frozen food. I assume the one in Shilo does, as well. If we reach Shilo, we’ll give the weather a hard appraisal. If we know we won’t make it, we turn back. Either way, should worse comes to worst, we can winter in either bunker, warm, safe and fed until spring. Should you not wish to winter with us, as I say, you can always run south for your warmer Deathlands.”

There were more than a few major “ifs” and question marks involved, but exploration was risk personified. In the end Ryan had to admit it wasn’t a bad plan. He wanted to see more of this land that was new to him.

“And, so?” Toulalan inquired.

Krysty spoke first. Ryan knew her reservations and was glad she did. She stuck out her hand to Toulalan. “We’re in.”

Toulalan ignored the proffered hand, and Krysty’s body stiffened in shock as Toulalan kissed her on both cheeks. Only the fact that he seemed so smiling and pleased, and Ryan had seen that the rest of convoy behaved this way, kept the one-eyed man from challenging the man. To Krysty’s horror Toulalan started to lean in to give her lover the same treatment. Something in Ryan’s single blue eye made Toulalan stop short at the last moment. He shoved out his hand awkwardly between them. “Well…good! Very good! I’ll tell the others. They’ll be most pleased to have you among us.”

Ryan shook the man’s hand, and he and Krysty walked back to tell their friends. Krysty’s cheeks were flushed red and not because she was blushing. “If he does that again I’ll kill him.”

Ryan grinned. “Not if I get to him first.”

THE CONVOY WAS READY to roll. Ryan’s LAV would be positioned roughly in the middle. Except for the big rig it was high enough to shoot over all the other wags. The armored wag’s huge, aggressive off-road tires would allow it to break formation to either side and rush forward or back if need be. The two off-road armed wags formed outriders on the sides. The ancient El Camino sheathed in chicken armor was on point, and the engineering LAV’s armor and machine gun protected the rear.

Cyrielle Toulalan approached the LAV. “Ryan!”

The one-eyed man nodded from the turret. “Yeah?”

“A word, please.”

Ryan hopped down. “Yeah?”

“You have driven a…” Cyrielle’s English wasn’t as good as her brother’s. “Big rig?”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm.” Cyrielle walked over to the semi and Ryan followed her. She pointed at a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield.

“You lost your driver,” Ryan surmised.

“Oui.” She nodded.

Ryan sighed. Krysty walked over. “What’s up, lover?”

“They need me to drive the semi.”

Krysty’s green eyes narrowed. “We need you in the war wag.”

“We’re part of this convoy now. Big wag like this takes know-how. I got it. Jak can drive the LAV and J.B. can fight it.”

Krysty didn’t blink. “I need you in the war wag. With me.”

“The convoy needs someone who can drive this rig.” Ryan gave Krysty an experimental smile. “And I need someone to ride shotgun with me.”

“I don’t have a shotgun.”

“We’ll find you something.”

Krysty sighed and slid her hand into Ryan’s. “Let’s take a look at her.”

Cyrielle clapped her hands.

Ryan examined his new ride. It was a Kenworth. It had been extensively modified with giant off-road tires and a new suspension. A hatch in the roof over the passenger seat opened onto a ring-mounted machine blaster. Ryan suspected it was a Diefenbunker special, and it was just about cherry, save for the slightly ominous bullet hole in the driver’s-side windshield patched with a piece of scrap metal. Krysty’s hands slid out of his and they climbed into the cab through opposite doors. There were some cracks in the plastic dash, and whatever ancient leather had once upholstered the cab had been replaced with deerskin. The driver’s seat had dried bloodstains on it. There was what looked like a functional hot plate, chem toilet and a bunk in the back.

Krysty ran a finger over the laced leather of her armrest. “Plush wag.”

It had been a while since Ryan had been behind the wheel of a major cargo wag. Toulalan walked up and waved. “You like?”

Ryan hurled a shrug back at the Quebecer. “It’s okay.”

Toulalan kissed his fingertips, popped his lips and walked away.

The biggest problem with wags in the Deathlands was the lack of batteries. That usually meant cartridge or crank ignition. Seriah walked up and pulled the crank handle from the rack above the bumper. She grinned and shoved the crank spoke through the hole in the grille.

Ryan leaned out the driver’s window. “Light it up!”

Seriah hurled her tiny frame against the crank handle and spun it in a huge circle. Ryan tapped the gas pedal lightly at the apogee of the crank. The turbine turned over, whined and trembled on the first attempt. Seriah jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “Très bien!”

Ryan pulled the horn chain and the Kenworth bellowed like a twentieth-century dinosaur into the postapocalyptic Canadian sky. The people of the convoy hit their horns, leaned out of their windows and clapped and whistled in response. “Ryan! Ryan! Ryan!” they called. Their enthusiasm was infectious. Krysty’s full lips twisted in a smile. “I’ll go tell J.B. he’s in command of the LAV.”

Chapter Six

“Hey, Mace! Lars is wormy, eh!”

Baron Mace Henning glowered out of his hammock at his sec man. “Baron to you, Shorty.”

Shorty lived up to his name. He made up for it with an almost artistic appreciation of violence. They had been partners as sec men until Mace had led a coup and made himself baron. Shorty had backed him. Sometimes when Shorty got excited he forgot protocol and flashed back to the old days. “Uh, sorry, Baron. Lars is like, definitely ’fected. Too bad, he’d just earned his loonie.”

Henning rolled out of his sleeping sling and walked over to the campfire. Shorty heeled after him like a faithful dog.

Mace Henning was a huge, sagging bull of man. His short curly red hair and beard were shot through with gray. Green eyes peered out of a nearly permanent squint. Even in his youth no one had ever accused him of being handsome. A badly set broken nose and the dent in the ride side of his face from a fractured cheekbone hadn’t helped matters. Scar tissue beneath his left eyebrow raised it up a tad higher than his right. It made it look like anyone or anything he laid his gaze upon was being weighed, measured and found wanting.

He or she usually was.

He had sixty-eight armed men in the saddle. He’d had seventy-five but the tide of yesterday’s battle had turned into a costly and unpleasant surprise. His best men greeted him as they rolled up hammocks, wolfed their breakfast of jerky and pine tea or prepped their bikes, wags or weapons. A sizable crowd of his new-hire coldhearts was gathered in a circle beyond the campfire, morning maple-liquor ration in hand and watching the entertainment.

The circle parted for the baron. Mace turned his gaze on Lars. The buckskin-clad sec man was red-eyed and lunging at the chain tethering him to a motorcycle lying on its side. He’d shown worm-sign just before dark the night before. Sometimes other maladies could be mistaken for early worm symptom, so they had chained him and waited while he begged and pleaded and screamed he’d just eaten something bad.

Lars was definitely infected. His muscles rippled with Herculean effort and infestation. The man’s fingers curled into claws as he lunged again. The motorcycle weighed around five hundred pounds. Each lunge dragged it a few inches along. The baron stood unconcernedly a bare meter out of range of the filthy clawing hands. In his hand Mace carried his badge of office and the source of his nickname. It was a blackthorn club about two feet long. The root ball at the end was as big around as a large apple, and he had drilled out its center and “hot-shotted” it by pouring in molten lead to give it killing end-weight.

“Hey, Baron?” Shorty asked.

Mace heaved a sigh. Shorty combined the traits of not being particularly bright but also being something of a ponderer. Mace didn’t take his eyes off Lars and his carnivorous, worm-fested carryings-on. “What?”