Prodigal's Return (9 page)

“That was a compliment,” J.B. told him, pushing back his poncho. Then he grinned. “At least, I think so.”

Slowly rising, the howler shambled forward once more, as unstoppable as the dawn.

“How very annoying. Shall we try the chairs next?” Doc asked, brushing back his long silvery hair.

“Let’s use one of the diesels,” Krysty suggested, flexing her hands.

Jak nodded. “Sounds good.”

Just then, the
Hercules
stopped fishtailing and with a hard jerk went level again, the speed increasing dramatically.

“Made it!” Ryan sighed, easing his grip on the wheel. Flipping switches on the cracked dashboard, he attempted to turn off a few of the engines to save fuel, but they continued running. “Somebody ace those things!”

“On it!” J.B. replied. Walking over to the nearest engine, he placed a hand on top of the air filter, then reached down and yanked out the distributor cap. With a gasp, the machine stopped, and then he did the same
thing to both diesels. There was a lot more juice for the car engines than for the big Detroit power plants, which was a shame, since they got much better mileage.

The hard ground was fused and cracked for hundreds of feet around the nuke crater, something the Trader used to call the dinner-plate effect, but in the distance Ryan could see a vista of growing plants, and past that a scattering of trees.

“We’ll go slower in the woods,” Krysty stated, removing her splattered poncho. “But it sure will be nice to see green again.”

“On the other hand, we better not stop until we are very far away from here,” Mildred advised, gratefully dropping into her chair.

“Now, that could prove to be most unwise, madam,” Doc said, loosening the knotted fuse and closing the hatch to lock it tight. “We should briefly halt to remove as much of this cage as possible. While iron bars do not a prison make, the sheer mass of the metal is slowing us considerably.”

“Agreed,” J.B. stated, wiping his glasses clean. “Speed is our best defense against that mutie.”

“That’s brass in my blaster,” Ryan agreed, pulling throttles and pushing in chokes before applying the brakes. The wheels squealed in protest, and smoke rose from the front tires, but gradually the rattling vehicle came to a full stop near the edge of the grasslands. The ground below was a mixture of fused earth and rich loam.

“Okay, Krysty and Mildred on guard,” Ryan directed, gratefully releasing the steering wheel to flex
his sore hands. “J.B. and Doc, cut the cage. Jak and I will do the engines.”

As everybody got busy with their assigned tasks, Ryan took a few minutes to try to massage some life back into his aching muscles. As a young man, he had once killed a cougar with his bare hands, the bastard fight of his life, but trying to control this ramshackle piece of homemade salvation was starting to rate a close second. He felt as if he had been beaten with a club. Even his bones ached from trying to control the machine. With six different engines all running at the same time, it was a miracle his arms hadn’t been yanked out of their sockets.

It took J.B. and Doc almost an hour to cut away as much of the cage as they dared without weakening the structural integrity of the
Hercules.
Meanwhile, Ryan and Jak removed both of the big diesel power plants and their fuel tanks, then did the same thing to one of the gasoline engines, which had cracked its block sometime during their escape. The engine was still running, but it wouldn’t for long at the rate it was losing oil. The removal cost them a lot of horsepower, but hopefully, the decrease in weight would balance everything out.

“Done, and done!” J.B. announced, turning off the acetylene torch. “We cut away anything more from the frame, and the wag might fall apart.”

“It might anyway,” Doc said in disdain, tossing aside an empty fuel tank. Then he softly added under his breath, “By Gadfrey, we should have named this the vehicle
Frankenstein
instead of
Hercules.
”

“The doctor was named Frankenstein, not the creature!” Mildred replied smugly.

“No, madam, the creature was called Adam and took the last name of Frankenstein for himself. Go read the book again.”

“Sure, just let me pull a copy out of my ass!”

Sliding his leather jacket back on, Jak scowled. “How far next redoubt?” he asked, returning to the subject at hand. He really didn’t give a damn about predark whitecoats and their bastard experiments.

“About six hundred miles or so, as the crow flies,” J.B. replied, not bothering to check the map in his munitions bag. “And we have a lot of bad country to cross, too,”

“Want me to take the first shift driving, lover?” Krysty asked, sitting on a nearby tree stump.

“No, I’m good for a couple more hours,” Ryan replied, wiping his greasy hands clean with a gasoline soaked rag. “Just let’s have… Fireblast!”

A glowing green cloud was rising over the rim of the crater, and the wind carried to them a low, inhuman moan.

Scrambling back into the stripped-down
Hercules,
everybody grabbed a seat, and Ryan quickly got the wag moving. The handling was much easier for him with only three engines to contend with, and the speed was considerably faster. He had no accurate way to gauge the velocity, but the grasslands were crossed in only a few moments, and soon the crater was lost in the distance behind them. Out of sight, but never out of mind.

Entering the forest, Ryan discovered the remains of an ancient road and followed it deeper into the woods. The trees were well spaced, with lots of sunlight coming through the branches, so lack of headlights didn’t slow them in the least. Miles passed in restful quiet. It was cool among the trees, with squirrels darting about on the ground, and birds singing in the upper branches. The companions smiled at the sweet sounds, as it meant there were no major predators in the area, which was always good to know. There were a lot of bushes alongside the road, blueberry, hydrangea and laurel, along with the occasional wreckage of a partially melted skyscraper, the windows smashed and the interior alive with insects and weeds.

Startled, Mildred sat upright as something flashed by the hurrying wag. “This was a park!” she said, spotting the rusted remains of a wrought-iron bench.

“Most excellent news! Parks indicate the presence of a major city, or even a metropolis!” Doc said with a grin. “And we shall need an abode for the evening. It would be far too dangerous to risk driving across open country at night without working headlights.”

“Even if I had put in a set, they never would have survived ramming the howler,” J.B. said with a dismissive shrug.

However, noon came and passed without any sign of a city. Eventually, Krysty replaced Ryan behind the wheel, and then Jak took his turn wrestling with the mighty
Hercules.
Coming across a babbling creek, the companions stopped for a break, but then quickly decided against it and moved onward as the creekwater registered hot on the rad counters.

“Lover, what are we going to do if the mat-trans in the next redoubt is also down?” Krysty asked, unscrewing the cap from a canteen to take a drink.

“Check another,” Ryan replied gruffly, rubbing his bristly, unshaved jaw. “But we gotta consider the possibility that the whole bastard system has crashed, and that we walk from now on.”

“Or find someplace to stay,” Doc countered, unwrapping a stick of gum from an MRE food pack. “Perhaps Vermont was not very badly damaged during skydark, and we know there are friendly villes in Virginia, Nevada, and New Mexico.” Starting to chew, Doc frowned. “Not many, but a few.”

“N’Orleans,” Jak added proudly, making it one word.

“Okay, four villes out of hundreds.” Mildred sighed, shaking her head.

“Better than naught, madam.”

“Sad, but true.”

“How to get there would be the next problem,” J.B. said, neatly sidestepping the whole issue of finding a permanent place to settle down. “This rolling heap of mismatched parts wouldn’t last for an hour in the desert, or trying to cross the Darks.”

“Horses,” Jak stated, as if that settled the matter.

“Horses,” Ryan said in somber agreement.

It was late in the afternoon when the companions stopped to take a break alongside a narrow brook. Getting out of the wag, they stretched cramped muscles, while Doc ambled off to relieve himself in the bushes.

“Hey, smell shine cooking,” Jak said, sniffing the air.

“There might be a ville nearby,” Krysty said hesitantly, resting a hand on her blaster.

“J.B. and I’ll go check it out,” Ryan said, getting the Steyr and hanging it over a shoulder. “Everybody else stay here, and be ready to run.”

“Sounds good to me,” Mildred said, rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand.

Following the pungent aroma of bubbling mash, the two men wandered through a forest of birch trees until coming to the swell of a low hillock.

A large log cabin stood across a woody glen, dark smoke spiraling from a stone chimney. A split-rail fence edged a vast expanse of neatly trimmed grass, where a small herd of sheep contentedly munched away. White vapors rose from a small hut near a cord of split wood, the breeze carrying the familiar smell of cooking shine.

Netting was draped over the front porch, and rocking in a chair was a busty teenage girl in torn pants, and a patched denim shirt tied under her breasts for
some much needed support. She was smoking a pipe and carving something small out of a block of wood.

“Hello!” Ryan shouted through cupped hands, and then gave a friendly wave. “Mind if we come over to talk some biz?”

Laying aside the knife and wood, the young woman spoke to somebody inside the cabin, and a hulking man appeared at the front door. Dressed entirely in tanned leather, he was bald with a beard that went down to his belt. He held what appeared to be a remade predark Barrett .50 longblaster.

Instantly, Ryan and J.B. became alert, but kept their weapons pointed at the grass. A drawn blaster wasn’t the way to start a negotiation.

Bellowing something in an unknown language, the huge man swung up the Barrett and worked the arming lever. Diving for cover, Ryan and J.B. hit the grass just as the man cut loose, and a birch tree shook violently as a section blew off the trunk.

“Hey, we just want to talk!” J.B. yelled from behind a fallen log.

Peering between some weeds, Ryan saw a pair of adult women join the man on the porch, both also cradling longblasters, one of them working the lever to open the breech and insert a bullet. The teenager smoking the pipe appeared bored, and had started whittling on the piece of wood once more, as if this sort of thing occurred every day.

The three adults triggered their weapons in unison, and branches were blown off the birch trees, missing the companions by inches as they came crashing down.

“Mighty unfriendly folks,” J.B. observed, removing his hat and stuffing it inside his jacket.

The longblasters boomed again, the trio of concussions rolling across the grazing land to shake leaves off the trees.

“Bastard good shots, too,” Ryan added with a grimace. “They’re not even using the telescopic sights, but just firing from the hip. Not sure I could do that.”

The grim family fired another synchronized volley, the rounds slapping into the side of the hillock, throwing out puffs of dirt.

“These are warning shots,” Ryan snarled, pressing himself lower against the ground.

The ancient longblasters spoke again, and the log exploded, nearly breaking in two, loose chips and bit of bark flying everywhere.

“So I figured,” J.B. grunted, squinting through his glasses. “If they like blasters so much, what do you say we show them what we got, old buddy?”

“Fine by me,” Ryan replied. “On my count of three…two…one!”

Rising slightly, both men cut loose with their blasters, but the range was too great, and the hardball rounds only rustled the tall grass and startled the sheep, not even reaching halfway to the sharpshooters.

As she worked the bolt on her longblaster, the shirt of the younger woman got caught and ripped free. Uncaring, the topless woman fired the longblaster again, her full breasts jumping from the titanic recoil. Her face was sweaty and smiling, and now both of the companions understood that these were chill thrillers, crazies who liked to ace folks purely for the pleasure of taking
a life. There would be no negotiations with these people, and since there was nothing the companions wanted except for some shine for the wag, it was pointless to expend any more brass.

“Time to go,” Ryan muttered, and crawled away until the natural curve of the hill took the log cabin out of sight.

Returning to the other companions, Ryan and J.B. brushed the leaves off their shirts, and tousled their hair to remove any lingering wood chips or bark.

“We heard blasters,” Krysty said, scanning behind them for any danger.

“What happened?” Doc asked, hefting the LeMat and looking around in a circle.

“We got a lesson in marksmanship,” J.B. snorted, climbing back into the wag.

“Let’s get moving,” Ryan said, squeezing in through the cage. “And if any topless women appear, shoot to chill.”

Hours later, the sun was nearing the horizon when the companions saw several columns of dark smoke on the horizon. They seemed to be rising from behind a long narrow band of tan stone. The regular pattern clearly showing it was a wall.

Driving closer, they could see that the surrounding land was laid out in neat squares of different colors—the dark green of some leafy vegetable, the tall golden shafts of wheat. There was even a barren field where nothing had been planted, to let the soil rest and recharge for a season.

“By the three Kennedys, that’s crop rotation!” Doc
said in delight. “Clearly, these are not uneducated hillbillies such as those people you encountered!”

“Which only makes them that much more dangerous,” Ryan growled, pulling an object from his coat pocket about the size of a soup can.

Extending the antique Navy telescope to its full yard in length, he surveyed the place. “Can’t see much from this angle,” he muttered. “Just some wooden guard towers, a gallows and what looks like a brick water tower in the center of ville. No signs of a slave pen.”

“At least there are none in sight,” Mildred retorted.

Squeezing out of the cage, Krysty stepped away from the wag and drew in a deep lungful of air. “No smell of long pig, if that helps any,” she said softly, trying to sense anything unusual. Sometimes she could detect a trap, or an ambush, before it was sprung. But most of the time she couldn’t.

“Well, we can’t go much farther, anyway,” J.B. said, bending over to rap a fuel tank with a knuckle. It responded with a hollow boom. “This is the last of our juice, and it’s almost gone. Another fifty miles or so, and we start walking.”

“How far do you gauge it is to the ville?” Doc asked, testing the draw on his new revolver. The 6-shot .38 S&W felt unnaturally light in his grip, almost like a toy in comparison to the massive LeMat handcannon.

“Twenty miles or so,” Ryan said, collapsing the telescope. “That’s cutting it close, but this is our best chance to get some supplies.”

“We going to barter, or go for a nightcreep?” J.B. asked, stressing the first option to clearly show his preference.

“I’d rather cut a deal with the local baron,” Ryan said gruffly, adjusting the Steyr to hang across his chest. “But if he’s not interested in doing some biz, we still need those supplies. Juice, horses, food, whatever they got.”

“Ain’t got much barter with,” Jak noted, starting forward.

Checking the magazine in his blaster, Ryan grunted. “Yeah, I know.”

Following the road down the hill, Jak steered around several potholes large enough to swallow the wag whole, one of them with a small tree growing from the depths.

As they drew closer, a gong began to sound from the ville, and there seemed to be a lot of activity along the top of the wall. Suddenly, dozens of previously unseen people poured out of the fields to race toward a large dark area set into the wall. As they approached, the dark area swung aside, revealing it was a gate. The farmers raced into the ville, and the gate closed immediately.

“That was professionally done,” Mildred said. “They’ve been attacked before.”

“Who hasn’t?” J.B. asked rhetorically, adjusting the meager contents of his munitions bag so that a length of fuse dangled in sight. It wasn’t attached to anything but the rest of the roll, but the mere fact that he owned a predark mil fuse would make smart folks think twice about trying something.

Suddenly alert, Krysty looked sharply about, feeling as if she was under direct observation, even though there was nobody in sight. Could the ville have a doomie? Just in case, she decided to keep her thoughts under tight control. Better safe than chilled.

Abruptly, the wild countryside ended at a split-rail fence that edged the cropland and followed along the road. The wood was old and splintery, but studded with jagged pieces of glass that sparkled like diamonds in the setting sun. Next came a wide band of punji sticks, wooden poles jammed into the earth, the ends sharpened like spears.

Cradling the empty Steyr, Ryan nodded in approval at the layered defense. It was a good design. The punji sticks would ace anything from trying to jump over the outer fence. Triple-smart. The baron here was clearly no feeb.

In passing, the companions could now spot a couple raised platforms set among the crops to offer the field workers somewhere to fall back to in case of an attack. The base of each also bristled with punji sticks, and every one possessed a brass bell of some kind.

“Those are warning bells,” Doc said, allowing himself a small smile. “They must have scavenged those from the ruins of a firehouse, or mayhap a school. This speaks well for the local baron. Clearly, he cares about his people.”

“On the other hand, Hitler loved the German people,” Mildred countered. “Only them and nobody else.”

Just then, the
Hercules
passed by a crucified scarecrow, its arms outstretched, the bleached bones of a grinning human skull perched on top of the sagging, rag doll body. Though they surreptitiously checked their weapons, nobody made a comment.

“May I suggest that we swap blasters, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked, proffering the S&W .38 revolver. “It would be unwise for us to demonstrate the unique
acoustic properties of your SIG-Sauer at this early a stage of the negotiations.”

Passing over his blaster, whose built-in sound suppressor sometimes worked, Ryan said nothing as the exchange was made.

The farmland stopped at another set of fences, leaving a broad field of flat dirt that extended to the outer wall. That was pretty standard for any ville. This was a shatter zone, leaving invaders no place to hide or take cover, making them easier to chill. This close, the companions could clearly see the sec men stationed along the top of the wall. They were dressed in assorted clothing: flannel shirts, buckskins pants, leather jackets, fur hats and lots of faded denim. The only unifying item was a dark blue vest marked with a white star on the right side, and red stripes along the left. The companions easily identified that as a version of the American flag, which wasn’t a good sign or bad, just something to take into consideration. The founders of the ville might have been military personal who survived skydark. That would explain the orderly fields and multiple layers of defenses.