The Saffron Malformation (2 page)

The Saffron Malformation

Quey and The Once Men

             
Wind carried dirt across the road while the sun was just past peaking in the sky, and the deep silence over the waste was broken by a set of cars, beaten past being worthy of scrap, chasing after Quey Von Zaul in his eighteen-wheel rig, intent on running it down.  The truck had been a brilliant silver many years ago, but time had worn on it and now it was simply the color of metal.  All that remained of its former glory were the faded decals across the sides of the trailer and its doors—a simple diamond with:

Pickens

&

Zaul

             
written through the middle.

             
Quey kept his head low and gripped the massive steering wheel, slick with sweat, in both hands as the truck roared along the highway.  He wiped his hands on his jeans one at a time then shrugged the short sleeve of his faded grey ‘Pickens and Zaul’ logo T over his drenched hairline.  He’d had gentle features once but that was in his other life, the one that existed before his parents got sick and he learned some harsh truths about the workings of the world.

             
A bullet pinged off the side of the rig so close to his window he saw the spark out of the corner of his eye.

             
Fucking Once Men, nipping at his heels like ravenous dogs, which wasn’t too far from a good description of them.  They snarled as they leaned from the windows of the cars speeding after him, grey cracked lips peeled back against their rotting teeth.  They screamed in their simple monosyllabic language as mad with excitement as any animal caught up in the hunt.  They were chasing him but they couldn’t tell you why.  They had no idea what, nor any use for whatever he might be carrying.  They were hunting him because he happened by.  Later they would eat him because they might as well.

             
He took a moment to silently curse the cars they were driving for still running, and let his foot lay heavy on the accelerator. 
‘Whoever made these cars,’
he thought,
‘should record this for their next ad campaign.’
 

             
“If
they
can’t run our vehicles into the ground, what chance do you have?” he joked to himself as the engines roared behind him.

             
Gunfire cracked across the cloudless sky as Quey sped along the narrow and seemingly endless highway.  The tires kicked the thin layer of dirt that had settled on the road up into a cloud of dust behind him.  He heard the ricochets of small caliber shells as they dented the sides of the cab and the trailer he was hauling.  Both were reinforced, as Once Men weren’t the only dangers along the road.

             
Heart racing, he steered the truck with two hands, both gripping far more fiercely than they should, and looked over at the gun resting on the seat beside him, shining in the sunlight like a well-polished sword.

             
No.  It’d do him no good to start shooting now.  Bullets were a commodity these days, and he didn’t make a habit of throwing them away by firing blindly behind him.

             
The savages giving chase grew bold, he heard the lead engine roar as it leapt forward and tried to pull past the trailer and close on the truck’s cab.  He let it gain ground, watching it in the dust-coated mirror at his side, then swerved right and sideswiped the vehicle sending an earsplitting cry of tortured metal across the grey.  He heard another cry, this one of excitement, as the driver of the car struggled to keep his tires on the road.

Heat swarmed the cabin of the truck.  It could get to be over one hundred and twenty degrees in the waste at times.  Quey suspected it wasn’t near that today, but over a hundred for sure.

He wiped at the fresh sweat beading along his brow, pasting his light brown hair to his skin as his sharp gaze glanced from the road ahead, strait on to the horizon, to the side mirrors.  Quey saw one of their faces in that grimy reflective surface, wild with fury, and knew he was right in that the term men didn’t apply to them any longer.  They had abandoned that likeness out here in the wastes.  They chose to leave the safety of the cities and settlements for whatever tempts a man to give up hope.  They’d walked away from reason, wandered out here into the tainted land.   And they drank the water.

             
The car he’d run off the road kicked up a cloud of sand as its tires spun and struggled for traction.  The two others rolled side by side just behind him.  Once Men leaned from the passenger side windows of the two cars and aimed handguns at his truck.

             
He could see the damage living off the wastes had done to them.  Their skin was dry and grey, and their hair grew in thin, colorless patches.  Up close he knew it would be worse, as he’d seen them before.  Often the whites of their eyes were yellow or brown, and their fingernails had a tendency to turn black and fall off.  Their mouths were full of sores.  Their teeth were rotting in their gums and it stunk like rancid meat.

             
Gunfire cracked behind him once again and Quey swayed the truck into the middle of the two lanes.  Watching his side mirrors, he could see the men firing wildly and the small puffs of smoke that exploded into existence around the gleaming metal in their hands.

             
Once Men preferred their guns to have as few moving parts as possible.  They liked old fashion barrel shotguns, the sort you don’t have to pump, and revolvers, because they had a tendency to leave their weapons lying around in the sand and rarely, if ever, cleaned them.  Guns with an automatic loader were far more likely to jam when kept in that sort of care.

             
Quey’s eyes widened when he saw one of the Once Men reach into the car and trade the revolver he’d been firing for a double barrel shotgun.  The truck was reinforced so he didn’t feel threatened by the spray of the gun, but the aim of the Once Man holding it.  When he saw where it was targeting it made his heart skip into a trot.

             
“No no nonono,” Quey muttered as the barrel of the Once Man’s gun aimed low.  He was taking his time, training in on the rig’s back tires.  They were made of puncture proof rubber, of course, and that would hold up against a bullet from a handgun but a shotguns spray was another animal.  It wouldn’t just punch a hole or two through the wheel, there was a good chance it would rip it to shreds.

             
Quey watched the man intently.               

             
It was a difficult shot at this speed, with the condition of the road questionable as it was, but Quey knew with the force and spread of that gun close might be good enough.

             
His eyes, steel and focused, watched the Once Man in his filthy, jostling side mirror, waiting to see the change in him that said, ‘I’m about to fire,’ and when he saw it he slammed on his breaks.  The shotgun roared and leapt in the Once Man’s hands.  Pellets crashed into the pavement under the trailer.  The truck’s breaks squealed and Quey’s hands gripped the wheel so tight his fingernails dug into his palms as he struggled to keep the rig strait.  Last thing he needed to do now was jackknife the fucking thing.

             
Quey felt every one of the thousands of cracks and chunks missing from the road under his tires as his truck protested the sudden stop.

             
The two cars racing behind him dodged to either side, kicking up sand along the shoulders of the highway as they flashed past his rig.  Quey allowed himself a brief smile that was snatched from his lips when he saw the third car, not quite up to speed yet, screech to a stop beside him.

             
“Shit,” he said.  He hadn’t considered that one.

             
He ducked as gunfire cracked and metal panged against the side of his truck.  He heard a reverberating boom and the shredding of rubber followed by the hiss of air escaping.  He felt the left side of the truck sink a centimeter at a time, taking his heart with it.

             
The glass from the driver’s side window exploded and rained prismatic shards down on the legs of his jeans.  He felt a chunk scrape his ankle as it began to work its way into his boot.

             
Quey took up his gun, an automatic, and counted the pops outside.  When he got to six he sat up and emptied his weapon into the rusted heap stopped on the road beside him.  The sides of his truck were armored, and he smiled slightly when he saw theirs were not.

The Once Man sitting in the passenger’s seat reloading his revolver didn’t even have time to react to the shot that shattered his skull and sprayed bits of his brain onto the one sitting in the driver’s seat.  He just sat grinning as he reloaded the gun one shell at a time and then… nothing.

It took the driver a full pair of ticks to realize that the chunks of wet sticky stuff clinging to his face and the warm fluid slowly trickling down to his chin had been his friend’s head a moment before.  He touched his cheek and wiped bits of skull and brain into his hand and peered down at it quizzically as one of Quey’s bullets sunk into his torso, broke through his ribs and popped his right lung.

             
Ten shots spread between the front and back seats and Quey was empty.  He ducked back down, lying flat against the passenger seat and reached into the glove compartment where two more magazines were loaded and waiting.

             
Outside there was shouting and he heard the other two cars making their way back.  Gunfire cracked, shattering the windshield and raining more glass down on him.  Covering his head, Quey waited for a break in the shots.  He knew he’d hit the guys in the front seat, but the two in back might have scampered out and taken cover.

             
Bullets rang all around him and he knew the other two cars had turned around and come back.  He listened to metal hammer into the truck like dried corn rattling around in a tin can.  He could wait out their ammo here in the reinforced cab, and then he could take them.

A louder gun boomed twice from in front of the truck.  Bullets punctured the hood and rattled around the engine a bit before the truck sputtered to a stop.  That was when Quey’s face went blank.  He realized, as he listened to the engine sputter and quit, that he was a dead man.  Even if he somehow managed to fend off the Once Men, even if he had enough spare tires in the back, the engine was finished and he didn’t have the water to make it anywhere.  Not to mention the wildlife that roamed around out here, and the other Once Men who were likely to hear the scuffle and come to investigate.

              There was a part of him, in the back of his head, that denied such a thought.  ‘I’ll be alright,’ it told him.  ‘I won’t die out here, not like this.’

             
But his heart knew the truth.  He’d been making this run for almost a decade, four of those years on his own, and he’d had a few close calls but nothing like this.  He’d been lucky and now luck had tossed him to the Once Men.  ‘No,’ that place in the back of his brain insisted, ‘You’ll be just fine.  The truck is reinforced.  Their shells can’t get through. You’ll take them out and then…’

             
Quey smiled and laughed at himself.  “Then what?” he asked the cab.  And he wondered, as he reloaded, if the hundreds of other roaders who’d met this fate had thought the same thing before the Once Men got hold of them.  “Not me,” they’d insisted, even as they felt their skin being sliced off, “I’m going to live.”

             
One of them jumped up onto the side of the truck and stared through the shattered window at Quey lying on the seat.  He saw everything in that scarred, colorless and leathery face peering in over the jagged glass teeth jutting up from the driver’s side door.  They were as smart as men, had the awareness of men, but they’d lost something and what that was, he suspected, was what made men people.

             
To Quey’s horror the Once Man snarled at him and he saw its rotting teeth and black, bleeding gums.  Chunks of teeth were chipped away and the bits that remained were yellow at best and drifted toward black from there.

Quey cringed as the thing’s yellow brown eyes glared at him and then he let his gun destroy the Once Man’s face with a resonating boom, jerking its head back and sending
it tumbling to the pavement.  ‘Hopeless or not there was no point in making it easy for them,’ he thought.

             
They answered his shot with a dozen of their own, all of which cracked uselessly against the truck.  When the echo’s faded into the distance he heard them shouting back and forth in their simple language, short sounds that communicated basic thoughts.

             
“Ka na!”

             
“Ra ba.”

             
No words in the Once Men’s language spanned more than a single syllable and he knew this was it.  They still had the brains of men and they were using them now.  Coordinating their efforts into a single final assault.

             
Quey sat up and fired wildly at the Once Men.  The first shot struck one and a red mist burst from his shoulder and sent him spinning to the ground.  The others reacted, ducking behind the cars and his shots hit air or metal.  When he was empty he lay flat against the seat again and listened to the frantic shouts of their staccato language as he loaded his last magazine into his gun and chambered a round.