Thunder Road (10 page)

“Good, good, you are awake. I trust you have recovered from your illness as we journeyed here. For that I must apologize. I have had no call to use the gas before, and that was an effect that was not on the file. I shall have to see if this unfortunate effect can be remedied before any further use.”

Nice—so he had every intention of putting others through that less-than-charming experience. She felt that she had to choose her words carefully.

“That’s…good. Yes, it’s good that you want to avoid anyone experiencing discomfort…”

He inclined his head. “You seem a little upset, a little less than reassured by my assurances. I know that it was neither the best nor the friendliest way to introduce myself, but as I stated, it was the most expedient. And that is my priority right now. The notion of having to do what may not necessarily be the right thing per se, but is the right thing for that moment, must surely be something with which you are familiar, Krysty Wroth.”

Gaia, but she was having trouble following his arcane speech. However, she had been able to follow it enough to make her point. Looking down at the bonds that held her secure, she said, “If you know who I am, and you want to gain my trust, then the first thing you’d know is that I don’t take kindly to being tied up like this. You can explain anything else you want in whatever way you want, but it isn’t going to mean shit while you’ve got me trussed up like road chill.”

The rider shook his head and moved toward her. “Please forgive me, that was most remiss,” he said hurriedly. “You are, of course, correct.”

He took off his goggles and hung them over the steering column of the bike. Taking in as much as she could quickly, she saw that the goggles were high tech. It looked like a scope, a speaker and a mike attached to it, and she caught a glimpse of some other circuitry, the purpose of which was beyond her, before the rider moved in front of her and blocked the view. As he leaned over, she also caught a brief glimpse of startling blue eyes—not just the color, but something else that she didn’t have time to fully absorb.

With a tenderness that she would not have expected given her perception and slight knowledge of him, the rider loosed the bonds and took her weight as she swayed, weaker than she thought. He picked her up gently.

“Please. You are still weak, and your circulation will have been momentarily impaired by the bonds and the journey. Allow me…”

He carried her across the floor of the bunker toward one of the five doors. Part of Krysty balked at letting him do this. He was the enemy, and she felt that could in no way let him gain the advantage. Yet, at the same time, she could feel how weak she was. Anything that would let her regain her strength, give her time, was a good thing. Besides, she figured that she could fake being more exhausted than she was, and take the opportunity to try to observe as much as possible of the complex in which she found herself.

“Sector Three, open door two, please,” the rider said, seemingly to no one.

Still, one of the doors glided effortlessly open, with no human hand to guide it. The whole area of the mechanics bunker had to be miked up; probably cameras, too. She was triple glad she had been too weak to try anything. An attempt at escape would likely have brought a whole sec squad down on her. She was going to have to watch every word and action.

He exited into a corridor that was noticeably more ornate than the bunker. The walls were painted in an eggshell-blue, and the lighting was concealed. A soft-hued tone lit the corridor with a less harsh glare, and the doors leading off this corridor—all, frustratingly, closed—were made of old wood, varnished, polished and ornate. The floor was actually covered with an old, predark-style carpet. In a shade to match the walls, no less.

Hell, this was certainly no redoubt. So what was it?

She allowed herself to be carried, taking all this in—even though, in truth, it told her very little.

Even so, it was a surprise when the voice seemed to slip out of the walls around her. She looked around as surreptitiously as she could, but could see no sign of the speaker, or even of a remote speaker from which the sound could emanate.

“Howard, your request for addition to file 444/720G has been noted and attended to. Work is currently taking place on synthesizing an element to eliminate the noted effect. Until this is achieved, the remaining grenades will be removed from the Ordnance Depot.”

“Thank you, Sid. Would it be possible to have records of the missions available by 0700?”

“This can be done. Is there anything else?”

“Inform Hammill that I would like schematics for the cruiser available first thing. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I think it may not be too long before we have allies in our quest.”

“That is excellent news, Howard. I shall refer the request immediately.”

“Thank you.” He looked down into Krysty’s eyes, reading the question. “Sid is the hub of this base. Without him, the whole Thunder Rider project could not have been launched.”

“‘Thunder Rider’?” The name bemused her. It seemed to have no meaning that she could discern. And what was with this Sid and Hammill that he had mentioned? Names and voices but no sign of the people?

He smiled. “Don’t concern yourself at this stage. It will all become clear to you soon. But first, you must rest. I fear that the effects of the gas are more wide-ranging than the files would have led me to believe.”

They had reached the end of the corridor. A staircase wound around an elevator shaft. It looked something like she had seen in old vids or photographs. The stairs were carpeted like the corridor, and the elevator was of open ironwork, the cage decorated in a design like leaves and flowers, while the cage within was open.

No, certainly no military redoubt. What the hell was it? Krysty’s mind raced as she tried to piece together what she knew…which was very little, but was beginning to make an intriguing picture. From the old vids and photographs, she knew that only people with a lot of jack lived in places that looked like this. She also knew that anyone nonmilitary with this much tech would also be loaded with jack. Put that together, and you had someone who had serious power and influence before skydark. That would also account for the staff—the invisible staff. She’d feel happier when she’d seen them, had some idea of what they looked like.

So you had people with a lot of power who’d taken to their bunker when the nukecaust happened. And Howard—which didn’t seem somehow threatening enough for such a coldheart—was the result of several generations underground. There had to be a bigger gene pool down here than she’d reckon, as he was nowhere near as inbred as she would have figured. No drooling, stunted stupe. But there was something about the eyes, a kind of coldness that made her hair curl around her protectively, made her wonder what was going on behind those ice-blue orbs.

While this had been racing through her mind, and she had been doing her best to keep it from her face, Thunder Rider had entered the elevator, and they had ascended two floors. They were now partway down another corridor, decorated in a similar style. He paused outside a door.

“Level Four, door seven, please.”

The door clicked softly before opening. He carried her inside a room that was lushly decorated in pinks and oranges, and placed her on a bed covered with a richly decorated pane.

“This was my sister’s room,” he said softly. “I think you will be comfortable here.”

Krysty didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, he turned and left before she had need to frame a reply, leaving her lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Where, she wondered, were the monitors? What was the Thunder Rider project he spoke of? Where was his sister? And most of all, what was lurking behind those eyes that made her skin crawl?

There was nothing she could do right now except get some rest. Until she’d had a chance to find out more, any thoughts of escape would have to wait. She turned onto her side and tried to sleep, but the knowledge that something in the room was watching her made that far from easy.

Just like everything was going to be far from easy.

Day two, coming up for thirty-six hours since they had lost Krysty. A day and a half. That was without the added time it would take them to catch up. And there was nothing they could do about it. Their pace was fixed by the horses and couldn’t be increased.

There was nothing to do. Nothing except watch the wastelands up ahead, and the territory they had already covered to their rear.

Ryan had never felt so frustrated, so helpless. It was a feeling he didn’t like. He was used to taking action, to being in charge of a situation…or at least trying to take that charge. Now he could do nothing, and the tension and frustration was like an itch under his skin that he could not scratch. It crawled in his gut, making him edgy. It had no release: there wasn’t even anything he could do to take his mind off the nagging doubts. Could he have done something to protect his people back at the camp? Could he be doing something now?

His frustration was nearly boiling over, waiting for an outlet.

“Incoming, eleven o’clock,” J.B. muttered. Those three words, said in a laconic tone, referred to something so far away that Ryan couldn’t even, at this point, hear it. But it was enough. Galvanized, he felt like a coiled spring given release.

He had been brooding in the back of the wag, J.B. taking the reins while Doc stared out the back, trying to stop his mind wandering more than usual. Jak and Mildred were trying to sleep, but in the silence of the seemingly endless wastes even the murmur of the Armorer was enough to rouse them.

Ryan was out the front of the wag, crouching beside the Armorer, before his words had even had time to die away. Following the direction of J.B.’s gaze, Ryan could see a cloud of dust on the horizon, seemingly floating in midair as it hovered at the point where sand and sky meet. But with a rapidity suggesting great speed, it moved away from the vanishing point and became a much more corporeal figure on the landscape. The cloud billowed, and even at such a great distance it was possible to make out the rough impression of a wag.

“Our coldheart?” Ryan mused.

“Figure not,” J.B. replied. “Our boy’s trail leads more one o’clock, and this isn’t any kind of a bike. Even a big fucker like his.”

“He could have more than a bike,” Ryan cautioned, “but I take your point. So someone else, then. Question is, are they looking for him, too?”

“Mebbe. Not our problem if they are, though,” J.B. drawled.

Ryan nodded. “Exactly. They’re just gonna see this wag, see the horse, and think easy meat.”

J.B.’s mouth quirked. “Better advise them of their error, then….”

The others had been listening to this exchange, and as Ryan turned to them he could see that they were already going through the routines of checking and preparing their blasters. Truth was that they were always combat ready. It did no harm to make triple sure.

“You heard that, right?” He looked at them, could see he was correct, and continued without pause. “We don’t know who these people are, but they’re better protected than us in that wag, and they’ll see us as easy. I want them to think there’s just J.B. and me on board. You stay here, stay down, and get ready to move out the back and adopt firing positions at the least provocation.”

“Think you want much as me, Ryan.” Jak grinned, his teeth showing in a vulpine leer.

Ryan shrugged. “Glad I’m not the only one feeling it.” He looked over his shoulder. “Shit, they’ve got some speed…Get ready.”

He moved to the front of the wag, settling himself beside J.B. The Armorer had kept up the same pace and direction as before. Anything else would have been noted by the approaching wag. No way did he want to give them any cause for suspicion. They were bigger, and they were better protected. He didn’t want them to start blasting from distance, or else the companions were really screwed.

And the wag—whoever was in it—was definitely taking an interest in them. While their course had remained constant, the wag had deviated from the line it had been taking from the horizon, so that it arced around to come closer to them. It was still throwing up clouds of dust to its rear, but from the front they could now see that it was an old military armored wag. It had a gun turret with a front-mounted machine blaster, with two ports below, under the windshield. Most of those old wags had originally had comp equipment so that they could drive blind. J.B. would guess, from the slightly erratic line, that the driver was having to rely on visual alone. A bubble-mounted blaster on each side, with a full 180 rotation; two wheels on each side at the front. He couldn’t see the rear, but he was guessing caterpillar tracks.

A formidable vehicle against five people with a couple of horses and a hunk of wood.

It sped toward them with no sign of diminishing its speed. It was fortunate that the horses had their remarkable placidity, or even a more experienced horseman than J.B. would have had trouble controlling them. As it was, they showed no interest in the approaching wag, and the Armorer was able to handle the reins with one hand while slipping his mini-Uzi from his shoulder so that it rested by his hip. Similarly, Ryan had slowly dropped the Steyr from his back until it rested casually across his lap. The two blasters wouldn’t be much good against the armor-plated wag, but both men figured that whoever was inside would feel just confident enough against a horse-drawn wag to want to show their faces. They’d seen enough sloppy fighters in their time to lay odds on this.

The wag continued until it looked as though it was prepared to drive right through them. J.B. kept to his course, kept his nerve and hoped that his judgment was sound. As the roaring, whining engine approached them, and the dissipating clouds of dust started to reach them in choking waves, the Armorer wondered momentarily if he’d picked the wrong moment to make a bad call.

But no. At the last, the wag skidded on the sandy soil and turned side-on, the braking throwing up even larger, denser clouds of dust that temporarily blinded them, making them choke. In the rear of the covered wag, Jak, Mildred and Doc were partially protected from this, but were still denied the clear sight they needed.

The reason for the move became obvious when the dust settled. Between tear-filled, blinking red-eye stares and coughs that yielded dust-flecked sputum, both Ryan and J.B. could see that two men had emerged from the wag. One was standing in front of it, pointing an AK-47 directly at them. The other was half-hidden by the turret of the wag, from which his upper torso projected. He was holding them in the sights of a scattergun. He was older than the man with the AK-47, with a gray beard covering his grizzled face, a dusty stovepipe hat topping his long, gray hair. The younger man had no beard, and his long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Both men had the same long, hooked nose and protruding front teeth. They had to be kin, probably father and son.

Their clothes were old and patched. Their blasters looked pretty much the same to J.B.’s practiced eye. Because of this, and because of the way they had turned the wag side-on, the Armorer figured that however they had laid hands on it, they either hadn’t got ammo for the mounted blasters, or else they hadn’t maintained the ordnance properly and it no longer worked.

Which was good. If they were the only two in the wag, then it more than evened the odds.

“G’afternoon, gentlemen,” the older man said with a twang in his voice that told them that, like themselves, these were not natives of the area. From farther south, Ryan would guess. Not that it mattered. Coldhearts were coldhearts, and from the shrewd stare he was getting, Ryan knew these men for stone chillers.

There was a long silence. The older man had obviously been expecting a reply, maybe even a capitulation.

It wasn’t going to happen. Ryan and J.B. could outwait any bastard they encountered. And so it was this time. The silence hung too heavy for the old man.

“So mebbe I was thinking that you were gonna be in the least bit curious as to why we’ve stopped you like this,” he said. “Mebbe you are. Mebbe you’re smarter than two dudes trying to cover this land with horses have any damn right to be. Mebbe you’re mute retards who can’t speak ’cause you got no tongues. Makes no difference to me.”

He waited again for them to break their silence. When they remained silent, he sighed and carried on.

“See, me and my boy here—” he indicated the younger man “—we been traveling across this here stretch of useless shit for some time, and we’re running a little low on the necessities of life. To be blunt, gentlemen, we ain’t got shit in the way of water or food. And when we saw your wag in the distance, we said to ourselves, what kind of damn fool is gonna be rumbling across this land at that speed? And we kinda knew what the answer might be—a damn fool who’s at least smart enough to make sure that they’ve got enough water and food to stop themselves from buying the farm halfway across.

“And so you see, gentlemen, we want you to hand over everything you’ve got. Now, we ain’t nasty types. We ain’t gonna chill you. We’re fair men. You hand over your blasters and your supplies, and we drive off, and you take your chances out there. Now, I’ll admit that it ain’t much of a chance. But it’s better’n being chilled.

“Course, you don’t wanna do that, then we got no choice other than to blast the living shit out of you right now and just take it all anyway. See, either way you lose your blasters and your food and water. But do it our way, and at least you get to live a little longer…mebbe a lot longer.

“So how d’you want to play it, gentlemen?”

Ryan and J.B. exchanged glances. It seemed to them that these coldhearts were bluffing. No one was given a chance in these kinds of circumstances. The blasters had to be empty, and they were desperate enough to try to con what they wanted. From the way that the old man spoke, it was also pretty clear that there was only those two traveling in the wag. So perhaps they could just bring up their blasters and fire now, calling that bluff. Sure, there was a chance that it could backfire and they could get fired on, but…

There was no need for that. They had three blasters in the back, just waiting to spring. This was going to be somebody’s lucky day, and it wasn’t going to be the two men facing them.

“Okay,” Ryan said simply, “we’ll take our chances. That we can survive, and that you won’t just chill us anyway.”

“Boy, you can take my word on that,” the old man said in a voice that sounded sincere.

Yeah, sure. Sincere because they were right. The two men wouldn’t fire on them because they had no ammo. This was going to be easy.

Ryan shrugged. “Take your word for it. We’re going to throw down our blasters on the count of three, then start to unload. That okay with you? You got the cards.”

Don’t overplay it—he could almost feel J.B.’s thoughts. Too easy to give in, and these coldhearts would be suspicious. There was still the chance they weren’t bluffing.

The old man nodded his agreement, and Ryan counted out loud. On three, both he and J.B. took the Steyr and the mini-Uzi, holding them barrel-first, and threw them past the horses so that they landed with a dull thud in the sand, puffing up dust around them. They waited until that dust had settled.

This was the crucial moment. If the younger man collected the blasters before they had a chance to move—to clear the shot for the trio of blasters at their backs—then there was a chance he might be able to snatch at one of the blasters on the ground and return fire before he had been chilled.

Ryan’s eye locked with the old man. An almost imperceptible nod as a signal, and Ryan took this as his cue to turn toward the rear of the wag. This was the moment when he figured that, if they really meant to chill them, the younger man would make his move.

J.B. anticipated his friend’s action. He delayed his own turn the merest fraction of a second, enough to see that the younger man darted forward for the fallen blasters.

“Now!” he yelled, diving off to one side and rolling under the wag, his arm shooting out as he did so to push at Ryan, give him more momentum.

The one-eyed man was grateful for that. Not very often would he be glad to fall face-first into a pile of less-than-soft sacks, but this time was different. He heard and sensed, rather than saw, the action above his head. He felt Jak brush against him, heard the deafening roar of the .357 Magnum Colt Python, so close to his head that it drowned out even the elephantine roar of Doc’s LeMat.

As J.B. fell sideways, and Ryan fell in front of them, the three friends who had been listening from the back of the wag took their cue. Regardless of whether the men in the wag had been bluffing, they knew they only had one shot. One shot, one chance: the difference between life and a long time chilled.

Jak was nearest to the younger man, had been able to tell this by the sound of movements across the sand. Even as he was rising from his position crouched in the back of the wag, he was bringing up his blaster and drawing a bead with one fluid motion, his finger already squeezing on the trigger. As the blaster exploded, the recoil made him rock on the wag’s unsteady wooden floor; but it didn’t affect his aim. The powerful slug took off the side of the young man’s head as he bent down, an eye socket, an ear and part of his skull exploding in a mulch of blood, brain and bone. The slug continued into his shoulder, gouging out flesh and bone. Not that he felt it. The initial impact had taken away all consciousness and life.

The older man would have been shocked by the sudden chilling of his son if he had been given the chance to even register it. Instead, he was hit by a double blow. A dead shot from Mildred’s ZKR drilled a small hole between his eyes, neatly piercing his brain. That was followed in less time than it took to blink by a hail of shot from the LeMat, which obliterated not just the neatly drilled hole, but most of his head. His body, topped only by a bloodied mass of pulp, slumped in the turret of the wag. If, by chance, there had been anyone inside, they would have been trapped by the inert corpse.