Thunder Road (8 page)

Ryan’s face split into a grin for the first time in hours. “Guess you’re right, Doc. But let’s give him a little surprise. Let’s go after the coldheart bastard anyway, and meet him halfway. Full-on.”

Unconsciousness had at least given her a respite. To be dragged from it and thrown into a world of pain and confusion was not how she would have chosen to have surfaced. She was still on the bike, still secured to the mystery rider, and the wind chill from their speed was freezing bones that had only just regained the sense to feel.

And how. The cramps that the others had felt on their recovery were intensified for her by the weakness she still felt, and by her restraints. She was unable to move with the spasms, and did not have the energy to fight against the painful contortions of her muscles. The agony ripped through her head in a welter of flashing lights behind her closed eyes, like synapses exploding and splattering her brain against the insides of her skull. She opened her eyes, hoping that light and the sense of where she was would somehow still the waves of nausea that welled up in her throat, pressing against the sore hollow of her breastbone.

Her eyes were immediately hit by brilliant sunlight, strobed by the movement of the rider’s broad back as it moved on the saddle in front of her. The movement also broke up the wind that whipped over and around the man. He sheltered her from the worst of the buffeting, but this only had the effect of making what did hit her seem all the harder. It sucked the breath from her mouth and nose, making her gulp for air when all she wanted to do was to take a deep breath.

The convulsions caused by the cramps made her twitch uncontrollably on the pillion of the huge bike. She was grateful for its size as, even though the rider still had to adjust to the way in which she momentarily threw his balance, her convulsions would have thrown them from a smaller machine.

She knew she was going to puke. If she did it all over his back it would stink, maybe even splash back on her face, which would make her puke some more. Frankly, she doubted that she had the strength in her to heave more than the once. She was more likely to choke herself. If she had to go out, she wanted to go out fighting, not choking on her own spew while she was tied to a captor.

She hung her head out to one side, hoping that the convulsions wouldn’t be so strong as to overbalance her, throwing her from the bike. The wind from their speed blew her hair out behind them like the clouds of dust that rose in their wake. The chill was such that the heat of the sun didn’t even register for her. She could have done with it at that moment, as a cold shiver swept through her, the sweat on her back like ice.

She opened her mouth, surrendering to the reflexive cramps in her stomach that rippled up her esophagus, forcing bile into her throat, deep poison following…

Her stomach felt like it was turning over and over, trying to flip itself inside out as she emptied everything inside her in a stream that trailed out behind them, the wet sound of it hitting the desert dirt lost in the roar of the bike and the distance that was eaten up at great speed.

She hawked and spit the last remnants from her mouth before righting herself. The sour taste was unpleasant, and she could feel it running down her chin, the stench drifting up to her nose. But the cold sweat had passed, and the muscle cramps were subsiding. A little taste and smell she could take for a while.

She was weak, like a newborn. She felt physically defenseless. But she knew that would pass. There were other ways of defending yourself. Like being prepared.

She tried to piece together what had happened. She felt as though she had once had a grasp on it, but now it was foggy. She tried to pull the pieces out of the mist, tried to make sense of it.

She could remember the confusion before the incoming gren. The numbing paralysis. The man at whose back she now traveled, speaking words that made sense and yet did not. And then passing out…

Shit—the others. Unable to move, it occurred to her that they may have just bought the farm before they’d had a chance to regain use of their limbs. There were so many dangers they had been left open to, yet that had not seemed to be the rider’s intent. Alongside her fear for her friends, Krysty’s brain registered that her enemy may not have the wit and intelligence he would have wished for.

Okay, then. She could not take it for granted that they were coming in search of her. If they were able, then they would, but she figured that she couldn’t count on it. She would have to rely on herself.

The mystery rider obviously meant her no harm. Quite the opposite, from what she could remember of his words. In truth, there was something about that which made her skin crawl. But no matter. She couldn’t think about that now. She was too weak to attempt an escape, and out here it would be pointless.

Best to just play possum, as the old predark phrase went, and see where the rider was taking her. Once there she could see his strengths: personnel, equipment, tech. She could see how crazy he was, whether there was anything in his makeup she could use against him.

And she could recover her own strength while working out a way to wipe the triple-crazy bastard off the face of the earth.

T
HINGS HAD NOT
, perhaps, gone quite as he’d wanted. All had been well up until the moment Krysty Wroth recovered consciousness. The file, he knew, had said nothing about the spasms that seemed to follow recovering from the gas. Her body was racked by them, and it made him wonder if there would be a similar risk of neural damage. It would be a shame if he had gone to so much trouble, only for the woman to be reduced to a vegetable. She would be of little use to him in such an event. Nonetheless, he would look after her. She would live out her days at the base, wanting for nothing in the way of care. It would, frankly, be the least he could do. He felt a responsibility to her.

Strange. This was the first time that he had felt such a thing. True, in a general sense he felt that he had a responsibility to the human race. But this was a very different feeling to that which had powered his forays into the field so far. He would have to record this later, discuss it and what it meant.

Meantime, he had distance to cover. He felt her move behind him and adjusted his balance accordingly. He could not see what she was doing, but he was sure it was not escape. The feeling was confirmed when an unpleasant sour odor assailed him. She had vomited, another side effect of the gas that the file had not mentioned.

In truth, he was beginning to wonder how accurate the files were—how much was evidential, how much supposition and how much was a sin of omission. There was a lesson to be learned here. Not to trust the computer systems a hundred percent, and to test equipment more thoroughly before use in the field.

There was something good to be drawn from any situation.

Meantime, he had other matters of more immediate importance. He took one hand from the bike’s handlebars and flipped down the mike at the side of the goggles.

“Thunder Rider reporting in. We are now approximately fifteen minutes from first defense lines. Please disable as approach registers. Estimated time of arrival at base, twenty-one minutes. Message ends.”

He flicked the mike back up and returned both hands to the handlebars. The farthest reaches of the border fence were now in sight. The ranch building was nestled in a small, man-made valley in the center of the compound. Those who had come before had made it this way. Finding the ranch from the ground without falling foul of the defenses was nearly impossible. He remembered Jenny’s words: “Nothing is ever fail-safe. Caution is the best word in the language. The most useful. Learn not just the word, but its real meaning.”

Air attack would be dealt with by long-range, radar-guided missile defenses. In many ways, these were much easier to deal with, as nothing could truly hide in the open skies. But it was—what was the word she had used?—“academic” now that there were no planes to take to the skies. Still, he was glad the systems were there, as one day, perhaps…

He snapped out of his reverie. The boundary was approaching. Time to concentrate.

Thunder Rider and his machine were almost as one as he guided it through the boundary defenses. Invisible to the naked eye, undersoil detectors registered movement within two square yards, and would detonate fragment grenades. The motion sensors would also send back to base details on the weight and bulk of any vehicles that came close. From this, the computer would estimate the probability of the grenades alone securing the base. If the calculations proved that the next line of defense was necessary, then digital imaging equipment that was in place around the land surrounding the ranch would kick into operation. Trackers would mark the intruders, and smart missiles would seek and destroy.

If, by any chance, an attacking force should get beyond this, a wall of chemical fire would be triggered. A particularly good tactician, or perhaps sheer weight of numbers, may get an enemy this far. The possibility of them getting beyond the chemical fires was very slight. However, while there was still the smallest possibility then it was politic to have a last line of defense. The ranch house itself was circled at a distance of five hundred yards by rapid-fire automatic heavy-caliber ordnance. Anyone who got past the fire, by some amazing quirk of chance, would surely fall at this stage.

No matter. The ranch house itself, merely a shell these days, was also booby-trapped. After the days following the nuclear winter, those left in the base had emerged to maintain the weapons and defense systems, considering these to be top priority. The wreckage of the ranch house itself had been left as it was. The disrepair and damage would act as a diversion. Besides, they had long ago opted to live belowground rather than try to rebuild on the surface.

So it became the perfect disguise for the base, a fortuitous act for which he could only thank those who had come before.

To gain access to the base, anyone approaching would have to steer a course between the triggering devices once they were in operation. This was a labyrinthine route that had to be intimately memorized by those who sought to use it. It was of a narrow gauge designed to be negotiated only by the bike. Any larger vehicle, even assuming they should accidentally stumble on the route, would overlap the safety zone and trigger the defenses.

Despite the almost nonexistent margin for error, Thunder Rider took the route at speed, such was his confidence. Why not? It was something that he had been learning from a young age. He had always been prepared for this moment.

P
UKING HER GUTS UP
had cleared Krysty’s head, if nothing else. Although her body still felt weak, she was starting to think a little more like her old self. She could have done without the twisting and turning of the bike, as the rider seemed to pilot it on a completely random course—it made her already weakened body feel even more fragile—but her mind was sharp enough to figure that there was a reason for this action.

It had to be that there was some kind of hidden defenses in these parts, and that the evasive course of action was to drive a course through them. Concentrating, no matter how hard it seemed, she scanned the area. To take in the terrain at the kinds of speeds they were using was almost impossible, and as far as she could see there was nothing to mark this area of wasteland as any different from that which they had traveled straight. But there had to be something…

It was when he veered to ninety degrees for a short stretch that she realized why here, why now. She caught her first glimpse of the ranch house, hidden in a small valley but with the roof just showing above the slightly raised level of the ground. Before, any indication of it had been concealed both by its own location and by the broad back of the rider, her primary view during the journey.

This had to be his base. Where it was exactly in relation to where they had come from, she had no real way of telling. She squinted up at the sun, hoping that she could deduce something from its position in the sky. But given the twists and turns of their course, the most she could get from the position was that it was now past the middle of the day, which, she wryly reflected, was next to useless.

Instead, she concentrated her attention on where they were headed. Moving as much as she could behind the rider, not wanting to attract his attention, and also mindful of the fact that she had no goggles, and it was his back that had protected her eyes from the onrushing wind resistance, she tried to look around him as he righted direction and drove head-on for the ranch house. It was almost impossible. The briefest of glances gave her a fleeting impression of a building that showed only a roof gaping with holes, the upper story barely visible but seemingly stripped of paint and stucco, weather-beaten, with the frame of the ranch house showing through in places.

That was all she could get before the solid wall of air drove dust and bugs into her eyes. Dipping back behind the cover of his back, she blinked rapidly, her eyes streaming. She desperately wanted to wipe, no, to claw at them and stop the irritation, but her arms were too secured around the rider to allow her to do this.

Still, this brief glimpse had been enough to make her wonder. There was no way that anyone could live in a building like that, especially if the rest of the building was as derelict as the top sections. So why head for it? Perhaps it was just a marker on the route?

No. That wouldn’t account for the strange maneuvers he had indulged in with the bike. The building had to be the key. Her mind raced. If there were a number of defense systems that couldn’t be seen, then that would suggest a survival of predark tech. And if the ruined ranch house was a front, then that would suggest something hidden, like a redoubt. Gaia alone knew that they had encountered enough of those over the past few years; some other hidden bases, too.