Wasteland Blues (24 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

On their fourth day fro
m the museum, Derek let John take a turn at the wheel. He rode up front for an hour, keeping an eye on him, but John quickly mastered the basic operations. Once Derek was confident that John wouldn’t wreck the crawler, he had him pull over. Derek climbed out and let Maggie and Samuel ride on the bench seat next to John. Sheba also leapt into the front seat with her master.

“Check this out,” said Derek, once everyone was settled. He reached across the two passengers and flipped the switch for the cold air blower.

“Praise the Lord!” shouted John as the deliciously chilled air swirled around him. Maggie reached out a hand to feel the current that pushed out from the blower and sighed.

“Merry Christmas,” said Derek with a wry grin. He slammed the door and climbed up onto the flatbed, pushing past the mules who sat with their halters tied to the side rail. He squeezed onto the bench seat between Teddy and Leggy then turned around and tapped on the rear window of the cab.

“Fire it up, and let’s roll!”

The vehicle lurched forward, and quickly they were on their way again. As the sand crawler rumbled and shook down the road, Leggy grimaced.

“A Hell of a lot more comfortable in there,” said the old man, jerking his thumb at the cab.

“Gettin’ soft already, huh?” said Derek. But he was glad that the old man had said it first.

***

Just before noon the road passed between a pair of rocky hills. Shadows fell on the vehicle. Derek poked his head out of the canvas canopy and scanned the hillsides.

“I could use a rest stop,” said Leggy, “if that’s what you’re lookin’ for.”

“I am,” said Derek. “But let’s wait till we get through this. I don’t like the idea of bein’ boxed in between these hills.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Leggy. He had to piss bad, and the rattling of the sand crawler wasn’t helping matters. But he was pleased to see Derek being cautious, and he certainly wasn’t going to discourage it.

Ten minutes later, the hills began to slope gently downward, and soon the crawler emerged onto open road again. Derek turned to tap on the glass and signal a halt when Afha, the donkey, wobbled to his feet and began to bray.

“Probably gotta take a piss as bad as I do,” said Leggy. Then he saw the donkey’s mutated third eye swirling madly. He looked at Derek. “Do you…”

Suddenly, the ground on both sides of the road erupted in a flurry of segmented legs and clacking mandibles.

“Bugs!” shouted Teddy as the donkey went wild with panic.

“Go go go go go!” screamed Derek, pounding on the rear window of the cab. John had also seen the creatures scuttling up out of the ground. He slammed the go pedal to the floor. The crawler leapt forward. Leggy tumbled down the length of the flatbed and crashed into Afha, knocking the donkey down.

A bug slashed through the canopy, hissing as it scrambled into the flatbed. Teddy struck at it with a wrench that had fallen loose but couldn’t get his full force behind a blow, the crawler was jostling so badly.

A second bug skittered up over the tailgate and landed on top of Afha and Leggy, who were still in a tangle. A third leaped onto the canopy above their heads—they could see it writhing, a wormy shadow through the canvas.

Derek skidded down the flatbed to help the old man, who was in as much danger from Afha’s hooves as he was from the bug. The crawler bounced once—a high, hard jolt that nearly threw Derek out of the flatbed. John was driving straight over the bugs in his path. Derek grabbed for a railing as the crawler bounced twice more. The impact flipped the giant insect in the flatbed onto its back. Before it could turn over, Derek snatched his knife from his wrist sheath and drove it repeatedly into the creature’s soft underbelly.

Leggy wormed free of the donkey. He grabbed the tailgate and pulled himself to his knees. Dozens of bugs were in pursuit, hissing and chattering, but the sand crawler was outpacing them.

Suddenly, the crawler stopped short. Leggy slid up the length of the bed and slammed into the bench seat.

“What the fuck!” shouted Derek, who had also fallen over. “Drive, you asshole, drive!”

The sand crawler lurched forward again—and stalled. Leggy looked up as another bug tumbled through the canopy. It landed upright and raised its claws.

John was pounding on the start button, stomping on the go pedal—frantically trying to get the sand crawler moving.

Leggy flipped up the bench seat and pulled the flare gun from the storage locker. The creature pounced, its mandibles wide. Leggy’s arm disappeared inside the bug’s maw up to the elbow.

With a start, the crawler’s engine roared back to life and the truck lurched forward.

“Gaaahhhh,” screamed Leggy and the bug began to bite down on his arm. He pulled the trigger.

The blast knocked the creature back to the tailgate. The flare exploded, dousing the flatbed in burning phosphorus. But still the creature charged. Leggy watched dumbly as burning death descended upon him. Suddenly, strong hands grasped the nightmare insect. Teddy screamed in rage and in pain as he flung the burning monster from the truck. It crashed through the torn canvas out onto the scrubland and moved no more.

Derek looked behind them. The bugs had not given up pursuit but were falling rapidly behind. He could see sunlight glinting off the polished armor of their midsections, and their legs churning up dust in their fury over lost prey.

***

“Did we outrun ’em? Did we outrun ’em?” John gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands—his eyes locked on the black strip of the road as he sped onward.

“I don’t know,” said Magdalen, clutching Sheba. “Sam, what’s happening back there?”

But the boy said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the windshield. A crack ran straight down the middle of the window, like a jagged flash of lightening captured in glass. A monster had leapt right at them, right at
him
, and had nearly made it through the windshield. Samuel had seen its mandibles, its eager mouth—wet and pulsating and filled with serrated cilia. If John hadn’t stomped on the brakes and sent the monster skittering off of the hood, it would’ve bashed through the glass and…and….

From the back of the crawler had come a sound like a gunshot. Light filled the cabin as the crawler swerved crazily. John fought for control and slowly eased the vehicle to a halt.

“Wait here,” he said and leapt from the cab. He ran around to the flatbed. The canopy was shredded, and parts of it were burning.

Teddy was sitting in the back, weeping, his hands held up painfully before him—the skin was red and peeling with blisters. Leggy lay on his stomach, the back of his shirt sliced open, his back riddled with lacerations. He held his bloody hand where the creature had bitten him. Derek had a black eye, and his forearms were streaked with gore.

In the back of the truck Afha sat in a pool of blood, braying softly. Minna shook and trembled.

John noticed that the flatbed was tilted at an odd angle—the rear wheel on the driver’s side was a shapeless mass of smoking rubber treads tangled around a crumpled steel rim.

“Holy Jesus,” said John. He ran back to the cab. “C’mon, they’re hurt!” he shouted.

John’s words galvanized Samuel. He remembered the first aid kit under the bench seat. He scuttled around to the flatbed and found the pack. He searched through its contents and began tossing items to John.

Then he turned to Teddy, a small squeeze bottle in one hand.

“Does it hurt, Teddy?” said Samuel.

Teddy nodded, tears streaking his dirty cheeks.

“Try this. I think it’s medicine, okay?” said the boy.

Teddy shied away, lifting his hands above Samuel’s head. “Don’t want medicine. Medicine hurts.”

“Not this,” said Samuel, spraying bit onto his own tiny finger. “It’s a foam. It feels cool, like water. It’ll make the pain go away and help your skin grow back.”

Teddy shook his head.

“How about if we just try one hand first?” said Samuel. “Just a little bit. If you don’t like it, we’ll forget it.”

Teddy thought. Tentatively he lowered one hand. Samuel sprayed a small amount of pink foam onto the big man’s enormous pinky. Teddy winced, then relaxed.

Samuel covered the palms and fingers with a thick layer of the foam. “Here. Now put these on,” said Samuel. He pulled another packet out of the medical kit and tore it open. Inside were two gauzy white bandages like mittens. He frowned, realizing there was no way that Teddy’s humongous paws would fit inside the mitts. He had to make do with cutting the gloves into strips and taping the material over the worst of Teddy burns.

In the meantime, Derek and Magdalena tended to Afha. Derek shooed Minna out of the flatbed then held Afha still as Magdalena probed his wound.

“It’s deep, but I don’t think it’s fatal,” she said. Samuel brought bandages to them, and Magdalena carefully pressed them to the donkey’s wound and held them with long strips torn from the canvas and wrapped around the donkey’s girth.

Derek hopped out of the truck and examined the damage to the wheel. Leggy limped over on his hands, each swing causing him to wince in pain.

“We can’t stop here,” said Derek. “Still too close to that bug nest.”

Leggy nodded.

“We’ll have to divide up the gear between us. You can ride Minna. We’ll have to put that other donkey down.”

Leggy started to speak, but Derek held up a hand. “I know it ain’t too bad a wound. If we had two or three days to rest and let it recover, that’d be different. But we don’t.” Already, in the distant hills, they could see the reflected march of the soldier bugs descending the broken highway.

Now Leggy laughed. Derek turned, a hot flush rising in his cheeks. He knew that laugh: it meant Leggy was about to point out his ignorance.

“You’re too quick to give up this here ride,” said Leggy. “Ain’t you ever heard of a spare?” The old man pointed to the underside of the flatbed.

Derek crouched down and saw it—a pair of balloon tires strapped to the underside by thick canvas webbing.

“But how to do we—?” Derek started and then shut his mouth again. In between the two tires was a metal contraption with a crank handle. He was so pleased to think they might be riding again that he forgot his anger.

“You, me, and Johnny will have to do this,” said Leggy. “Ted’s out of commission for the time bein’. And we’ll have to work fast.”

They did work fast. Ten minutes later Derek and John were hot, sweating, and smeared with axle grease. They drank deeply from their canteens and quickly scrubbed off as best they could with a combination of sand and the alkaline juice from a barrel cactus. And then Derek was behind the wheel once again. He drove until well after dark, letting the sand crawler’s headlights guide him along the road.

***

Several days later, Leggy scratched absently at his back, feeling the hard ribbons of scar tissue that had formed where the bug had cut into him. The Wasteland keeps knockin’ us down, and so far we keep gettin’ up, he thought. So far, at least.

Teddy seemed all right, though he complained that his hands were still tender. And that old donkey was a tough son of a bitch—they’d taken his bandage off last night, revealing a long angry slash of new pink skin on his flank. The donkey had sniffed it and then brayed defiantly. Derek had re-christened the beast “Scar.”

Since the bug attack, the road had been easy and uneventful. No one spoke much, particularly young Samuel. Leggy heard the boy whimpering each night, and once the child had sat up and screamed, a shrill, high sound that cut through Leggy’s sleep like a guillotine. He knew why. The boy who could share his thoughts  could also share his nightmares. At the same moment the boy had screamed, Leggy saw in his own mind a horrific bug poised to pounce and devour.

The fear was normal, thought Leggy, but Samuel had shared something else—the realization that death could come so suddenly and so easily out here. It was a shock and a reality check for him. The boy knew about death—he was always talkin’ about storybooks with battles and great adventures and utmost peril. But now death was real to Samuel, and his mind was tryin’ to make room for that fact.

We’re all the heroes of our own stories, thought Leggy, and heroes are supposed to live happily ever after, at least in the story books. But the Wasteland keeps its own book, and writes its own endings.

Leggy was stirred from his reverie by a sudden shout from Derek. The sand crawler stopped, and Leggy poked his head around the side of the trailer to see what was going on. That’s when he saw the minor miracle.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The only thing stranger than the tree growing in the middle of the barren desert was the man climbing it.

The tree was tall and, unbelievably, full of lush, green leaves. They could see it from nearly a mile off, but it wasn’t until they’d gotten within a hundred yards that they saw the small house and tiny shed nearby. And it wasn’t until they were almost upon it that they had noticed a man in the tree’s upper branches.

Derek stopped the crawler, and they all got out. The sun was setting, and the last rays of the day framed the old black man high above them.

“Hello, I’m Jordan,” he called out. He carried a length of frayed rope on his shoulder and was rather frayed himself. His clothes were sun-faded and torn in places. His ebony skin was slick with sweat. And they could smell the rank odor from his armpits wafting down to them.

And he was a
talker
—an ardent and garrulous practitioner of soliloquy. None of the travelers had even been able to introduce themselves, nor had they been asked to.

Jordan worked the rope as he spoke, measuring lengths by holding it between outstretched hands, feet balanced expertly on the thick branches of the tree. He looped one end of the rope over a stout branch and secured it with a strong knot.

“Pleased ta meetcha, I am. That’s to be sure! Where’re you folks comin’ from? Wait, don’t tell me, lemme guess. Moses Springs! Ha ha. Where else?

“Me? I’m just throwin’ some rope. What else am I gonna do? Got no wife, no kids. Not no more, I don’t. Sure! Just me and the tree, me and the tree. I watered this damned thing every single fucking day for fifty fuckin’ years and what’d it get me? Do you think this thing ever bore a fruit that wasn’t grainy or filled with worms? Nope. Not a one. It’s an apple tree, but ya wouldn’t know it.” The man smacked the trunk with frustrated affection.

“But now why bother? I say, what’s the point? Got no wife, got no kids. Not no more, I don’t. Yeah, they’re dead. You guessed it. Dead and gone. They killed ’em. Ha! An’ they’ll probably kill you good folks too, if ya keep headin’ where you’re headin’. Sure! Or if they don’t kill ya and eat ya, maybe they’ll make pets outta ya. Yeah, they just might, especially the big’un.” The man winked at Teddy. “They do that, dontcha know. Eat ya. Kill ya. Make a pet outta ya!”

He laughed. “Keep people as pets. No lie. Don’t believe me? You c’mon up here. Ya can just barely see ’em from up here. Yeah, they murdered Ruth and Josh and Mary-Lou, right in my front yard here. I was in the shed, pulling water from the well for this goddamned, accursed, mother-fucker of an apple tree. They didn’t know I was here. And I couldn’t do a goddamned thing but watch them murder and butcher and slice up my family. For food, ya see. That’s what they do. If they don’t keep ya as pets, that is.”

The man’s eyes took on a faraway look. “Well, good day to ya,” he called cheerfully, waved, then slipped a loop of rope around his neck and stepped from the branch.

There was a sickening
pop
as the vertebrae of his neck separated, and then the rope creaked on the wood as Jordan’s lifeless body swung gently in the still air, the muscles of his legs twitching.

***

For a long, shocked moment, no one spoke. Samuel pressed his face into Magdalena’s side, refusing to look.

Finally, Derek broke the silence. “Well,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat before continuing. “I’m gonna climb up there and see what this crazy old shit was yabbering about.”

He started toward the tree and stopped again as Jordan’s booted feet swung slowly toward him, and then away again, then toward him, then away, like a compass needle seeking north.

“Maybe ah…maybe we ought to cut him down first,” he said. The others nodded.

Teddy boosted Derek onto a branch. Derek reached out and snagged the rope. The taut fibers transmitted the weight of the dead man up to Derek’s hand, making his flesh crawl. He sawed through the thick strands, and Teddy lowered the body gently to the ground. Jordan’s eyes bulged in their sockets, and his mouth was wide, as if he’d had one last thing to say. Leggy closed the man’s eyes.

John rocked back and forth on his feet. “What do we do with him?”

“There’s a hole around the other side of the tree,” called Derek from his perch. “Dirt looks freshly dug.”

Leggy nodded to Teddy and John.

John blanched but did as he was told. They moved gingerly around the wide trunk and returned a few minutes later, their hands and faces smeared with dirt.

“He dug his own grave,” said John, wiping his hands repeatedly on his pants. “A grave and a shovel, so we put him in. I said a prayer for him.”

“What kinda madman digs himself a grave and then hangs himself all alone?” Leggy wondered aloud. No one answered.

***

In the meantime Derek had scaled the tree, moving carefully from branch to branch. Though he’d never climbed a tree before, it was remarkably similar to scaling the crane in The Heap back in San Muyamo. He stopped about three quarters of the way to the top. His companions were hidden from view by the leaves, but he guessed he’d come about twenty-five or thirty feet off the ground. A slight wave of vertigo rolled through him. He clutched the trunk more firmly and let his eyes roam across the landscape.

A distant structure caught his attention to the southeast, the direction that the strange man had indicated, the direction that they were heading. He took out his telescope for a closer look.

“Holy shit,” Derek muttered, his hands trembling and causing the spyglass to waver. What he saw through it was too bizarre, too disturbing, to relate to the others in shouts and hollers from the top of the impossible tree. He would fill them in once he’d descended. But first, he had to take another look.

A low, concrete building was surrounded by what appeared to be chain-link fence, several miles distant. Standing atop the building—
not a building, a fort
, thought Derek—were three figures dressed entirely in black. Each wore some sort of device over his face, bulging glass eyes with tubes and nozzles trailing down. Rebreathers. Each had a rifle strapped to his back.

But strangest of all were the people down on the ground, within the confines of the fence. Three men and a woman, Derek could see. They were stark naked, and staggered around on all fours as animals would. Collars had been fitted around their necks, and muzzles over their mouths, giving them a disturbing, snout-like appearance. They were staked to the wall of the small building by chains fastened to the collars around their necks. Derek watched as one of the men scratched his own cheek with his foot, and another turned his muzzle to sniff at the groveling woman’s buttocks. Derek was ashamed to discover that he had an erection.

After carefully collapsing the spyglass and placing it back in the folds of his clothes where it belonged, Derek descended from the tree and found his companions gone.

Those fuckers abandoned me
, was the first thought that flashed into his mind.
Those weirdos got them
, was the second.

But the crawler was still there, and then he heard laughter—the high-pitched giggle of the kid and then Teddy’s deep, donkey-like bray. It was coming from around the other side of the house.

***

Derek walked around and saw everyone stripped to their drawers—excepting Magdalena, who wore a knee-length slip. He cast his eyes away when he saw how the wet fabric clung to her torso.

The group stood on a small patio of flat, neatly laid stone and were splashing each other with water from a big aluminum bucket. They were all soaking wet. Even Sheba the dog had consented to a bath. She stood to one side, vigorously shaking water from her sopping fur.

Teddy emerged from a small shed next to the patio. He carried another bucket, water sloshing over the sides. Then he upended it over John and Magdalena, who were standing close together as Maggie scrubbed John’s back with a white cakey substance. Soap!

Teddy saw his brother. “Look, Der-Der. We’re havin’ bathtime!”

“There’s a well in the shed,” said John.

“C’mon son,” said Leggy, who was soaping up his white hair and grizzled beard. “Feels damn good to be clean again.”

Derek hesitated. Teddy put another brimming bucket down in front of him. He reached his hand into the water. It was cool and clean.

What the Hell
, he thought.
Guess I can talk and wash at the same time
. He shucked off his boots and then stripped down to his underwear. Then he bent down and plunged his head straight into the bucket. He emerged spluttering and shook his head, spattering droplets across the warm stones of the patio.

“What’d you see up there?” asked Leggy, passing the soap.

Derek was quiet for a moment, and then he began to speak. The group’s laughter died away as he described the armed figures and their strange captives.

“Shit,” said Leggy after Derek had finished his tale. “I was hoping to spend the night under a roof.”

“You think we should move on?” asked John, absently wringing water from his long hair.

“Hell yeah,” said Leggy. “I thought that old coot in the tree was just crazy. But it sounds like he was telling the truth.”

“We’ll have to take a detour,” said Derek. “That bunker sits right on the road.”

“Which is more dangerous?” asked Magdelena, her blank eyes fixed on Leggy. “Staying here until morning or traveling the Wasteland at night?”

“She’s got a point,” said John. “What’s the chance those gunmen would come back? They already think they killed the folks living here.”

Leggy pursed his lips. The sun had gone down and the brightest of the evening stars had already appeared. He looked at the landscape, pointed to the low hills to the north. “We don’t have to travel all night. I bet we could put them hills between us and the fort in a couple of hours. Then we hunker down till morning and take the long way ’round.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Derek. “Anybody else who’s got objections should climb that tree and see what I saw.”

“All right, let’s dry off and get dressed,” said Leggy. “It’s a damn shame though. I was hopin’ to wash these clothes.” He looked askance at his dingy shirt and pants.

Derek snorted. “Old man, the only thing holdin’ them rags together is the dirt and the stink.”

Teddy and Samuel laughed out loud. Leggy shook his head.

When they’d dressed, Leggy suggested topping off their jugs with well water.

John and Teddy drew water and carried buckets to the tank. Samuel and Magdalena tried to coax the mules back aboard the crawler. The beasts had been nibbling green leaves from the lowest branches of Jordan’s tree.

Leggy and Derek waited by the driver’s seat. “How much longer you think this thing’s gonna run?” asked Derek.

“Don’t know,” said Leggy. “Not forever. I’m not even sure what it runs
on
—not gas. Maybe ’lectricity. I honestly don’t know. There’s a gauge inside I been keepin’ my eye on. When we started it was all the way to the right. Now it’s more’n three quarters of the way to the left. I ’spect when it goes all the way left, the crawler will stop. I ain’t lookin’ forward to gettin’ up on the back of a donkey again. But we definitely got enough juice to slide past that bunker you told us about, and for now that’s all that concerns me.”

“Me too,” said Derek. “I—”

“There’s men coming,” shrieked Samuel, standing in the flatbed. “I can sense men coming!”

“Shit,” said Derek. He lifted Leggy off the ground and shoved him inside the cab then jumped into the driver’s seat and started the motor.

“Wait,” said John. “Teddy’s still in the shed drawing water.”

“Go and get him,” hissed Derek.

John sprinted for the shed.

M
agdalena drew her long rifle from a web of netting along the left side of the flatbed’s rail. Suddenly Sheba turned toward the shed and started barking.

A group of men emerged from the twilight shadows behind the house. They were armed, and John and Teddy walked ahead of them with their hands laced behind their heads.

The group stopped ten paces from the sand crawler. Derek counted six of them. They wore wide-brimmed hats and long, brown, handwoven ponchos. They carried hunting rifles and shotguns, and one man had what Leggy recognized as a grenade launcher slung across his shoulders.

“Are they the ones from the bunker?” whispered Leggy.

“No,” said Derek.

The men’s rough faces were exposed beneath the wide brims of their hats. They didn’t wear the strange rebreathers that Derek had described on the men of the distant outpost.

John and Teddy were pushed to their knees. Then the tallest of the men stepped forward. He carried a rifle that was, for the time being, pointed toward the ground.

“Where’s Jordan?” he asked, his eyes hard. “Where’s Ruth and the children?”

Standing in the flatbed, Magdalena trained in on the sound of the man’s voice, her rifle at the ready. In turn, three men aimed up at her.

“Who’re you?” demanded Derek.

“The name’s Burrell,” said the tall man. “Captain Burrell. And I’ll only ask you one more time—where’s Jordan?”

“Dead,” said Derek. “Hung himself. The rope’s still in the tree, and his body’s buried in the roots.”

“Ruth? The children?”

“The old man said raiders came for ’em,” Leggy called out. “The ones from that bunker down the road.”

Burrell tipped his head sideways. One of the men approached, and Burrell whispered to him. The man lit a lantern and went inside the house. Derek watched the light leak through open windows as the man searched the house. He emerged a few minutes later and walked in a slow circle around the tree, squatting for a moment beside the fresh grave. Then he returned to Burrell and spoke quietly into his captain’s ear. Burrell listened, nodded, and then turned to face the cab of the sand crawler.

“Step out of the vehicle one at a time. The woman with the rifle will go first. Put your hands behind your heads. Kneel next to your companions here.”

“Fuck you,” said Derek. “You ain’t in charge of us, and we ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

“Easy, easy,” whispered Leggy.

“What you have or haven’t done is still to be decided,” said Burrell. “But we’ve got six rifles to your one. We are in charge.”

“I’ll send you straight to Hell,” said Magdalena from the crawler bed, “and then we’ll see who’s in charge.”