Authors: Brian Hodge
6
It was, without a doubt, the singular most enjoyable day Jason had known since leaving St. Louis five months ago. For an early August day in Texas, the sun was surprisingly mild, hot enough to feel good but without scrambling your brains. The fact that he and Tomahawk had just climbed from a cool pond to lie in overgrown grass didn’t hurt either.
His car was parked several yards away, catching the shade of a bushy tree. Far beyond, a thick grove of cottonwood shielded them from view of State Route 6. Jason had turned the Mustang into an all-terrain vehicle to get the two of them back here. When the wind was right, they could hear gusts of sound from the rest of the clan, parked on the highway a quarter-mile away. Laughter, music, a demand for more Spam.
“They may be family now,” said Tomahawk, rolling onto his back to gaze up at the sky, “but it’s good to cut away. You can get on each other’s nerves real fast living like we do.”
Jason flipped his wet hair off his shoulders. Beads of water glittered in his beard like jewels. “Maybe you need to settle down with a few more walls.”
Tomahawk shrugged. “Someday. When it’s right.”
The bruises and cuts and scrapes they’d inflicted on each other over two weeks ago in Oklahoma had faded almost to memories. Except for what Jason thought would remain a small scar beside his right eye, where he’d connected with the truck door. After the number Lucas and company had done on his back, though, this wasn’t anything to write home about.
Home? For a moment it didn’t seem fair, whiling away an early afternoon by swimming and basking in the sun while everybody back in St. Louis could be enduring further tyrannies, depending on him to spirit them out of it. Had any of them guessed the search would have stretched on this long?
Forget it,
he decided. His conscience had no reason for guilt trips. Not when his odometer had racked up better than twenty thousand miles in five months.
In the past two weeks, he and the court of the Highway King had rolled across Oklahoma, crossed the Texas panhandle as far as Amarillo, and trekked south to Lubbock. East to Wichita Falls. Southeast to Fort Worth. South farther still, doing their best to retrace a helter-skelter path they’d taken last fall as the King and Tomahawk tried to remember where it was they’d aided someone who had come from a commune of survivors. Last night had been Waco, and they’d gotten about twenty-five miles northwest of there this morning when one of the trucks broke a timing chain.
“Shut it down,” had come the Highway King’s voice over the CB, one of which now hung mounted in Jason’s Mustang. “We’ll camp here for the night.” So much for progress today.
“Every now and then I think maybe I ought to head back up to New York State,” Tomahawk said. “That I should see what’s left of my people. If anything.”
Jason plucked a long blade of coarse grass, tracing his finger along one edge. If held just right, it would cut. “They say you can never go home again.”
“You believe that?”
Another summer, an older summer, flashed in his mind’s eye, bringing with it uncomfortable images of him trying to immerse himself in a way of life he’d moved beyond. Outgrown, or maybe just outmoded.
“I guess I do,” Jason finally said. “It hurt to find that out, but I couldn’t ignore it.” His mind lit on a sweaty chance encounter last summer, the kind he’d always dreamed of in younger days. What was her name? Lilly, right. Lilly Dannon. Locked together in the back seat of his car. Instead of feeling satiated, he’d been left curiously hollow, even a little sad. It hadn’t meant anything, and he supposed it should’ve.
“Going back again…it’s never like you imagine it,” Jason continued as he and Tomahawk watched clouds drift overhead. “It’s like you find gaps there, at home. They were always there, only before you leave you don’t notice them much, and after you’re gone you forget about them. Then when you come back, it’s like you discover them all over again. And it’s a letdown. That’s why you can’t go home again.”
Tomahawk looked at him sideways. “You must’ve been a ton of fun at holiday dinners.”
Jason sat and drew his knees toward his chest, wrapping his legs with his arms, staring out across the rippling surface of the pond. Holiday dinners—he couldn’t even remember the last one before the world ended, or before his parents’ car crash. Nothing ever told you
Remember this one, because there aren’t going to be any more.
He’d forgotten, trading the memories in on…nothing.
But he didn’t have to dwell on it much longer. Their attention was snared by the sound of engines and tires, far off but drawing nearer. Tomahawk was the first to hear it, and his head perked up like a predator’s, cocked and poised. When Jason asked what was up, Tomahawk replied with a finger to his lips.
Jason glanced toward the direction of the sound, but there was nothing to see. Too many trees between where they were and the rest of the clan on the highway. To the southeast, what seemed to be the approaching route of the new engines, a large rocky hill obscured any possible view of the highway.
The whine of tires grew louder, full-throated and aggressive, drowning out everything else…
Then the staccato chatter of automatic weapons.
“Shit!” Tomahawk cried, scrambling to his feet. He was already halfway into his pants by the time Jason was up.
“What is it?” Jason grabbed for his own clothes.
“Raiders, I think. Remember that day we first met, and I told you you were lucky it was us, not some others who wouldn’t have been as easy as we were?”
Jason turtled his head through a sleeveless shirt, said he did.
The look on Tomahawk’s face said the rest. “Bet you anything they picked us up on the CBs earlier.”
The highway a quarter-mile to the south sounded like a war zone. The steady rip of gunfire laced together a patchwork of roaring engines and screeching tires. Out of the midst of that rolled a concussive explosion, followed by another. A moment later, plumes of oily smoke rose above the trees.
Jason and Tomahawk bolted into the Mustang, hair trailing wetly across their shoulders. Tomahawk grabbed his road atlas and pitched it into the back seat, out of the way, and Jason did the same with a case of cassettes. He ground the starter, and the engine caught with a growl.
Jason paused a split second with his hand on the gearshift. Wow. The response to charge back to the highway had been automatic. No thought, no consideration of alternatives, and if there was fear, then it hid itself well.
“Orenda time?” Jason said.
“Orenda time,” said Tomahawk.
Jason shifted and stomped the accelerator and the car dug twin furrows of ground away from the pond. He gripped the bucking wheel with one hand while he grabbed his shotgun and pumped a shell into the chamber with the other. The car lurched, bottoming out with a grinding scrape as it passed over a dip. Tomahawk’s head smacked the ceiling and he cursed.
There was only one clear path back to the road: the same way they’d come in. They had to swing around the thicket of trees screening them from Route 6 and cut back onto the highway. It would put them about a hundred yards ahead of where the lead vehicle in their convoy, the one with the screwed timing chain, had stopped.
Jason gritted his teeth and jogged the car around a good-sized rock, then cut a sharp left. The Mustang arrowed into a shallow depression and then they were on an incline, shooting a diagonal path uphill until at last they surged up and over the top, airborne for a moment, then slamming down onto Route 6 in a shower of dust.
Jason kicked the brake and hooked the Mustang into a sliding halt, a cockeyed angle back toward the rest of the truckers. A moment’s glance told them that the outcome was anybody’s guess. The one truck was already disabled, and another was burning…it looked to be Gary Jenkins’s blue Mack, Gary being the squat fellow with the mammoth belly. Another truck was rolling alongside them like a moving bonfire, but this one wasn’t theirs. One of the raiders’, then. Another pair of unfamiliar pickups was running parallel to the outside of the larger one, all three headed straight for the Mustang.
“Uhhh,” Jason said, knuckles turning white on the wheel. He looked back at Tomahawk in time to see him haul himself halfway out the window, sitting atop the door and tugging his M16 out after him. It thumped onto the roof and a second later Tomahawk was raking a line of fire across the semi’s windshield. It chewed up a yard of glass along the truck’s burning nose, and finally the fire it seemed to be trying to outrace caught up with it, and the side-slung gas tank went up with an orange-yellow explosion that nearly tore the truck in half. The cab tilted forward from the chassis at a skewed angle with a ferocious grind of metal, and then it slammed onto the highway in fresh blooms of flame.
Like domino action, it took out the nearest pickup that was running alongside like a hound beside a horse. The pair ground themselves across the highway, leaving a trail of wreckage. Fiery fragments of the initial eruption continued to rain down like brimstone.
They must’ve been fifty yards away when they came to a grinding halt, fused together, and Jason could feel the heat lapping at his face in the open window.
Tomahawk gave a whoop of triumph…
…and then out of the flames rolled the other truck, careening madly from side to side, coming through with the luck of angels.
No way back now. It was a two-lane highway flanked by too many trees, a burning blockade taking up the entire width, and that last pickup aimed at them was better equipped to handle off-road driving than the Mustang. Only one way out now…away to the northwest.
“Shit,” Jason said. He grabbed Tomahawk by the leg and yanked him back inside just as someone in the truck opened fire. Ricochets whined off the pavement, then a round thunked into metal somewhere in the back of the car.
Jason slammed the car into reverse and floored it. He adjusted the wheel to straighten them out and watched the smoking cloud of rubber linger where they’d just left. The truck, a dusty red mongrel, was going to follow.
A starburst appeared in the glass between him and Tomahawk. On its way out the back, the bullet blew most of the rear windshield from its frame. A million fragments of safety glass showered onto the speaker deck and trunk.
Jason was beyond thought now, out on the precipice of pure instinct. He backed the car as quickly as he dared, holding it steady and true, then stomped the brake and wrenched the wheel with one hand. With the other he dove for the gearshift. As he brought the car out of its one-eighty skid, leaning hard into the door, Jason geared from reverse into second. The car jumped as if it had a mind of its own, and Jason’s foot punched the accelerator to the floorboard.
“I don’t think you better count on outrunning them,” Tomahawk said gravely, peering out the hole in the back.
“Then you better do some good with
that.
” Jason tipped his chin at the rifle in Tomahawk’s hands.
As the speedometer edged upward, Tomahawk slid down into his seat and aimed the M16 through the length of the car. He squeezed off one shot, two, three. If he was doing any good back there, the truck didn’t show it. It would be pure luck if he were even hitting it. Both the truck and the Mustang were zigzagging a haphazard course along the highway, turning themselves into tougher targets.
“How much gas?” Tomahawk asked.
“A little over a quarter-tank,” Jason said. “It’ll keep us going a while.”
The red truck gained a little ground as trees and fields flicked by. The world was a blur of gray and green and brown.
“What do they want?” Jason said.
“Anything they can take. Doesn’t matter if they need it or not. That’s just the way some of these rovers are.”
“I know the type.”
The truck hung back at the same distance for a mile, another mile, a couple more, and Jason was beginning to think it was a race that would end only when one or the other sputtered and died of an empty gas tank. But as a shallow pass loomed up ahead, with low rocky bluffs flanking either side of Route 6, he knew differently.
The red truck lunged and began to narrow the gap. Bullets whined off the pavement around them. His foot reflexively ground down on the accelerator, but that was it, they were topping ninety, the best he was going to get out of the Mustang. Jason glanced into the mirror and saw the pickup’s nose growing.
“This is it!” Jason screamed, and Tomahawk was fumbling to reload another magazine into the M16.
He swerved left when he saw a gun barrel leave the cab, a screech of rubber sounding in protest. The pickup’s nose sheared lightly across the Mustang’s back bumper like a wolf nipping at the leg of a deer. Jason watched as the truck recovered and came back across the highway after him, bearing down…
He tensed, waiting…
He strained and yanked the wheel right, standing on the brakes a second later. The Mustang fishtailed with a scream of rubber, and as the truck shot past on the left side, Jason thrust his sawed-off out the window and fired a wild blast at the fleeting target. The kick of the gun fired one-handed wrenched sudden pain through his wrist.
Three men sat abreast in the truck, he saw, oddly remembering the glint of a gold tooth. Just some good old boys out for fun and games. And he saw a sudden splash of red inside the truck a microsecond after pulling his trigger, as if someone had burst a ripe melon against the inside of the windshield.
The truck cut a sudden right that crossed their path, and the two vehicles clashed in fury, Jason wrestling to regain control of the wheel as the rocky bluffs drew nearer. Tomahawk leaned out his window with his rifle and aimed into the truck’s engine compartment. He unleashed a blast that destroyed the radiator, the grill spewing green antifreeze and a noxious cloud of steam. A burst of return fire came from the cab, and Jason heard bullets hammering into the side of his car, coming back from the fender, closer, into the door…
“FUCK!” he shouted.
At first he didn’t realize he’d been hit, only peripherally aware of the door’s upholstery mushrooming out and a tug at his leg. Then the pain set in, a white-hot lance skewering his thigh. He felt blood trickling back toward his rump.