Thunder Road (11 page)

As the burst of fire echoed and evaporated over the wasteland, there was a moment where no one dared to move. Then it became apparent that the threat posed by the two men had been eradicated, and Ryan and J.B. rose to their feet.

The one-eyed man jumped down from the wag and joined the Armorer as he collected their blasters from beneath the body of the son. As the others dismounted and joined them, they strolled over to the armored wag. The tension in the air had dissipated with the blasterfire, and they now felt at ease. If anything, they felt better than they had for the past thirty-six hours. Now, perhaps, they may have found themselves a faster form of transport.

First, though, they had to check over the wag, which meant moving the old man’s corpse. It was difficult, as his deadweight had slumped in such a way as to jam him in the hatch. Doc and J.B. shifted him after a lot of sweat and more cursing. The Armorer then descended into the body of the wag, still cautious lest anyone be lurking.

In truth, all that was lurking was the stench of filthy bodies, excreta and the remains of rotting food. It was all he could do not to retch. How the previous owners had managed to bear it was beyond him, and he was a man who considered he had a strong stomach.

Swallowing hard and biting down on the bile that rose from his gut, he adjusted his eyes to the interior gloom. There had been a light in the cab of the wag at one time, but the bulb had long since blown, and these stupes either didn’t have a replacement, or had been unable to work out how to fit it. No matter. As his eyes grew used to the feeble light, he was able to make out the control panel of the wag without too much effort. So, if necessary, they could drive without any extra illumination. However, there was no point straining his vision unnecessarily. He took out his flashlight and switched it on, directing the beam in a slow sweep over the interior.

It was much as his nose had told him. The floor of the wag was sticky with something that could have been shit, could have been blood, and was probably a mixture of both, along with other bodily fluids. Not necessarily those belonging to the chilled coldhearts, either. The sweet and heavy stench of decaying meat that had hit him was explained by the pile thrown into one corner. Some of it was animal, the fur, heads and paws still attached in places, empty eye sockets filled with dark masses of flies that buzzed greedily and possessively around their prize, their low hum becoming clear to him only when he could see them. The heated interior of the wag was buzzing with metal expansion and contraction, and he had unconsciously attributed all noise to that.

Some of the meat was patently not animal in origin. Pale skin showed on some roughly hacked pieces, skin that had not been shorn of fur. Bone showing through with jaggedly cut edges had shape that came not from a quadruped. J.B. didn’t want to touch the rotten, diseased pile, but he had to know. Gingerly, with a tentative prod of his boot, he shifted the bulk of the pile. It moved with a slithering, sucking sound that made him gag, and the flies hummed and buzzed angrily when disturbed at their task. In the slithering morass, a hand fell out, the fingers limp, blackening at the ends, the skin grayer than other human-seeming chunks. The hand was small, though: it was difficult to see if it had been that of a child or a woman at that advanced stage of decay.

The Armorer turned away. He had seen things that were in some ways worse than this—people burning alive, tortured and slowly chilled, disemboweled while still conscious. Yet somehow this was worse. It wasn’t just that someone who had once had a life, however hard it had been, had been chilled and then chopped up for meat. It was that the sicko crazies who had done this had then carried it with them: living, sleeping, shitting and breathing next to it as it started to rot away; and then casually eating it as though it were nothing more than the jackrabbits and rats that it lay with.

It was the simple matter of the hand lying limp next to the empty-eyed stare of a rotting jackrabbit as just another game tidbit that made him lose the contents of his stomach, the acid bile splashing on the floor of the wag, hot stink rising as it mixed with the fetid layer of mulch on the floor.

Taking a deep breath—and regretting it as the stench made him gag again—J.B. hawked up the last of the bile and phlegm and spit it out, sparing a mouthful from the canteen of water he carried with him to rinse the taste away before spitting that out, also.

Dark night! he thought. The wag had better be worth cleaning out after this…

He turned the flashlight and his attention toward the control panel of the wag, dismissing the images still seared on his retina, and instead focusing on the matter in hand.

The wag was a military vehicle, as he had known. The control panel was mostly useless, the equipment to which it had been connected taken out to give an optimum of interior space. The steering system left in place was sturdy and in good repair, considering who had been in charge of the wag of late.

It would take some cleaning to get the interior into a condition where they could all comfortably sit inside, but there was space. And when he checked, there was a good fuel supply and an air con system that coughed into life when he switched it on. It would use fuel, and would be wasteful over a long distance, but would be useful in the short term to drive out any remaining stink.

Like all such wags, there were sluices for cleaning, and these looked as though they would be relatively easy to clear of any blockages. And there was plenty of water. These coldhearts hadn’t been so crazy that they hadn’t provided for themselves after their own fashion. They might have wanted to scavenge from the friends, but their need had—and no surprise here—been nowhere as desperate as they made out.

Water was one thing of which the friends were short, but the notion of using it for anything other than cleaning out the wag stayed with him for only a second. Just a moment’s thought of what the crazies they had just chilled may have done in the water supply, and where they may have got it from, dissuaded him of this notion.

Finally, J.B. was ready to climb out of the cab and tell the others of what he had found. As he emerged from the snub turret of the wag, it was obvious to all of them that what he had seen down there had been appalling. His face, in the bright light of the sun, was pale and drawn, and his eyes had the puffy, strained appearance of one who has recently vomited heavily.

Before he even began to outline what was within the wag, they could guess. He finished his report and added his own views on cleaning and using the wag.

“We’d take a few hours to clean it out so that it’s usable, and mebbe we think that’ll be wasted time. But once we start, the speed we’ll gain will more than compensate,” he finished.

Ryan gave a wry grin. “Just got to keep patient while it’s being done,” he said with a dry humor, knowing that he would be the one most likely to need keeping in check.

“It sounds less than ideal in there, and we will have to take our time, I know, but the benefits accruing will be more than worthy of the delay,” Doc mused.

“Shit, understand half that. Getting better, Doc,” Jak murmured. It was the closest to humor that the dour albino would ever get, and was a reflection of the manner in which their mood was beginning to lift.

Not wanting to waste any more time than was necessary, they began the task of clearing and cleaning the wag. With the flies already beginning to gather on the corpses of the coldhearts, it was time to get busy. Doc volunteered to clear the rotting meat from the interior. With a grimness that he tried to hide behind a jaunty mask, he reasoned that he had seen things far worse in his time—had been treated almost as badly as he imagined the people whose remains now littered the wag’s interior had suffered. He was still alive. There were times when he regretted it. But it meant that although a feeling of being scared could overtake him in panic, he no longer feared anything. It was distasteful, but that was all.

As Doc began his task, Ryan and J.B. took the corpses of the coldhearts and dragged them across the sand, leaving two blood-soaked trails, until they were bundled together. They would form the basis of a fire. There was little chance of anyone noticing out here in the wastes, but such a store of raw decaying meat would surely attract predators and call attention to their trail. The last thing they wanted was another encounter with anyone other than their target.

When the interior had been cleared, Doc—at J.B.’s behest—took a can of fuel from the store of the wag and poured a little of it over the rotting pile, touching a flame to it and watching it catch in black, gasoline-assisted smoke. The smell was appalling to begin with, but the gas and the acrid odor of burning fur began to swiftly eclipse the fatty, sweet tang of flesh.

This dealt with, Jak and Mildred clambered into the wag’s cab and used the water inside to wash as much of the filth from the floor and other surfaces as was possible. Again, a little of the gas helped to shift some of the encrusted dirt. The smell of the gas also, despite its own sharp tang, aided in covering the charnel house smell of decay in the enclosed space.

While the interior of the wag was cleaned, Ryan and J.B. unloaded the friends’ supplies from the covered wag and carried them to the armored wag, ready to be loaded when the cleaning had been completed.

The horses, unhitched, wandered only a few yards away, and watched the proceedings with bland disinterest. As with everything they had seen since they had first been hitched to the wag, they seemed unconcerned almost to the point of catatonia. It had been a positive when they had been hitched to the wag, but it didn’t bode well for their survival. Would they wander off in search of food and water, or would they just stand there until they died slowly of torpor as much as starvation and dehydration?

Jak walked over and led them toward the blazing fire. They followed him without complaint, and he maneuvered them so that they both stood at a right angle to the fire, staring at him with large, brown, uncomprehending eyes.

The albino drew his Python and without hesitation fired a shot into the forehead of each horse, so quick that the second animal had no time to even register what had happened to its mate before its own brain had been pulped. The two corpses fell into the fire, sending up showers of sparks and momentarily damping it before the flames started to lick around and take hold of their fur.

Ryan raised an eyebrow at Jak.

The albino shrugged. “Never find way back. Better quick.”

It was an inarguable point, yet unusual for the albino to waste ammo on such a humane act.

Ryan walked over to the wag. Water was leaking from the sluices, heavily discolored and smelling as bad as it looked as it soaked into the sandy soil, leaving behind pools of fetid sludge. He climbed up and stuck his head into the turret. The smell was still pretty foul, but nowhere near as bad as that which had greeted J.B., or indeed Doc when he had climbed in to begin the cleaning process.

“How long do you think?” Ryan asked shortly.

“Not long,” Mildred replied, her voice tight as she tried to avoid breathing in too deeply. “I hope John’s right about the air-conditioning,” she added with an even tighter smile.

By this time, everything was ready to load. Ryan joined Jak and J.B. while they waited for Mildred and Doc to finish. They tried to judge by the amount of water coming from the sluices, but the openings were so small that it was hard to tell if the flow was abating. Eventually, Doc’s head appeared and with a brief nod he signaled that all was ready. It was only when they were loading the last of the supplies that J.B. noticed the water flow finally slow to a trickle.

It had ceased entirely by the time that they had all descended into the wag and the turret was closed. Even with the apertures for ordnance, there was little air within. The smell of gasoline, underpinned by the still-lingering scent of decay, would soon be overlaid by the smell of their own bodies as they clustered within the tight space.

“Let’s hope we don’t have to spend too long in here,” J.B. murmured almost to himself as he hit the ignition.

The engine of the wag coughed into life, spluttering as it turned over. He knew from past experience that this kind of armored wag was a fine piece of machinery, and the sound of the mechanics bespoke of neglect. If he’d had more time, he would have felt comfort in stripping the bastard down and making sure it was tuned. Lurking at the back of his mind was the possibility that it could get halfway to wherever they were going and then just buy the farm on them, which would be just great.

He tried to dismiss this worry from his mind, hitting the air-conditioning switch. A deathly rattle started up, and they could all feel the cold air begin to circulate within the heated confines of the wag. The rising heat of their bodies, crammed together, had started to make the smell of rotten flesh creep up from beneath the top note of gasoline. J.B. had hit the switch not a moment too soon. There was almost a collective sigh of relief as air sucked from outside and fed through the cooling plant began to drive out the fetid air that was gathering within.

“By the Three Kennedys, I am grateful for such small mercies,” Doc murmured.

Ryan said nothing, but kept his eye fixed on the trail ahead as he sat by the Armorer’s side. The desert atmosphere out here was so airless, and the chem storms that raged in waves had been quiet, so the trail left by the mystery rider’s bike was still visible to the naked eye, even at some distance. The delay in setting forth had been added to both by the relative tardiness of the horse-drawn wag, and then by the delay both in being held up by the coldhearts and the time it had taken to clean out the armored wag so that it was habitable.