Thunder Road

“What was that half-wit talking about?”

Mildred was enraged. “Why the hell did he take Krysty away?”

Doc smiled sadly. “Because, my dear doctor, I fear that like so many of us, he may not be exactly of sound mind.”

“A crazy. Great,” Jak snorted.

Doc’s smile broadened. “I think you may have missed my point, dear boy. If he has this one aim in mind—that Krysty become converted to his cause in order to convert us—then he will do all within his power to keep her alive and well. It’s in his best interest. And, of course, he is unwittingly buying us time to find and destroy him.”

“He’s going to be looking for us sooner or later, right?” J.B. pointed out.

“Exactly,” Doc agreed. “The irony is that he has mistaken our pragmatism for a sense of spurious justice, and faith in a law that no longer exists. A misunderstanding that will lead him straight back to us. In a sense, we have no need to chase him. He will come to us.”

Ryan’s face split into a grin for the first time since they’d lost Krysty. “Guess you’re right, Doc. But let’s go after the coldheart anyway.”

He that has and a little tiny wit,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

Though the rain it raineth every day.

—William Shakespeare

King Lear, III, ii, 76

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Prologue

Thunder Rider rides again!

With a full-throttled roar from the throat of his magnificent iron steed, the masked avenger, the seeker of justice, the righter of wrongs, roared into the small town. Villainy trembled beneath his iron heel, and those with much to fear fled in abject terror at his approach.

There was much wrong with this town. For too long the forces of lawlessness had held sway over the land, allowing evil to flourish. He could see it in the faces of those he passed as they leveled their weapons, turning with the following wind of his trusty machine, their aim arcing to follow and intercept its trajectory. He narrowed his eyes against the slipstream of the wind, even though the thick Plexiglas goggles protected them. It was more an indication of his steely and grim determination as his face set into a mask of fury.

He threw the motorcycle into a skid, one hand diving to the battered leather holster—inherited from those who had rode this path before—and freeing the .44 Magnum gun he used for maximum effect. It wasn’t just the damage inflicted by the bullets, it was the mighty roar of the weapon that struck fear into the hearts of those who dared oppose him. With his free hand he gripped the specially modified steering, power-assisted to be as light as the softest down to his touch. The bike responded to the feather’s breath of movement, the tonnage of screaming hot metal beneath him scoring an arc of dirt that flew up into a blinding shower, acting as a screen to the full angle of his turn.

As the way in front of him cleared, he saw the first of the coldhearted villains standing before him, defiant, aiming a long-barreled rifle in his direction. Without pause, without even the need to register and react, he squeezed the trigger of the .44, the gun bucking and rearing in his hand, the shock of recoil absorbed by the whipcord tendons of his wrist.

The villain’s sneer of menace turned into a gasp of disbelief as the slug from the mighty Magnum weapon ripped into him, tearing a gaping maw in what had once been his chest. Thunder Rider’s lips parted in a tight smile of satisfaction. One down, but many more to go. As the rest of the villains scattered, he snapped off a few quick shots. If one hit, then all well and good. Their real purpose was to act as a deterrent, to drive the opposition back and give him enough time to circle with greater care, reholster the gun and withdraw the MP-15 assault rifle from the casing that kept it firmly strapped to the chassis of the bike.

It was time to take out some trash….

Easing on the throttle, he headed for the center of the town. From his recon, he knew that this was where the young women were being held hostage. It was his task to free them from their bondage. They were being kept captive in a large building guarded by seven heavily armed men.

Although Thunder Rider had announced his arrival in no uncertain terms, he knew that the villains of this town had nothing as fast as his iron steed, nothing in their transport to match his speed and power. This, and the training he had put in to hone himself to the peak of fitness and to the mastery of his machine—until the point where he and the bike were almost as one—were more than enough to level the odds, no matter how outnumbered he may be.

The building where the women were being held was in his sights. Seven men approached him. They made it too easy. Clustered together, they presented an easy target. Without slowing, and without veering one degree from the course he had set himself, he raised the MP-15 and loosed the last of the grenades at the group of villains. Two of the men vanished as though they had never existed. One second they were there; the next they were a fine spray of blood, bone and flesh. The other five were wounded in differing degrees. Each fatally, the only difference being the amount of time it took them to die.

He slewed the bike to a stop and dismounted in one fluid movement. Erect, and with a swagger in his stride that bespoke a man not to be messed with, he racked the MP-15 and entered the building. A few craven souls cowered in front of him. He pulled the .44 from its holster and fired a few shots into the floor. They scattered.

“Ladies,” he said, his stentorian tones resounding around the echoing and empty inside of the building, “you can come out now, you are free.”

They emerged slowly, like small mammals blinking in the sunlight, staring at him with uncomprehending eyes.

“Your captivity is at an end. You may go where you wish, do as you wish. None shall hold you prisoner from this day forth, lest they fall beneath the wrath of Thunder Rider.”

Crisply, he turned on his heel, after the briefest of bows, and strode out of the building into the wan sunlight. He mounted his iron steed, looking around at the peace that now reigned, and nodded to himself. It was good.

He kicked the massive engine into life and rode off into the distance, another wrong righted. Another step toward justice.

IT WAS A DAY like any other day. But not for long.

The ville of Casa Belle Taco was clustered around the remnants of a mall left from the days of predark. It was named after the gaudy house, which had been housed in the remnants of an old fast-food restaurant, and had grown over the years to cement its reputation as the finest gaudy in New Mex. Trade convoys and parties of marauding coldhearts would make special journeys to drink the psychotropic brew that was the house speciality, and to watch the sluts perform in shows with each other and selected members of the audience before offering services to the highest bidders. Not many men would bid for a gaudy slut, but these were no ordinary girls. It was said that they could do things that most men could only dream were possible.

Casa Belle Taco was a small ville. Rich in jack because of the gaudy house, those who lived there worked in some connection with the focal point of the ville. They either catered the gaudy, worked as staff or were sec. Even those who ran the local stores and ran sec on the perimeter were under the command of Mad Jack Flack, the baron of the ville—although baron was, in truth, a big title for a pesthole like Casa. Predark, he would have been the biggest pimp in the area, but no more.

The first indication of trouble had been the approach of the vehicle. Traffic in and out of the ville was no strange thing, but never before had the patrolling sec crews seen a single vehicle. Never before had they seen one that had eaten up the dirt and dust at such a pace.

“Sec force” was too dignified a name, in truth, for the two men in a wag, blasters idly at their sides, who watched the approach almost with disinterest.

Any danger from such a rapid approach was lost on them: the ville’s reputation was such that no one wanted to upset the baron and get banned from the Casa.

The stranger burned rubber as he entered the ville. Astonished men with blasters at their sides were reduced to chilled corpses as the stranger pulled his blaster and fired indiscriminately. He was an expert rider on his machine, and it was almost impossible for the befuddled, bemused and still stoned men of the ville to get a bead on him. For the most part they ran for cover. Discretion was not so much the better part of valor as the chance to stay alive. All the same, many of them were chilled by stray slugs as he switched to a high-powered blaster. Then the first of the grens hit home, reducing much of the ville off the main drag to smoldering rubble, which meant most of the ville, as Casa Belle Taco was nothing more than a few buildings leading off the road to the gaudy house.

The sec force that manned the gaudy was a little more together than those who patrolled the outreaches. Even so, roused as some of them were in a stuporous sleep, they were still a ragged force as they rushed out to meet the oncoming danger.

Tactics and strategy weren’t even words to them. They all arrived at the front of the building, following the sound of the vehicle, not even thinking of what an easy target they presented.

If they hadn’t thought of this beforehand, they had less than no time to think of it when the stranger took advantage of their clustering to take them out with ease.

Baffled and scared, those still alive watched from hiding as the stranger dismounted and strode into the gaudy house. Inside, the gaudy sluts hid, also. Who knew what the triple-mad freak wanted from them.

The last thing they expected was his little speech, and for him to bow to them and leave them confused and staring with bemusement at the chaos around them.

Who the hell was this triple-stupe bastard? And what was the idea behind blasting their livelihood to shit and then telling them they were free? What use was that with no jack? Shit, they’d been happy with their lives until this asshole rode into town and screwed everything up. Now they had a gaudy house in a mess, and no sec to keep the customers in order.

Might as well have slit their throats and have done with it.

As one of them walked to the door and watched the cloud of dust recede into the distance, she wasn’t to know that they were just the first call of the day for the man who called himself Thunder Rider.

Chapter One

“Hot. Boring. Need action.” Jak was sullen, hunched over at the front of the seat, holding the reins loosely in his grip while the emaciated horses tethered to the wag plodded on across the scrub and desert.

“My dear boy, I should have thought that we’d all had more than enough action to last us a lifetime,” Doc replied laconically from the rear of the wag. He was lying propped against a rough hessian sack, once full and now alarmingly depleted. His shoulders slumped uncomfortably against the cans, self-heats and withered fresh produce that still lay within. His lips barely moved as he added, “Speaking for myself, I would welcome this respite from a life of constant peril. The merits of an adrenaline rush are, in my humble view, much overrated. Oh, for the balmy days when I could relax beneath the New England skies with a slim volume of poetry—”

“Not talk,” Jak interrupted pithily. “Prefer you when crazy to this.”

Doc gave a throaty chuckle. “Sometimes, lad, I think that I would agree with you.”

Ryan was keeping watch out the back of the wag. It was hard enough to concentrate in the heat, without the added irritation of Jak and Doc. The flying bastard parasites who kept buzzing around him, diving to bite and take some more of his blood no matter how much he swatted at them, were irritation enough. The wasteland vistas out the back of the covered wag were endless: partly an illusion fostered by the heat haze and the stretches of scrub and desert dotted only with a few mutated cacti. They had been driving for days. It was as necessary to ration water to the horses as it was to ration the water for themselves. There was no other way they could make the distance. Paradoxically, in doing this, they had made their progress interminably slow. It was the lesser of the two, but still made days beneath the canvas cover of the bone-jarring wag hot, boring and seeming to stretch across time like the ooze from a stickie’s pads.

There was a word for what the one-eyed man was feeling. Ennui. Ryan Cawdor wouldn’t have recognized the word, but Krysty Wroth would have. She lay propped against him, idly stroking his leg, lost in her own thoughts. Sure, she could snap out of them in an instant, but right now there was no necessity, and so she let her mind wander back to the days of her upbringing in the ville of Harmony, where her education would have included some old texts that had used that very word. It was an idyllic time, rainbow-colored by learning, by youth and by the fact that it was a very long way away. There had been bad things, but her memory filtered them out to make room for only the good. And she was aware of this, using it as a place to escape when she had the chance. It helped her to relax. As she could feel the tension in Ryan’s muscles and tendons beneath the rough material of his combat pants, she figured he could do with something to help him relax.

They had been heading in a southwesterly direction for—Ryan stopped to think—this was the fourth day. Fireblast, it seemed a lot longer. Four short days ago they had been riding sec for a ville baron who had hired them to help his men shift a herd of cattle across the plains. Doc had marveled at the job—“a return to the agrarian mores of yesteryear, my dear Ryan,” whatever the hell that meant—and had seen it as a sign that the world was beginning to settle again.

Ryan hadn’t seen it that way. To him, it had been a triple-stupe move. The cattle were the only asset the ville had; the baron was taking a hell of a chance using outsiders to augment his inept sec men; and there were coldhearts in every pass who could take the cattle and use them for ransom, for slaughter and for trade. But they were offered jack and, more importantly, this wag and some supplies. Coming as they were off yet another arduous trek, the latter was more than enough of an enticement.

The journey had been even shorter, swifter and bloodier than even he had expected. Two days out on their journey to the ville that had exchanged the cattle for goods, the route took them through a rocky mountain pass. To skirt around the pass in safety would have added a couple of days to the journey. Ryan had tried to argue for it, but had been shouted down by the baron’s sec chief, already sore over the fact that outsiders had been brought in.

Six of Ryan’s people against twice that number of ville sec: in truth, the friends could have taken all of them out without even breaking a sweat, but that would have left them with the cattle and not enough personnel to go around. It wasn’t worth it. The lesser of the options was to go with the majority, and just make sure that, if nothing else, their own backs were covered.

It was a wise move. Just as Ryan had feared, there was an ambush in that most obvious of places, and they rode straight into it. The fool sec chief was taken completely by surprise. Ryan and his people were ready.

The result was a bloody firefight in which the ville sec men were quickly disposed of, the friends pinned down in the pass and the cattle stampeded to a certain death—either under the hail of fire that crossed the narrow chasm, or by drought and starvation in the arid plains beyond. There were no winners here, only those who could survive.

It had been a bitter battle, in the end won only by the triple-stupe action of the ambush party, who had been torn between chasing the cattle and finishing off the people in cover. They chose the former, figuring that there were only a few left alive and they would be no threat.

There are bad calls, and there are those that go way beyond bad. This was one of them. Usually, it would have been a toss-up whether to waste the ammo by chasing the retreating coldhearts. This time, it was personal. Not a single one of the ambush party had survived.

Which left Ryan with this to consider: the sec men were chilled, the cattle were chilled, the ambushers were chilled. Apart from a charnel house full of corpses, both animal and man, there was nothing to back up their version of events. Should they go back? Should they go on to their destination and try to explain what had happened? Or should they just collect the wag of supplies that had accompanied them on the cattle drive and head off without looking back?

It was a no-brainer of a decision. Why risk being the messenger who got the shitty end of the stick? The whole operation had been a mess from start to end. Cut the losses and go.

The horses had been remarkably calm while chaos erupted around them. After their driver had been chilled, they had simply wandered into a shelter from the rain of fire. There they stood, ignoring the firestorm. Too stupe to notice, or just plain deaf? It was hard to tell, and in truth it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the wag was waiting for them when they got back to the pass.

Some of the water cans had been pierced by stray shots. Some of the cans and self-heats had been similarly hit. But, for the most part, the supplies were intact. Of course, there was nowhere near as much as they had been promised, but that was almost to be expected. All it did was reinforce their decision not to go back to the ville and the stupe double-crossing baron. Screw him.

So they had set off, not having any clear idea of where to go other than to avoid the ville from which they had come, and the one to which they had been headed. J.B. had used the minisextant that he found invaluable to determine their position, and the most expedient course had been to head toward the Grand Canyon and the nearest redoubt. It was territory that they knew, and although it harbored bad memories—which could have been said for most of the Deathlands—it was not a place where a welcome involving heavy firepower would await them if they returned.

Four days. The sky was clear of the taint of chem clouds, which meant that they could avoid the awful acid rains. But it meant that there was no cover for the oppressive heat of the sun. The canvas covering the wag was thick, but even that smelt at times as though it were beginning to smolder under the constant rays.

The seemingly endless boredom didn’t help. A keening sound, underpinned by a dull roar that was all but masked in the air, broke the dead silence. It was a wag, or something like a wag…but unlike any Jak could ever recall hearing. Small, but powerful—he could tell by the note of the engine against the noise from the ground.

“Something out there.” He spit over his shoulder. “Weird shit.”

“What kind of weird shit?” Ryan said, his full attention now on his scanning of the landscape out the back of the covered wag. The hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle and rise.

Ryan’s attitude communicated itself to the others without his having to say anything. They had been a unit for too long not to be able to read each other. Krysty, J.B. and Mildred shifted their positions and began to check their blasters, knowing they were primed and ready, but knowing the value of always making sure. Even Doc moved from his uncomfortable perch, the ancient but deadly LeMat coming easily to his hand.

“Still way off,” Jak commented more than once.

Then, just as it seemed that the tension was to leave them, the sound became audible to their unattuned ears. It was like the angry hum of an insect, but growing louder with every second.

“There,” Jak said simply, raising a hand to indicate direction. A cloud of dust and dirt rose toward the sky, a solitary blemish on the clear blue. It grew like a smokestack, spreading out to form a trail.

It was apparent that the vehicle was moving at a right angle to them. It was approaching, but not directly, which suggested that whoever was heading this way was not necessarily hostile.

The covered wag was an easy target, moving or still. That wasn’t a consideration. What did concern Ryan—concerned all of them—was their own effectiveness in a moving as opposed to still vehicle. Particularly one that was little more than wood or canvas. As it moved, the wag gave them little in the way of options for firing. There was the uncovered front and rear, and little else. To fire from the front meant that whoever took the reins of the horses would be as impeded as the firer beside them. From the rear, there was a limited angle of vision. The only option would have been to strip off the canvas cover, which would merely leave the wag open and even more vulnerable than it was at best.

In truth, their best option was to stop the wag, unhitch the horses so that they could get clear—they had already demonstrated a propensity for avoiding crossfire—and use the wag for as best a cover as possible. They’d have to fire from under and around the structure to utilize the cover and also maximize the angle of fire.

In less time than it would have taken Ryan to explain the plan, the companions had complied. Each of them knew what was the best option, and they worked without words, knowing time was of the essence.