Hell Road Warriors
“What do you think goes through a man’s mind? I mean, you know, like, when the worms get to his brain and stuff?”
Some of the sec men muttered in amusement. Shorty’s ponderings didn’t exactly soar up into rarified intellectual heights. Mace moved with the sudden, stunning speed most of his opponents never expected. He whipped his club up and around like a tennis serve and sank it through Lars’s skull. The scout dropped to his knees and fell face-first into the dirt. The sec men gaped. The baron shrugged carelessly as he pulled his bludgeon free of Lars’s brainpan. “Probably not much more than that.”
The men roared.
The baron reached down and snapped a leather thong from around his former scout’s neck. An old, predark, Canadian dollar coin—known as a loonie for the waterfowl on one side—hung from it. Mace closed his fist around the coin. Shorty was right. It was too bad, but Lars wasn’t from around here, and it looked like he hadn’t heeded the warnings. And even if you took every precaution, sometimes the worms found a way. Mace jerked his head at the corpse. Filth was already squirming into activity in the shattered skull. “Butch, Ledge.”
Butch and Ledge were twins. The two lanky, ponytailed young men came forward unlimbering their clubs. Theirs weren’t as fancy as Mace’s. They were just well-turned, tapered lengths of hickory each with a gaff hook imbedded in it. Butch and Ledge were local boys. They knew what to do from long experience and weren’t squeamish about it. They quickly broke Lars’s knees and elbows. Lars started twitching as worms writhed beneath his dead flesh. Arms and legs were levers, and denied the fulcrum of the knees and elbows, the best the worms’ contractions could manage was some awkward heaving and flopping. The two men expertly shattered Lars’s jaw to keep him honest and his collarbones to keep him armless. They gaffed him through the armpits, and the other sec men shoved out of the way warily as the twin exterminators dragged Lars’s twitching corpse over to the campfire and heaved him into the flames.
Mace went for a walk while his men oohed and aahed in fascination as Lars’s carcass slowly twisted and burned and worms snaked out of his body in a panic only to wriggle, blister and burst in the flames. Mace jerked his head at a man in passing. “Tag.”
Skin Tag rose and followed his baron. The mutie’s name said it all. Skin tags a half-inch long covered every inch of his exposed body. They covered his head like hair. The only place he didn’t visibly have them were on his eyelids and the palms of his hands. Mace had never cared to look, but it was rumored they covered the rest of Tag’s body, including his dangle. Rumor was some women liked it, but even Shorty wasn’t dumb enough to ponder it in Tag’s face. Mutie or not, Tag was just about the most dangerous man Mace had ever encountered, and one of the smartest. But beyond his skill with blaster and blade or his ruthless cunning, it was something radiation and mutation had set inside his skull that made him a gold mine.
Tag could sense other muties, even ones that outwardly appeared perfectly normal.
When Mace had first met him, Tag was making a living out of it. He would appear at the gates of villes that were known to kill or drive out muties. What had been central Canada had taken the least of skydark’s damage. Human muties were a lot rarer there and often more feared and reviled than in the Deathlands or what was left of Canada’s coasts. Tag would appear at the villes on the plains and throw back his robe. Seconds before they shot him he would shout out that unclean as he was, he could detect the unclean among them. Mace had been a sec man in such a ville in Saskatchewan when Tag made an appearance. Mace’s first instinct was to crush Tag’s fleshy-headed mutant skull for the charlatan he was, but the baron was obsessed about keeping the gene pool clean and demanded a demonstration. Tag had walked straight toward a sec man named Voor. Mace had known Voor for years, but Tag pointed a melodramatic finger at Voor in judgment.
“Mutie.”
At the baron’s order Mace and the other sec men had grabbed Voor, howling and struggling, and had stripped him. The crowd had gasped at the pale baby fingers protruding from Voor’s underarms. Mace didn’t give a dark night one way or the other about muties, but he’d crushed Voor’s skull instantly and without being asked, much to his baron’s rabid approval. Tag found two more victims. Afterward he had been given food, jack, ammo for his blaster, and at his strange request, allowed to take any books of his choice from the ville if the ville had any of the rare items. The baron generously allowed Tag to sleep in the ville that night. In a bed.
That night the baron had decided to keep Tag around for the sake of the ville’s genetic hygiene and ordered Mace to kneecap Tag and chain him. Mace had bigger plans. He found Tag in his room, and instead helped Tag to escape and proposed a partnership. It was simple. They went from ville to ville. Tag would go first and perform his act and receive his reward. However, if he found several mutants, he would allow one or two to escape undetected. The next day Mace would come to the ville posing as a trader. That night he would inform the undisclosed muties of their impending discovery and relieve them of everything of value that Mace could put in his pack.
It was a profitable racket and went on for several seasons. Finally they had come all the way east to Ontario. There they found a ville on the brink. Tag pulled his act but Mace stayed on. The ville was prosperous, but the baron was old, he had no sons and his sec men were already forming factions for the succession. Mace had joined up, ingratiated himself and become the baron’s right-hand man. Mace recruited a small, very hard-core corps out of the various factions, starting with Shorty. Meanwhile, Tag lurked. It was something he was very good at.
One night Mace and his picked cadre silently slaughtered the baron and his family, but let his two daughters live. The ville had awakened to find Mace Henning enthroned, entrenched in the hall. Though well bruised and abused, the old baron’s daughters acknowledged Mace as heir. It had almost turned into ville civil war until Mace pulled his ace card. Tag appeared out of nowhere. He pointed at Mace’s main rival and said the dreaded word.
“Mutie.”
It didn’t matter that the man showed no sign. The people of the ville had seen Tag ferret mutants out earlier in the spring. The accused’s own men turned on him. Strangely enough, over the course of the next few days, most dissenters or loyalists to the old regime found themselves declared mutie and found themselves summarily shot. Strangely enough, after the coup, Baron Mace Henning discovered a tolerance for human muties as long as they were useful and fell short of outright abominations, and they began flocking to him and his ville in a slow, steady and extremely loyal trickle.
Tag had been Mace’s right-hand man ever since, and the only man he let call him Mace, though even then only in private.
Mace and Tag hadn’t stopped at usurping a backwater ville. They had turned their former blackmail victims across Canada into a web of informants. Knowledge was power, and Mace had waxed strong. Half a dozen villes paid him yearly tribute, and word of what was going on in other villes he had yet to conquer or intimidate was nonetheless whispered in Mace’s ear.
Mace had had his eye on Val-d’Or for some time.
The previous year Tag had pulled his act in Val-d’Or, and what he had discovered had been a game-changer in Mace’s dreams of conquest, and his plans for the ville.
Tag followed the baron on a slow walk around the raiding camp. “Mace?”
“What do you think, Tag?”
“About the battle?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t like it.”
Mace snorted and spit. Yesterday had hurt. “Pulling out that third armored wag, like an ace in hole. I didn’t expect that out of Toulalan. Oh, he’s smart, mind you. Too smart for his own good, a damned intellectual, but he ain’t battle clever. Not like us. He’s shown us that more than once. Him switching tactics like that stinks of something. Maybe he’s finally started listening to Six.” Mace’s ugly face flushed angrily. Six had been a thorn in his side for years. “And why none of the boys can seem to put a bullet in that son of a bitch is beyond me.”
Tag pushed back the hood of his robe. He preferred clothes of flowing homespun. Pants and tight clothes chaffed and tore at his affliction. Around his neck he wore a gleaming silver coin. “It’s not a new tactic, and it’s not Six. Six never wanted to leave Val-d’Or. He thinks the mission is foolish. That’s part of his problem. It undermines his strategy.”
“Oh?” Mace’s face flushed redder. “We’ve been picking away at the bastards for weeks. I mean nuke it! We could have taken them the last time out if we’d pushed it. Yesterday we had them dead to rights. I was about to pull the men back and let the bastards lick their wounds for another week when that third war wag came out of nowhere and rained on us like a chem storm!”
“They weren’t part of the convoy,” Tag asserted.
Mace stopped walking. “Oh?”
“You saw. Toulalan’s people can barely drive those iron wags, much less fight them. The people in the third came out of that bunker coldhearted and knowledgeable. Took out our scouts, flanked us and rained on us.”
“So how’d they get into the bunker in the first place?”
“I don’t know.” Tag shook his head. “It’s anomalous.”
Mace raised his left eyebrow a hair higher than normal. “Don’t give me the big words, Tag.”
Tag smiled. Despite the mutated flesh studding his face, it was surprisingly charming. Beneath it he was undoubtedly a very handsome man. “Don’t know. Don’t like it.” Tag leaned in conspiratorially. “Tell you this, though.”
Mace leaned in. “What?”
“The newcomers got a mutie among them. I felt it.”
There was nothing charming at all about Mace Henning’s smile. “Interesting.”
Chapter Seven
The convoy rolled north. Krysty was positively giddy behind the wheel of the big rig. It was a warm afternoon. The windows were open, and the wind of their passage ruffled her red hair. She was a beautiful woman. In the pink light of Canada’s shimmering skies her beauty was heartbreaking. Krysty could drive a wag, but a big rig was something else entirely. Ryan was proud she was picking it up so quickly. He dragged his eye back to business. He stood in the machine-blaster hatch and scanned backward through his Navy longeye at the distance they had put behind him. There was nothing there, but Ryan’s gut was speaking to him and he always listened to it. He saw Six standing in one of the outriding pickups. Ryan clicked on the radio. “Six, Ryan.”
The big man sounded distracted over the static. “What?”
“I think we’re being followed.”
Six made a noise. “I guarantee it.”
“Want to do something about it?”
Six considered this for several long seconds. “Why not?”
The iron-skinned pickup closed up with the convoy and pulled alongside the semi. Six scowled even more mightily than usual at the sight of Krysty grinning behind the wheel. He shouted over the cacophony of engine noise. “What do you propose?”
“Get us two of the bikes!”
Six got on the horn, and two of the motorcycle scouts headed back in.
Ryan slid down into the cab. “Keep her straight.” The one-eyed man took up his rifle as the vehicle came alongside, and he jumped into the pickup bed. Six thumped his hand on the roof and the driver brought the pickup to a halt.
Six got back on the horn. “Seriah, Krysty is driving the truck. Why don’t you ride with her for a while?”
The little wrench’s voice came back. “You got it, Vinny!”
Six made another noise. Seriah’s attitude seemed to be eternally sunny. The two bikers pulled up. “Oui, Six?”
“Ryan and I are going for a ride. Give us your bikes.”
The two riders didn’t look happy about having their rides usurped, but Ryan was quickly getting the impression that no one in the convoy other than Toulalan and perhaps Seriah ever gave Six any lip.
Ryan threw a leg over an ancient Honda Nighthawk that looked as though it had been rebuilt from stem to stern more than once. He gave the ’Hawk some gas and began tooling down the road the way the convoy had come. Six followed, and Ryan could feel the big man’s eyes burning into his back. He ignored the sec man and thought like a coldheart. The land was low and rolling, and the road wound between the hills and stands of forest. There was no way for the convoy to hide its tracks.
The one-eyed man looked back, and the convoy’s dust plume rose into the sky like a giant pointing finger. All of the convoy’s vehicles had been modified. Beefed-up suspensions and offroad tires gave them the ability to traverse the raddled, broken and often overgrown Canadian roads, but they had few genuine offroad vehicles. The symbolism was obvious. The convoy was a herd. A dangerous herd, as it had horns, but like a migrating herd it stayed on its route. The coldhearts were a wolf pack, which could strike wherever and whenever it wanted. Chipping away, picking off stragglers, just the presence of a few of them in the distance would keep the convoy on the razor’s edge, day after day, wearing them down.
Ryan was pretty sure they were close.
He pulled off the road and drove up a steep green hillside, followed by Six. Ryan reached the top of the hill and stopped. On a hill opposite them to the east a coldheart stood dismounted and was watching the convoy’s dust. He didn’t seem particularly cautious.
Six’s voice was bitter with frustration. “This isn’t the first time they’ve done this.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, my second in command, a man named Guy. He doubled back to find our trackers. The situation was much like this. He and his team gave pursuit.”
Ryan thought he knew the answer. “And?”
“And we used to have six motorcycles,” Six said bitterly. “Now we have two.”
“They drew Guy into an ambush.”
Six scowled across the rolling grassland separating him from someone he desperately wished to kill. “Guy was brave, and strong, but impulsive. I have since forbidden hot pursuit of the enemy.”
“So they pick at you, waging a war of attrition.”
“Yes.” Six glowered. “Look, he has seen us.”
“No doubt,” Ryan agreed. Quicksilver flashed in the pink, late-afternoon light on top of the far hill. “They’re signaling with mirrors. He’s got more behind him.”
“I can see that.” Six turned his glare on Ryan. “Somehow I thought you had a plan.”
“I do.”
“Oh? I would very much like to hear it.”
Ryan lifted his chin toward the other hill. “We kill that guy.”
“Oh?”
Ryan looked at the laser range-finding binoculars Six wore around his neck. The one-eyed man almost never carried battery-operated devices himself, simply because in the Deathlands the rads, electromagnetic anomalies and the nearly universal lack of recharging facilities made them a dangerous crutch to become dependent on. However, since Six happened to be carrying one…
“Yeah, range me.”
“Ah, your magic rifle,” Six scoffed, but raised his optics to his eyes and pushed a button. The laser aligned with the glass gave him an exact distance. “The range is nine hundred and seventy-five meters,” he reported dryly.
Ryan dropped prone and deployed the Scout’s internal bipod. The blaster had proved to him it could unleash lightning during the boar attack. Now it was time to see if it could hurl the thunderbolt. Ryan tilted his cheek into the stock of his rifle. At 2.5 power, the magnification was low and at nearly a thousand yards the range was long. The man on the opposite hill was still doll-size in Ryan’s scope. The Deathlands warrior considered his target very carefully and raised his aim until it barely occupied the lowest visible point of his crosshairs.
“You think you can hit a man at a thousand meters, in this light, with that—”
Ryan’s fingertip gave the trigger a slow kiss and the Scout bucked against his shoulder. The man on the other hill jumped in alarm.
“A miss!” Six spit.
Ryan flicked the bolt and fired again.
“Miss! You are wasting your am—” Six suddenly shifted his binoculars. “No! Hit! Hit!”
“Six!” Ryan put a final round into the other man’s bike. The coldheart didn’t dare try to jump on as bullets kept cracking against it. “Get him!”
Six jumped onto his bike as the coldheart broke and ran. The big man popped a wheelie and tore across the grassland separating him and his prey. Ryan snapped his bipod shut, slung the Scout and got in the saddle. The Nighthawk snarled and spit blue smoke.
The Quebecer flew over the hill and disappeared. Ryan came to the crest and spun to a stop. The sec man quickly caught up with the coldheart. His longblaster flashed in his trademark big spin. The running man turned only in time to scream and take a big .45-70-caliber bullet through the sternum. Six swept past the fallen man and turf flew as he spun in tight circle.
Ryan unlimbered his longblaster once more as massed engines rumbled like thunder in the distance.
Six knelt over the man and drew his huge bowie knife. Despite the slug in his chest, the coldheart managed a thin scream as Six scalped him. Ryan looked at the coldheart’s motorcycle. The tailpipe was torn, tufts of wool batting stuck out of the bullet hole in the buckskin seat. Ryan had hit the tank, and he could smell the home-stilled alcohol the coldheart had been burning for fuel. Ryan took a precious butane lighter out of his pocket, then pushed the stricken bike over with his boot. In the Deathlands you didn’t mess with another person’s ride. Most likely it was the same in Canada.
This was war.
He took a rag from a pocket, touched the flame of his butane lighter to one end, then tossed the rag onto the bike. Pale blue flame played across the engine block.
“Six!” Ryan shouted. The big man leaped onto his bike and rode back to the top of the hill and spun to a stop next to Ryan. From their vantage the one-eyed man saw a mob of motorcycles cresting the next row of hills to the east. He took out his Navy longeye and extended it, counting about a dozen. The two forces stood and regarded each other over the half mile between them. A thin plume of black smoke rose from the burning bike beside Ryan. Six slowly held aloft his grizzly trophy. The scalped man was a bloody rag lying between the contenders. Ryan waited for the cavalry charge and hoped for it. If the coldhearts were hot for revenge, they would roar down in a swarm, and Ryan and Six would drop prone and shoot the riders out of their saddles as they came on.
The coldhearts didn’t take the bait.
Ryan was pretty sure they had taken note. Six had made his bloody mark, and the one-eyed man had made his point. Stalking the convoy had turned into a much rougher game. Unfortunately the enemy had made a point, as well.
For roving coldhearts they had a sense of discipline that Ryan didn’t care for at all.
BARON MACE HENNING wasn’t pleased. He sat on his camp tool with his cluboss his knees like a samurai warlord. “What’s that you say, Shorty?”
Shorty scuffed the toe of his boot into the ground nervously. “Said Jimmy Pickering’s been chilled.”
“Oh yeah?” Jimmy had been one of Mace’s better scouts. “How’d that happen?”
“Old Vinny scalped him.” Shorty cleared his throat. “Burned his bike.”
“You saw it?”
“Saw after. Old Vinny was up on the next rise. Wavin’ Jimmy’s scalp at us.”
Mace’s eyes went to slits. “So what’d you do about it, Shorty?”
Shorty started paying intense attention to his boots again. “Nothin’…”
“Nothing?”
“Vinny was up on that hill, like I said, ’bout a klick away with that big shiny blaster of his and nothin’ ’tween us and it but a lot of real open ground. And there was another guy with him. I saw him real good. Through my ’noculars. Guy was one-eyed and had some kind of funky-lookin’ carbine. I don’t think he’s from around here, or Val-d’Or neither. Real coldheart-lookin’ prick. Lookin’ like he might even give old Vinny a hard time. ’Cept they was standin’ side-by-side and Vinny was smiling. We had ’em numbered, Baron, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that stranger or his blaster, and I sure didn’t like the smile on Vinny’s face.”
Mace stared at Shorty. It was undoubtedly the most intelligent thing the sec man had ever said. Mace looked to Red, who was one of his sons. He was nowhere near as big as his father; indeed he took after his mother in being short and thin. Mace neither denied Red nor acknowledged him, but the red hair, green eyes and ugly features were absolutely unmistakable. When Red had first come to his father and asked for a job as a sec man, he didn’t bring up his blood. Mace had told him to go to a rival ville and bring him three ears. Red had come back with ten. He was unlikely to ever win a stand-up club or tomahawk fight, but Red was a nightcreeper extraordinaire, a decent shot with a blaster and could think on his feet. The chunk of change he wore around his neck was proof. “Red?”
“Like he said, Baron. Those two just stood there waitin’, and Jimmy all laid out on the killing ground between us with the bedsheet pulled off his skull. No one sneaks up on Jimmy. That means they picked him off at range, and that says somethin’ right there. Some of the boys wanted to go straight in. Shorty said no.” Red met his father’s eyes. “I backed him.”
Mace had been working very hard the last few years to instill some sense of tactics into his men. It had taken some head cracking, but it was starting to pay off. Baron Henning still wasn’t ready to start handing out compliments. “Don’t suppose anyone retrieved Jimmy’s change?”
“No.” Red flinched. “Vinny’s got it. Added it to his collection.”
Mace slowly rose. His club hung loose from his wrist by its thong. Tag rose behind him. His gaudy-house fancy autoblaster wasn’t quite pointing at anyone in particular, yet. The baron looked at the arc of men arrayed in front of him on the other side of the campfire; his eyebrow permanently cocked in judgment. The men stared back, mentally laying bets on whether Shorty, Red or both would get their skulls crushed and lose their change. Would Mace really put his club through his best friend’s brain? Or his own redheaded bastard son?
Baron Mace Henning bellowed like a bull and shoved his club skyward. “Who wants to winter in Val-d’Or?”
Shorty shouted first. He’d seen Mace rally the troops before, and he was ecstatic his skull was still intact. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”
The baron let the lack of protocol go. “Who wants to winter down in that underground gaudy palace they got? Heard they got central heating!”
More men took up the chant. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”
“Who wants to winter sleeping on bearskins, smoking hemp and eating poutine? Heard they’re growing taters in excess!”
The chant grew. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”
“Who wants his own blond French slut to chew his boots this winter, and slobber on anything else a man has a mind for?”
The chant grew to a roar.
Baron Mace Henning’s riding skins creaked as he slowly sat and once more laid his club across his knees. “The way I figure it, Vinny owes me about fifty dollars now. Who’s going to bring me back all that jack?” Mace leaned forward. “Who’s going to bring me a black ear?”
Every man shoved a club, tomahawk or blaster toward the shimmering Northern Lights and shook it. They whooped and shoved one another, each man shouting out how he was the one who would take down Vincent Six.
“Boys?” A silver coin appeared in Mace’s hand. He held it up to gleam in the firelight. “Who’s going to earn himself a silver Voyager?”
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