The wounded man staggered forward, then fell

Cheetah Luis knelt over the fallen fighter. “What happened to the others?” he demanded.

“Cannies took them all. The living and the dead. Dragged off into the swamp…”

“Did you see the live prisoners? Did you see them get taken away?” Ryan asked.

The dying man nodded, but as he did so, his eyes fluttered shut and his chest stopped heaving. Ryan leaned down and grabbed the man’s chin. When he squeezed hard, the fighter opened his eyes wide.

“Did you see a black woman and a pale-skinned man? Were they taken prisoner?”

“Cannies took them both. Man’s in bad shape.”

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter: Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

Damnation Road Show

Devil Riders

Bloodfire

Hellbenders

Separation

Death Hunt

Shaking Earth

Black Harvest

Vengeance Trail

Ritual Chill

Atlantis Reprise

Labyrinth

Strontium Swamp

Shatter Zone

Perdition Valley

Cannibal Moon

James Axler

…Late August,

I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where

the moving dead still talk

of pushing their bones against the thrust

of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel

or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death.

—Anne Sexton,

“You, Doctor Martin” [1960]

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

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

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter One

Pistol in hand, Dr. Mildred Wyeth leaped through swirling, acrid smoke. Blistering heat seared through the back of her gray T-shirt and desert camouflage BDU pants. The junked Winnebago RV behind her was swallowed up in a thirty-foot-high pillar of flame. Over the roar of the blaze and the mad crackle of blasterfire, she heard children screaming as they were dragged away.

Cannies—as cannibals were called in Deathlands—loved babies.

And cannies were everywhere.

Dark, furtive shapes darted between the bonfires they had made of shanties, lean-tos, and wheelless, rusting RVs. Gunfire boomed from all sides of the ramshackle ville. Ricochets whined overhead. Somewhere in the maze of torched structures, the black woman’s five companions fought shoulder to shoulder with the ville folk, dealing death to the invaders.

Mildred blinked her streaming eyes, every nerve straining. When the children screamed again, she zeroed in on the sound. For a split second she had a clear view of three cannies as they raced past the burning hulk of a station wagon. The two in front carried a squirming child under each arm. The cannie covering the hasty retreat clutched a remade Ruger Mini 14 rifle in both hands. Mildred snap-fired her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, taking the only shot she had. She dropped the tailgunner with a single .38-caliber slug in the base of his spine. As she ran toward him, she got a last glimpse of the children’s kicking legs and bare feet, then they and their captors vanished through a break in the log-and-earth defensive berm.

Mildred could no more wait for help from Ryan Cawdor and the others than she could will her own heart to stop beating. Unless she closed on the cannies quickly, unless she chilled them, they would escape into the night with their innocent prey.

Howling, the flesheater she had wounded dragged himself after his fellows, clawing the dirt with both hands, trailing his paralyzed limbs behind him. Mildred jumped over his prostrate body. She didn’t bother shooting him in the head.

A cannie wasn’t worth a second bullet.

At the edge of the berm, she struggled to pick up their direction of flight. Squinting hard, she could see perhaps sixty feet in front of her. The starlit world was a dim monochrome, varied shades of gray blotched with black. When she heard the faint sound of children mewling, she holstered her handblaster and broke into a run. The cannies were heading east, across the wide valley of the Grande Ronde river, probably making for a hidey-hole in the densely forested Wallowa Mountains whose craggy peaks loomed in front of her, blocking out the stars on the horizon.

In daylight, the high desert valley was a fairly easy traverse. On a moonless night, it was like crossing a vast carpet-bombed battlefield. The depressions were deeper and the rises were higher than they looked. The impact of repeated, misjudged footfalls racked Mildred’s knee and hip joints. The sound of her own breathing roared in her ears. A burning pain stabbed her lungs, but she kept on running, full-tilt. She couldn’t see the cannies, but she could hear them ahead, crashing through the stands of brush. Burdened by their struggling prizes, the flesheaters were gradually losing their lead.

From the darkness beyond the limit of her vision came nearly simultaneous thuds and yelps. Mildred’s fingers closed around her holstered gun butt.

A moment later a pair of terrified little boys blundered into her path. As she reached out for them, they took to their heels, scattering to either side into the night. At least they had a chance now.

“Run and hide!” Mildred shouted over her shoulder as she raced on.

The fleeing cannies had each jettisoned a child to lighten the load and make better time. Carrying one small victim each, they quickly pulled away from her, their footfalls growing fainter and fainter. They weren’t circling or splitting up, trying to throw her off the trail or to catch her in an ambush. Afraid of losing their way in the dark, they were beelining for the foothills. The only signposts were the stars overhead. Mildred guessed they had picked a constellation on the horizon and were running toward it. She did the same, determined to play out the hand she had been dealt, but with fast-fading hope. Ahead was a vast maze of potential escape routes.

The extreme northeast corner of Oregon had avoided the leading edge of Armageddon, the all-out U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange of January 21, 2001. There had been no military installations or population centers to attract the nuke-clusters of Russian MIRVs. Since the mountainous, heavily forested area was three hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, it had also dodged the great tsunamis, spawned by worldwide thermonuclear detonations that had devastated the coastline. Northeastern Oregon had drawn a pass for everything but the earthquakes and a terrible firestorm that had swept through mountains and valley, burning out the little towns in its path; and of course the nuke winter that had gripped the entire planet. Even before the end of civilization it had been a rugged place, thinly colonized.

A little farther to the east, the landscape got even tougher.

One hundred miles away was Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, deep enough to hide twenty battleships, stacked one on top of the other. Hells Canyon also hid a predark redoubt, a vast bunker and storage facility, complete with a functional mat-trans unit. The mat-trans network was intended to move people and matériel across vast distances instantaneously. It was thanks to that system that Mildred and her companions had emerged unscathed into the wilds of Oregon.

Most of the predark interstate highways in Deathlands led to uninhabitable ruination: miles-wide, nuke warhead impact craters, skeletonized cities, poisoned water, air and soil. Highway 84, which cut across northeastern Oregon, through the Grande Ronde valley, was an exception. Sections of its crumbling roadway still connected minor habitations and nowhere villes; out of necessity it had become a corridor of life and trade.

Where there was life in the hellscape, there were predators. Two-legged, four-legged, winged and slithering…

Running in the dim half-light, Mildred wished that Jak Lauren had been by her side. The ruby-eyed, white-haired, wild child could track a rabbit fart in a hurricane.

The base of the foothills stopped Mildred’s advance. Above her the slope’s blackness wasn’t quite absolute. Faint starlight reflected off basalt bedrock, making it look wet. It was not. Ancient lava dikes and arches radiated trapped day heat like a furnace. Above the bedrock were densely treed slopes, fully recovered from the wildfires of more than a century earlier. If the cannies had climbed into the tree line, she knew she would never find them this night. And by morning it would be too late to save the children.

Mildred scanned the rocky flanks of the hills while her heart thudded in her throat. Come on, you bastards, she thought. Come on. Where the hell are you?

Then she saw something odd—a flicker of light bouncing off the black rock a couple hundred feet up the hillside. It was there, then it was gone. Not from the stars, because it was the wrong color. Pale yellow, instead of dead white. Had she imagined it? Were her eyes playing tricks?

Breathing hard, she watched. After a minute or two the light reappeared. Then vanished. It was real. The Wallowa Mountain basalt was riddled with caves. Some were little more than shallow dishes. Others were long and winding. A campfire set deep in a cave, perhaps around a bend or two, would give off that kind of weak light. Light that could be completely blocked by some kind of barrier.

At least she knew where they had gone.

Mildred started to climb, careful not to dislodge any loose bits of rock. If there was an established track to the cave, she couldn’t see it. The sound of the gun battle was far behind her now. There would be no backup. And no going back.

The cave entrance, a low arch in the basalt slope, would have been hard to find even in the daytime. Without the intermittent flicker of light, she might have climbed right past it. No one stood guard outside. The cannies thought they had lost her.

Mildred brushed the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand, then wiped her fingers dry on her BDU pants. By feel, she broke open her revolver, replaced the single spent shell, then softly clicked closed the 6-shot cylinder.

She didn’t know how many flesheaters were in the cave. Cannies usually ran in hunting packs. They used footspeed and the cover of night to snatch away the weakest, the dumbest, the easiest chills. This night the no-name ville had been hit by multiple packs simultaneously, all competing for the spoils. Cannies didn’t like to share. And when push came to shove they ate one another.

Mildred reached into her right pants’ pocket. With her fingertips she counted four, full speedloaders. She took one out and palmed it in her left hand.

The ZKR ready to rip, she stooped to enter the cave. Inside the arch, the ceiling was eight or nine feet high. The walls were about that far apart, too. There was no guard on duty. Moving quietly, Mildred followed the faint light around a bend. Beyond it, the cave walls necked down and a ratty, brown-polyester blanket blocked her path. It hung from the ceiling to the dirt floor, leaking yellow points of light from a hundred holes and small rips.

From the other side, she heard voices. And soft whimpering.

Mildred stepped up and peeked through a hole in the blanket. It took a couple of seconds for her eyes to adjust to the glare of light, which came from a stone-ringed firepit in the middle of a wide chamber. She counted four cannies. She couldn’t tell whether the cave went on or dead-ended. Strewed in a corner was a pile of fire-blackened human bones. From the angle she had she couldn’t see the children, but the whimpering was definitely theirs.

With a sweep of her hand, Mildred pushed back the blanket, looking over the ZKR’s sights. She caught the cannies flat-footed.

The Czech target pistol boomed deafeningly in the tightly enclosed space. The closest cannie, a tall man with a bushy, foot-long chin beard, took the up-angled round through his left eye-socket. His hair, skull and brain matter splattered the cave ceiling and he toppled over, rigid from head to toe with shock, like a felled tree.

Two others leaned over a boy and a girl who were huddled in a corner. The cannies whirled at the gunshot, the slivers of fileting knives flashing in the firelight. Unblinking, Mildred shot them both rapid-fire, placing one slug below each breastbone.

Heart shredders.

Muzzle climb was her old and trusted friend, and she rode it onto the fourth target who had grabbed up a blaster and was coming at her fast. As the cannie charged, he swung the side-by-side scattergun from the hip. The full-length weapon came around slowly. Way too slowly.

Center chest, point-blank, Mildred tapped him three times. As she pivoted away, the cannie’s filthy cotton shirt and matted chest hair burst into flames. Dead on his feet, he dropped to his knees, then crashed in a cloud of dust at her boot tops.

With the ZKR aimed at the ceiling, she broke open the cylinder and flicked out the smoking empties. Muzzle down, her feet braced wide apart, her steady, deft fingers fitted the speedloader in place and twisted the cartridge release.

She felt a rush of breeze on her neck as the blanket over the entrance whipped aside. In the next instant, something heavy slammed into the back of her head. Her knees buckled under her. Everything went black. She didn’t feel the ground when it flew up and hit her in the face.

WHEN MILDRED OPENED her eyes, the world spun madly around her. She had a splitting headache. She tried to focus and was overcome by a wave of nausea. Shutting her eyes, she leaned back against what felt like a rough wooden post. It was wedged tightly between the cave floor and ceiling. Her wrists were lashed around the post behind her; her ankles laced to its base. The bonds were skillfully tied. There was no wiggle room, and no stretch whatsoever.

As she waited for the vertigo to pass, she recalled the seconds prior to her blackout. She had been poleaxed from behind, and that was the source of her throbbing headache.

Opening her eyes again, she looked up into a gaunt, unshaven face.

At that moment she realized that a possible skull fracture was the least of her worries.

The cannie’s right cheek was marred by a burn scar, a swathe of shiny, pink, pockmarked skin where whiskers no longer grew. To Mildred, it looked like a near-miss from a close-range black-powder discharge. A victim fighting for his or her life had failed to hit the point-blank ten-ring. The cannie had no eyebrow or eyelashes on that side. His right eyelid was shriveled to nothing and the eyeball was milky-white, like a hardboiled egg, cooked in its socket by a flash of Pyrodex. The bastard’s breath stunk like a three-week-old corpse.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Stalactites of gray hung glistening from both his nostrils. The thick discharge had smeared and crusted like a snail trail through the dark stubble that covered his upper lip and chin. He was infected with the scourge of Deathland’s cannibal clans, a contagious, blood-born, inevitably fatal disease known far and wide as “the oozies.”

Mildred looked past him. There were two more cannies. Live ones. The trio had entered the cave as she had started shooting, probably rejoining their running buddies for a share in the spoils. With no one covering her back, she had left herself open to attack.

The two kids were still alive, huddled in each other’s arms on the dirt floor, crying softly. From stories told on their mothers’ knees, they knew what was coming next.

The scarred one smiled down at her, showing off yellow incisors filed to points. He was the pack leader, the alpha. Without a word, he reached around her hip and groped her buttocks. Not in a sexual way. His interest was entirely culinary. Mildred tried to twist away from his powerful fingers. He squeezed harder, until she stopped struggling, then he let go.

“She’s a tough one,” the alpha said to his pals. “We’ve got to pit roast her. Slow fire, wrapped in wet leaves. Let her cook all day.”

The other two cannies stepped closer. They had hollow-cheeked faces, skinny arms and legs. Bloated potbellies.

“Or we could slice her into steaks,” the nearly bald one suggested. “Pound ’em flat with a rock. Quick-fry ’em in baby fat.” The fringe along the sides of his head fell in long, greasy coils to his shoulders.

The third cannie licked his cracked lips. He had a narrow groove across his forehead where the bone had been crushed by a blow, perhaps by a tire iron or piece of rebar.

Mildred looked from face to grimy face. Gray pendulums of snot swayed from their noses. Gray discharge leaked from their filthy earholes. They were all goners. Terminal stage oozies.

There had been no such disease in the scientific literature when Mildred Wyeth had graduated from medical school. There had been no such disease when years later she had undergone a relatively minor surgical procedure and had experienced a negative reaction to the anesthetic. In a last-ditch attempt to save her life, her colleagues had put her in cryogenic stasis. That had been shortly before the cataclysmic events of January 21, 2001. After sleeping through the end of western civilization, and a century or so thereafter, she had been revived by Ryan Cawdor and the others, reborn into a strange and violent new world.

Medical science no longer existed. What information there was, was anecdotal and unsubstantiated. Rumors and lies. Lies and rumors. From her own limited experience over the years, Mildred had come to no conclusions about the true nature of cannies, or their fatal affliction. They didn’t exhibit the gigantism or chimerism found in Deathlands other mutated species. Superficially at least, their flesh-eating seemed more like an addiction. One taste of human flesh and they were forever hooked. Oozie infection only seemed to increase their depravity, giving them a bottomless hunger.

In human history, cannibalism was almost always a ceremonial choice, Mildred knew. Eating one’s fallen or captured enemies was a way of taking their physical and spiritual power; it was never the mainstay of diet. Epidemiological studies that might have answered the questions about cannies were no longer an option. That kind of research had vanished forever, along with the Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth stood disarmed and helpless, facing a truly horrendous fate, but she wasn’t thinking about herself, nor about how far she had come to die so miserably. She was thinking about the children. The only way she could protect them was by getting eaten first. There was still a remote chance her companions would track her to the cave before the cannies got hungry again.

“I did your packmates a favor when I blew them apart,” she taunted her captors. “It was mercy chilling. You ought to thank me for easing their way to hell. Dying from the oozies is triple hard, as you boys are finding out. First come the uncontrollable hand tremors, then you start shitting yourselves. You can’t digest human flesh anymore, but you can’t eat anything else. You eat more and more but still you slowly starve, until you’re too weak to fight off the blades of your own blood brothers.”

“We’ve been final stage for over a year,” Rebar Head bragged. “Still hunting strong. Took our medicine…”

In Deathlands, white-coated doctors and scientists had been replaced by raggedy charlatans riding from ville to ville in donkey carts, dispensing homemade potions and elixirs in recycled plastic pop bottles. They were miles away by the time their customers started dropping dead from the “medicine.”

“There’s no drug for what you’ve got,” Mildred said. “It’s turning your brains to pus. That’s what’s dripping onto your boots.”

“You don’t know shit about shit, Lamb Chop,” Alpha said, his carrion breath gusting in her face.

“Let’s eat the bitch first,” the bald one snarled. “Pay her back for chillin’ half our crew. The kids’ll keep.”

“Gotta much better idea,” Alpha said. He pulled a long knife from a sheath hidden in the top of his lace-up boot. It was a predark Ka-Bar combat knife with a black Kraton handle. Alpha knelt beside the first cannie Mildred had shot. He lifted the dead man by the armpits, holding the torso propped upright. Using the knife’s bluesteel pommel, he pulped the residue of brains left in the cratered skull. Mortar and pestle. When he was satisfied with the result, he tipped the man’s head, slopping the lumpy mess into a tin plate.

“Old Tom, here, is gonna have his revenge,” he said, shoving aside the corpse. “Open her mouth.”

Mildred went rigid against the pole. She clenched her teeth with all her might.

Twenty filthy fingernails couldn’t pry her jaws apart, four hands couldn’t hold her head still.

Alpha broke the stalemate, sucker-punching her in the stomach. The others exploited her moment of weakness. Baldy pulled down her bottom jaw, Rebar Head forced a thick stick crossways, between her back molars.

Mildred couldn’t snap the stick and close her mouth. She couldn’t dislodge it by shaking her head. She flexed her throat muscles, shutting her gullet, her eyes wide with panic.

Then came the metallic taste of the plate on her tongue, followed by warm goo flooding her mouth. Before she could cough out the pureed brains, hard fingers pinched off her nostrils and a callused palm covered her mouth.

Mildred’s stomach heaved violently, but she couldn’t expel a single drop. The resulting explosion of pressure only drove it up into her sinuses.

“How do you like it?” Alpha inquired, pinning the back of her head to the pole and holding it there.

The taste of death was shrill, feral, fecal. The stench in her nose burned like battery acid.

With the hands shutting off her air, it was either swallow or suffocate.

She wanted to suffocate, but the choice wasn’t hers to make. Her nervous system’s hardwiring wouldn’t allow it. Just before she passed out, she swallowed.

When Alpha released her, she gasped a breath, then projectile vomited across the cave floor.

The cannies brayed at her dry heaving, and her frantic coughing and spitting. “You been dosed good,” Baldy said.

“You’ll be hungry for long pig in no time,” Alpha added, wiping his leaking nose on the back of his hand.

“The oozies might chill me, but it won’t make me a rad-blasted cannie,” Mildred said defiantly.

“You think cannies are born that way?”

The monsters laughed some more.

“Which came first, the cannie or the oozies?” Alpha asked her. “Guess you’re gonna find out.” Then he glanced over at the children, his good eye narrowed to a slit. “Throw some more wood on that fire,” he told his packmates. “Let’s get something cooking. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m fuckin’ starvin’.”

Chapter Two

Ryan Cawdor followed in Jak Lauren’s footsteps, trying hard to keep up, his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster in hand. Behind Ryan in a tight single file was the remainder of the companions. Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s red-haired, emerald-eyed lover, was wrapped in a long, shaggy black coat, and carried a Model 640 .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. John Barrymore Dix, Ryan’s comrade since the days of riding with Trader’s convoy, had his trademark fedora screwed down on his head; his military-style, M-4000 shotgun swung on a shoulder sling. Theophilus Algernon “Doc” Tanner, Oxford scholar circa 1881 and reluctant time traveler, brought up the rear in his tattered frock coat and cracked riding boots. In one fist he held a massive Civil War relic black-powder handblaster; in the other an ebony walking stick that concealed a rapier blade.

One of their number was missing.

They wouldn’t rest until they recovered her.

Krysty had watched Mildred vanish into the night, chasing a pair of cannies who carried off two young children each. Pinned belly-down by withering blasterfire, the tall redhead couldn’t go to her friend’s aid, and in the deafening clatter of the exchange couldn’t summon the others to help. It wasn’t until almost half an hour later, until after the attack had been beaten back and the cannies driven out of the ville’s berm, that Ryan and the companions had regrouped and begun the pursuit.

They had covered less than a hundred yards when Jak called a halt to the advance. Kneeling, he holstered his .357 Magnum Colt Python and carefully examined the narrow strip of churned-up ground.

“Cannies dropped kids,” the albino announced.

“No bodies here,” Ryan said as he looked around. “They must have been alive. Looks like they got away.”

Jak walked on a few more yards. “Cannie tracks both heavy on one leg,” he said.

“They’re still carrying a kid each,” Krysty said. “I saw them take four from the ville.”

“I wonder why our Mildred did not stop to round up the escapees?” Doc asked.

“They probably hit the ground running,” Ryan answered. “Even if she saw them she couldn’t catch them in the dark.”

“That way,” Jak said, pointing due east.

The companions resumed the chase. They moved triple fast and triple quiet. There was only the soft hiss of their bootheels on sand as Jak led them across the valley, toward the dark screen of mountains.

As Ryan ran, he thought about the ville they had just left, and the dozens of bodies strewed in its rutted dirt lanes. How many of its folk had died fighting? How many had been carried off to meet a worse fate than a bullet? How many women and children had either been suffocated by smoke or burned alive in their underground hiding holes? The exact cost of victory was impossible to count until after daybreak, which was still hours away. The shambling shacks could be rebuilt, of course. The stacked logs and heaped earth of the defensive berm could be repaired, and its design much improved. But Ryan knew it would take years to restore the human population to its former size.

All the while with flesheaters hammering at the gates.

Taking the battle to the cannies, finding their dens and chilling them one by one, was the only way to tip the balance. It was a daunting task, given the mountainous terrain and their apparent numbers. Even before the attack there hadn’t been enough ville folk to handle the job. Unlike Deathlands numerous mutated species, cannies were still essentially human beings. Humans gone psycho-renegade. They fought with blades and blasters instead of teeth and claws. This night they had been particularly well-armed with semiauto and full-auto centerfire weapons. Several of them weren’t remades.

Over the years, after numerous skirmishes, Ryan had cannies pegged as cunning, cowardly adversaries. Their normal strategy was hit and git, like true pack-hunting predators. Cannies worked a vulnerable territory until it could no longer support them or until they were chilled or driven out.

Because they looked human, cannies sometimes infiltrated villes and mingled with norms, then struck without warning. Children and the dimwitted simply disappeared overnight. Cannies were blood traitors to their own species, universally despised and feared. The happy downside to the cannie lifestyle was the oozies, a horrible, wasting disease that ultimately claimed them, one and all. It was widely assumed that they got it from eating the infected brains of their own packmates.

No one knew their exact origins. From the time-honored campfire tales, it appeared cannies had been around since skydark, when nuke winter had forced the surviving humans to make awful choices about protein sources. Although the companions had come across isolated small bands that roamed Deathlands interior, Ryan had never seen or heard of cannies unleashing a coordinated, mass attack on a bermed ville. Their organization had always stopped at the pack level, the primary hunting group.

The hellscape was full of mysteries. Explanations, when they came, were usually incomplete.

Jak somehow picked out Mildred’s trail in the weak light, leading the companions across the high desert valley on a near dead run. How the albino managed the feat was a puzzle to Ryan, especially after Mildred had explained her twentieth-century understanding of albinism to him. Before the Apocalypse it had been a well-documented genetic disorder, caused by a random mutation that stopped production of a chemical vital to normal development of skin pigmentation, eyes and brain. According to Mildred, predark albinos always had poor vision, were susceptible to sunburn and had blue-gray or brown eyes. Jak had exceptional eyesight. He never sunburned. And his eyes were ruby-red. The youth vehemently insisted that he wasn’t a mutie—those with mutie blood were Deathlands untouchables, often chilled on sight—but the evidence said otherwise. Whether he was seeing the bootprints in the sand, or smelling out the track, or using some other extra-norm sense that had no name, Jak was bird-dogging. The pace he set was grueling, but no one complained, and no one asked for a rest.

Ahead, the impenetrable black of the mountain crags loomed larger, the landscape tilted underfoot, and the companions began to climb the gradual incline of the valley side. As the physical effort increased, body heat built up. Sweat peeled from Ryan’s hairline, down his forehead, burning into his good eye. The other socket was an empty hole, covered by a black leather patch. A livid scar divided that eyebrow and split his cheek, a secondary wound from the knife slash that had half blinded him. Ryan ignored the growing ache in his thighs, pushing the pain aside as though it belonged to someone else.

Mildred Wyeth was more than a treasured friend, more than a trusted comrade in arms; she was a resource the companions couldn’t afford to lose. Mildred had been a physician; she understood the workings of predark science and technology. She had come from a time not only with different knowledge, but very different values.

Would any of the other companions have taken off on their own to rescue the children?

Mebbe.

Mebbe not.

When the five reached the base of the mountains, they paused for breath, faces upturned, searching the black vastness above.

“Where’d she go?” J.B. said softly.

Jak tugged on Ryan’s sleeve.

“There,” the albino teen said. “Cave mouth.”

Above them, weak firelight flared against bedrock, then it was gone. They all saw it.

“How can you be positive that’s where Dr. Wyeth has gone?” Doc asked.

“Can’t,” Jak said.

“That fire didn’t start itself,” Krysty said. “Got to be cannies hiding inside. Nobody else would be out in the bush around here.”

“Nobody in their right mind,” J.B. added.

“We need to have a look-see,” Ryan told the others. “Spread out, take it slow, make sure of your footing. We don’t want any rockslides on the approach.”

The companions climbed the mountain flank, closing in on the cave entrance with blasters raised, safeties off. They saw no movement and met no resistance. The cannies weren’t expecting company. Probably because they considered themselves well-hidden and figured no one would try to hunt them down before dawn.

As Ryan neared the cave mouth, he smelled wood smoke, charring meat and burning hair. His stomach twisted into a knot.

Not Mildred, he thought. For nuke’s sake, not Mildred…

He ducked under the low arch, entering the outer chamber, where the trapped smoke and stench hung like an evil fog.

When all companions were inside the arch, he led them through the smoke, toward the source of the flickering yellow light. Around the cave’s bend, they spread out on either side of the blanket that served as a door, weapons aimed, fingers resting lightly on triggers.

Holding the SIG-Sauer braced against his hip, Ryan leaned forward and peered through a rip in the fabric. He saw two men, one bald and the other with a badly scarred face, crouched on the far side of a roaring fire. There had to be a vent in the ceiling, he thought, a fissure in the rock drawing most of the smoke up and out. The cannies were eating with their bare hands, pulling greasy strips of charcoaled meat off the shoulders of a human corpse. They had removed the dead man’s clothing but hadn’t bothered to cut up his body. They had simply shoved it into the fire like an oversize log, burning it at one end, flame-roasting the head and upper torso.

A third cannie stood with his back turned to the entrance, urinating torrentially against the cave wall. When Ryan saw Mildred tied to the post, the weight on his shoulders lifted. She was still alive. The children were huddled in a corner. Still alive, too.

Ryan turned to the companions and held up three fingers. Three targets.

“Mildred?” J.B. whispered.

The one-eyed man gave the thumbs-up.

At his signal, Krysty ripped down the tattered blanket. Ryan and J.B. burst into the death chamber, shoulder to shoulder.

Before the bald cannie could stand, J.B. blasted him full in the face with a load of double-aught buckshot. The cannie jerked violently backward, a plume of skull and brains flying; J.B. cycled the M-4000’s action and fired again. The scar-faced cannie was already moving sideways, lunging for a nearby weapon. J.B.’s buckshot missed its intended target by a foot. Instead of taking off his head, the blast slammed the cannie in the left shoulder, bowling him over as a cloud of dirt and rock dust rained from the ceiling. The creature landed hard and stayed down.

The remaining flesheater lunged toward the children through the swirling dust, his knife blade drawn. Leading him, Ryan squeezed off two shots with the SIG-Sauer. And hit the ten-ring. A pair of tightly spaced, 9 mm rounds in the head blew the cannie off his feet before he could cut throats. He crashed into a pile of bones at the base of the wall, and lay there, twitching.

Doc rounded the firepit and covered the wounded cannie with his double-barreled LeMat. Krysty gathered up the children, who were bawling with relief.

Drawing his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath, Ryan stepped over to Mildred. There was blood on her chin. The glistening stripe ran down the front of her neck and onto her T-shirt, which was speckled with pink bits of bone. She reeked of vomit.

As Ryan cut her bonds he said, “Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Are you wounded?”

Mildred shook her head minutely, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.

Ryan had fought side by side with this woman in countless pitched battles. Under fire, Mildred was intense, determined, fearless. He had never seen her like this in the aftermath of combat. Numbed. Shellshocked. What had the bastards done to her?

He wasn’t the only one who noticed the change.

There was concern on J.B.’s face as he returned Mildred’s revolver to her. “You did good,” he assured her. “It all worked out.”

Mildred holstered her revolver. She let her arms drop to her sides. Then she slumped back against the wooden post, utterly deflated.

“Mildred?” J.B. said. He stared helplessly at the dazed, blood-smeared physician.

“For nuke’s sake, Jak,” Ryan snarled over his shoulder, “drag the chill out of the fire. Stop that rad-blasted stink.”

The albino grabbed the corpse by the heels and pulled it from the blaze. Then he kicked dirt on its smoldering head.

“Who was he?” Ryan asked the woman. He put his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle shake. “Mildred?”

“Cannie I shot,” she replied in a barely audible voice. “The others decided not to let him go to waste.”

Doc loomed over the sole cannie survivor, holding the LeMat’s shotgun barrel against his temple, and down angling the load of bluewhistlers so as to empty his cranial vault, top to bottom. As the old man cocked the black-powder blaster’s hammer, Alpha twisted his head around so he could look his executioner in the face.

“Prepare to meet your maker, Devil spawn,” Doc said.

The wounded cannie pursed his lips and blew Doc a juicy, gray-smeared kiss.

Suddenly, Mildred came to life. “No!” she cried, lunging forward with arms outstretched. “Don’t chill him!”

Chapter Three

“Forgive me, my dear,” Doc said, decocking his antique weapon. “I didn’t mean to presume. You will, of course, wish to do the honors yourself.” As he stepped away from the wounded cannie, he made a sweeping gesture with his ebony swordstick, gallantly inviting her to have at her revenge.

Mildred advanced on the monster with gun drawn.

Ryan was gratified to see her back in action.

His relief was short-lived.

“When you gonna tell ’em, Mill-Dred?” cannie said, sneering at her. “When you gonna tell ’em our little secret?”

Instead of immediately shooting the cannibal through the head as Ryan and the others expected her to do, Mildred braced her feet, and, grunting from the effort, started pistol-whipping him with the barrel of her ZKR 551. She literally beat the evil grin off his face, in the process knocking out several of his filed teeth, and cutting deep slashes in both his cheeks with the Czech blaster’s front sight.

No one said a word. Her longtime companions looked on in astonishment. In the space of a couple of minutes, Mildred had gone from devastated to near-demonic, and in the process, turned her physician’s oath on its head.

“Get him up on his feet!” she shouted to J.B. and Jak.

The two men scrambled to hoist the cannie from the cave floor.

Raising her arm, threatening to continue the beating, Mildred backed the monster against the post. “Tie him tight, Jak,” she said.

The albino teen cinched wrists and ankles to the rough-hewn pole.

When the cannie was immobilized, Mildred’s fury seemed to ebb. She viewed the blood on her gunsight with deep, deep disgust; she scooped up a dead man’s rag of a shirt and quickly wiped the muzzle clean.

“I need to talk to Ryan,” she told the others.

“So talk,” J.B. said.

“I need to talk to him alone.”

“We’ll wait outside the cave, then,” Krysty offered.

“No,” Mildred said. “Ryan and I have got things to do here, just the two of us. It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to get loud before we’re done. I don’t want the children to hear and be scared all over again.”

Jak stared at the battered, bound cannie, his ruby eyes glittering with menace, certain that rough justice was on its way.

“Take the kids back to the ville, Krysty,” Ryan said. “Find their parents, if they’re still alive. Jak, Doc, J.B., go with her.”

“Not a good idea for you two to stay here by your-selves,” J.B. said.

“I concur most emphatically,” Doc said. “We either should all go, or all remain, for safety’s sake.”

“We’ve got plenty of ammo,” Ryan said. “Daybreak’s not far off. We’ll be fine. We’ll catch up with you in the valley.”

The companions didn’t like leaving them behind, but there were no more protests. Mildred had earned herself a private face-to-face, and private payback, if that’s what she wanted.

“We’ll see you back at the ville, then,” J.B. said. With a wave of his arm he led the others out of the cave.

Krysty touched Mildred on the hand as she herded the wide-eyed children past her. “You saved them,” the redhead said. “You saved them, and you survived. You did great, Mildred.”

After the companions had filed out, Ryan threw another hunk of wood on the glowing coals and watched it slowly ignite. “What’s going on, Mildred?” he said.

“Something real bad.”

“Figured that.”

“I wanted to tell you about it first,” she said, her voice tight, her words clipped. “I need you to make me a promise. I need you to give me your word on something.”

“Of course.”

“Before you and the others got here,” Mildred said, “the bastards force-fed me cannie brains.”

Ryan felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The puzzle had been solved, albeit horrifically. Now he understood why she had acted with such uncharacteristic savagery.

“They were infected brains, Ryan,” Mildred said. “Terminal stage oozies. Three of them ganged up after they had me tied to the post. They made me swallow a plateful. Afterward I vomited up as much as I could, but chances are I’m infected.”

Ryan reached out to comfort her, but she backed away.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take for the oozies to manifest,” she told him. “I don’t know what will happen when the infection starts to spread through my brain.”

“You didn’t have to keep this from the others.”

“Yes, I did,” she insisted. “We’ve been together too long. Covered too much ground, been through too much hell. I trust every one of them with my life, Ryan, but not with my death. I’m afraid they might wait to do what needs to be done, out of friendship or love or misplaced sympathy. I won’t risk that. I don’t know how long I can fight off the disease. I may not know I’ve lost the battle until it’s too late for me to do anything about it. What I’m saying is, I may be too weak or too crazy to eat my own gun. Ryan, I want you to promise me you’ll do the job when the time comes. Without hesitation or mercy. Will you do that for me?”

It wasn’t a deed Ryan wanted on his conscience, it made his head reel to even contemplate it, but he couldn’t refuse her. He concealed his reaction behind a mask of stone, looked her straight in the eye and said, “You got it, Mildred.”

“And there’s something else. It’s the reason I stopped Doc from chilling that one.”

“I wondered why you stepped in like that,” Ryan said. “After what the bastard did to you, why you didn’t shoot him yourself?”

“When they had me tied up,” Mildred said, “the cannies started talking about their ‘condition.’ They claimed they had medicine for the oozies. They didn’t elaborate on what it was or where it came from. They said it kept them alive, even though they had been in final stage for over a year.”

Ryan turned and addressed the filthy, scarred man tied to the pole. “Is that true?”

The cannie cackled and spit a big crimson gob in the dirt.

“It probably was idle talk,” Mildred said. “Something they made up to mess with my head. Or maybe they came across some carny show snake oil, drank it down and are hoping against hope. On the other hand, it just might be something real. Ryan, I know it’s a hell of a long shot, but I’ve got a short list of options. I’m looking at a triple nasty ride on the last train west. It’s a journey I surely don’t want to make.”

Ryan said nothing. He’d seen a few victims of end-stage oozies in his time. Based on that experience, if he’d been the one infected, he knew he’d have been grasping at straws, too.

“I’ll tell you everything,” the cannie offered, “if you just snip off one of them nice, crispy ears and pass it over to me.”

“Shut up,” Ryan said, “or I’ll saw off your rad-blasted foot and make you eat that, boot and all.”

The one-eyed cannie grinned back, showing off the bloody slivers of his fractured incisors. “You can’t do anything to me that I won’t purely enjoy.”

“You’re wrong there,” Mildred assured him. “If we do absolutely nothing, you’re going to purely hate it, and sooner or later you’ll tell us everything we want to know.”

The cannie spit again.

“You got a name, shitbag?” Ryan said.

“I got two names. My born name and my hunting name.”

“Take it from me,” Ryan said, “your hunting days are done. What name were you born with?”

“Georgie Tibideau Junior,” the cannie said. “From the Siana line of Tibideaus, though if you asked my ma and pa about me, I suppose they would deny I was ever born.”

“You’re a long way from home, cannie,” Mildred said.

“Been walking the Red Road for years.”

“What road?” Ryan asked.

“You never heard of the Highway of Blood? It’s the path all cannies take, the path we make. It stretches from here to there.”

“‘There?’” Cawdor said.

“The homeland.”

“And where might that be?” Ryan asked.

Tibideau squinted his good eye up at Cawdor’s face, then said, “You know, I should get me a patch like that. Got some style. Bet it keeps dirt and crap from falling into the hole, too.” Having delivered a transparent compliment, the cannie tried to reap an undeserved reward. “You know you folks broke in before I could finish my morning snack,” he told them. “Come on, brother, use that big, sharp blade of yours and hack me off a hunk of one them dead ’uns. Don’t let that good meat go to waste.”

It was Ryan’s turn to hawk and spit.

Interrupting the cannie’s calorie intake was the whole idea.

Ryan and Mildred took seats on flat rocks near the fire and propped up their boots, settling in for an extended rest.

At first, Junior Tibideau remained sullenly quiet. Unable to backhand away his nasal excretions, he let them trickle down his unshaved upper lip; when they spilled over onto his mouth, he spit.

Ryan and Mildred didn’t have to discuss the interrogation strategy. They both saw the same weakness in their enemy, and the same way to exploit it. When infected cannies neared death, they reaped so little energy from their food that they had to eat almost non-stop. No matter how much they ate, they were in state of perpetual near-starvation.

Junior Tibideau was a tough nut. He didn’t buckle under the psychological pressure, the anticipation of the terrible agonies to come. It took almost six hours on the post for his hunger pangs to become unen-durable. Mildred and Ryan watched him sweat, squirm, shiver head to foot; they listened as his high-pitched whimpers turned to guttural moans. And when Junior couldn’t stand it anymore, it was like a dam breaking. The cannie started talking, fast and furious, chatter-boxing like a jolt addict coming off a two-week binge.

“Do you really think this is how I dreamed of ending up when I was little?” Junior said. “Tied to a pole in a stinking cave with my shoulder shot and my belly on fire? Mebbe I deserve to die triple hard because of what I’ve done, but I had no choice. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a cannie. I woke up and I already was one. Mebbe you don’t want to believe it, but I’m as much a victim as the stupid bastards I’ve made my meat.”

Although Ryan and Mildred didn’t respond to his plea for sympathy, Junior pressed on. “That very first night, years ago,” he said, “when cannies came through our swamp, they could’ve butchered me on the spot, but they didn’t do me that favor.

“I was night fishing by myself down by the river. I’d just set my snag line when I heard them sneaking through the mangroves along the mud bank. It was too late to get away. I can’t swim a stroke. They had me sandwiched, all of them with blasters and long blades ready. I thought for sure they were going to eat me then and there. But that wasn’t what they had in mind. Turned out that they needed another hunter to fill out their crew. If I’d said no to joining the pack, they would have sundried strips of my flesh on the bushes and turned me into jerky.

“I didn’t taste human being that night, though there was plenty of eating going on. I ran with the pack, hanging back a little and watching what they did. How they hunted the tiny, shit-scrabble farms on the edges of the swamp, how they swept through the ramshackle buildings, chilling as a team. Some cannies ate way more of the bounty than others. They were the sick ones.

“I was back in my bed in my folks’ shanty before sunup, with no one the wiser. It was triple hard getting to sleep. All I could think about was running free and wild. I’d seen a different world through different eyes. I woke up feverish and dripping sweat the next morning. Through the heat of the day my whole body throbbed. It felt like it was going to explode. I just laid there on my straw and panted like a dog. The coolness of evening eased my fever but not the pressure inside me.

“At dark, when the cannies came back for me, I was shivering I was so ready to join the hunt. When they asked about easy pickings close by, I told them about a little dimmie boy I knew who lived with his pa on the other side of the swamp. I told them the dimmie was blond-haired and freckled—a couple weeks later I would’ve just called him a ‘hundred pounder.’ That’s gutted, hanging weight.

“I tricked the dimmie boy into coming out of his shack by standing at his window and calling his name real soft. He knew me from night fishing, so he didn’t suspect anything. I got him over to the edge of the woods and when his head was turned I whacked him on top of the head with a steel hatchet. I split his skull wide open with the first blow, before he could yell for help from his pa who was sitting in the shack, sipping joy juice, not fifty feet away. The dimmie was still twitching a little when me and the others dragged him deep into the thicket. We picked at his bones until dawn.

“One taste of long pig and I had to have more. I never went back home. Never saw my kin again. I’ve been on the Red Road ever since, with this pack and that.”

“Along the way looks like somebody managed to royally fuck you up,” Ryan said.

“Brother, the way you look, you must’ve pissed somebody off, too.”

Ryan shrugged.

“I got this face three years ago,” Junior said. “Dirt farmer heard our pack coming through her corn field and took her kids down in the root cellar to hide. We shot holes through the wooden door until we figured we must’ve nailed her. When I opened the hatch everything was quiet below, so I jumped down for a looksee. About then her oldest son cut loose with a black-powder handblaster. He got off one shot before I had hold of him. His pistol ball missed my head by a gnat’s ass, but the muzzle-flash caught me square in the peeper. Felt like hellfire burning into my brain. I screamed, but I didn’t let go. The others had to pry my fingers off the kid’s busted neck so they could fry him.”

“Maybe I should just go ahead and kill this filthy bastard,” Mildred said through gritted teeth.

“That’s your call,” Ryan said.

“Brother, your woman there isn’t telling you the whole story,” Junior informed him.

“About what?” Ryan said.

“The oozies.”

“Mildred, what’s he on about?”

“According to Junior, the oozies does more than chill,” she replied. “He claims it turns norms into cannies. The infection comes first, then strict cannibalism, and finally the array of debilitating symptoms leading to death.”

“Either of you ever see a norm with the oozies?” Junior added.

Ryan couldn’t say that he ever had. “Is that even possible?” he asked Mildred.

“Hypothetically, I suppose it is. If the oozie virus permanently alters the brain chemistry of its victims, it could affect sensory perception, ideation and ultimately behavior.”

“Nukin’ hell!” Ryan exclaimed as he followed that premise to its logical conclusion.

“You got it,” Mildred said. “If what Junior says is true, sooner or later, and long before I’m dead, I’ll end up just like him.”

“Not going to let that happen,” Ryan said. “No fucking way.” Rising to his feet, he unsheathed his panga. He leaned over one of the dead cannies and smeared the heavy blade with congealing blood.

“This what you want?” he asked Junior as he waved the bloody knife under his nose.

Whining, Junior craned his neck as far forward as he could. He opened his mouth wide and started to drool. The look on his face said he would have eaten his own hand if had he been able to reach it.

“Where did the oozie medicine come from?” Ryan said.

“For a lick, brother. I’ll tell you all about it for one little lick.”

“Answer the question, then mebbe I’ll give it to you.”

“Got the medicine down in the homeland. From La Golondrina.”

“What’s La Golondrina?”

“Who. She’s a who. Gimme my lick…” Junior thrust out a gray-coated tongue. Stretching. Stretching.

When Ryan pulled back the glistening panga, the cannie started to shake violently from head to foot. “Stop playing games, shitbag,” Cawdor said. “And spill it.”

“La Golondrina’s a freezie,” Junior hissed. “As far as anybody knows, she was the first case of the oozies. She came down with the sickness before the nukecaust. She was the very first cannie, too. Did some hunting on her own down in southern Siana until the predark law caught up with her. Law turned her over to the whitecoats for testing. They couldn’t cure her, and they were afraid the disease might somehow get out and spread. The legend says they put La Golondrina into some sort of deep sleep when she was in the last stages of dying. She was frozen, sort of. She woke up about a year ago, after there was some sort of malfunction. She still had the oozies, but it was too weak to chill her.”

“What’s that got to do with the medicine you took?” Ryan said.

“One drop of her precious blood keeps a hundred of us alive, brother. The word about La Golondrina’s healing power spread from pack to pack all across Deathlands. Cannies started pilgrimaging from the farthest corners to find her and be saved from the Gray Death. They’re still coming.”

Ryan turned and gave Mildred a dubious look.

“There had to be a Patient Zero, Ryan,” Mildred said with conviction. “An initial human case. If this woman survived, whether because of the freezing or thawing process, or the duration of her cryosleep, or some other unknown factor, she had to have produced antibodies to the disease. If oozie-infected blood can kill, blood with oozie antibodies can save.”

“Do you have to take the medicine more than once to be protected?” Mildred asked Junior. “Does its effect wear off over time?”

“Don’t know. I’ve only taken it the once. Four months ago. I haven’t gotten any worse.”

“It may not be a complete cure,” Mildred said. “In low concentrations, it could be just a temporary treatment, a palliative that has to be repeated to keep the final stage at bay.”

“How do we find this freezie?” Ryan asked the cannie.

Junior cackled, sensing a sudden turn of fortune. “You don’t,” he said. “Not without me to guide you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You need me, brother. If what we did to you norms down in the valley was hell, the homeland in Siana is hell on wheels. You’ll never get close to La Golondrina without my help.”

“Let’s talk outside a minute,” Mildred told Ryan.

As they left the cave, Junior’s shrill pleas echoed against their backs. “Feed me! You promised you’d feed me!”

Squinting at the bright morning light, Mildred and Ryan stared across the wide river valley. They could see fires still burning out of control in the no-name ville.

“What happens to me is no longer the issue,” Mildred said gravely. “I don’t matter anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a much bigger problem, Ryan. Until now the oozies kept a lid on the population and spread of cannies. Until now it was one hundred percent fatal. If there’s a treatment that lifts that lid, there’s nothing to stop the disease and cannies from overrunning the continent. Every norm in Deathlands is a potential new cannie or cannie victim.”

“How can we follow a stinking bastard who’d eat his own mother if given the chance?”

“We don’t have any choice, other than hiding our heads in the sand. We’ve got to turn off the spigot once and for all, or every night is going to be like last night—or worse. We’ve got to find La Golondrina and kill her.”

“Jak’s gonna take the news about Siana triple hard,” Ryan said. “And the whole crew is gonna to be mighty unhappy if we bring Junior back alive.”

“Ville folk aren’t going to like it much, either. We have to convince them that he’s too valuable to chill.”

“Tough sell all around.”

As if to underscore his point, a familiar cry echoed in the cave behind them. “Feed me!”

“Junior won’t survive the journey unless we let him eat a little something,” Mildred said.

“Little is what he’s going to get. If we keep the bastard hungry, we keep him honest.”

Chapter Four

Naked to the waist except for her Army-issue bra, Mildred squatted beside the creek, sloshing her T-shirt in a shallow pool. She washed off the crusted vomit and gore, then wrung it out and pulled it back on, still wet and clinging. No way she could wash the smell from the inside of her nose. The cannie cave’s greasy pall of melted fat and burned flesh clung to her skin and hair, as well. Inside and out, she felt soiled, contaminated.

She inventoried her physical state with as much professional detachment as she could manage. In the wake of the forced feeding and projectile vomiting, her stomach ached like she’d swallowed, then expelled, a five-pound cannonball. There was no evidence of fever, though. According to Junior Tibideau, he had come down with symptoms overnight, after his first contact with the Siana pack. No flesh-eating on his part.

“Woke up cannie.”

An unlikely outcome, Mildred knew.

If oozie virus was inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it would take several days, perhaps even a week or two, to build up to the point where increased production of white blood cells would cause his body temperature to rise to the fever point. She also knew that brain lesions and radical changes in behavior didn’t happen suddenly in the absence of violent head trauma. Mildred concluded that Junior was flat-out lying, trying to deflect the blame for his vile actions, which were more voluntary than he wanted to let on; this in order to minimize or eliminate punishment. The wretched, weak-willed bastard didn’t want to admit that he had been so easily seduced by the cannie lifestyle.

Junior had proved himself a liar, so how could she believe him about the existence of the oozie medicine?

He wasn’t the only source of that information. The cannie with the caved-in head had bragged about it before Junior had dosed her, while they were still in complete control of the situation. So it couldn’t have been a lie calculated to keep the miserable bastards alive, or to make her a compliant member of the pack by dangling survival under her nose.

Before they left the cave, Mildred and Ryan had decided that she would have the only close contact with Junior. They couldn’t be sure how contagious the infection was; and she was already exposed to the max. Mildred checked his shoulder and found a superficial flesh wound, which she cleaned, but didn’t bother to stitch.

Then at blasterpoint they turned him loose for a couple of minutes on the dead ’uns.

It was triple hard to watch him go at it. He fed like a ravening animal on his own, downed packmate. Mildred couldn’t help but think she might be looking at her own future, and even more horrifying, the future of her companions. She had driven Junior off the charred corpse with a sharp blow of her pistol butt on the top of his head and a single, barked command. “Enough!”

She picked up her gunbelt and rose, still dripping, from the creekside.

Thirty feet upslope, Ryan guarded the cannie with his SIG-Sauer. Junior’s wrists were tied behind him. A thick, four-foot length of tree limb was thrust between his back and crooks of his arms. This served to keep the prisoner bent slightly at the waist, off balance; he couldn’t run five steps without falling on his face. Which made him much easier to handle. They didn’t have to keep him on a short leash.

Under a clear blue midday sky they continued across the Grand Ronde valley. In the distance, the ville’s dirt-and-log berm was still burning, sending up clouds of brown smoke and soot. As they neared the encampment’s perimeter, they could hear sounds of weeping, coughing and the intermittent crunch of shovels gouging the stony earth. When the blinding smoke shifted, it revealed a line of women, children and oldies digging a long communal grave in the hard-pan.

On the other side of the trench, more than twenty bodies were lined up on the ground, shoulder to shoulder. Young, old, male, female. Hacked. Shot. Incinerated. They had manned the barricades and defended the rutted lanes with their lives. Some had died trying to escape the cannie wolf packs. Mildred knew there were many more ville folk missing. On their descent of the valley, she and Ryan had come across numerous sets of tracks in the sand, twin, parallel tracks made by bootheels, the last impressions of unconscious victims as they were dragged away.

Downwind of the diggers, a wide, shallow pit belched low flame and coils of black smoke. Doused with gasoline, the heaped cannie dead were burning like garbage on a midden.

Mildred visualized ten thousand such narrow Pyrrhic victories. Adding up to an unwinable war against an implacable, ever-growing foe. After the long, valiant struggle up from the radioactive ash heap of Armageddon, it was the end of humanity’s hope. With considerable effort, she drove the awful images from her mind.

“Stop right there!” someone shouted from behind the berm. “Stop or we’ll fire!”

Blaster barrels poked over the berm’s ridge, and here and there through crude firing ports. Every sight was trained on them.

“Who you got there?”

Even at a distance Junior Tibideau’s identity was obvious from his filth, his disfigurement and his overwhelming carrion stench.

“That’s a cannie!” one of the grave-digging women cried, pointing at him with her shovel. “They caught a cannie!”

“Chill the bastard!” another woman shouted.

“Pulp his fucking head!” shrieked an oldie.

The column of gravediggers surged forward, waving shovels, clubs and pickaxes.

Mildred and Ryan drew their blasters but held fire. They had no cover. Shooting the diggers would only bring a withering response from the blasters along the berm.

For a second it looked as if they were going to be overrun and surrounded, perhaps summarily clubbed down by the mob. Then blasterfire chattered, freezing the crowd’s advance. The ville folk craned their necks to locate the source of the shooting.

J.B. stepped out of the berm gate with a smoking AKS aimed in the air. Mildred figured he had picked up the assault rifle from a dead attacker or defender. Jak, Krysty and Doc followed him with their blasters out and ready. They quickly formed ranks around Mildred, Ryan and Junior. Shoving, kicking, threatening, they made the diggers retreat toward the gate.

The companions regarded the trussed-up cannie with surprise and displeasure.

“What in dark night are you doing, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“Why he not dead?” Jak demanded, aiming his .357 revolver at Junior’s heart.

The mob cheered his question.

“Hang him high,” someone in the rear of the throng shouted.

“Skin him first,” a haggard, blood-stained woman countered.

Junior grinned nervously from around Ryan’s back.

“Let us have him,” the woman said. “Let us punish him, and no harm will come to any of you.”

“Can’t do that,” Ryan told her. “We need him alive for the time being. He’s ours. We’re not going to give him up.”

“Then you’re going to die, too, cannie lover.”

“Mebbe they’ve all gone cannie?” someone cried. “Chill ’em all!”

The crowd picked up the chant. “Chill ’em all! Chill ’em all!”

“How soon they forget,” Doc chided, sweeping the twin muzzles of his Le Mat over the crowd of mostly women, children and geriatrics. He shook his head. “This, dear friends, is an abomination.”

“We saved your rad-blasted bacon last night!” J.B. hollered at the belligerents. “Wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be one of you ungrateful bastards left!”

The truth silenced the mob for a moment.

“Too many good folks have died here, already,” Ryan told them. “Don’t make us add to it.”

“We don’t want you here no more,” an oldie brandishing a pickax informed him.

The ville folk shouted in agreement, spreading out and blocking the gate with their bodies and grave-digging tools.

“Don’t matter what you did or didn’t do for us last night,” said the haggard woman. “We can’t trust you today. Take your pet cannie and make tracks out of here. That’s all the thanks you’re going to get.”

One of the children picked up a stone and chucked it at them. Another did the same. Soon the companions were being pelted with showers of rocks, large and small.

“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. growled, touching off another clattering air burst, emptying the weapon’s 30-round magazine. The stone throwers scattered for cover. J.B. tossed the AKS aside as the companions rapidly backed out of range. There was no pursuit, no longblaster fire from the berm. The ville folk were content to see them gone.

“We have been cast out, like lepers,” Doc said.

“Like what?” J.B. said.

“The accursed, the afflicted, the unclean.”

“The misunderstood,” Mildred added.

J.B. scowled at what were to him unintelligible predark references. He turned on Ryan, scowl intact. “We want an explanation,” he said.

Mildred provided it. In clipped, emotionless terms, she described exactly what had been done to her.

The companions stood stunned as their battlemate read out her own death sentence.

Then J.B. swung his 12-gauge pump to hip height and advanced on the prisoner with murder in his eye.

Mildred blocked his path, pushing the wide barrel aside.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Couldn’t we catch it, too,” Krysty blurted, “just from being around him?”

She didn’t add, “And around you.”

She didn’t have to.

The companions were incensed, sickened, grief-stricken, but deep down Mildred knew what they were thinking.

That death walked among them.

Horrible, lingering death.

“If you could catch it that way,” Mildred said, “you’ve already got it, Krysty. We were all in the cave, in the confined space, all breathing the same contaminated air.”

“Why haven’t you chilled that unspeakable degenerate?” Doc demanded.

“Because there might be a cure, Doc,” Ryan replied. “And he’s the only one who knows where to find it.”

Mildred recounted the story to the companions. She told them about the supposed existence of the freezie Patient Zero, the putative first victim and the first survivor of the oozies. She told them about the supposed ability of La Golondrina’s blood to prolong the lives of the terminally afflicted. She didn’t have to explain the double downside of cannie longevity and the resulting spread of infection.

Because she owed nothing less than the whole truth to her friends, she also told them about the possibility that the disease and the cannie lifestyle were linked.

“Turn cannie on us?” Jak said in disbelief.

“Not if the medicine really exists,” Ryan countered at once.

“If it does exist and we can find it before the infection takes hold of me,” Mildred added, “I may have a chance. It’s my only chance.”

“Where is this Patient Zero?” Krysty said.

“Louisiana,” Ryan answered. “In what our prisoner, there, calls the cannie homeland.”

After a moment of shocked silence, the albino teen snarled a blistering curse. “Know people there,” he growled, advancing on Junior. “Left friends. Cannies take over?”

The companions had recently left Jak’s birthplace after taking down an evil baron. How quickly things changed.

“How the fuck do I know?” Junior replied in defiance.

“Only way to find out for sure is to go back, Jak,” Mildred said, putting her hand on his slim shoulder.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, my dear Ryan,” Doc said as he leaned heavily on his walking stick, “but are you and Mildred proposing that to save her we six enter the belly of this slouching beast, that we steal its greatest treasure, this life-giving serum, and to fore-stall any repetition of the threat we currently face, that we hunt down and chill the cannibals’ queen?”

“Nothing less,” the one-eyed man said. “Any objections?”

Though on its face the task seemed impossible there was none.

One by one, the companions turned toward Mildred and nodded their assent. They had long ago thrown their lots together, to do or die. They valued the lives of their comrades more than their own. A pact signed in sweat and blood. A pact of selflessness and sacrifice that served the survival of all.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to backtrack to the Hells Canyon redoubt for another mat-trans jump,” J.B. said.

The return trip was a four-day hike. But it was more than just a hard, uphill trek. Their descent along predark Highway 84 had been perilous, to say the least. Cannie snipers had taken potshots at them from the ridgetops all during the day; after dark, the flesheaters had come out in force. In beating back the cannies their third night on the road, the companions had nearly run out of ammo. If they hadn’t reached the ville berm by nightfall on the fourth day, they never would have survived.

“We’ve got no choice,” Ryan said. “Walking to Louisiana isn’t an option. Check your ammo and food.”

“We’re full up in that department,” J.B. told him. He, Krysty, Doc and Jak had spent their morning searching the ville’s rutted lanes, scavenging appropriate caliber centerfire cartridges from the dead, norm and cannie; and gathering unspoiled eats. Their pockets and packs bulged with the booty.

“Then let’s get a move on,” Cawdor said. “We’ve already lost most of the day. We’ve got to find cover we can defend before sundown.”

With Jak in the lead, the companions and their bound captive turned their backs on the ruined ville and headed north, along the newly christened stretch of the Red Road, the Highway of Blood.

Chapter Five

A rifle slug whined a foot over Ryan’s head, slamming with explosive force into the underside of an uptilted slab of road bed. The one-eyed man instinctively averted his face as he ran on; flying shards of concrete stung the back of his head and smacked his shoulder.

Then came the gun crack.

From the time delay, the cannie shooters were five hundred or more yards away. They were firing from well-concealed, hardsite positions on the slopes above the highway. The snipers had the kill zone zeroed in, but because of the distances involved they couldn’t predict exactly where their targets were going to be when the bullets landed downrange.

The companions were doing their best to complicate the problem. They zigged and zagged along the rutted wag tracks on the shoulder of the ruined highway. Their advantage was in speed and in erratic movement, in being someplace else when the slugs hit. Highway 84, itself, was impassable to wags and an obstacle course for foot traffic. The jumble of fractured concrete plates and eroded asphalt was the result of earthquake, flooding and a lack of maintenance or repair for more than a century. To run the highway proper would have been suicide. The companions couldn’t move quickly enough over the tangle of rubble.

Ten feet in front of Ryan and five feet behind Krysty, who was running ahead of him, another heavy-caliber rifle slug plowed into the concrete, sparked and whined off into the trees.

It was like being the turkeys in a turkey shoot.

Ryan and his companions handled the danger the only way they could, by blocking out the possibility that the next incoming round had their name on it and by concentrating on giving the snipers the most difficult targets. Seasoned fighters all, they sorely hated holding fire when under attack. But they knew they had to conserve their ammo and use it only when kills were absolutely assured. The only one with the firepower to reach out and touch their harassers was Ryan. And given the cover of the enemy and the distances involved, even he couldn’t be certain of a lethal hit with his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle.

The cannies’ use of snipers was a switch from the tactics and behavior Ryan and the others had come to expect. Flesheater packs usually chilled up close and personal, this so the chillers could battle over and take their respective shares of the spoils. Snipers who scored a hit from half a mile away would lose out to their brethren hiding much closer to the roadway. It was an unworkable situation unless the cannies were sharing the bounty in a more highly organized way, a way not based on brutal dog-eat-dog dominance. A real army instead of a gaggle of loosely knit bands.

Ahead was a testament to the effectiveness of this new strategy. A string of waylaid wags dotted the highway’s shoulder. The convoy was made up of crudely armored minivans, pickups, SUVs and RVs. The burned-out, overturned hulks were pocked with bullet impacts. Strewed along the ground were stripped, charred human skeletons, obviously cooked on the spot. No other convoy had passed this way in a while. The wrecked wags hadn’t been shoved out of the ruts to clear the path for traffic.

Cannies were picking apart the trade route, and doing a bang-up job of it.

Their cannie prisoner stumbled along near the end of the file. Doc acted as a rear guard and pacesetter, poking and whacking the flesheater with his sheathed swordstick whenever he started to lag behind. From the determined, head-down way Junior Tibideau ran, Ryan got the impression that he wasn’t sure his cannie kin would free him if given the chance. He was helpless, already trussed up, prime for spit-roasting.

Ryan had no doubt that cannies hid among the dense stands of fir trees above the highway. They were keeping well back from danger, letting the long-distance chillers do the work. If one of the bullets struck home, and the companions abandoned the unlucky victim, they would sweep in like cockroaches for the feast. Their bottomless appetites were balanced by a healthy fear of destruction. Darkness increased their courage and magnified their hunger pangs. The degenerate humans had largely become nocturnal hunters; that was when their chosen prey was the most vulnerable. Night blind. Sleepy. Easily approached. When cannies committed to an attack, day or night, they were almost impossible to turn back. Like cougars or jaguars, once switched on, once they had a target selected, nothing less than a bullet in the brain would switch them off.

The highway shooting gallery was the fastest and safest route to the Hells Canyon redoubt. It was the best of the bad choices available to them. Ryan could have led the others on a more direct forest route, shortcutting up and over the mountains, but the chances for a close range ambush there were too great. The trees were too tightly packed. Slopes too steep. Progress too slow. And it was perfect terrain for concealing deadfall and pit traps. Or antipers mines. Cannies weren’t fussy about picking their dinners out of the branches.

Besides, Ryan had mentally mapped this road on the descent; he didn’t know anything about the mountains. He had already selected the best defensive sites. There was no hope of reaching the spot where they had spent their last night on the highway and successfully turned back the cannies. They had gotten too late a start to make it all the way there. One of the secondary sites was going to have to do. A dead-end side canyon, mebbe. Mebbe a cave. A place with a single opening they could defend until dawn.

Daylight was already starting to fade around them, the sky edging from azure to brilliant turquoise to lavender.

Ryan sensed movement behind the dark trunks and thick branches of the trees on both sides of the road, but saw no targets. They were being tracked by more and more flesheaters; a gathering storm shadowed them. The intermittent rifle fire was the dinner bell ringing.

Fifty yards ahead, an enormous hump transected the ruined roadway from shoulder to shoulder. It looked as though a gargantuan tree root had torn through the pavement. On the way down they had made a detour around the partially heaved-up, ten-foot-diameter culvert.

Jak was within fifteen feet of the hump when heavy slugs slapped the earth; not one at a time, but in an un-godly hail, sending dust, bits of rock and bullet fragments flying. It was a triangulated crossfire from rifles stationed on the ridgetops on either side of them. These weren’t bolt guns; these were semiauto longblasters with 30- or 40-round magazines, all working in unison to frame and seal off a predetermined kill zone.

The albino youth ducked through the roiling dust and skidded down into the wide mouth of the culvert. It was the only hard cover close enough for them to reach. Krysty, J.B. and Mildred disappeared inside after him. Ryan followed, striding into the knee-deep, standing water. Doc and the cannie made it safely, as well, although Junior tripped and slid headfirst into the stagnant slop. Doc grabbed him by the collar and jerked him back up, dripping. The bath might have done Junior some good had the surface not been topped with a dense mat of bright green scum and floating human bones.

The clamor continued for a full minute as the cannie snipers poured fire onto the exposed top of the massive, corrugated steel pipe. It was ineffective in terms of penetration, but the roar of bullet impacts was deafening. They shook loose the crusted dirt from the top of the pipe; it fell on the companions’ heads and rained down into the water, making it hard to see and hard to breathe without coughing.

Then the shooting stopped.

Gradually the dust settled and the ringing in their ears faded.

“Everyone okay?” Ryan asked, looking from face to face.

There were nods all around.

“Not going to be so lucky for long,” J.B. said. “If they can keep us pinned down in here until sundown, we’re dead. Cannies can come at us unopposed from three directions.”

Krysty stared into the darkness that led under the highway. “This pipe is mebbe a hundred feet long,” she said. “Could be open at the other end, or ruptured someplace between here and there with a hole big enough for cannies to slip through.”

“Wouldn’t have to be that big,” J.B. said. “Just big enough to drop in a few grens, and we’d be their next meal.”

“Wonder why didn’t they spring this trap on us on the way down?” Mildred said.

“Trap not set,” Jak said.

“Mebbe they learned something when we slipped past them on foot the last time,” Krysty suggested.

“While it’s still light, I’ve got to do a recce up the pipe,” Ryan said. “If there’s no holes and if other end is blocked off, we might be able to hold out from here—we’ve got ourselves a ten-foot-wide shooting lane, if we mass our fire we can control the entrance and keep the bastards off us. If there’s another way in, we’re going to have to make a break for it.”

“Come, too,” Jak volunteered.

Ryan trudged ahead, sloshing through the vile water. He advanced with his handblaster drawn in case they already had company in the culvert. The deeper they went, the darker it got. The smell of death and corruption couldn’t have gotten worse. Again and again, Ryan nudged aside unseen floating objects with his knees.

After fifty feet, it began to get brighter and brighter, until he could make out a wide shaft of light piercing the gloom, illuminating a charred rib cage that bobbed in the slime.

“Bad luck,” Jak said as they looked up at the wide rent in the steel cylinder. The split ran from the top of the pipe halfway down its side. It was easily large enough for a man to slip through.

Ryan holstered his SIG-Sauer and passed Jak his longblaster, then he climbed up into the split and pulled himself out on his belly, crawling into the shadows beneath a shelf of uptilted concrete. After scanning the tree lines above them, he retreated back down the hole.

“No point in going all the way to the end of the pipe,” Ryan told Jak as he took back his Steyr. “We can’t stay the night here. Go back to the entrance. Draw some fire from the snipers so I can pinpoint their hides.”

Without a word, the albino teen turned and splashed off into the darkness.

Ryan crawled back out into the softening light. He squirmed into a comfortable prone position under the angled slab and dug in his elbows. Downrange, a wall of trees loomed in front of him. The snipers could have been hidden anywhere. He opened the rifle bolt and snicked it back an inch, making sure a round was chambered. Then he flipped up both of the scope’s lens caps. With the setting sun behind him, he wasn’t worried about a reflection off his front lens giving away his position.

Ryan didn’t sight through the scope. He needed as wide a field of view as possible to locate the targets. But he did drop the Steyr’s safety and snug its butt firmly against his shoulder. While he waited for Jak to make his move, Ryan listened to his own heartbeat and consciously relaxed, breathing deeply to slow it. He smelled the forest. Clean. Green. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Ryan stretched out the pause between heart-beats, getting the rhythm right, finding the null, the shooting space.

From far behind him came a clatter of boots as Jak jumped out of the end of the pipe.

The snipers were waiting for just such a move.

Bullets screamed over Ryan’s head, then came the flurry of sharp reports. Multiple, tightly spaced shots made the blasters easier to find against the dark curtain of trees. Ryan caught the faint orange wink of a muzzle-blast as Jak continued to draw sustained fire. The hide was a stand sixty feet up a fir tree. Ryan looked through the scope and rested its crosshairs below the erratic flash, adjusting his aimpoint for the distance and the forty-five-degree uphill shot. Then, with his cheek against the stock and his finger curled lightly around the trigger, he concentrated on his heartbeat.

Thud. Pause.

Thud. Pause.

He steadily tightened down on the trigger, taking up the slack, bringing it to breakpoint.

Thud. Pause.

Thud—

With a thunderclap roar the 7.62 mm slug sailed away.

The Steyr punched Ryan hard in the shoulder. Tensing his muscles, he rode the recoil, swinging the scope back on target. In the field of view, fringed tree limbs shivered as a body fell heavily through them. Then they were still.

The other two long blasters continued to rage. Jak’s odds of being hit increased with every passing second.

Cycling the Steyr’s action, Ryan quickly located the second target up the highway to his left on a high outcrop that jutted like the bow of a vast black ship from amid the tall trees. A more difficult shot because of the solid cover.

Ryan settled into position, adjusting his aimpoint through the scope. As his finger tightened on the trigger, as he was about to ice the crossfire and open the way for the companions’ escape, he heard crunching sounds coming toward him.

Footfalls.

Hard, running footfalls from the other side of the highway.

Swinging the rifle barrel down, he looked over the scope and saw three figures dashing along the hump, straight for him.

He snapfired and hit the lead cannie in the midsection, blowing him off his feet and flat onto his behind.

As Ryan worked the bolt to eject the spent shell, handblasters blazed and bullets chipped the concrete rubble on either side of him. The cannies were trying to reach and control the hole in the pipe.

Ryan fired again and the 173-grain, M-118 slug blew through the flesheater’s chest, taking most of his heart with it. The cannie’s momentum sent him crashing, spread-armed onto his face.

The third cannie was undaunted by the deaths of his pals. On the run, he dumped an empty mag. As he slapped home a fresh one, he stumbled on a loose bit of rock. It took only a second for the cannie to regain his balance, but by the time he snicked his blaster’s action closed, Ryan had cycled another live round into the Steyr’s breech and pushed up to his knees.

Before the cannie could bring his blaster to bear, Ryan shot him in the front of the throat, just under the chin, taking out three inches of his spinal column. Instant chill. The body dropped rag-doll limp, its head connected to torso by glistening threads of muscle.

Concrete exploded ten inches from Ryan’s nose, peppering the side of his face. As he ducked, he heard the hollow boom. The sniper up in the rocks was now targeting him, trying to pin him down. At the far end of the pipe, he could see more cannies filtering out of the trees. Swarms of them. They knew where he was, too. Their bullets zinged all around him.

Under concentrated fire, Ryan backed down the hole and hit the water running.

He shouted the bad news to his waiting companions. “They’re closing in quick. Light’s fading. We’ve got to break out. It’s now or never. Move fast, move low. Jak, you take the point.”

J.B. rammed his fedora tight onto his head and pushed his spectacles against the bridge of his nose. “Let’s do it,” he said.

As Jak lunged for the culvert entrance, the distant crash of steel on steel, of breaking glass, and the screech of bending metal stopped him in his tracks. Then from down the highway they heard the rumble and roar of powerful wag engines.

A second later came the unmistakable, full-auto, rolling thunder of an M-60 machine gun.

“It would appear we have company,” Doc said.

Chapter Six

Ryan led the others out of the pipe. They peered over the top of the concrete rubble as the chatter of machine-gun fire and the howl of engines got louder. This while cannie return fire dwindled to nothing.

The wag convoy lumbered uphill toward them. Huge, hulking forms bounced over the ruts, headlights off in the gloaming. The M-60 atop the second wag swept the far side of the roadway, streaming white hot tracers over their heads.

“Keep down,” Ryan warned the others. “They might mistake us for cannies.”

With nothing to distinguish them from the enemy, rescuers could quickly turn into executioners.

It turned out not to be a problem.

The convoy crews had already assessed the situation and singled out the good guys from the bad.

The lead vehicle was a dually tow truck with a high cab and a wedge-shaped steel snowplow attached to its front bumper. Overlapping steel plates protected the cab and windows. The tow truck pulled past the culvert entrance and stopped, giving the companions cover with its broad flank. Then the driver and passenger cracked the armored doors and opened fire over the hinges at fleeing cannies with night sight-equipped, Russian SKS semiauto longblasters.

From the clatter of the sustained gunfire, their rescuers had deduced what was going on up the road. As a rule, cannies didn’t wage all-out war on one another. The wag crews knew what an unfolding ambush sounded like.

A gray-primered Suburban 4x4 rolled up behind the tow truck and parked. The Suburban’s chassis was jacked up for two feet of additional ground clearance. The windows, grille, hood and wheel wells were covered by crudely welded sections of steel plate; gaps left between the plates served as view and firing ports. A hole had been cut in the roof amidships, providing a gunner access to an M-60 mounted on a circular track. The 7.62 mm machine gun’s arc of fire encompassed an unobstructed 360 degrees.

A vehicle for the serious, postnuke entrepreneur.

The back doors of the SUV popped open and a burly giant of a man jumped out. He shouldered the RPG he carried and took aim at the edge of forest on far side of the road.

With a blistering whoosh the rocket launched and seconds later came the whump of explosion. Trees along the opposite shoulder fireballed. In the hard flash of light Ryan saw cannie silhouettes cartwheeling through the air and the survivors scattering like rats low and fast into the forest.

The tow truck crew continued to peck away at cannie wounded and stragglers. The crews from the other wags joined them, raining fire on the enemy caught out in the open. The convoy was the usual jumble of predark makes and models, but they all had horsepower to spare. Serious muscle was required to move the weight of cargo, armor and personnel over the wasteland.

“Look at the bastards run!” the RPG shooter said with pleasure.

He was a mountain of a man, nearly as tall as Ryan, but a hundred pounds heavier, solid muscle covered with a thick layer of jellylike blubber. Most of his weathered face was hidden by a full brown beard. He wore stained, denim bibfronts and a black leather vest with no shirt underneath. He didn’t need one. The layers of fat and the mat of hair on his back, shoulders, arms and chest provided plenty of insulation.

“You the convoy master?” Ryan asked, checking out the man’s personal armament. The twin, well-worn, bluesteel .357 Magnum Desert Eagles in black ballistic nylon shoulder holsters looked like peashooters tucked under his massive arms. The mountain reeked of joy juice, stale tobacco and gasoline.

“Harlan Sprue’s the name,” he said. “You look mighty familiar to me. Mr…?”

The one-eyed man hesitated a moment. “Ryan Cawdor.”

“Not the same Cawdor what used to run with Trader?”

“Same.”

“I locked horns with you and your old crew once, back east,” he said. “We had ourselves a little disagreement over ownership of some predark knickknacks. You probably don’t recognize me now. I was quite a few pounds lighter back then.”

“I remember you, Sprue,” Ryan said. “You weren’t any lighter in those days and as I recall, you lost the argument.”

“Memory is a funny thing. I recollect just the opposite.” Sprue looked over the other companions. When he got to J.B., he stopped and grinned broadly. “Four-eyes was with you then, too,” he said. “One mean, sawed-off little bastard.”

“You got that right, fat man,” J.B. said, shifting the weight of his pump gun on its shoulder sling. “Only I got even less patience nowadays.”

When Sprue took in Junior Tibideau, his hairy smile twisted into a scowl. “You caught yourselves a cannie?” he said incredulously. “Looks like a sick un, too. Are you out of your rad-blasted minds? That’s like taking a mutie rattler into bed. For a thank you, he’ll bite you in your ass first chance he gets.”

“He isn’t going to bite anybody,” Ryan said.

Then a single sniper round skipped off the Suburban’s hood and whined into the trees.

Which drew a volley of answering fire from the wag crews.

When the shooting stopped, Sprue said, “We’ve got to move a ways up the road before the bastards regroup. You can pile in the 6x6 at the end of the line. All of you but that cannie. My crews won’t share a wag with a goddamned, oozie-drippin’ flesheater. They’ll blow him out of his socks soon as look at him. If you want him to keep on breathing, you’d better tie him to the back bumper and let him hoof it.”

To lead a wag convoy through the hellscape, to deal with Nature run amok at every turn, to face coldheart robbers and mutie attacks, a person had to be one hard-headed, pedal-to-the-metal son of a bitch, the kind of leader who never buckled, never bent, who kept on pushing until he or she got where he or she wanted to go.

For Ryan, looking at Harlan Sprue was like seeing himself in a distorted, carny show mirror.

There was only one way to argue with that kind of man, and that was with a well-aimed bullet.

This wasn’t the time or place for that kind of an argument.

The companions trotted down to the idling 6x6. J.B., Jak, Krysty and Doc scrambled up onto the armor-sided cargo bed. The Armorer threw Mildred a coil of rope he found inside, and she slipped it around Junior’s waist, and, leaving about fifteen feet of slack, tied him to the wag’s back bumper.

“You could take this tree limb off my back, Mildred,” the cannie said. “Make it easier for me to keep up.”

“Yeah, I could, but I won’t. Making your life easier isn’t way up there on my to-do list.”

“How far are we going?”

“We’ll both know when we get there.”

Doc leaned over the bumper. “Best step lively, cannie,” was his sage advice.

As the wags at the head of the file started moving, Ryan climbed up on the 6x6 cab’s step. He spoke through the louvres melted through the side window’s steel plate. “Take it easy,” he warned the driver, “you’re towing a prisoner on foot.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure and do that,” a hoarse-voiced woman replied. Then she gunned the engine and popped the clutch.

The big wag lurched ahead. Ryan had to hustle to swing up beside Mildred and the others.

No way could the cannie keep up. He fell after a dozen steps and was dragged across the dirt on his belly. Lucky for Junior Tibideau, progress was stop and go as the heavily loaded wags in front maneuvered around the route’s deepest ruts. Before Mildred could hop down to help him, before the wag could roll on, Junior jumped back to his feet, grinning fiendishly.

“Piece of crap,” was Mildred’s terse assessment.

To Ryan, she still seemed normal. On top of her game even. He wanted to make sure.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“No problems as far that I can tell. Got my fingers crossed.”

So had Ryan.

Behind him, a propane lantern swinging from a roof strut cast a wildly shifting light over the interior. On either side of the truck bed were battened-down fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline and joy juice leaking fumes, and smaller drums marked “Drinking Water.” Between the barrels were stacks of car batteries, long wooden crates of ammo and unmarked boxes of other trade goods. The enclosed space—windowless except for rifle firing ports—smelled like a bear pit. Wag crews had been camping out in back of the truck for months, perhaps years. Five pairs of eyes stared back at Ryan with suspicion and disdain. The other three crewmembers were so disinterested in the newcomers that they had already curled up and gone back to sleep on their rag pile beds among the crates.

The howl of the 6x6’s engine and the groans and shrieks of its springs as it jolted over the track made conversation as well as rest impossible.

For about half an hour, the convoy continued along the shoulder of Highway 84, stop and go. Occasionally a rifle round or two would spang into the truck’s side armor, but there was no concerted attack, no enemy regrouping of any consequence.

When a horn up front honked, the wags slowed to a crawl and circled for the night. Virtually bumper to bumper.

Ryan jumped from the truck bed. The convoy had parked on a flat field of hardpacked earth. The stars were out in force.

Junior Tibideau nowhere in sight, but one end of the rope was still tied to the bumper. Cawdor squatted and peered under the wag.

The cannie cowered on his knees behind the rear axle. He knew how much danger he was in. “You gotta protect me, brother,” he insisted. “If you let me get chilled, your woman friend is gonna die hard.”

Ryan didn’t need the reminder.

When he straightened, some of the other wag crews were already closing in on the 6x6 with burning torches in hand. Their faces were hard and scarred by struggle.

The companions jumped from the cargo bed and closed ranks, barring access to the cannie.

“Looks like we got ourselves some entertainment tonight,” one of the male drivers said as he peeked under the wag with his torch.

“You don’t wanna mess with our fun,” his shotgun-ner advised the companions.

The 6x6 driver put in her two cents. “Let’s soak the cannie in gas and light him up,” she said. “We can take bets on how many times he makes it around the circle.”

“Slice him open and feed him his own guts,” was another suggestion.

“Stake him outside the circle,” said a skinny crew-man in his late teens. “Use him as live bait to draw in his kin. We can nail a bunch of the bastards that way.”

Ryan understood the depth of their hatred; he shared every millimeter of it. The crews wanted to exercise their power over this pure evil creature. Not just for vengeance’s sake. In a situation of terrible, unknowable threat, there was nothing like a little mindless brutality to take the edge off one’s fear.

“You better stand aside quick, One-Eye,” the 6x6 driver warned, her hand dropping to her holstered Beretta 92.

“Back off, now!” Sprue shouted, clearing a path for himself by shoving the intervening bodies aside. “Cut this droolie bullshit. That cannie ain’t yours to play with. You all got work to do. Set up the defensive perimeter and get dinner a-cooking. Move it! It’s gonna be another long night.”

The would-be disembowelers drifted away without comment. The fat man didn’t have to touch the butts of his Desert Eagles. None of his crew had the guts to try to take him out. Their continued survival depended on his experience and judgment.

A couple of the men set up an iron tripod in the middle of the circle. While one of them built a roaring fire under it, the other began pouring ingredients for supper into a big metal caldron—water, dried beans, root vegetables, wilted tops and all, and unidentifiable chunks of meat and bones. He then dumped handfuls of seasonings into the pot and stirred them in with a long spoon.

Sprue noticed Ryan’s interest in the fixings. “Don’t worry, it ain’t human,” he joked.

It took both cooks to swing the fully loaded pot onto the tripod over the flames.

The convoy master set out a couple of shabby folding lawn chairs upwind of the fire. “Come over here, Cawdor,” he said. “Have yourself a seat while we wait for dinner to boil. You and me need to parlay.”

“Don’t worry about the flesheater,” J.B. assured Ryan. “We’ll hold the fort here.”

As Ryan walked over to Sprue, the convoy master picked up a blue plastic antifreeze jug and twisted off the cap.

“Go on, sit,” he said. He offered his guest the jug. “Swig?”

Ryan sniffed at the contents and frowned. “About ninety octane, I’d say.” He passed the jug back without sampling it.

“How about a nice cee-gar, then?”

Ryan declined, then said, “Your folks look mighty jumpy.”

Sprue’s crew scurried to complete their assigned tasks. They set out extra weapons and ammo, and manned the perimeter, some crawling to firing positions under the wags.

“They’ve got good reason for that,” Sprue told him. “Over the few last weeks, the situation in these parts has been going downhill fast. Cannies have been hitting us almost every night. Half my crew sleeps during the day so they can fight all night. The other half tries to get some rest at night so they can go all day. We’ve kept the bastards out so far, but I gotta tell you it’s starting to wear us down.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“Hard to say for sure,” Sprue answered. “But they’re following the same trade route we are, between here and Slake City. We’ve caught them riding around in wags, just like norms—except for the goddamned sides of smoked meat packed in the trunks. These ain’t no dum-bass muties, for sure. They fight just like us, with blasters. They learn from their mistakes. That’s something a stickie can’t do. Stickie follows instinct, even if instinct says to jump off a cliff. Cannies use their brains.”

The convoy master took a deep swallow from the blue jug, gasped as the alcohol burned its way down his gullet, then shuddered and said, “I want to hear the whole story about your pet flesheater.”

The whole story was something Sprue wasn’t going to get. Ryan had no intention of mentioning their destination, the Hells Canyon redoubt. The companions kept such things to themselves. It’s what gave them a leg up on the competition.

“Have you ever heard of a queen of the cannies?” Ryan asked the bearded fat man. “Down Louisiana way?”

Sprue paused to scratch his chin. His hand disappeared up to the wrist in the tangle of coarse hair. “Can’t say that I have, but it’s been a couple years since I run wags there,” he admitted. “Louisiana norms are good folk for the most part, but they’re shitpoor. Not enough jack thereabouts to make me wanna go back. Don’t like the humidity or the gators, neither.”

“Incoming!” someone shouted from the perimeter.

Suddenly everyone took up the cry. “Incoming! Incoming!”

Ryan and Sprue vaulted from the lawn chairs as streaks of light arced in from the darkness. Streaks of light that hissed as they fell almost lazily into the convoy’s midst.

Crashing to earth, the Molotov cocktails bloomed orange, their explosions sent flaming fuel flying in all directions. It sprayed over wags and a few unlucky crewmembers. Men and women screamed and batted at themselves as they ran and burned. Their comrades immediately caught them and knocked them down. They smothered the flames with blankets and dirt, then dragged the still-smoking, still-screaming victims to cover beneath the wags.

Gunfire roared around the defensive perimeter. Every blaster was cutting loose at once. The din was tremendous; the chill zone a complete circle.

But the gasoline bombs kept falling, turning the center of the ring into a lake of fire.

“It’s all flat ground out there,” Sprue snarled into Ryan’s ear as they crouched beside a van. “There’s no cover for 150 yards in all directions. The throwers should be chopped down by now.”

He was thinking arm toss; he was thinking short range.

He was thinking wrong.

“Catapults,” Ryan told him. “The cannies are using catapults.”

Chapter Seven

As the Molotovs rained down, Mildred stuck to Junior Tibideau like grim death, her fingers gripping the back of his trouser waistband.

Krysty, Jak, J.B. and Doc had also taken cover under the 6x6. On either side of them convoy crew was firing longblasters through gunports and gaps in the wheel well armor. The clatter in the narrow space was earsplitting.

J.B. crawled up against the steel skirt and had a look for himself. He immediately turned on the nearest of the two riflemen. “What the hell are you shooting at?” he shouted. “You can’t see anything out there!”

The prone crewmembers ignored him. He and his pal continued to rattle off frantic, full-auto bursts from their AKs. They had plenty of ammo to burn. Rows of 30-round mags were laid out beside them.

From their panic, Mildred guessed they hadn’t encountered a cannie attack like this before. Up until now Convoy Master Sprue’s strategy for surviving the night had been to pick a campsite he knew they could defend. The response to attacks had been to hunker down and fight back until dawn. Unless the present situation changed radically, by dawn the circled defenders would all be dead. The only option was to pull up stakes and make a run for it before the fires took their toll. But there was a big problem with that. Running could put them in an even worse position in a hurry. The road ahead could be mined. Or blocked by an impassable obstacle. In the dark, strung out without room to circle, the wags would be easy pickings for the cannies.

“Flares! Put up some bastard flares!” the convoy master bellowed to his crews as he ran the inside of the perimeter.

The rest of the companions squirmed up to the 6x6’s steel skirt so they, too, could see downrange. Still holding on to Junior’s pants, Mildred peered under the rear bumper. A few seconds later, 100,000-candlepower illuminating stars burst over the battlefield and slowly floated down on their deployed parachutes.

In the ghastly white light, the companions stared out at a flat expanse. A plain of nothing. No big rocks. No trees. Not so much as a blade of needle grass decorated the pale dirt.

The wild blasterfire around them faltered, then ceased.

Even the hair-trigger crew could see there was nothing for them to shoot at.

The illuminating stars hit the ground, one by one, sputtered and began to wink out. At the edge of the flares’ dying light, a tiny yellow dot arced silently up into the black sky. To the right and left, two more dots shot skyward. They climbed higher and higher until the companions lost track of them as they passed, whistling, overhead.

Then gasoline bombs burst in the center of the circle.

J.B. came to the same conclusion Ryan had. “There’s no sound, no flash when the fuel grens are launched,” he told the others. “They’re using some kind of mechanical launcher. They’ve got them dug in below ground, out of the line of fire. There’s no way to hit and break the Molotovs with small arms before they’re catapulted. They aren’t even visible until the throwing arm swings up, and by then it’s too late.”

“What about RPGs?” Krysty said. “Couldn’t they use those?”

“The cannie targets are only visible at the instant of launch,” J.B. said. “And then they’re just pinpoints of light. Hell of a trick to lob an RPG into a hole in the ground 150 yards away in the dead of night.”

A cluster of Molotovs exploded directly above their heads, making the 6x6 shudder, spilling liquid fire down its metal flanks and onto the dirt around it. Intense heat and the stench of burning fuel engulfed the companions.

“The cannibal bombardment appears to be coming at us from all sides,” Doc said.

“There’s no telling how many launchers they’ve got out there,” Mildred said.

“Cannies knew this was a favorite overnight spot for convoys,” J.B. said. “Probably got their butts kicked here a bunch of times before they figured out a way to attack it. Catapults would be easy to hide in excavated positions. Cover them with mats and dirt during the day. Uncover them after dark with the ranges already zeroed in.”

J.B. didn’t have to point out that gasoline bombs were a highly effective homemade munition, and they had the double advantage of pinning down the targets and lighting up the kill zone for longblasters. A perfect tactical choice under the circumstances.

As if underscoring that conclusion, the 6x6 was again rocked by overlapping explosions and blasts of heat.

“They’ve locked in on us,” Krysty said.

“Biggest wag, biggest target,” J.B. said.

Even as he spoke, a different sort of smoke began to filter under the wag. Blacker. Thicker. Chokingly abrasive.

Jak put his palm against the undercarriage, then immediately jerked it away. “Hot!” he said in surprise.

J.B. touched it, too, and had the same reaction. “Wag’s on fire!” he exclaimed “Fuel from the Molotovs must have dripped down inside.”

The 6x6 absorbed yet another flurry of blistering direct hits.

Mildred envisioned the piles of rags on the cargo bed above their heads, the cargo bed loaded down with leaky fifty-five-gallon drums of highly flammable liquids and stacked ammo crates.

The smoky air under the wag suddenly became almost too hot to inhale.

“Run!” J.B. shouted to the others. “Run, quick! Before the bastard blows!”

As the companions scrambled out, he helped Mildred drag Junior from under the wag. Then they grabbed the cannie by the armpits and half carried him away from the raging heat at their backs.

Ahead, wide puddles of fuel burned out of control. Dead folks lay facedown in them, their clothes melted away, their flesh charring to ash. Smoke and flame spewed from wags all around the ring. Even as the crew resumed shooting, more Molotovs slammed on target.

Mildred sensed the wheels were about to come off.

And in the next second they did. Literally.

The 6x6 exploded with a horrendous boom as hundreds of gallons of gas and booze detonated almost simultaneously. The fuel ignited in a withering fireball, which expanded to fill the interior of the circle. Before the wall of flame swept over them, J.B., Mildred and their bound captive were flattened by the shock wave, and momentarily knocked unconscious.

The blast saved their lives.

Mildred came to on her stomach, her beaded hair still sizzling as the wags parked on either side of the 6x6 began to explode in a chain reaction, like a string of five-hundred-pound firecrackers.

In a flash, a third of the defensive perimeter was wiped away.

And then it began to rain.

First came the heaviest debris: truck wheels, engine blocks, armor plate, axles, wag frames, transmissions, car seats. All crashing down from the dark. Then came the lighter stuff. Pieces of broken metal, glass, plastic. And finally, mixed in with the dust and smoke, a mist of sulfuric acid from the wag load of ruptured car batteries.

“Keep your head down!” Mildred cried to Junior as she shielded her own eyes with her hand. J.B. was wearing a hat and spectacles, so he was well protected.

Others in the fat trader’s band weren’t so lucky. Blinded by the falling acid, shrieking in pain, they blundered stiff-armed into the flaming pools of gasoline and the spray of bursting bombs. Wild flurries of bullets crisscrossed the circle as Mildred, Junior and J.B. reached the far side. The blasterfire wasn’t incoming; it was homegrown. But the cook-offs from the wags’ burning ammo stores had exactly the same effect—they chopped down the helpless crewmembers where they stood.

Then the Molotov barrage abruptly stopped.

The flesheaters had either run through their stockpile of fuel bombs, or somewhere in the dark, cannies were popping out of holes in the ground, sprinting for the breach they had made in the perimeter.

There was no time for a look back.

Bullets kicked up the dirt at their feet and whined past their ears as Mildred and J.B. steered Junior along the inside of the ring to the convoy master’s Suburban, where the others had gathered to make a stand.

Doc stepped forward, his Le Mat raised in a one-handed dueling stance. As Mildred, Junior and J.B. ducked under his outstretched arm, Doc cut loose, sending forth a yard-long tongue of flame and a billowing cloud of smoke. Over her shoulder, not ten yards away, Mildred saw two cannies go down hard, their heads hamburgered by bits of steel shrap and shards of broken glass.

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