“What was that half-wit talking about?”

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

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

“A crazy. Great,” Jak snorted.

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

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

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

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

Thunder Road

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

He that has and a little tiny wit,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

Though the rain it raineth every day.

—William Shakespeare

King Lear, III, ii, 76

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Prologue

Thunder Rider rides again!

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

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

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

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

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

It was time to take out some trash….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the wag on the horizon was getting closer with every second.

As the horses wandered off, and they took up their positions, J.B. squinted through his spectacles at the approaching vehicle. It struck him that it was making one hell of a noise for something that seemed so small. It wasn’t a tricked-out war wag; neither was it the kind of old predark truck that was still used for transporting goods within a short distance range.

“What is that thing?” Mildred asked to no one in particular. “I haven’t seen anything go like that since NASCAR.”

“What?” J.B. questioned absently.

Mildred gave a brief, bitter laugh. “Long time ago, John. Way, way before your time.”

“Heads up, people. He’s closing way too quick for my liking,” Ryan stated.

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL DAY for Thunder Rider. A one-man crusade against the forces of darkness was never going to be an easy task, but already he felt that he was making progress along his thunder road. More towns had been cleaned up: more scum had felt the scything sword of justice within the time between sunup and sundown.

Now to return to the secret base, where he could rest and recuperate in peace and security before venturing forth once more. Of course, he knew there would come a time when he would have to venture so far afield that it would be impossible for him to return home with the sun. Then, he would have to establish mobile bases that would serve as a secure haven while he rested. Perhaps in time he would be able to recruit others to his cause. There were good people out there, tired of being under the oppressive heel of the scum, who would join with him once they had a figurehead, once they knew they were not alone. He knew there were others from the communications that had been monitored at base since before he was fully trained. It was only a matter of finding them.

Though the dust streamed behind him, he had a clear view from all other angles. As darkness fell in such a barren environment, there was likely to be danger all around.

Like over to his right, and ahead of him. It was nothing more than a dot on the horizon to begin with, but as he approached, he could see that it was a horse-drawn wagon, with a small, hunched-over man driving it. It was covered, and he could not see within, but it was unlikely to be harboring danger. Those who would oppose him were not the sort to be driving a humble horse-drawn wagon, after all.

Nonetheless, he took one hand from the bar of the bike and flexed his fingers. He could find the .44 in a fraction of a second if necessary.

Perhaps it would be. He furrowed his brow as he watched the wagon pull to a halt. The small man leaped nimbly down and unhitched the horses, who wandered off. From each end of the wagon, men and women came forth. They were armed, he could see that, though not even his keen vision could make out their ordnance at such a distance. If he had worn the enhanced vision comp-visor that was a part of the bike’s setup, then he would not have this trouble.

It was an oversight. He had been lax. That would not happen again.

Meanwhile, he fixed his eyes on the wagon in the distance. The people were adopting defensive postures. They were not looking for a fight, but rather they were responding to his approach. Oh, irony, they thought that he was one of the bad guys.

He determined to show them that all was well. Easing the throttle, he turned the bike toward them, slowing slightly. Raising one hand, palm up and out, he showed that he was unarmed. He could imagine the puzzlement on their faces as he approached them. What was this all about? Why was this powerful man not attacking them?

As he came within view, he could see them behind and around the wagon. Not enough to be able to identify them should they ever cross paths again, but enough to know that his gesture had achieved its intended effect. Their guns were not raised to him.

Perhaps they would recognize him. Surely the news of Thunder Rider had already spread far and wide. He could imagine the look of delight on their faces when they realized who he was; or, at least, that he was friend and not foe.

Perhaps in time they would join him.

He was past them in less than a moment. Righting his path, he opened up the throttle once more, the pulse engine responding to his deft touch. He returned both hands to the bars and sped on, once more, for home.

“HE’S COMING RIGHT FOR US,” J.B. said incredulously. “Tell me I’m not imagining what I’m seeing.”

“Oh no, freak boy’s for real, John,” Mildred whispered in tones that mixed awe with astonishment.

They could see that the vehicle was massively powerful. Wide and squat-bodied, it was obviously an engine-driven bike rather than a wag; yet its bulk suggested that it should be a trike, which would also account for its stability. Yet astonishingly, as it turned side-on to them, it became apparent that it was only dual-wheeled, the tires being of an immense width and thickness. And there was no trail of exhaust fumes to mingle with the dust in its wake. No smell of wag fuel that would have been so familiar and expected.

The most bizarre thing of all was the way in which the rider on the bike waved to them. There was no other word for it. He took one hand off the bike’s steering and waved, as friendly as if he was an old friend greeting them after a long absence.

It was apparent that he was not going to attack them. As one, they lowered their blasters, watching in collective amazement as he turned away and roared off into the distance.

“Triple-good bike,” Jak commented. “Weird bastard.”

“Very succinctly put,” Doc murmured.

“What was powering that thing?” Krysty asked.

Ryan looked at J.B., who returned his questioning gaze, then shrugged. “Don’t know. But if he’s that friendly to any old stranger who passes, then he’s headed for a whole lot of trouble.”

“Mebbe not,” J.B. mused. “Anyone with wheels like that is going to have one bastard of an armory on board.”

Mildred shook her head. “Yeah, well, there’s too much weirdness there. Thank God he’s headed in the opposite direction.”

“Agree with that,” Krysty added.

Chapter Two

When the sun went down, the companions pitched camp for the night. They had changed their direction, figuring that a ville lay on the line cut through the desert plain by the man on the bike. It was still in line with their original course, and a detour couldn’t hurt if it gave them a chance to collect more supplies. Particularly water. They were on too tight a ration for the heat they had to endure during the day, and it was a primary concern.

Jak was on edge, senses straining for the return of the bike. What if the stranger hadn’t attacked simply because he was on his own? What if he had been on a recce, and was now on his way back with other riders, heavily armed?

Ryan felt much the same, although without the heightened senses to give him warning. He did, however, have something that may have been even better than that: Krysty.

It was obvious from the way that she sat, staring into the fire, that something was bothering her. She was preoccupied. He could tell from the way that her flowing, prehensile hair had flattened itself, curled around her like a shield. Usually, the tresses were wild and free. The opposite could only mean one thing.

“Problem?” he asked her quietly. Jak was himself preoccupied, Doc was sleeping and J.B. and Mildred were some distance off, grabbing themselves a little privacy. None of them had noticed Krysty’s demeanor, and the one-eyed man was unwilling to draw their attention to it unless it became a necessity.

“Mebbe, lover,” she replied in an equally soft tone. “Could be I was just spooked by that rider. Could be that there was just something that seemed odd about him.”

“Man riding by on such a machine that doesn’t try and blast the fuck out of you is weird enough these days,” Ryan said with a small, tight grin.

Krysty gave a short bark of a laugh. “Yeah, true enough. But mebbe there’s just this feeling that he wasn’t as harmless as we thought. I can’t say what. You know what this is like. It’s like there was a scent of danger left, and I can’t get the bastard out of my nose.”

“Usually it’s a good thing that it stays there,” Ryan said, moving closer to her. “I trust that sense of yours. And this time it’s backed up by Jak, and by something in my gut. Couldn’t say what, just that I know the fucker’s there.”

Ryan left her to begin patrolling the camp’s perimeter. He looked at his wrist chron by the light of the fire before moving any farther: an hour remained until his watch was over and he could get some sleep. Time then to wake up Doc. Jak was also supposed to be getting some rest, but the albino couldn’t sleep. Ryan knew him too well to counsel otherwise.

Moving away from the light and warmth of the fire, he shivered as the cold and dank of the darkness draped itself over him. J.B. and Mildred were on the edge of where the light petered out, and he skirted them, unwilling to disturb them. The Armorer and Mildred were on last watch before sunup. They had plenty of time yet.

AS THEY SET OFF next morning, the subject of the motorcycle rider wasn’t mentioned. He was long gone, in the opposite direction to that in which they now traveled, and there was no sign of his return. The only way in which he was relevant to their journey now was in the hope that his path of the day before would lead them to a ville.

It was a hope that was realized within a few hours. Before the sun had risen more than forty-five degrees in the sky, they sighted a distant ville.

They could tell it was only a small ville by the fact that there were only a few columns of smoke rising into the sky.

“Oh, boy, do I have a bad feeling about this,” Mildred remarked heavily.

“Don’t need a doomie sense for that,” Krysty agreed.

It took an hour for the slow, horse-drawn wag to get close enough to the ville to make out anything other than the smoke. It was a journey that seemed as though it would never end, the horses seeming to go slower with every step. The lack of water was beginning to tell: problem was, would there even be anything left in the ville when they got there? Right now, they expected to find nothing more than smoldering ruins.

A smell in the air wafted toward them on the light desert breeze. It was, in part, horribly familiar—the smell of burned, charred and roasting human flesh. There was something else mixed in with it, a sweet smell with a bitter undertone. It was foreign to all but Mildred. She had no firsthand knowledge, but it reminded her of something she had read about when she was a child back in predark days.

Could it be napalm? Surely not. They had never come across much evidence of this surviving skydark, in all the time they had spent crossing the Deathlands. But if not that, then how had anyone come up with a hybrid that was so close?

Ryan stopped the wag. “We go on foot from here,” he said shortly. “Triple red.”

Jak tethered the horses to a fence post on the perimeter of one of the fields, and they began to move in on foot, along the trail that led to the center of the ville.

The smell hung over them like a pallid cloud, heavier than the smoke that rose to the skies, more oppressive. As oppressive as the quiet. The ville was only a small collection of residential dwellings. Some were cobbled together, and some were the remnants of predark adobe houses, patched badly over the years. Perhaps at some time this had been a small mall on the outskirts of a larger town. But it didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was that they were drawing close to the center, and the quiet was replaced by the faint noises of people moving, people talking and people in pain, the small whimpers of those who had no fight left in them, and were hovering close to buying the farm.

The columns of smoke they had seen from a distance were now easily identifiable as coming from a small area in the center. The friends spotted scorch marks on some of the buildings, and debris that suggested some kind of explosion.

More than that, there was an orange tinge that spread over some of the walls and impregnated the dust on the sidewalks and roads that were, in themselves, little more than dirt tracks.

“What is that?” J.B. asked. His tone bespoke an almost professional curiosity. There was little about ordnance that he did not know, yet this was a new one.

“I fear, my dear John Barrymore, that it may be a portent of terrible things,” Doc said with a quiet solemnity.

Ryan stayed them with a raised hand as they drew close to the center of the ville. “Keep it frosty, people. Anyone who can handle a blaster is going to be trigger happy and jumpy as jackshit after what must have happened here.” He signaled for them to take whatever cover was possible as they approached.

So far, they had seen no one. That was strange. First thing anyone with any sense did when under attack was secure defensive positions. Ryan had expected to encounter at least one defensive sec patrol or lone blaster as they advanced. The fact that there had been none did nothing but fuel a dread of what may have happened here. Whatever had attacked this ville, its consequences had to have been severe.

But nothing could prepare them for what they saw as they entered the few streets that constituted the center of the ville.

The buildings were blackened, with orange streaks that ran across the blasted surfaces. Gaping holes pitted the frontages, with rubble strewed across the streets. Some of the buildings were little more than smoking piles of rubble, and in a few there were fires that still burned in small patches of red and orange flame.

Corpses littered the streets, bloated and gaseous in the heat. Some of them were burned and charred, which accounted for some of the smell. Others were beginning to stink of putrefaction, their sickly sweet odor adding to the olfactory overload. They were all male. And there were a lot of them. Ryan stopped counting at thirty, figuring that he now knew why there had been no sec or suspicious and paranoid ville dwellers to meet them. This was a small place. That many men had to have accounted for a good proportion of the ville’s population.

The rest, he figured, if they were still alive, were in one of the burned-out shells, along with any other casualties. He could see from where he stood that this building, on the far side of the ville’s central block, was full of people. Probably everyone left standing. Mostly women and children. They were clustered on the ground floor of what may have been the infirmary before whatever had happened here, but if nothing else had been converted to that purpose now.

“What happened here?” Mildred asked softly.

“Swift, sudden and brutal,” Doc murmured, shaking his head sadly. “A veritable feast of carnage.”

Ryan signaled to them to lower their weapons. Maybe not holster any blasters, in case someone over there got an itch to fire on them, but certainly at ease enough to avoid giving a hostile impression.

It looked like these people had seen enough of hostile to last them for some while.

Picking his way over the rubble, Ryan led the friends across the debris-strewed sidewalk and road. “Hey,” he yelled, “what happened here?”

Some of the women and children looked up from their tasks, many with fear in their eyes.

All the while the friends had been moving closer to the building, its front an open wound. At least it allowed easy access, which was probably necessary. Women moved in and out, intent on their tasks: water, rags, something that looked like medical equipment, or could at least pass for it…Looking past them, Ryan could see where the soft cries of pain had originated from, and also why. The ground floor of the building was littered with makeshift cots and beds, crammed in no order except that which would make use of available floor space. Some of the things that lay on the beds bore little resemblance to anything human. He guessed that these were probably corpses, and that they were there only because there had been no time to clear them when they had given up their tenuous hold on life. Those that more closely resembled human beings were the ones who made the noises, the mewling, whimpering or weak-throated screams changing in proportion to how human the figures on the cots looked.

Some of them were women, most were men. Most were barely recognizable, at any rate, their hair burned off, skin either blackened or blistered a raw red. Some had wounds that were visibly weeping; bleeding that could not be completely stopped and that seeped through makeshift bandaging.

One of the women spoke as they approached.

“Mister, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. None of us do. If you want to chill us all, if you think there’s anything worth taking here, then just do it. But if not, then just leave us in peace to try and deal with what’s happened to our menfolk.”

“Shit, if we coldhearts you be chilled for that,” Jak said, echoing the thoughts that ran through them all. For the woman to speak that way to armed strangers, for the rest of the women and children to ignore them, bespoke of a tragedy that had driven them beyond the bounds of normal caution.

“We don’t have an argument with you, and we don’t want anything,” Ryan said simply. “We’re just passing through. Mebbe we can help a little.” All thoughts of bartering for water and supplies left him at that moment. That could come later. Right now, it was time to perhaps earn that favor. And perhaps just time to act with a little civilization, a rare enough thing in the Deathlands.

Mildred and Krysty holstered their weapons and joined the women tending to the sick and dying. Each in her own way had skills that could help the ville women. Krysty’s upbringing in Harmony had supplied her with an extensive knowledge of herbal medicines, and the natural healing properties that may exist in anything to hand. She had an expertise that was hard to come by.

Mildred’s training as a doctor in conventional medicine in predark days was on shakier ground in this environment. She could administer and prescribe only those medicines that were available. In a ville like this, that wasn’t exactly going to leave her with much in the way of options. It soon became clear that there was little medicine that she could use, but she had one invaluable skill: her diagnostic technique allowed her to prioritize the use of the medicines. As painful as it was to make some decisions, she assessed how bad each patient was, how much chance he or she had of pulling through, and how much of a waste or a benefit the administering of medicines would be. That enabled her to maximize the use of limited resources. Furthermore, she was able to work with Krysty in identifying the problems of each patient, so that the Titian-haired woman could also maximize her skills.

It was long, arduous and tiring work. They kept going for longer than they could keep track of time, and only realized the passing of the hours when lamps lit their path around the makeshift infirmary, rather than the sun.

While they worked, the others made themselves busy. The constant need for water had to be attended to. There was some rudimentary plumbing in the buildings, but all of this had been ruptured and rendered useless by what had gone on. Now, the water had to be carried in buckets, in anything that could be used as a container, from the more outlying buildings that were still serviced by the water system. A lot of the water was also going to waste, spilling out of ruptured and broken pipes, and it was vital to fix the ruptures and conserve as much as possible. J.B. and Jak set to this task with alacrity; Doc, being less practical in such matters, was only too glad to lend his strength to the constant relay of buckets and containers. He looked old and infirm, but as the women of the ville were soon to learn, that was deceptive. He may have been wrinkled and almost as whip-thin as Jak, but beneath his frock coat he was wiry, and the whipcord muscles that his occasional stoop served to disguise were soon brought into play. He felt, in some ways, useless. Mildred and Krysty had medicinal skills; J.B. and Jak were mechanically and practically minded; but Theophilus Tanner was, and would always be, an academic at heart. His skills lay in the mind, and were of little call in such a circumstance. He therefore determined to make himself of whatever use he could, working tirelessly.

Which left Ryan a little space to ease up on his part in the chain. Not from any desire to avoid work, but rather because he wanted to take the time to find out what had happened here. He had an uneasy feeling in his gut that it was connected with the stranger on the motorcycle who had passed them the day before. They had followed his trail, and the coincidence was too much. But how, exactly, did the two connect? Had one man been able to do this much damage? How?

It took him some time to gain the confidence of the woman who had initially spoken to him. She had shown them where they were to collect water, and formed part of the chain with them, if for no other reason than to keep an eye on them, lest they should prove to be an enemy. Not that there was much she would be able to do. Nonetheless, Ryan understood and appreciated her attitude.

For some time, her answers to his questions were noncommittal, which made progress seem next to impossible, particularly as his questions had been less than direct. He figured from her attitude that an outright demand to know what had happened would not achieve any result. So he had been cautious. But he was starting to run short on patience.

Eventually, he tired of it all and decided to go for broke.

“Fuck this not asking what we need to know,” he said, taking her arm to stop her as they walked back from the water collection point. She looked down at his hand on her arm, then up into his eye, leveling her gaze with his. For a moment, he could see the fear in her eyes. Then it dissipated, replaced with acceptance.

“Okay, I figure by now that you don’t mean us any harm, mister. So where do I begin?”

“I’m figuring that a man on a big motorcycle has something to do with it.”

“You know him?” For a second, the alarm flared up once more in her eyes.

“Kind of,” Ryan replied quickly, then told her of their brief encounter with the mystery rider the previous day.

When he finished, she laughed bitterly. “You got off lightly, mister. Shit, you don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Was he on his own, or were there others?”

She fixed him firmly with a stare. “You won’t think it right, mister, but there was no one but him. No one. I tell you, there’s no one left living here who’s ever seen anything like it. Or would want to again.”

Ryan whistled softly. “Coldheart bastard must have one hell of an armory on that bike. Tell me everything you can, from the beginning.”

“You sayin’ that you’re gonna get him for us?” she asked with what was a palpably sardonic tone.

“No, I’m not saying that. I won’t lie to you. But mebbe he’s like a mad dog that needs chilling before it bites anyone else. We’ll see. Tell me everything, first.”

She nodded firmly. “Fair enough. But bear in mind that no matter how hard it is to believe, I ain’t making any of it up. Or exaggerating, either.”

And she began to tell him of the previous day.

“DAYS AROUND HERE GO much the same, no matter what. Guess they change with the seasons, mebbe even with the weather, but other than that there ain’t much to disturb us. This ville’s been here since skydark, and we ain’t rich in jack, like some. Nor have we got much in the way of growing stuff. But we get by ’cause we can trade a little.

“And we don’t get no trouble, either. A lot of these places, they got people buying the farm every day, people blasting each other for no reason. Now that’s their business, if they want to chill each other for no reason, but we’ve always kinda stuck together here. When there ain’t much to go around, you tend to look out for those next to you in case you need them to look out for you next.

“We were all going about our business like usual. The sun had just hit its peak, and it was no better or worse than any other day. Then we get word that this wag is coming to the ville. Really eating up the dirt, great clouds behind it. Faster than anything we’d ever seen come through here before. No one on the edges could explain what it was. Guess that’s why we was all so curious. Nothing like something new to get you talking, right?” She gave a bitter cough of a laugh. “Shit, wish the coldheart bastard had just carried right on by.

“Anyway, it was obvious that the wag was comin’ through here, and being as it was unlike anything we’d seen, mebbe we figured that it might have something on it for trade or jack. We get the same traders through here all the time, someone new, some fresh blood, would be more than welcome. Reason I tell you that is to explain why so many people were in the center of the ville when the wag came in…’Cept it was no wag, but a bike. Weird-looking fucker—wheels big, like wag wheels, but it moved like a bike. Rider guided it in and pulled it up quick with a turn that he shouldn’t have been able to do. Anyway, it was real impressive. Word had been spreading while it was approaching, so it was pretty full in the center, everyone crowding around to get a good look. There was stuff on the bike—lotta blasters, but also stuff that looked like packs, so mebbe he was some kinda solo trader. Dressed odd, threads like I ain’t seen before, kinda shiny. Not hide or skin, but not wool or cottons, either. And he had these big, dark goggles on, like the kind you see sec men wearing on trade convoys, but more, y’know? There was something going on with them, but I don’t know what. Only know that we had no idea what was about to happen.

“He takes off the goggles and looks around at everyone. No one says anything as there’s this kinda weird feel about the whole thing. It’s not like he’s threatened us, so no one has gone for their blasters, but it’s not like he’s there to do us any favors. Y’know what it felt like? Felt like everyone breathed in and held it, waiting for him to speak. And then when he did, no one could understand what the fuck he was talking about.”

Ryan stopped her with a gesture. “What do you mean? It was another language? What?”

The woman shook her head, then spit on the ground. “It was the same language we speak, boy, but not how we speak it. The words we could recognize, but not what they meant. Y’know when someone gets sick in the head?”

Ryan, thinking of Doc and starting to see what she meant, nodded.

“Yeah, well, it was kinda like that. The words made a kinda sense, but not what you could make out straightaway…I dunno, it was just…”

“Can you remember what he said?” Ryan asked.

She looked at him. He could see in her eyes that she would never forget. She began to intone, as though dragging them wholesale from memory.

“‘Good people, I am Thunder Rider. I have come to deliver justice and peace. For too long there has been lawlessness in the land. There have been crimes committed against the good people of this and many other villes that have gone unpunished. The good and true cower in the shadow of evil. No longer shall the criminal go unpunished for his crimes. I have come to be your protector. You know who these wrongdoers are, and you stand in fear of them as they have greater strength, greater callousness, greater evil. You may fear no more, as I have a strength far greater than any they may possess. I carry with me the sword and shield of justice, and it is swift and sure. Vengeance will be yours, and I shall be the instrument. Turn your criminals over to me, and I shall deal with them, restoring peace and justice to your lands.’”

She stopped and fixed Ryan with a gaze that was defiant and bemused at the same time. “C’mon, One-eye, what kinda crazy stupe shit is that? What the fuck is a ‘crime’?”

Ryan knew from old books about the concept of crime, which went hand-in-hand with the idea of law and order. But they lived in a world where such ideas had no place, which made the idea of the man on the bike triple screwed. Where had he gotten such ideas, and how did he think they applied to this world? But the one-eyed man said nothing of this. Instead he merely prompted, “What happened then?”

She shook her head. Now, she could not catch his eye, the memories too fresh and painful. In the past twenty-four hours there had been no time to think about it. Now she had to. Her voice cracked as she continued.

“No one did anything. What was there to do? We were all confused, didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Everyone was looking at everyone else, not knowing whether we should just blast the fucker and be sure. But there was something about him. He just didn’t look like it’d be that easy to chill him, even though he was way, way outnumbered. Anyway, it must’ve been only a few moments before he spoke again. He said, ‘So, you choose to ignore me. You choose the ways of lawlessness. I offer you protection, and you spurn me. Very well, those who side with the lawless shall pay as those they condone.’ And then it started.”

She stopped for a moment, gathering herself. Ryan waited, keeping down his impatience. He wanted to know every detail; she may not know herself what she was telling him, but he would be able to work it out. This was a chance to discover what weaponry Thunder Rider possessed, what kind of ordnance had wreaked such havoc.

“He must have known that his words would make some of us fight. It was hard to understand most of what he said, but by the end it was pretty fucking well clear that he was gonna blast the shit out of us. He took a blaster out of a holster on his hip, a big long-barreled thing, and fired at the first man in his way. It was like the blood and shit that flew everywhere just shocked us more. Shoulda made us run, fight, something…Instead we stood there, triple stupe, slack-jawed like some buncha mutie inbreds. Easy meat, One-eye…” She stopped, gathering herself. Then, “Before any of us was smart and fast enough to react, he’d taken this big blaster rifle from the side of the bike.

“We were scattering. Some were firing as they ran, but we were spooked like horses. I guess most of the shots went into our own people. Nothing seemed to hit the rider. Calm, like nothing was happening—I saw him, like a stupe I couldn’t take my eyes away—he turns around to the bike and reaches into the packs. Had this strange little blaster he took out, looked like it had tin cans in it. He pulled his goggles down, then fired the little blaster over our heads. It hit one of the buildings, side-on. Exploded like a gren, bits of wall flying all over us, but it was more than that. Gas—no, like gas but not like it. It was like there was gas but with liquid in it. Orange. Stained the walls, spread like an orange mist, and as it came down it burned those it fell on. Most of those burned by it have bought the farm, but some are still living. Better off chilled, if you ask me, but you can’t just let them…”

She paused again, gathering herself. “I got lucky. The first gren of orange mist fell away from where I was standing. Shit, when I saw it burn, I ran. No way did I want that on me. I managed to get to cover, watched the rest. I shoulda done something, but I didn’t know what. And I was scared. Like some fucking madman, he just stands there, saying nothing. Real careful, like he was totally in control, he fires at all the buildings, picking those on the corners of the streets with the most people jammed in ’em to start with. People falling over each other, pissing themselves with fear. Easy meat…

“When the mist is falling, and people are burning, and there’s brick and stone and shit raining down, with all the buildings on fire, he takes the long-barreled blaster again and starts to pick off men at random. Then he stops, nods to himself like he’s just been told to stop and gets back on the bike.

“No one’s fired back, One-eye. No one. Can you believe that? All so…frightened? Froze in fear? I dunno…He just gets on the bike, revs the fucker up and rides out. Weaving past the bricks, the chilled, the orange shit on the ground, just like none of it’s there. Just like he hasn’t just taken out our entire ville.

“So he’s gone, and we have to pick up the pieces and try to fix it as new.” She laughed bitterly, hawked and spit.

“You wanted to know what happened? That’s what happened, One-eye.”

WHEN THEY RETURNED to the center of the ville, Mildred and Krysty had been able to start making some small difference. The path between the debris had also been improved by small teams under the direction of J.B. and Jak. They had only children to help them, the women being occupied in the infirmary, but the youth of the ville were wiry and strong. Doc, meanwhile, had continued his single-minded pursuit of his task, and his white hair was plastered to his scalp, his coat long since discarded in a heap, shirtsleeves rolled up.

Ryan paused for a moment, looking at the carnage with a fresh eye. The mystery rider had done this with no help, and with an armory that could comfortably be carried on a bike—a big bike, admittedly, but still one smaller than a wag. His words, which had seemed as so much stupe trash to the woman, made a kind of sense to the one-eyed man. The guy was crazy, sure. But crazy with a hell of an armory. That made him a triple-red threat.

Thing was, could they take him on? He hadn’t promised the woman that they’d go after him, but if they were offered a reward? They were in no position to turn down jack or supplies. Moreover, Ryan had felt his instinct for self-preservation tugging at him. They’d already encountered the rider once, and by the sound of it they’d got lucky. Mebbe they wouldn’t be so lucky a second time, and there was inevitably going to be a second time. Trouble followed them, there was no denying. So mebbe it would be for the best to hunt it down and face it before it came up behind and caught them unawares.

His reverie was interrupted by Jak.

“Ryan, careful orange dirt,” the albino said without preamble. “Look…”

He held out his hand. There was a smear of orange mud against the white skin of his palm, and showing around the smear was a red weal, blistering at the edges.

“Get Mildred to look at that,” Ryan said.

Jak grinned. “Gonna—not before show you, though. Some chem shit, stays burning a day after going off? Not seen before.”

“Just got the story from her,” Ryan said softly, indicating the woman who had returned to joining Doc’s quest to deliver water. “Fill you all in later. This was our rider, and he’s one mad coldheart by the sound of it.”

Jak gave the briefest of nods, turned and went across to the infirmary. Ryan took his place in clearing rubble and caught the expression on Mildred’s face as she examined Jak’s chem burn.

There would be much to discuss later.

BY THE TIME THE SUN had sunk and the cold night chilled their bones, the companions were exhausted. They went back to where they had tied up the wag and horses.

Almost everyone else had stayed in the center of the ville. A few stragglers returned to their homes; most wanted the security of staying close together. The house where the wag was tethered remained empty. Whether the occupant had been chilled, they did not know.

And it didn’t matter, except that it gave them the privacy they needed to talk about what had happened, and how it affected them. Ryan began by repeating what the woman had told him. They listened in silence. When he finished, and without comment, Mildred added her opinion of the burn she had seen on Jak’s hand. She told them about napalm, and how she had felt when they first entered the ville.

When she finished, no one wanted to be the first to speak.

“I suppose the real question here is, do we see ourselves as knights errant,” Doc said eventually. “I suspect that is what has been playing on your mind, Ryan.”

“You’re kind of right, Doc,” the one-eyed man replied. “I feel like we need to go after this coldheart before he comes after us. And I feel like if we do that, we can mebbe get what we need from here…the things we came here for in the first place.”

“There’s not much left in the way of provisions,” Krysty said quietly. “From here, the next ville is who knows where? We couldn’t get far.”

J.B. took off his spectacles and polished them. It was a habit, an indication that he was thinking. Eventually, he perched them back on his nose and started to speak.

“We got two separate problems here. First, we’ve got nothing in reserve, so we can’t move on unless we trade with these people in some way. Now, they got jackshit, too. The only way they’re going to give us what we need is if we can offer them something they want. Like revenge. Second problem is that this stupe is riding ’round at random, blasting the shit out of villes. Who knows where else he’s been? Who knows where he’ll stop? We stay in this area for any time, chances are we’re going to run into him. So, do we do it now, or later?”

The Armorer paused, then looked steadily at Ryan. “Seems to me that the only way we solve one problem is by solving the other. That simple.”

“Nothing to do with wanting to get your hands on his armory?” Ryan murmured.

A grin split J.B.’s face. “There could be that, too.”

IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS to help get the ville back into something approaching a functioning order. After the second day, the friends were offered food and water, so they could preserve their own. No mention was made of any condition. Rather, it was taken as payment for the work they were doing, which suited them fine at that point. The work was hard, and there was little demand beyond the immediate.

Soon the time was drawing near when the friends would want to leave. Question was, would they leave with renewed supplies and a mission?

The answer came on the fifth night. By now, the survivors had adopted a more communal style of living, pooling as they were their resources and their skills. It was while they were eating in the building that they’d adopted as their communal dining hall that Maggie, the woman Ryan had questioned on the first day, stood to address them all.

“You know what we all been through,” she began with a halting tone, “and you know that these people—” here she indicated the friends “—have been a lot of help. But there’s something else. Something some of you know about ’cause we’ve discussed it among ourselves.

“Ryan,” she continued, “you said you’d help us get the coldheart bastard who did this if we’d help you with what you wanted. You still stand by that?”

“I do,” he said slowly. “We all do. Happens that this mystery rider coldheart of yours might be a threat to others, might be a threat to us. That’s no reason to go looking for trouble, but mebbe it’d be better to find it before it finds us. As well, you’ve been fair to us, feeding us while we’ve worked for you, so I figure you’ll be reasonable about what we ask.”

“Depends,” the woman said, glancing at those around her.

Ryan’s face twisted into a wry grin. “It isn’t much. You know that when we arrived here we were looking to trade, pick up supplies as we were running low. You pay us in goods to go after this coldheart, and we will. We’ll need more than we’ve got now if we’re going to make a real job of it.”

“How do we know you won’t just go in the opposite direction fast as you can, forget about the rider as soon as you’re outta here?” The speaker was one of the older boys, emboldened by the silence of expectation that had descended over the hall.

“You don’t,” Ryan said simply. “But you know what we’re like. You’ve seen us work. We didn’t have to do that. Weak as you are, we could have just taken what we wanted and already be long gone. So you think about that. Then you say yes or no to our terms. It’s your choice.”

Chapter Three

No choice at all. The people of the ville agreed to their terms. The companions loaded their wag and set off the next morning, before the sun was too high in the clear sky.

“I never thought I would wish for the toiling colors of a chem cloud, but then there are many things to which I thought the word ‘never’ would apply,” Doc said sadly as he stared at the sky.

“Don’t talk shit, save energy, drive,” Jak muttered from the back of the wag. Doc, first on driving duties, spared himself a small smile and coaxed the horses onto the road out of the ville.

They could have taken a motorized wag, one that would have negated the need for food and water for the horses, one that would perhaps have been more reliable. But J.B.’s recce of the ville’s resources the night before had revealed that their wags were old and in poor repair, and that their supplies of fuel were low. To take what was needed from them would have left the ville with next to nothing, while at the same time taking a big risk on being stranded in the middle of the sandy dustbowl that was their chosen route.

The lack of speed shown by the two stringy creatures pulling their wooden wag was a small trade-off against these risks.

But that was not the only reasoning that Ryan was using. The rider had seen them once before, using this wag. That time he had been friendly. If he saw them again in a motorized vehicle, would he be more likely to perceive them as a threat? If he saw them with the horse-drawn wag, would he recall seeing them once before and passing by? These questions were important. He was one dangerous coldheart, and to attract undue attention and hostility in tracking him was the last thing Ryan wanted.

Although they set out along the route by which they had entered the ville—tracking back along the trail left by the rider almost a week before—they had no intentions of blindly following it and hoping that they might just, conceivably, run into him along the way. It was purely that it was the only road in. After all, the rider was faster than them, and had days of start on them. The problem here was how to try to find him.

Wherever he was currently based, he could only travel as far as the fuel tanks on the bike would take him. A return journey, at that. He had, by all accounts, left the ville by the same road he had entered. So his base of operations was more likely to lay back in the direction from where he had come than it was to lay on the road on the far side of the ville. If he was triple smart and didn’t want to be followed, Ryan thought, then he may have doubled on himself and circled the ville. But that notion didn’t tally with their encountering him a day’s wag ride along that return line.

Trying to get inside the mind of a triple crazie had given Ryan a headache. He’d discussed the options with the others, and it had left them with a headache, too. Most crazies were easy to figure out. When he thought of all the madmen they’d come up against, it was clear that for most of them there was always one driving obsession that was at the center of their craziness. You find that, and you find the key to how to deal with them. Strategy was easier when you had something to go up against. But what did they have with the mystery rider?

Mildred and Doc were the most likely to have some idea of what might be going on inside the head of the rider.

“The things of which he speaks are very much concepts from before the nukecaust,” Doc had mused. “There has been very little to survive that could have fully informed him of such notions.”

“Particularly if he was out here living in it,” Mildred added. “Let’s face it, a lot of our notions about the law and justice lasted squat once we actually had to adjust and survive.”

Doc gave a quiet chuckle. “True, my dear Doctor. Truer than you know…or maybe not.” He gave her a quizzical stare. “We were soon disabused of such notions, even if we kept knowledge. Yet our mysterious friend seems to still have an intrinsic belief that such a thing is possible. Now that shows a peculiarly muddled sense of reality, does it not? Yet he seems quite rational in other ways.”

“Doc’s right. The rider has the ability to function to a high degree,” Mildred mused. “So how could you get that combination? That isolation, and that knowledge, that would enable you to still function, yet have no real idea of the world in which you lived?”

“Lori…” Doc said softly.

Mildred looked at him, brow furrowed. Lori was before she had joined them, but she had heard tell of her. A glance around the others confirmed her suspicions—Lori Quint, the tall blonde with the short skirt. She’d been Doc’s companion for a short while, until she bought the farm. She had been born and brought up in a redoubt, never seeing the outside world until Ryan and the others had landed in the redoubt by sheer chance.

“You think he may live in a redoubt? There might be one around here?” Ryan questioned.

“Perhaps. Not necessarily a redoubt, but maybe a base of some kind? Somewhere that would be protected against the nukecaust. Somewhere people could interbreed without ever having to go outside.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time we’d found crazies living like that,” Krysty mused. “But as you say, people rarely go outside.”

So they reached a kind of conclusion. It wasn’t much to work on, but it was the best they could come up with and it did give them a place to start. If there was a limit to the fuel his bike could carry, and he had a base somewhere along a line from the ville to where they had first seen him, then it might be possible to narrow the search by drawing a circle that could encompass other villes in the area, and working in from there.

They had little in the way of maps to work from, but J.B. was an excellent navigator and plotter. Some judicious questioning of the people from the ville gave him the names and rough locations of other villes in the area, along with an indication of distance by the time it usually took to travel between them. Using old predark maps of the area leading to the Grand Canyon and New Mex that were among the papers he always carried with him, he was able to prescribe a rough circle, within which lay three other villes. It would take them several days to visit all of them, and the reception they would receive was a variable to be met with caution, but it was a plan that gave them somewhere to begin the search.

J.B.’S MAP AND ROUTE PRESCRIBED an arc that would take them a round 360 degrees back to their starting point. Along the way, they would hope to pick up more information about the mystery rider that they could use to pinpoint his base of operations. It would be a long, arduous task, but there was little else they could do to make it any easier.

As they made the tedious journey, under the boiling sun or the freezing moon, they looked across the desolate landscape for any sign of the rider, or for his tracks. There was none before they came to the first ville on their route.

Station Browns ville had no old predark rail depot from which it could have derived its name. There was little in the way of old railroad that had even traversed this section of the Deathlands, as they knew too well from past experience. The origin of its name was a mystery, except that it rang some distant bell in Mildred’s youth.

It was of no matter. Like the ville they had originally stumbled upon, Station Browns was, in effect, little more than a way station for passing trade. And as there was little that passed this way, it was as dirt poor as its neighbors. The little they had gleaned about it indicated that it was little more than a pesthole ville, with a gaudy house that paid its way and a nice line in home brew that traveled well. There was a kind of rivalry between Station Browns ville and a ville called Casa Belle Taco, which had a similar trade. But there was enough distance between them for horny and thirsty convoys and travelers to keep both in business.

On the third day out, both Jak and Krysty felt prickles of unease within them.

The albino, his hunting senses as sharp as they were, could find no reason why he was feeling that way. There was no scent, no sound that he could put a name to, yet he could feel that out there, somewhere just beyond the limits of his senses, there was someone—something?—watching them.

For Krysty, it was much the same. Except that she did not have to rely on empirical evidence. Her ability to sense danger was almost infallible, and it was sounding alarms in her head that were impossible to ignore. Yet the landscape was deserted, and the sense seemed to fade in and out, like a badly tuned old transmitter picking up white noise that was almost—but not quite—decipherable. When it was strong, it was impossible to ignore it. Yet just as quickly it would fade out, before returning with a great intensity. And so she kept quiet about it, figuring she would wait until she could pin it down a little better.

It was nonexistent when they got their first view of Station Browns ville. Across the flat plain, it was still several miles away—a good two or three hours by horse-drawn—and the ville looked to be undamaged.

It was only as they got closer that the truth became apparent.

HIS SUSPICIONS HAD FIRST become aroused as he sped away from the folks in the horse-drawn wagon. Regular types, the sort who could help to build a new world. That was what had come to mind. But why? That was what had nagged at Thunder Rider all the way back to base. What had made him think that of a random encounter that lasted only a few seconds? He knew there had to be something else, a trigger that had started that thought. The question that faced him was how to discern what that trigger might be.

Back at base, he had the technology that could help him. In the lab, there was a brain wave decoder. It had been built for him, and in truth he did not fully understand the principles on which it worked; but in essence, it took his brain waves from the memory sector of his brain and translated them into images that were digitally recorded, so that he would be able to study them in detail. The persistent nagging made him hit the throttle even harder: there was no way he could rest until he had laid his mind to rest.

When he reached base, he docked the bike, leaving maintenance and refueling until later, and went straight to the lab. The LED was simple to set, and he selected the decoder option, plugging the headset into the jack on the console before carefully positioning it on his skull. Seating himself, he relaxed, taking deep breaths as he had been taught, before punching the key that would set the program in operation.

The trick was to think about anything else other than what you wanted to capture. If you tried too hard, and bought it to mind, then you would be dragging it from the memory center, making it hard for the computer to scan and collect.

He diverted himself by thinking about his favorite video. The one where the cowboy found the underworld kingdom ruled by the ice queen. She was merciless to begin with, but only in the protection of her people. She had taught him that to do good, you had to be prepared to sometimes do things that would be bad…unless, of course, you were doing them to people who would do even worse. His sister had told him of that old saying “you can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg.” He knew what they were, of course, but he wondered what they tasted like. He had never seen one, other than in pictures.

The console hummed and a monitor screen flickered to light, a message appearing to tell him that the scan of the area was complete, the images captured. Letting his mind wander had worked, as he hoped it would. Sometimes he found it hard not to think of the things that concerned him.

He took off the headset, unplugged it and put it carefully away. He was mindful of the fact that he was fortunate to have this legacy of equipment with which to execute his mission, and he did not wish to waste or damage it with carelessness.

The computer program did it all for him. He had merely to key in the sequence to play, and then watch. The events of the past two days played out before him. He hit the key to fast forward to the relevant section, not wishing to view all of his life over again so soon. When it came to that section, he marked it on the toolbar: where it began, where it ended. He cut it out and played it over and over again, switching the angles, enhancing the image, zooming in and out. He wanted to try to catch as much of a view of the inhabitants of the wagon as he could.

It was far from easy. They had adopted defensive postures that were so accomplished that little of them could be gleaned. However, he could tell that there were six of them. One of them was small, pale. He had white hair, as did another. One was dark-skinned. And one…For a moment his breath was taken away. A flash of hair, a brilliant red, waving in a nonexistent breeze, as though alive of its own accord.

It could not be…He saved the best images he could and left them on screen. Each of the six images centered on one of the people hiding behind the wagon.

Swiveling in his chair, he went to another monitor. This archived all the reports, visual and verbal, that had been collected by the base’s intel-gathering equipment since the time of the Long Night. There was, in truth, very little. This system had been designed for use in the days before the darkness, and it had a vast capacity for memory. It was a sign of how things had degenerated that only a fraction of its vast storage capacity was in use. This made it simple for the search facility to scan intel for correlation with the people on the screen.

The search bought several matches, recorded over a period of time. There was precious little to go on, as there were very few facilities capable of broadcast and communication technology in these days. But these sparse mentions added up to a picture, one that Thunder Rider had noted while he had scanned the outside, preparing for his entrance.

This group of people—who seemed to have added and lost a few members over time, but remained with the same core nucleus—had, like himself, been pillars of right. They were the kind of allies he sought.

More…The vision of the red hair floating in a nonexistent breeze stirred something within him. It was something new, something that he had never felt before.

He was determined. When he had completed maintenance and refueling, when he had rested himself, then he had to find them.

He had to find her.

THEIR FIRST INDICATION that all was not well came with the burst of fire that seemed to erupt from nowhere, kicking up the sandy soil a few yards ahead of them. The horses reacted, moving erratically enough to throw off balance those who were in the back of the wag. It was as well that the horses had proved themselves calm to the point of stupidity under fire, otherwise Jak, currently at the reins, would have dropped them with a slug to each head. As it was, he was able to pull them around, giving those in the back the chance to find their feet and grab their weapons.

The burst of fire was followed by silence, the echo on the still air, mocking them. With the wag sideways-on to the direction the burst had come from, they lined up behind the shelter of the vehicle, just as they had when the mystery rider had skirted them. There was no other cover in this barren landscape.

“What do you reckon?” Ryan asked J.B.

The Armorer scanned the land between the wag and the horizon. Only the first few buildings on the edge of Station Browns ville broke the unrelenting flat.

“It didn’t sound like serious ordnance, or rip up much dirt. It had to have come from someplace between here and the buildings, some kind of hide or shelter. No way something that weak got that distance otherwise.”

Jak had been scanning the ground ahead of them, blotting out the conversation beside him. If there was anywhere they could hide, then he was determined to spot it. With no cover, it had to be some kind of dugout. Even the best-made hide would show somewhere against such a featureless surface.

It wasn’t well made, and it didn’t take him long to locate it.

“Ryan, there. Forty degrees,” he whispered, directing the one-eyed man’s gaze along a line prescribed by his bony white finger. Ryan followed and saw it immediately. Once you knew where it was, it was obvious: raised by the side of a cactus, dust-and dirt-covered canvas over a hole with a built-up ledge. Just enough of a slit between dirt and canvas to see out of, to direct a blaster.

Ryan beckoned Mildred and indicated the hide. “Just frighten the fucker out,” he said simply.

Mildred nodded and focused her aim. Her Czech-made ZKR was a specialist target pistol, and she had once been a specialist target shooter. This was simple. She placed three shots around the lip of the hide. One kicked up dust in the center, while the others knocked out the tiny supports that gave the hide its view of the world. With a puff of dust, the hide closed up.

“So we know where you are, you know where we are. We could have taken you out, but we didn’t want to. You come out, we won’t shoot. We aren’t your enemy…but we might know who is. We’re chasing a coldheart with a freaky motorcycle—”

“That fucker. Okay, I’ll trust you ’cause I’m pinned. Don’t let me down.”

The woman was an unlikely sec sniper. Dressed in a dirty camisole top, shorts and combat boots, long blond hair tied back, the large-busted and curvy young woman looked more like a gaudy slut who’d been given a blaster and thrown into the wrong job.

Showing good faith by holstering his SIG-Sauer and walking out into the open, Ryan prompted her to introduce herself.

“Name’s Anita. Long time since I hefted a blaster. More used to handling other kinds of weapons,” she said with a grin, “but I figure that we need all the skills we can get after what happened.”

“Which was?”

“Bastard you described…” Briefly, and with more cursing than even Jak would have thought possible, she outlined a situation similar to the one that went down in the last ville. By the time she had finished, the others had joined Ryan in front of the wag.

“So where the fuck do you fit into it?” Anita asked in what they had discovered to be her usual forthright manner.

Ryan told her briefly about their experiences, and about the pact they had made in the last ville.

“Should be glad we aren’t the only ones,” she said at the conclusion, “but then I wouldn’t wish that asshole on anyone. So I guess you’d better come on back with me, see if mebbe you can find out something else that would help.”

“You think there could be something?”

She shrugged. “Dunno. Can’t hurt to ask. ’Sides which, we’re pretty much on top of clearing up now. Weird fucker thought us girls were all prisoners. Didn’t touch any of us, just chilled all the men and blew up a lot of shit.”

“Where did a gaudy slut learn to shoot like that?” Krysty asked her.

The smile vanished. “My daddy.”

“He was a good shot?” Krysty prompted.

Anita sniffed. “Fucker wanted me to be mommy to my new little sister. Would have been if he’d got his hands on me. Sweetest shot I ever made, right through the bastard’s dick. Now, you gonna give me a ride back, or do I have to walk in front of that wag of yours?”

Doc gathered the horses and drove the wag into the ville, Anita sitting beside him to indicate that all was well. They made the short journey in silence, the friends gleaning what they could from the view out the back of the canvas wag cover.

There was little to see that wasn’t familiar to them. Station Browns ville was almost too small to have a center as such; rather, it had a few buildings that radiated from the hub, which was a cluster of about five buildings. It was difficult to tell, as they hadn’t been well-constructed, and the rider’s ordnance had wreaked more havoc here than the ville they had recently left.

The ville had looked fine from a distance: no smoking wreckage, and now they could see why. Any fires had long ago burned themselves out. The flattened center section of the ville was nothing more than rubble and corpses. Some of the gaudy sluts, incongruously still dressed for trade, were working to clear the corpses.

“How many of you are left, my dear?” Doc whispered.

“No more than fifteen, all women and girls. Every male, young or old, is chilled. Criminacs, or somethin’, that was what he called them.”

“Criminals, my dear. An old word, of no real meaning now.”

Anita sniffed. “Figure it must mean somethin’ if it makes him chill all our menfolk. That what he did where you come from?”

“Almost. A larger population, perhaps not enough time for him. We must find out all we can, I think, and quickly,” he said over his shoulder at Ryan.

The one-eyed man was in agreement. They had another two villes to get to. Chances were, on this evidence, that the coldheart rider had already paid them a visit. It was not a time to stand on ceremony.

Their approach had attracted the attention of those still left alive, and it was no problem for Anita to gather them together to explain who the strangers were and what they wanted. There was no shortage of information. What emerged was that the mystery rider’s visit to Station Browns ville followed the same pattern as the other event: ride in, speak of arcane things in a strange pattern, and when he didn’t get the reaction he wanted, he started firing—except that he refused this time to fire on any women, believing them to be innocents. As employees of the gaudy house, they weren’t allowed to carry blasters. A pity, as his leaving them alone would have given them a clear shot at him, and maybe avoided this destruction…and the destruction where they had come from, as it seemed that this attack had occurred before the one they had stumbled on.

The only other thing of note was that there was no sign of the napalmlike substance in this ville. Had he considered this ville too small to make that necessary, or was he limited by numbers as to how often he could use it? That question would only really be answered if they found the next ville had also been attacked.

There was little they could do to help here. The women had the situation as under control as was possible, and there was little medical help needed. The stark truth was that those who would buy the farm had already done so by this time.

There was little else they could do but leave, with the words of the gaudies ringing in their ears—pleas to wreak revenge.

It was when they were out on the empty expanse of desert once more that Krysty started to get that sense of being watched.

IT WAS WITH A SINKING HEART that they made the slow trek across the wastes to their next destination. The ville had been wiped out. No survivors.

But at least one important thing was evident at their last stop: this ville had been attacked in the time between the other two attacks, which meant that the rider wasn’t working his way around an arc, but was more likely to be at some point equidistant to all three villes.

Two down, one to go. They set off with a little more information, but not enough to reach any real conclusions. After a two-day drive across the desert and dustbowl, they found themselves with a ville that had been the first to be visited by the rider. Those that had been chilled had been disposed of. The infrastructure had been restored as much as was possible, and there had been no orange chem here. Again, the people talked of the rider’s strange language and undreamed-of ordnance. Their descriptions were sketchy, as had been those of the other villes, but they were enough to tell J.B. that the man had been using a limited range of weaponry so far. It didn’t mean he didn’t have a wider range available, but it did say much about his thought process.

They left the final ville on their arc with a little more information than when they had started, but not as much as Ryan would have wished.

“Not much good,” Jak commented tersely.

“On the contrary, dear boy, I would say that we have something that John Barrymore could work with,” Doc commented.

J.B. grimaced. “Okay, so if he starts from one point and attacks them, but not in any order of progression, then if we drew a line from the villes, we might get a central point, but only if the four villes form enough of an angle from which—”

“Yeah, okay, I get it—it won’t be accurate. But it would give us an area to start looking,” Ryan pointed out, “and that’s better than where we are now.”

“Mebbe,” J.B. breathed, “but you figured how big that area could be?”

Ryan sighed. “It’s about all we got right now.”

Jak exchanged a look with Krysty. “Ryan, head right direction, figure scum look for us. Knows where are,” the albino said.

“You sure of that?” Ryan questioned, dividing his gaze between them.

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure of that,” Krysty said with a shiver, her hair flicking around her shoulders nervously. “I don’t know where he’s hiding out there, with no cover, but he’s been watching us. All the while. I can feel it.”

Ryan nodded, almost to himself. “Okay. Let him bring it on, then. We plot a rough course, and we start out first thing. If that’s how it’s gonna be, let’s draw the bastard out.”

Chapter Four

“I am on a line going thirty-three by seventeen. The fourth quadrant. They are at rest for the evening, operating a watch rotation system. They seem to be very lightly armed, which has surprised me given their reputation. However, I shall still use long-distance search and recover tactics, and take no chances. Further reports after operations commence, which should be at 0400 by my chronometer. Message ends.”

Thunder Rider flipped up the slim mike that came down from his goggles and adjusted the long-range infrared recon scope before lifting the eyepiece to his left eye. The darkness of the surrounding desert now became a relief in grays and greens. The figures and the wagon in the distance, barely visible by the naked eye even in the light, now came into sharp focus. He adjusted the range with the slightest touch of his index finger, and the figures grew larger in the scope. He could see that the small albino and the famed Armorer were on watch. The others were sleeping, clustered around the fire. The red-haired woman was close up against the one-eyed man. For a moment, Rider felt a twinge of something in his chest, and was baffled. He truly had no idea what bothered him, only that something did. No matter, it did not fit in with the plan.

The scope had a long-range directional mike attached. Thunder Rider activated the facility. The receiver was attached to a small speaker in the goggles, relaying directly to his ear all that could be heard from such a distance. Not that there was much. The old man and the black woman were snoring. The albino was silent, and prowled like a wolf ready to spring. He was the most immediate danger. Not relevant now, but a point worth noting. The Armorer was muttering softly to himself, possibly as an aid to concentration. It was almost inaudible, and certainly under his breath. Rider doubted that the others would be able to hear him. It was testament to the power of the recon equipment that he was able to discern this.

So: two on watch, the others sleeping. Reflex times would be reduced. They would, of course, know before the strike hit. In this silence, even the best of stealth weapons would be detected, certainly by the albino. Even with an advanced warning, there would be little they could do against the weaponry he chose to use. However, no one won a war without caution and care. Preparation, thinking ahead, and the ability to be flexible. It was easier to do this when training than out in the field, as he had discovered. There were aspects of his recent activities that needed review and improvement.

Nonetheless, that made him all the more determined to be precise in this operation. To get it right.

The chassis of the bike was made of a polycarbon fiber, surrounded by titanium supports. The polycarbon enabled the frame to be strong and lightweight, the titanium supports forming an exoskeleton over the top to which were attached the pods that contained equipment, and the holstering that held his ordnance.

Thunder Rider crouched over one of the pods, snapping it open. All of the pods were self-contained, ready to be attached and removed to the frame as necessary. Their interior design was specific to whatever they were carrying, enabling him a secure storage system for ordnance and equipment that could be easily changed on the bike at a moment’s notice, back at base. He had thought long and hard before preparation for this mission, and as he inspected the contents of the pod he had just opened, he had no regrets for his decisions.

He had chosen the recon equipment from the stores with care. Knowing the reputation of the people he was about to trail, he wished to ensure that he would not have to engage them in direct combat. He had a twofold purpose in this: the first was that he had no desire to fight those he would wish to make his allies. The second was that he was outnumbered by six-to-one: not odds that would bother him in the usual run of things—had not his missions to those small towns shown this?—but when he was against an adversary with such a reputation as this group, it would bode him well to show some caution.

His basic plan was to take the redheaded woman, show her the base and support systems, and discuss with her the basic philosophy of his mission. He felt sure that if he were to do this, then she would help him convert the others to his cause. There were other, stranger feelings that he could not explain coursing through him. He chose to ignore them for the moment.

He focused his mind on the task in hand. The recon equipment had served him well so far. He was pleased by that as it was the first time that he had been called upon to use this in an operational capacity, and it had proved as effective in the field as he had hoped. The night scope was augmented by a long-distance digital imager for use in daylight. Between them, these two devices had enabled him to keep a close watch on the group without going too close. Similarly, the long-range directional mike had helped him to try to understand what was going on in the dynamics of the group, the better to adapt his tactics to the situation. In truth, there were certain elements of this operation that were completely new to him, and as such he was treating this as an exercise that would make him a better operative in the future.

The recon equipment was one thing: what lay in the pod in front of him, nestled comfortably into its protective fittings, was another matter entirely. It consisted of a series of small polycarbon rods that fitted together to form a barrel of variable length. There were overlapping supporting rods to reinforce the barrel when assembled. A small, electronic sight and laser target finder sat within a soft protective base, ready to be switched on and attached. The battery unit powering the target finder had a half-life of five hundred years. A triggering mechanism was also comfortably fitted into the pod, ready to be attached and deployed.

Most important of all were the small black eggs that sat in a line, snugly arrayed in a rack fitted into soft material. From the computer files back at base, he knew that these had been derived from a prototype that had never been called into commission. The design had been perfect, but the costings had been deemed prohibitive at the time. The report on file had been sidetracked into a rant about the wastage in military spending. The gist of the report had, however, been clear: this was a highly effective weapon, to be used sparingly and with great caution.

Again, he took this to be a good thing. Not only would it achieve its purpose, but he would be learning as he progressed in the mission. Thunder Rider was always looking to be better.

Dismissing such thoughts from his mind, he set to assembling the weapon. Using the range and directional finder on the recon equipment to set the coordinates on the directional and firing unit, he attached it to the long barrel he had constructed. The trigger unit came next, and remembering what the files had advised about caution, he did not deploy it until he had taken one of the small black eggs and inserted it into the chamber that was formed within the now fully assembled weapon.

He turned to the direction of his target. From the files, he knew that the dispersal of the gas was rapid, and that its effect was virtually immediate. That would give them little to no time in which to deal with the attack.

The effects of the gas would last for several hours, which gave him more than enough time to disassemble the weapon, take the bike across the desert surface, check their status and take the redhead. He would have no need to hurry, which was good. Hurry was the mother of panic.

A wireless unit on the recon equipment would feed exact coordinates into the directional unit. One touch, and it was done. A shielded light on the directional unit blinked once, paused, then blinked twice. A signal that the information was received, processed and the weapon was primed for deployment.

All he had to do now was to attach the trigger unit and point the weapon in the right direction. He smiled to himself, thinking of some of the old videos he loved, and the difference between the quality of weaponry used by those heroes and by himself. What they could have achieved if…

He pursed his lips, shook his head firmly. This was not the time to enter into such a reverie. He attached and deployed the trigger unit. Another shielded light, blinking once, pausing, then twice. Ready.

He nestled the weapon into the hollow of his shoulder, setting himself, then put the eyepiece of the directional unit to his goggles. An infrared grid, switching automatically as it read the light levels, showed him the campfire and those gathered around it. On the periphery of the scope’s vision he could see the Armorer and the albino, pursuing their separate circuits. It was surprising how clustered together they were, really. The range of the gas once the egg had burst was such that it would touch them easily.

Flickering figures in one corner of the eyepiece recorded time and distance. Coordinates appeared, and it told him how long it would take for the grenade to reach the target area once fired. He set the crosshairs to one side of the campfire. For want of anything else, it seemed an obvious target point. He squeezed gently and the egg was expelled with a recoil that jolted at his shoulder.

It had taken him by surprise. It was, after all, the first time that he had fired this weapon. With an ordinary piece of ordnance he would be cursing the fact that his shot would now be off target. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that a laser directional beam had locked on to the coordinates and once the egg had been sent along this beam, the smart circuits in it would keep it on target.

He brought the weapon back in line, using the direction unit to see what was occurring. They were momentarily unaware, and then he could see the albino turn, could hear him yell through the mike link.

They had quick reactions, as he had expected. But not quick enough. With a small nod of satisfaction, he turned away and began to disassemble the weapon. Swiftly, but without hurry. He had the time, now.

JAK WAS STARING into the dark. He knew that the bastard was out there, it was just a matter of where. He could almost sniff his scent on the cold night air. But it was as if he was just beyond reach. Still, every fiber of his being was screaming triple red.

Red. Something had brought that phrase to mind, something seen from the corner of his eye and registered only on the most subconscious level. He turned and looked toward the fire, which was still burning bright enough to cause him to squint at the contrast in brightness. Not a contrast so great that he could not see what had registered in his mind. A small red dot on the sandy soil, almost invisible in the glow of the fire, just to one side of it. It was steady on the ground. A laser of some kind. A marker?

Every nerve in his body jangled, his stomach flipping as the first wave of adrenaline began to rush through him.

“J.B.! Look! Incoming—everyone…” he yelled, words coming out in a jumbled bark.

On the far side of the circle cast by the fire’s light, J.B. whirled and was heading toward the albino even before his Uzi had come to hand. He didn’t waste time with words. A quizzical glance, answered by Jak’s own gaze, was enough, directing him to the red dot on the ground.

“Pathfinder,” he whispered to himself, knowing as he did that their only chance was to move quickly out of the immediate area, then try to locate where the attack originated. To do anything else except run would be to ask how much jack the farm cost.

Both men, despite having weapons to hand by reflex, showed no concern with following the direction of the beam. That would have been fruitless, anyway. It was little more than a red dot, with no chance of ascertaining direction by the naked eye. No, the only thing to do that would be of any practical use would be to rouse the others, get them out before whatever was heading their way hit.

Jak’s shouts had already awakened them. Ryan and Krysty were bolt awake, on their way to being on their feet before his words had even died away. Mildred was a little slower, having been asleep longer and much deeper into her rest. She was bleary, but under the fog of sleep her reflexes were forcing her to the surface. She was stumbling to her feet even as she felt J.B.’s hand under her arm, lifting her as if she were no more than a feather, his wiry frame lent strength by urgency. She wasn’t too sure where she was, but every fiber of her being yelled danger, her own adrenaline rush forcing her back to full consciousness.

Doc was the only one who did not respond with the necessary urgency. The shouts, the pounding of feet on the soil and sand around the campfire, all of these served to bring him out of his slumbers. But it was a slack-jawed Doc, eyes open but blank and uncomprehending, who greeted the night. His sleep, as ever, had been disturbed by nightmare visions. Sleep was a necessary evil, where pale demons emerged from the recesses of his mind to torment him, to remind him of that which had tortured him, of that which he had lost. On waking, he was never sure if it was still part of a dream or whether it was little more than an extension of the hellish vagaries of his own mind.

“Doc,” Mildred blurted, sleep clearing from her eyes, mind racing, catching sight of the disoriented man. She stumbled toward him, pulling at his arm to try to lever him up. He yelled incoherently, pulling himself away and stumbling from his half-standing position so that he sprawled back on the ground, raising a cloud of dust.

“Jak—” Ryan barked. The albino knew the one-eyed man’s query before he even voiced it, and pointed to the red dot.

“Coming fast,” he added, indicating to his rear.

With a speed far in excess of the time it would take to voice such thoughts, Ryan realized that whatever it was that was coming for them, it would be locked onto the laser dot, and it would be quick. It had to be from a great distance, otherwise they would have seen their tracker—for he had no doubt that whatever it was, the source was the mystery rider—but it was likely to be traveling at great speed.

So if it was locked onto the dot, then they needed to get as far away from that bastard red mark as possible. He knew that Krysty, Jak, J.B. and himself stood a chance if they set off at a run, but he could also see that Doc was still on the ground, and Mildred was slowed by her efforts to aid him. Run, or go to her assistance. There wasn’t time to think about the choice, just act. He took a step toward Mildred and Doc, could see that J.B. was doing the same.

The gas egg wasn’t visible in the darkness until the last moment. As it entered the ring of light cast by the fire, its dark shape was thrown into relief. Even then, it was hard to track as the speed at which it descended made it little more than a blur. It was audible from farther out, a high, whistling scream in the air as it was propelled at great speed toward its target. In what seemed like time slowed to an almost infinitesimal degree, all who turned their gaze could see the egg fall toward the red dot on the ground, the smart circuit in the gren making it follow the perfect arc to land and impact. It seemed to slow from its great speed until it was almost possible to see the rotation in flight that guided its direction. It fell toward the red dot with an inevitability and slowness that made Ryan feel that he could dive across the sandy soil between his feet and the red dot and pluck the gren out of the air, stopping it from hitting the earth and exploding, letting out whatever lethal load it may carry.

The one-eyed man tried to carry the thought through, forcing his sluggish limbs to move, feeling his muscles tense and wobble as though pushing against quicksand rather than air. In a flash of insight that was faster than real time, he realized that it was only normal air resistance that he felt, that, in truth, his danger-honed mind was trying to make him move faster than was humanly possible.

It had to have been imagination or hallucination, but he was almost sure that he saw the gren take one final wobbling turn in the air before hitting the sand. Felt sure that he saw the puff of dust raised by impact before the gren splintered into a thousand pieces, unleashing the payload. He flinched, squinting his good eye for fear of flying metal.

But it was no frag gren. A puff of smoke—or so it seemed—was all that issued forth, a white that shone incandescent against the red glow of the fire before spreading and dissipating into a mist that seemed to fade and die before it reached Ryan.

He was aware of a numbing that spread from his chest outwards, and a faint smell, sweet but with a bitterness underlying it. The two were connected, he knew, but it was hard to work out how, hard to work out why he should be bothering to ponder this, hard to…

He could breathe still, but everything else was becoming numb. His chest felt empty yet heavy at the same time. His shoulders were reduced to lumps of flesh with no movement, the numbness spread down his arms as though carried in his veins, trickling into his fingers, down to the very tips. He could feel the same happening in his legs, the lack of feeling spreading down to his groin and then down each leg, knees buckling as the muscles supporting them went dead.

Ryan felt himself tumble as his balance was unable to account for the lack of feeling and support from his body. He could not control the fall. He teetered, then pitched forward, landing full-length with a thud on the densely packed, sandy soil with a reverberation that seemed to resonate through his frame. He could sense this, and yet not feel it, almost as though he was detached from himself.

He could see nothing. The light from the fire was too slight, the ground in front of him too close to his face. He could hear little else but the crackle of the fire. Then, in the distance, approaching at speed and growing louder with every breath he took, the sound of a motorcycle engine.

Somewhere, deep in the recesses of a momentarily clouded mind, he knew that the gren had contained some kind of nerve gas. He had heard of such predark relics, had on occasion witnessed examples of them that had chilled on contact.

He hated being at the mercy of whoever—the mystery rider, he guessed—had fired the gren. The coldheart bastard could do anything he wanted to them, and they could not fight back.

Although Ryan could see nothing, falling as he had, there were others who had a better view of what was about to occur. Doc had fallen onto his back, staring up at the night sky, uncomprehending. No sooner had he managed to focus in some manner and realize where he was than the paralysis had hit him. It bewildered him as he had still been too befuddled to notice the gren. He was only aware of the numbness, the inability to raise himself up as he fell backward, and of the fact that he was flat to the ground without feeling it beneath him. As though he were floating above it, just hovering, and yet unable to move through any direction. In this state of disconnection, he heard the engine’s roar as the sound of his own approaching doom. Tears prickled at his eyes.

The vagaries of Doc’s imagination were as far away from what went through the head of Mildred Wyeth as it was possible to get. Caught trying to help the old man to his feet, Mildred had seen the gren impact from the periphery of her vision, and the first scent that hit her had told her that it was some kind of nerve gas. She tried to hold her breath for a second, then realized that it would probably be able to absorb through the skin, and so holding her breath was useless. She exhaled heavily as the first wave of numbness began to spread. For some reason that she could not explain, it seemed to take hold on her left side first, dragging her in that direction so that she toppled on her side. Her vision was partly obscured by the plaits that fell across her face, but in the far distance she could see a shape move across the landscape in sync with the sound of an engine. It was just beyond the circle of light cast by the fire, but as she lay immobile, wondering if she was going to be conscious and helpless at the moment of her death, she saw that it was the mystery rider. Something told her that their chilling was not on his mind…which led her to question what, then, his purpose could be in doing this.

J.B. and Jak were, in their own ways, cold and dark with impotent rage at what had happened. It was their watch, and they had failed. More than that, they were both now on the ground, twisted at odd angles because of the speed with which the gas had taken effect while they tried to rally the group, both struck down within yards of each other. J.B. could see Jak’s legs, above his head now that he was horizontal. Both could see the bike approach, and cursed the mystery rider. Coldheart bastard could do what the hell he liked with them and they would be unable to take revenge or even put up a fight.

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