FUTURE SPOILS

The human will to survive has sharpened to a knife edge after a century of postnuclear madness. In a lawless land where firepower and savagery rule, power lies with the barons and coldhearts who wield control through terror. Against all odds, a courageous few still fight for something better to live by—honor, decency and hope.

CHILL FACTOR

Emerging relatively unscathed from the apocalyptic rebirth of North America, Canada hides a trove of Cold War–era secret government installations known as Diefenbunkers, filled with caches of weapons, wags and food. Ryan Cawdor and his companions agree to ride sec for a convoy headed west across the remnants of the old Trans-Canada Highway to retrieve the ultimate prize: four portable nuclear reactors. It’s enough power to light up a ville for years, a bright beacon for a new tomorrow. But they have death on their tail, a baron and his sec men who will stop at nothing to claim the prize as their own.

In the Deathlands, the road to hell is a one-way ride...

The boar’s eyes burst as horror pushed through its pupils

The thumb-thick worms in its eye sockets waved like feelers and stiffened like pointers at Doc. The boar’s head swiveled in response, its tusks rasping against each other as its mouth fell open and its tongue lolled out, accompanied by an orgy of wiggling filth.

“By my stars and garters!” Doc exclaimed.

Ryan fired three 9 mm rounds through the dead boar’s head. Its skull broke apart, spewing broken lengths of black worm. The porcine behemoth staggered, but didn’t fall. Fresh worms waved forth from the shattered head and snout as if tasting the air. The corpse tottered toward the humans.

The entire fifty-strong herd of giant, newly dead mutie wild boars began to roll over and rise up.

“Fireblast…” Ryan breathed.

Hell Road Warriors

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.

—Norman Cousins

1915–1990

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter One

Ryan shouldered his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster and put his hand on the lever to open the mat-trans chamber. His companions had cleaned themselves up from the jump, and everyone was geared up and ready to go except Doc, who was coming down from his postjump shudders. The one-eyed man waited while Doc pulled himself together. The walls of the mat-trans chamber were an amber color densely veined with black. Ryan had never seen one colored like that and it made him uneasy. He didn’t know where they were, but it had to be better than the swamps, and Haven. “Ready, Doc?”

Doc took the hand off the wall he was using to steady himself. He drew his huge Civil War-replica model LeMat revolver and set the hammer to fire the shotgun barrel. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!”

Doc looked like a stiff breeze would knock him over. His mind and body were damaged by being torn through time from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Proving to be a difficult subject, after a period of time they shot him via mat-trans into the future that was the Deathlands. Having his matter transferred from point A to point B never did him any favors.

Being discombobulated was something no one ever got used to, but looking around, Jak, J.B. and Mildred were post-regurgitation and ready to go. Ryan’s eye came to rest on the love of his life. Krysty raised one eyebrow. “Lover, if you don’t pull that lever soon I’m going to pull yours.”

A grin ghosted across Ryan’s face. “Okay, everyone. Triple red.” His companions spread out and leveled their weapons at the door as he pulled the lever. The door hissed open. Ryan’s eye narrowed. The lights were on, and he could hear the hum of a generator. One glance told him this redoubt was unusual. Most were built to a pattern. The architecture here was all wrong. Ryan looked back at the mat-trans and then into the odd little redoubt. His instincts told him the mat-trans they had just stepped out of had been a last-minute addition. The party moved into a long, low room filled with workstations.

Mildred put her fists on her hips and stared around herself indignantly. “Okay, have we traveled back in time or something?”

Jak shook his head warily. “Hope not.”

Doc’s voice was very quiet. “I dearly hope so.”

“What are you talking about, Mildred?” Ryan asked.

“Look at this place!” Mildred threw up her hands. “I mean, look at it!”

Ryan looked at it. The ceiling was low and supported by squat pillars. Everything seemed wrong. The floor was an odd checkerboard of green and white. “And?”

Mildred sighed. “You see the floors? That’s linoleum. Have you checked the puke-green walls? The workstations are top-notch, but check the watercooler and the other stuff.”

Mildred had been cryogenically frozen over a century earlier and, like Doc, was an unwilling citizen of the postapocalyptic Deathlands. Ryan knew she was on to something. “What about them?”

“This place? It’s kitsch.”

Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Jak and Doc stared at Mildred blankly. When she went predark in her speech, no one knew what she was talking about. Mildred gazed heavenward for strength. “It’s totally retro.” Mildred was rewarded with more tolerant looks. She plowed on anyway. “I’m saying this place was built in the 1960s. During the cold war. It’s some kind of bomb shelter, and it’s like it got refurbished fast and dirty at the last second.”

Ryan nodded. He’d read old books about the cold war in his youth. Having a library of books was just one perk of being the son of an East Coast baron when he was growing up. Mildred was confirming his suspicions.

“Reactivated,” he said. “Probably added that mat-trans at the last minute.”

Jak shrugged. None of that meant much to the young man from the bayous of Louisiana. He had more immediate questions. “Where?”

Everyone turned at the sound of Doc tapping his cane on the wall. He tapped a painted flag over the door to the mat-trans chamber. It had two red stripes, one on each side and a white center. A stylized red maple leaf dominated the middle. A second smaller flag was painted beneath it. Ryan recognized the Union Jack in one corner of the flag and some shield off to the side.

Doc cocked his head. “I am confused.”

That was news to nobody.

Mildred shook her head. “We’re in the Great White North.”

“A Mari Usque Ad Mare.” Everyone stared at Doc. When it came down to being predark obscure, he had Mildred beat hands down. Doc sighed in defeat and translated from the Latin. “From Sea to Sea.”

“So where are we?” Ryan asked.

“Canada,” Doc concluded.

Ryan grimaced. He had been north of the Deathlands a few times, usually against his will and mostly in what had once been Alaska or Siberia. What little he knew about Canada was that it was vast and bastard cold.

“Where?” Jak repeated.

Doc tapped the smaller flag painted beneath the maple leaf. “That is what confuses me. At first glance the flag below is the Canadian Red Ensign, but upon consideration I believe the coat of arms is incorrect.”

“It’s the flag of Ontario,” Mildred said. This garnered her more uncomprehending stares. The physician shrugged. “I dated a radiologist from Toronto once.”

Ryan and his friends walked through the redoubt, clearing it room by room. They found a dormitory, an infirmary and a lavatory all in order. They looted supplies from every room. Mildred found a treasure trove of medical supplies, but it was the sight of toilet paper still in its packaging that nearly made her burst into tears.

Jak raised his head and sniffed the air. “Food.”

“Damn!” Mildred swore. “No freakin’ way! I smell pizza!” Blaster out in front of her, she made a beeline toward the smell of pepperoni and cheese. Ryan didn’t know what pizza was, but he found himself salivating at the scent.

“Triple alert, people!” He kicked open a set of double doors. His longblaster pointed at an empty kitchen. Beyond it lay an equally empty cafeteria.

“Just missed whoever was here,” J.B. observed. “We better take a look around here. Bastards might creep up and attack.”

A recce of the immediate area revealed nothing. The companions went back to the kitchen.

“We just missed pizza!” Mildred was agitated at the loss. Ryan took in several receptacles stuffed to the gills with plastic packaging. A sea of plastic eating utensils lay in the sink. Whoever they had just missed, there were a lot of them. Other people were using this place.

Mildred scoured the kitchen. “Look at this!” Ryan looked. It was a freezer unit. A wall full of them, and walk-in size. It was more than a freezer. It was literally a kitchen cryogenic unit. Mildred picked up a white binder with the Canadian flag on it and began flipping through it. “Jeez! This thing is more sophisticated than the unit I came out of.” She scanned pages of inventory. “Look at this, hams, venison, sides of beef, vegetables, fruit juice concentrate… Man, they even managed to freeze wine and beer!” Mildred closed the binder. “Someone went to one whole hell of a lot of trouble to stock this place, and not just with those crappy MRE packs in the redoubts, but with real food that would be as tasty as the day as it was frozen, even if that was a hundred years ago.”

“Just like you?” J.B. observed.

Mildred’s lips quirked. J.B. was a man of few words but every once in a while he said something sweet. “Something like that.”

Ryan looked at the food vaults and then Mildred. “Can you unfreeze something?”

The physician tapped the binder. “The thawing process seems to take four-to-six hours, depending on the foodstuff, and that’s not counting actual cooking time.”

Ryan wasn’t sure they had four-to-six hours. No one would leave a treasure trove like this unguarded for long. He was starting to get an itchy feeling. “See if they got ration packs or anything quicker.”

Doc opened a regular refrigerator and pulled out four, fourteen-inch-diameter disks shrink-wrapped in military olive-drab packaging. “These seem merely cold. Mayhap like dear Dr. Wyeth, they are thawed and ready for the oven of this brave new world.”

Mildred lunged. Her eyes lit up at what Doc found. “Damn, Doc.” She shuffled the pizza pies. “Pepperoni and cheese…pepperoni and cheese…veggie… Oooh! Yeah! Hawaiian!”

Jak peered at the Canadian military pizza packages. “What Hawaiian?”

“Canadian bacon and pineapple.” Mildred scanned the control panel on one of the large ovens and punched buttons. Instantly heating coils blazed orange. “It says just five minutes to brown the cheese …” Mildred slid in the pies on their packaged plates and set the timer. “What else have we got in there, Doc?”

Doc pulled out two six-packs of olive-drab cans emblazoned with maple leafs. He peered at the fine print. “Lager.”

Jak’s chin lifted. “Beer?”

Beer was at premium in the Deathlands. Only the most prosperous villes could devote any arable land or grain to produce it. Most just distilled shine out of whatever agricultural scraps were left over. Doc looked at the cans suspiciously. “One-hundred-year-old-resuscitated lager—it is hard to lend it credence. Perhaps one of us should test it first and—”

Jak snatched a can. The tab cracked with a decisive pop and hiss and suds spilled over his fingers. He blew off the froth and his ruby-red eyes closed as he tilted the can back. Everyone watched Jak’s snowy white Adam’s apple move up and down as he poured back about half the can. His eyebrows pulled down in consideration as he regarded the can. Jak let forth a belch longer than most sentences he uttered. “Good,” he proclaimed.

“A most potent eructation,” Doc declared. “And a good portent that the lager has lost none of its luster.” He passed out cans to the rest of his friends. He fumbled with the tab for a moment but it cracked and he held up his foaming can. “To good friends!”

“To good friends.” They clicked the cans together and raised their beers to their lips.

Ryan’s shoulders relaxed and his eye nearly closed as he drank. Jak was right. It was good. It was real good.

Mildred sighed and squinted at the fine print on the can. “Diefenbunker? Hey, wait.”

No one waited. Mildred ran back to the inventory binder and pulled up a pizza wrapping from the trash. “Everything around here says Diefenbunker.”

“’Facturer?” Jak suggested.

“No, the places with the mat-trans are called redoubts, but in my day, a place like this was called a bunker or a bomb shelter.” Mildred began flipping through the kitchen inventory binder. “Allotments, Central Diefenbunker.” Mildred stabbed her finger onto the page. “Borden, Borden, Ontario! There was a map on the wall back in the last room!”

Mildred ran off. The team followed clutching their beers and blasters. The woman stood in front of a wall-size map of Canada. Her finger traced a line up from Lake Ontario. “Borden! We’re right here! About, oh, an hour’s drive north of Toronto!”

Ryan scanned the map. There was little red star just east of someplace called Angus. Mildred’s fingers began leaping from province to province locating little red stars. “Look, Nanaimo, British Columbia. Penhold, Alberta. Shilo, Manitoba. Valcartier and Val-d’Or, Quebec. Debert, Nova Scotia. Bunkers, all out in the sticks, but not far from each provincial capital.”

Ryan nodded. “Good work, Mildred.”

Mildred beamed. Ryan didn’t hand out praise often. She went to the nearest computer and hit the space bar. The Canadian flag popped up, but other than that the computer responded to nothing she tried. “Without a password I think we’re locked out.”

Out in the kitchen the oven pinged.

The map was forgotten as they filed back into the kitchen.

“If Toronto’s the capital,” J.B. mused, “then it probably got hit.”

J.B. was probably right, Mildred thought.

They sat around the kitchen counter as she found a pizza cutter in a drawer. She cut slices and doled out fresh beers all around. Krysty took one bite of the pepperoni and cheese slice and closed her eyes. “Gaia…”

Conversation ceased as the friends attacked the hot food and cold beer. It wasn’t often that they got to eat their fill of anything. Much less something that good. Ryan spent some time savoring the flavors. “You pulled your weight today, Mildred.”

“Yeah, well, it isn’t Domino’s.” Mildred spoke through cheeks bulging like a squirrel gathering nuts for winter. “But damn, it’s been a long time.”

“Indeed.” Doc finished his first slice and nodded. “I was always rather partial to Poppa John’s, myself.”

Mildred stared over her fourth piece. “When did you get Poppa John’s?”

“During the time of my unfortunate captivity. Perhaps it was in the Chicago lab… I was particularly enamored of their anchovy and onion pies.” Doc’s eyes grew faraway as he reviewed pain and indignities inflicted upon him over a hundred years earlier. “That is, when the scientists saw fit to share any with me. I fear after my last escape attempt my rations were rather severely reduced in diversity, quality and quantity.”

Mildred felt her eyes sting. Whenever she felt like she couldn’t take living in this hellish future another second, she reminded herself that Doc’s suffering dwarfed hers. Mildred pushed the plate over. “Have another slice, Doc.”

“I believe I will try the Hawaiian, thank you, my good Doctor.”

The pizzas disappeared to the last crumb. Krysty and Mildred weren’t above licking their plates clean. The cans of lager were shaken, turned upside down and sucked for the last bit of foam. Ryan wiped his mouth with the back of his fist. “Someone’s been here. A lot of them. And they’re going to be back. We’ll recce the rest of the redoubt and hopefully avoid a confrontation.”

Doc sighed. “A shame to have feasted so well, only to regurgitate our repast in some mat-trans only the Fates know where.”

Ryan admitted it was one bastard sad thought indeed, but there just wasn’t going to be much time for digestion. “Let’s do it.”

They scouted out the rest of the redoubt. More of the rooms upstairs had been raided. In the second dormitory the beds had been stripped down to the frames. A tool room and a machine shop were bare bones. They came to another room, and J.B. rocked on his heels. “Dark…night.”

Jak whistled.

Dark night was right. Ryan shook his head. The barrel-shaped vault looked like another add-on, quick and dirty as Mildred had said. It was an armory. Many of the racks were empty, but a shocking amount of weaponry was still in place. Ryan counted more than a dozen military blasters, the only difference being their plastic furniture was a dark green rather than the usual Deathlands black. Spare mags, bandoliers and crates of ammo were stacked along the walls.

“Nuke me!” J.B. ran to a rack. “Ryan! Ryan!”

The one-eyed man ran his hands over the racks of weapons as he walked over to where J.B. stood transfixed. Ryan looked at a little bolt-action rifle with a funny little scope that was set too far forward.

“Know what that is?” J.B. asked.

Ryan frowned. The Armorer wasn’t normally the gushing type. But his old friend was a gunsmith of the first order, and the weapon in front of them had detonated his passion. “A blaster?”

J.B. gave Ryan an offended look. “That is a Steyr Scout longblaster, Tactical version.”

“Yeah?”

“It was designed to be the ultimate do-it-all rifle— 7.62 mm, big enough for a good shot to take any game in North America. But look at it!” J.B. handled the rifle with almost erotic enthusiasm. “Unlike most bolts, this detachable mag has a ten rounder.” J.B. flipped the rifle over. “See here? It carries a spare mag in the stock. Here?” He pushed a button. “Cleaning kit in the butt. Here, sidesaddle on the stock holds five ready rounds in these clips. And here?” The fore end of the little rifle split and deployed forward like a praying mantis’s wings. “Bipod.” J.B. snapped the bipod back in place and handed the rifle to Ryan.

It was light, not much more than six pounds. Ryan eyed the short fluted barrel. “Going to kick some.”

“Recoil reducing stock,” J.B. said smugly. “And check the sling. Three swivel positions and two straps. One for carrying and one for wrapping your arm through to steady you.”

Ryan looked at the little scope. “Not much magnification.”

“It’s 2.5 power.” J.B. nodded. “It’s not a sniper rifle. It’s the weapon of a rifleman, of a scout.”

Ryan shook his head. The scope was completely forward of the action. “Scope’s too far forward.”

“It’s supposed to be. Shoulder it.”

Ryan shouldered the longblaster and instinctively wrapped his arm through the sling. He peered through the scope. It was about a foot from his face, but the image within was crystal clear, and he could still see everything else in front of him.

J.B. knew Ryan saw it. “You see! That’s what they call long eye relief. It allows you to see your target in the scope, but at the same time you can still see what is going on around you. When you shoot a Scout, you want to keep both eyes open, and that allows you to…” The Armorer trailed off as Ryan turned his single blue eye on him in vague amusement.

J.B. cleared his throat. “And if the scope ever breaks?” He reached over and flipped up front and rear iron sights. “Back in the day it they said it was one of the fastest, handiest rifles ever designed. Experienced men could bust clay pigeons out of the air with one.”

Ryan wasn’t sure what a clay pigeon was, but taking a bird in flight with a longblaster was something. He was a keep it simple kind of man. He had to admit everything about the little longblaster made absolute sense, and it felt absolutely right in his hands.

“One more thing.” J.B. was grinning uncharacteristically. “Look at the muzzle.”

Ryan looked. It was threaded.

J.B. reached into the rack and pulled out a factory-fresh black sound-suppressor tube. “I’ll work up some subsonic rounds for you. Keep them in the side carrier. Between that and the tube you got a silent shot whenever you want it.”

“Sold.” There were three Scouts in the rack. Whoever had been here had probably looked at them and dismissed them at first glance like Ryan had. “I want ten mags on a bandolier. Take the other suppressor tubes. Cannibalize the other scopes and any parts you can think of for spares.”

“Right. You’ll probably want a slightly longer length of pull. I’ll take a spacer from one of the spares and lengthen it for you.”

“Just grab it all. You can smith it after the next jump.”

J.B. festooned himself with rifles and gear.

They left the armory and followed the corridor, which opened up into a very large room. It was clearly another crude, last-second expansion. Ryan stopped short, and J.B. nearly dropped his load as he bumped into him.

Huge blast doors dominated the far wall. The most important thing was the vehicle bay off to the side. There were three bays, and two were empty. Ryan could smell gas and see fresh grease in the bays. The last bay was occupied by a Light Armored Vehicle. Ryan took in the 25 mm cannon and the eight giant road wheels.

The armored vehicle was painted a dark military green and looked like it had just rolled off the factory floor. “You remember, Ryan? When we wagged it up to Seattle in one?”

Ryan remembered. “LAV 25.”

“Nah, this is a LAV III.”

Ryan didn’t see much difference other than the red maple leaf painted on the prow.

J.B. was shaking his head, only he wasn’t smiling any more. “Ryan?”

Ryan was shaking his head, too.

It was too much. No one would leave this kind of wealth behind. There were only three explanations. One, it was a grotesquely well-baited trap. Two, something horrible was lurking in this Canadian redoubt that they just hadn’t run into yet. Three, and most likely, there was simply too much loot here for whoever had been visiting to carry or wag away, and they would be back. Though that did beg the question, why didn’t they leave anyone to guard it?

“Ryan?” J.B.’s eyes glittered behind his glasses in pure avarice. “Tell me we’re taking that wag.”

Jak looked around the Diefenbunker meaningfully and said what everyone was thinking. “Stuff it full,” Jak voted. “Run south.”

Ryan knew Doc’s vote but he asked anyway. “Doc?”

Doc sagged with visible relief at the idea of not having to go through the mat-trans. “I believe a cross-country jaunt across Canada might be edifying to both mind and body.”

“Mildred?”

“Doc’s right. We’re all tired of jumping. Last few things we jumped into were bad. In a vehicle at least we can see what’s coming. Plus I’m thinking Canada couldn’t have got hit anywhere near as hard as the States. Maybe clean air, clean water.” Mildred’s eyes got faraway like Doc’s sometimes did when he thought of the past. “I remember Ontario being beautiful.”

Ryan looked to Krysty. “Lover?”

“I’m going whichever way you’re going, jump or drive.” Krysty ran her eyes up and down Ryan’s long, hard, scarred frame and then smiled at the Canadian Land Force LAV III behind him. “But I’ll tell you something. That wag looks good on you.”

One of Ryan’s rare smiles crossed his face. The vote was unanimous.

“J.B., you and me load it and check it. Cannon, coax, top blaster, gren launchers, spare fuel everything. Full war load. Everyone else, food, trade goods and supplies. Blasters, ammo, ration packs.” Ryan nodded at the external cleats and equipment cages. “Load it to the gills. I want to wag out of here within the hour.”

Chapter Two

“Clear!” Krysty called. She tracked the security periscope. All the computers were locked down, including those controlling the sec cameras. The Diefenbunker did have several periscopes strategically placed around the facility. “Got some daylight left!” She let go of the periscope’s handles.

Ryan stood in the commander’s hatch of the LAV behind the pintle-mounted Minimi Squad Automatic Weapon. “Mildred!”

The physician hit a big red button and the blast doors began grinding open. The two women ran and jumped in the back hatch.

“Jak! Button her up and take us out!” The LAV’s rear ramp whined up while red light spilled into the vault of the Diefenbunker’s entry bay from the outside. Gears ground as Jak sent the LAV rumbling out into Ontario. The sun wasn’t quite setting yet, but it was a low red ball in the sky. The sky pulsed with sheets of red and green light as if it were on fire. Ryan had seen the Northern Lights before, but not often while the sun was still shining. In the lurid light Ryan saw a plain of low rolling hills broken up by stands of pines. Ryan also saw a war going on about a mile away.

“Jak! Hold up! J.B., up top!”

The gunner hatch clanged open and J.B. stood from behind the cannon. Ryan pointed. The Armorer took up his binoculars. Almost a mile ahead the land dropped into a shallow depression. Within it a sizable convoy was pulled up into a defensive circle. Outriders besieged it on every side. Ryan ran his Navy longeye over the encircled wags. He counted about a dozen vehicles of all different descriptions with men firing out of, from underneath and between them. Diefenbunker gear and supplies were strapped to the outsides of the vehicles. Most interesting were the convoy’s two LAVs. It explained the empty bays in the bunker. One was like the one Ryan and his companions were in, and it was burning out of control.

“Attackers.” J.B. grimaced. “They got some kind of tank buster.”

Ryan scanned the other LAV. “That one doesn’t have a turret.”

The Armorer’s eyes went wide. “That, is an engineering-recovery vehicle. Check the crane folded down on the back, the dozer blade and the winch.” J.B. sighed. “How many times could we have used one of those when we were with Trader?”

More times than Ryan could count. In the Deathlands a vehicle like that was worth its weight in anything, including human life. Ryan noticed it wasn’t attracting much in the way of fire despite the fact a man in the top hatch was firing a machine blaster like the one Ryan stood behind. The one-eyed man scanned the enemy ringing the convoy. Most of them had off-road bikes, but they had laid their bikes down and were firing prone from behind rocks and folds in the earth. Some of the pits were clearly man-made. They had chosen their ambush site well. They had probably blown the LAV before the convoy knew what was happening. The convoy had been surrounded in plain sight of the sanctuary of the Diefenbunker and cut off. Ryan picked out some 4x4 pickup wags pulled far back from the fight. The attackers were numerous, heavily armed and equipped for cross-country speed. Most had painted their faces with skulls, abstract designs or swathes of color. It wasn’t camouflage. It was war paint and designed to terrorize.

They were coldhearts.

J.B. pointed. “Watch there.”

A coldheart rose up with broad length of pipe over his shoulder. A man behind him touched a flame to the fuse in the back and ducked. A rocket hissed out of the pipe and shot out of the tube. The object arced and twisted in flight and exploded into the ground in a blast of orange fire and gray smoke a dozen yards from one of the caravan’s flatbeds.

J.B. snorted derisively. “Home made. Black powder. Not even spin stabilized. Real close you could take out a wag, even a big one, but nothing like what we’re sitting in. They still got a tank-killer we haven’t seen.”

The driver’s hatch clanged open. Jak’s head popped up. His eyes were the same color as the sinking sun as he surveyed the scene. “Pickin’ sides?”

Ryan was about the closest thing to a decent human being that could survive in the Deathlands. He could see there were women in the convoy, and the attackers looked like they were doing what they liked to do best. Nightcreeping and ambushing.

“Not our fight, and they got something down there that can kill us all.” Ryan shook his head wearily. It was a scene he had seen far too many times in his life. He was reluctant to walk away, but his friends came first. “We’re out of here and— Fireblast!”

Ryan’s hand crushed the top of J.B.’s fedora as he shoved him back into the turret. Three men had crept up out of a fold in the terrain and a rocket hissed straight at the LAV. Jak slammed the driver’s hatch shut. Ryan dropped down the commander’s hatch as a thunderclap backhanded the LAV. Mildred yipped as the armored war wag rocked violently on its chassis. The brimstone stench of black powder filled the air from the open hatches. The coldhearts howled with bloodlust outside. “Die! Die! Die!”

“Jak,” Ryan snarled, “we just picked sides!”

Jak answered by stomping on the gas. The LAV lurched forward. Bullets whanged and spalled off the hull. Ryan rose out of the hatch and leaned into the light machine gun’s stock. He rattled off a 5-round burst into a shrieking, painted face. Dust flew from the chest of a second coldheart as Ryan hammered him down. The last man dropped his rocket tube and turned to run screaming. He was still screaming as he went down beneath the LAV’s wheels.

Ryan knew he was a bullet magnet standing in the turret, but buttoned up it was very hard to see the enemy coming. “Jak, take us about a thousand yards out! Western side. Get us in range of those pickups!” Jak put a low hill between the LAV and the battle and began sneaking west.

“J.B.?”

The Armorer sat in the gunner’s chair. He’d pushed his fedora firmly on his head and tapped his finger against a small comp screen. “Fire control comp is locked, like inside. Going to have to shoot manual. Jak, get me within three hundred yards!”

The LAV rolled across the terrain at speed. Jak suddenly drove up a low gradient and parked on the crest of a low hill looking down on the battle. It would be a matter of seconds before they were spotted.

Ryan called down into the cabin. “Krysty, Mildred, Doc! Out, and keep an eye on our six!”

The back door lowered and they spilled out, blasters at the ready.

The turret whined and the seven-foot, fluted cannon barrel dipped as J.B. picked a target. Sitting in the gunner’s seat and looking through the manual aiming optical gradients, he was calculating more than aiming.

The muzzle of the cannon thudded and spit smoke.

Five coldhearts surrounding a pickup three hundred yards distant just about crapped their homespun coveralls as the high-explosive round detonated uncomfortably close. “Ten wide! Thirty short!” Ryan called. The turret turned a hairbreadth. The barrel tilted up an even tinier increment. The cannon spit. The coldheart pickup’s hood flew up into the air and the windshield shattered. The man behind the wheel disappeared in a haze of blood and smoke.

Coldhearts scattered.

Ryan kept his eye on the big picture as J.B. traversed for targets of opportunity. A coldheart had leaped up from his firing position and was jumping onto his bike. The 25 mm blaster thumped and man and motorcycle burst apart in a cloud of flesh and metal. Ryan nodded as he continued to scan the surroundings. “Nice shot, J.B.”

A pleased noise drifted up from inside the turret.

“J.B.!” Jak pointed excitedly at another pickup. Ryan whipped up his Navy longeye for a moment and smiled. The back of the wag contained a pallet of the homemade rockets.

“Oh yeah!” J.B. enthused.

Ryan thought he might be enjoying this a little too much. “I make it four hundred yards, J.B.!”

“Right!” The turret turned. The muzzle of the cannon elevated a few inches then. The blaster thudded and earth flew up in a geyser.

“Dead on but thirty short!” Ryan called.

The men around the wag didn’t need a second shot. They knew what they were carrying and they ran for their lives. The cannon hammered again and more earth flew.

“Dead on! Ten short!”

The smoking muzzle of the cannon rose almost imperceptibly and thudded.

The wag and its load blew sky-high. Jak whooped. The grass around it rippled and flattened out in a thirty-yard wave. A column of black smoke rose into the bloody sunset. The remaining pickups tore up turf in their haste to escape. Motorcycles fled the scene of the ambush and coalesced into a herd stampeding northward into the low hills. Ryan was interested to notice they took the time to take their dead with them. The pickups streaked after them.

“Moving targets!” J.B. called up. “Hard to hit on manual!”

“Hold fire,” Ryan ordered.

Krysty looked up at Ryan in his perch. “We going down?”

“No. Let them come to us. J.B., stay on station, keep the cannon pointed at anything that comes.”

Ryan watched the convoy. They stayed in defensive formation. A lot of heads stayed turned their way, but the people took care of their dead and wounded and transferred loads from ruined vehicles. A Volkswagen Iltis broke away from the defensive circle and drove slowly toward Ryan’s band. A man stood in the back holding a white flag. Ryan filled his hand with his new Scout longblaster and clambered down from the turret. Jak hopped down after him. The muzzle of J.B.’s cannon watched them like the cold eye of death, making slight adjustments as the wag closed. The 4x4 stopped about twenty yards away. The driver was a gray-hair wrinklie in homespun, and he stayed behind the wheel. The man sitting shotgun and the man in back jumped out. The man in front was clearly in command, but Ryan kept his eye on the other one.

He was black, half a head taller than Ryan and looked to be about half again as heavy, all of it muscle. His head was shaved, and he wore a sheepskin coat someone had tailored to his massive frame. The stainless-steel lever action blaster he carried looked like a toy in his hand. He was obviously a sec man and a damned impressive one.

The leader was a plain-looking man and he stepped straight up to Ryan. He was neither tall nor short. His brown hair was clipped short as was his mustache and beard. The most notable thing about him was his green eyes. They literally twinkled as he smiled at Ryan, and the man radiated a busy, competent sort of energy. His predark parka, cargo pants and boots looked as though they had only recently been put into use. A shiny knew Diefenbunker SIG-Sauer blaster was tucked under his belt. He raised an open right hand in friendship and spent long moments saying something to Ryan that sounded mostly like vowels. It kind of sounded like language Ryan had heard in Cajun country. He looked at Jak. The young man’s snowy brows were bunching mightily. His head cocked slightly as he tried to digest what he had just heard.

Doc took a step forward and made a graceful bow. “Parlez-vous anglais?”

The convoy leader grinned. “But of course.” He nodded at Ryan again. “Hello!”

Ryan nodded noncommittally. “Hi.”

“I am Yoann Toulalan, son of Baron Luc Toulalan, baron of the ville of Val-d’Or.”

Krysty shot Ryan a look, who had caught it, too. Val-d’Or was one of the Diefenbunker locations in Quebec. He nodded at the baron’s son again. “Ryan.”

“Uh…” Toulalan seemed nonplussed at Ryan’s taciturn part in the exchange. He threw up his hands and grinned again. “Well! You are our savior!”

“Glad to help.”

The big man’s face split into a smile as he loomed over Jak. His voice was incredibly deep. “This one is mutant.”

Krysty’s lips tightened but she kept her mouth shut. For the moment.

Ryan’s voice went quiet and cold. “Albino, it’s a condition.”

“Ah.” Toulalan nodded. “We know of such things.”

The big man turned to Ryan and tilted his chin at the LAV and the supplies strapped to the sides. “You stole from us.”

Toulalan made a tsking noise.

Ryan spoke quietly. “You left it. Headed west. With no one to look after it.” The one-eyed man lifted his chin toward the smoking ruins of the coldheart wags. “Except mebbe them.”

The big man slowly straightened in outrage. For a heartbeat Ryan thought it was going to be a fight. Mildred had been in the LAV with J.B. She stepped out angrily. “Why don’t you back off, brother-man!”

The man’s rage fell away. He was clearly startled at the sight of Mildred. His mouth opened and closed again.

Toulalan took the opportunity to step in. “Monsieur Ryan, may I introduce my head security man, Vincent Six. Forgive him. We have taken losses, lost friends. We’re all upset.”

Six tore his eyes off Mildred for a moment. He looked like he didn’t give a spent shell whether Ryan forgave him, but the big man grunted and nodded. Ryan nodded back. Six went back to openly eyeballing Mildred, who put her fists on her hips and glared back.

Toulalan gestured back at his wag. “And allow me to introduce my dear friend Florian Medard, he’s our, how would you say…scholar?”

Florian nodded and touched a pair of fingers to his head in greeting. His eyes ran over each member of the companions and seemed to be cataloging them.

Ryan shrugged. “What do you want?”

Toulalan blinked in surprise. “I believe the question is, what do you want? You have driven off our enemies. For that we are deeply in your debt, but by the same token, you could easily decimate our convoy with your autocannon. I merely ask, what are your intentions?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged. “Head south mebbe.”

“Well, would you care to join us in our evening meal? Six shot a wild boar just this morning.”

“We just had pizza.”

“We had pizza for lunch!”

“We noticed.”

Toulalan gave Ryan a very shrewd look. “We have more beer.”

One corner of Ryan’s mouth quirked against his will. “Bastard.”

Toulalan threw back his head and laughed. “Florian, go tell Cyrielle we have guests for dinner tonight.”

Chapter Three

Ryan gnawed contentedly on a rib of barbecued wild boar. Little more than reconstituted Diefenbunker olive oil, salt and fresh-picked herbs had worked glory over the fire spit. The convoy had broken out predark folding picnic tables, lit fires, candles and storm lanterns, and it was a full-on feast. A woman played a mandolin, accompanied by flute, and several people were dancing. Toulalan’s sister pressed a fresh can of Diefenbunker beer into Ryan’s hand. She was nothing like her brother. She was small and dark with black hair, olive skin and huge dark eyes. However the twinkle in her eyes, the penchant for smiling and similar mannerisms made their kinship unmistakable. Ryan chewed the arc of bone more out of habit and for pleasure than anything else. In the Deathlands one often never knew where the next meal was coming from. Gorging was a reflex. The pig had been accompanied by green beans and something called potatoes au gratin that had sent Mildred to sighing with joy. The convoy had spent several days resuscitating large quantities of the Diefenbunker’s cryo-frozen fresh food. Six’s pig had also been accompanied by beer.

The convoy was celebrating survival. They celebrated Ryan and his friends as conquering heroes. They had moved the convoy to a little hill surrounded by flat plain. The convoy formed a loose defensive ring around the hill. Sentries had been sent out, and Ryan’s LAV sat on crest with a 360° view of the landscape, ready to rain doom on anyone who approached. Jak was taking the first watch in the turret.

Krysty leaned her head against Ryan’s shoulder. “You think they’re fattening us up for the kill?”

Ryan spoke quietly into her titian tresses. “No, they lost their fighting LAV because they barely know how to operate it. If we hadn’t shown up, they’d be dead. They’re laying out the spread because they want us to join up.”

“And?”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” Ryan whispered. “And Toulalan looks like he’s about to get down to recruiting.”

Yoann Toulalan raised an ancient piece of plastic picnic stemware full of wine in Ryan’s direction. “Salut, mon ami!”

Ryan raised his can along with everyone else at the table and sipped the brew.

“So,” Toulalan began, “you’ve been in the bunker, no?”

Ryan looked up at the LAV on the hill and back at Toulalan.

The man shrugged sheepishly. “Yes, but of course. But we have access codes. May I ask how you gained entrance?”

“You can ask,” the one-eyed man replied.

The irony wasn’t lost on the Canadian. “Yes, I see.”

“Let me ask you a question,” Ryan said.

“Anything,” Toulalan replied.

“That bunker is still loaded with food, blasters and goods, and you’re driving away from it.” Ryan lifted his chin and pointed. “Quebec is that way. Why aren’t you loaded to capacity and running for home?”

Toulalan shrugged. Ryan was beginning to believe the man’s shoulders, hands and eyebrows were connected to his mouth. “Well, my friend, there’s more to life than bullets and beans.”

That struck a sympathetic chord with Ryan. “And so?”

“I’m an explorer.” He shot Ryan a very shrewd look. “Like yourself.”

Ryan kept his poker face. More times than he could count he and his friends had found places as decent as the Deathlands got to settle down in. But in the end Ryan always kept moving on, always exploring. He was more than an explorer, knew in his heart he was a searcher. Many people, even some of his companions had accused him of searching for something he would never find; and that he really didn’t even know what he was searching for anymore. Nevertheless, his friends followed him, willingly.

Toulalan pursed his lips in thought. “Would you care to hear some Canadian history?”

There was nothing at the moment Ryan wanted to hear more. He took a sip of beer and idly considered the can. “If you want to tell it.”

“Well, skydark came. This we all know. But Canada, we had no nukes and far fewer—how do you say…high-value targets? Oh, we got hit, but for the most part surgically. Capitals, military bases. It wasn’t like the horrific exchange that created the Deathlands. We have been south. We know. Few earth-shaker bombs, tailored viruses or, as we say, orgy weapons like the United States and its prime enemies flung at one another.” Toulalan sipped wine. “Nevertheless, the weather changed, the Earth changed. Tailored viruses will spread, and fallout and chem storms, well, they know no boundaries. When the big freeze happened, well…” Toulalan shrugged. “This is Canada.”

“And?”

“And so. In the Deathlands, people left the cities because they were radioactive. In Canada, the cities were abandoned because in the nuclear winter they were freezing and there was nothing to eat. You have thousands of ruins. We have thousands of ghost towns. Winters were always long in the north and summers short. Now the winters are longer and the summers shorter. Spring and fall? Beautiful respites, but I warn you, do not blink. They are ephemeral. And come Father Snow, we have, what we call, the hard freeze. You can literally see it come toward you, like an avalanche across the horizon. Pray you never see it, except from behind thick stone walls with a roaring fire at your back.”

“Speaking of that, isn’t it getting a little late in the season,” Ryan questioned, “to wag it cross country?”

“Indeed.” Toulalan leaned forward. “We’re behind schedule. We must push hard.”

“Where are you headed?”

“West.”

Ryan ran his eye over the collection of wags. “I noticed you don’t have a tanker. You got tanks and cans loaded on every wag, but not enough fuel to cross country.” Ryan crushed the empty can in his hand. “You’re going from bunker to bunker.”

Toulalan tossed off a postapocalyptic French-Canadian shrug and considered the one-hundred-year-old wine in his glass by candlelight. “Will you tell me how you got into the bunker?”

Ryan was starting to believe that Yoann Toulalan had no idea what the mat-trans chamber was. “Codes can be broken.”

“The computers are locked.”

“Trade secret.”

“Ah.”

Ryan threw his cards on the table. It might be for an ephemeral moment, but Ontario was green. His rad counter told him this was the cleanest land in North America he’d seen in a while. His friends didn’t want to jump again, and despite his every effort he found himself liking Yoann Toulalan. “What are you proposing?”

“You and your friends can drive and fight a LAV. That’s worth its weight in gold.” Toulalan set his glass on the table. “I’m tempted to offer you a place here in the convoy.”

“But?”

“But I beg of you, tell me something of you and your friends.”

Ryan kept it short and to the point. “I’ve led convoys, guarded convoys and drove convoys. I can drive any wag you got, and I can wrench a little.”

“Very useful.” Toulalan looked up toward the LAV guarding the convoy. “And your pale friend?”

“Jak’s the best fighter I know, and he’s a tracker.”

“Excellent.” Toulalan looked over at J.B. The Armorer was getting deep into his beer. “And your cannoneer?”

“Armorer. He can fix any blaster you got.”

“Excellent.” Toulalan looked at Mildred. “And her?”

“She’s a healer, and you tell Six ‘hands off.’”

“Understood.” Toulalan ran an appreciative eye over Krysty. “And her.”

Ryan smiled. “She’s mine.”

“Ah.”

“She’s a crack shot,” Ryan said.

“Better and better.”

Toulalan looked askance at Doc. “And him?”

Doc was well into his wine and speaking French to a good-looking young woman wearing a coverall and a tool belt. Ryan had to admit the old man was something of a sight wherever they showed up.

The one-eyed man smiled. “Doc’s our…resident scholar.”

“Ah!” Toulalan laughed. “Very good!”

Ryan watched Six walk by. He never stopped walking the perimeter, but each time he passed the feast he cast long looks at Mildred.

“Your man Six doesn’t like muties.”

Toulalan made noise. “Who does?”

Krysty’s body went rigid against Ryan. He kept his tone neutral. “You don’t tolerate them?”

“In the Deathlands, do you?” the man countered.

“Some villes do. Some don’t.”

“Ah. Well, in Val-d’Or those born mutant are culled.” Toulalan shrugged again. He seemed to consider the matter to be of little consequence. “Life is hard enough without nurturing horrors.”

Krysty’s hand clenched Ryan’s knee.

Ryan kept his voice neutral. “What’re you proposing?”

“Accompany us west. As far as you like. My convoy will be far stronger with you among us. As for you, there’s safety in numbers. Alone, even a wag as powerful as a LAV is vulnerable.”

Everything Toulalan said was true. Ryan took another beer. “Authority?”

Toulalan shrugged again. “I’m the leader of this convoy. You’re the leader of your people. If I wish something of any of your people, I’ll ask you. You’ll accept my authority over the convoy and obey my orders until the day you find you can’t. On that day you and I’ll shake hands and part as friends.” Toulalan held up his glass again. “If you join us, the only thing I’ll promise you is food like you have never known until that food runs out. That will be your—how do you say it in Deathlands, jack? And when the bounty of the Diefenbunker runs out…” Toulalan shrugged again. “Well, you have tasted Six’s pig.”

It was a damn tempting offer. “I’ll have to talk with my people.”

“But of course. Take your time. You may give me your answer in the morning, and whatever that answer should be, I insist you and your friends stay for breakfast.”

“Mighty kind, and I’ll think on your offer.” Ryan rose and took Krysty’s hand. He looked over at the mandolin player and the flautist. A young man playing a hand drum had joined them. “Right now I’m gonna dance with Krysty.” The redheaded beauty grinned in delight and stood to join him.

RYAN SIGHED as Krysty collapsed forward onto his chest. He pulled the top blanket back over them both. He handed her the canteen without being asked, and Krysty gulped water thirstily. She gasped and tilted the spout to Ryan’s lips. He drank deeply and relaxed back, staring up into the Northern Lights. “What do you think?”

Krysty sighed. “It’s greener here. The air is cleaner. Open country. Just lying here I can feel Gaia more strongly.”

“Toulalan said the good times don’t last long.”

“Neither does a man’s orgasm, but I don’t hear you complaining much.”

Ryan snorted and got back on topic. “And?”

“Lot of good food. Mildred isn’t going to want to leave until every last crumb is gone.”

Ryan couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Mildred so happy. “The sec man, Six, he’s eyeballing her long and hard.”

Krysty chuckled. “Mildred said ‘brother-man’ probably hasn’t seen any chocolate good thing in a long time.”

Ryan got the gist of it. “And?”

“And Doc could use a rest from jumping. Gaia knows so could the rest of us. Besides, Toulalan said we can leave whenever we like, and I think I believe him. He seems like a decent man.”

Ryan knew Krysty’s moods all too well. Despite the wine, the dancing and the lovemaking, he knew she had been simmering since supper. “You aren’t happy.”

“No.” Krysty’s voice grew cold. “I’m not.”

Ryan had a real strong suspicion about what was bothering her. “And?”

“You heard him.” Krysty clutched Ryan tightly. “He kills muties. And I’m one.”

Bigotry was all too alive and well in the Deathlands, only now most often it was directed at the integrity of someone’s DNA rather than any race, creed or color.

“If you want to go, we’re gone. Right now.”

Krysty rolled off Ryan and stared up into the night. “I didn’t say that.”

They were quiet for long moments as they stared into the shimmering veils of the light show above. Krysty was a mutie. It didn’t show outwardly, unless her hair flexed around her head when she was in distress. Most places in the Deathlands tolerated muties if they weren’t too deformed, or if their mutation proved useful somehow. A lot of places drove them out. All too many summarily executed muties upon discovery. It made Krysty sick to have to hide her own leap in evolution; but Ryan knew she would hide it, and take it, for the sake of the man she loved, and her friends.

“We’re in this together, lover,” Ryan told her. “I’ll defend you to the death.”

Krysty snuggled closer. “I know.”

Chapter Four

Ryan awoke to the smell of real coffee. The Northern Lights shimmered in shifting golden sheets in the morning light. Mildred stood over Ryan and Krysty’s bedroll grinning from ear to ear. She held two steaming sierra cups. “Wakey, wakey eggs and bakey!” Ryan sat up sniffing. The majority of the coffee he had drunk in his life was instant from one-hundred-year-old redoubt MRE packs, or old cans of coffee on redoubt shelves. Most people in the Deathlands drank chicory or a brew of herbs called coffee sub, and even that traded at a premium. The smell of what Mildred held set Ryan’s mouth to salivating. He took the cup and drank deeply.

“French roast.” Mildred sighed. “Who would have guessed?”

Ryan drained the mug and was grateful that Krysty had agreed that they stay with the convoy for another day or two and see how it went. Ryan rolled out of the blankets and shucked into his pants, drawn immediately to the smell coming from the mess wag. “Pancakes?”

“Oh yeah,” Mildred enthused. “With syrup, sausages and mimosas.”

“What’s mimosa?”

“Champagne and orange juice.”

Ryan’s face showed that he thought that sounded like an excellent waste of two rather rare commodities. Mildred took a patient breath. “You’ll like it. I promise you.”

Ryan and Krysty sauntered over to the mess wag for breakfast. He found that he did like mimosas. Krysty loved them. The friends sat at a table being waited on hand and foot. The redheaded beauty gave Ryan’s leg a squeeze and whispered, “If we stay here much longer, Doc might just put on a pound or two.”

Doc normally ate with relish, but maintained his spare frame. This morning he was enjoying a hearty breakfast, but he was smiling as he engaged one of the drivers in conversation. Canada was agreeing with him. It was agreeing with them all. If the pastoral beauty of the place was only going to last a few more weeks, then Ryan was tempted to wring every last second out of it. According to the map and Toulalan there were other Diefenbunkers ahead, and the one they’d exited contained one of the biggest stockpiles Ryan had ever encountered. He wanted to be there when Toulalan unlocked the next one.

Toulalan came over, smiling amiably. Six followed him, and with obvious effort managed an attitude short of open hostility. Toulalan gestured at the spread. “Breakfast agrees with you?”

“Yeah.” Ryan nodded. “Thanks again.”

“May I?”

Jak moved over and Toulalan took a seat. Six stood while Toulalan unfolded a map. Ryan raised an eyebrow at it. He had seen a fair chunk of what remained of Deathlands’ West Coast. It didn’t look anything like the map in front of him anymore. “That’s an old map.”

“The thing to notice is this.” Toulalan ran his finger along a pair of red intersecting lines stretching from east to west. “The convoy follows the Trans-Canada Highway.”

Ryan looked at the route dubiously. “It’s still up?”

“I will admit time hasn’t been kind to it. Many sections are out. But unlike much of your Deathlands, the basic path is still there. We have extensive maps of all the provinces. Each time we’ve found an impassible stretch we have found smaller routes around it, and once more returned to the path. River traders tell us vast sections in the great central plains are whole. There we will make good time.”

“River traders.” Ryan poured more Diefenbunker syrup on his pancakes. “Why aren’t they using it?”

“It is rumored there are dangers, plus fuel is scarce. A cross-continental trip?” Toulalan made a noise. “Few have the resources to attempt it. Besides, since time immemorial rivers have been the roads of Canada.”

“But you have a map of the Diefenbunkers. Assuming they haven’t been cracked, you got resupply depots in every province with all the fuel, food and supplies you can carry.”

Toulalan nodded.

“You give away too much!” Six snarled.

Toulalan gave Ryan a poker player’s smile. “I’m not telling our guests anything they haven’t already surmised.”

Six could no longer contain himself. “You’ll give them a place among us?”

Toulalan sighed. “Vincent, my friend, you know I respect you. But you were here yesterday, no? Around sunset? During the battle?”

Six looked away. “I’ll admit they were helpful.”

Mildred mumbled into a mouthful of pancake and sausage. “Saved your Canadian bacon is what we did.”

Six flinched.

Jak’s fork froze midbite, and he snapped his head around. His eyes narrowed as he looked toward the thickets between the hills just a few hundred yards to the west. Ryan set down his mimosa and scooped up the Scout longblaster. He had seen that look on Jak’s face before. “Something coming?”

The albino teen stepped away from the table and put hand to the ground. He crouched that way for long moments. “Herd.”

“Oh?” Six frowned at the hills. “It’s early for the caribou. They usually run south before the hard freeze, and that’s weeks away.” The big man’s stainless-steel longblaster flashed like a drum major’s baton as he twirled it through the rifleman’s spin to cock the weapon and pushed on the safety to lock it. “Perhaps they migrate earlier here in Ontario.”

Ryan, Jak and J.B. followed Six outside the perimeter. The Armorer began rapidly ejecting fléchette rounds out of his scattergun and swapping them for rifled slugs.

“Hunters!” Six called. “Go!”

A handful of Six’s sec men gulped the last of their coffee and grabbed their blasters. The convoy was bristling with Diefenbunker assault rifles. These men came forward with predark bolt-action hunting weapons of .30-caliber or larger.

Ryan checked the loads in his Scout. “You say it’s early for caribou?”

Six shrugged. The one-eyed man was starting to believe that everyone in the convoy’s shoulders, hands and eyebrows were attached to their vocal cords. “I’ve never been this far west, though I’ve heard traders say the St. Lawrence lowlands have sizable herds of wild mustangs. Either way, meat is meat, no?”

Doc strode up to the hunting party. “A morning shoot?”

Ryan frowned at the tangled, impenetrable acres of scrub thorn between the hills. The sound was getting louder. “Thick cover for a migrating herd.”

Six’s brow furrowed. He was thinking the same thing. The thicket rippled with the passage of large animals and the sound of brush snapping sounded like the distant gunshots of an army starting a skirmish. Six pushed off his longblaster’s safety. “In moments we’ll know.”

It didn’t take moments. It took a heartbeat. The edge of the thicket exploded as the herd burst forth. They weren’t caribou or wild mustangs. They were hogs. Boars, bigger than Ryan had ever seen. They came out of the thicket between the hills in a wedge. He made the lead boar to be over nine feet long and four feet tall at the shoulder.

Its companions weren’t much smaller.

“Good heavens,” Doc opined.

Ryan didn’t like what he was seeing. Wild boars were solitary animals. When you saw them in groups, it was usually a sounder consisting of a few sows and their offspring. Over half of the herd were adult males the size of wags. There were no piglets in sight. The fifty-strong herd arrowed straight for the convoy in a rumbling wave. Ryan dropped to a knee and shouldered the Scout. It was time to see what the new weapon could do.

Ryan wound his arm through the Scout’s sling and dropped his elbow to his knee to form a solid firing platform. The scope was mounted well forward, and he could see the entire oncoming herd around it. At the same time the crosshairs of the heavy reticule were crystal clear as Ryan held them low beneath the gargantuan lead boar’s shoulder. His finger slowly began putting pressure on the trigger as he watched the herd rumble into range.

Six watched Ryan with a dubious air. “Long range for a carbine. I would—”

The Scout bucked against Ryan’s shoulder. It was a light rifle firing a high-power bullet. The muzzle-flash and report were impressive; the recoil was surprisingly mild. The huge hog’s snout dug into the turf, and the momentum of its half-ton frame nearly made it summersault.

“Mon Dieu!” Six exclaimed.

The herd continued forward undeterred.

Ryan flicked the bolt on the Scout and trained the scope on his next target. The longblaster kicked and a supersize sow spun out as Ryan’s bullet shattered its skull.

“Come here!” Six roared. “Come to papa!” Six’s .45-70 sounded like a cannon going off. A boar dropped like it had been poleaxed. Longblasters began cracking and popping along the informal firing line. The shooters made hog calls and called out porcine insults in English and French as they shot. A slow smile crept across Ryan’s face as he took his fifth pig. J.B. had been right. The Scout was like lightning. It qualified for the highest praise the Armorer could give a weapon. The Scout was as accurate as the man firing it.

Ryan was deadly accurate.

He took three more pigs with four more shots and quickly slapped in a fresh magazine. “They aren’t stopping.”

“No,” Six agreed. He had stopped his hog calling. The giant beasts didn’t seem to need much encouragement. Insults toward the oncoming pork and one another ceased among the sec men as they grimly fired as fast as they could work the actions of their longblasters. What was left of the herd was starting to get uncomfortably close. Members of the convoy came out and joined the firing line. Their assault rifles were too light for animals this big and only seemed to make them angry. Squealing screams rent the air as the wounded hogs bore down on the convoy in red-eyed, froth-spewing rage. At one hundred yards J.B.’s shotgun began slamming slugs. Jak carefully began pulling the trigger on .357 Colt Python in slow deliberate fire, and Mildred joined him. It was like some terrible shooting game where the prize was not to end up in a wild boar’s belly. The boars didn’t seem to care who won as long as they died going forward. Ryan’s skin crawled as he aimed, shot and shot again.

The last half-ton hog fell to Ryan’s longblaster only twenty yards from the firing line.

The entire convoy watched the plain shake with the convulsions and screams of the wounded and dying monster hogs in a picture of porcine hell. Ryan rose and drew his SIG-Sauer. He went forward to finish off the crippled and dying animals. Six drew his handblaster and nodded at two of his rattled sec men. “Sylvan, Alain with me.” Six and his men joined Ryan in the mercy killings. There was plenty of ammo available, so why leave the animals to suffer?

Toulalan walked up beside Ryan as he put a bullet-riddled, trembling sow down. “I saw you shoot. You are incredible.”

Ryan ignored the compliment. “Pigs like this normal up here?”

“I don’t know about Ontario.” Toulalan shrugged. “But in Quebec we don’t allow our pigs the luxury of this kind of behavior.”

Ryan had to admit Toulalan and his people had a certain sense of style. Right now Ryan wasn’t laughing.

Doc pursed his lips at a specimen that had taken one of Ryan’s bullets through the heart. “I am reminded of the wild boar of Argentine Andes. They were known for their size and aggression, and as famous for a carnivorous bent in their diet. Large males were known to break into chicken coups and sheep enclosures and wreak great slaughter. It was endlessly argued whether the boar were so large and aggressive because they ate meat, or they were naturally large and aggressive and it led to carnivorous behaviors. Nearly every village had a legend about someone’s friend’s, third uncle’s grandmother who everyone knew had been eaten by one.”

Six pushed fresh shells into his rifle. “Perhaps they were attracted by the smell of the pancakes, no?”

“No.” Ryan knew that wasn’t true. “They came for us.”

Mildred’s stomach got the better of her and she smiled at Six. “Pork chops for dinner?”

Six unveiled a mouthful of gold and silver teeth. “But of course. Whatever the lady wishes, the lady gets.”

J.B. glowered.

Ryan shook his head at the slaughter. There was no way a herd of beasts behaving like that could be allowed to reach the convoy, but he hated wasting meat. Something between forty and fifty thousand pounds of pork was steaming in the morning light.

Six shrugged out of his sheepskins. Beneath them he wore a tomahawk and an enormous bowie knife. He drew his blade and cut into a boar’s belly. The boar’s flesh parted like butter beneath the razor-sharp steel. Six leaped back as squirming black horror spilled forth. “Merde!”

Mildred threw up.

Ryan raised his SIG-Sauer.

Doc peered at the ropey, viscous, black masses of foot-long worms as they tried to crawl back into the boar’s carcass. “Surpassingly peculiar.”

Mildred staggered away. “I’m never eating pork again.”

Doc cocked his head as he watched the flesh of the dead boar ripple in waves. “Monsieur Six, with utmost caution, a few more cuts, if you do not mind?”

Six scowled but he stepped around the boar, his knife slashing a leg, making a cut along the spine and opening the head from jowl to ear. Ryan took note of his artistry with the blade. Six stepped away from the pulsating carcass and spit in disgust. “Parasites! Vileness! Val-d’Or is clean! We should never have left!” The sec man gave Ryan an accusing scowl. “You see! We’re too close to the river! This is Deathlands filth!”

Ryan put a fresh clip into the Scout and reserved comment.

Doc leaned into the mess a little too closely for everyone’s comfort. “No, Monsieur Six. These are not parasites. Parasites feed off their host, and to their host’s detriment. When the host is dead, parasites flee if they are able, they do not crawl back within.” Doc scratched his chin in thought. “Can they be commensals? Commensals receive benefit from their host but do no harm, and yet…”

Ryan gazed at the slices Six had inflicted in the pork. The writhing black worms squirmed through the dead boar’s muscles and squeezed around its bones and spine. Ryan had seen plenty of rotting corpses. Whatever was going on, the worms didn’t appear to be feeding. There was almost some other kind of…

Ryan’s single eyes narrowed.

Intention.

“Doc,” Ryan warned, “step away.”

“What? Oh, yes. Unknown infection, of course.” Doc took several prudent steps back but continued his scientific musings. He pointed his swordstick at the writhing masses within the mutated hog. “Observe! No living creature could survive such a cataclysmic infestation, unless somehow it derived some sort of benefit from it in return. This is neither parasitism nor commensalism. This must be symbiosis of some sort. I believe it must somehow work to— Oh dear!” Doc leaped back adroitly as every visible worm in the dead boar’s wounds contracted in unison.

The swine corpse rolled over and lurched to its feet.

The boar’s eyes burst as horror pushed through its pupils. The thumb-thick worms in its eye sockets waved like feelers and stiffened like pointers at Doc. The boar’s head swiveled in response, its tusks rasping against each other as its mouth fell open and its tongue lolled out, accompanied by an orgy of wriggling filth.

“By my stars and garters!” Doc exclaimed.

“Mon Dieu!” Toulalan cried out.

“Merde!” Six reiterated.

Mildred screamed.

Ryan fired three 9 mm hollowpoint rounds through the dead boar’s head.

The boar’s skull broke apart, spewing broken lengths of black worm. The porcine behemoth staggered but didn’t fall. Fresh worms waved forth from the shattered cranium and snout as if tasting the air. The boar corpse tottered toward the humans. Ryan holstered his SIG-Sauer and spun the Scout off of his shoulder. He flicked the bolt as he backed up. “Fireblast…”

The entire fifty-strong herd of giant, newly dead, mutie wild boars began rolling over and rising up.

“J.B....” Ryan kept backing up. “Get to the LAV. Load HE. Jak, get behind the wheel.”

It took a lot to shake up J.B. The Armorer’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates behind his glasses as he backed up alongside Ryan. “Right.”

“Run!” Ryan roared.

J.B. ran. Jak was already gone.

Six’s guide gun thundered as he put a .45-70 shell into the hog’s sagging skull. The pig kept coming. Ryan raised his rifle. “Forget the head!” The Scout bucked against the one-eyed man’s shoulder, and the pig formed a porcine tripod as the bullet shattered its shoulder blade. He flicked the bolt and his next bullet crushed the hog’s opposite collarbone. The undead pig went snout-first into the dirt. “Take their wheels!”

“Oui, Ryan!” Six flicked the lever of his rifle and blasted apart a corpulent, pulsating sow’s femur. “Everyone! Back to the convoy! Allez! Allez!”

Humans ran.

The pigs shambled forward. There was no squealing. The only noise the dead animals made was the thud of their huge hooves in the soft soil and the sickening crackle of their muscles, joints and fascia as their corpses were manipulated from within. Mildred and Doc began shooting pig knees. Ryan flicked his bolt and fired with mechanical precision. “Yoann! Get your people in the wags! Button up!”

Toulalan shouted to his people in French and they scattered. Six and his men kept shooting. Ryan fired his clip dry and clawed for a fresh one. “J.B.!” A thousand-pound pig tottered toward Ryan, worms waving out of its eyes like flesh-detecting divining rods. “J.B.!”

The closest hog burst like a balloon as it took J.B.’s 25 mm high-explosive shell broadside. “Everyone! Up on wags! Go! Go! Go!” The firing line ran for the convoy as J.B. cut loose. The LAV’s automatic cannon slammed in slow, aimed fire. Hogs exploded in sprays of blood, bone and black worms. Ryan leaped up into the bed of an ancient Toyota Tacoma jacked up on off-road wheels. He pulled Krysty up after him. The pickup had a MAG machine gun mounted on a post. Ryan got behind it and racked a round into the chamber.

Doc stood in front of the march of the monster hogs with his LeMat forgotten in his fist. He stared at the oncoming creatures quizzically and discoursed to no one in particular. “I have never seen nor heard of such coordinated effort among an invertebrate species. Well, bees, ants and some other social species, yes, but among annelids imbedded in a host animal? Truly this species is—”

“Doc, get out of there!” Ryan roared.

Doc suddenly seemed to notice a pair of pigs lurching toward him for the first time. “Ah! Yes! Right! Very good!” Doc turned as Ryan began putting bursts into the offending animals. Doc pulled up short as another pig tottered between him and Ryan. “Oh bother.”

“Here!” Mildred shouted. She stood on the hood of an old police cruiser covered with hillbilly armor with Six twenty yards away. “Here!”

Doc hightailed it with his coat flapping behind him. Six grabbed him by his collar and heaved him to the roof. The pigs were among the convoy. It was too close for cannon work. Jak sent the LAV rolling forward and ground several hogs into hamburger under the LAV’s eight massive road wheels.

“Six!” Toulalan shouted from the top of his camper wag and pointed at the engineering LAV. “Le LAV! Le LAV!”

Six shoved his rifle into Mildred’s startled hands. She shook her head in horror. “No! Six! Don’t—”

Six jumped from the hood and ran for the other LAV. He wove through the hulking, undead horrors like a fullback breaking tackles. He literally ran up the engineering vehicle’s dozer blade and jammed down the driver’s hatch. The engine roared into the life and the dozer blade rose with a whine. Six followed Jak’s example of pitting 34,000 pounds of steel against half-ton worm-controlled meat puppets.

Steel won.

The people of the convoy huddled on the hoods and roofs of their wags and fired down into their attackers. A vast amount of the fire was doing little good.

“Toulalan!” Ryan bellowed over the sound of battle. “Get the wags rolling! Pull away and let the LAVs finish it!”

“Oui, Ryan!” Toulalan jumped from the top of his wag and slammed the driver’s door closed seconds behind the snapping tusks of a sow.

He shouted to Cyrielle on top. “Hold on!” The air horn blared the signal to pull out.

Ryan was nearly knocked from his feet as the pickup beneath him lurched. A huge hog had lowered its head against the passenger door. The pickup slewed. The behemoth boar lowered its snout beneath the chassis. Worms extruding out of its ears pointed at Ryan and Krysty almost in accusation. The chassis creaked and lurched again.

The pig was going to roll the pickup.

Ryan tilted the machine gun down and dropped the hammer on the hog. Bones splintered and shattered. Metal-jacketed bullets pulverized the pig’s shoulders into masticated meat. The creature fell forward, its legs shattered.

“Krysty! Drive!”

The woman limboed through the driver’s window and slid behind the wheel. The engine roared and the pickup bucked as she rolled over the fallen hog’s head with a crunch. Krysty drove the pickup a good fifty yards away from any carcass moving or not. The convoy pulled out of its defensive circle, leaving the remaining creatures suddenly milling around in a lost fashion. Only Doc and Mildred stayed on the roof of their wag. Neither seemed eager to jump down and start the car. But they were a lone island now rather than part of a confused melee.

Jak and Six descended like ironclad guardian angels. The two men seemed to be in race to see who could reduce the most pounds of pork flesh into mulch. J.B. stood in the turret watching the perimeter as the destruction derby wound down.

Ryan tapped the roof of the pickup. “Let’s get Doc and Mildred.”

Krysty rolled up to the old sec cruiser. The field around it was a butcher’s morass. Ryan held out his hand. “Mildred, Doc, jump here in the back. I’ll drive that one.”

The two men handled Mildred across. Ryan held out his hand to Doc, who was looking at the strip of ground between the two vehicles. The broken worms seemed to have no life left in them but many were still whole. Ryan watched as those that were burrowed into the soft dirt.

“Ryan.”

“Yeah, Doc?”

“I think we should only eat food from the Diefenbunkers, or dried goods.”

“Right.”

“We should boil any water we drink,” Doc added.

“Right.”

The two men watched as the last of the worms disappeared into the earth, leaving nothing but steaming flesh and crushed bone behind.

“No one should sleep on the ground.”

Ryan was losing that loving feeling for Canada right quick.

Chapter Five

“Did you see that!” Mildred was incensed. She was outraged and paced in circles, waving her arms. “Goddamn Night of the Pigging Dead!” No one got her reference, but everyone took her meaning. The convoy was almost half a mile away. They had left behind camp gear and equipment, a heartbreakingly sizable spread of food and a sea of spent brass. No one wanted to wade through the swathes of goop rotting in the sun or risk what might be squirming beneath in an attempt at salvage. Ryan and his friends were having a private palaver behind their LAV. “I’ll take good old-fashioned American deserts, rads and stickies any day of the week!”

Ryan pulled the chain of his flexible cleaning rod through the Scout’s barrel. The new longblaster had been baptized the hard way and seen him through. Ryan shook his head. He’d seen more horrors than he cared to think about in his travels. That last bit had been bad. “J.B.?”

The Armorer was on the same page. “That was bad.”

“Doc?”

“The coordinated effort of the annelids, particularly once their porcine hosts were obviously postmortem, clearly bespoke some sort of collective intelligence,” Doc enthused. “Really quite extraordinary. I would be curious as to—”

“Jak?” Ryan asked.

“Bad,” Jak agreed.

Mildred had already spoken her mind. It wasn’t something she ever had much problem with. Ryan looked at Krysty. She sat at the top of the LAV’s ramp door and hugged her knees. Her good feelings for this land had been rocked like everyone else’s. However her connection to the earth left her a little more sensitive to abominations.

Ryan wiped down his weapon, loaded it and put the cleaning kit back in the recess in the stock. “So, jump? Run south? Keep going?”

“Either of the later.” Doc sighed. “But you know I will jump if it must be.”

“I know.” Ryan nodded. “Thanks.”

J.B. finished running a rag over his M-4000 shotgun and began loading fléchette and slug rounds. “South.”

“South?” Krysty sighed. “Alone? It’s four hundred miles to anywhere we’ve been, much less heard of. Got coldhearts to the north. Those…things to the south. Mebbe there’s safety in numbers. Mebbe the plains will be better. Mebbe we should head west with a convoy a bit more before we break and run south.”

It was a lot of mebbes, but she had a point.

“Jak?”

“West,” Jak replied.

Mildred’s lips quirked. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with a little grease monkey in coveralls?”

Everyone looked over at the engineer LAV. A short girl with curly brown hair covered by a bandanna was perched on top, half in and half out of the engine compartment wrenching away. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but her big brown eyes, full lower lip and dimpled chin were something to look at. She currently had a smudge of grease on the tip of her nose. For the past twenty-four hours Jak’s ruby-red gaze often strayed to whatever wag she was working on, and she seemed to work wags 24/7. He lifted his chin at the mechanic.

“Name’s Seriah. Yeah.” Jak nodded at Ryan again. “West.”

“Mildred?”

“What the hell, west. The weather’s nice. The food is good. The people seem friendly.”

J.B. stared hard at Mildred. “Six seems real friendly.”

Everyone stared at the Armorer’s comment.

Mildred stared in wonder. “J. B. Dix, are you jealous?”

J.B. snatched up his shotgun and stomped away without another word.

Ryan looked around the circle. “We got five votes west. In a while I’ll—”

“It’s unanimous.” The Armorer stomped back just as quickly. “West it is.”

Mildred stepped toward him. “J.B.?”

“Doc?” J.B. reached into his pocket and held out what appeared to be six beige wine corks.

Doc took the objects and exposed his gleaming white teeth. “These are suspiciously of a 16-gauge conformation.”

“They’re high explosive. Those pigs got me thinking. Can’t just shoot them full of holes. That’s an ounce of HE. Should shatter some bones.”

“Thank you, J.B. I shall refit myself this instant.” Doc set about reloading his LeMat.

“J.B.?” Mildred questioned.

“Walk?” he asked.

Mildred slid her arm in his. “I’d love to.” The two of them walked off in a circuit of the wag camp.

Ryan took Krysty’s hand. “Let’s sign up.” They walked back to the circled wags. People were checking loads and prepping to go. Toulalan watched the proceedings. His sister Cyrielle and Six seemed to be doing most of the directing. Toulalan stood by his personal wag. It was a Chevy Silverado, lovingly maintained, with a camper mounted in the bed. Unlike a lot of the vehicles it was almost miraculously free of bullet strikes.

Ryan had taken an informal survey of the convoy’s vehicles. They currently had twelve wags rolling and four motorbikes. The big rig, the engineering LAV and Toulalan’s home on wheels were the most spectacular. Ryan counted three armed wags—a pair of pickups and an El Camino, sheathed in sheet-iron chicken armor with post-mounted machine guns in the truck beds. An old ambulance was stuffed with Diefenbunker med supplies. Six’s jacked-up Crown Victoria was almost unrecognizable under the added-on plate. The rest of the vehicles had been repaired, rebuilt and remodified so many times the lines of their original pedigree had been lost. The convoy consisted of about seventy-seven souls at the moment, not counting Ryan and the companions.

“Impressive collection,” Ryan said.

Toulalan smiled delightedly. “Merci. We’re quite proud of it!”

“Is your next destination another bunker?”

“Indeed.”

“So how come no one has cracked these Diefenbunkers before?” Ryan asked.

“Long before skydark, there was the cold war. You’ve heard of it, no?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, well, the Diefenbunkers were built for the cold war, but when she was won, they were deactivated. They became museums. After skydark, why go to a cold bare hole in the ground? The few who did, found the massive blast doors locked to them. The Diefenbunkers were placed out in the countryside. There was no time for historical expeditions when most were simply trying to live one more day.”

“But you cracked one.”

Toulalan smiled slyly. “My father did. Would you like to hear the story?”

Ryan nodded.

“Val-d’Or means ‘Valley of Gold.’ We were a mining town, and in our valley far from the horror that fell. Of course, regardless, in the nuclear winter, many died, the ville contracted. But being a mining town we knew construction. The ville was also fortified. We dug a system of tunnels beneath the ville to survive the winter. Again, many died, but still many lived. Our forests were thick with timber and thick with game. Rivers and lakes abounded. Come the new hard freeze, huge herds of animals migrated south before it. There is always a great culling and smoking of meat. We survived on that, in some ways better than other villes farther south. We were far enough north not to take much radiation or be faced with the horrors it brought with it, but south enough that we could reap the benefit of the freeze without being hit by it, except only once every few years.”

“But you cracked your bunker.”

“My father found a cache of papers. They were—how do you say?—eyes only, for the mayor of Val-d’Or and few of the civic leaders. There was a flurry of activity at the Diefenbunker, construction, top secret, right before skydark, but the local people were never aware of it. That convinced my father there might be something down below the earth besides empty desks and concrete.”

“How did you get in?”

Toulalan thumped his chest proudly. “The men of Val-d’Or have always been miners! My father figured the bunker must be like, oh…” He pointed at the LAV. “More heavily armored on the top than the bottom. A thick foundation, yes, but not hardened against the nukes like the top, no? He sank a shaft down and came up underneath. It took three years of effort, whenever that effort could be spared, but in the end my papa broke inside! I was with him!”

“What did you find?”

Toulalan kissed his fingertips and grinned. “Potatoes!”

Ryan blinked. “Potatoes?”

“Seed potatoes, actually, preserved for the future. There was a vast storehouse of them. The people weren’t pleased. Oh, there were blasters and medical supplies, a machine shop and much that was useful, but the men of Val-d’Or had survived since skydark as miners, hunters and fisherman. We weren’t farmers. Many said we couldn’t afford the time to take up the plow. Our spring and summer were for catching as much meat and fish as possible and smoking it for the long winter.” Toulalan smiled in happy memory. “My father joked that we lived half our lives underground like potatoes anyway. In the end he convinced them. We planted. There was trial and error, but that first season there was a crop. The seed potatoes had been modified, with the conditions of the new world in mind. They were hardy, resistant to the cold and matured quickly to take advantage of the brief warmth.”

“And suddenly you had a surplus,” Ryan surmised.

“Yes, no longer were we dependent upon hunting, fishing, trapping and the always uncertain migrations. We had a food staple, and we now had time for other things. We built more. Learned more. The seed bunkers also contained a number of other vegetables, and more importantly, hemp. It grew like, well, a weed in the short spring. We cleared forest and planted that, too. With that we had hemp seed oil and seeds to supplement our diet, textiles and paper. Hemp oil can be used directly to fuel diesel engines. We’re very busy underground during the winter, spinning, pressing manufacturing. We still hunt and fish, but now we mine once again, as well. Val-d’Or has gold, silver, zinc and lead. Whoever stocked the Val-d’Or Diefenbunker had put a great deal of thought into local survival.”

Ryan glanced back at the Borden Diefenbunker. “No seeds in that one.”

“No, instead there were bays for armored wags, and equipment and spares to repair them. There were also many, many blasters.” Toulalan shot Ryan another pointed look. “And a strange chamber of glass.”

“We saw that.” Ryan shrugged. “But it was the beer and pizza that grabbed our attention.”

“Mmm.” Toulalan nodded, but his eyes were seriously trying to read what Ryan was really thinking.

Better men had tried and failed. Ryan changed the subject. “So each of the bunkers seems to have been stocked differently.”

“So it seems. We have used the radio at Val-d’Or and tried the Borden one, as well. No other bunker responds. The computer links between them fell long ago. We don’t really know the disposition of the other bunkers. But whatever their function, they must be a treasure trove. We decided an expedition west would be the best course. We would head for Borden. If successful there—” Toulalan grinned again “—we would make an attempt for Shilo Diefenbunker in Manitoba.”

Ryan did a little math with the maps he’d recently seen. “That’s a long haul.”

“Indeed.” Toulalan didn’t seem overly concerned.

Both men knew the other wasn’t revealing all his cards. “And those coldhearts?”

“We have you to thank for bloodying their noses. I suspect they won’t be back. Also, according to traders, the farther west you go, the flatter and more open the land becomes. Also, villes in the center are increasingly farther apart and increasingly more primitive. I believe we will be able to roll past them, using their awe at our trade goods and the offensive power and majesty of our convoy.”

“And if this hard freeze of yours hits before you’re back in Val-d’Or?”

“We have lost a bit of time, that is true, but once we hit the central plains it should be, how do you say, a straight shot.”

“And if we get caught with winter coming on?”

“My friend, I have considered that. You have seen the inside of the Borden Diefenbunker. The one in Val-d’Or also had the same stocks of frozen food. I assume the one in Shilo does, as well. If we reach Shilo, we’ll give the weather a hard appraisal. If we know we won’t make it, we turn back. Either way, should worse comes to worst, we can winter in either bunker, warm, safe and fed until spring. Should you not wish to winter with us, as I say, you can always run south for your warmer Deathlands.”

There were more than a few major “ifs” and question marks involved, but exploration was risk personified. In the end Ryan had to admit it wasn’t a bad plan. He wanted to see more of this land that was new to him.

“And, so?” Toulalan inquired.

Krysty spoke first. Ryan knew her reservations and was glad she did. She stuck out her hand to Toulalan. “We’re in.”

Toulalan ignored the proffered hand, and Krysty’s body stiffened in shock as Toulalan kissed her on both cheeks. Only the fact that he seemed so smiling and pleased, and Ryan had seen that the rest of convoy behaved this way, kept the one-eyed man from challenging the man. To Krysty’s horror Toulalan started to lean in to give her lover the same treatment. Something in Ryan’s single blue eye made Toulalan stop short at the last moment. He shoved out his hand awkwardly between them. “Well…good! Very good! I’ll tell the others. They’ll be most pleased to have you among us.”

Ryan shook the man’s hand, and he and Krysty walked back to tell their friends. Krysty’s cheeks were flushed red and not because she was blushing. “If he does that again I’ll kill him.”

Ryan grinned. “Not if I get to him first.”

THE CONVOY WAS READY to roll. Ryan’s LAV would be positioned roughly in the middle. Except for the big rig it was high enough to shoot over all the other wags. The armored wag’s huge, aggressive off-road tires would allow it to break formation to either side and rush forward or back if need be. The two off-road armed wags formed outriders on the sides. The ancient El Camino sheathed in chicken armor was on point, and the engineering LAV’s armor and machine gun protected the rear.

Cyrielle Toulalan approached the LAV. “Ryan!”

The one-eyed man nodded from the turret. “Yeah?”

“A word, please.”

Ryan hopped down. “Yeah?”

“You have driven a…” Cyrielle’s English wasn’t as good as her brother’s. “Big rig?”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm.” Cyrielle walked over to the semi and Ryan followed her. She pointed at a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield.

“You lost your driver,” Ryan surmised.

“Oui.” She nodded.

Ryan sighed. Krysty walked over. “What’s up, lover?”

“They need me to drive the semi.”

Krysty’s green eyes narrowed. “We need you in the war wag.”

“We’re part of this convoy now. Big wag like this takes know-how. I got it. Jak can drive the LAV and J.B. can fight it.”

Krysty didn’t blink. “I need you in the war wag. With me.”

“The convoy needs someone who can drive this rig.” Ryan gave Krysty an experimental smile. “And I need someone to ride shotgun with me.”

“I don’t have a shotgun.”

“We’ll find you something.”

Krysty sighed and slid her hand into Ryan’s. “Let’s take a look at her.”

Cyrielle clapped her hands.

Ryan examined his new ride. It was a Kenworth. It had been extensively modified with giant off-road tires and a new suspension. A hatch in the roof over the passenger seat opened onto a ring-mounted machine blaster. Ryan suspected it was a Diefenbunker special, and it was just about cherry, save for the slightly ominous bullet hole in the driver’s-side windshield patched with a piece of scrap metal. Krysty’s hands slid out of his and they climbed into the cab through opposite doors. There were some cracks in the plastic dash, and whatever ancient leather had once upholstered the cab had been replaced with deerskin. The driver’s seat had dried bloodstains on it. There was what looked like a functional hot plate, chem toilet and a bunk in the back.

Krysty ran a finger over the laced leather of her armrest. “Plush wag.”

It had been a while since Ryan had been behind the wheel of a major cargo wag. Toulalan walked up and waved. “You like?”

Ryan hurled a shrug back at the Quebecer. “It’s okay.”

Toulalan kissed his fingertips, popped his lips and walked away.

The biggest problem with wags in the Deathlands was the lack of batteries. That usually meant cartridge or crank ignition. Seriah walked up and pulled the crank handle from the rack above the bumper. She grinned and shoved the crank spoke through the hole in the grille.

Ryan leaned out the driver’s window. “Light it up!”

Seriah hurled her tiny frame against the crank handle and spun it in a huge circle. Ryan tapped the gas pedal lightly at the apogee of the crank. The turbine turned over, whined and trembled on the first attempt. Seriah jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “Très bien!”

Ryan pulled the horn chain and the Kenworth bellowed like a twentieth-century dinosaur into the postapocalyptic Canadian sky. The people of the convoy hit their horns, leaned out of their windows and clapped and whistled in response. “Ryan! Ryan! Ryan!” they called. Their enthusiasm was infectious. Krysty’s full lips twisted in a smile. “I’ll go tell J.B. he’s in command of the LAV.”

Chapter Six

“Hey, Mace! Lars is wormy, eh!”

Baron Mace Henning glowered out of his hammock at his sec man. “Baron to you, Shorty.”

Shorty lived up to his name. He made up for it with an almost artistic appreciation of violence. They had been partners as sec men until Mace had led a coup and made himself baron. Shorty had backed him. Sometimes when Shorty got excited he forgot protocol and flashed back to the old days. “Uh, sorry, Baron. Lars is like, definitely ’fected. Too bad, he’d just earned his loonie.”

Henning rolled out of his sleeping sling and walked over to the campfire. Shorty heeled after him like a faithful dog.

Mace Henning was a huge, sagging bull of man. His short curly red hair and beard were shot through with gray. Green eyes peered out of a nearly permanent squint. Even in his youth no one had ever accused him of being handsome. A badly set broken nose and the dent in the ride side of his face from a fractured cheekbone hadn’t helped matters. Scar tissue beneath his left eyebrow raised it up a tad higher than his right. It made it look like anyone or anything he laid his gaze upon was being weighed, measured and found wanting.

He or she usually was.

He had sixty-eight armed men in the saddle. He’d had seventy-five but the tide of yesterday’s battle had turned into a costly and unpleasant surprise. His best men greeted him as they rolled up hammocks, wolfed their breakfast of jerky and pine tea or prepped their bikes, wags or weapons. A sizable crowd of his new-hire coldhearts was gathered in a circle beyond the campfire, morning maple-liquor ration in hand and watching the entertainment.

The circle parted for the baron. Mace turned his gaze on Lars. The buckskin-clad sec man was red-eyed and lunging at the chain tethering him to a motorcycle lying on its side. He’d shown worm-sign just before dark the night before. Sometimes other maladies could be mistaken for early worm symptom, so they had chained him and waited while he begged and pleaded and screamed he’d just eaten something bad.

Lars was definitely infected. His muscles rippled with Herculean effort and infestation. The man’s fingers curled into claws as he lunged again. The motorcycle weighed around five hundred pounds. Each lunge dragged it a few inches along. The baron stood unconcernedly a bare meter out of range of the filthy clawing hands. In his hand Mace carried his badge of office and the source of his nickname. It was a blackthorn club about two feet long. The root ball at the end was as big around as a large apple, and he had drilled out its center and “hot-shotted” it by pouring in molten lead to give it killing end-weight.

“Hey, Baron?” Shorty asked.

Mace heaved a sigh. Shorty combined the traits of not being particularly bright but also being something of a ponderer. Mace didn’t take his eyes off Lars and his carnivorous, worm-fested carryings-on. “What?”

“What do you think goes through a man’s mind? I mean, you know, like, when the worms get to his brain and stuff?”

Some of the sec men muttered in amusement. Shorty’s ponderings didn’t exactly soar up into rarified intellectual heights. Mace moved with the sudden, stunning speed most of his opponents never expected. He whipped his club up and around like a tennis serve and sank it through Lars’s skull. The scout dropped to his knees and fell face-first into the dirt. The sec men gaped. The baron shrugged carelessly as he pulled his bludgeon free of Lars’s brainpan. “Probably not much more than that.”

The men roared.

The baron reached down and snapped a leather thong from around his former scout’s neck. An old, predark, Canadian dollar coin—known as a loonie for the waterfowl on one side—hung from it. Mace closed his fist around the coin. Shorty was right. It was too bad, but Lars wasn’t from around here, and it looked like he hadn’t heeded the warnings. And even if you took every precaution, sometimes the worms found a way. Mace jerked his head at the corpse. Filth was already squirming into activity in the shattered skull. “Butch, Ledge.”

Butch and Ledge were twins. The two lanky, ponytailed young men came forward unlimbering their clubs. Theirs weren’t as fancy as Mace’s. They were just well-turned, tapered lengths of hickory each with a gaff hook imbedded in it. Butch and Ledge were local boys. They knew what to do from long experience and weren’t squeamish about it. They quickly broke Lars’s knees and elbows. Lars started twitching as worms writhed beneath his dead flesh. Arms and legs were levers, and denied the fulcrum of the knees and elbows, the best the worms’ contractions could manage was some awkward heaving and flopping. The two men expertly shattered Lars’s jaw to keep him honest and his collarbones to keep him armless. They gaffed him through the armpits, and the other sec men shoved out of the way warily as the twin exterminators dragged Lars’s twitching corpse over to the campfire and heaved him into the flames.

Mace went for a walk while his men oohed and aahed in fascination as Lars’s carcass slowly twisted and burned and worms snaked out of his body in a panic only to wriggle, blister and burst in the flames. Mace jerked his head at a man in passing. “Tag.”

Skin Tag rose and followed his baron. The mutie’s name said it all. Skin tags a half-inch long covered every inch of his exposed body. They covered his head like hair. The only place he didn’t visibly have them were on his eyelids and the palms of his hands. Mace had never cared to look, but it was rumored they covered the rest of Tag’s body, including his dangle. Rumor was some women liked it, but even Shorty wasn’t dumb enough to ponder it in Tag’s face. Mutie or not, Tag was just about the most dangerous man Mace had ever encountered, and one of the smartest. But beyond his skill with blaster and blade or his ruthless cunning, it was something radiation and mutation had set inside his skull that made him a gold mine.

Tag could sense other muties, even ones that outwardly appeared perfectly normal.

When Mace had first met him, Tag was making a living out of it. He would appear at the gates of villes that were known to kill or drive out muties. What had been central Canada had taken the least of skydark’s damage. Human muties were a lot rarer there and often more feared and reviled than in the Deathlands or what was left of Canada’s coasts. Tag would appear at the villes on the plains and throw back his robe. Seconds before they shot him he would shout out that unclean as he was, he could detect the unclean among them. Mace had been a sec man in such a ville in Saskatchewan when Tag made an appearance. Mace’s first instinct was to crush Tag’s fleshy-headed mutant skull for the charlatan he was, but the baron was obsessed about keeping the gene pool clean and demanded a demonstration. Tag had walked straight toward a sec man named Voor. Mace had known Voor for years, but Tag pointed a melodramatic finger at Voor in judgment.

“Mutie.”

At the baron’s order Mace and the other sec men had grabbed Voor, howling and struggling, and had stripped him. The crowd had gasped at the pale baby fingers protruding from Voor’s underarms. Mace didn’t give a dark night one way or the other about muties, but he’d crushed Voor’s skull instantly and without being asked, much to his baron’s rabid approval. Tag found two more victims. Afterward he had been given food, jack, ammo for his blaster, and at his strange request, allowed to take any books of his choice from the ville if the ville had any of the rare items. The baron generously allowed Tag to sleep in the ville that night. In a bed.

That night the baron had decided to keep Tag around for the sake of the ville’s genetic hygiene and ordered Mace to kneecap Tag and chain him. Mace had bigger plans. He found Tag in his room, and instead helped Tag to escape and proposed a partnership. It was simple. They went from ville to ville. Tag would go first and perform his act and receive his reward. However, if he found several mutants, he would allow one or two to escape undetected. The next day Mace would come to the ville posing as a trader. That night he would inform the undisclosed muties of their impending discovery and relieve them of everything of value that Mace could put in his pack.

It was a profitable racket and went on for several seasons. Finally they had come all the way east to Ontario. There they found a ville on the brink. Tag pulled his act but Mace stayed on. The ville was prosperous, but the baron was old, he had no sons and his sec men were already forming factions for the succession. Mace had joined up, ingratiated himself and become the baron’s right-hand man. Mace recruited a small, very hard-core corps out of the various factions, starting with Shorty. Meanwhile, Tag lurked. It was something he was very good at.

One night Mace and his picked cadre silently slaughtered the baron and his family, but let his two daughters live. The ville had awakened to find Mace Henning enthroned, entrenched in the hall. Though well bruised and abused, the old baron’s daughters acknowledged Mace as heir. It had almost turned into ville civil war until Mace pulled his ace card. Tag appeared out of nowhere. He pointed at Mace’s main rival and said the dreaded word.

“Mutie.”

It didn’t matter that the man showed no sign. The people of the ville had seen Tag ferret mutants out earlier in the spring. The accused’s own men turned on him. Strangely enough, over the course of the next few days, most dissenters or loyalists to the old regime found themselves declared mutie and found themselves summarily shot. Strangely enough, after the coup, Baron Mace Henning discovered a tolerance for human muties as long as they were useful and fell short of outright abominations, and they began flocking to him and his ville in a slow, steady and extremely loyal trickle.

Tag had been Mace’s right-hand man ever since, and the only man he let call him Mace, though even then only in private.

Mace and Tag hadn’t stopped at usurping a backwater ville. They had turned their former blackmail victims across Canada into a web of informants. Knowledge was power, and Mace had waxed strong. Half a dozen villes paid him yearly tribute, and word of what was going on in other villes he had yet to conquer or intimidate was nonetheless whispered in Mace’s ear.

Mace had had his eye on Val-d’Or for some time.

The previous year Tag had pulled his act in Val-d’Or, and what he had discovered had been a game-changer in Mace’s dreams of conquest, and his plans for the ville.

Tag followed the baron on a slow walk around the raiding camp. “Mace?”

“What do you think, Tag?”

“About the battle?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t like it.”

Mace snorted and spit. Yesterday had hurt. “Pulling out that third armored wag, like an ace in hole. I didn’t expect that out of Toulalan. Oh, he’s smart, mind you. Too smart for his own good, a damned intellectual, but he ain’t battle clever. Not like us. He’s shown us that more than once. Him switching tactics like that stinks of something. Maybe he’s finally started listening to Six.” Mace’s ugly face flushed angrily. Six had been a thorn in his side for years. “And why none of the boys can seem to put a bullet in that son of a bitch is beyond me.”

Tag pushed back the hood of his robe. He preferred clothes of flowing homespun. Pants and tight clothes chaffed and tore at his affliction. Around his neck he wore a gleaming silver coin. “It’s not a new tactic, and it’s not Six. Six never wanted to leave Val-d’Or. He thinks the mission is foolish. That’s part of his problem. It undermines his strategy.”

“Oh?” Mace’s face flushed redder. “We’ve been picking away at the bastards for weeks. I mean nuke it! We could have taken them the last time out if we’d pushed it. Yesterday we had them dead to rights. I was about to pull the men back and let the bastards lick their wounds for another week when that third war wag came out of nowhere and rained on us like a chem storm!”

“They weren’t part of the convoy,” Tag asserted.

Mace stopped walking. “Oh?”

“You saw. Toulalan’s people can barely drive those iron wags, much less fight them. The people in the third came out of that bunker coldhearted and knowledgeable. Took out our scouts, flanked us and rained on us.”

“So how’d they get into the bunker in the first place?”

“I don’t know.” Tag shook his head. “It’s anomalous.”

Mace raised his left eyebrow a hair higher than normal. “Don’t give me the big words, Tag.”

Tag smiled. Despite the mutated flesh studding his face, it was surprisingly charming. Beneath it he was undoubtedly a very handsome man. “Don’t know. Don’t like it.” Tag leaned in conspiratorially. “Tell you this, though.”

Mace leaned in. “What?”

“The newcomers got a mutie among them. I felt it.”

There was nothing charming at all about Mace Henning’s smile. “Interesting.”

Chapter Seven

The convoy rolled north. Krysty was positively giddy behind the wheel of the big rig. It was a warm afternoon. The windows were open, and the wind of their passage ruffled her red hair. She was a beautiful woman. In the pink light of Canada’s shimmering skies her beauty was heartbreaking. Krysty could drive a wag, but a big rig was something else entirely. Ryan was proud she was picking it up so quickly. He dragged his eye back to business. He stood in the machine-blaster hatch and scanned backward through his Navy longeye at the distance they had put behind him. There was nothing there, but Ryan’s gut was speaking to him and he always listened to it. He saw Six standing in one of the outriding pickups. Ryan clicked on the radio. “Six, Ryan.”

The big man sounded distracted over the static. “What?”

“I think we’re being followed.”

Six made a noise. “I guarantee it.”

“Want to do something about it?”

Six considered this for several long seconds. “Why not?”

The iron-skinned pickup closed up with the convoy and pulled alongside the semi. Six scowled even more mightily than usual at the sight of Krysty grinning behind the wheel. He shouted over the cacophony of engine noise. “What do you propose?”

“Get us two of the bikes!”

Six got on the horn, and two of the motorcycle scouts headed back in.

Ryan slid down into the cab. “Keep her straight.” The one-eyed man took up his rifle as the vehicle came alongside, and he jumped into the pickup bed. Six thumped his hand on the roof and the driver brought the pickup to a halt.

Six got back on the horn. “Seriah, Krysty is driving the truck. Why don’t you ride with her for a while?”

The little wrench’s voice came back. “You got it, Vinny!”

Six made another noise. Seriah’s attitude seemed to be eternally sunny. The two bikers pulled up. “Oui, Six?”

“Ryan and I are going for a ride. Give us your bikes.”

The two riders didn’t look happy about having their rides usurped, but Ryan was quickly getting the impression that no one in the convoy other than Toulalan and perhaps Seriah ever gave Six any lip.

Ryan threw a leg over an ancient Honda Nighthawk that looked as though it had been rebuilt from stem to stern more than once. He gave the ’Hawk some gas and began tooling down the road the way the convoy had come. Six followed, and Ryan could feel the big man’s eyes burning into his back. He ignored the sec man and thought like a coldheart. The land was low and rolling, and the road wound between the hills and stands of forest. There was no way for the convoy to hide its tracks.

The one-eyed man looked back, and the convoy’s dust plume rose into the sky like a giant pointing finger. All of the convoy’s vehicles had been modified. Beefed-up suspensions and offroad tires gave them the ability to traverse the raddled, broken and often overgrown Canadian roads, but they had few genuine offroad vehicles. The symbolism was obvious. The convoy was a herd. A dangerous herd, as it had horns, but like a migrating herd it stayed on its route. The coldhearts were a wolf pack, which could strike wherever and whenever it wanted. Chipping away, picking off stragglers, just the presence of a few of them in the distance would keep the convoy on the razor’s edge, day after day, wearing them down.

Ryan was pretty sure they were close.

He pulled off the road and drove up a steep green hillside, followed by Six. Ryan reached the top of the hill and stopped. On a hill opposite them to the east a coldheart stood dismounted and was watching the convoy’s dust. He didn’t seem particularly cautious.

Six’s voice was bitter with frustration. “This isn’t the first time they’ve done this.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, my second in command, a man named Guy. He doubled back to find our trackers. The situation was much like this. He and his team gave pursuit.”

Ryan thought he knew the answer. “And?”

“And we used to have six motorcycles,” Six said bitterly. “Now we have two.”

“They drew Guy into an ambush.”

Six scowled across the rolling grassland separating him from someone he desperately wished to kill. “Guy was brave, and strong, but impulsive. I have since forbidden hot pursuit of the enemy.”

“So they pick at you, waging a war of attrition.”

“Yes.” Six glowered. “Look, he has seen us.”

“No doubt,” Ryan agreed. Quicksilver flashed in the pink, late-afternoon light on top of the far hill. “They’re signaling with mirrors. He’s got more behind him.”

“I can see that.” Six turned his glare on Ryan. “Somehow I thought you had a plan.”

“I do.”

“Oh? I would very much like to hear it.”

Ryan lifted his chin toward the other hill. “We kill that guy.”

“Oh?”

Ryan looked at the laser range-finding binoculars Six wore around his neck. The one-eyed man almost never carried battery-operated devices himself, simply because in the Deathlands the rads, electromagnetic anomalies and the nearly universal lack of recharging facilities made them a dangerous crutch to become dependent on. However, since Six happened to be carrying one…

“Yeah, range me.”

“Ah, your magic rifle,” Six scoffed, but raised his optics to his eyes and pushed a button. The laser aligned with the glass gave him an exact distance. “The range is nine hundred and seventy-five meters,” he reported dryly.

Ryan dropped prone and deployed the Scout’s internal bipod. The blaster had proved to him it could unleash lightning during the boar attack. Now it was time to see if it could hurl the thunderbolt. Ryan tilted his cheek into the stock of his rifle. At 2.5 power, the magnification was low and at nearly a thousand yards the range was long. The man on the opposite hill was still doll-size in Ryan’s scope. The Deathlands warrior considered his target very carefully and raised his aim until it barely occupied the lowest visible point of his crosshairs.

“You think you can hit a man at a thousand meters, in this light, with that—”

Ryan’s fingertip gave the trigger a slow kiss and the Scout bucked against his shoulder. The man on the other hill jumped in alarm.

“A miss!” Six spit.

Ryan flicked the bolt and fired again.

“Miss! You are wasting your am—” Six suddenly shifted his binoculars. “No! Hit! Hit!”

“Six!” Ryan put a final round into the other man’s bike. The coldheart didn’t dare try to jump on as bullets kept cracking against it. “Get him!”

Six jumped onto his bike as the coldheart broke and ran. The big man popped a wheelie and tore across the grassland separating him and his prey. Ryan snapped his bipod shut, slung the Scout and got in the saddle. The Nighthawk snarled and spit blue smoke.

The Quebecer flew over the hill and disappeared. Ryan came to the crest and spun to a stop. The sec man quickly caught up with the coldheart. His longblaster flashed in his trademark big spin. The running man turned only in time to scream and take a big .45-70-caliber bullet through the sternum. Six swept past the fallen man and turf flew as he spun in tight circle.

Ryan unlimbered his longblaster once more as massed engines rumbled like thunder in the distance.

Six knelt over the man and drew his huge bowie knife. Despite the slug in his chest, the coldheart managed a thin scream as Six scalped him. Ryan looked at the coldheart’s motorcycle. The tailpipe was torn, tufts of wool batting stuck out of the bullet hole in the buckskin seat. Ryan had hit the tank, and he could smell the home-stilled alcohol the coldheart had been burning for fuel. Ryan took a precious butane lighter out of his pocket, then pushed the stricken bike over with his boot. In the Deathlands you didn’t mess with another person’s ride. Most likely it was the same in Canada.

This was war.

He took a rag from a pocket, touched the flame of his butane lighter to one end, then tossed the rag onto the bike. Pale blue flame played across the engine block.

“Six!” Ryan shouted. The big man leaped onto his bike and rode back to the top of the hill and spun to a stop next to Ryan. From their vantage the one-eyed man saw a mob of motorcycles cresting the next row of hills to the east. He took out his Navy longeye and extended it, counting about a dozen. The two forces stood and regarded each other over the half mile between them. A thin plume of black smoke rose from the burning bike beside Ryan. Six slowly held aloft his grizzly trophy. The scalped man was a bloody rag lying between the contenders. Ryan waited for the cavalry charge and hoped for it. If the coldhearts were hot for revenge, they would roar down in a swarm, and Ryan and Six would drop prone and shoot the riders out of their saddles as they came on.

The coldhearts didn’t take the bait.

Ryan was pretty sure they had taken note. Six had made his bloody mark, and the one-eyed man had made his point. Stalking the convoy had turned into a much rougher game. Unfortunately the enemy had made a point, as well.

For roving coldhearts they had a sense of discipline that Ryan didn’t care for at all.

BARON MACE HENNING wasn’t pleased. He sat on his camp tool with his cluboss his knees like a samurai warlord. “What’s that you say, Shorty?”

Shorty scuffed the toe of his boot into the ground nervously. “Said Jimmy Pickering’s been chilled.”

“Oh yeah?” Jimmy had been one of Mace’s better scouts. “How’d that happen?”

“Old Vinny scalped him.” Shorty cleared his throat. “Burned his bike.”

“You saw it?”

“Saw after. Old Vinny was up on the next rise. Wavin’ Jimmy’s scalp at us.”

Mace’s eyes went to slits. “So what’d you do about it, Shorty?”

Shorty started paying intense attention to his boots again. “Nothin’…”

“Nothing?”

“Vinny was up on that hill, like I said, ’bout a klick away with that big shiny blaster of his and nothin’ ’tween us and it but a lot of real open ground. And there was another guy with him. I saw him real good. Through my ’noculars. Guy was one-eyed and had some kind of funky-lookin’ carbine. I don’t think he’s from around here, or Val-d’Or neither. Real coldheart-lookin’ prick. Lookin’ like he might even give old Vinny a hard time. ’Cept they was standin’ side-by-side and Vinny was smiling. We had ’em numbered, Baron, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that stranger or his blaster, and I sure didn’t like the smile on Vinny’s face.”

Mace stared at Shorty. It was undoubtedly the most intelligent thing the sec man had ever said. Mace looked to Red, who was one of his sons. He was nowhere near as big as his father; indeed he took after his mother in being short and thin. Mace neither denied Red nor acknowledged him, but the red hair, green eyes and ugly features were absolutely unmistakable. When Red had first come to his father and asked for a job as a sec man, he didn’t bring up his blood. Mace had told him to go to a rival ville and bring him three ears. Red had come back with ten. He was unlikely to ever win a stand-up club or tomahawk fight, but Red was a nightcreeper extraordinaire, a decent shot with a blaster and could think on his feet. The chunk of change he wore around his neck was proof. “Red?”

“Like he said, Baron. Those two just stood there waitin’, and Jimmy all laid out on the killing ground between us with the bedsheet pulled off his skull. No one sneaks up on Jimmy. That means they picked him off at range, and that says somethin’ right there. Some of the boys wanted to go straight in. Shorty said no.” Red met his father’s eyes. “I backed him.”

Mace had been working very hard the last few years to instill some sense of tactics into his men. It had taken some head cracking, but it was starting to pay off. Baron Henning still wasn’t ready to start handing out compliments. “Don’t suppose anyone retrieved Jimmy’s change?”

“No.” Red flinched. “Vinny’s got it. Added it to his collection.”

Mace slowly rose. His club hung loose from his wrist by its thong. Tag rose behind him. His gaudy-house fancy autoblaster wasn’t quite pointing at anyone in particular, yet. The baron looked at the arc of men arrayed in front of him on the other side of the campfire; his eyebrow permanently cocked in judgment. The men stared back, mentally laying bets on whether Shorty, Red or both would get their skulls crushed and lose their change. Would Mace really put his club through his best friend’s brain? Or his own redheaded bastard son?

Baron Mace Henning bellowed like a bull and shoved his club skyward. “Who wants to winter in Val-d’Or?”

Shorty shouted first. He’d seen Mace rally the troops before, and he was ecstatic his skull was still intact. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”

The baron let the lack of protocol go. “Who wants to winter down in that underground gaudy palace they got? Heard they got central heating!”

More men took up the chant. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”

“Who wants to winter sleeping on bearskins, smoking hemp and eating poutine? Heard they’re growing taters in excess!”

The chant grew. “Fuckin’-ay, Mace!”

“Who wants his own blond French slut to chew his boots this winter, and slobber on anything else a man has a mind for?”

The chant grew to a roar.

Baron Mace Henning’s riding skins creaked as he slowly sat and once more laid his club across his knees. “The way I figure it, Vinny owes me about fifty dollars now. Who’s going to bring me back all that jack?” Mace leaned forward. “Who’s going to bring me a black ear?”

Every man shoved a club, tomahawk or blaster toward the shimmering Northern Lights and shook it. They whooped and shoved one another, each man shouting out how he was the one who would take down Vincent Six.

“Boys?” A silver coin appeared in Mace’s hand. He held it up to gleam in the firelight. “Who’s going to earn himself a silver Voyager?”

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