The back doors of the SUV popped open and a burly giant of a man jumped out. He shouldered the RPG he carried and took aim at the edge of forest on far side of the road.
With a blistering whoosh the rocket launched and seconds later came the whump of explosion. Trees along the opposite shoulder fireballed. In the hard flash of light Ryan saw cannie silhouettes cartwheeling through the air and the survivors scattering like rats low and fast into the forest.
The tow truck crew continued to peck away at cannie wounded and stragglers. The crews from the other wags joined them, raining fire on the enemy caught out in the open. The convoy was the usual jumble of predark makes and models, but they all had horsepower to spare. Serious muscle was required to move the weight of cargo, armor and personnel over the wasteland.
“Look at the bastards run!” the RPG shooter said with pleasure.
He was a mountain of a man, nearly as tall as Ryan, but a hundred pounds heavier, solid muscle covered with a thick layer of jellylike blubber. Most of his weathered face was hidden by a full brown beard. He wore stained, denim bibfronts and a black leather vest with no shirt underneath. He didn’t need one. The layers of fat and the mat of hair on his back, shoulders, arms and chest provided plenty of insulation.
“You the convoy master?” Ryan asked, checking out the man’s personal armament. The twin, well-worn, bluesteel .357 Magnum Desert Eagles in black ballistic nylon shoulder holsters looked like peashooters tucked under his massive arms. The mountain reeked of joy juice, stale tobacco and gasoline.
“Harlan Sprue’s the name,” he said. “You look mighty familiar to me. Mr…?”
The one-eyed man hesitated a moment. “Ryan Cawdor.”
“Not the same Cawdor what used to run with Trader?”
“Same.”
“I locked horns with you and your old crew once, back east,” he said. “We had ourselves a little disagreement over ownership of some predark knickknacks. You probably don’t recognize me now. I was quite a few pounds lighter back then.”
“I remember you, Sprue,” Ryan said. “You weren’t any lighter in those days and as I recall, you lost the argument.”
“Memory is a funny thing. I recollect just the opposite.” Sprue looked over the other companions. When he got to J.B., he stopped and grinned broadly. “Four-eyes was with you then, too,” he said. “One mean, sawed-off little bastard.”
“You got that right, fat man,” J.B. said, shifting the weight of his pump gun on its shoulder sling. “Only I got even less patience nowadays.”
When Sprue took in Junior Tibideau, his hairy smile twisted into a scowl. “You caught yourselves a cannie?” he said incredulously. “Looks like a sick un, too. Are you out of your rad-blasted minds? That’s like taking a mutie rattler into bed. For a thank you, he’ll bite you in your ass first chance he gets.”
“He isn’t going to bite anybody,” Ryan said.
Then a single sniper round skipped off the Suburban’s hood and whined into the trees.
Which drew a volley of answering fire from the wag crews.
When the shooting stopped, Sprue said, “We’ve got to move a ways up the road before the bastards regroup. You can pile in the 6x6 at the end of the line. All of you but that cannie. My crews won’t share a wag with a goddamned, oozie-drippin’ flesheater. They’ll blow him out of his socks soon as look at him. If you want him to keep on breathing, you’d better tie him to the back bumper and let him hoof it.”
To lead a wag convoy through the hellscape, to deal with Nature run amok at every turn, to face coldheart robbers and mutie attacks, a person had to be one hard-headed, pedal-to-the-metal son of a bitch, the kind of leader who never buckled, never bent, who kept on pushing until he or she got where he or she wanted to go.
For Ryan, looking at Harlan Sprue was like seeing himself in a distorted, carny show mirror.
There was only one way to argue with that kind of man, and that was with a well-aimed bullet.
This wasn’t the time or place for that kind of an argument.
The companions trotted down to the idling 6x6. J.B., Jak, Krysty and Doc scrambled up onto the armor-sided cargo bed. The Armorer threw Mildred a coil of rope he found inside, and she slipped it around Junior’s waist, and, leaving about fifteen feet of slack, tied him to the wag’s back bumper.
“You could take this tree limb off my back, Mildred,” the cannie said. “Make it easier for me to keep up.”
“Yeah, I could, but I won’t. Making your life easier isn’t way up there on my to-do list.”
“How far are we going?”
“We’ll both know when we get there.”
Doc leaned over the bumper. “Best step lively, cannie,” was his sage advice.
As the wags at the head of the file started moving, Ryan climbed up on the 6x6 cab’s step. He spoke through the louvres melted through the side window’s steel plate. “Take it easy,” he warned the driver, “you’re towing a prisoner on foot.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure and do that,” a hoarse-voiced woman replied. Then she gunned the engine and popped the clutch.
The big wag lurched ahead. Ryan had to hustle to swing up beside Mildred and the others.
No way could the cannie keep up. He fell after a dozen steps and was dragged across the dirt on his belly. Lucky for Junior Tibideau, progress was stop and go as the heavily loaded wags in front maneuvered around the route’s deepest ruts. Before Mildred could hop down to help him, before the wag could roll on, Junior jumped back to his feet, grinning fiendishly.
“Piece of crap,” was Mildred’s terse assessment.
To Ryan, she still seemed normal. On top of her game even. He wanted to make sure.
“You all right?” he asked her.
“No problems as far that I can tell. Got my fingers crossed.”
So had Ryan.
Behind him, a propane lantern swinging from a roof strut cast a wildly shifting light over the interior. On either side of the truck bed were battened-down fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline and joy juice leaking fumes, and smaller drums marked “Drinking Water.” Between the barrels were stacks of car batteries, long wooden crates of ammo and unmarked boxes of other trade goods. The enclosed space—windowless except for rifle firing ports—smelled like a bear pit. Wag crews had been camping out in back of the truck for months, perhaps years. Five pairs of eyes stared back at Ryan with suspicion and disdain. The other three crewmembers were so disinterested in the newcomers that they had already curled up and gone back to sleep on their rag pile beds among the crates.
The howl of the 6x6’s engine and the groans and shrieks of its springs as it jolted over the track made conversation as well as rest impossible.
For about half an hour, the convoy continued along the shoulder of Highway 84, stop and go. Occasionally a rifle round or two would spang into the truck’s side armor, but there was no concerted attack, no enemy regrouping of any consequence.
When a horn up front honked, the wags slowed to a crawl and circled for the night. Virtually bumper to bumper.
Ryan jumped from the truck bed. The convoy had parked on a flat field of hardpacked earth. The stars were out in force.
Junior Tibideau nowhere in sight, but one end of the rope was still tied to the bumper. Cawdor squatted and peered under the wag.
The cannie cowered on his knees behind the rear axle. He knew how much danger he was in. “You gotta protect me, brother,” he insisted. “If you let me get chilled, your woman friend is gonna die hard.”
Ryan didn’t