Hell Road Warriors

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?”