Hell Road Warriors

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.”