Thunder Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened here?” Mildred asked softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the women spoke as they approached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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