Salvation Road

And then there were the nights…Desert nights could kill. They chilled to the bone and caused hypothermia to set in and take effect long before the morning sun could warm frozen flesh. In many ways, the nights were more dangerous, more insidious. During the days, temporary shelters could be constructed, any scrub used to give some kind of shade during rest periods. At first the cool of evening would be welcome, lulling the unsuspecting into a false sense of security before the bitter cold took hold. The scrub was even more vital at these times, as a source of firewood.

But there was little scrub and little chance to shelter. The chem-scoured and rad-blasted skies above them afforded no respite from the burning ultraviolet of the sun, and the deep freeze of the moon. Time began to lose meaning as there were no landmarks along the way, no visual relief from the unrelenting monotony of the desert, spreading all around in brownish, red dust that soaked up the rays of the sun and beat them back out. The heat burned the soles of their feet even through their heavy boots, radiating through the heavy clothes they used to cover the ground when they rested in whatever shade they could find or manufacture from their surroundings.

J.B. had taken regular readings to try to keep them on track. It would have been too easy to end up wandering in circles in a place where there were few landmarks. They kept heading in the direction they had chosen, but by the time they reached the remains of the road even Ryan began to wonder if somehow they had wandered off track and would end up frying in the desert dirt.

Doc was the worst hit. His time-trawl-ravaged body needed water at regular intervals, intervals that began to grow shorter with even greater regularity. He began to lean heavily on the lion’s-head swords-tick that also doubled as a cane, and Dean hung back to aid him.

“Don’t worry, Doc, it’ll soon be better,” he said at one point.

Doc’s answer chilled him. He fixed him with a blank-eyed stare and said, “Jolyon, you’ve come back to me at last. How is my dear Emily? And Rachel? Is my hell finally over?”

Dean didn’t know what to say, but his eye met Mildred’s, and he could see that the woman was concerned about the way that Doc was deteriorating.

In ordinary circumstances, the water supplies they had taken from the redoubt would have lasted them more than a week. But here, the sun was hotter, the lack of cloud cover and the way in which the baking earth absorbed then released the heat made the journey almost intolerable. Even when they stopped and tried to raise some kind of rudimentary shelter, it was almost impossible to escape the heat. All the companions were sweating out more water and salt than they could afford to lose, and when the cold night drew in they huddled around the small fires they could build and filled up on the self-heats. As most of these were soup or stew-based foods, they supplied some more water for the dehydrated bodies, as well as supplementing the salt tablets that Mildred had plundered from the medical stores.

So the road, when it came, was met with a sense of elation—although all were too hot and exhausted to express this in any other way than a massed sigh of relief, shot through with the uneasy knowledge that even though they had reached the road Ryan had gambled upon, there was still the dilemma of choosing which way to follow the cracked blacktop.

The shimmering surface of the road, the aged macadam almost melting in the intense heat, was visible from a few hundred yards away, and the companions exchanged glances as they, as one, noted the landmark for which they had been searching. They were too exhausted to speak until they had tramped the last few yards to the edge of the road, where they drew to a halt.

“Why don’t I feel excited that we’re actually here?” Krysty said in a hoarse, cracked voice. Her sweat-plastered red hair clung to her head, the long ends clinging like tendrils to her neck and shoulders. Her fine skin was covered with a layer of dust, and her lips—as cracked as her voice—betrayed her attempts to conserve the rapidly shrinking water supply.

“Because this is still only the beginning,” Ryan replied in a voice that had been reduced by thirst to a dry whisper. “First we work out which way to go, and then we hope we hit some kind of old wag stop, or mebbe a ville if we’re lucky.”

“I think we’ve got a better chance of a wag stop,” Mildred commented. “Who the hell could keep a ville going out here?” she added, turning her head slowly, sun-blasted muscles aching, to survey the long blank stretch of the road in each direction.

“Mebbe just over the horizon.” Dean shrugged, following Mildred’s stare.

J.B. said nothing. He took out his minisextant and took a reading to confirm their position, then extrapolated it to an overall direction for the road.

“I’d say that we head due west from here, following the road,” he said in a voice made drier than his usual tones by the heat and attempts to save his water. “I’d reckon that going east just leads us back.”

Ryan assented. “If I remember right, then there were some villes headed that way. We should rest up a few minutes, mebbe take some water and a salt tablet, then head that way,” he said softly, lifting his arm to indicate a westerly direction. Even lifting his arm made the muscles ache, the buildup of lactic acid unable to dissipate with his dehydrated state. His skin was burning, but covering up made him sweat too much, losing more fluid and salt. Like all of them, he was trying to balance perspiration with the dangers of sunburn and sunstroke.

But it was Jak who was having the greatest problem. As an albino, he had no pigment in his skin to combat the harsh rays of the sun, and his face was almost scarlet, the scars that crisscrossed his countenance standing out lividly. His arms were red and raw, and the amount of sun he was absorbing was making him susceptible to sunstroke, and he was swaying dangerously as they stood still.

Mildred had some sunblock originally designed for desert maneuvers by the predark military that she had taken from the redoubt, and she offered one of the tubes to Jak.

“Not doing good,” he said in a distant voice as he took the tube from her.

“It’s all there is,” Mildred replied. She watched as he applied some of the cream to his raw skin. They had all used the block, but she had saved extra for Jak, only too aware of the problems he was left open to by his albino condition.

Ryan noted the concern in her voice. “How much of that do we have left?” he asked.

Mildred shrugged. “Not enough. Maybe two, three days’ worth. It’s like the water and the self-heats. This damn sun is making us use more than we could have estimated.”

Ryan nodded but said nothing. It was a cause for some concern that all their supplies, taken from a rich source, were being used far too fast. He squinted his good eye and took a long, hard look down the road in the direction in which they would travel. The horizon shimmered, but even in the haze there was little sign of even a hallucination that could be construed as shelter.

“Okay. Let’s just see….”

THEY SPENT the rest of the day making slow, agonizing progress along the old blacktop. The surface was too broken and scarred to use. The uneven tarmac could cause a sprained ankle or worse, and the sticky, almost melting surface would slow progress and take too much energy as it dragged and pulled at their aching leg muscles.

The sun, with an almost interminable slowness, gradually sank. Night fell, and the sudden drop in temperature caused them to shiver uncontrollably, making it hard when they stopped to light a fire from the sparse brush, using a flare to ignite the blaze and add a burst of heat. The self-heats were difficult to handle with their spasms, and precious water was spilled.

“We have to try to sleep,” Mildred said when they had finished eating. “Try to get as much rest as possible.”

“If I sleep, then I fear that I may never wake,” Doc said in a sudden burst of lucidity. “If this is life, and nothing more than a waking dream,” he added as an afterthought.

“Nightmare, more like,” Dean said, his voice betraying a slide into sleep.

“Have to get through this,” Ryan said as they huddled together to keep warm and preserve valuable body heat. “There could be a ville just over the horizon.”

“Or a wag stop,” J.B. added. “Anything…”

THE RISING SUN WOKE them next morning, the lack of atmospheric cover causing the ultraviolet rays to immediately scald them.

“Another day, another adventure,” Mildred muttered sarcastically as she stirred beneath her jacket. “I just hope that we find something today….” She let the sentence drift, not wanting to add that they didn’t have the water and salt—even as carefully rationed as they dared—to last much beyond.

They began the slow march to the west, trudging heavily along the side of the road. The sun beat down steadily and with an ever growing intensity, and after a few hours it was all any of them could do to keep their heads up. Ryan took the point, J.B. the rear, and they straggled out into a line with Dean propping up Doc in the middle, while Krysty and Jak followed close to the one-eyed warrior, with Mildred staying at the rear with the Armorer.

They couldn’t bear to look up in the glare of the sun, and their aching neck muscles couldn’t support them in their attempt to stare ahead, so it was the sound that came to them first, floating across the empty air and breaking the intense concentration that enabled them to keep one foot going in front of the other.

It was Jak, with his heightened senses that made him such a keen hunter, who heard it first. Despite his fatigue, he snapped his head upright, red eyes burning brighter than the bloated orb above them.

“People.”

Ryan stopped, the line closing behind him as they banded together, coming to a halt. Jak’s statement, and Ryan’s sudden halt, instantly broke them from their own personal reveries. They all listened intently, staring as they did so into the shimmering haze that became more indistinct as it approached the horizon.

There was no mistaking the sound. Voices—at least four men, maybe more. And the sounds of hammering and some kind of work activity.

Under the intense light, it was harder to make out the view, but there seemed to be some kind of building moving in and out of the edges of the haze, standing at the side of the old blacktop. It was too indistinct to see, but it seemed to be obvious that this was where the sounds emanated.

“A wag stop, and people,” Ryan husked, his voice almost destroyed by the dry heat.

“I don’t believe it, even though I see it,” Mildred said, even the husky and croaking tone of her voice failing to hide her elation.

“Let’s get to it,” Dean said, “before we can’t make it.”

J.B. was, as ever, the voice of caution. “Don’t know that they’re friendly, though,” he pointed out.

Ryan nodded. “Good point. Triple red, but try not to let it show. We’ll be a shock for them, coming out of nowhere…No need to spook them more by looking ready for a firefight.” He coughed as he finished the speech, his voice almost wasted by the amount of words he had to use.

He indicated that they move rather than speak, and as the companions moved forward they all checked their blasters and brought them to hand. The instincts that had kept them alive for so long enabled them to smoothly bring their favored blasters to hand and chamber shells in case they should need to fire on the human beings ahead—the first they had seen for days, the ones who could save them if they had water and food, and the ones who could give them shelter…if they were friendly. And there was no guarantee of that in the Deathlands. No, not at all.

The last thousand yards would be the hardest.

IT WAS A SMALL cinder-built blockhouse, the adjunct to an old truck stop that had long since perished. The raised floor and foundations were all that remained, and it was on these remains that the men had their camp while they worked on the blockhouse. The roof had been removed and an upper story added. It was made of old sheets of corrugated iron, insulated against the sun by loose sheets of an aluminum foil, which deflected the blazing sun from the iron, which would otherwise trap and magnify the intensity of its heat. The roof had been replaced on top of this, its sloping tiles giving the appearance that with one chem storm they could slide off at a bizarre angle.

It was to this problem that the work party was now addressing itself. To one side of the blockhouse lay an abandoned site that marked an extension to the existing building, while the eight-strong work party was either on the roof itself, or was swarming up and down the three ladders that stood at the sides of the building unattached to the new extension.