Читать книгу Thunder Road - James Axler - Страница 10

No choice at all. The people of the ville agreed to their terms. The companions loaded their wag and set off the next morning, before the sun was too high in the clear sky.

“I never thought I would wish for the toiling colors of a chem cloud, but then there are many things to which I thought the word ‘never’ would apply,” Doc said sadly as he stared at the sky.

“Don’t talk shit, save energy, drive,” Jak muttered from the back of the wag. Doc, first on driving duties, spared himself a small smile and coaxed the horses onto the road out of the ville.

They could have taken a motorized wag, one that would have negated the need for food and water for the horses, one that would perhaps have been more reliable. But J.B.’s recce of the ville’s resources the night before had revealed that their wags were old and in poor repair, and that their supplies of fuel were low. To take what was needed from them would have left the ville with next to nothing, while at the same time taking a big risk on being stranded in the middle of the sandy dustbowl that was their chosen route.

The lack of speed shown by the two stringy creatures pulling their wooden wag was a small trade-off against these risks.

But that was not the only reasoning that Ryan was using. The rider had seen them once before, using this wag. That time he had been friendly. If he saw them again in a motorized vehicle, would he be more likely to perceive them as a threat? If he saw them with the horse-drawn wag, would he recall seeing them once before and passing by? These questions were important. He was one dangerous coldheart, and to attract undue attention and hostility in tracking him was the last thing Ryan wanted.

Although they set out along the route by which they had entered the ville—tracking back along the trail left by the rider almost a week before—they had no intentions of blindly following it and hoping that they might just, conceivably, run into him along the way. It was purely that it was the only road in. After all, the rider was faster than them, and had days of start on them. The problem here was how to try to find him.

Wherever he was currently based, he could only travel as far as the fuel tanks on the bike would take him. A return journey, at that. He had, by all accounts, left the ville by the same road he had entered. So his base of operations was more likely to lay back in the direction from where he had come than it was to lay on the road on the far side of the ville. If he was triple smart and didn’t want to be followed, Ryan thought, then he may have doubled on himself and circled the ville. But that notion didn’t tally with their encountering him a day’s wag ride along that return line.

Trying to get inside the mind of a triple crazie had given Ryan a headache. He’d discussed the options with the others, and it had left them with a headache, too. Most crazies were easy to figure out. When he thought of all the madmen they’d come up against, it was clear that for most of them there was always one driving obsession that was at the center of their craziness. You find that, and you find the key to how to deal with them. Strategy was easier when you had something to go up against. But what did they have with the mystery rider?

Mildred and Doc were the most likely to have some idea of what might be going on inside the head of the rider.

“The things of which he speaks are very much concepts from before the nukecaust,” Doc had mused. “There has been very little to survive that could have fully informed him of such notions.”

“Particularly if he was out here living in it,” Mildred added. “Let’s face it, a lot of our notions about the law and justice lasted squat once we actually had to adjust and survive.”

Doc gave a quiet chuckle. “True, my dear Doctor. Truer than you know…or maybe not.” He gave her a quizzical stare. “We were soon disabused of such notions, even if we kept knowledge. Yet our mysterious friend seems to still have an intrinsic belief that such a thing is possible. Now that shows a peculiarly muddled sense of reality, does it not? Yet he seems quite rational in other ways.”

“Doc’s right. The rider has the ability to function to a high degree,” Mildred mused. “So how could you get that combination? That isolation, and that knowledge, that would enable you to still function, yet have no real idea of the world in which you lived?”

“Lori…” Doc said softly.

Mildred looked at him, brow furrowed. Lori was before she had joined them, but she had heard tell of her. A glance around the others confirmed her suspicions—Lori Quint, the tall blonde with the short skirt. She’d been Doc’s companion for a short while, until she bought the farm. She had been born and brought up in a redoubt, never seeing the outside world until Ryan and the others had landed in the redoubt by sheer chance.

“You think he may live in a redoubt? There might be one around here?” Ryan questioned.

“Perhaps. Not necessarily a redoubt, but maybe a base of some kind? Somewhere that would be protected against the nukecaust. Somewhere people could interbreed without ever having to go outside.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time we’d found crazies living like that,” Krysty mused. “But as you say, people rarely go outside.”

So they reached a kind of conclusion. It wasn’t much to work on, but it was the best they could come up with and it did give them a place to start. If there was a limit to the fuel his bike could carry, and he had a base somewhere along a line from the ville to where they had first seen him, then it might be possible to narrow the search by drawing a circle that could encompass other villes in the area, and working in from there.

They had little in the way of maps to work from, but J.B. was an excellent navigator and plotter. Some judicious questioning of the people from the ville gave him the names and rough locations of other villes in the area, along with an indication of distance by the time it usually took to travel between them. Using old predark maps of the area leading to the Grand Canyon and New Mex that were among the papers he always carried with him, he was able to prescribe a rough circle, within which lay three other villes. It would take them several days to visit all of them, and the reception they would receive was a variable to be met with caution, but it was a plan that gave them somewhere to begin the search.

J.B.’S MAP AND ROUTE PRESCRIBED an arc that would take them a round 360 degrees back to their starting point. Along the way, they would hope to pick up more information about the mystery rider that they could use to pinpoint his base of operations. It would be a long, arduous task, but there was little else they could do to make it any easier.

As they made the tedious journey, under the boiling sun or the freezing moon, they looked across the desolate landscape for any sign of the rider, or for his tracks. There was none before they came to the first ville on their route.

Station Browns ville had no old predark rail depot from which it could have derived its name. There was little in the way of old railroad that had even traversed this section of the Deathlands, as they knew too well from past experience. The origin of its name was a mystery, except that it rang some distant bell in Mildred’s youth.

It was of no matter. Like the ville they had originally stumbled upon, Station Browns was, in effect, little more than a way station for passing trade. And as there was little that passed this way, it was as dirt poor as its neighbors. The little they had gleaned about it indicated that it was little more than a pesthole ville, with a gaudy house that paid its way and a nice line in home brew that traveled well. There was a kind of rivalry between Station Browns ville and a ville called Casa Belle Taco, which had a similar trade. But there was enough distance between them for horny and thirsty convoys and travelers to keep both in business.

On the third day out, both Jak and Krysty felt prickles of unease within them.

The albino, his hunting senses as sharp as they were, could find no reason why he was feeling that way. There was no scent, no sound that he could put a name to, yet he could feel that out there, somewhere just beyond the limits of his senses, there was someone—something?—watching them.

For Krysty, it was much the same. Except that she did not have to rely on empirical evidence. Her ability to sense danger was almost infallible, and it was sounding alarms in her head that were impossible to ignore. Yet the landscape was deserted, and the sense seemed to fade in and out, like a badly tuned old transmitter picking up white noise that was almost—but not quite—decipherable. When it was strong, it was impossible to ignore it. Yet just as quickly it would fade out, before returning with a great intensity. And so she kept quiet about it, figuring she would wait until she could pin it down a little better.

It was nonexistent when they got their first view of Station Browns ville. Across the flat plain, it was still several miles away—a good two or three hours by horse-drawn—and the ville looked to be undamaged.

It was only as they got closer that the truth became apparent.

HIS SUSPICIONS HAD FIRST become aroused as he sped away from the folks in the horse-drawn wagon. Regular types, the sort who could help to build a new world. That was what had come to mind. But why? That was what had nagged at Thunder Rider all the way back to base. What had made him think that of a random encounter that lasted only a few seconds? He knew there had to be something else, a trigger that had started that thought. The question that faced him was how to discern what that trigger might be.

Back at base, he had the technology that could help him. In the lab, there was a brain wave decoder. It had been built for him, and in truth he did not fully understand the principles on which it worked; but in essence, it took his brain waves from the memory sector of his brain and translated them into images that were digitally recorded, so that he would be able to study them in detail. The persistent nagging made him hit the throttle even harder: there was no way he could rest until he had laid his mind to rest.

When he reached base, he docked the bike, leaving maintenance and refueling until later, and went straight to the lab. The LED was simple to set, and he selected the decoder option, plugging the headset into the jack on the console before carefully positioning it on his skull. Seating himself, he relaxed, taking deep breaths as he had been taught, before punching the key that would set the program in operation.

The trick was to think about anything else other than what you wanted to capture. If you tried too hard, and bought it to mind, then you would be dragging it from the memory center, making it hard for the computer to scan and collect.

He diverted himself by thinking about his favorite video. The one where the cowboy found the underworld kingdom ruled by the ice queen. She was merciless to begin with, but only in the protection of her people. She had taught him that to do good, you had to be prepared to sometimes do things that would be bad…unless, of course, you were doing them to people who would do even worse. His sister had told him of that old saying “you can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg.” He knew what they were, of course, but he wondered what they tasted like. He had never seen one, other than in pictures.

The console hummed and a monitor screen flickered to light, a message appearing to tell him that the scan of the area was complete, the images captured. Letting his mind wander had worked, as he hoped it would. Sometimes he found it hard not to think of the things that concerned him.

He took off the headset, unplugged it and put it carefully away. He was mindful of the fact that he was fortunate to have this legacy of equipment with which to execute his mission, and he did not wish to waste or damage it with carelessness.

The computer program did it all for him. He had merely to key in the sequence to play, and then watch. The events of the past two days played out before him. He hit the key to fast forward to the relevant section, not wishing to view all of his life over again so soon. When it came to that section, he marked it on the toolbar: where it began, where it ended. He cut it out and played it over and over again, switching the angles, enhancing the image, zooming in and out. He wanted to try to catch as much of a view of the inhabitants of the wagon as he could.

It was far from easy. They had adopted defensive postures that were so accomplished that little of them could be gleaned. However, he could tell that there were six of them. One of them was small, pale. He had white hair, as did another. One was dark-skinned. And one…For a moment his breath was taken away. A flash of hair, a brilliant red, waving in a nonexistent breeze, as though alive of its own accord.

It could not be…He saved the best images he could and left them on screen. Each of the six images centered on one of the people hiding behind the wagon.

Swiveling in his chair, he went to another monitor. This archived all the reports, visual and verbal, that had been collected by the base’s intel-gathering equipment since the time of the Long Night. There was, in truth, very little. This system had been designed for use in the days before the darkness, and it had a vast capacity for memory. It was a sign of how things had degenerated that only a fraction of its vast storage capacity was in use. This made it simple for the search facility to scan intel for correlation with the people on the screen.

The search bought several matches, recorded over a period of time. There was precious little to go on, as there were very few facilities capable of broadcast and communication technology in these days. But these sparse mentions added up to a picture, one that Thunder Rider had noted while he had scanned the outside, preparing for his entrance.

This group of people—who seemed to have added and lost a few members over time, but remained with the same core nucleus—had, like himself, been pillars of right. They were the kind of allies he sought.

More…The vision of the red hair floating in a nonexistent breeze stirred something within him. It was something new, something that he had never felt before.

He was determined. When he had completed maintenance and refueling, when he had rested himself, then he had to find them.

He had to find her.

THEIR FIRST INDICATION that all was not well came with the burst of fire that seemed to erupt from nowhere, kicking up the sandy soil a few yards ahead of them. The horses reacted, moving erratically enough to throw off balance those who were in the back of the wag. It was as well that the horses had proved themselves calm to the point of stupidity under fire, otherwise Jak, currently at the reins, would have dropped them with a slug to each head. As it was, he was able to pull them around, giving those in the back the chance to find their feet and grab their weapons.

The burst of fire was followed by silence, the echo on the still air, mocking them. With the wag sideways-on to the direction the burst had come from, they lined up behind the shelter of the vehicle, just as they had when the mystery rider had skirted them. There was no other cover in this barren landscape.

“What do you reckon?” Ryan asked J.B.

The Armorer scanned the land between the wag and the horizon. Only the first few buildings on the edge of Station Browns ville broke the unrelenting flat.

“It didn’t sound like serious ordnance, or rip up much dirt. It had to have come from someplace between here and the buildings, some kind of hide or shelter. No way something that weak got that distance otherwise.”

Jak had been scanning the ground ahead of them, blotting out the conversation beside him. If there was anywhere they could hide, then he was determined to spot it. With no cover, it had to be some kind of dugout. Even the best-made hide would show somewhere against such a featureless surface.

It wasn’t well made, and it didn’t take him long to locate it.

“Ryan, there. Forty degrees,” he whispered, directing the one-eyed man’s gaze along a line prescribed by his bony white finger. Ryan followed and saw it immediately. Once you knew where it was, it was obvious: raised by the side of a cactus, dust-and dirt-covered canvas over a hole with a built-up ledge. Just enough of a slit between dirt and canvas to see out of, to direct a blaster.

Ryan beckoned Mildred and indicated the hide. “Just frighten the fucker out,” he said simply.

Mildred nodded and focused her aim. Her Czech-made ZKR was a specialist target pistol, and she had once been a specialist target shooter. This was simple. She placed three shots around the lip of the hide. One kicked up dust in the center, while the others knocked out the tiny supports that gave the hide its view of the world. With a puff of dust, the hide closed up.

“So we know where you are, you know where we are. We could have taken you out, but we didn’t want to. You come out, we won’t shoot. We aren’t your enemy…but we might know who is. We’re chasing a coldheart with a freaky motorcycle—”

“That fucker. Okay, I’ll trust you ’cause I’m pinned. Don’t let me down.”

The woman was an unlikely sec sniper. Dressed in a dirty camisole top, shorts and combat boots, long blond hair tied back, the large-busted and curvy young woman looked more like a gaudy slut who’d been given a blaster and thrown into the wrong job.

Showing good faith by holstering his SIG-Sauer and walking out into the open, Ryan prompted her to introduce herself.

“Name’s Anita. Long time since I hefted a blaster. More used to handling other kinds of weapons,” she said with a grin, “but I figure that we need all the skills we can get after what happened.”

“Which was?”

“Bastard you described…” Briefly, and with more cursing than even Jak would have thought possible, she outlined a situation similar to the one that went down in the last ville. By the time she had finished, the others had joined Ryan in front of the wag.

“So where the fuck do you fit into it?” Anita asked in what they had discovered to be her usual forthright manner.

Ryan told her briefly about their experiences, and about the pact they had made in the last ville.

“Should be glad we aren’t the only ones,” she said at the conclusion, “but then I wouldn’t wish that asshole on anyone. So I guess you’d better come on back with me, see if mebbe you can find out something else that would help.”

“You think there could be something?”

She shrugged. “Dunno. Can’t hurt to ask. ’Sides which, we’re pretty much on top of clearing up now. Weird fucker thought us girls were all prisoners. Didn’t touch any of us, just chilled all the men and blew up a lot of shit.”

“Where did a gaudy slut learn to shoot like that?” Krysty asked her.

The smile vanished. “My daddy.”

“He was a good shot?” Krysty prompted.

Anita sniffed. “Fucker wanted me to be mommy to my new little sister. Would have been if he’d got his hands on me. Sweetest shot I ever made, right through the bastard’s dick. Now, you gonna give me a ride back, or do I have to walk in front of that wag of yours?”

Doc gathered the horses and drove the wag into the ville, Anita sitting beside him to indicate that all was well. They made the short journey in silence, the friends gleaning what they could from the view out the back of the canvas wag cover.

There was little to see that wasn’t familiar to them. Station Browns ville was almost too small to have a center as such; rather, it had a few buildings that radiated from the hub, which was a cluster of about five buildings. It was difficult to tell, as they hadn’t been well-constructed, and the rider’s ordnance had wreaked more havoc here than the ville they had recently left.

The ville had looked fine from a distance: no smoking wreckage, and now they could see why. Any fires had long ago burned themselves out. The flattened center section of the ville was nothing more than rubble and corpses. Some of the gaudy sluts, incongruously still dressed for trade, were working to clear the corpses.

“How many of you are left, my dear?” Doc whispered.

“No more than fifteen, all women and girls. Every male, young or old, is chilled. Criminacs, or somethin’, that was what he called them.”

“Criminals, my dear. An old word, of no real meaning now.”

Anita sniffed. “Figure it must mean somethin’ if it makes him chill all our menfolk. That what he did where you come from?”

“Almost. A larger population, perhaps not enough time for him. We must find out all we can, I think, and quickly,” he said over his shoulder at Ryan.

The one-eyed man was in agreement. They had another two villes to get to. Chances were, on this evidence, that the coldheart rider had already paid them a visit. It was not a time to stand on ceremony.

Their approach had attracted the attention of those still left alive, and it was no problem for Anita to gather them together to explain who the strangers were and what they wanted. There was no shortage of information. What emerged was that the mystery rider’s visit to Station Browns ville followed the same pattern as the other event: ride in, speak of arcane things in a strange pattern, and when he didn’t get the reaction he wanted, he started firing—except that he refused this time to fire on any women, believing them to be innocents. As employees of the gaudy house, they weren’t allowed to carry blasters. A pity, as his leaving them alone would have given them a clear shot at him, and maybe avoided this destruction…and the destruction where they had come from, as it seemed that this attack had occurred before the one they had stumbled on.

The only other thing of note was that there was no sign of the napalmlike substance in this ville. Had he considered this ville too small to make that necessary, or was he limited by numbers as to how often he could use it? That question would only really be answered if they found the next ville had also been attacked.

There was little they could do to help here. The women had the situation as under control as was possible, and there was little medical help needed. The stark truth was that those who would buy the farm had already done so by this time.

There was little else they could do but leave, with the words of the gaudies ringing in their ears—pleas to wreak revenge.

It was when they were out on the empty expanse of desert once more that Krysty started to get that sense of being watched.

IT WAS WITH A SINKING HEART that they made the slow trek across the wastes to their next destination. The ville had been wiped out. No survivors.

But at least one important thing was evident at their last stop: this ville had been attacked in the time between the other two attacks, which meant that the rider wasn’t working his way around an arc, but was more likely to be at some point equidistant to all three villes.

Two down, one to go. They set off with a little more information, but not enough to reach any real conclusions. After a two-day drive across the desert and dustbowl, they found themselves with a ville that had been the first to be visited by the rider. Those that had been chilled had been disposed of. The infrastructure had been restored as much as was possible, and there had been no orange chem here. Again, the people talked of the rider’s strange language and undreamed-of ordnance. Their descriptions were sketchy, as had been those of the other villes, but they were enough to tell J.B. that the man had been using a limited range of weaponry so far. It didn’t mean he didn’t have a wider range available, but it did say much about his thought process.

They left the final ville on their arc with a little more information than when they had started, but not as much as Ryan would have wished.

“Not much good,” Jak commented tersely.

“On the contrary, dear boy, I would say that we have something that John Barrymore could work with,” Doc commented.

J.B. grimaced. “Okay, so if he starts from one point and attacks them, but not in any order of progression, then if we drew a line from the villes, we might get a central point, but only if the four villes form enough of an angle from which—”

“Yeah, okay, I get it—it won’t be accurate. But it would give us an area to start looking,” Ryan pointed out, “and that’s better than where we are now.”

“Mebbe,” J.B. breathed, “but you figured how big that area could be?”

Ryan sighed. “It’s about all we got right now.”

Jak exchanged a look with Krysty. “Ryan, head right direction, figure scum look for us. Knows where are,” the albino said.

“You sure of that?” Ryan questioned, dividing his gaze between them.

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure of that,” Krysty said with a shiver, her hair flicking around her shoulders nervously. “I don’t know where he’s hiding out there, with no cover, but he’s been watching us. All the while. I can feel it.”

Ryan nodded, almost to himself. “Okay. Let him bring it on, then. We plot a rough course, and we start out first thing. If that’s how it’s gonna be, let’s draw the bastard out.”