James Axler - End Day

Fate had granted them that favor—thanks to the mile-a-minute prattle of a jolt-stoned gaudy-house slut.

“We don’t have enough gas and water left to follow the convoy for another day,” Ryan went on. “We have to make our move tonight. It’s been a hard and bloody road, but this is going to be Magus’s last sunset.”

“Justice finally delivered,” Doc Tanner intoned. “Without mercy or restraint, swords buried to the hilt.”

Even though Doc was the only one who carried a sword—a rapier, actually, which lay concealed inside his silver-handled, ebony walking stick—there were grim-faced nods of agreement all around. After so many years of wandering the hellscape together, the nineteenth-century time traveler’s archaic metaphors rolled off the companions like water off a duck’s back.

Gathering up their longblasters and backpacks, they remounted the dirt bikes they’d acquired from the mountainside ville some eight thousand feet above the desert plain. Krysty took a seat behind Ryan. J.B. and Mildred, and Doc and Ricky were riding double, too. Only Jak Lauren, the albino, was riding solo.

J.B. hawked and sent a gob of rust-colored spit flying over the handlebars and into the dirt. Then he thumbed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and screwed down his fedora. The Armorer was ready to roll.

So was Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Having settled in on the seat behind J.B., the African American freezie clapped a steadying hand on his shoulder, which raised a sizable puff of dust.

To Ryan it looked like orange smoke.

“Remember to stay clear of the road,” he said. “Spread out and keep the speed down. If they bother to look back, they’ll think we’re a dust devil. They won’t be able to hear our bike engines over their own racket. Jak, take point. Get as close as you can without showing your hand. When they stop to make camp, turn back at once and catch us up.”

“Yeah,” Jak said, kick-starting the dirt bike and revving the engine. His shoulder-length white hair was streaked with orange, as were his front teeth and dead-pale face. With his ruby-red eyes and the .357 Magnum Colt Python strapped on his hip, he looked like a nightmare clown.

Bristling with their own armament, kerchiefs pulled up over their noses and mouths, Ryan and the others followed Jak down the steep, rocky trail to the valley floor. Without another word the albino zoomed off after the convoy, white hair flying behind him as he jumped the ruts in the crude road.

Ryan waved for his companions to fan out, and they began to advance in a thin skirmish line on either side of the track. Krysty’s arms wrapped around his waist as he zigzagged around sagebrush and cactus, avoiding exposed rocks and navigating flash-flood gullies. Because he was moving so slowly over the soft, loose terrain, he had to keep planting his boot soles to make the bike stay upright. It was hard, sweaty work but necessary: for them to have the best chance of success, they had to catch this enemy by surprise.

As he plowed forward, fighting the drag of the sand, images of what he’d seen high on the mountainside kept cycling through his mind. Try as he might, he couldn’t make them stop.

In Deathlands, violent acts always had a familiar form and shape, like something copied over and over: deeds of murder and mayhem committed out of greed, hunger, lust, revenge and sheer stupidity. Though the details, the circumstances and victims differed from one instance to another, they were similar in scale and scope.

What had happened at the mountain ville was different.

If the place had ever had a name, there was no one left alive to reveal it. What had been done there made the hellscape’s standard inbred chillers, coldheart robbers and insane barons seem like dimmies playing in a very small sandbox.

This wasn’t like the legendary massacre at Virtue Lake, where it was said even the flies on the dog shit were dead. Despite the campfire tales that painted Trader and his cohorts, Ryan Cawdor included, as senseless, murdering monsters, Virtue Lake had no perpetrators, only victims; it was the result of an unfortunate coalescence of events. A bad hand of cards.

The luck of the draw had nothing to do with what had happened high on the mountain. Beyond excessive, as pointless as a cataclysmic act of nature, it bore the unmistakable signature of its creator. The companions had not only viewed this grandiose handiwork before, they had almost been made part of it more than once. There was just one such artist in all the hellscape—an artist who mimicked a wrathful, mindless god.

Magus.

Ryan coasted the bike down the side of a shallow gully, then powered over the soft sand of the wash, building speed to climb the opposite bank. Krysty’s arms tightened around his waist as the bike went momentarily airborne, crow-hopping over the lip.

The suffering of the innocent and the weak in Deathlands was a given, as were the angry forces of nature unleashed by the apocalypse more than a century before. Drought, pestilence, fire, earthquake, eruption, storm, flood, famine were things the companions were powerless in the face of. But the cyclone that was Magus, that cut a path of destruction and horror across the Deathlands, could be halted with bullet and blade, and for the sake of their own continued survival, had to be stopped.

They had fought Steel Eyes before, never losing but never completely winning, either. The monster always seemed to find a way to slip from their grasp at the last second, leaving a stalemate and the threat of doom still hanging over their heads. What they were about to do this night, they were doing for themselves. Avenging the slaughter of the helpless, and the misery left in its wake, was the icing on the cake.

Despite the kerchief covering his lower face, grit crunched between Ryan’s back molars. He would have spit it out, but he was already losing too much moisture. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face, down his spine and rib cage. The bike wasn’t moving fast enough to cool him down. Riding in slow motion, with the taste of mud in his mouth, time dragged on and the exertion was constant. The convoy’s dust cloud was too far away to see; besides, he had to focus on what was directly in front of him. Strain built up in his arms and lower back, even in his fingers, as they gripped the handlebars and feathered throttle and brakes.

Gradually, the eastern hills grew larger until they towered above. The chain of peaks was about four hundred feet high, with saddles between the rounded summits. They were glowing an even warmer shade of red as the sun began to set. When Ryan glanced down at the fuel gauge, the needle was bouncing on empty. If he was running on fumes, they were all running on fumes.

A dirt bike appeared out of the heat waves in the near distance, coming toward them at a leisurely pace, Ryan signaled for the others to stop and shut down their bikes at once. By the time the albino rode up, they had dismounted and were stretching out sore muscles.

“Well?” Ryan said as Jak dumped his bike onto the sand.

“Stopped base of hill, mile ahead. Circled wags, make camp.”

“We’ll hide the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to take control of the high ground above them. Me and Ricky will circle around behind the hill and come down over the crest. When we attack, we attack from all sides at once. Everyone has to be in position before we lose the light. We have to be able to see these bastards. We can’t have them coming at us out of the dark. If there’s no wind, belly crawl in, close enough to pitch the grens into the middle of the camp. If there’s any breeze, come at them from downwind so the enforcers don’t sniff us out.”

“If we’re that spread out, how will we know when to attack?” Mildred asked.