James Axler - Hell Road Warriors

Toulalan came over, smiling amiably. Six followed him, and with obvious effort managed an attitude short of open hostility. Toulalan gestured at the spread. “Breakfast agrees with you?”

“Yeah.” Ryan nodded. “Thanks again.”

“May I?”

Jak moved over and Toulalan took a seat. Six stood while Toulalan unfolded a map. Ryan raised an eyebrow at it. He had seen a fair chunk of what remained of Deathlands’ West Coast. It didn’t look anything like the map in front of him anymore. “That’s an old map.”

“The thing to notice is this.” Toulalan ran his finger along a pair of red intersecting lines stretching from east to west. “The convoy follows the Trans-Canada Highway.”

Ryan looked at the route dubiously. “It’s still up?”

“I will admit time hasn’t been kind to it. Many sections are out. But unlike much of your Deathlands, the basic path is still there. We have extensive maps of all the provinces. Each time we’ve found an impassible stretch we have found smaller routes around it, and once more returned to the path. River traders tell us vast sections in the great central plains are whole. There we will make good time.”

“River traders.” Ryan poured more Diefenbunker syrup on his pancakes. “Why aren’t they using it?”

“It is rumored there are dangers, plus fuel is scarce. A cross-continental trip?” Toulalan made a noise. “Few have the resources to attempt it. Besides, since time immemorial rivers have been the roads of Canada.”

“But you have a map of the Diefenbunkers. Assuming they haven’t been cracked, you got resupply depots in every province with all the fuel, food and supplies you can carry.”

Toulalan nodded.

“You give away too much!” Six snarled.

Toulalan gave Ryan a poker player’s smile. “I’m not telling our guests anything they haven’t already surmised.”

Six could no longer contain himself. “You’ll give them a place among us?”

Toulalan sighed. “Vincent, my friend, you know I respect you. But you were here yesterday, no? Around sunset? During the battle?”

Six looked away. “I’ll admit they were helpful.”

Mildred mumbled into a mouthful of pancake and sausage. “Saved your Canadian bacon is what we did.”

Six flinched.

Jak’s fork froze midbite, and he snapped his head around. His eyes narrowed as he looked toward the thickets between the hills just a few hundred yards to the west. Ryan set down his mimosa and scooped up the Scout longblaster. He had seen that look on Jak’s face before. “Something coming?”

The albino teen stepped away from the table and put hand to the ground. He crouched that way for long moments. “Herd.”

“Oh?” Six frowned at the hills. “It’s early for the caribou. They usually run south before the hard freeze, and that’s weeks away.” The big man’s stainless-steel longblaster flashed like a drum major’s baton as he twirled it through the rifleman’s spin to cock the weapon and pushed on the safety to lock it. “Perhaps they migrate earlier here in Ontario.”

Ryan, Jak and J.B. followed Six outside the perimeter. The Armorer began rapidly ejecting fléchette rounds out of his scattergun and swapping them for rifled slugs.

“Hunters!” Six called. “Go!”

A handful of Six’s sec men gulped the last of their coffee and grabbed their blasters. The convoy was bristling with Diefenbunker assault rifles. These men came forward with predark bolt-action hunting weapons of .30-caliber or larger.

Ryan checked the loads in his Scout. “You say it’s early for caribou?”

Six shrugged. The one-eyed man was starting to believe that everyone in the convoy’s shoulders, hands and eyebrows were attached to their vocal cords. “I’ve never been this far west, though I’ve heard traders say the St. Lawrence lowlands have sizable herds of wild mustangs. Either way, meat is meat, no?”

Doc strode up to the hunting party. “A morning shoot?”

Ryan frowned at the tangled, impenetrable acres of scrub thorn between the hills. The sound was getting louder. “Thick cover for a migrating herd.”

Six’s brow furrowed. He was thinking the same thing. The thicket rippled with the passage of large animals and the sound of brush snapping sounded like the distant gunshots of an army starting a skirmish. Six pushed off his longblaster’s safety. “In moments we’ll know.”

It didn’t take moments. It took a heartbeat. The edge of the thicket exploded as the herd burst forth. They weren’t caribou or wild mustangs. They were hogs. Boars, bigger than Ryan had ever seen. They came out of the thicket between the hills in a wedge. He made the lead boar to be over nine feet long and four feet tall at the shoulder.

Its companions weren’t much smaller.

“Good heavens,” Doc opined.

Ryan didn’t like what he was seeing. Wild boars were solitary animals. When you saw them in groups, it was usually a sounder consisting of a few sows and their offspring. Over half of the herd were adult males the size of wags. There were no piglets in sight. The fifty-strong herd arrowed straight for the convoy in a rumbling wave. Ryan dropped to a knee and shouldered the Scout. It was time to see what the new weapon could do.

Ryan wound his arm through the Scout’s sling and dropped his elbow to his knee to form a solid firing platform. The scope was mounted well forward, and he could see the entire oncoming herd around it. At the same time the crosshairs of the heavy reticule were crystal clear as Ryan held them low beneath the gargantuan lead boar’s shoulder. His finger slowly began putting pressure on the trigger as he watched the herd rumble into range.

Six watched Ryan with a dubious air. “Long range for a carbine. I would—”

The Scout bucked against Ryan’s shoulder. It was a light rifle firing a high-power bullet. The muzzle-flash and report were impressive; the recoil was surprisingly mild. The huge hog’s snout dug into the turf, and the momentum of its half-ton frame nearly made it summersault.

“Mon Dieu!” Six exclaimed.

The herd continued forward undeterred.

Ryan flicked the bolt on the Scout and trained the scope on his next target. The longblaster kicked and a supersize sow spun out as Ryan’s bullet shattered its skull.

“Come here!” Six roared. “Come to papa!” Six’s .45-70 sounded like a cannon going off. A boar dropped like it had been poleaxed. Longblasters began cracking and popping along the informal firing line. The shooters made hog calls and called out porcine insults in English and French as they shot. A slow smile crept across Ryan’s face as he took his fifth pig. J.B. had been right. The Scout was like lightning. It qualified for the highest praise the Armorer could give a weapon. The Scout was as accurate as the man firing it.

Ryan was deadly accurate.

He took three more pigs with four more shots and quickly slapped in a fresh magazine. “They aren’t stopping.”

“No,” Six agreed. He had stopped his hog calling. The giant beasts didn’t seem to need much encouragement. Insults toward the oncoming pork and one another ceased among the sec men as they grimly fired as fast as they could work the actions of their longblasters. What was left of the herd was starting to get uncomfortably close. Members of the convoy came out and joined the firing line. Their assault rifles were too light for animals this big and only seemed to make them angry. Squealing screams rent the air as the wounded hogs bore down on the convoy in red-eyed, froth-spewing rage. At one hundred yards J.B.’s shotgun began slamming slugs. Jak carefully began pulling the trigger on .357 Colt Python in slow deliberate fire, and Mildred joined him. It was like some terrible shooting game where the prize was not to end up in a wild boar’s belly. The boars didn’t seem to care who won as long as they died going forward. Ryan’s skin crawled as he aimed, shot and shot again.