James Axler - Thunder Road

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.