Thunder Road. James Axler

held out his hand. There was a smear of orange mud against the white skin of his palm, and showing around the smear was a red weal, blistering at the edges.

      “Get Mildred to look at that,” Ryan said.

      Jak grinned. “Gonna—not before show you, though. Some chem shit, stays burning a day after going off? Not seen before.”

      “Just got the story from her,” Ryan said softly, indicating the woman who had returned to joining Doc’s quest to deliver water. “Fill you all in later. This was our rider, and he’s one mad coldheart by the sound of it.”

      Jak gave the briefest of nods, turned and went across to the infirmary. Ryan took his place in clearing rubble and caught the expression on Mildred’s face as she examined Jak’s chem burn.

      There would be much to discuss later.

      BY THE TIME THE SUN had sunk and the cold night chilled their bones, the companions were exhausted. They went back to where they had tied up the wag and horses.

      Almost everyone else had stayed in the center of the ville. A few stragglers returned to their homes; most wanted the security of staying close together. The house where the wag was tethered remained empty. Whether the occupant had been chilled, they did not know.

      And it didn’t matter, except that it gave them the privacy they needed to talk about what had happened, and how it affected them. Ryan began by repeating what the woman had told him. They listened in silence. When he finished, and without comment, Mildred added her opinion of the burn she had seen on Jak’s hand. She told them about napalm, and how she had felt when they first entered the ville.

      When she finished, no one wanted to be the first to speak.

      “I suppose the real question here is, do we see ourselves as knights errant,” Doc said eventually. “I suspect that is what has been playing on your mind, Ryan.”

      “You’re kind of right, Doc,” the one-eyed man replied. “I feel like we need to go after this coldheart before he comes after us. And I feel like if we do that, we can mebbe get what we need from here…the things we came here for in the first place.”

      “There’s not much left in the way of provisions,” Krysty said quietly. “From here, the next ville is who knows where? We couldn’t get far.”

      J.B. took off his spectacles and polished them. It was a habit, an indication that he was thinking. Eventually, he perched them back on his nose and started to speak.

      “We got two separate problems here. First, we’ve got nothing in reserve, so we can’t move on unless we trade with these people in some way. Now, they got jackshit, too. The only way they’re going to give us what we need is if we can offer them something they want. Like revenge. Second problem is that this stupe is riding ’round at random, blasting the shit out of villes. Who knows where else he’s been? Who knows where he’ll stop? We stay in this area for any time, chances are we’re going to run into him. So, do we do it now, or later?”

      The Armorer paused, then looked steadily at Ryan. “Seems to me that the only way we solve one problem is by solving the other. That simple.”

      “Nothing to do with wanting to get your hands on his armory?” Ryan murmured.

      A grin split J.B.’s face. “There could be that, too.”

      IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS to help get the ville back into something approaching a functioning order. After the second day, the friends were offered food and water, so they could preserve their own. No mention was made of any condition. Rather, it was taken as payment for the work they were doing, which suited them fine at that point. The work was hard, and there was little demand beyond the immediate.

      Soon the time was drawing near when the friends would want to leave. Question was, would they leave with renewed supplies and a mission?

      The answer came on the fifth night. By now, the survivors had adopted a more communal style of living, pooling as they were their resources and their skills. It was while they were eating in the building that they’d adopted as their communal dining hall that Maggie, the woman Ryan had questioned on the first day, stood to address them all.

      “You know what we all been through,” she began with a halting tone, “and you know that these people—” here she indicated the friends “—have been a lot of help. But there’s something else. Something some of you know about ’cause we’ve discussed it among ourselves.

      “Ryan,” she continued, “you said you’d help us get the coldheart bastard who did this if we’d help you with what you wanted. You still stand by that?”

      “I do,” he said slowly. “We all do. Happens that this mystery rider coldheart of yours might be a threat to others, might be a threat to us. That’s no reason to go looking for trouble, but mebbe it’d be better to find it before it finds us. As well, you’ve been fair to us, feeding us while we’ve worked for you, so I figure you’ll be reasonable about what we ask.”

      “Depends,” the woman said, glancing at those around her.

      Ryan’s face twisted into a wry grin. “It isn’t much. You know that when we arrived here we were looking to trade, pick up supplies as we were running low. You pay us in goods to go after this coldheart, and we will. We’ll need more than we’ve got now if we’re going to make a real job of it.”

      “How do we know you won’t just go in the opposite direction fast as you can, forget about the rider as soon as you’re outta here?” The speaker was one of the older boys, emboldened by the silence of expectation that had descended over the hall.

      “You don’t,” Ryan said simply. “But you know what we’re like. You’ve seen us work. We didn’t have to do that. Weak as you are, we could have just taken what we wanted and already be long gone. So you think about that. Then you say yes or no to our terms. It’s your choice.”

      Chapter Three

      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