Thunder Road. James Axler

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