Hell Road Warriors. James Axler

folded down on the back, the dozer blade and the winch.” J.B. sighed. “How many times could we have used one of those when we were with Trader?”

       More times than Ryan could count. In the Deathlands a vehicle like that was worth its weight in anything, including human life. Ryan noticed it wasn’t attracting much in the way of fire despite the fact a man in the top hatch was firing a machine blaster like the one Ryan stood behind. The one-eyed man scanned the enemy ringing the convoy. Most of them had off-road bikes, but they had laid their bikes down and were firing prone from behind rocks and folds in the earth. Some of the pits were clearly man-made. They had chosen their ambush site well. They had probably blown the LAV before the convoy knew what was happening. The convoy had been surrounded in plain sight of the sanctuary of the Diefenbunker and cut off. Ryan picked out some 4x4 pickup wags pulled far back from the fight. The attackers were numerous, heavily armed and equipped for cross-country speed. Most had painted their faces with skulls, abstract designs or swathes of color. It wasn’t camouflage. It was war paint and designed to terrorize.

       They were coldhearts.

       J.B. pointed. “Watch there.”

       A coldheart rose up with broad length of pipe over his shoulder. A man behind him touched a flame to the fuse in the back and ducked. A rocket hissed out of the pipe and shot out of the tube. The object arced and twisted in flight and exploded into the ground in a blast of orange fire and gray smoke a dozen yards from one of the caravan’s flatbeds.

       J.B. snorted derisively. “Home made. Black powder. Not even spin stabilized. Real close you could take out a wag, even a big one, but nothing like what we’re sitting in. They still got a tank-killer we haven’t seen.”

       The driver’s hatch clanged open. Jak’s head popped up. His eyes were the same color as the sinking sun as he surveyed the scene. “Pickin’ sides?”

       Ryan was about the closest thing to a decent human being that could survive in the Deathlands. He could see there were women in the convoy, and the attackers looked like they were doing what they liked to do best. Nightcreeping and ambushing.

       “Not our fight, and they got something down there that can kill us all.” Ryan shook his head wearily. It was a scene he had seen far too many times in his life. He was reluctant to walk away, but his friends came first. “We’re out of here and— Fireblast!”

       Ryan’s hand crushed the top of J.B.’s fedora as he shoved him back into the turret. Three men had crept up out of a fold in the terrain and a rocket hissed straight at the LAV. Jak slammed the driver’s hatch shut. Ryan dropped down the commander’s hatch as a thunderclap backhanded the LAV. Mildred yipped as the armored war wag rocked violently on its chassis. The brimstone stench of black powder filled the air from the open hatches. The coldhearts howled with bloodlust outside. “Die! Die! Die!”

       “Jak,” Ryan snarled, “we just picked sides!”

       Jak answered by stomping on the gas. The LAV lurched forward. Bullets whanged and spalled off the hull. Ryan rose out of the hatch and leaned into the light machine gun’s stock. He rattled off a 5-round burst into a shrieking, painted face. Dust flew from the chest of a second coldheart as Ryan hammered him down. The last man dropped his rocket tube and turned to run screaming. He was still screaming as he went down beneath the LAV’s wheels.

       Ryan knew he was a bullet magnet standing in the turret, but buttoned up it was very hard to see the enemy coming. “Jak, take us about a thousand yards out! Western side. Get us in range of those pickups!” Jak put a low hill between the LAV and the battle and began sneaking west.

       “J.B.?”

       The Armorer sat in the gunner’s chair. He’d pushed his fedora firmly on his head and tapped his finger against a small comp screen. “Fire control comp is locked, like inside. Going to have to shoot manual. Jak, get me within three hundred yards!”

       The LAV rolled across the terrain at speed. Jak suddenly drove up a low gradient and parked on the crest of a low hill looking down on the battle. It would be a matter of seconds before they were spotted.

       Ryan called down into the cabin. “Krysty, Mildred, Doc! Out, and keep an eye on our six!”

       The back door lowered and they spilled out, blasters at the ready.

       The turret whined and the seven-foot, fluted cannon barrel dipped as J.B. picked a target. Sitting in the gunner’s seat and looking through the manual aiming optical gradients, he was calculating more than aiming.

       The muzzle of the cannon thudded and spit smoke.

       Five coldhearts surrounding a pickup three hundred yards distant just about crapped their homespun coveralls as the high-explosive round detonated uncomfortably close. “Ten wide! Thirty short!” Ryan called. The turret turned a hairbreadth. The barrel tilted up an even tinier increment. The cannon spit. The coldheart pickup’s hood flew up into the air and the windshield shattered. The man behind the wheel disappeared in a haze of blood and smoke.

       Coldhearts scattered.

       Ryan kept his eye on the big picture as J.B. traversed for targets of opportunity. A coldheart had leaped up from his firing position and was jumping onto his bike. The 25 mm blaster thumped and man and motorcycle burst apart in a cloud of flesh and metal. Ryan nodded as he continued to scan the surroundings. “Nice shot, J.B.”

       A pleased noise drifted up from inside the turret.

       “J.B.!” Jak pointed excitedly at another pickup. Ryan whipped up his Navy longeye for a moment and smiled. The back of the wag contained a pallet of the homemade rockets.

       “Oh yeah!” J.B. enthused.

       Ryan thought he might be enjoying this a little too much. “I make it four hundred yards, J.B.!”

       “Right!” The turret turned. The muzzle of the cannon elevated a few inches then. The blaster thudded and earth flew up in a geyser.

       “Dead on but thirty short!” Ryan called.

       The men around the wag didn’t need a second shot. They knew what they were carrying and they ran for their lives. The cannon hammered again and more earth flew.

       “Dead on! Ten short!”

       The smoking muzzle of the cannon rose almost imperceptibly and thudded.

       The wag and its load blew sky-high. Jak whooped. The grass around it rippled and flattened out in a thirty-yard wave. A column of black smoke rose into the bloody sunset. The remaining pickups tore up turf in their haste to escape. Motorcycles fled the scene of the ambush and coalesced into a herd stampeding northward into the low hills. Ryan was interested to notice they took the time to take their dead with them. The pickups streaked after them.

       “Moving targets!” J.B. called up. “Hard to hit on manual!”

       “Hold fire,” Ryan ordered.

       Krysty looked up at Ryan in his perch. “We going down?”

       “No. Let them come to us. J.B., stay on station, keep the cannon pointed at anything that comes.”

       Ryan watched the convoy. They stayed in defensive formation. A lot of heads stayed turned their way, but the people took care of their dead and wounded and transferred loads from ruined vehicles. A Volkswagen Iltis broke away from the defensive circle and drove slowly toward Ryan’s band. A man stood in the back holding a white flag. Ryan filled his hand with his new Scout longblaster and clambered down from the turret. Jak hopped down after him. The muzzle of J.B.’s cannon watched them like the cold eye of death, making slight adjustments as the wag closed. The 4x4 stopped about twenty yards away. The driver was a gray-hair wrinklie in homespun, and he stayed behind the wheel. The man sitting shotgun and the man in back jumped out. The man in front was clearly in command, but Ryan kept his eye on the other one.

       He was black, half a head taller than Ryan and looked to be about half again as heavy, all of it muscle. His head was shaved, and he wore a sheepskin coat someone had tailored to his massive