Camino sheathed in chicken armor was on point, and the engineering LAV’s armor and machine gun protected the rear.
Cyrielle Toulalan approached the LAV. “Ryan!”
The one-eyed man nodded from the turret. “Yeah?”
“A word, please.”
Ryan hopped down. “Yeah?”
“You have driven a…” Cyrielle’s English wasn’t as good as her brother’s. “Big rig?”
“Yeah?”
“Mmm.” Cyrielle walked over to the semi and Ryan followed her. She pointed at a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield.
“You lost your driver,” Ryan surmised.
“Oui.” She nodded.
Ryan sighed. Krysty walked over. “What’s up, lover?”
“They need me to drive the semi.”
Krysty’s green eyes narrowed. “We need you in the war wag.”
“We’re part of this convoy now. Big wag like this takes know-how. I got it. Jak can drive the LAV and J.B. can fight it.”
Krysty didn’t blink. “I need you in the war wag. With me.”
“The convoy needs someone who can drive this rig.” Ryan gave Krysty an experimental smile. “And I need someone to ride shotgun with me.”
“I don’t have a shotgun.”
“We’ll find you something.”
Krysty sighed and slid her hand into Ryan’s. “Let’s take a look at her.”
Cyrielle clapped her hands.
Ryan examined his new ride. It was a Kenworth. It had been extensively modified with giant off-road tires and a new suspension. A hatch in the roof over the passenger seat opened onto a ring-mounted machine blaster. Ryan suspected it was a Diefenbunker special, and it was just about cherry, save for the slightly ominous bullet hole in the driver’s-side windshield patched with a piece of scrap metal. Krysty’s hands slid out of his and they climbed into the cab through opposite doors. There were some cracks in the plastic dash, and whatever ancient leather had once upholstered the cab had been replaced with deerskin. The driver’s seat had dried bloodstains on it. There was what looked like a functional hot plate, chem toilet and a bunk in the back.
Krysty ran a finger over the laced leather of her armrest. “Plush wag.”
It had been a while since Ryan had been behind the wheel of a major cargo wag. Toulalan walked up and waved. “You like?”
Ryan hurled a shrug back at the Quebecer. “It’s okay.”
Toulalan kissed his fingertips, popped his lips and walked away.
The biggest problem with wags in the Deathlands was the lack of batteries. That usually meant cartridge or crank ignition. Seriah walked up and pulled the crank handle from the rack above the bumper. She grinned and shoved the crank spoke through the hole in the grille.
Ryan leaned out the driver’s window. “Light it up!”
Seriah hurled her tiny frame against the crank handle and spun it in a huge circle. Ryan tapped the gas pedal lightly at the apogee of the crank. The turbine turned over, whined and trembled on the first attempt. Seriah jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “Très bien!”
Ryan pulled the horn chain and the Kenworth bellowed like a twentieth-century dinosaur into the postapocalyptic Canadian sky. The people of the convoy hit their horns, leaned out of their windows and clapped and whistled in response. “Ryan! Ryan! Ryan!” they called. Their enthusiasm was infectious. Krysty’s full lips twisted in a smile. “I’ll go tell J.B. he’s in command of the LAV.”
Chapter Six
“Hey, Mace! Lars is wormy, eh!”
Baron Mace Henning glowered out of his hammock at his sec man. “Baron to you, Shorty.”
Shorty lived up to his name. He made up for it with an almost artistic appreciation of violence. They had been partners as sec men until Mace had led a coup and made himself baron. Shorty had backed him. Sometimes when Shorty got excited he forgot protocol and flashed back to the old days. “Uh, sorry, Baron. Lars is like, definitely ’fected. Too bad, he’d just earned his loonie.”
Henning rolled out of his sleeping sling and walked over to the campfire. Shorty heeled after him like a faithful dog.
Mace Henning was a huge, sagging bull of man. His short curly red hair and beard were shot through with gray. Green eyes peered out of a nearly permanent squint. Even in his youth no one had ever accused him of being handsome. A badly set broken nose and the dent in the ride side of his face from a fractured cheekbone hadn’t helped matters. Scar tissue beneath his left eyebrow raised it up a tad higher than his right. It made it look like anyone or anything he laid his gaze upon was being weighed, measured and found wanting.
He or she usually was.
He had sixty-eight armed men in the saddle. He’d had seventy-five but the tide of yesterday’s battle had turned into a costly and unpleasant surprise. His best men greeted him as they rolled up hammocks, wolfed their breakfast of jerky and pine tea or prepped their bikes, wags or weapons. A sizable crowd of his new-hire coldhearts was gathered in a circle beyond the campfire, morning maple-liquor ration in hand and watching the entertainment.
The circle parted for the baron. Mace turned his gaze on Lars. The buckskin-clad sec man was red-eyed and lunging at the chain tethering him to a motorcycle lying on its side. He’d shown worm-sign just before dark the night before. Sometimes other maladies could be mistaken for early worm symptom, so they had chained him and waited while he begged and pleaded and screamed he’d just eaten something bad.
Lars was definitely infected. His muscles rippled with Herculean effort and infestation. The man’s fingers curled into claws as he lunged again. The motorcycle weighed around five hundred pounds. Each lunge dragged it a few inches along. The baron stood unconcernedly a bare meter out of range of the filthy clawing hands. In his hand Mace carried his badge of office and the source of his nickname. It was a blackthorn club about two feet long. The root ball at the end was as big around as a large apple, and he had drilled out its center and “hot-shotted” it by pouring in molten lead to give it killing end-weight.
“Hey, Baron?” Shorty asked.
Mace heaved a sigh. Shorty combined the traits of not being particularly bright but also being something of a ponderer. Mace didn’t take his eyes off Lars and his carnivorous, worm-fested carryings-on. “What?”
“What do you think goes through a man’s mind? I mean, you know, like, when the worms get to his brain and stuff?”
Some of the sec men muttered in amusement. Shorty’s ponderings didn’t exactly soar up into rarified intellectual heights. Mace moved with the sudden, stunning speed most of his opponents never expected. He whipped his club up and around like a tennis serve and sank it through Lars’s skull. The scout dropped to his knees and fell face-first into the dirt. The sec men gaped. The baron shrugged carelessly as he pulled his bludgeon free of Lars’s brainpan. “Probably not much more than that.”
The men roared.
The baron reached down and snapped a leather thong from around his former scout’s neck. An old, predark, Canadian dollar coin—known as a loonie for the waterfowl on one side—hung from it. Mace closed his fist around the coin. Shorty was right. It was too bad, but Lars wasn’t from around here, and it looked like he hadn’t heeded the warnings. And even if you took every precaution, sometimes the worms found a way. Mace jerked his head at the corpse. Filth was already squirming into activity in the shattered skull. “Butch, Ledge.”
Butch and Ledge were twins. The two lanky, ponytailed young