Hellbenders

Doc conceded the point with an inclination of his head, and the parry responded to Lonnie’s gesture to move on down by beginning their descent.

As they stumbled down the rocky road, Dean, Doc and Jak were all thinking along similar lines. The remaining blacktop surface under their feet was crumbling as they touched it. Given that wags very rarely ventured around this side of the mountain, and it was only the Hellbenders themselves who used to it to access their base in the redoubt, the road was extremely unsafe. It was perfect for keeping out strangers. No one even having the misfortune to stumble around the dead side of the mountain would have the seeming idiocy to take a crumbling road to nowhere, but it didn’t bode well for when the assault parties left the redoubt to mount the attack on the trade convoys in a few short days.

Stray rocks and stones gave way under them, gravel and dirt making the surface unsteady. The road down the mountain was only just wide enough for most wags, being about twelve feet from the sheer rock wall on one side to the sheer drop on the other. They had kept close to the wall as the uneven surface tended to pitch and yawl underfoot, causing them to stumble.

They descended with Lonnie and Mik in the lead, as surefooted as it was possible to get on this surface, with Jak and Doc following, sandwiching Tilly between them. Danny, who traveled as nervously as his mannerisms would suggest, hung back and took the descent with a nervous care. Dean also hung back, fascinated by the teenager.

“You okay there?” Dean asked as Danny stumbled on yet another decaying stretch of road and pitched forward onto his knees. Dean took him under the arm and lifted, assisting him back to his feet.

“Yeah, guess so,” Danny mumbled. “This ain’t my idea of fun, though.”

“So why did you volunteer for it?” Dean asked.

Danny shrugged, pushing his spectacles back onto his nose. “Don’t know, really. I’m not cut out for all this, I should have stayed back at base, fiddling with the old tech and trying to make some sense of it.”

“You use the comps?” Dean said, wondering if he had found someone from the Hellbenders whose interest would mirror his own.

“I try,” Danny replied with a shrug. “When I was a little kid, I lived in Charity. My dad was on sec there, and where Baron Al had some of the old stuff, then I’d get to mess around on it. I suppose it was all the pretty lights when I was small,” he added in a sardonic tone, with a grin that Dean echoed.

“You mean to say that the baron actually had some of the old comps up and working?”

Danny waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I wouldn’t exactly say that. See, as much as I can remember it—and I’ve been here for what seems like years—part of Charity is built on what used to be some kind of place where they made stuff like that. So they had generators of their own, and lots of the old stuff in different stages, like different parts of the process of putting it together, y’know? Sometimes Baron Al’d fuel up the generator and run some of them, try to make sense of them. There were still papers in all the old offices that probably tell you how it all works, but the dumb fuck couldn’t read at all and didn’t trust anyone else.”

“So how come you got to use them?” Dean asked, wondering what, then, had caused Danny and his father to leave Charity.

“Wasn’t supposed to, but my dad had to look after me and work for the baron on sec. He was a really good sec man at one time, and then when my mom died there was no one else to look after me, so he got detailed on all the jobs where he didn’t have to go so far. Then he could take me with him. It wasn’t s’posed to be that way, and Baron Al didn’t know shit about it, but Joe was chief sec then, and he and my dad got on. It was harder once he got banished, and Dad had to sneak me in.

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