At point-blank range, Stephen fired again and again. “Too damn bad. Let’s chill them all!”
The driver’s-side door rattled as a mutie jumped partially into the cab, clawing at Ryan with three-fingered hands. Slamming an elbow into the creature’s face, the one-eyed warrior grabbed the SIG-Sauer in a cross draw, shoved the muzzle into the mutie’s mouth and triggered a round. With only half a head, the creature dropped from sight.
In the passenger’s-side mirror, Ryan saw a mutie leap from the branches of a tree to land on top of the passenger van. Krysty twisted the steering wheel, trying to dislodge the thing as it scuttled for the window. Suddenly, a thunderous report filled the wag with bright light, and the mutie was blown off the roof to land sprawling on the highway. Doc neatly rolled over the thrashing creature, ending its pain with a sickening crunch.
Driving with one hand, Krysty aimed the shotgun and fired out the window at the hooting attackers.
Then, just as quickly as the attack started, it was over, the highway ahead of Ryan clear of any obstruction. Putting the pedal to the floor, he gunned the engine and watched the temperature gauge steadily climbing from the mechanical exertion.
Moments later, Krysty burst out of the hooting crowd, then Doc and finally Jak, Mildred and Dean in the second truck. Dean shouted in victory as the wag escaped the forest muties and reached clear roadway. Then his elation dimmed as he saw the creatures running after the speeding wags, waving their arms and hooting furiously. Most of the creatures soon dropped back, but several actually started to gain on the last truck. The sleek muties pumping their arms and legs were running fast as dogs, maybe faster. Tense seconds passed for the boy as he prepared to drop a gasoline bomb in their wake before the truck finally pulled away from the tiring creatures.
“You okay?” Jak shouted out the window.
“Fine!” Dean yelled against the wind. “Keep going!”
“No prob!”
Several minutes passed with the drivers and gunners reloading their blasters and watching for treachery in the trees.
“Nice work,” Stephen complimented, closing the bolt on his Remington .30-06 hunting rifle.
“That was too easy,” Ryan muttered, shifting gears as the road surface changed from concrete to cracked pavement “And I don’t like the fact they hit us where the road was poor and we had to drive slow.”
“Better here than at the rest stops.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rest stops are where I usually rest the engines and gather wood for the campfires. The greenies often wait for travelers there. There are a dozen rest stops along this route, so I use different ones each time to confuse them.”
Avoiding a large clump of weeds growing in the middle of the roadway, Ryan upped his estimation of the fat man another notch for the second time in as many days. So he wasn’t a total fool. “You always change locations each trip?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Then we’ll use the exact same spots as the last trip,” Ryan decided, holding his pistol between his thighs to slide out the used ammo clip and insert a fresh one. “That should catch them off guard completely.”
“If the forest muties are smart enough. I’ve seen them standing for hours alongside a crashed wag waiting for more norms to come crawling out when you could see clearly through the windows it was empty.”
Holstering his blaster, Ryan recalled Mildred once speaking about how the visible spectrum was different for cats, dogs and norms, so it was probably the same for the rad-blasted muties, stickies, swampies, crawlers, the whole horrid mess. However, that was much too complex to explain.
“Triple stupe,” the one-eyed man agreed, gunning the engine to increase their speed as the laboring truck rolled over a hill. “We’ll have to stay sharp.”
“Then there are the coldhearts,” Stephen grumbled, stroking his blaster as if it were a lucky charm. “They attack anywhere, anytime.”
“We’ll be ready for them, too,” Ryan stated coldly, barely controlling his anger and wondering what else the fat man hadn’t told them about this trip to Front Royal.
Chapter Six