James Axler – Road Wars

J.B. knocked the engine out of gear, allowing the LAV-25 to roll forward under its own momentum, until he stopped it on the crown of the bend, a couple hundred yards from the edge of the frontier ville.

“Roadblock,” he staled.

Ryan, higher up, had already seen it and was back inside the turret again.

“Over, under, through or around?” he asked, quoting what was probably the best known of all the Trader’s favorite sayings.

J.B. laughed quietly. “By the look of it, we could probably do any one of three. Not so sure about managing to get under it, though.”

The blacktop ran north-south, ruler straight, with no side trails visible in either direction. The roadblock was composed mainly of terminally rusted automobiles and pickups, welded together to almost fill the main street. The gap in the middle was just about wide enough for a war wag to slide through.

“Two men with hunting rifles,” J.B. announced, peering through his magnifying scope. “Probably a few more around the place. Doesn’t look like a sec zone.”

“Another sign on the left, hand-painted. Can’t make it out with the sun across it.”

“Says that you pay a toll to Noah Huston for the way-leave of passing by.”

“How much jack?”

J.B. read the sign again. “Doesn’t say. Probably the old frontier toll. How much you got? Give it all to us. That’s the toll here.”

The diesel engine rumbled softly. Ryan looked at the country on either side of the road. It was fairly flat, but there could easily be a honeycomb of old irrigation ditches that would make it difficult driving, even for the powerful LAV.

“Through, I think,” he said.

“HOLD IT THERE!” Ryan could barely hear the shout, but the gesture was unmistakable.

The man was of average height and wore a fur vest and denim pants. He carried what looked to Ryan like a bolt-action Winchester Ranger. His colleague, whose face was hidden under the brim of a battered Stetson, held a Model 848 Mossberg rifle with a remodeled stock. He was leaning against the hood of a rusted flatbed truck.

“We’re coming through,” Ryan yelled.

In his earpiece he could hear J.B.’s calm voice confirming that he had the guy in the fur vest covered with the wag’s machine gun.

“Pay the toll and on you go, stranger.”

One of the many things that helped to keep you alive in Deathlands was being a good student of behavior. How a person stood, spoke and acted gave you some clue as to what might be going down.

The speaker wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence. He stood with his shoulders hunched, and his fingers drummed nervously on the stock of the Winchester. Twice in a handful of seconds he’d glanced behind him, toward the row of semiderelict houses and stores.

“He’s looking for company to arrive,” J.B. said.

Ryan held the SIG-Sauer in his right hand, just below the rim of the turret. There wasn’t any point in wasting time here.

“Noah Huston says” began the man by the roadblock.

But nobody ever got to hear just what it was that Noah Huston said.

Ryan brought up the automatic and fired at the shadowy figure in the Stetson. At a range of only twenty yards, it was a positive no-miss situation.

The bullet went within a quarter inch of where Ryan had aimed it, a finger’s width below the jaw, exploding the air passage and the gullet, powering through and destroying the fragile cervical vertebrae, exiting out of the back of the neck as a distorted and mangled chunk of hot lead. Eventually it buried itself over the door of what had once been, in the nineteenth century, the finest sporting house in Huston Wells.

The Mossberg clattered to the dirt and the Stetson flew off, becoming splattered with arterial blood as it landed behind the flatbed.

Ryan stared at the mane of blond hair that cascaded from under the hat, across the young woman’s startled face, vanishing as she fell dead at the back of the roadblock.

Almost simultaneously, the machine gun coughed into life. J.B. fired a triple-shot burst at the man in the fur vest, two of the bullets hitting him in the middle of the chest. The third one struck the barrel of the Winchester and spun howling toward the setting sun.