James Axler – Road Wars

The two men from the old movie theater were both shooting, bullets sparking off the armasteel. The wounded woman was screaming at the top of her voice. Someone fired a shotgun from an upstairs window, but the aim was poor, though Ryan heard the hiss above his head of the pellets slicing through the dusk.

And the M-72 had been fired.

At least five of the 9 mm rounds struck Noah Hustonone through the left elbow, another in the groin, a third and fourth in the chest, toward the left side. A fifth round had ripped away a chunk of bone the size of an ax blade from the right side of his skull, taking the ear with it.

A dying spasm fired the bazooka. The 66 mm rocket roared diagonally across the street, missing the front of the LAV by twenty feet, hitting the front of an ancient funeral home.

There was a devastating explosion, and a sheet of flame with boiling coils of red and gold leaped skyward. Smoke billowed out across the main street of the ville. J.B. pushed the wag up through the gears, accelerating away.

Ryan looked down at the dying man as they thundered by the alley, blinking at the brightness of the setting sun.

“I can see hostiles coming after us, Ryan!”

“They’re too far away to bother us.”

“They look close.”

Ryan was staring back at Huston Wells. It looked as if the rocket had been a flamer, packed with hi-ex and napalm, as half the ville seemed to be burning. There were two diminutive figures, way behind.

“Don’t worry, J.B.,” he said. “Remember that objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are.”

Both men started to laugh.

Chapter Six

They covered another eighteen miles north of Huston Wells, through the gathering gloom, before Ryan decided it was safe to call a halt and camp for the night.

“Fire?” J.B. had taken off his glasses to polish them, cleaning away the road dirt.

“Mebbe not. If that was Noah Huston I chilled, he might have kin eager to come after us. These frontier folk like to try the vengeance trail.”

The Armorer nodded. “Could be. I’m sure I heard Jak mention that place once. Old man was supposed to put himself around a lot. Didn’t much matter whether it was woman, girl, man or boy.”

Ryan whistled softly between his teeth. “Sure. I remember now. Kid said that he peopled the ville with his own bastards. Slept with his own daughter and then, years after, bothered the child he’d fathered on her.”

“Sick.”

“Could be the safest for us to sleep inside the wag. Lock down the turret. Cold outside.” He looked up at the clear sky, where the first bright stars were breaking through the layer of dusty velvet.

“Shall I gas her up?”

Ryan shook his head, sighing as he tried to stretch some of the kinks out of his spine. “Leave that until the morning. Way I feel now, a quick meal and then some shut-eye sounds like the ace on the line.”

I.B. carefully put his glasses back on. “I’ll second that.”

THE LIGHT ARMORED VEHICLE wasn’t all that well equipped in the sleeping department. The LAV-25s had originally been designed for a working crew of three, so at least there was a little more space for the two men.

There were vent slits and ob slits around the sides of the wag, and Ryan went around and carefully closed all but twoone at the front and one at the top of the turret, leaving a narrow gap in both of them.

“Don’t fancy having one of the locals slipping a rattler in among us,” he said.

“Or a scorpion.”

“Or a black widow spider.”

“Or a poison toad.”

Ryan considered. “Or anything that might kill us.” He grinned at his old friend.

J.B. looked around the darkling land. They had parked the LAV near the top of a ridge, among a clump of feathery tamarisks. The dying northerly was carrying the faint scent of a wood fire, elusive, untraceable. Both men knew well enough that a smell like that could easily have insinuated itself for twenty miles or more across the uninterrupted desert.