James Axler – Road Wars

Now he couldn’t decide whether he was feeling too hot or too cold.

And all the Trader could say was that he was fucking surprised that the posse from the nameless shit-hole of a ville hadn’t given up the chase after the brutal murder of one of their number. Well over half of the day had gone, and if anything, the sound of the tracking hounds was closer.

They had gone up another steep track, after the river crossing. Despite the patches of sunshine between the trees, Abe’s clothes didn’t seem to have dried properly and still felt damp and clammy.

The longer the day wore on and the nearer the vigilantes came to them, the worse Trader’s temper became.

Now he was gnawing at one of their last strips of jerky, the Armalite lying across his lap. Abe was stretched out on the dry turf, massaging his belly, trying to get some relief from the raking claws that were working his guts.

“How long to dark, Trader?”

“Your eyes failed, Abe?”

“No. But the sun’s gone behind some cloud. I figure it must be” he thought about it, “I figure that dusk’ll be in about another three hours.”

Trader didn’t even reply.

“We got any water left?” Abe asked.

“Yeah. But you don’t get any. Looks like we’ll be going down again after we top this ridge. Could be more streams or rivers down yonder. Drink then.”

It was a river. A big river.

ALL OF THE PINE TREES vanished once they were over the far side of the hill, replaced by shrunken bushes and outcrops of bare, ferrous rock.

The sides of the gorge were the steepest that they’d come across since fleeing the squalid settlement. The path almost disappeared, with tumbled boulders and shale blocking it in several places.

There were blotches of sickly green lichen dappling the stones and the long-dead trunks of trees, blighted about a century earlier. Abe wished that they’d had rad counters like Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix carried, so that they could watch out that they didn’t get trapped in any potential hot spots.

“You sure we can get out of here, Trader?”

“Why?”

“Steep.”

“And?”

“River looks much wider.”

“So what?”

Abe was concentrating on trying to hear what Trader was saying, so he slipped and nearly went cascading down to the bottom of the path.

“So, I don’t see any sign of a trail going up the other side of the canyon.”

“Bound to be a way out.”

“Hut of some sort down there.” Abe pointed to the roof of a small building that had just come into view, a little way above the cresting white water. On the ground alongside the cabin was a large rubberized, inflatable raft.

“Take that boat and run the rapids,” Trader said, having to raise his voice to a full shout now that they were close to the noise of the river.

“Great,” Abe muttered. Swimming had never been one of his favorite activities, and the thought of going down the dark-shadowed gorge wasn’t that appealing.

It also worried him, as it had earlier, that they wouldn’t hear above the rumbling of the frothing water the dogs, or the men, trailing them. They could be coldcocked and not even know itnot until they found themselves on their backs, looking up at the sky through fading eyes.

AS THEY EMERGED from the bottom of the path, about fifty yards from the hut, Abe wondered if it had started to rain. But he realized that there was just a fine drizzle, spraying from the river as it pounded over the boulders.

Trader paused a moment, glancing behind them at the flank of the ravine, checking for any sign of pursuit. “Seems good to me,” he said. “Let’s go boating, Ches. I mean, Abe.”

“Smoke from the chimney of the hut.”

“Yeah. I see it. Get your blaster out. We’ll try words first. Then bullets if we need them.”

Abe eased the Colt Python in its holster, sighing at the prospect of more chilling. During the time that he’d traveled with Ryan and the others, there’d been plenty of death. But it had somehow seemed unavoidable.