James Axler – Road Wars

Ryan stooped to hug his son. “Look after things,” he said. “Back soon.”

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll all be fine,” Mildred added, standing on tiptoe to kiss Ryan on both cheeks. She smiled at J.B. “We said our goodbyes earlier.”

“So did we,” Krysty said. “Look after him, J.B., and bring him safe back to me.”

“Sure.” The slightly built figure nodded to everyone, the light sparkling and dancing off the polished lenses of his glasses.

Jak was leaning against one of the uprights at the front of the long veranda. Ryan turned, caught his eye and waved a casual hand, getting a nod of the white head in return. J.B. clenched his fist in a salute to the albino.

“Bring Trader back,” Jak called. “Heard a lot. Be double great meet him.”

The goodbyes were done.

Each man made sure that his own personal weapons were safely aboard the armored combat vehicle.

J.B. put his Uzi machine pistol on the metal floor of the vehicle, beside the driving control position. Carefully he placed his pride and joy alongside it. The Smith amp; Wesson Model 4000 12-gauge looked at a quick glance like a fairly ordinary 8-round scattergun with a pistol grip and a folding butt. But its ammunition was a country mile out of the ordinary. The blaster fired murderous Remington flechettes, each round containing twenty of the tiny, inch-long arrows.

Ryan had his panga with the hand-honed eighteen-inch blade sheathed at his belt. The pistol balancing it on the right hip was a SIG-Sauer P-226. Just under eight inches in length with a barrel that was just a bare thumb’s width below five inches, the weapon weighed in at a sturdy twenty-five and a half ounces. It held fifteen rounds of 9 mm ammunition, and had a pushbutton mag release. It’s built-in baffle silencer had seen better days.

The rifle went behind the codriver’s position, where the navigator would probably have once sat. There was a scratch on the walnut stock and Ryan spit on it, rubbing at the mark with the bed of his hand. The Steyr SSG-70 was a bolt-action blaster, with a mag of ten rounds of 7.62 ammo. It carried a beautiful Starlite night scope, as well as a laser image enhancer. Though Ryan lacked Mildred’s uncanny skill with firearms, he figured that he could still put a bullet through a man’s head with the Steyr, in good weather and visibility, at a range in excess of six hundred yards.

The LAV had once had a powerful 25 mm Bushmaster cannon, but there was no ammo for it, though they had a couple of belts of 7.62 mm rounds for the coaxial machine gun.

J.B. reemerged and gave a last wave to the remaining friends, getting a blown kiss from Mildred. Then be slipped back down through the hatch. Ryan remained on top, hanging on as the six-cylinder turbo-charged diesel engine kicked in, with a surging roar and a cloud of blue-gray smoke from the exhaust, generating nearly three hundred horsepower.

He’d put on the miniature earphones and throat mike that enabled him to communicate easily with J.B., inside or outside the cacophonous steel box.

“Ready, Ryan?”

“Ready as I’ll be.”

Krysty put her hands to her mouth and shouted at the top of her voice, the words barely reaching Ryan’s ears. “Gaia go with you, lover.”

Everyone else waved, Doc framed in the doorway, Jak on the porch. Mildred and Dean stood close together, turning away from a dust devil thrown up by a gust of wind. Krysty stood very still, her dazzling hair blowing out behind her, one hand high above her head.

The gears meshed noisily and the LAV began to move slowly across the sandy dirt, the eight wheels leaving a complex pattern behind them.

Ryan stood up on top of the slow-moving arma-wag, staring around him, capturing the scene in the camera of his memory. He held on to how Krysty looked, the last grin from his son, Doc flourishing the sword stick, the silver hilt catching the desert sun, Mildred punching the air, Jak, his face in shadow beneath the tumbling mane of snowy hair. His friends.