James Axler – Road Wars

Time was still on their side. Since leaving New Mexico, the friends had been nearly a month on the road, leaving them a good two weeks to reach Seattle and track down Abe and the Trader. Easy traveling.

Apart from one minor problem.

They’d almost run out of gas.

The main tanks had been run dry since the previous morning, and now the reserve gauge was trembling into the red. The Armorer’s guess had been about another fifty to eighty miles before the laboring engine finally coughed its way into stillness.

And that would leave them stranded in the wilderness, at least one hundred and fifty miles short of their destination.

Which didn’t make their planned rendezvous completely out of the question. Just difficult.

Now they’d found themselves in the little settlement of Mitchell Springs, which boasted that it had supplies of gas available for anyone who could raise the necessary amount of jack. Ryan and J.B. couldn’t. But the inhabitants of Mitchell Springs were also prepared to involve themselves in some serious trading with the two stone-eyed outlanders.

“Gas for chilled stickles,” the leader of the ville repeated. “Chilled stickies. Stickies.” He was in his early fifties, with a face covered in scabs that his fingers picked at constantly. He also had an occasional lapse into echolalia, repeating his own words again and again.

His name was Andrew Sheppard.

“How much?”

“Oh, boy, oh boy! How much? Eight stickies.” He looked up at the slate sky outside the general store. “I reckon twenty gallons for eight stickies.”

Ryan laughed. “Do it yourself. Save twenty gallons of gas. If it’s that easy.”

“Fifty gallons, gallons.”

Ryan was genuinely puzzled. Stickies were accepted to be one of the greatest and most dangerous scourges of all Deathlands. Over the years he had lost a number of good companions to their rending suckered hands.

They moved in loosely knit tribes, often coming out of nowhere to raid isolated villes or lonely homes. Their chief pleasure was to inflict pain on norms, particularly if it could be linked to bright fires or shattering explosions.

Fear of stickies was understandable.

But Mitchell Springs seemed well run, and most of the adult males carried blasters. So, why were they frightened of a handful of the muties?

Ryan sniffed. “Before we get down to the nuts and bolts of this deal,” he said, “how about you telling us why you don’t go and wipe out these stickies yourselves? Has to be something you aren’t telling us.”

“No, not really. Oh, boy. Not really.”

The crippled woman hawked up phlegm and spit out of the open door onto the frost-dusted earth beyond. “You ain’t dealing with triple stupes, Andy Sheppard, by God, you ain’t. If you don’t tell ’em, then I sure as shit-in-a-hole will.”

“Tell them, then, Maggie. Tell them, tell them. See what happens.”

“Tell us, Maggie,” J.B. urged. “Tell us why you’re all so scared of less than two hands of stickies.”

THE DEAL WAS STRUCKtwenty gallons of gas for each stickie dead, paid in advance, pumped into the echoing tanks, and a room and food for two nights in Mitchell Springs.

It was dusk, and Ryan and J.B. had just finished a dish of home-fried potatoes and thick slices of wild pig, with a sauce of cinnamon and apples.

“Good,” Ryan said. “Bellyful of decent chow and I’m ready to go and carry out some cleansing.”

J.B. was staring out of the ill-fitting window at the light flakes of snow that were blowing by, carried on the back of a rising norther.

“Yeah, but”

Ryan looked at his old friend. “You want out of this?” he asked.

“No. We got paid so”

“The shitting sickness.”

J.B. nodded. “Yeah. Cholera’s bad, any day of the tad-blasted week. But when you got the special pick-’em-up-and-knock- ’em-down stickie version”

Ryan stood, the legs of the chair scraping on the rough wooden floor of their cabin. “Better than ninety-nine percent terminal.”

“So they say.”

“But we can find a good place tomorrow morning. Scout their camp. Four miles to the west, out back of an old hospital. And use the Steyr. And the Uzi if they come at us. No way any of the poor bastards can come close enough to infect us. Don’t have to go in among them.”