Ches said calmly, “I’ve been meaning to tidy up that shelf below the window. It
was getting clogged up with all kinds of crap. Those guys did a sweet job.”
“You hit the button?”
“Sure I hit the button—and we’re still in business. Far as I can tell the worst
damage is to the glass and frame.”
“That figures.”
“Yeah, well you’d better pray it ain’t gonna snow, Ryan, because I don’t like
driving in a blizzard, specially if that blizzard’s coming in at me.” He glanced
around, and Ryan could tell that although the kid had shifted the vehicle into
automatic, he was still putting on a show. “Do I clean ’em off now? Fry them
out?”
“No. Not yet. Wait.”
The E-button. A nifty device dreamed up by J. B. Dix for just such an emergency
as this. Plate-metal strips around each war wag, topside and underside, were
connected to the powerful generators at the rear but insulated from the rest of
the chassis and frame. The E-button was a failsafe. Now all it needed was the
tug of a lever and anyone or any thing touching those innocent looking rods got
instant heartburn. Not to mention everything-else burn.
But Ryan did not want to blow that one until they had reached a last-ditch
situation. It used up far too much power.
He could hear bangs and cracks outside, short rattling bursts of auto-fire, the
hammer effect of rounds pounding the exterior. It wasn’t exactly a standoff, but
he figured their attackers were conferring somewhere, probably in the tunnels
below the road. He idly wondered if they were new tunnels or old tunnels,
tunnels maybe dug out by the guys who’d built the Stockpiles. They were more
likely new ones, excavated for just such ambushes as this. He half turned,
snapping his black-gloved fingers.
“C’mon, c’mon!” His voice was laced with urgency.
Two men shoved past him holding a wood frame that enclosed a crisscross of fine
steel mesh. They leaned over Ches, ramming it into place over the buckled screen
frame, and clipped it.
“Now let ’em try lobbing a gas can in.”
Everything was smooth, thought Ryan, relaxing slightly. He checked his watch,
noted that there still remained two and a half minutes to go before the booby in
Four blew.
“Lint. Hooley. Up top.”
The two men who had carried the wire barrier followed him at the run down the
cabin. They threaded into the bunk room passage, waited while Ryan slid open a
side door into a ladder well. Ryan mounted the ladder fast but silently, checked
out the view ports at the top. Nothing. He began flicking at well-oiled bolt
levers in the darkness, slicking them back. Then he slid the hatch sideways
softly on its specially fixed runners until it would go no farther, and stuck
his head out into the cool air.
Far to the east the gray twilight was gradually easing into milky dawn, but here
a wash of flame from the now fiercely burning truck was the only light that
mattered, casting a lurid glare over the scene, causing shadow dances on the
blacktop, highlighting lurking figures among the roadside rocks and boulders,
There was a gap in the convoy. It was now split into two distinct sections fore
and aft of the blazing truck. Ryan’s war wag had pulled well forward, and Trucks
One, Two and Three had followed. Far down the road Ryan could see the snub-nosed
bulk of the second war wag, with the rest of the convoy trailing behind it.
Auto-rifle fire rattled, weaving its high-pitched chatter around single-shot
cracks and the roar of the flames. Ryan focused his one eye on the roof of Three
and saw that it was clear. Either the guys from Four had managed to tumble down
through the truck’s roof hatch into comparative safety, or they were dead meat
on the road. He could see no one on the other trucks, but that didn’t mean there
weren’t stickies clinging to the sides.
He crawled out into the roof gully, which ran the length of the vehicle, front
to rear, wide enough for two men to lie side by side and be hidden from view