Salvation Road
Salvation Road
#58 in the Deathland series
James Axler
Chapter One
The broken wheel weighed heavily on his chest, the sharpened and splintered spokes beginning to feel uncomfortable as they poked into his flesh. He pressed himself back into the ground, feeling the sharpness of the small rocks and pebbles in the red dust as they formed a hard, compressed mattress beneath him.
He breathed in short, shallow gasps, trying to extract the maximum amount of oxygen from the minimum movement of his chest muscles. He figured that the axle of the wheel would keep it aloft enough to prevent it penetrating the cloth, skin and flesh and breaking bone and mashing internal organs into a pulpy mess. The balance of the wrecked wagon was delicate, but he hoped that the bulk of its contents would stay on the far side, with just enough weight to lift the broken wheel and prevent it from tilting slowly and inexorably into his all too frail human frame. He would have tried to move, to wriggle out from beneath the spokes, if not for the fact that they already had him delicately pinned, moving almost with the breeze that blew dust and grit into his eyes, making him blink.
Everything was otherwise still. The delicate swirl of the wind and the almost whispered creak of the broken wagon as it shifted was all that could be heard.
He couldn’t remember exactly how the accident had occurred. A vague blur of action as the wagon hit the half-buried rock, the vast majority of its bulk being hidden beneath the loose earth, the terrified cries of the horses as the reins and harness pulled on their muscle and sinew, the wagon suddenly brought to a dead halt by the obstruction. The arrested force pulled the animals back and snapped the neck of one while the other tore free of the frayed leather and ran on, disappearing from view behind an outcrop, the sound of its terrified flight fading into the distance. His own flight, propelled by the force of the impact and pulled forward by the momentum of the reins he had been loosely clutching, had been too swift to recall.
He remembered the impact of his fall, the bone-crunching jarring of his spine on the earth recording indelibly that journey into his memory. The wagon had eventually rolled over the dislodged rock after balancing for a moment in midair, poised to fall with the full weight of twisted and splintered spokes onto his body. The weight inside the wagon, shifted to one side by the impact, had prevented the descent of the deadly wooden stakes, and thus a swift oblivion.
But perhaps this was worse.
He moved again, shuffling beneath the pointed ends of the spokes, which seemed to push back against him and pin him further, as if to emphasize their mastery over his aching, pain-racked frame. The heels of his boots tried to dig into the dust and push back, but found no purchase in the loose earth.
“Emily…my love, are you all right?”
His voice was little more than a whispered croak, the light clouds of dust that eddied around him drying out his mouth even more, making him choke. The coughing racked his body, the spokes responding by pushing harder, biting into his body, their sharpness now more than uncomfortable through his clothing, which, he realized with an obvious but still despondent resignation, offered scant protection.
There was no reply from inside the wagon. His wife had been in the back with their two children. Young Rachel would be all right, but the boy, Jolyon, was little more than a babe in arms, and Doc Tanner was worried that the child would be hurt.
But no more worried than he was about his beloved wife. Doc’s world revolved around Emily; that was why the university-educated academic was making his way across country to begin a new life, moving from the civilized and educated east to the still untamed wilds of the West.
For a moment, as he considered this, a flicker of puzzlement and worry crossed Doc’s brow, making him forget his current predicament, his mind switching to another gear.