Chapter Five

 

 

 

A bullet-pocked sign, a mile back, had warned Ryan and J.B. that they were approaching Huston Wells, altitude three thousand eight hundred feet, populationthat sign had been painted, repainted and over-painted so many times that it was now illegible.

 

J.B. knocked the engine out of gear, allowing the LAV-25 to roll forward under its own momentum, until he stopped it on the crown of the bend, a couple hundred yards from the edge of the frontier ville.

 

"Roadblock," he staled.

 

Ryan, higher up, had already seen it and was back inside the turret again.

 

"Over, under, through or around?" he asked, quoting what was probably the best known of all the Trader's favorite sayings.

 

J.B. laughed quietly. "By the look of it, we could probably do any one of three. Not so sure about managing to get under it, though."

 

The blacktop ran north-south, ruler straight, with no side trails visible in either direction. The roadblock was composed mainly of terminally rusted automobiles and pickups, welded together to almost fill the main street. The gap in the middle was just about wide enough for a war wag to slide through.

 

"Two men with hunting rifles," J.B. announced, peering through his magnifying scope. "Probably a few more around the place. Doesn't look like a sec zone."

 

"Another sign on the left, hand-painted. Can't make it out with the sun across it."

 

"Says that you pay a toll to Noah Huston for the way-leave of passing by."

 

"How much jack?"

 

J.B. read the sign again. "Doesn't say. Probably the old frontier toll. How much you got? Give it all to us. That's the toll here."

 

The diesel engine rumbled softly. Ryan looked at the country on either side of the road. It was fairly flat, but there could easily be a honeycomb of old irrigation ditches that would make it difficult driving, even for the powerful LAV.

 

"Through, I think," he said.

 

 

 

"HOLD IT THERE!" Ryan could barely hear the shout, but the gesture was unmistakable.

 

The man was of average height and wore a fur vest and denim pants. He carried what looked to Ryan like a bolt-action Winchester Ranger. His colleague, whose face was hidden under the brim of a battered Stetson, held a Model 848 Mossberg rifle with a remodeled stock. He was leaning against the hood of a rusted flatbed truck.

 

"We're coming through," Ryan yelled.

 

In his earpiece he could hear J.B.'s calm voice confirming that he had the guy in the fur vest covered with the wag's machine gun.

 

"Pay the toll and on you go, stranger."

 

One of the many things that helped to keep you alive in Deathlands was being a good student of behavior. How a person stood, spoke and acted gave you some clue as to what might be going down.

 

The speaker wasn't exactly brimming with confidence. He stood with his shoulders hunched, and his fingers drummed nervously on the stock of the Winchester. Twice in a handful of seconds he'd glanced behind him, toward the row of semiderelict houses and stores.

 

"He's looking for company to arrive," J.B. said.

 

Ryan held the SIG-Sauer in his right hand, just below the rim of the turret. There wasn't any point in wasting time here.

 

"Noah Huston says" began the man by the roadblock.

 

But nobody ever got to hear just what it was that Noah Huston said.

 

Ryan brought up the automatic and fired at the shadowy figure in the Stetson. At a range of only twenty yards, it was a positive no-miss situation.

 

The bullet went within a quarter inch of where Ryan had aimed it, a finger's width below the jaw, exploding the air passage and the gullet, powering through and destroying the fragile cervical vertebrae, exiting out of the back of the neck as a distorted and mangled chunk of hot lead. Eventually it buried itself over the door of what had once been, in the nineteenth century, the finest sporting house in Huston Wells.

 

The Mossberg clattered to the dirt and the Stetson flew off, becoming splattered with arterial blood as it landed behind the flatbed.

 

Ryan stared at the mane of blond hair that cascaded from under the hat, across the young woman's startled face, vanishing as she fell dead at the back of the roadblock.

 

Almost simultaneously, the machine gun coughed into life. J.B. fired a triple-shot burst at the man in the fur vest, two of the bullets hitting him in the middle of the chest. The third one struck the barrel of the Winchester and spun howling toward the setting sun.

 

"Go!" Ryan shouted, his eyes raking the deserted street of the township.

 

J.B. was already moving, putting the wag into first gear and slamming his foot on the gas. The roadblock didn't leave much room on either side of the LAV. The gap was only around eight feet, to deter anyone trying to run it at speed. The armored vehicle was precisely seven feet, two and a half inches wide. There was less than five inches clearance on each side.

 

The dying man in his torn and bloodied fur vest had fallen across the gap, almost as though he had made the deliberate decision to try to use his corpse to try to check the escape of the outlanders.

 

All four wheels on the left side ran over the man's right arm, chest and head.

 

Ryan felt only the slightest jolt as the skull was splintered to shards of smeared bone, none of them any larger than a silver dollar.

 

"Company, right, thirty."

 

The voice of the Armorer whispered urgently into Ryan's ears, warning him that other residents of Huston Wells were coming out at them, thirty degrees from the front of the wag, on the right side. Three figures came running out of a movie theater, one holding a machine pistol like she knew how to use it.

 

"One ahead, hundred yards."

 

Ryan glanced down the street. There were alleys and narrow side roads along the western flank, each one with pools of bright sunlight spilling out across the street. There was a man, tall and white-haired, standing in one of those dazzling golden lakes, slowly bringing a bazooka to this shoulder.

 

"Fireblast!"

 

J.B. had spotted him. "Not much ammo left for the MG, Ryan. Want me to try and take him out?"

 

To have a safe shot at the man with either the SIG-Sauer or the rifle, Ryan needed a stable base to shoot from. The LAV, rocking and rolling over the humps and potholes in the street, wasn't going to be a help.

 

"Bust him, J.R, now!"

 

He snapped off a couple of rounds at the trio of attackers on his right, seeing the woman go down, clutching her leg, the Uzi skidding away down the seed-strewed sidewalk. A bullet screamed off the armaplating just behind the turret, and Ryan instinctively ducked a little lower.

 

"Get 'em, Noah!" The shout came from a window above one of the stores to the left, but Ryan couldn't identify which one and held his fire.

 

The silver-haired man seemed impervious to any threat of danger from the approaching armored wag, standing quite still, surrounded by the halo of brilliant light. He held what looked like an old M-72, the muzzle gaping toward Ryan, as big as the mouth of a mine shaft.

 

Against a soft target, the weapon had an effective range of more than three hundred yards. Less than half that if the target was on the move.

 

But the LAV was barely fifty yards away, coming straight at him, with no chance of veering to one side or the other.

 

"J.B., do it!" Ryan yelled.

 

The machine gun opened fire, but the wag had just hit an ancient speed-bump and tipped up and down, throwing Ryan against the side of the turret, dealing his right elbow a sharp blow that nearly made him drop the automatic.

 

He saw the stream of bullets tear into the shingled wall of the frame house just beyond the figure with the blaster, a figure that Ryan guessed was probably the same Noah Huston who ran the small ville.

 

From high up in the turret he heard the repeated clicking as the machine gun ran out of ammo.

 

It wasn't a time for hesitation.

 

Ryan braced himself as best he could against the yawing and pitching of the wag, raised the automatic and opened fire at the man by the alley, not pausing, pouring a river of lead, his index finger working at the trigger, until the mag was empty.

 

There was chaos all around.

 

J.B. fought the controls, as the vehicle swerved and clipped a supporting post from a storefront, bringing half the building down in a shower of dust and rotted timbers.

 

The two men from the old movie theater were both shooting, bullets sparking off the armasteel. The wounded woman was screaming at the top of her voice. Someone fired a shotgun from an upstairs window, but the aim was poor, though Ryan heard the hiss above his head of the pellets slicing through the dusk.

 

And the M-72 had been fired.

 

At least five of the 9 mm rounds struck Noah Hustonone through the left elbow, another in the groin, a third and fourth in the chest, toward the left side. A fifth round had ripped away a chunk of bone the size of an ax blade from the right side of his skull, taking the ear with it.

 

A dying spasm fired the bazooka. The 66 mm rocket roared diagonally across the street, missing the front of the LAV by twenty feet, hitting the front of an ancient funeral home.

 

There was a devastating explosion, and a sheet of flame with boiling coils of red and gold leaped skyward. Smoke billowed out across the main street of the ville. J.B. pushed the wag up through the gears, accelerating away.

 

Ryan looked down at the dying man as they thundered by the alley, blinking at the brightness of the setting sun.

 

"I can see hostiles coming after us, Ryan!"

 

"They're too far away to bother us."

 

"They look close."

 

Ryan was staring back at Huston Wells. It looked as if the rocket had been a flamer, packed with hi-ex and napalm, as half the ville seemed to be burning. There were two diminutive figures, way behind.

 

"Don't worry, J.B.," he said. "Remember that objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are."

 

Both men started to laugh.