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Ryan passed Brother Ha’ahrd, who was surrounded by a phalanx of followers, including a few former wag drivers that seemed to have undergone a last-minute conversion in the face of overwhelming, mind-frying horror. He was loudly preaching a doctrine of love and forbearance and waiting on the will of the Great Old Ones. The rotties didn’t seem to be listening. They were more interested in eating his head.
Which meant most of the shambling freaks were focused on something other than the approach of Ryan and friends from the rear. He heard a couple shots pop off behind him, and the thwack of stout ash wood on a skull, accompanied by a grunt of effort and triumph from Mildred. Apparently a few of the freaks still tracked them.
Ryan didn’t look back. Unless somebody screamed for his help, his job was clearing the way.
He waded into the mob of rotties surging toward the bus door, where three cultists had linked arms to keep them out. Ryan hacked at the backs of necks and skulls as if the changed were a stand of brush he was trying to cut a trail through.
A woman turned a blood mask to snarl at him and he shot her between the eyes. He sensed a presence on his right and whipped the butt of his SIG around to squash a changed man’s nose in a spray of dark fluid. The rottie staggered back. An eye blink later Doc’s slim rapier impaled the creature through both temples like an apple on a skewer.
A burly rottie, obviously a changed wag driver, bare-chested and with a short Mohawk, spun to bare his teeth and spread his arms to seize the one-eyed man. Ryan hammered him between the eyes with the SIG’s butt, then shot him in the forehead as he staggered back.
The rotties pulled down the two women and one man barring the door. As the cultists futilely screamed and thrashed, the rotties homed in on them. Ryan kicked at the flailing tangle until the way was clear, then rushed into the school bus with his friends at his heels.
A stout woman in a robe sewn together from burlap bags barred their way. “Stop! There’s no room in here for anyone but believers!”
Ryan was about to rebut her with a copper-jacketed 9 mm bullet where it would do the most good when Krysty grabbed his arm from behind.
“Wait!” she yelled. “She’s right!”
The cultist was. Ryan looked around the bus to see the seats and aisles jammed with refugees. Not all of them looked as if they belonged to Brother Ha’ahrd’s flock, or at least had started the day that way. Still, the practical puzzle was insoluble: even shooting the reticent wasn’t likely to drive these people out into the blood-smeared rottie mob.
“Up!” he heard Jak call.
“Say what?” Ryan turned to see Jak disappearing up the first window behind the door.
Ryan jumped back outside. After even momentary exposure to the relative warmth inside the bus, generated by close-packed bodies and humid panting breath, the chill hit him like a slap. As did the stench of burning petrocarbons, human flesh and hair, and spilled intestines.
“Follow Jak!” Ryan yelled. He stooped to grab one of Krysty’s calves. J.B. grabbed the other, and the two men boosted the woman high enough to scramble onto the roof after the albino youth.
Stabbing, slashing, shooting only when utterly necessary, Ryan and Doc helped the cultists stave off the rotties while Mildred and J.B. quickly passed the packs up to Krysty and Jak atop the bus. Then Ryan and J.B. gave Mildred a boost, and Doc. Finally, Ryan stood facing out, while J.B. scaled him like a monkey and clambered up.
The changed surged forward. Unfeeling hands reached out for Ryan, blood-spilling mouths gaping wide to consume his flesh.
* * *
MILDRED HAD BARELY got her bearings atop the ice-cold metal roof of the bus when another stout woman wearing the Cthulhu cult’s flowing robes and head scarf came bustling up alongside the baggage that had been strapped onto a rickety roof rack.
“You can’t come up here!” she snapped. “This is for believers only—”
“Gaia forgive me,” Krysty said. She kicked the stout woman off the roof.
Mildred felt her brows climb up her forehead. Krysty looked back at her and shrugged.
“Move your broad butt, woman!” yelled a familiar voice from behind. Mildred turned a furious glare on J.B., whose head popped up over the roof edge like a curious prairie dog’s.
“John,” she said, “you and me are going to talk.”
But she shifted aside to make way for him as a great cry went up from the cultists below.
“Brother Ha’ahrd!” a voice screamed.
Ryan looked past the rotties closing in on him to see the long-haired prophet knocked off his feet by a surge of creatures who had overwhelmed his guards. Cultists stampeded off the bus, bowling over the rotties in their path in their zeal to rescue their guru.
Ryan had caught a break.
Not a man to waste an opportunity, Ryan holstered his panga and handblaster, spun around and jumped as high as he could. Krysty and J.B. caught hold of his outstretched arms and hauled him up on top of the bus as if he were a child.
“After all this trouble we could ride inside now,” Mildred said peevishly. She knelt on the heaped baggage, making fast their own packs. Doc squatted to one side, reloading his revolver as calmly as if he were out for a morning stroll outside his home in nineteenth-century Vermont.
Ryan shook his head emphatically. “Just as glad to ride up here,” he said. “Rotties get inside—”
Screams pealed out the door. “Shit!” J.B. said, leaning out to peer over. “They are!”
“Grab legs!” Jak called. Without waiting to see if anybody responded, he got down on his knees at the front end of the bus roof. While the few cultists and other refugees who had also sought safety up there looked on dumbly, Krysty and Mildred jumped to grab the youth’s ankles as he let himself topple forward.
An instant later Ryan heard the roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python.
* * *
FEELING KRYSTY’S AND Mildred’s grips strong on his ankles, Jak let himself almost smack face-first into the cold windshield of the bus, using his right palm at the last moment to keep from breaking his nose.
Beyond the glass, which remained unfogged due to the icy air streaming in the open door, he saw the look of terror on the driver’s face, rendered more comic by being upside down: the saucer eyes, the mouth a screaming O below a bearded chin.
The driver had good reason to scream. He was trying to hang on to the wheel, probably to keep from getting pulled out of his seat, and batting with his right arm at a rottie who was trying to bite his head. Other rotties had got themselves jammed in the door in their lust for human flesh and hot blood.
Jak pressed the vented muzzle of his blaster against the glass near the first rottie’s head and pulled the trigger. The Magnum blaster kicked itself away from the windshield as the glass collapsed inward. He let his arm straighten to ride out the recoil; he hadn’t been able to brace properly, and expected the reaction.
Inside, the bus driver stared in even greater horror at his attacker. The back of the changed woman’s head had been blown off. The guy was staring through her mouth at the other rotties still struggling to break free and get at him.
The half-headed rottie collapsed. People in the bus were screaming and leaning over at least one person who’d been hit by the 125-grain hollowpoint slug, which hadn’t expended all its energy blowing the rottie’s head apart. Jak took in the fact without emotional reaction. These were no friends of his, nor enemies, either. So why care?
With the window glass gone he had clear shots at the rotties in the door. Grabbing the Python’s grips with both hands, he fired three shots as fast as he could. Two of the creatures went down at once, shot through the forehead. The third reeled back with her lower jaw torn away. Instantly, hands grabbed her from behind and threw her to the ground as furious cultists surged in, bearing their injured leader.
Jak turned to the driver. “Drive,” he said, gesturing with his Python for emphasis.
Eyes all but popping free of his lean, ashen face, the driver put the wag in gear and hit the gas.
* * *
A BLOOD-STREAKED GRAY head appeared over the rear end of the bus roof as the vehicle took off with a jerk. Kneeling on the cool metal, Ryan had unstrapped his Steyr from the top of his backpack and cracked the bolt to make sure the weapon was loaded. He put a hand down briefly to steady himself against the sudden acceleration, then whipped the longblaster’s butt to his shoulder and fired.
The head disappeared. Whether he’d destroyed the brain or not Ryan didn’t know. The 7.62 mm bullet might have caught the creature in the shoulder. It didn’t matter as long as the thing didn’t get up here.
“Everybody all right?” Ryan shouted, hanging on to the jury-built luggage rack as the bus wheeled in as tight an arc as it could toward the compound exit. “Sing out.”
“Yes,” Krysty called.
“I’m here,” J.B. said.
“Capital, Ryan!” Doc declared.
“Ace,” Mildred said sourly, as she and Krysty stood up together, hoisting Jak back up with his white hair swinging wildly. “Jak’s here, too.”
The albino youth jackknifed up between the two women and popped to his feet.
“Holy shit!” Ryan saw Mildred pointing straight ahead.
The caravanserai gate was shut. It was also on fire.
Chapter Six
Yellow flames danced against the backdrop of the snow-dusted prairie beyond.
The bus driver never slowed. “Brace yourselves!” Ryan shouted. He saw Krysty and Mildred turn away from the front of the bus and throw themselves on the mounded baggage. He did likewise.
The snowplow blade hit the gate. Whether more weakly constructed than it appeared, or weakened by the flames, it flew apart, sending flaming planks and posts spiraling away like pinwheels.
The bus took off down the dirt road, which was basically a pair of ever-deepening ruts running northeast to southwest.
“Tie on!” Ryan shouted over his shoulder to his companions. As far as he could see, the six of them now had the roof to themselves. The handful of cultists who had climbed up here, presumably not as keenly honed to a survival edge as the companions, either had been tossed off by the wag’s wild maneuvering, or had bailed voluntarily.
A mob tottered in slow pursuit of the wag, black figures silhouetted against yellow flame. They faded rapidly as the school bus jounced off across the countryside.
Lying on his belly, Ryan used his belt to fasten himself to the steel rail of the roof rack. His companions chimed in with shouts as they finished making themselves fast.
“Weapons out!” he called when Doc called the last acknowledgment.
“The rotties can’t catch us on foot,” Mildred said.
“Do you know there’s not a hundred of ’em waiting out here?”
“Weapon out,” Mildred said.
* * *
THE GREAT PLAINS were never as flat as they appeared, Mildred thought. The dark land scrolling past them mostly looked like the top of a billiard table. Yet she ached in elbows and thighs and breasts from being slammed on the metal roof every time the bus bounced over an unseen obstacle or crashed down onto ground as hard as a baron’s heart, each time threatening destruction to its ancient suspension. Meanwhile the back of her was freezing through from the ice-blast wind of passage, especially her legs, covered only by the thin fabric of her camo pants.
Every bounce also reminded her that the dark country abounded with hiding places for lurking foes. Not just the changed, either. Lethal predators abounded in the Deathlands, animal, mutie and human.
Shadows seemed to flit across the shadowed land. A score of times Mildred opened her mouth to cry an alarm, or slipped her gloved finger into the trigger guard of her Czech-made .38-caliber target revolver. Each time she held herself back from screaming or shooting. And each time no attack came.
She was horribly aware that didn’t mean the threats she thought she saw in the shadows weren’t real.
The bus picked up speed, trading the occasional bone-slamming jolt for a constant rattle that felt as if it might detach Mildred’s retinas. But she gritted her teeth and hung on.
Because one thing she’d learned, more than a century before she’d ever opened her eyes to this terrible new world, was to endure.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER the bus rumbled to a stop in a sandy wash next to a slowly moving stream. Steam rolled from under the hood. The engine hissed and pinged as it cooled.
“What’s happening?” Ryan called.
“Driver says he thinks we’re far enough away to take a break.” Krysty called back. “He says we’ve come about thirty miles.”
“Great,” J.B. said. “I could stand to try to winch my bones straight again. The knots in my muscles’re getting knots in them.”
“All right,” Ryan said. “Everybody cut loose. Keep eyes skinned and blasters ready.”
“Really, friend Ryan,” Doc croaked, “sometimes you belabor the obvious.”
Ryan stood and stretched. He felt about the same way J.B. did—as if some triple-size mutie had grabbed his ankles and tried to bust boulders using Ryan as a hammer.
The door opened and passengers spilled out onto drifted sand. Some fell weakly to hands and knees. Somebody puked noisily.
A woman with a hood pulled up over her head scarf stopped after several paces and turned to look up at Ryan.
“Any of our brothers and sisters up there with you?”
“No,” he said.
She gazed up at him for a spell, then turned and walked off.
“What that about?” Jak asked, walking up to Ryan. He moved with his customary youthful-predator swagger. Ryan shrugged in response. He reckoned Jak didn’t feel much better than anybody else, but had enough resilience to hide it better.
The one-eyed man already knew none of his party was injured. It had been hard to make himself heard above the bus’s clatter, but he’d confirmed that nobody had caught any grief beyond scrapes and bruises.
And, most importantly, no bites.
The companions moved off to the side. The cultists and other refugees showed no interest in mingling with them, and they were just as glad not to have to answer any uncomfortable questions about the manner in which they’d hitched a ride. Not to mention the fates of the cultists who’d been atop the bus with them.
“A fire would be welcome,” Doc said, rubbing his hands together. “Restore warmth to chilled bones.”
In lieu of that they squatted in the lee of the bus. An east wind had risen during their uncomfortable ride. It came whistling beneath the wag’s swaybacked undercarriage, cutting through Ryan’s clothes and skin like a knife.
“What do you plan to burn for fuel, you old coot?” Mildred asked. “Your extra long johns from your pack?”
They had unloaded their backpacks from the luggage rack, just in case they needed to make their own way out of there in a hurry. Or in case some of the cultists unexpectedly drove off.
“What are those rad-blasted creatures?” Ryan said, ignoring the byplay. He stood with his back to the wag and his Steyr slung over his shoulder.
“Triple-pain in the hindquarters, is what,” J.B. said.
“They have me feeling the creepies all over,” Krysty said.
Ryan looked at her. “How come they don’t feel pain? How come a wound that would drop any normal man doesn’t slow them down? How can they even move? And why do they need to eat, anyway? Far as I can tell, they’re chills, or next thing to it. What do they need food for?”
“Why, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, “you seem to have taken an unusually empirical turn of mind.”
