verging the road, dogwood along streams and river cuts. The road was meandering, serpentine, left to right and right to left, lots of Day-Glo yellow signs with squiggly arrows on them.
He came around a bend thick with enshrouding juneberry and that’s when the first shot rang out. Even over the roar of the hog he heard it. Then he heard another and another after that and it was about that time as he cut off the highway and into the prairie grass that he realized he’d driven right into a fucking ambush. Maybe if he’d been paying a little closer attention, it might not have happened.
No matter.
In the rearview he could see two pickup trucks with riders in the beds carrying rifles pulling off the road in hot pursuit. They were shooting, and thank God they were no marksmen. The reports of the rifles echoed again and again and a few rounds came close, but not too close. Slaughter was caning the hardtail now, riding fast and aggressively, seesawing this way and that, hoping they couldn’t get a bead on him. The trucks behind him were thumping along into dips and holes and the shooters were barely hanging on. There was no way they’d get a clear shot like that.
Slaughter brought the scoot into a stand of heavy brush, dropped it and cut the M16 free of its bracket. He slipped through the bushes and fired two three-round bursts at the lead vehicle. The first volley went wild, the second hit the pickup, peppering the hood and popping a spiderwebbed hole in the windshield.
That slowed them.
They were shooting wildly now, expending cartridges everywhere. In the distance, an armored APC entered the field. The Red Hand. No doubt of that.
Slaughter got down low and pulled the walkie-talkie out of the inside of his vest. He got Apache Dan right away. “Ambush up ahead,” he said over the box. “Get everyone off the road and into cover.” There was some static, then,
Slaughter came up out of the brush with the M16 again.
He zeroed in on one of the shooters in the back. He missed with his first volley and then popped the guy with the second. He cried out and fell from the bed of the truck and the second pickup couldn’t stop in time: it rolled right over him.
More shooting.
Lots of swearing and shouting.
But the trucks had stopped rolling.
Now was the time. Slaughter jumped on his hog, kicked it into life, and went flying out of the bushes, zigzagging again. More shots. But he rode low and fast, cutting around stands of brush and following a dry ravine until he was out of range. He came out into the grass and there were woods ahead, along a ridgeline. There was a footpath and he aimed the scoot up it. He could still hear the engines of the trucks and the APC, but distant now.
But they would compensate.
He couldn’t give them time to do that.
The path was rocky in the woods and the scoot bumped along, but he knew the Red Hand couldn’t follow him up here unless they came in on foot and if they did, then it would be his kind of fighting: close-in and personal. He cut across a stream then up a hill, down another, through another dry ravine and up a hillock and across a little footbridge. He kept his speed low. The hog wasn’t made for this off-road shit and with the hardtail frame, he felt every little bump hard right up into his hips. He kept going until the trees thinned and there was a two-rut dirt road below him. He cut down onto it and followed it maybe a mile and then cut into more open prairie, then into a cedar stand. By then, the Red Hand were nowhere to be seen or heard. He moved through the switchgrass until he found a gravel road that he guessed might swing back around and bring him within sight of the highway, but several miles back before he ran into the ambush. He kept going but saw no highway.
Finally, he rolled the hardtail into a stand of withered juniper and killed the engine. It was quiet. Real quiet. He tried to raise Apache Dan on the walkie-talkie but all he got was dead air. He hoped they were hid good and tight.
That’s all he cared about.
Because for right now, he himself was hopelessly lost.
Maybe an hour later, Slaughter came out of cover onto some pavement and overhead, there were dozens of buzzards circling. There was death nearby and the birds knew it. And to draw them in such numbers it must have been real thick, real good, and real meaty, none of which remotely concerned Slaughter because what was death in the big bad new world as envisioned by the Outbreak? Death was just death. It held little significance in the greater scheme of things. The living envied the dead, as it was said.
He followed the pavement as it moved through the countryside, knowing it was a secondary road and not the I, but hoping the two would meet up. He cracked open the throttle, kept an eye on the buzzards overhead, and eased his hog on down the road. Death was on his mind like it had been for so long now.
He thought about Black Hat.
He thought about the Hag.
And the more he thought about the both of them the more he thought he was probably fucking crazy.
But as he rode on, thinking death and such, that poem by Poe he’d memorized in the eighth grade kept bouncing around in his skull like a catchy tune you just can’t rid yourself of:
Yeah, that was it. That was the meat of the thing and he knew it:
He drove on.
The road wound down into a little grassy glen and then came up through a sparse thicket and under a train bridge, right outside a little town called Victoria. Set out at the crossroads was another of those freaky little altars.
This time he was in no hurry, so he stopped.
He parked his scoot and hopped off, looking around carefully and strapping on the Combat Mag in case the shit started flying. The town was just before him and he could tell it was a dead place. The buzzards were circling directly overhead and he knew that there was death, recent death, in its streets. The wind was slight, warm, and dry. It smelled like hay and corn husks. When it shifted direction, it brought the stink of the town out to him: a hot, maggoty odor of decomposition.
But the altar…
Like the other one he’d passed, there were bones scattered all around it. Some were human—femurs and ulnas, a couple of ribcages, a few jawless skulls—but most were animal bones. Big, staff-like leg bones that must have belonged to antelope and heavy trains of vertebrae and rib baskets that were probably from buffalo or cow. Above them, nailed to a crude wooden cross was another scarecrow…except, as Slaughter looked closer, he saw it was a weathered, wind-dried corpse, a brown-skinned mummy with jutting bones who’d been slit open, emptied, then stuffed with things and stitched back up. The suturing looked like it had been done with shoelaces, and was haphazard at best. The corpse was bursting open, spilling an eclectic and bizarre collection of items: feathers and dried sacks of weeds, tiny bones braided together with sinew and little blackened things that looked like mummified rodents and reptiles.
