Chapter Five

      “Did you see that!” Mildred was incensed. She was outraged and paced in circles, waving her arms. “Goddamn Night of the Pigging Dead!” No one got her reference, but everyone took her meaning. The convoy was almost half a mile away. They had left behind camp gear and equipment, a heartbreakingly sizable spread of food and a sea of spent brass. No one wanted to wade through the swathes of goop rotting in the sun or risk what might be squirming beneath in an attempt at salvage. Ryan and his friends were having a private palaver behind their LAV. “I’ll take good old-fashioned American deserts, rads and stickies any day of the week!”

       Ryan pulled the chain of his flexible cleaning rod through the Scout’s barrel. The new longblaster had been baptized the hard way and seen him through. Ryan shook his head. He’d seen more horrors than he cared to think about in his travels. That last bit had been bad. “J.B.?”

       The Armorer was on the same page. “That was bad.”

       “Doc?”

       “The coordinated effort of the annelids, particularly once their porcine hosts were obviously postmortem, clearly bespoke some sort of collective intelligence,” Doc enthused. “Really quite extraordinary. I would be curious as to—”

       “Jak?” Ryan asked.

       “Bad,” Jak agreed.

       Mildred had already spoken her mind. It wasn’t something she ever had much problem with. Ryan looked at Krysty. She sat at the top of the LAV’s ramp door and hugged her knees. Her good feelings for this land had been rocked like everyone else’s. However her connection to the earth left her a little more sensitive to abominations.

       Ryan wiped down his weapon, loaded it and put the cleaning kit back in the recess in the stock. “So, jump? Run south? Keep going?”

       “Either of the later.” Doc sighed. “But you know I will jump if it must be.”

       “I know.” Ryan nodded. “Thanks.”

       J.B. finished running a rag over his M-4000 shotgun and began loading fléchette and slug rounds. “South.”

       “South?” Krysty sighed. “Alone? It’s four hundred miles to anywhere we’ve been, much less heard of. Got coldhearts to the north. Those…things to the south. Mebbe there’s safety in numbers. Mebbe the plains will be better. Mebbe we should head west with a convoy a bit more before we break and run south.”

       It was a lot of mebbes, but she had a point.

       “Jak?”

       “West,” Jak replied.

       Mildred’s lips quirked. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with a little grease monkey in coveralls?”

       Everyone looked over at the engineer LAV. A short girl with curly brown hair covered by a bandanna was perched on top, half in and half out of the engine compartment wrenching away. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but her big brown eyes, full lower lip and dimpled chin were something to look at. She currently had a smudge of grease on the tip of her nose. For the past twenty-four hours Jak’s ruby-red gaze often strayed to whatever wag she was working on, and she seemed to work wags 24/7. He lifted his chin at the mechanic.

       “Name’s Seriah. Yeah.” Jak nodded at Ryan again. “West.”

       “Mildred?”

       “What the hell, west. The weather’s nice. The food is good. The people seem friendly.”

       J.B. stared hard at Mildred. “Six seems real friendly.”

       Everyone stared at the Armorer’s comment.

       Mildred stared in wonder. “J. B. Dix, are you jealous?”

       J.B. snatched up his shotgun and stomped away without another word.

       Ryan looked around the circle. “We got five votes west. In a while I’ll—”

       “It’s unanimous.” The Armorer stomped back just as quickly. “West it is.”

       Mildred stepped toward him. “J.B.?”

       “Doc?” J.B. reached into his pocket and held out what appeared to be six beige wine corks.

       Doc took the objects and exposed his gleaming white teeth. “These are suspiciously of a 16-gauge conformation.”

       “They’re high explosive. Those pigs got me thinking. Can’t just shoot them full of holes. That’s an ounce of HE. Should shatter some bones.”

       “Thank you, J.B. I shall refit myself this instant.” Doc set about reloading his LeMat.

       “J.B.?” Mildred questioned.

       “Walk?” he asked.

       Mildred slid her arm in his. “I’d love to.” The two of them walked off in a circuit of the wag camp.

       Ryan took Krysty’s hand. “Let’s sign up.” They walked back to the circled wags. People were checking loads and prepping to go. Toulalan watched the proceedings. His sister Cyrielle and Six seemed to be doing most of the directing. Toulalan stood by his personal wag. It was a Chevy Silverado, lovingly maintained, with a camper mounted in the bed. Unlike a lot of the vehicles it was almost miraculously free of bullet strikes.

       Ryan had taken an informal survey of the convoy’s vehicles. They currently had twelve wags rolling and four motorbikes. The big rig, the engineering LAV and Toulalan’s home on wheels were the most spectacular. Ryan counted three armed wags—a pair of pickups and an El Camino, sheathed in sheet-iron chicken armor with post-mounted machine guns in the truck beds. An old ambulance was stuffed with Diefenbunker med supplies. Six’s jacked-up Crown Victoria was almost unrecognizable under the added-on plate. The rest of the vehicles had been repaired, rebuilt and remodified so many times the lines of their original pedigree had been lost. The convoy consisted of about seventy-seven souls at the moment, not counting Ryan and the companions.

       “Impressive collection,” Ryan said.

       Toulalan smiled delightedly. “Merci. We’re quite proud of it!”

       “Is your next destination another bunker?”

       “Indeed.”

       “So how come no one has cracked these Diefenbunkers before?” Ryan asked.

       “Long before skydark, there was the cold war. You’ve heard of it, no?”

       “Yeah.”

       “Yes, well, the Diefenbunkers were built for the cold war, but when she was won, they were deactivated. They became museums. After skydark,