Well Fed - 05 (60 page)

Gus nodded and bobbed. Trailers streaked by, seemingly missing by fingers.

Then he spotted the main gate, closed, along with a pickup of armed men, parked behind lines of teeth.

Gus felt his balls draw up.

They weren’t teeth. They were spike strips, steel fangs attached to lengths of extendable and collapsible metal, designed to shred tires.

Gus slowed down.

“Fuck you doing?” Collie shouted.

Three of the gunmen in the box opened fired at the slowing Kat, and Gus cringed away from the onslaught and jerked on the steering wheel, pulling the machine away to the right. Collie returned fire, blasting one then a second shooter from the back of the pickup.

“Roll through it!” she yelled before the turn forced her to hold on.

“The spikes’ll fuck up the tires!”

“
Nothing
’s gonna fuck up these tires!”

But the dump truck was already committed to the turn. A trailer loomed up.

Gus didn’t have time to avoid it.

The Kat smashed through the rear of the long unit in a slap and clap of twisting, collapsing metal. Paneling flattened against the stairway like a flimsy sail. A section tore free and flashed before the driver’s view port like a tablecloth caught in a tempest. Gus bared his gums, controlling the big truck as it rolled over another pickup, and felt his molars clamp together as the children sang out in unholy terror.

The Kat crushed a pair of cars.

It bashed aside a low trailer with a generator affixed to it.

The heavy-duty beast bounced, came down, and slammed through an office building. Wooden planks flipped up and clattered past the machine in a flurry. One slapped the front viewport Gus used to see through, scaring the piss out of him.

The kids screamed.

Maggie screamed.

Collie
howled
, her bloodied features ghoulish and delighted all at once.

And the Kat kept turning.

“Crazy fucker’s turning around!” Slick Pick yelled, but Shovel ignored him. The leader of this pack of top-tier predators swung the minigun around, struggling to keep it on the rampaging Kat, pissed off and exultant as he unleashed the full uninterrupted might of the land cannon at the oncoming vehicle.

Gunfire strafed the flatbed, distracting Shovel.

A knot of new recruits, maybe the shitheads from Pine Cove, had gathered up assault weapons from the fallen and taken up position on the other side of the sandbags.

Treacherous little pricks
.

Slick Pick took a full burst in the chest, flinging him from the flatbed in a mist of blood and bone.

The raiders loyal to Shovel started running and firing back at the armed newbies.

Shovel brought the minigun to bear and hosed down the sandbags with lead. Bags exploded. Geysers of grit and gravel burst into the air. And through it all, men and women screamed as the minigun tore them apart.

That diversion took only ten seconds, then Shovel swung the cannon back toward the Komatsu rampaging across his driveway.

One, two
, the Kat punched its way through the ends of two trailers, upending the rigs in explosions of glass, fiberglass, and aluminum. Crystal pelted the front sheet metal, some raining through the narrow port and making Gus cringe. A motor home appeared, and he reacted slowly, stomping his bleeding foot down as the Kat’s jawline smashed and heaved the vehicle out of its way. A gleaming length of plastic snapped forward with all the power of a yew bow and lanced the Kat’s armored stairway. A storage compartment flew free of the motor home and crashed against the view port, all while a refocused squall of tracers and bullets made Gus’s existence miserable.

He flinched, yanking the wheel, and felt the left side rise by a foot before slamming back down, diverting the truck toward Whitecap, to face the source of bullets head-on.

Straight into the remainder of Shovel’s pack.

And the hateful breath of the minigun.

The Kat steamed straight at the flatbed.

Shovel didn’t know who was driving that industrial pile of shit, but he unquestionably liked the odds of the minigun over the dump truck any day of the week.

“
Come on
!” Shovel shrieked, mirroring the mounting fury of the minigun as he aimed at the machine’s armored face. His surviving soldiers fired upon the charging rig.

The chatter of impacts intensified as the space between the flatbed and the monster truck shortened.

Gus winced when the edges of the view port cracked from multiple impacts.

But he did not relent. Instead, he
stomped
on the gas.

Collie raged and unloaded short bursts at multiple shooters on that gray plain. A series of meaty explosions ripped across one bandit’s chest, marching him back three steps before he realized he was dead. A woman screamed when her shoulder disintegrated in a red cloud. Collie shifted and mowed down a guy crouched into a tight tuck, tearing him apart like an overstuffed pillow.

The two dozen or so left returned fire.

The minigun strafed the Kat from right to left, striking the face of the monster in a ferocious ripple of sparks, bearing down on the cab.

Collie ducked down behind the armored wall, and bullets exploded off the sill of the gun port, bouncing around inside the upper deck like a hundred super-springy balls of light, terrifying the children and Maggie. One streak took the last two toes of Collie’s left foot off in an eruption of blood. Another zinged through her left bicep, spattering her against the bulkhead before she rolled over onto her side. Gus glimpsed her head dropping out of sight before he cringed under the punishing onslaught. A deluge of bullets streaked forth from the minigun and etched a line across the face of the Kat, scarring it, making it snarl as Gus charged the flatbed. Rage flooded him, erasing all coherent thought as he stole pain-wracked peeks through his view port.

“Gonna ram that fucker!” he cried out over the popcorn impacts of
ping
s and
pang
s.

The Kat thundered toward the flatbed.

The minigun strafed the giant machine with a banshee’s death cry, concentrating everything on the driver’s cab. Light sheared through the view port, exploding and rebounding around Gus’s head. One bit hard into his shoulder, making him jump in the driver’s seat. Meteorites lasered across his back, rattling him, before blasting his side door open in a startling crash of metal. The last two fingers on his right hand disappeared at the knuckle in a painless burp of blood. The unconcerned bullets nailed bandits outside the truck as well, flipping them back from the oncoming truck.

The flatbed loomed closer.

Gus screamed at the barrage of tracer fire spattering the cab.

The minigun roared light.

And the Kat powered straight into it.

The last thing Shovel saw––before the Komatsu truck plowed through the flatbed––was the angry glare in his brother’s eyes.

And his last thought…

Gus had the killer instinct after all.

The Kat mashed into the flatbed dead center, like a cement block being shoved into a high-powered band saw. Rubber screeched on cement. The monster truck took the minigun’s wrath straight on the chin before the momentum behind tons of charging industrial steel silenced it. The Komatsu flipped the weapon’s stage in a scream of stars and a clap of mountains. A section of the flatbed rose and slapped the Kat’s driver’s side as if insulted, crunching the cab. The impact ripped the wheel from Gus’s pained grasp. The bright, blazing world filled his viewport and slanted for gravity-defying seconds. Steel shrieked a death-metal chorus, almost making eardrums bleed.

Then the Kat slammed down.

The noise subsided to dull groans and a disturbing patter.

The world darkened.

Stilled.

Gus opened his eyes, sucking in ragged breaths, and smelled blood, smoke, and burnt rubber. The last thing he remembered, besides the supernova of a minigun unloading itself straight into his face, was being slammed into the steering wheel… and the sight of the flatbed’s end flipping up and swatting the side of the Kat like a plank.

Crossbeams of painted steel lay above him, and he realized he was on his back, gasping. Each breath hurt, and he suspected broken ribs. Probably a lot of broken ribs.

Sounds. Kicks. Coughs and crying children.

Alive
.

That put a smile on his face.

Gus turned his head and saw an unmoving Collie stretched out on the floor, pale face splashed with blood. His smile faltered.

Warm hands clutched his head, righting it.

“Gus,” a voice echoed softly.

He tried to speak but couldn’t.

A shadow hovered over his eyes, blotting out the day.

And oblivion sucked him down.

The surf rolled onto the beach and dragged itself back. Gus sat on the sands and watched it, thinking thoughts as clean and sparkling as the receding water. Clouds speckled the sky, perhaps southward bound, and while he couldn’t see a sun, that didn’t bother him. It was summertime, and all seemed very well with the world.

“Gus.”

He turned around and saw the Captain, swishing a red hat at his knees, resplendent in his foppish attire. The black scarf covering his head made him appear dashing, with a pinch of rapscallion thrown in for taste.

“Didn’t hear you.”

The Captain smiled and squinted at the sky. “Fair skies. Trade winds. Good traveling weather.”

Gus regarded the heavens and nodded slowly. “You’ll be heading off, then?”

“I think so.”

“Caribbean bound?”

This time the Captain smiled and nodded. “Do you miss him?”

“Jerry?”

“Yes.”

Gus thought about that. No. He didn’t miss him. The man who was his brother had died a long time before. The man called Shovel would not be a part of that memory.

“No.”

The Captain absorbed this for a moment, allowing the silence to mellow before slapping his hat and turning to leave.

“Leaving me alone?” Gus asked, smiling.

That gave the old sailor pause. “Never alone, my son.” He smiled then, and Gus joined him.

When the moment passed, the Captain left him.

Gus watched his friend walk away, down the beach, until his outline faded into the shimmers of heat.

Gus opened his eyes and saw a window and forest beyond.

He took a shallow breath and made a face at the twinge of discomfort around his ribs.

A battered man sat in a chair at the foot of his bed. His name was Marty. Marty had been one of Shovel’s group who didn’t share the warlord’s worldview but went along with the pack for fear of his life. At the battle of Whitecap, Marty and a few others had seen an opportunity, and they’d seized it, turning their guns on the few remaining followers bent on killing everyone in the Komatsu truck. When the dust cleared, only Marty and a woman called Melissa lived to help the survivors from the Kat.

“Gus.”

“Marty,” Gus greeted. “How you doing?”

“Could be better.”

“Hear that. Where’s Mel?”

“She’s out making rounds. Not too far, I guarantee that.”

Gus lay on the gurney, his bed ever since a week before, since the battle at the base of Whitecap.

“You sure you want to do this?” Marty asked.

“Yeah.”

“I could finish it and leave it at that.”

“Just help me up.”

Marty did as told.

He could walk, slowly, careful not to get his blood flowing too much as the pain could be dizzying. According to Maggie, he’d fractured four of his lower ribs, and she’d done all she could with the resources available to her. His lungs were fine, but he wouldn’t be doing anything heavy for quite a while. That suited Gus. He could use a little R and R.

The little convoy, consisting of a motor home and the last remaining pickup, had pushed east under Maggie’s direction until they stopped for the night in the parking lot of a deserted motel and gas station. Gus had asked Marty to do something for him, and he’d done it.

One last request had to be honored.

The two men stood at the edge of the parking lot, their breaths vapor in the air. The season’s first snow glittered in their flashlight beams. A pick and shovel had been thrown down in the weeds next to a cone of cold dirt. When Gus came upon it, he stopped and stared down at the nearby hole and the ice cooler it contained.

“This okay?” Marty asked, carrying one of several assault rifles they’d picked up after Whitecap.

“Yeah,” Gus said.

“Who was he, anyway?”

“He was…” Gus started, staring down at the cooler containing the last few remains found of Clay “Ollie” Wallace.
Who was he?
He was a soldier, a condescending bastard—at least in the beginning—and a husband who loved his wife. He was determined, focused, Gus decided, and he’d sacrificed himself in the fight against Shovel’s pack of killers.

“He was the man who saved my life,” Gus admitted quietly, “and a friend.”

Marty nodded, satisfied with the answer, and asked no more questions.

Gus appreciated that. “Guess I should say something,” he muttered, feeling the onset of the cold. “Give me a few minutes, willya? I’ll call you over when I’m ready.”

Marty didn’t object. He walked off into the night.

“Wallace. Ollie,” Gus began after a few moments. “At least, I hope I can call you that now. Listen. Ah, sorry for the cooler. There weren’t any coffins around, and, well, Marty didn’t really find much of you to fill one even if we did.”

Gus thought that sounded lame and tried again.

“It snowed yesterday. I slept through the whole thing, but it’s covering the ground now. And, from what I can see, you’re going to rest next to a motel and a gas station. Looks nice. Good location. Bet they did steady business here in this part of New Brunswick.”

He stopped then, reflective, holding the flashlight and seeing a few flakes just starting to fall.

“Spoke too soon. Snow’s falling now. Anyway, I’ll keep this short. I’m not one for this kinda thing. Never had to do it before. Certainly never had to bury anyone before. We’re all here, safe. At least those of us still living, because of you. We got the kids, and we got Maggie back. She’s leading the group. Seems like she got word of a place back east, a safe place Shovel was planning to take after he got into Whitecap. No one went in there, in case you were wondering. I was out for it, but Maggie had Marty and Melissa and the kids gather up whatever was useful over two days and pack it away. Food. Guns. Ammo. Y’know. Regular camping shit.”