“Hold it there!”
“Where?”
A ruined face stares back, oozing blood to add to the river flowing past their knees. It coughs, twitches once. Moans. Tattoos twist across sunken cheeks.
“Harder!”
His hands tear a dirty strip off his shirt; the remains of it. Strings it tight over the blood and the shaved remains of her braids, the worn lines along her raised neck where the necklace digs in deep. She never takes it off.
She’ll probably be buried in it.
“Tie it on. You know the drill.”
She’s too tired to argue.
The rig bounces and creaks and bucks like the wild thing it was. Glass tinkles, drops across the shambles of the cargo bay like ice. Signatures in .50, .30 and buckshot are scrawled along the old beast’s iron sides, etched so deep he could stare out from the ‘bay floor to watch the burned rolling hills.
The door to the cab is dented, ajar. Only the inch-thick steel stopped him from being blown to paste across the dash. He can only be thankful for it.
Anything else was a misery.
He feels his boots splash through the gore; feels his tread press on cold flesh and broken bone.
They’d picked up Amarett in the cells. Promised him loot, food; a place to lay his bedroll at night. The open roads made no promises. Even overpasses are often burned out, broken places where the renders rise from their roadside ditches to cook, to skin, to eat their forbidden flesh.
He presses against the door handle. Amarett stares up at him; glassy eyed, gut a ruin from sternum to groin. One less man to pay off.
The cab is silent, littered with splinters of wood, shards of glass, sweat stains, blood stains and smoke. Grit crunches under his boots. The high chair in front of him is missing the backrest. It had been blown apart and spat across the back door.
A head still shows; shaven and starved like the rest of them. Its hands still clutch the wheel. Glassy, blue-tinged eyes follow the broken relic of the highway, running east through the miles and miles of burned out suburbs. Overpasses here are intact, but deserted. The bandits and psychos watched the rig rip ruin through the industrial zones.
Life is the only currency in the urban zones. They’re unwilling to spend their own.
“Miles?”
Miles’s right hand droops over the gearshift, unmoving, unresponsive.
It is pale.
He crosses to the shotgun seat.
“Miles?”
Miles topples from his seat, kidneys and bowel trailing into the pedals. Half of him is gone, shredded by the ancient guns of the downtown. The stink is horrible.
He drags Miles aside. Sits in the ruined seat and guns the engine. Slams the rig into second, the rhythm seizing his hand as his deadbeat eyes watch the curve of the road disappear up ahead, into haze. The city gathers decades of pollution around itself like dusty skirts; the leavings of the pyres burning downtown.
They hadn’t stopped since the end of the world.
He takes the curve at speed, in sixteenth with all remaining cylinders firing. Garbage fills the roadside ditches like snow. The renders hide under those piles for stopped trucks.
His foot never wavers.
Around the bend are the remains of a wall higher than the cab. Pieces are scattered across the road; the remains of giants or time at play. It’s been chopped down to size; no more than knee high.
Aren’t we all?
The highway climbs through the haze.
***
Sunset turns the wastes to blood.
He’s been driving for twenty-two hours now. Two have passed since he took the wheel out of Miles’s dead fingers. There’s been no time to shift him from his sprawl across the shotgun seat. No time to stop and bury him, or simply throw him to the wolves and the renders.
No energy, either. The crew is passed out or dying.
“She’s dying.”
Rose held the cab’s frame. He only glanced through the rear-view.
“We’ve got to stop. Stitch her up proper.”
“Look behind us.”
She crossed the cab; lithe and young and bombarded by horrors. Her face and arms looked like someone had knitted her flesh with barbed wire. She ached, peered through the rear-view. By a miracle, it’s intact.
“Urban Zones. Hell on Earth. Our payoff. So what if there are burning skyscrapers? So what if the dredges, the vultures of the world drive here to die? She’s dying.”
“Or we all could die. We keep going. Get back to her. Or get on a gun. We stop when we can. That doesn’t include a roadside haunt.”
Houses surround them like trees. The suburb jungles of the mad and the bandits are worse than the cities. They might not be smoke-wreathed, but you will die before seeing the light of day.
He wonders if they should pull over and ask for a room.
He wonders why he isn’t mad. Why he isn’t dead.
They’re mutually exclusive.
***
“Here?”
“Here.”
The wastes are behind them. Now, there are fields. Endless fields, all scorched, all burned in the death throes of a metropolis. The road threads all the countries of hell together.
On the right, a kilometer down, there’s a wall. It’s cut from brick, cement, and pavement; rimmed with earth. Rising above it is a ruby-red platform; a gas station.
Pegged beside that is an old highway turn-off sign; Pit Stop 169.
It’s shelter.
There’s a figure on the road; old, shabby, as worn and wrinkled as they feel. He’s got a double-barrel over a shoulder; probably a SPAS-12 stolen from a police armoury.
Rose stands behind him. Hephaestus is plying his trade with wrench and hammer, holding together this floundering wreck before she sinks.
They’re the last ones standing.
He isn’t afraid. He simply stands beside the stop, shotgun over his shoulder with an etched face that’s as old as the burning pyres and spider-web of rotting corpses that’s the city behind them.
Probably older.
He slams on the brakes, feels several panels crack. The tank reads empty. He’s been riding the last drops since they passed Mavis.
The man walks around.
“Name?”
“This your place?”
“Name?”
“Everett Rover. This is my crew.”
“’Zone run?” He runs tired eyes up and down the slashed hood, the decimated windshield. The ruined paint and grill clogged with flesh.
“Yeah. We’ve got wounded.”
He shrugs.
“I’ve got a stove and some bandages, maybe some whiskey. If you can pay.”
“We can pay.”
They‘re deadbeat and bleeding, but they could pay for anything.
“Truck stays here. Not enough room inside. Your guns stay with me and my cousins.”
Two men walk through the ramshackle gate set into the wall. Both are hooded, wrapped in several layers of coat and quilting. Both heft old rifles, bolt action basic survival rifle models.
“Fair enough.”
He doesn’t carry. Hadn’t since they drove in.
The two step into the back, bang around.
“Where you from, trucker?”
Everett jerks a thumb to the wastes at his back.
“That a problem?”
The old man shrugs.
“We get all kinds.”
***
The opening section of "Pit Stop". It's been my joy, learning curve, and merciless project from day one, so I figure it gets pride of place here.