Hell's Maw by James Axler Read Free Book Online Page A

goodness of her heart. Cold hard cash was in the equation somewhere, and if that didn’t sit well with Kane’s more philanthropic instincts, then he could console himself that the food was going to hungry people who needed it. Traders like Ohio Blue profited out of misery, but they served a need that otherwise went unfulfilled.
    Kane’s partners were located in the two other wags, while Kane took the foremost, wary of a frontalassault. The middle wag contained Brigid Baptiste, an ex-archivist from Cobaltville who, like Kane, had stumbled onto the conspiracy at the top of the ville and been swiftly exiled from its walls. Brigid and Kane had worked together for a long time, ever since that exile into the so-called hell beyond the ville walls. During that time, they had learned that they shared a mystic bond that traversed time and space. That bond named them anam-charas , or soul friends, and it put them closer than siblings or lovers, a deeper bond than mere flesh or chronological time could contain.
    Guarding the rearmost wag was Domi. Domi was another exile from Cobaltville, although she had been born an outlander in the atomic wastes beyond its high walls. Unlike most of the Cerberus staff, which numbered almost forty housed in a refitted military redoubt in Montana, Domi had little in the way of a formal education. As such, she could come across as brash, even animal-like in her desires and the methods that she considered acceptable in achieving those desires. Kane, however, trusted her implicitly. He figured that if she was wild with an uncontrollable streak, then it was better to have her at his side than at somebody else’s.
    The trio of wags trundled on across the stark landscape under the afternoon cloud cover. The wags were similar without matching. They were tired things, old designs patched together and brought back into service, a caking of mud and dirt and poor repaints loaning them the appearance of patchwork quilts as they bumped over the rough road. All three had flatbed rears, though the rearmost included a rail around the bed for added security. A two-man cab sat up front, where driver and shotgun traveled, scanning the long road for danger. Behind the cab of the front and rear vehicles, a makeshift gun turret had been installed, running a .50 gauge machine gun with belt ammo,while the middle wag had two smaller guns installed on tripods on the rear. The vehicles ran on alcofuel—“homebrew engines,” the drivers called them, which gave some insight into where that fuel was coming from.
    Crouched between sacks, Kane kept alert. Back in his Magistrate days he had been fabled for his point-man sense, a seemingly uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened. It was no supernatural ability, however—just the combination of his five senses making intuitive leaps at an almost Zen-like level.
    The road seemed empty, abandoned even, like a lot of the back roads across the territory that had once been called the United States of America. So much had suffered in the nukecaust, and the population had been reduced to one-tenth of what it had been before the war. That left back roads like this abandoned and forgotten, and even now, two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, they remained overgrown and despoiled. There was an irony in that, Kane saw—that it was almost impossible to grow crops on the irradiated land and yet the old roads had become beds for wild grasses.
    They were approaching a rise, the splutter of the wag engine loud as it tackled the incline. Kane thought back to how Ohio Blue had described the previous attacks on her freight convoys. “The wags were crippled and left to rot,” she had said, “and my men had been singed by fire, their flesh burned away. Those who had survived had been incomprehensible, babbling about red and amber lights as though they had been attacked by a predark traffic signal.”
    He was armed, of course, even