Thunder Road

Mildred was enraged. “Why the hell did he take Krysty away?”

Doc smiled sadly. “Because, my dear doctor, I fear that like so many of us, he may not be exactly of sound mind.”

“A crazy. Great,” Jak snorted.

Doc’s smile broadened. “I think you may have missed my point, dear boy. If he has this one aim in mind—that Krysty become converted to his cause in order to convert us—then he will do all within his power to keep her alive and well. It’s in his best interest. And, of course, he is unwittingly buying us time to find and destroy him.”

“He’s going to be looking for us sooner or later, right?” J.B. pointed out.

“Exactly,” Doc agreed. “The irony is that he has mistaken our pragmatism for a sense of spurious justice, and faith in a law that no longer exists. A misunderstanding that will lead him straight back to us. In a sense, we have no need to chase him. He will come to us.”

Ryan’s face split into a grin for the first time since they’d lost Krysty. “Guess you’re right, Doc. But let’s go after the coldheart anyway.”

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor:
The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth:
Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer:
Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner:
Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth:
Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren:
A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor:
Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Thunder Rider rides again!

With a full-throttled roar from the throat of his magnificent iron steed, the masked avenger, the seeker of justice, the righter of wrongs, roared into the small town. Villainy trembled beneath his iron heel, and those with much to fear fled in abject terror at his approach.

There was much wrong with this town. For too long the forces of lawlessness had held sway over the land, allowing evil to flourish. He could see it in the faces of those he passed as they leveled their weapons, turning with the following wind of his trusty machine, their aim arcing to follow and intercept its trajectory. He narrowed his eyes against the slipstream of the wind, even though the thick Plexiglas goggles protected them. It was more an indication of his steely and grim determination as his face set into a mask of fury.

He threw the motorcycle into a skid, one hand diving to the battered leather holster—inherited from those who had rode this path before—and freeing the .44 Magnum gun he used for maximum effect. It wasn’t just the damage inflicted by the bullets, it was the mighty roar of the weapon that struck fear into the hearts of those who dared oppose him. With his free hand he gripped the specially modified steering, power-assisted to be as light as the softest down to his touch. The bike responded to the feather’s breath of movement, the tonnage of screaming hot metal beneath him scoring an arc of dirt that flew up into a blinding shower, acting as a screen to the full angle of his turn.

As the way in front of him cleared, he saw the first of the coldhearted villains standing before him, defiant, aiming a long-barreled rifle in his direction. Without pause, without even the need to register and react, he squeezed the trigger of the .44, the gun bucking and rearing in his hand, the shock of recoil absorbed by the whipcord tendons of his wrist.

The villain’s sneer of menace turned into a gasp of disbelief as the slug from the mighty Magnum weapon ripped into him, tearing a gaping maw in what had once been his chest. Thunder Rider’s lips parted in a tight smile of satisfaction. One down, but many more to go. As the rest of the villains scattered, he snapped off a few quick shots. If one hit, then all well and good. Their real purpose was to act as a deterrent, to drive the opposition back and give him enough time to circle with greater care, reholster the gun and withdraw the MP-15 assault rifle from the casing that kept it firmly strapped to the chassis of the bike.

It was time to take out some trash….

Easing on the throttle, he headed for the center of the town. From his recon, he knew that this was where the young women were being held hostage. It was his task to free them from their bondage. They were being kept captive in a large building guarded by seven heavily armed men.

Although Thunder Rider had announced his arrival in no uncertain terms, he knew that the villains of this town had nothing as fast as his iron steed, nothing in their transport to match his speed and power. This, and the training he had put in to hone himself to the peak of fitness and to the mastery of his machine—until the point where he and the bike were almost as one—were more than enough to level the odds, no matter how outnumbered he may be.

The building where the women were being held was in his sights. Seven men approached him. They made it too easy. Clustered together, they presented an easy target. Without slowing, and without veering one degree from the course he had set himself, he raised the MP-15 and loosed the last of the grenades at the group of villains. Two of the men vanished as though they had never existed. One second they were there; the next they were a fine spray of blood, bone and flesh. The other five were wounded in differing degrees. Each fatally, the only difference being the amount of time it took them to die.

He slewed the bike to a stop and dismounted in one fluid movement. Erect, and with a swagger in his stride that bespoke a man not to be messed with, he racked the MP-15 and entered the building. A few craven souls cowered in front of him. He pulled the .44 from its holster and fired a few shots into the floor. They scattered.

“Ladies,” he said, his stentorian tones resounding around the echoing and empty inside of the building, “you can come out now, you are free.”

They emerged slowly, like small mammals blinking in the sunlight, staring at him with uncomprehending eyes.

“Your captivity is at an end. You may go where you wish, do as you wish. None shall hold you prisoner from this day forth, lest they fall beneath the wrath of Thunder Rider.”

Crisply, he turned on his heel, after the briefest of bows, and strode out of the building into the wan sunlight. He mounted his iron steed, looking around at the peace that now reigned, and nodded to himself. It was good.

He kicked the massive engine into life and rode off into the distance, another wrong righted. Another step toward justice.

I
T WAS A DAY
like any other day. But not for long.

The ville of Casa Belle Taco was clustered around the remnants of a mall left from the days of predark. It was named after the gaudy house, which had been housed in the remnants of an old fast-food restaurant, and had grown over the years to cement its reputation as the finest gaudy in New Mex. Trade convoys and parties of marauding coldhearts would make special journeys to drink the psychotropic brew that was the house speciality, and to watch the sluts perform in shows with each other and selected members of the audience before offering services to the highest bidders. Not many men would bid for a gaudy slut, but these were no ordinary girls. It was said that they could do things that most men could only dream were possible.

Casa Belle Taco was a small ville. Rich in jack because of the gaudy house, those who lived there worked in some connection with the focal point of the ville. They either catered the gaudy, worked as staff or were sec. Even those who ran the local stores and ran sec on the perimeter were under the command of Mad Jack Flack, the baron of the ville—although baron was, in truth, a big title for a pesthole like Casa. Predark, he would have been the biggest pimp in the area, but no more.

The first indication of trouble had been the approach of the vehicle. Traffic in and out of the ville was no strange thing, but never before had the patrolling sec crews seen a single vehicle. Never before had they seen one that had eaten up the dirt and dust at such a pace.

“Sec force” was too dignified a name, in truth, for the two men in a wag, blasters idly at their sides, who watched the approach almost with disinterest.

Any danger from such a rapid approach was lost on them: the ville’s reputation was such that no one wanted to upset the baron and get banned from the Casa.

The stranger burned rubber as he entered the ville. Astonished men with blasters at their sides were reduced to chilled corpses as the stranger pulled his blaster and fired indiscriminately. He was an expert rider on his machine, and it was almost impossible for the befuddled, bemused and still stoned men of the ville to get a bead on him. For the most part they ran for cover. Discretion was not so much the better part of valor as the chance to stay alive. All the same, many of them were chilled by stray slugs as he switched to a high-powered blaster. Then the first of the grens hit home, reducing much of the ville off the main drag to smoldering rubble, which meant most of the ville, as Casa Belle Taco was nothing more than a few buildings leading off the road to the gaudy house.

The sec force that manned the gaudy was a little more together than those who patrolled the outreaches. Even so, roused as some of them were in a stuporous sleep, they were still a ragged force as they rushed out to meet the oncoming danger.

Tactics and strategy weren’t even words to them. They all arrived at the front of the building, following the sound of the vehicle, not even thinking of what an easy target they presented.

If they hadn’t thought of this beforehand, they had less than no time to think of it when the stranger took advantage of their clustering to take them out with ease.

Baffled and scared, those still alive watched from hiding as the stranger dismounted and strode into the gaudy house. Inside, the gaudy sluts hid, also. Who knew what the triple-mad freak wanted from them.

The last thing they expected was his little speech, and for him to bow to them and leave them confused and staring with bemusement at the chaos around them.

Who the hell was this triple-stupe bastard? And what was the idea behind blasting their livelihood to shit and then telling them they were free? What use was that with no jack? Shit, they’d been happy with their lives until this asshole rode into town and screwed everything up. Now they had a gaudy house in a mess, and no sec to keep the customers in order.

Might as well have slit their throats and have done with it.

As one of them walked to the door and watched the cloud of dust recede into the distance, she wasn’t to know that they were just the first call of the day for the man who called himself Thunder Rider.