Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [50]
“It could be anything, and whatever it was”—Hella emphasized the past tense of the word—“it’s not that anymore. No way it could be anything after hitting the ground like that.”
“Doesn’t matter. Pardot’s convinced that this is what they want. Either we’re going to lead him there or he’s going to set off on his way without us.”
Hella stared at the burning glow in the distance. The meteorite wouldn’t be impossible to find as long as it stayed on fire. And the longer it stayed on fire, Hella was certain, the less of whatever it was would be there to find.
She walked back up to camp, ready to follow Stampede’s lead.
Less than twenty minutes later, Hella still couldn’t believe how quickly Riley and his people could break camp or that the group was mobile. She sat astride Daisy and led the way along the trail to the east. They’d caught a break there: the way they wanted to travel and the trade route Stampede had elected to follow coincided with one another.
She took her readings from a compass and plotted the course through instinct and memory. Stampede stayed more toward the middle of the caravan, where he could provide some cover in case Hella had to retreat from the front.
Their path took them higher up into the Buckled Mountains. By the time morning tinted the eastern sky pink and gold, they’d gone into the highlands, out of the cover of the forest. Red-tailed hawks skated on the winds and watched over them. Carrion eaters, crows and vultures that had come up out of Texas, kept watch over the caravan as well.
At the top of the rise, a good hundred meters in the lead, Hella took up her canteen from the strap around the saddle horn and gazed back the way they’d come. Some of the expedition’s land-crawling vehicles struggled with the incline and the soft ground as they forced themselves upward. Every now and again, a supply wagon lost traction, skidded, and became a danger to everyone below it. Several guards walked alongside the supply wagons, helping keep them in motion.
Although she looked for Colleen, Hella never spotted the woman. She assumed Pardot had Colleen locked down.
Curiosity nagged at Hella as she wiped sleep from her eyes. No one had mentioned what the falling star might have been. She suspected Riley and his men didn’t know either because they were full of questions as well.
So far they’d been lucky with the Sheldons. The biker gang hadn’t come around. She assumed the Purple Dragons had turned back to the south, maybe looking for action in the border towns where Mexico, Texas, and the Redblight crashed into each other along the Raider River.
She climbed down from Daisy, got a water bag, and tied it to the mountain boomer’s face. Glugging with slow deliberation, Daisy drank her fill then whined for a handful of treats till Hella gave them up.
Then Hella remounted and they got under way again. She couldn’t tell for certain how far away the impact site was, and either the fires had dimmed or the morning had leached their color away. She kept her rifle naked across her pommel and watched the surrounding land. There were a lot of hiding places behind the large rocks and in the crevasses caused by the earthquakes that had ripped through the land after the collider had exploded.
She reached into a saddle and took out a crushable boonie hat that kept the sun off her head and neck. She pulled the hat on and kept going.
An hour later they reached the main trade road that cut through the heart of the mountains. Little grass grew along the trail because it was constantly cut and shifted by horses’ hooves and vehicles.
An old man and three small children sat in the shade of an unfurled canvas tarp that stuck out from the mountainside along the road. The man’s black skin didn’t show any signs of disease, and the three children looked healthy, but they quickly hid back up in the rocks behind the old man, moving as sure-footedly as goats.
“Hold up, Stampede.” Hella glanced to her left and right and waved Riley’s wingmen back.
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like maybe