Route 666 Anthology Read online

  Dark Future

  Route 666

  edited by

  David Pringle

  Published by GW Books

  Copyright © 1990 Games Workshop

  ISBN: 1–872372–03–1

  All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Version: 1.0

  Route 666

  by Jack Yeovil

  Brother Claude was going to die soon. He hoped.

  They had left him in the middle of the road, then driven over him a whole bunch of times. Cars, cykes, RVs, everything. He could have sworn that the third from last was at least a half-track. He could feel the sharp ends of his snapped bones stabbing inside him as he breathed, and he knew too much of him was broken, crushed or squashed to fix. They had been cruel, and concentrated on his extremities, his legs and arms. He had hoped they would kill him outright, but here he was left to die slowly in the sun. It would probably be suffocation that got him—he was finding it almost impossible to draw breath into his collapsed lungs—or else loss of blood. Even those fancy-shmancy GenTech bio-implants and replacement doodads couldn’t do anything for him, even if he could have afforded that kind of repair work. Not that he approved of that kind of mad scientist stuff. It was better to die clean than go on living with half your guts replaced by vacuum cleaner parts and computer terminals. Before they drove on, one of them had knelt almost tenderly by him and spilled a little water into his mouth. He tasted his own blood in the water.

  “Are you okay, brother?” The kneeling water-dispenser had asked, concern dripping from her every syllable.

  Brother Claude had tried to smile, had tried to make the woman—if woman she was—feel better.

  “Good,” she had said, black against the sun. Then she had kicked him again, breaking a few more of his bones.

  They had driven away after that, leaving the stink of their exhaust in the air, haring off after the motorwagons, firing to wound or damage, not to do any serious harm.

  Dying clean. Funny how it didn’t seem so clean after all. Nobody had chanced along the freeway since they had left. Brother Claude wasn’t surprised. Only a damfool would venture this far into the desert. A fool, or a pilgrim…

  He was twisted in the middle, so he was face up, but skewed at the hips, groin pressed to the asphalt. He couldn’t feel anything below his ribs. Which, considering what he could feel from the rest of him, was probably a mercy. He realized he was deaf, and that one of his eyes was sealed shut by a rind of dried blood.

  Brother Claude hadn’t always been with the Church. In the Phoenix NoGo, he had been a gofer for the Knights of the White Magnolia, and then a soldier in the War. Not any of the overseas wars—like the ones in Cuba or Nicaragua—but the War between the Knights and the Voodoo Brotherhood, when the Knights had tried to clear the nigras out of Arizona. That had been a bust. He had had all these noble ideas about racial purity and holy wars drummed into his head, then it had turned out the Knights were financed by some raghead troublemakers from the Pan-Islamic Congress. He had lived outside Policed Zones all his life, and had always had to follow someone. His Daddy took off early—Mom Akins tried to make out he was some high mucky-muck in a Japcorp, but Claude knew better the types she slung out with—and so he had found other Daddies.

  First was President Heston, in whose Youth Corps he had enlisted during one of the Moral Re-Armament Drives of the mid–1980s. When he was kicked out of that for breaking a Chinese kid’s nose, he transferred his allegiance to Burtram Fassett, the Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of the White Magnolia. And when the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez operative agency broke up the Knights and brought Fassett in, he had drifted a while. Didier Brousset, head houngan of the Brotherhood, put a bounty on the scalps of ex-Knights, and so it wasn’t too healthy to keep your white hood and red-cross robes. Finally, Claude had come upon the Church of Joseph, and found himself a new Daddy in Elder Seth. He had been Saved, he thought, and he didn’t miss recaff or coca-cola or Heavy Metal (the Devil’s music) or carnal relations or fast foods or pockets or any of the things he was required to abjure.

  Elder Seth believed the heartlands of America were not lost after all, believed they could be reseeded, resettled, reclaimed. Most everybody else outside the church said Elder Seth was a damfool, but the Elder had a way of convincing people. Face to face with him, it was difficult to argue. Brother Claude had argued at first, but had come round in the end and signed up for the Church’s Pioneer Program. He had sung the songs with all the others—“The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Tis the Gift to Be Simple,” “Stairway to Heaven”—and been enlisted as shotgun on the first convoy for Salt Lake City. They had all cheered as the convoy put out of Phoenix. Plenty of bignames from the PZ had come out, surrounded by armed guards—natch—and Elder Seth had made a speech to the multitudes. Then the gates of the city were opened, and—after some minimal escorting to get them through the Filter—the resettlers were on their own.

  And here he was now, bleeding himself empty on the Interstate. Flies buzzed, and he kept imagining tall, dark figures standing over him. They had faces he could recognize—President Chuck was there, and ole IGW Fassett, and Elder Seth, and the womanlike beast who had given him water—but no real shape. Elder Seth had talked a lot about angels, and spirits he called the Dark Ones. These must be the Dark Ones.

  Where, Brother Claude wondered, were the others now? Elder Seth, and Brother Bailie, and Sister Consuela, and the Dorsey Twins? If he twisted his head, he could see Brothers Finnegan and Dzundza, man-shaped pizzas in black suits on the other side of the road. Perhaps there were other casualties, out of his range. Carrion birds had come for some of them. The buzzards really did circle overhead.

  He had recognized the colours of his attackers. They were The Psychopomps, one of the mid-sized Western gangcults. Mostly girls. They favoured spiked heels, fishnet body-stockings, basques, glam make-up, stormcloud hairdos, painted fingernail implants, Russian pop music, Kray-Zee pills, random violence, facial mutilations, and Kar-Tel Kustom Kars. Compared with The Maniax, the Clean or The Bible Belt, they were easy-goers. After all, they had only killed three of the resettlers.

  Three. Finnegan. Dzundza. And Claude.

  Something gave in his neck, and his head rolled. His cheek pressed to the hot, gritty road, and his field of vision changed. Beyond the asphalt was the desert. In the distance were mountains. Nothing else. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, hadn’t been for decades.

  The sun shone down, reflecting like a new hundred-dollar coin in the pool of Brother Claude’s blood that was spreading across the road.

  Blood on the road.

  That reminded him of something Elder Seth had said. Something important.

  Blood…

  … on the road…

  Blood…

  A fly landed on Brother Claude’s eyelash. He didn’t blink.

  Trooper Kirby Yorke, United States Cavalry, shot a glance at the route indicator on the dashboard. The red blip of the cruiser was dead centre, the green lines of the map slipping by around it. They had just crossed the state line into Utah and driven up past a place that had once been Kanab. Outside the wraparound sunshade windows, the scenery of Kanab, Utah, could as well be the scenery of Boaz, New Mexico, Shawnee, Oklahoma or almost anywhere in the desert that stretched almost uninterrupted from the foothills of the Appalachians to Washington State. Rocks and sand. Sand and rocks. The Great Central Desert, the Colorado Desert, the Mojave Desert, the Mexican Desert. Pretty soon, they’d have to junk all the names and call it the American Desert. By then, they would all be citizens of the United States of Sand and Rocks.

  The two outrider blips were
also holding steady. Tyree and Burnside, out on their mounts, would be getting hot and sticky by now. You couldn’t air-condition a motorcyke like you could the four-wheel drive canopied transport Yorke was sharing with Sergeant Quincannon. That would be rough on Tyree and Burnside. Yorke liked the feel of the wheel in his hands, liked the feel of the cruiser on the hardtop. He had an appreciation of beautiful machinery. The Jap corporations could put some heavy hardware on the roads, and the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez sanctioned operatives were known for their impressive rolling stock. But the U.S. Cavalry, theoretically independent of the federal government, had access to all the latest military and civilian equipment. On the black market, the cruiser would be worth a cool million gallons of potable water, or an unimaginable equivalent sum in cash money. Yorke thought of the cruiser as a cross between an F–111, the Batmobile, Champion the Wonder Horse and Death on Wheels. And all plugged into the informational resources of Fort Valens and, through the Fort, into the Inter-Agency datanet whose semi-sentient Information Storage and Retrieval centre was in a secret location somewhere in upstate New York.

  Yorke reached up to the overhead locker, and pulled a pack of nicotine-free cigarillos down from Sergeant Quincannon’s stash. The flap was broken, and wouldn’t stick back. The sergeant stopped pretending to be asleep, and accepted one of his own smokes. Yorke noticed a picture of a girl taped to the inside of the flap. It must have been from some very old magazine, because it was in black and white and the image was faded. A blonde stood on the street in a billowing dress, showing her legs. They were nice legs, particularly up around the thighs. But the print on the other side of the picture was showing through, giving her gangcult-style tattoos.

  “An old girlfriend, Quince?”

  Quincannon grunted. “No, Yorke, just the woman who got us all into this.”

  “Into what?”

  “Hell, boy, hell.” The Sergeant lit up, and adjusted the extractor fan. “See those legs. They changed the world.”

  Yorke sucked in a lungful of tar-free, and held it down. Tyree’s blip wavered. The road ahead was unmaintained. She was signalling a slow-down. Sometimes the sand drifted so thick you couldn’t see the asphalt. Yorke adjusted the speed of the cruiser without thinking. This was a routine headache. Nothing serious.

  “Who was she, Jesus’s mother?”

  Quincannon didn’t laugh. “No, that girl was Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Hell, I know who Marilyn Monroe is. She’s in that show on all the teevee nets, I Love Ronnie. She’s that fat lady who lives next to Ronnie and Nancy, and whose feeb husband is always coming over and making trouble. She sure was thin back then. She’s bigger’n Shelley Winters and John Belushi rolled into one these days.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” the Sergeant said, almost wistfully. “Before you were born, she was a big movie star. Back when you saw movies on a screen, boy, not in a box. That pic’s from The Seven Year Itch. I saw all her pictures when I was a kid. Bus Stop, River of No Return, How to Marry a Millionaire. And the later ones, the lousy ones. The Sound of Music—she was no nun, that’s for sure, they laughed her offscreen in that. The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffmann. She was Mrs Robinson. And Earthquake 75. Remember, the woman who gets crushed saving the handicapped orphans?”

  Yorke had never had Quincannon figured for a movie freak. Still, out on patrol, you wound up talking about almost anything. Out here, boredom was your second enemy. After the gangcults.

  “So, she was your pin-up. I kinda had a crush on Redd Harvest back when she was with that rock ‘n’ roll band. And Drew Barrymore was a knock-out in Lash of Lust. But that don’t make ’em world-changers.”

  The cruiser beeped a gas alarm at them. Refuel within a hundred and fifty klicks, or face a shut-down. Yorke stubbed his butt into the overflowing ashtray. The interior of the car could do with a thorough clean at some point. It was beginning to smell pretty ripe.

  “Marilyn wasn’t like the others, Yorke. You’re too young to remember it all. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one that remembers. The only one who knows it could have been different. It was October, 1960. That was an election year. Richard M. Nixon…”

  “I remember him. Trickydick.”

  “Yeah. He was running against a guy called John F. Kennedy. A Democrat…”

  “What’s a Democrat?”

  “Hard to tell, Yorke. Anyway, Kennedy was a real Golden Boy, way ahead in the polls. He was a cinch to win the election. There was a real good feeling in the country at the time. We’d lived through the first Cold War and put up with Dwight D. Boring Eisenhower, and here was this young kid coming along, a war hero, saying that things could change. He was like the Elvis of politics…”

  “Who?”

  “I was forgetting. Never mind. Anyway, Jack Kennedy had a pretty wife, Jackie, and in October 1960, a few weeks before the election, she opened the wrong door and found the freakin’ future president of these United States in bed with Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Sheesh.”

  “Yeah. It was in the papers for what seemed like years. The Kennedys were Catholics and the Pope had a big down on divorce back then, not like the new man in Rome, Georgi. But Jackie sued Jack’s ass, and he took a beating in the court and a bigger one at the polls. The country let itself in for eight years of Richard Milhous Criminal. Remember that scam with the orbital death-rays that wouldn’t work? And the way we stayed out of Vietnam and let the Chinese walk in? Trickydick was like the first real wrong ’un in the White House. Since then, we’ve not had a winner.”

  “I voted for Ollie North, and I’m proud of it.”

  “We didn’t have much choice, Yorke. Remember the others. Two terms’ worth of Barry Goldwater, followed by Spiro Agnew, and then that lousy actor. If they were executin’ any of them for havin’ a brain, they’d be hangin’ an innocent man. Now we’ve got a busted officer with sweaty palms and a used weapons dealer’s eyes. All he can do is kiss ass for the multinats and go on freakin’ teevee gameshows so’s he can lower taxes nobody pays anyway. And Marilyn Monroe started the rot. Without her, things would’ve been… maybe not better, but different.”

  “Is that so?”

  Tyree’s blip came to a halt two and a half klicks up the blacktop. Burnside’s swung in from the dirt and joined it. The patrol was taking an unscheduled stop. Yorke unbuttoned his holster, and put on a burst of speed. He sensed a Situation up ahead. The road felt different somehow. Yorke knew something was wrong. Quincannon was unslinging the pump-action shotgun he kept clipped down by his seat, and fishing fresh rounds out of his bandolier. He jammed a couple into the chamber, and primed the gun.

  “It don’t seem much now, but you had to be there at the time. I’ve a feeling that Jack Kennedy might have done something for this goddamned country. And who knows who else we might have had. Maybe this country wouldn’t be one big beach with the tide three thousand miles out? Maybe… aw heck, maybe everything would be different!”

  They could see the outriders now, standing by their mounts in the middle of the road. Tyree had her hand in the air, and was beckoning them on. There was no immediate danger. Burnside knelt down on the asphalt. He had his helmet off, and his white sweatband stood out against his recaff-coloured skin. There was someone with them, someone lying injured or dead on the ground.

  Yorke realized what had been bothering him. The white line down the middle of the road hadn’t been white for a klick or two.

  It was red.

  This citizen was dead. As usual, he had been overkilled. Trooper Leona Tyree guessed they had run a parade over him. There were a couple of them on the road, all dressed the same, all dead the same. For the first time in the recorded history of the world, according to the newsnets, violence was a bigger killer than disease or starvation. No wonder the population was declining.

  “This one lived a little longer than the others,” said Trooper Burnside, “the poor bastard.”

  Burnside stood up, and brushed road-dirt off the knees of his regulation
blue pants. After a couple of hours out on patrol, the yellow stripes down the side were almost worn away. Like her, he wore gunbelt and braces, heavy gauntlets, a yellow neckerchief and knee-high boots. With his micro-circuit packed skidlid off, he could have been US Cav, 1895 vintage.

  And the desert here had always been the same. There had never been any wheatfields in this part of Utah.

  But it was 1995 all right. You could tell by the treadmarks on the corpses. And by the armoured US Cav cruiser bearing down on them.

  “Here’s the Quince.”

  The cruiser eased to a halt, and Sergeant Quincannon pulled himself out. For a fat old guy, he was in good shape, Tyree knew.

  He had a red complexion that came from high blood pressure, Irish ancestors and Shochaiku Double-Blend Malt, but he never gave less than 150 per cent on patrol. In his off-hours, he was another guy altogether. She gave him the no-trouble sign, and he slung his laser-sight pump action back in the car. Yorke stayed at the wheel. He got kind of squeamish in the vicinity of dead folks, she knew. Not a useful character trait in the Road Cav, but he was stuck with it.

  “What’s the situation?” Quincannon asked.

  “Unidentified casualties, sir,” Tyree replied. “I came upon them just as they are. There were birds, but I shooed them off with a miniscreamer…”

  Quincannon strode up to them.

  “This fella’s been gone for less’n an hour,” put in Burnside. “The others bit the cold one three-four ticks earlier.”

  “Careless driving costs lives.”

  “This wasn’t careless. Whoever did it made freakin’ sure they did a good job.”

  Quincannon wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. A minute out of his air conditioning and he was sweating. There were flies swarming on the corpses. Soon, the atmosphere in these parts wasn’t going to be too pleasant.

  “What do you reckon, sir? Maniax?”

  “Could be, Leona. Or Gaschuggers, KKK, Psychopomps, Razorbacks, Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Bible Belt, Virus Vigilantes, Daughters of the American Revolution, White Knights, Voodoo Bros, or any one of a dozen others. Hell, the Mescalero Apache ain’t been no trouble for over a hundred years, but this is their country too. Killin’ people is the Great American Sport. Always has been.”