Wasteland Warlords: Chapter 3 - Bonafide Monster Hunters

“What the hell were you thinking, Joe?” Alex asked as they shook out their tent to unroll it.

Joe kicked back against the wall. “I only answer to Lumberjack Joe now.”

He wasn’t slurring at all, which was actually kind of impressive considering how much booze he’d put away. Drinking had always been one of Joe’s talents, though, like filling the yard of anywhere he lived with rusted out lawn mowers.

“This isn’t Scooter’s Bar down on the corner.” Clay grabbed the edge of the waterproof material and helped Alex lay the tent out. “The guys here aren’t friendly neighborhood construction workers or off-duty cops like back home—most of them are killers. You can’t just get wasted with a total stranger in a place like this. And not just any stranger, but a freaking Incant.”

“Especially after what happened in Visalia,” Alex added.

Joe waved that off. “Totally different situations. Like comparing apples and calculators.”

Clay paused in hammering a tent stake into the hard, dusty ground. “What I want to know is how you thought you were going to pay. Trade off Bertha?”

“First off, I would never,” Joe said, splaying his hand on his chest with wounded dignity. “Don’t listen to these haters, Bertha. Second of all, it worked out, didn’t it? I made some new friends, and we got a few coppers in change out of the mix. Once the tab was settled up.”

Clay snorted. “Morgan paid you a gold to shut up and leave him alone. I wouldn’t call that making a new friend.”

“You would if you had the right perspective. Like yours truly.” Joe surveyed the other tents set up in the area. Across the little encampment, cook fires glowed, fed on the refuse and small amounts of brush available. Their own pile of kindling sat forgotten at Joe’s feet. “Besides, you’re forgetting about my good buddies the Wilfords from the great state of Arkan’s Ass. Me drinking shots with those boys got us further than either of you did, so I say they were a better investment than checking the boards or chatting it up with that piece of dried out boot leather with the missing eye.”

Alex hooked a tent stake through a ring. “If we don’t check, we can’t be sure they don’t have what we’re looking for.”

Joe blinked. “Come on, there had to be a double-negative in there somewhere.”

“Don’t you have a fire to make?” she said, but she was trying not to smile.

Joe pointed at Clay. “Judge, can I get grammar ruling?”

“No double-negatives.” Clay tossed Alex the mallet and got to work on the fire himself. “And what time exactly are we supposed to meet your good buddies tomorrow?”

“We roll out at sunrise. I’m telling you, dude, these guys are the real deal. They called grinding ‘taking a run outside the wire.’ How freaking pro is that?”

“Hopefully pro enough to know where we can find a Dungeon Lord,” Clay said.

They finished setting up and ate a small meal to help soak up some of the booze before calling it a night. Joe was out like a light in minutes, but Clay lay awake for an hour, nestled up against Alex’s back. His body was crying out for sleep, but it was a long time in coming. His mind cycled through the thousand and one different ways this operation could turn south. The scenarios and possibilities were endless.

Someway, though, he would keep Alex alive, no matter what that old weed said.

***

The next morning, as the sun peeked over the horizon, they met up with the Wilford brothers—the musclebound Derail and lanky Roy Lee. Neither of the Arkansas boys were Incants, but they’d been freelancing in the IZ for the better part of a year and had even built their own badass body armor out of a combo of tactical vests, enchanted metal plates, and custom scale mail sleeves. In addition to their ingenuity, neither one seemed too hung over to get the job done, which Clay and Alex had discussed as a possibility over their scant dinner the night before. Really, that was no small miracle given the volume of moonshine the Wilfords had helped Joe consume.

After the eldest Wilford, Derail, ran down the recon they had done the day before and went through a detailed briefing on the terrain and known monster nests in and around Bakersfield, they headed outside the protective walls of Camp Liberty.

“Y’know, we coulda give ya a rifle or a big ass sword, if you like the two-hander weapons,” Roy Lee said, eyeing Joe’s chainsaw. “You don’t have to lug around that hunk a junk all day.”

Joe hugged Bertha to his chest. “Do you have any idea what this is? This is a Poulan Pro Classic, my friend. Twenty-inch bar, 62 ccs under the hood. You don’t just discard a monster-hunting machine like this, no matter how well intentioned the offer. I mean, have you ever even seen Army of Darkness?”

“No one’s seen Army of Darkness but you,” Clay said. “That movie is from like a thousand years ago.”

“Hey. Classics are classics for a reason,” Joe shot back with a scowl. “And maybe if you had watched it, you’d know that toting this chainsaw along is gonna save our asses one day.”

“Assuming you can find gas for it,” Clay said with a shrug.

Joe’s scowl deepened. “Oh, believe you me, I’m gonna find gas for her.”

Derail took the point of the formation, with Joe and Alex in the middle, Clay behind them, and Roy Lee bringing up the rear as they headed toward the Uninhabitable Zone that used to be Bakersfield.

During his time in Jordan, Clay had seen more than his fair share of shit. He’d fought in the bombed-out shells of what used to be homes, watched as vehicles were ripped to shreds by bands of crimson magic, and had to fend off wild dogs, twisted by the power of an Incant. Walking into Bakersfield was at the same time all too familiar and completely alien. The place was a warzone, though of a different variety. Everything was more feralsomehow—the remnants of human reclaimed by something wholly unnatural. It was like Jordan, if Jordan were on ’roids… And playing a guitar while attached to a post-apocalyptic tank like a hood ornament.

They passed an airfield that looked like it had been hit by a firenado. The terminals were burned out husks, and here and there pieces of wing or landing gear sat rusting apart.

A hunched gray-green creature flashed by the edge of Clay’s vision, disappearing into the twisted fuselage of a helicopter. He followed it with his M4, but the thing was gone before he could get a shot off.

“Oh, don’t worry about those little guys,” Roy Lee said. He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “Boggles are more afraid of you than you are of them. Ammo’s hard to come by out here, so save it for the big boys.”

The hot mineral smell of an oil fire hung on the air, thanks to the burning wreckage of oil derricks they kept passing. Not one had been left standing.

Alex gasped and pointed out something with ragged orange wings flitting in and out of the fire.

“Flame mephits,” Derail said. “Y’oughta ask your crossbow buddy at the gate about those puppies sometime.”

“Think I’ll pass,” Alex said.

They stuck to old Route 99 where they could, weaving around wrecked SUVs, sedans, and trucks, only deviating from the road where the overpasses had caved in, but always getting back to the cut of asphalt as quickly as they could.

“You don’t wanna get bogged down out there,” Derail explained, gesturing with his Uzi at what looked like a landfill. “Bunch of trash monsters dug in up to their earballs. No big deal when they’re on their own, but they’ll swarm you if you fiddlefart around.” He grinned over his shoulder. “Ain’t that right, Roy Lee?”

“Fucksake, man, you get overrun one time and it’s all anybody can talk about.”

Joe squinted out at the trash pile. “Dude, are those houses?”

“Used to be,” Roy Lee said with a knowing nod. “What I heard, this stretch of town was the hopping place to live back before the Merge. Then the monsters moved in, and boom, there goes the neighborhood. Right down the crapper.”

Another mile down the road, they took the 204 interchange, and the destroyed residential area gave way to ruined industrial complexes, warehouses, factories, and trainyards.

They were picking their way through a rusty, burnt-out twelve-car pileup on the river bridge when Clay heard the roar of engines. It was coming from the city side of the bridge.

Derail threw up his fist. “We got gobbos! Take cover and get ready to light ’em up!”

Roy Lee hooted and hollered, a broad smile breaking across his face. “Time to get some!”

Clay and Alex ducked behind the crushed box of an overturned bread truck, while Joe and the Wilfords took cover among the chunks of concrete and rebar from the destroyed median.

A trio of motorcycles thundered onto the bridge—two bobbers sporting desert camo spray painted onto spikey armor plating and a big ugly chopper stuck to an equally ugly sidecar with a crude flamethrower mounted to the hood. Bent, misshapen green creatures in mismatched armor, black leather, and an assortment of dusty motorcycle gear piloted the things, weaving in and out of the crashed cars at insane speeds and gibbering at the top of their lungs.

The flame thrower was the biggest threat. Clay tracked the chopper’s pilot as it bobbed and weaved through the busted cars, looking for the shot. The goblin’s half-shell helmet kept popping up, its mohawk of metal spikes clearly visible.

Roy Lee leapt onto a debris pile. With a delighted whoop, the Wilfords opened up on the bobber in the lead like they had unlimited ammo to dump and limited number of minutes to dump it in. One of the bullets must’ve done the trick, though, because the bobber crashed and rolled, scraping its rider across the highway, turning the little green bugger into so much meat paste.

The second bobber reared up and ramped its buddy’s wreckage, taking to the air, its wheels spinning madly, light glinting off the rust-pitted chrome fixtures.

Up by the cab of the bread truck, Alex’s shotgun boomed, vomiting fire and lead in equal measures. The blast knocked the driver off the flying bobber midair. It slapped to the concrete in a crunch of armor.

Impossibly, the little bastard popped to his feet and produced a pair of bike chain whips. With a cackle, it sprinted across the concrete. Alex’s shotgun racked and boomed again, this time taking the creature’s head off.

Finally, the chopper Clay was tracking tore into the open, Mohawk still at the helm. The flamethrower wielder was a pointy-faced creature who had a second, smaller face growing off a lump on the side of its head like an oversized tumor. It pointed the nozzle at Roy Lee. Before it could trigger the flamethrower, Clay squeezed the trigger and sprayed a lined of .556 across the two gobbos.

Oily brown blood spurted from Twin Head, and its lumpy face went slack, but a transparent blue shield of light flashed to life around Mohawk. The bullets sparked off harmlessly, ricocheting into the twisted form of a burned-out SUV.

Mohawk cranked the handlebars toward the bread truck, sending the ugly chopper into a drift. In the sidecar, Twin Head’s one living face shrieked like a banshee as its knobby hands triggered the flamethrower.

An orangey mix of gasoline and diesel spewed from the nozzle, fire racing across the spray toward Clay. He dove away from the truck, hitting the concrete of the bridge’s walkway, then slamming into the metal railing.

“Big boy’s got him a projectile shield!” Derail cried, ecstatically. “Look out now!”

There was a metallic shing, and a hand grenade flew out from behind the debris pile. Mohawk and Twin Head bailed. Clay ducked and covered, curling in on himself.

The grenade’s explosion shook the bridge and sent chunks of chopper shrapnel somersaulting through the air. While dust and debris still swirled in the air, Clay quickly scampered across the asphalt and took cover behind a chunk of concrete to avoid a burning tire. Just in time, too. He didn’t see the flamethrower explode, but he heard the whumph and felt a blast of heat as the fireball ate up the oxygen around him.

He was still trying to breathe when Mohawk slammed into him headfirst like a missile. The helmet-shot knocked the wind out of Clay and left his ribs screaming in pain. Thankfully only one of the spikes managed to puncture his vest.

Mohawk scrabbled and snarled and bit, all teeth and claws, but Clay shoved a forearm up under the thing’s jaw, holding it off. Barely. The wiry bastard was smaller than him by a fair margin, but it was strong as hell and it writhed like a rattlesnake.

Clay grabbed for his Kbar with his free hand. Like a lightning strike, Mohawk twisted around and sunk its teeth into Clay’s forearm. The gobbo’s teeth were like chunks of broken glass. They tore through the fabric covering his arms like a lawnmower through a birthday cake and sank into the flesh below. Hot jags of pain raced through Clay’s arm and white stars danced at the edge of his vision. With a shout, Clay tried to kick the bastard off, but it was useless.