Wasteland Blues (26 page)

Chapter Thirty

For the longest time, the group sat in silence.

They’d hiked into the night, trying to put as much distance between them and the battlefield as they could, before throwing together a quick haggard camp and surrendering themselves to unconsciousness. They woke with the sun, and Leggy boiled some water, warming the last of their coffee over the embers of the previous night’s fire.

The wind rose to a shrill gale and then receded to what, for the Wasteland, might be considered a comfortable zephyr. In the distance, a sandstorm made the grit and dust turn in strange arabesques, but the dance went unnoticed by the sullen band of travelers.

Derek removed his spyglass and scanned the horizon. Endless desert and broken highways as far as the glass eye could see. No signs of life, no signs of civilization. Leggy had called this barren stretch the gateway to the Blasted Lands. Only sand and crumbling tarmac littered the shattered highways, punctuated with distant dust devils, and heat lightning.

Then Derek’s glass caught a slight movement to the south. A man. No, two men—the second had been dwarfed by the enormous girth of the first—were scavenging through the rubble of what might once been a small market or a villa, but was now little more than a dry-rotted abutment of broken adobe and rubble.

For a while Derek watched them scavenge. They were at such a distance that he had no fear of being spotted. The larger one might even surpass Teddy in size—surely he was a mutant of some sort. But, strangely, Derek felt no threat from them. Rather, there was a sense of unspoken kinship, a mutual feeling of…
survival
communicated over the empty miles between them.

They might never meet in person, but Derek could sense that they too were survivors. The giant and his skinny little brother—Derek decided with strange certainty that they
were
brothers, not so very different than he and Teddy. Only these two were not lucky enough to have gathered a group around them, or perhaps they simply preferred traveling alone.

Derek shivered, lowering the spyglass to his crossed legs. For the first time since the beginning of this insane quest, he realized that he was indeed grateful for his traveling companions. Though he knew he would never tell them so—any of them—he also knew that without them he and Teddy would never have made it this far. And without them, he might never make it to New York.

He brought the spyglass back up to his eye. The distant travelers had given up on the ruined market, and dejectedly headed out into the wastes, following the cracked path of their own heat-twisted highway. Derek watched as they hiked farther and farther away. He watched until they became mere dots on the horizon. He watched as the distance between the two grew and grew—the small one lagging behind, and the larger, stronger one trudging ever onward. And Derek watched as the little one fell to his knees in exhaustion and hunger, unable to take another step and his brother went back for him. The giant pulled his brother up onto his shoulders, turned, and then marched out of sight trudging with all the weight of his brother on his back, marching directly into the fiery sunset sinking into the blasted horizon.

Tears that Derek couldn’t explain suddenly filled his eyes. He hadn’t felt a thing when he’d slowly cocked his shotgun and, despite Teddy’s tears, put down his brother’s infernal half-man, Woofy. But now, thinking of the brothers carrying each other out there in the Wasteland, alone, but
not
alone…. Suddenly, Moses Springs seemed impossibly far behind. And New York? New York had never seemed so far away.

About the Authors

Scott Christian Carr
lives on a secluded mountaintop deep in New York’s Hudson Valley.
He spends his time writing novels and stories, producing for film and television, and enjoying the country life with his kids. Carr is the co-creator of The Learning Channel TV series
Dead Tenants
, and has produced television for such networks as MSNBC, Discovery, The Hallmark Channel, A&E, and others. His fiction & nonfiction have appeared in
Shroud Magazine
,
Withersin
,
GUD
,
Horror Quarterly
,
Pulp Eternity
,
Weird N.J
., and assorted anthologies. His novels
Champion Mountain
and
Hiram Grange & the Twelve Little Hitlers
are currently garnering favorable reviews. His recent accolades include The Hunter S. Thompson Award for Outstanding Journalism, Scriptapalooza TV: 1st Place Best Original Pilot, and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award nomination. He is the author of the upcoming novels
Hiram Grange & The Twelve Steps
and
Matthew’s Memories
(illustrated by Danny Evarts).

Andrew Conry-Murray
is a technology writer and editor. He is the author of the book
The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security
and the novella
Fei the Hero
. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons.

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