Warhead Saul's Last Leg
Interstate 90 was a shooting gallery. The winners were the gods who lived in the mountains and fortresses on either side, gods who watched over the world night and day through their divine scopes; the losers were the foolish mortals who thought that they could walk the road. He was one of those foolish mortals of course but unlike the others he had a trick. He looked picked clean. He wasn't even wearing any boots.
Naturally there was always the possibility that someone bored enough might decide to give him his trophy of dirt but it was a risk he was willing to take. Ammunition was precious too so that helped. And for someone who looked like they had nothing worth having it was safer to walk directly under the gaze of Almighty Death than to wander into the wilderness. Besides, a nice clean bullet was a good way to go. In the wilderness you were lucky if they killed you.
The man in bare feet steered his clattering shopping cart around one of the many burned out wrecks that littered the highway. Even by the standards of a world gone crazy he looked insane. The grimy yellow bathrobe he wore was only loosely tied around his waist, leaving his gaunt hairy chest partially visible and his genitals often too, depending on the breeze. His tumultuous greasy beard, the color of car rust, further managed to accent his mania, and in this it was assisted by the dark ski goggles he wore at all times. Anyone who just dismissed him as a harmless lunatic however could be making a fatal mistake. In a gun holster hidden beneath his robe, a Korean pistol waited for its moment with six eager rounds. He had taken it off of a highwayman in the outskirts of Baltimore and the man had been wearing decades old robotic armor. A relic from one of the original invaders.
His shopping cart meanwhile had its own secrets. Two to be precise. On the outside though someone would have only seen what he wanted them to see. Bones. Femurs, ribcages, pelvises, skulls – the shopping cart was literally overflowing. Because corpses were so easy to come by in a land that’d been baptized by nuclear fire, there wasn't anyone who would be interested in these. Many people however would have slit his throat to get their hands on the unopened six pack of glass bottled Coca Cola he had hidden – in fact he’d done the exact same thing to get it in the first place. As for his other treasure, well, he was sure there wasn't a crime that wouldn't be committed by someone to possess that. If the value of something was how much violence it was worth, what evil wouldn't people be willing to pay for violence incarnate? Of course many people out of fear would just want to see his prize destroyed. He was answering a call though. It had spoken to him when he found it, when he’d carefully removed it from the missile's shell to swaddle it like a newborn baby.
His package and him had come a long way from when he’d first found it in some hills outside Lititz; it’d spent a night beside him in a restaurant fridge in Ephrata, it’d been born heavily on his aching back along route 222, past Shillington and the horrors of Berks County park and Kutztown; it’d been retrieved from a ditch beside Quarry Road as he crossed to the I-78, it’d passed through Fogelsville and Hellertown where he had told off the wormlike recruiter for the New Bethlehem Militia; it was carried through Pohatcong and Union Township and Clinton and Bedminster Township, outside the latter of which he had to bury it for six nights to keep it from the clutches of two greedy feuding warlords; it’d rejoined him to continue along the I-287 through the mass graves of Basking Ridge, through the slag of Morristown and Parsippany and Montville; it’d been with him when he’d almost confessed its existence to the convent of nuns that lived in a warehouse on the fringes of Pequannock; it’d ridden with him on a flatbed truck he’d hitched a ride on through Wyckoff and Woodbury, where he jumped off to cross the Hudson river, where he ditched the ferry he stole on the other side and made a sled to drag his treasure along the I-84, past the minefields of Fishkill and Carmel and Brewster, through the rat hives of Danbury and Southbury and Middlebury and Waterbury; he’d pulled it to Southington where he scrounged supplies and to Plainville where he made a meal out of a dog he found half alive in a leg hold trap; he crossed Route 6 with it to Unionville, to Aton, then north on Route 202 to Weatogue to ford the river, stumbling eventually on Windsor and then the Connecticut River and John Fitch Boulevard; in a supermarket near Vernon he’d found the remains of a century old genocide, corpses stacked higher than the aisle shelves, and there he’d found his bones and his shopping cart and his case of Coca Cola; back on the I-84 he shoved it on past Rockville and Tolland and Willington, even talking his way out of trouble with some mercs in the Nipmuck Zone; he’d pushed it out of Southbridge and onto the I-90 where he was greeted by a man in Pre-Holocaust attire playing a scorched piano in the middle of the street, the man only tipping a hat at him before continuing playing; and now it was still with him, just outside of Grafton.
He paused a moment to wipe some sweat off of his forehead. The sun had been scourging him all day and a prayer for mercy was hovering over his dry cracked lips. He had the Coca Cola of course but it was too precious to think about. Besides, it’d be warmer than piss right now. No. He should try to scavenge something else. Plenty of places to go searching in anyways. Looking to his left he scanned the various buildings situated there and soon found a suitable candidate off in the distance. The telltale numbers on the tall sign were still visible through the layers of dust. Gas stations – the oases of the wasteland.
About the Author
John Xavier is a writer whose work covers everything from hard science fiction to symbolist poetry. He's currently halfway through his first novel, a black comedy that follows an ordinary demon's life as a professional torturer in Hell.