THE GUARDIANS DESOLATION ROAD by Richard Austin First published 1987 by Jove Books, adivision at The Berkeley Publishing Group, New York This edition published 1991 by Pan Books Ltd. Cavaye Place, London SWIO 9PG 987654321 © Richard Austin 1987 ISBN 0 330 31766 0 Printed in England by Clay’s Ltd, St Ives pic This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be tent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. CHAPTER ONE “The accused, Theron Leodore McDonald, is hereby found guilty of possession of an unauthorized automatic weapon,” the fat man in horn-rimmed glasses and a slightly grimy white robe intoned, pretending to read from a scroll held myopically close to his nose. The flicker of the torches ringing the clearing reflected in the lenses of his glasses; bullfrogs boomed the bass line to a buzzing cicada chorus. “Has the accused any last words before sentence is executed?” “I demand a retrial,” said the black young man who stood on the lowered tailgate of a Chevy pickup, which was hiked way the hell up on its suspension and had been equipped with tires the size of a 737’s. Split, puffed lips mangled the words, and eyes swollen almost shut from a savage beating blunted the effect of the defiant glare he swung around the twenty or thirty heavily armed white men gathered in a semicircle facing the tupelo gum tree under which the pickup was parked. His right arm was in a sling, the left was tied behind his back. A noose of slick nylon rope was draped around his skinny neck A burly man with a ginger beard and mustache bronzed by flamelight stood beside the tailgate of the truck, turning over an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon in his blocky hands. “Theron, you always been a good boy. What got into you, made you think you could get away with carrying around a machine gun like this? We got gun control in these parts.” “There was this little matter of a war goin‘ on,” Theron said, swaying a little in the grasp of the two burly, hooded men who held his arms. “We’d been invaded, like.” “Let’s hurry up and hang him, Luther. These damn robes is hot and the mosquitoes is eatin‘ my face all to shit,” somebody in the crowd said. A face like a red balloon poked expectantly out the driver’s window of the truck as the executioner craned for the word to let in the clutch. But the big man shook his head. “No, we Regulators’re dedicated to restorin‘ law and order and the American way of life. We got to do things right and proper.” They weren’t exactly the Ku Klux Klan, which had never been too popular in southern Louisiana anyway, though they’d stolen heavily from Klan rituals and regalia. But they were too much into KKK mumbo-jumbo to be out-and-out vigilantes. They were roughnecks, rednecks, cashiered cops, and marginal employables, who had wandered down into the bayou country after the bombs got New Orleans and the plague decimated Baton Rouge and set themselves up as lords and masters over the folk struggling to wring a living out of the green, and black and soggy land. Their hooded robes and midnight murders made them seem a lot fancier than they really were. What they mostly were was goons. And they had come down hard when the young black came home a hero, sporting a wound and an automatic weapon acquired during the recent fight with the Federated States of Europe force that had landed in Terrebonne Bay to seize control of the top-secret Project Starshine lab and its miracle fusion-power generator. The Regulators, however, knew nothing of FSE invasions. Whenever they tried sticking their noses too far south the Cajuns whipped their asses, so mostly they stayed well north of Thibodaux and east of the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin, and consequently had missed the fun, though they’d gotten their share of the hurricane which finatty put paid to the Effee endeavor. What the Regulators did know from was that it was not in line with their plans to have uppity niggers wandering around loose with heavy-duty armament. So they had paid a little visit to the McDonald house. The hero’s welcome-home celebration had been well under way when the masked men, armed with shotguns and assault rifles, had busted in. Their earlier object lessons had taken effect, it seemed—it wasn’t even necessary to shoot any coons as they dragged Theron and his booty off into the night. Now Luther lowered the M-249’s bipod and set it carefully on the ground at his feet. “It don’t have to be this way, Theron,” he said, almost gently. “All you got to do is tell us who else might have acquired some illegal weapons and you go free.” “And the Guardians, Luther, don’t forget the Guardians,” an adenoidal young voice said from behind. “Shut up, Willie Earl. Yeah, and if you have any information pertainin‘ to the whereabouts of the so-called Guardians, who are wanted for trespass and carrying of unauthorized weaponry, there might be something extra in it for you.” “Fuck your mama, Luther. She the only one who’d have you anyway,” said Theron. Luther’s pitted face went white behind his beard. “All right, nigger, if that’s the way you want it—” He raised his arm. “Hold on a minute, here, everybody,” a voice said from behind. “Let’s not do anything you’re all gonna regret.” Hoods turned. A man had emerged from the darkness among trees. A large man, with the thick chest and wide shoulders of a lineman. Gold highlights glinted in hair cropped close to his head, which was scarcely—if any—wider than his neck. He wore coveralls dabbed with green and brown and tan camouflage patterns. His brow and chin were massive, his nose broken, his eyes squinted. His lips were wrapped around a stub cigar and a great big grin. But the most commanding feature of his appearance wasn’t his size, or his battered face. It was the big black machine gun he held in both hands, with a half-moon-shaped magazine hung on the side of a humpbacked receiver, rifle stock tucked under one arm, fore and rear pistols grips held in huge scarred hands. The Regulators gathered in the clearing for a little rough post-holocaust justice believed as fervently in Sylvester Stallone as they did in the thunder-and-napalm gospel broadcast by the Reverend Nathan Bedford Forrest Smith from his stronghold in Oklahoma City, so the brighter among them even recognized the weapon from its cameo appearance as a captured Soviet machine gun in Rambo. Actually, it was a Maremont Lightweight Machine Gun, military designation M-60E3, and as American as pizza and chop suey. And it was held in very unauthorized hands. “Just who the hell do you think you are?” the moonfaced man in glasses demanded. “I think I’m Billy McKay of the Guardians,” the apparition said around his cigar. “And I think I got the drop on a lot of detached assholes.” “Hey, Luther,” the skinny kid with the M-16 slung over his back said excitedly. “Hey, I bet he’s one of them dudes like we ran into a couple weeks back—” McKay turned to regard the ginger-bearded man, who stood a good two inches taller than his six-three. “Yeah. And you must be the two Sam Sloan put the fear of God into with his little grenade trick.” A red flush crept up out of the robe and crawled all over Luther’s face. “I figured you Regulators couldn’t amount to much, to let a Navy boy run your asses like that. I see I was right.” He gestured with the M-60. “I’m gettin‘ tired of small talk. Cut him down.” Luther stood there with his jaw working like a kitten under a blanket. He was no coward, just a man with a fine appreciation of the odds. The shorter, round-faced man presiding over the ceremony was of different stuff. Since the One-Day War he’d found a whole new life browbeating the unarmed and the helpless, people too pounded down by disaster to make any kind of effective stand against Regulator inroads. It had given him kind of a skewed perspective as to just how things ought to go. “What are you men thinking of?” he demanded, starting around with his fire blanked lenses. “There’s twenty, thirty of us here, and just one of him.” “He got him a machine gun,” Luther pointed out. “We got guns.” Which was true, but most of them were slung, and those who happened to have long arms in the hand had developed a marked tendency to stare at the ground or off into the trees and hold the pieces as if they weren’t sure what they were or how they happened to have hold of them. Seeing his companions were not exactly closing ranks behind him, the round-faced man smiled. “Well, we still got something you want,” he said, “and I aim to make sure you don’t get it. Rollie, fire her up—make that nigger dance!” And he whipped a Smith & Wesson .38 out from under his robes and shot Billy McKay in the short ribs. A lot of things happened at once. The jacked-up pickup roared and bucked like a bronc busting out of the gate and shot right out from under Theron McDonald. He dropped—clear to the ground, where the nylon rope coiled around him, cleanly severed by a gunshot no one had heard. Billy McKay staggered from the bullet’s impact. It was a soft lead hollowpoint, which made even a piss-poor pistol like a .38 stone death to frightened swampers with just their shirts between them and it, but it never even had a chance of punching through the Kevlar vest McKay wore under his coveralls. In fact it splashed so comprehensively that its force was spread out over McKay’s side, sparing him much of the effect of even a well-stopped rou...
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