Wasteland Warlords: Chapter 7 - Junkyard Bound

They woke up early the next morning, gearing up and heading out into the dark, silent camp. Coals from last night’s cookfires smoldered. Someone in the tent city snored. The wind whistled in off the desert, cool and hollow-sounding.

The sun wouldn’t come up for another half-hour, which meant the Wilfords were still tucked safely away in their bedrolls. Clay and the others liked the knuckleheads, but they couldn’t afford to bring them along on this run. The old weed had made it clear that this wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. On top of that, the stat potions were the sort of loot that would really test somebody’s loyalty. You keep what you kill didn’t just apply to monsters out here. The Wilfords seemed like great guys, but who could say what might happen when a permanent boost to strength, intelligence, or dexterity was up for grabs.

People had done worse for less, and Clay wasn’t willing to take the chance.

At the gate, the on-duty militia man sneered down what was left of his cigar at them. Clay gave the guy a nod and held the repurposed gym door open for Alex and Joe. Joe saluted the guard with Bertha. The door swung shut behind them and caught with a clunk.

They took the highway down like usual, but split off well before they got into the city proper, following the old timer’s map around the oil derricks to the east. None of the freelancers they’d partied up with since arriving in Camp Liberty would come this far east, and everyone seemed to have a different reason for avoiding it. One guy said he had it from a good source that the place was home to a Dungeon Lord who’d killed multiple other Dungeon Lords and gained their powers, becoming some kind of Super Dungeon Lord. Clay was ninety-percent sure that wasn’t even possible, but the guy was certainly insistent.

Another salvager claimed he knew somebody who’d seen the ground open up and swallow a whole party of freelancers. There were a few more stories floating around that seemed to corroborate that idea, but there were also just as many accounts of dragons and space aliens and a hundred other oddities besides. Roy Lee said the area was haunted, which had kept Alex busy speculating for a good long while.

“With everything that’s out here—goblins, zombies, hags, those weird snot monsters we fought the other day—why claim it’s ghosts?”

“’Cause he likes attention but he’s got crap for imagination,” Joe had replied without looking up from shining his huge clomping Warboots in nothing but his jorts while his red flannel with the newly cutoff sleeves dried on their little clothesline. “Some people got no self-awareness at all, shorstack. You can’t fathom a guy like that.”

Personally, Clay’s theory was that somebody had started a bunch of rumors to keep people from raiding the place, probably to keep these potions under wraps. In that light, all the disparate stories made sense.

Well, all of the stories except Roy Lee’s. On that account, Clay was inclined to agree with Joe.

They skirted past the eastern edge of Oil City with no indications of ghosts or haunting. Mephits flitted around burning wells, but didn’t pay any attention to the Jaegers. Clay kept one eye on the map the old-timer had given him. On it, notes had been scribbled in red ink. Nothing here, waste of time on a tourist-highlight coffee shop. Overrun with noids down a small side street. Avoid at all costs! across what looked like it had once been an affluent country club. Decent place to take a sit, scrawled next to what looked to be a Chevron gas station.

The sun climbed higher, shortening the shadows as they crossed into a residential section. They passed a college campus where the last vestiges of a bonfire smoked and smoldered. A group of boar-tusked blue demons in skinny jeans and suspenders with ironic mustaches staggered around the dying flames, guzzling from wine glasses and chatting while an old stereo cranked out distortion-heavy classic rock from the 2070s.

Clay, Alex, and Joe stayed on guard as they crept past the revelry, silently praying their weapons had the stopping power to put down a herd of charging boar demons, but the notes on the map held true—Hipster central, but not dangerous. Don’t engage about Proust.

Sticking to the map, they were able to navigate their way through the city without so much as a single skirmish, and they didn’t come across any sign of party-swallowing sinkholes or Super Dungeon Lords. Smoother sailing than any other time they’d been out on a run.

Until they came to the junkyard.

Behind the razor wire-topped chain link fence, they could see a labyrinth of towering crushed cars and mountains of smoldering tires letting off toxic fumes into the atmosphere. It looked like a real-time advertisement for mesothelioma.

Clay grunted and turned his face away as the acrid black smoke rolled out into the street. Back to the tire fire, he rechecked the map to make sure they were in the right place. This didn’t seem like the kind of location you’d find ultra-rare stat increasing potions, but sure enough it was circled in bright red marker on the map.

Alex wrinkled up her nose. “I think this place is giving me double cancer.”

“I kinda like it,” Joe said, sniffing down a big lungful. “Remember my mower shed back home? It smelled just like this when it burned down.” He took another deep breath. “Damn, but I miss that shed. And that mower.”

“You never should’ve put those mudding tires on that thing. Or that suped up ‘tree-trimmer’ attachment,” Clay said, shooting Joe a sidelong glance. “You’d probably still have that damned shed if you could ever just leave well enough alone.”

“The Super Swampers were the best part!” Joee sighed. “Could’ve cut your way through the Everglades rolling on those puppies. I’m just glad the shed burned down before the bank could come for my baby. It would’ve broken my heart to see some else riding around on Fat Charlie.”

“No one in their right minds would’ve wanted to ride around on Fat Charlie,” Alex replied. “Now get your head in the game.” She looked at Clay. “What’s next?”

“We need to find an entry point.”

The piles of crushed cars stretched the length of four city blocks before running up against a potholed driveway that led back to huge processing facility of corrugated steel and broken windows. That was most likely where they needed to be to get the potions, but the rolling gate there had been chained shut and reinforced with more razor wire.

They found a second, smaller driveway around the south side of the junkyard. It’d probably been for workers’ vehicles back before the Merge. The gate there was chained, too, but this one hadn’t been given the max-sec treatment like the front. There was just enough of a gap to squeeze underneath if they took off their packs.

They crawled under one at a time—the other two keeping watch, one set of eyes on the junkyard and one on the street—then hefted their packs back on and followed the small gravel road into the smoking rubber and metal maze. The towers blocked the desert breeze, turning the smoky air into an oven. Under the Cinderscale, Clay felt like he was cooking. Sweat matted his hair to his head and drenched his clothes. He could see beads of it rolling down Alex’s cheek and dripping off the tip of Joe’s nose. The sizzling and pop of melting components filled the air while the ticking of metal heating and cooling came from the stacks around them.

Joe swung around, Bertha raised for an attack. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah. Yeah I did,” Alex said, squinting as she searched the stacks. “What was it?”

Clay’s eyes roved the scrapheaps, straining for movement. There were so damn many hidey-holes and crannies, any one of which could be squirreling away something nasty, waiting to pounce. After six weeks of monster hunting, willingly venturing into a place like this felt like a suicide run. It had everything they avoided: cramped spaces, blind corners, dead ends. An ambush or a trap could come at any second from any side.

Chittering bounced off the crushed cars. Something clanked behind him.

Clay spun on his heel, searching for the source. A pitted hubcap rolled across the gravel, wobbling then falling with a rattle. “That sounded like…”

A jumble of soft thuds and clinking echoed through the labyrinth, making it impossible to tell which direction the sounds were coming from. The three of them tightened into a circle, instinctively putting their backs to one another as they aimed their weapons outward.

Something skittered across the warped hood of a rusty junker, there and then gone. At the top of the stack came a flash of ringed tail.

A blinking red eye peered out of a crushed passenger window. A pair of five-fingered paws gripped the edging, one black and furry, the other metallic and studded with rivets and pistons. Clay followed the hands upward to the black-masked face peering down at them. It had one normal eye and one red one, blinking on and off like some kind of indicator light.

“Aw!” Joe cooed, lowering Bertha. “It’s just a passle of coons. These cute little trash pandas must’ve taken over when the owners abandoned the place.”

Alex didn’t lower her shotgun. “Yeah… These aren’t exactly your run of the mill raccoons, Joe.” She squinted. “That thing is half cyborg. Also, why is that thing half cyborg?”

Joe shrugged. “Phft. Who knows? Probably just something to do with the merge. Chances are they’re more afraid of us than we are of—”

A scrapheap to Clay’s left groaned and shifted, metal protesting as something heavy climbed over it.

A racoon the size of an actual panda bear came to a stop on top of the pile, claws leaving furrows in the hood of an old jeep. It sat back on its thick hind legs and aimed a pair of flamethrower arms down at them.

“Run,” Clay said.

The three of them bolted through the smoky stacks, firing off shots at the massive flamethrower mechacoon and its chittering minions. The monster leapt from one wall of cars to another, its arms hosing huge gouts of fire at them. Dozens of smaller cyborg racoons the size of rottweilers bounded along the footpaths, trying to head them off all while communicating with one another in half-digital screeches like a bunch of ancient dial-up modems pretending to be animals.

Bertha was particularly effective against the attacking beasts. Joe knocked metal jaws clean off of heads and sent the trash panda’s fat half-metal bodies tumbling.

Alex’s shotgun boomed, taking a chunk out of the huge mecha’s shoulder. Blood, fur, and flesh, intermixed with bits of wire and shards of plastic, flew into the air. The mecha roared at the sky and sprayed fire wildly in every direction, dousing a nearby tractor tire and lighting it up like the Fourth of July.

Clay conserved his ammo, only using the M4 when one of the unnaturally upgraded creatures landed directly in their path and Joe’s chainsaw didn’t immediately do the trick. There was no telling how many of these things there were between them and the processing facility, and they still had a return trip to make.

A hair-raising shriek like an excavator raking its bucket down the world’s largest chalkboard split the air, and a shadow fell across their path.

“Stop!” Clay yelled.

The flattened remains of a box van crashed down ten feet in front of them, smashing a pair of mechacoons and sending up a geyser of shattered glass.

Overhead, a crane swung around, gears grinding and screeching as it snatched up a crushed SUV off the top of a teetering pile. It whipped its boom around and let the vehicle fly. Clay pushed Alex to the side then dived away, curling into a ball as the SUV exploded on the ground, metal screaming and glass exploding out in a wave.

Clay rolled into a crouch, scanning for Alex and Joe. Alex was already back on her feet, no worse for the wear, and his brother was tucked down behind the remains of a badly dented fridge.

“Holy crap,” Joe breathed, eyes tracking the crane as it reloaded. “It’s a Megazord.”