Chapter 28

The air tasted of copper and dissolving lungs.

Ramona didn't climb the drop—she plummeted, sliding down an avalanche of toxic slag and razor-sharp rebar while the fallout-choked atmosphere burned her throat raw. Below, the convoy’s diesel engines thundered like a war drum against the dead earth, shaking the ash-dunes beneath their boots.

Lina slammed into the dirt, her rifle snapping to her shoulder as she tracked the lead crawler through the violet gloom. Gary hit the ridge beside them, his respirator hissing frantically as his Geiger counter spiked into a continuous, deafening shriek of lethal decay.

"They see us!" Gary choked out, his visor instantly glazing over with greasy radioactive condensation. "The dust is clearing—they're zeroing in!"

The lead crawler slammed to a brutal halt, churning black soil into a blinding, toxic cloud. A heavy steel hatch overhead violently popped open. A brute clad in rotting, scavenged plate armor hauled himself out into the howling gale, hoisting a twin-linked rotary cannon toward the ridge.

Now.

Ramona exploded out of the ash-drift like a ghost of the old world, a streak of lethal momentum tearing straight down the embankment directly into the crossfire.

The heavy cannon spun, vomiting a wall of lead that atomized the rock inches from her boots. Ramona didn't break stride; she threw herself forward into a lethal slide, passing beneath the crawler’s massive, chain-wrapped clearance just as armor-piercing rounds shredded the earth where she had stood a heartbeat before.

She slammed upward, driving Fang with savage, two-handed force straight through the thin floorboards of the cabin.

A wet, choking gasp echoed from above. The driver convulsed, his blood dripping through the splintered wood before his weight went completely dead against the controls.

From the ridge, Gary and Lina opened hell. A vicious, disciplined stream of fire pinned the second convoy truck, shattering its windshield as Ramona kicked the crawler’s side door open, yanked the dead enforcer out by the throat into the ash, and hauled herself into the cockpit.

She slammed the heavy gear-shift into drive, stomped the floorboards, and roared the engine to life.

The machine surged forward, a juggernaut of rusted, blood-spattered iron, smashing squarely into the flank of the second convoy vehicle. Metal shrieked in agony. Sparks exploded like dying stars against the dark.

Ramona keyed the comms, her voice cutting through the radioactive storm like a blade.

"Get in!"

The heavy-duty chassis shuddered violently as Lina and Gary dove off the ridge, slamming through the passenger hatch just as a fresh fusillade of armor-piercing rounds chewed the metal frame to ribbons behind them.

"Go! Go! Go!" Gary roared, slamming the blast-door shut and sealing the atmospheric filters as Lina shoved her rifle barrel through the reinforced firing port.

Ramona didn't hesitate. She wrenched the wheel hard, flooring the accelerator as the crawler's supercharged diesel engine screamed in protest, tearing straight through a barrier of rusted pre-Collapse rail guards. Behind them, the second syndicate truck tried to recover, its tires spinning wildly in the radioactive slag, but Ramona had already pivoted the heavy steel hull, slamming its front axle straight into the enemy's flank.

The impact was catastrophic.

With a deafening shriek of tearing metal and shattered glass, the enemy vehicle buckled, its front end folding inward like paper before sliding backward into the burning, ash-choked ravine.

"Clear!" Lina yelled, chambering a fresh magazine as she scanned the rear view through the cracked, reinforced glass. "No movement behind us!"

Ramona kept her white-knuckled grip on the wheel, her eyes locked on the faint, erratic GPS waypoint flickering across the dashboard’s dying amber screen. The wasteland stretched endlessly before them—a dead, silent expanse of gray dunes and toxic mist under a bruised, terminal sky.

"We're on the perimeter highway," Ramona said, her voice cutting cleanly through the rhythmic hiss of the air scrubbers. She glanced back at the two survivors, their faces pale behind their fogged visors, drawing breath in the recycled, metallic air. "Keep your eyes on the horizon. The coast is fifty miles south."

Gary wiped a streak of greasy black soot from his forehead, looking out at the ruined ghost-towns flashing past their headlights like tombstones in a vast, open grave. "And if the ocean's dead?"

Ramona downshifted, gripping Fang as she steered the stolen juggernaut deeper into the roaring dark of the nuclear storm.

"Then we carve a new road," she said.

Ahead, the black horizon swallowed the headlights, and the wasteland closed its ranks behind them, leaving only the track of their tires in the ash to prove they had ever passed at all.