Free Thunder Road by James Axler Page A

numbing that spread from his chest outwards, and a faint smell, sweet but with a bitterness underlying it. The two were connected, he knew, but it was hard to work out how, hard to work out why he should be bothering to ponder this, hard to…
    He could breathe still, but everything else was becoming numb. His chest felt empty yet heavy at the same time. His shoulders were reduced to lumps of flesh with no movement, the numbness spread down his arms as though carried in his veins, trickling into his fingers, down to the very tips. He could feel the same happening in his legs, the lack of feeling spreading down to his groin and then down each leg, knees buckling as the muscles supporting them went dead.
    Ryan felt himself tumble as his balance was unable to account for the lack of feeling and support from his body. He could not control the fall. He teetered, then pitched forward, landing full-length with a thud on the densely packed, sandy soil with a reverberation that seemed to resonate through his frame. He could sense this, and yet not feel it, almost as though he was detached from himself.
    He could see nothing. The light from the fire was too slight, the ground in front of him too close to his face. He could hear little else but the crackle of the fire. Then, in the distance, approaching at speed and growing louder with every breath he took, the sound of a motorcycle engine.
    Somewhere, deep in the recesses of a momentarily clouded mind, he knew that the gren had contained some kind of nerve gas. He had heard of such predark relics, had on occasion witnessed examples of them that had chilled on contact.
    He hated being at the mercy of whoever—the mystery rider, he guessed—had fired the gren. The coldheart bastard could do anything he wanted to them, and they could not fight back.
    Although Ryan could see nothing, falling as he had, there were others who had a better view of what was about to occur. Doc had fallen onto his back, staring up at the night sky, uncomprehending. No sooner had he managed to focus in some manner and realize where he was than the paralysis had hit him. It bewildered him as he had still been too befuddled to notice the gren. He was only aware of the numbness, the inability to raise himself up as he fell backward, and of the fact that he was flat to the ground without feeling it beneath him. As though he were floating above it, just hovering, and yet unable to move through any direction. In this state of disconnection, he heard the engine’s roar as the sound of his own approaching doom. Tears prickled at his eyes.
    The vagaries of Doc’s imagination were as far away from what went through the head of Mildred Wyeth as it was possible to get. Caught trying to help the old man to his feet, Mildred had seen the gren impact from the periphery of her vision, and the first scent that hit her had told her that it was some kind of nerve gas. She tried to hold her breath for a second, then realized that it would probably be able to absorb through the skin, and so holding her breath was useless. She exhaled heavily as the first wave of numbness began to spread. For some reason that she could not explain, it seemed to take hold on her left side first, dragging her in that direction so that she toppled on her side. Her vision was partly obscured by the plaits that fell across her face, but in the far distance she could see a shape move across the landscape in sync with the sound of an engine. It was just beyond the circle of light cast by the fire, but as she lay immobile, wondering if she was going to be conscious and helpless at the moment of her death, she saw that it was the mystery rider. Something told her that their chilling was not on his mind…which led her to question what, then, his purpose could be in doing this.
    J.B. and Jak were, in their own ways, cold and dark with impotent rage at what had happened. It was their watch, and they had failed. More than that, they were both now on the