One shell hit a gren

Without warning, the wag exploded with a sudden violence that took the Armorer by surprise.

And then it was over, almost anticlimactic. The convoy rolled on.

The Armorer looked at Eula, who regarded him impassively, as though the events of the firefight hadn’t occurred, as though she were examining him in minute detail, trying to get inside his head, unconcerned by what had just happened.

J.B.’s sense of unease welled up with renewed vigor. There was something odd about the whole situation, something that could spell danger not just for him, but for all the companions.

Something for which only he could find the answer—if he could figure out what the question was….

Desolation Crossing

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom, is—to die.

—Oliver Goldsmith,

1728–1774

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter One

“A hard rain’s going to fall,” Doc muttered gnomically from the rear of the wag.

Mildred looked at him, also hard. The reference was lost on the others; but she, of an earlier age than them, wondered if some memory had once more filtered through Doc’s labyrinthine and fogged mind.

Jak looked up at the clear sky above them and sniffed. “No rain. Not for too long…”

The sky was azure, the sun burning red-yellow as it passed its peak and they entered the afternoon. The heat seemed to bounce off the ground around them and radiate back up, meeting itself so that it created a haze of shimmering air that held them tight. The land surrounding the wag on all sides was barren for as far as they could see, a chiaroscuro of browns that disappeared into the false horizon of the heat haze. It was dotted here and there by patches of stark cacti, rising up freakishly as though a part of the land was reaching to the sky in search of escape. To their rear, diminishing steadily with the rhythmic turning of the wag’s engine, lay the hellhole from which they had just departed.

“Rain, sun, who gives a shit as long as this damn engine doesn’t stall,” Ryan said through gritted teeth, grinding the gears as he ground his teeth.

J.B. and Krysty exchanged glances. Ryan had been in a foul mood since they had acquired the wag. Stranded in a pesthole that went by the name of Stripmall, they had been short of jack, short of supplies and short of work. Like others they had encountered in these wastes, the ragged-assed ville had been devoted to one primary industry: a gaudy house of large proportions, designed to service the trading convoys that had to make the arduous trek across the dustbowl lands.

There were many old malls that had been adapted in this way, and each followed the same basic pattern: the old storefronts had been converted into display cabinets for the girls and services within. Each held a different type of woman, displayed a different kind of pleasure. All tastes were catered to. And with the friends devoid of any kind of currency, there had been a tacit pressure exerted on the men to push Mildred and Krysty into work. After all, mutie women with prehensile hair were always at a premium, and there were few black women in this area of the Deathlands. Both of them represented a novelty, which made them potentially high earners.

And when Ryan and J.B., in particular, had paid no heed to the imprecations; when Millie and Krysty had made their own opinions known forcefully—the proprietor of one gaudy house now nursed two broken arms—it had become obvious that the choice to say no would soon be removed. So they had made it their business to get the hell out of the ville as soon as possible. A catalog of bad luck had landed them in Stripmall, and it hadn’t got much better when they had been forced to trade what little they had left for a broken-down wag. It was cumbersome, too big for their needs and made a noise as if a dozen stickies were being chewed up in the pistons.

But it would serve its purpose. They hoped.

The wag was a big yellow school bus, the padding long since disintegrated or ripped away from the uncomfortable metal seats. The suspension was shot to hell. That wouldn’t have mattered on the kinds of roads that it had originally been built to traverse, but the road out of Stripmall was little more than the beaten remains of a highway, more pothole and debris than smooth surface. Even the tarmac that remained was in a sticky, semiviscous state because of the heat. So the bald tires dragged, bumped and slewed across the surface.

The steering was also shot, each crevice, bump and deviation in the surface wrenching the wheel in Ryan’s hands, tearing at the muscles in his forearms. It was less than comfortable on his buttocks, too, as the combination of poor road surface and even worse suspension catapulted him toward the ceiling of the wag with monotonous regularity. Back in the seats, spread down the length of the bus, the other friends found themselves bounced around like ball bearings, rattling with the same force against the sides of the bus.

To make it worse, Ryan was starting to get the feeling that they had been gypped over the amount of fuel in the wag. It was impossible to get an accurate reading as the fuel gauge was broken, and even though they had watched the toothless, scrawny guy they had bartered with fill the tank from battered gas cans, there was no way of knowing what the consumption of the beast may be—Ryan was beginning to fear it was a damn sight less than they had figured.

Stripmall vanished into the haze of the horizon, and now they were surrounded by nothing but dust, blue and cacti that looked uncannily as if they were moving across the ground. It was as though the companions were isolated from the rest of the world, with nothing but the whine and strain of the engine and the bone-jarring impact of the road to occupy their minds.

Which was perhaps why Doc’s mind was starting to wander again. Drivel to most, but to Mildred something that struck an associative chord.

“We are just desolation angels on the road,” he intoned softly, staring out the back window, his voice hiccuping in time to the jolting of the vehicle.

“Say what?” Krysty asked.

Doc looked around, his eyes barely registering that she was there for a fraction of a second before recognition returned to them.

“Did I say something?” he asked, dreamily.

“Something but nothing,” Jak muttered, “same usual.”

Mildred ignored them, and asked, “Where did you get that from, Doc?”

The old man looked puzzled for a second, then remembrance crossed his face and he grinned slyly. “It may have been during my subterranean life, or perhaps when I was on satori in Paris,” he answered.

Mildred’s face split into a grin. “I have seen the best minds of my generation ripped apart…no, torn apart…is that it?”

Doc raised an eyebrow. “Something like. I fear your memory may be as faulty as mine, my dear Doctor. Which is something that does not, perhaps, bode well for the future. Immediate or long-term.”

“It has been a long time, Doc. Both for us, and for the rest of what’s left of the world. I know I remember that from high school. We had a progressive teacher who wanted us to read more than just the syllabus in Lit classes. Not just Frost, but the Beats, as well. That was how I came across them. But you?”

Doc frowned for a moment, as though struggling to pull out a memory that sought to elude him, remaining just that touch out of reach. Then his face lit up as he was able to grasp it.

“It was when I was taken from my home, and deposited in that purgatory that existed before the purging fire of skydark. Though it has birthed this wasteland, I suspect that it could not have been that much better in many ways. The stench of corruption always filled my senses back when…But where was I? Ah yes, the road dreams of Kerouac and Cassady. The endless journeying, with no destination in sight and no real goal other than to move on. Perhaps there was an object once. Perhaps, at one time, there was a point to the interminable road. But somewhere along the line that became lost, and to keep moving was the only goal. What is it, I wonder, that has bought that back to me…Come to that, was the whole thing allegory or metaphor, or was it just the ultimate realization of the dream to be free?”

“Dream you talk sense one day,” Jak muttered almost to himself.

“Doc,” Mildred said softly, “I asked you how you knew about the Beats and Dylan.” She turned to Krysty and J.B., who had been trying to follow the discussion with varying degrees of enthusiasm. After all, there was nothing but the land and sky outside to occupy them.

“The Beats,” Mildred explained, “were a late twentieth-century group of writers, and Dylan was a singer and poet who wasn’t part of them, but was kinda like them. All long after Doc was a young man.”

“I disagree,” Doc replied with a sudden and surprising vehemence. “I was still a young man. I am still a young man. That which you see is not the real me, but what their meddling has made of me. And yet…” He calmed down, grew more reflective. “And yet they were not all bad. There were some who were interested only in the experiments, and found themselves at the behest of those who had power and money. One of them, a doctor called Seeger, was not a bad man, just a misguided one who was out of his moral depth. He consoled himself by reading the books he had treasured as an idealistic student, by listening to the recordings that had fired him on. I recall asking him why he had chosen his path. He grew by turns angry and morose, but in the latter state he was able to give me at least some kind of answer.”

“What did he tell you?” Krysty asked, fascinated by this small glimpse of a time she had not seen.

“He said that fate has a way of snatching our dreams and hopes, distorting them in its breeze, tangling them the way that the string of a kite gets tangled by the winds. He said that roads that we travel are not as signposted as we think, and that even if we think that the past has escaped us, for better or for worse, it still has a way of sneaking up, tapping us on the shoulder, and reminding us that those things we thought long since buried have a bearing on where we are now, whether we should like this or not.”

“So was he right?” Krysty asked again.

Doc’s face creased into a rueful grin that held more melancholy than joy. “He is long since dust, and I am here. How can I ask him?”

“Come to that, would he have a better answer than any of us?” Mildred murmured.

Doc’s face creased a little more. “My dear Dr. Wyeth, a doctor of philosophy you should have been.”

Mildred was sure it was a half quote from something else that she should have known. She was trying to recall the source when her attention was taken by a more pressing matter. Jak had moved past J.B., Krysty and Mildred, and was now on the backseat next to Doc, staring out of the back window.

Doc turned and faced the rear, trying to follow Jak’s gaze. In the unfathomable manner he had of snapping from reverie to an alert present, he could tell that the albino youth had caught wind of something on their tail.

“What is it, lad? I cannot see,” he muttered.

“Not see,” Jak replied softly. “Hear, feel. Different buzz under wag noise. Feeling road change. Not much, but enough. Bastard heat,” he added. Doc knew what he meant: the heat mist that obscured the true horizon, and bought a curtain down between them and Stripmall, limited their field of vision. If something was approaching, then it was not yet near enough to pierce that curtain, yet how much time would that cost them?

Even without the eerie miasma of the heated air, the motion and erratic progress of the wag would have made it difficult to discern what—if anything—had been in their wake. But such was the level of trust felt by Ryan Cawdor in the judgment of the albino hunter that he barked an order for the friends to be on triple red for whatever was about to approach them. And such, indeed, was the level of trust felt by the rest of the companions that they had already unsheathed weapons before the words had fallen from Ryan’s lips.

J.B. moved forward to keep an eye on anything that could approach from the front of the vehicle: although it was unlikely, Ryan could do little to recce, his eye being riveted to the treacherous road surface directly ahead of them. J.B. could act as a roaming pair of eyes, just in case.

But in truth they knew that any danger would come from the rear. Mildred and Krysty were halfway down the bus, one on each side of the center aisle, arms curled painfully tight around steel seat supports to give them as much stability as was possible, sight intent on the wastes that stretched on each side, but the bias of their vision directed to the rear, where Jak and Doc were tight against the back window, as if the mere act of this could somehow force their hidden enemy to show themselves.

Enemy? Maybe not: but considering they had left Stripmall in some hurry, and that the women were highly prized by those who ran the gaudy houses, it was a fair assumption. A safe assumption. And better safe than chilled.

The progress of the old school bus became that bit more tortuous, the road that bit more treacherous: at least, that was how it seemed as translated through the steering grip of Ryan Cawdor. Maybe it was tension. Maybe the road really had worsened. It didn’t matter: all that counted was that it was that little bit harder to cling on and keep rattling eyeballs in focus.

“Nearer,” Jak murmured. He spoke low, but his voice carried to them with the authority of one who was never wrong. None of the others could distinguish the sounds he could hear, but they knew he was right.

They waited….

As though in slow motion and as though materializing from nothing, the pace of the pursuing vehicles caused them to shimmer and take shape as they broke the distance barrier and penetrated beyond the heat haze. There were three of them: two low-slung wags, like old cars that had been cut down and opened out to allow the shooters easy access and aim. Not that they would need it, judging from the size of the side-mounted machine blasters, each of which looked as though their weight could drag the vehicle to one side without the counterbalance of their opposite mounting.

The third vehicle was a motorbike bearing two men, the man on pillion carrying what looked to be a rocket launcher.

“Ryan, would it perhaps be possible to squeeze a little more pace from this vehicle?” Doc queried. “I fear they are starting to gain with some rapidity, and will soon be able to test their range.”

Ryan couldn’t look round—the road was in bad shape. But he knew one thing for certain. “It doesn’t matter how quick they are, or what kind of firepower they’ve got. There’s no way I can squeeze any more speed from this bastard. We’re gonna have to fight.”

Doc had suspected as much, but figured it was worth asking the question. Too much speed and the Lord alone knew how much precious fuel they would waste. Too much speed and the Lord was equally the only one who would have any notion of how the wag would stand up to the road surface.

Besides, it was too late to worry now. The bike had streaked ahead of the two wags that had previously flanked it, and the pillion rider had risen to his feet, swaying with the movement of the bike as he raised the rocket launcher and took aim.

“Bastard,” Jak hissed, his tone saying far more than just the word itself could convey. As the roar of the discharged launcher reached them, a fraction of a second be hind the muzzle-flash and the unsteady swaying of the pillion rider, the recoil kicking back at him, Ryan had already hauled the wheel to the right, taking them to the edge of the ruined blacktop and onto a dusty soil that was almost harder and surer than the road they had left.

The rocket hit the road about a hundred yards ahead of them, where they would have reached in moments, and where the impact of detonation would have shattered the glass of the windshield into Ryan’s good eye, in all likelihood bringing chunks of rock, soil and softened blacktop with it.

Instead, the impact—now lessened by distance—hit them broadside. Krysty yelped involuntarily as she ducked, slivers of shattered window glass raining on her with some rock and soil. The side of the bus sounded as though it had been pelted with stones, but the damage was minimal.

Jak had already beaten out the glass of the back window with the butt of his Colt Python pistol, and had the barrel centered on the pillion rider, who was reloading while still standing. It was a neat trick, but stupe. With his attention on the rocket launcher, he wasn’t looking at the bus. The rider was, and made to move the bike to one side. But he was hampered by the need to keep the balance of his passenger, and he wasn’t quick enough. Jak snapped off one shot from the .357, the sound of the blaster almost deafening within the confines of the bus, despite the noise out side.

Jak had a hunter’s aim. The pillion rider flew backward as the round hit him, the velocity of the impact multiplied by the forward motion of the bike. A red mist of blood spread around him.

The bike sheered as the rider attempted to cope with the sudden shift in weight and balance presented to him. He was good, but not good enough to deal with both this and the treacherous road surface. The front tire of the bike blew out on something unseen, and the bike slewed viciously out of control, the rider dragged underneath as the weight and momentum pulled it to one side. His torso had been bare, and he was in moments little more than a red slick on the road.

Simultaneously, fate had smiled on the friends. The pillion rider—now minus half of his viscera and quite chilled—had flopped back into the road, causing one of the wags to swerve to avoid hitting him. This attempt to keep hot on the trail would have proved successful, if not for the fact that the rocket launcher that the pillion rider had been carrying had parted company from his lifeless grip and skittered across the road and into the path the wag had taken to evade impact.

It merely swapped one for another; one of a deadlier effect. The front of the wag and the rocket launcher met with an impact that caused the detonation of the explosive that the pillion rider had been in the throes of loading. The resultant explosion rocked the air, causing the remaining wag to skid and veer across the surface of the road wildly before righting itself and continuing the pursuit.

IT GAVE RYAN a little more time to try to pilot the cumbersome wag across the hardpacked earth. It was bouncing and veering less than on the road, but it was still bone-shaking, and difficult for anyone to aim well.

The pursuing wag was almost on them, the machine blasters chattering and tracers of fire kicking up around them. The whine and clang of shots striking home were also a little too close for comfort. Short of stopping, there was little Ryan could do to give his companions a break when it came to return fire.

But maybe he could slow the opposition a little, and use the fact that the wag was large and cumbersome to its advantage. Without even thinking about it, he had been heading away from the ruined road, and had come within distance of one of the groups of eerie cacti that dotted the landscape.

He realized why he had been doing this, and without pause hauled the heavy steering column around so that the old school bus was headed straight for the center of the cacti. As they neared it, he could see that the plants were much larger, much taller than they had appeared from a distance. The actual span of the patch had to have been about 150 yards, and the plants themselves had thick bases at least six feet around. They needed them, if they were to support the branching arms of thick spikes that sprouted on all sides, reaching upward in mute supplication.

Despite the distances and sizes involved, there was no way that he could get the bus through the maze they made without crashing into them.

Good. That was his plan.

“Away from the windows,” he yelled.

Considering they were about to engage the enemy, it may have struck his people as a strange thing to say. One glance ahead told them why. They were in the aisle of the bus within moments.

Ryan slewed the bus into the middle of the cactus patch. The big yellow bus hit big yellow and green stalks that were as hard as wood. The front fender crunched, the headlights splintered, but the bus barged through, knocking some cacti over at a drunken angle, toppling others completely. Sap spurted and dribbled from branches taken off by the impact of the large wag.

The old school bus left a path in its wake, but one that was scattered with spikes like nine-inch nails, trails of sap and listing and fallen trunks.

The wag on their tail had been gaining all the time. The driver was hunched over the wheel, trying to keep a steady path so that the two blasters on either side—both manned—could lay down a barrage, which they had started to do as soon as the school bus had come in range. Their fire had taken out what was left of the back windows, and peppered the hide of the bus with dents and small holes. But they hadn’t accounted for the fact that the old buses were built like tanks, for long and hard use. The main body of the vehicle could stand a lot more pounding than most nontrading wags the machine blasters were used to firing on.

Inside, stray shots ricocheted, and the din of the slugs on metal was dimmed only by the sounds of the cacti as the wag collided with them. The old bus was taking a lot of punishment, and the companions were huddled in the aisle, unable to risk firing back.

The blaster-mounted wag hit the cacti patch close, now, on the tail of the school bus. Close enough to catch the splinters of cactus trunk, the spines like nine-inch nails and the sprays of sap.

The way in which the side panels and roof of the wag had been cut away to accommodate the mounting and firing of the machine blasters was ingenious, and skillfully executed. In normal circumstances it was to be admired. But these were not normal circumstances, and all it did in this situation was to leave the three inhabitants of the wag wide-open to the furies of the cacti.

The big heavy splinters of trunk wood took out the windshield of the wag, making the driver swerve erratically as he tried to avoid the stationary trunks, the flying wood, and still see where he was headed. His driving veered violently to the left as a splinter the size of his fist drove a hole in his shoulder, making him scream in red-hot agony.

But that was nothing next to the pain suffered by the exposed blaster firers. Leaning out of the vehicle on specially constructed bucket seats that took them directly behind the sights of the blasters, they were open to the sap and spines that flew freely in the wake of the old school bus.

The spines were razor-sharp, and flying at speed. They flayed and cut at the exposed flesh of the two men, driving into their arms and ribs with the drive of a knife being thrust home. One man got a spine right in the eye, puncturing the orb and allowing the viscous fluid to ooze down its length as it kept on going, through into his brain. A flicker of bright white light as the optic nerve shorted out, and he was gone, falling from his seat to roll lifeless on the hard earth, picking up stray wood and spines like a pin cushion.

The other man wasn’t so lucky. He thought, at first, that he was. He had avoided the spines and spikes, more through luck than any attempt on his part to take evasive action. He had not, however, been so fortunate in avoiding the sap that was splashing the side of the wag. It touched his skin—just the forearm—and felt cool. He looked down, and could see that the coolness was caused simply by its burning through the surface nerves before they had a chance to register pain. The skin had melted from his arm, and already the corrosive liquid had stripped down to the bone. He made to scream, and another blob of sap caught in the air was sucked into his mouth as he drew breath. No scream issued forth as the coruscating liquid took the flesh from the roof of his mouth, continuing down his throat to strip his larynx. The effects also traveled up, eating into his nasal passages. His own blood began to drown him, although he was beyond noticing by this point, driven mad by the agony of being eaten alive by the acid sap.

As the second man also plunged to his doom, the driver was still attempting to pilot his vehicle through the carnage caused by the school bus. It was a losing battle as the pain from his shoulder injury rendered it useless, and his reflexes grew slower with every enforced turn of the wheel. As darkness engulfed his senses, he drove the wag into the base of one of the cacti. Already weakened by a collision with the school bus, it wavered then slowly tumbled forward, down onto the wag, igniting the fuel in the tank and engulfing cactus and wag in sheets of flame.

The enemy had been vanquished, but Ryan’s main concern was getting the wag out of the cactus patch without any further damage. The labyrinthine path through the patch had seen him turn back on himself many times to try to squeeze the wag into gaps, and so he was no longer sure where the road lay, or indeed where the end of the patch itself could be found. He felt as if he was driving in dizzying circles, growing more and more confused, until he caught a glimpse of clear land beyond. He straightened the wheel and gunned the engine as much as he dared, foot down and headed for empty space. The interior of the wag echoed with the crash of cactus against metal, but there was no other apparent damage done as the wag crashed out and onto the flat, dry earth.

Ryan let the wag come to rest, the engine gently ticking over, and looked around. The cactus patch behind them was partially ablaze as the fire from the blaster wag spread. The road was to their left. The wag was pitted and scored by the impact of bullets, shafts of cacti trunk and spines, some of which had penetrated the roof of the wag, partially visible.

But the friends were intact. Gathered in the aisle, only now straightening and standing, they were in one piece. Wordlessly, they left the wag to survey the carnage. J.B. began to check the wag, noting the scoring away of paint and the stripping to bare metal where the acid sap had hit. Damn lucky it didn’t hit any of us, he thought, tentatively approaching the scored sections of the wag body.

It was Doc who broke the silence.

“I wonder what it was that they actually wanted?” he wondered. “If it was to take our women, then it was a very strange way to do it…to blast us all to annihilation.”

“Mebbe it wasn’t that at all,” Ryan mused. “Mebbe just sport. Mebbe the feeb we got this from thought it was still his. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we get some distance between us and that pesthole.”

He joined J.B. at the side of the wag. “Any damage?”

The Armorer shook his head. “Not anything more than surface. That bastard cactus juice is strong, though,” he added, indicating the acid-eaten patches.

“Then we got lucky it never got inside,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope we don’t have to ride that luck.”

In a subdued mood, mindful of how close they had come to being overpowered by both man and nature in tandem, the friends boarded the bus. As Ryan clashed the gears and guided the vehicle back to the road, they sat detached from one another, each lost in his or her own thoughts. They hardly noticed that their driver elected to follow the line of the road, but not to actually venture onto the crumpled blacktop. The shoulder was rough, but actually less damaging than the potholed road surface itself.

They made slow, steady progress for more than ten miles, putting plenty of distance between themselves and Stripmall. The old highway seemed to stretch out before them like an endless ribbon, disappearing into the heat haze that was still heavy, even though the afternoon was wearing on. Some of it should have burned off by now, but out here the sun was so intense that any burn was minimal.

Which was why the sudden intersection of another blacktop took them by surprise. It seemed to snake from nowhere and cut across the one they drove beside. Ryan pulled the bus up to a halt at the junction and turned to J.B.

“What do you reckon?” he asked simply.

The Armorer screwed up his face in concentration as he looked out of the shattered windows in both directions. He stood and, without a word, got off the bus, pulling the minisextant from a bag slung across his shoulder. He looked up at the sun, then took a reading before surveying the short distance available before the horizon blurred.

“That way’s west,” he drawled, indicating with his hand. “We were coming from the southeast to begin with, and the way I figure, there’s more habitation to the west.”

Ryan nodded. “West it is, then.”

J.B. got back on board, and Ryan heaved the old wag toward the west. It was the first time since they had got back on the road that he had been compelled to put the wheel on full lock. As the wag groaned around, the steering became unsteady, and a whining, grinding sound began to come from beneath the vehicle. It veered sharply, and then tilted forward as a snapping, abrasive screech came from beneath, throwing all those within violently forward.

“Fireblast!” Ryan breathed as he managed to get the air back into his body that had been expelled by the sudden impact against the wheel. “What the fuck…”

“I would wager to suggest that perhaps we were not as lucky as we had assumed,” Doc commented mildly, pulling himself up and ignoring the pain in his ribs.

“Yeah, Doc’s right there,” Mildred said with a sardonic tone. “Always knew our luck couldn’t go on.”

J.B. was already out of the wag and examining the damage. His head appeared in the doorway. “Nothing good to say.” He shrugged. “Guess some of that sap shit must’ve got underneath, and turning the wag sharply hit the weak spot. It’s sheered right underneath.”

“No chance of being able to fix it?” Ryan asked, more from blind hope than anything else.

The Armorer allowed himself a ghost of a smile. “Not unless you got a torch and mebbe a replacement axle hidden somewhere in here.”

It took them a few minutes to gather themselves and assemble outside, in the baking heat, where they could survey the damage for themselves.

“Shit, we gave our food and water for that,” Krysty said as she looked at the irreparable damage, voicing the thoughts of all of them.

“We’ve just got to hit the road and hope we reach a ville before we run out,” Ryan said. “No sense in heading back. May as well keep going west.”

“You say that like we’ve got a choice,” J.B. said, amused.

They gathered their packs, and were ready to begin when Ryan noticed that Jak had become distracted. The albino teen shook his head.

“Trouble. Wags coming from west, heading straight here. Heavy shit, should eyeball soon.”

Ryan didn’t doubt him. Even as he spoke, the sound of a convoy became audible from the distance. In normal circumstances, visual contact would have occurred first; but with this heat haze still rendering a false horizon, normal was a changed thing.

Ryan breathed heavily. “At least they’re not from Stripmall. They might be friendly, or at least inclined to ask first, fire second.”

The old bus still had some use. It was a big vehicle, and could at least offer a degree of cover that was sorely lacking in the surrounding environment. The friends adopted positions around the bus that covered them from the oncoming convoy. As it broke through the haze, they could see that it was at least five wags strong, with a heavily armored vehicle at the front. They would have expected it to either fire on them from a distance—a “make-sure” defensive measure—or to approach them close up, knowing that the armored wag offered protection.

It did neither. Instead, the wag pulled up about a thousand yards away, the rest of the convoy coming to a halt at its rear. It sat there, immobile, for some time.

“What’s his game?” Mildred asked.

“An interesting one,” J.B. replied. “Is he trying to draw our fire?”

“Bastard strange way to do it,” Ryan countered.

And then, just when they’d started to grow weary of the waiting, something happened. The offside door of the wag opened, and a squat, muscular man emerged. Dressed in a black vest and camou pants, with heavy boots and a khaki bandanna, he was holding a white cloth above his head. Slowly, he began to walk toward them. As he got closer, they could see that he was wearing the bandanna out of vanity for his bald head, although the rest of him was hairy, down to the bushy black beard flecked with gray that flowed onto his chest. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored aviator shades.

“He triple stupe or something?” Jak spit.

“Or triple smart,” Ryan countered. “We’re not going to fire on him when he’s unarmed but has all that firepower at his back. That’d be like saying please chill me.”

“Might be mutie stupes,” Jak said. “Still taking big chance.”

“Looks like the kind of guy that’s based his life around taking chances,” Mildred returned. “You don’t get a trader with a wag like that unless you’re prepared to walk the line.”

As she said this, both J.B. and Ryan’s thoughts turned to their old mentor, the man known simply as Trader. The one thing he’d taught them, above all else, was that life was a risk so you always had to weigh the odds with great care.

“They’ve got us covered,” Ryan said decisively. “Must have.”

“Probably long-range, mebbe they’ve even got one of those working infrareds or heat-seekers so they can see how many of us there are. We make one move, and we’ve bought the farm before he even needs to duck and cover,” J.B. stated.

They laid their weapons at ease, as Ryan indicated. By this time, the heavyset man was in hailing distance.

“Looks like you’ve got trouble, there,” he began.

Ryan and J.B. exchanged puzzled glances. No ultimatum? The lone man continued.

“I’m thinking that mebbe you could use some help.”

Ryan paused before answering, “That’s good of you to offer help, especially to strangers. But it’s not the way things usually are. People in these parts usually come in blasting first, asking questions second. That’s if there’s anyone left to ask.”

The heavyset man shrugged. “True. But there are some people I’m looking for in these parts, and I figure you may be them.”

“How come?” Ryan looked along his people. Their faces echoed his own suspicion. They were rarely welcomed, or sought for anything other than retribution.

“I heard tell that a certain group of fighters were in these parts. I know their reputation. I know that they were last heard of in Stripmall, and that no one who isn’t gaudy or paying mark is welcome there for long. And I know that there are six of you using that wag as cover.”

“You’re certain of a lot of things,” Ryan yelled in return. “Means you must have good information and some serious tech.”

“You’re damn right I have,” the man replied, his tone taking on a kind of pride. “I didn’t get to be the best trader in these parts of the land without having a nose for useful shit. I like useful. I like good. And you people have a rep as being the best.”

“How do you hear so much?” In truth, Ryan didn’t care, but he’d ask anything to buy some time—time to figure out how they could cover themselves against the armored wag when they were either pinned down behind the old bus or completely in the open. Either way, it wasn’t good.

“Tell ya something. I got this armorer, and she’s obsessed by stories about you people. She’s also got a nose for the ordnance like you wouldn’t believe. She’s got two big goals in her life, much as she’ll let me know. One is to have the best armory of any trader. The other is to work with you guys. I trust her word on how good you are. But listen, don’t just take my word for it.” Slowly, so as to show that he had no concealed weapon, he lifted his right hand until it touched the side of his face. “Eula, get your ass out here, but slow.” He carefully put his hand down, then continued. “Something she scoped out for me. Some old tech equipment that enables us to communicate without having to carry a lot of shit. See, she’s good. But don’t take my word for it. She’s coming.”

From beyond the heavyset trader, they could see someone exit the armored wag and start to walk slowly toward them with a purposeful stride, and a gait that suggested she was not to be trifled with. She was barely more than five feet tall, and slight in build. She was dressed in black: vest, skirt and leggings, with heavy boots that seemed too large for her. Her hair was also raven-black, tied in a ponytail that whipped behind her with every stride. She was carrying a 7.62 mm assault rifle that seemed too large for her.

When Eula was level with the trader, she stopped. She didn’t bother to look at him, but spoke unbidden.

“Been looking for you people for a long time, if you’re who I think you are. Got a lot to learn from you. We all have. Especially J. B. Dix. Met him once. Remember him well.”

Behind the bus, Mildred looked at the Armorer. “You know who she is, John?”

The Armorer looked puzzled. “She doesn’t look all that old. If it had been recent times, then all of you would know her, too. But, if I do know her, then it must’ve been when she was real small. Don’t recognize the name, either.”

“Well, she knows you,” Mildred replied. “What’s more, that fact looks like it may save our asses for now. So you’d better remember, in case she gets pissed at the fact that you can’t.”

“Well?” the trader yelled, “you gonna come out, or you still figure that we want to chill you?”

“Could have done that a long time back,” Ryan countered. He indicated to his people. “We’re coming out.”

The friends emerged from the cover of the old school bus. As they did, they could see that Eula was scoping them. She turned to the trader and nodded. She was satisfied they were who they were supposed to be, which was some kind of comfort, Ryan figured. At least they were safe…for now.

Eula spent the longest time staring at J.B. Her expression was unfathomable, and it made the Armorer feel uncomfortable.

“You don’t remember me, do you, John Barrymore Dix?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, a smile played across her lips. “Don’t worry. It was a long time ago. And no one noticed me back then. No one.”

Chapter Two

The Past

Guthrie was a nowhere ville, a small pesthole of huts and small hovels constructed from the debris that could be scavenged. The people made some desultory attempts at farming, but the nature of the dustbowl soil meant that the few crops it could produce were stunted and lacking in nutrients. It was off the beaten tracks and ruined blacktops that still crosscrossed the midwest, and those who lived there had a legend that they only landed up there because they got lost on the way to somewhere else. The ville itself was named after the guy who was the first to erect a little hut that fell down many times before others stumbled on him and built a few little huts of their own.

J. B. Dix had ended up in the pesthole ville of Guthrie in much the same way as anyone else who arrived there: by accident, and less than willingly. The skinny youth was quiet, slight, wiry, and wore spectacles that he was almost always polishing. He never said a word if he could help it, although if a person got him talking about blasters, that was another matter. You couldn’t shut him up, and he’d talk about stuff that no one else in Guthrie gave a shit about. So after a while they stopped asking. And he stopped talking.

What they really wanted to know was where he’d come from, why he’d landed in Guthrie and what the hell had happened to cause him to run. But any attempt to broach that subject was met with a greater silence than was usual. And it wasn’t just a matter of his being a quiet kid. There was something else there, a kind of menace that said it would be a real bad idea to mess with him.

So no one did. Except for Jeb Willets, who was big and muscular and therefore so out of place in Guthrie that he was able to bully his way around the ville. He figured the little kid with the bad eyes would be an easy mark. And at first he’d seemed right. He’d taken him by surprise and landed a few blows that seemed to knock the hell out of the kid. But Dix was sly—a feint, a foot, a use of balance that the lumbering Willets wasn’t used to, and the big man was on the ground, unconscious.

Then the thing that really made them leave J.B. alone: while Willets was unconscious, the skinny kid wired his shack to blow with some explosive he’d made. Then, when Willets was recovered, Dix took him at knifepoint and made him watch as the shack blew.

No one stepped in. The truth was, they all wished that they could have done that to the man. Willets was broken, and left the ville soon after.

And no one asked J.B. any questions. They left him alone. He liked it that way.

Of course, a man had to live. And one of the few things that he ever let out about himself was that he came from Colorado way, from a ville called Cripple Creek. He said nothing about family, but only mentioned it by way of saying that since he was young he’d been fascinated by blasters and explosives, and had educated himself in seeing what made them work, taking them apart and putting them back together again in better working condition than he’d found them. He knew the predark histories of the things, and he’d tell you about them while he was taking your beat-up old blaster and making it shiny like new.

The kid had a talent. It was the one time he didn’t shut up, and no one wanted to know, but nonetheless you had to give it to him.

So most of the time you’d just leave the blaster with him, and let him bring it back to you when it was done. That was fine. You paid him jack if you had any, or else you gave him food or supplies of some kind. There were convoys that passed in or near from time to time, and there was usually some service or some goods that Guthrie could use for exchange.

It wasn’t living, but it was existing. You didn’t buy the farm, and that was enough for most people. It was enough for the young J. B. Dix, for now.

That changed when Trader chanced upon the shanty.

“WHY DO WE ALWAYS end up in shit heaps like this?” Hunnaker moaned, idly scratching at herself; she could already feel the bugs starting to bite. She looked out of War Wag One at the expanse of dust, ordure and ramshackle buildings that made up the ville. “We’re supposed to be the best, so why do we bother?”

Trader bit the end off a cigar, spit it over her shoulder and out into the dirt, then clamped the smoke between a grin that threatened to split the graying stubble that covered the lower half of his face.

“Hunn, sometimes I can’t believe how stupe you can be. For someone so smart, you don’t do a lot of thinking. How do you reckon we got to where we are? I’ll tell you,” he went on, not giving her a chance to answer, “it’s because we pay attention to detail. You never know what’s out there until you’ve looked. That’s how come I found the stash that set us up, and that’s how come we keep getting bigger while all those other traders just bitch and whine and wonder how we did it.”

“And you reckon we’ll find something here?” she questioned, her tone leaving her doubt all too obvious.

Poet leaned over them both. “Ever known Trader to be wrong?”

She looked at both men, who were grinning at her.

“There’s always a first time,” she said flatly.

Trader and Poet were still laughing sometime later, when they took a look around the ville. By the time they’d finished, the smiles had gone and they were figuring that maybe Hunn had been right. There was nothing in this pesthole to interest them. They’d made some sparse business, just for the sake of it, and because Trader had a few commodities, he was overstocked with that he could afford to let go at a low rate. Never knew when they might come back this way, and they wanted a hospitable rather than hostile reception. Come to that, it would ensure they left on friendly terms, rather than in the wake of a firefight. Because these were mean folk, more so than in many other places. The misery of their existence saw to that.

So it looked as though this little detour would draw a blank, and it would be little more than just some wasted fuel.

Until the one thing that had been nagging at Trader the whole while suddenly clicked in his mind.

“You notice something about these folk?” he asked Poet in an undertone.

“Other than they’re being meaner than a mutie rattlesnake with a jolt hangover?”

Trader’s grin returned. “Yeah, other than that. Take a look at their blasters.”

Poet allowed himself a surreptitious study as they walked, before answering. “Nice gear. Wouldn’t like to have to face them down with those, even with all the ordnance we carry.”

“Too true, Poet. But think about it. This place is knee-deep in its own shit, with nothing to offer us in any way…to offer anyone who passes through. So how come they have such good ordnance?”

“Let me ask a few questions,” Poet replied.

Which didn’t prove too hard. There was only one bar in the ville, and although the brew it purveyed was of a poor quality—indeed, Poet felt he’d drunk better sump oil than this filth—it was all the locals had, and they were more than happy to let a lonely traveler spend some jack on getting drunk with them. He had plenty to spare, it seemed, and was more than happy to spend. Get him drunk enough and there was the chance of rolling him, boosting the local economy and getting one over an outlander, which was always a local favorite.

Except that Poet had drunk more, and far better, men under the table than lived in Guthrie. And for all its foul taste, the local brew was nowhere near as strong as some that he’d tasted over the years. So it wasn’t long—and not so deep in his pocket as he’d feared—that Poet had turned the tables and had the locals on the subject of their hardware. A little flattery about how good their blasters were compared to some he’d seen on his travels, and they were soon telling him about their little secret advantage in the matter.

And it didn’t take them much to start speculating on J. B. Dix, the taciturn and private teenager who’d arrived the previous fall had been a hot topic of conversation ever since. Tongues loosened, Poet had to put up with a whole lot of speculation that was of no use to him. But he did work out—among the drivel and drunken babble—that the young man had a rare talent that he figured Trader would feel wasted in this backwater.

So it was that the following afternoon, while Poet busied himself and those he had drunk with still nursed the mother, father, son and daughter of all hangovers, Trader made his way to the small shack that the mysterious J. B. Dix had made his home.

“Speak to you, son?” Trader had asked as he hovered in the doorway. The young man said nothing, hunched over an old Smith & Wesson .38 snubbie, meticulously cleaning and reassembling the blaster. The pieces he had finished with were immaculate; the pieces he had yet to reach looked as if they came from a different blaster. Trader was about to speak again, when J.B. finally answered.

“What do you want?” he asked in a tone that was neutral but brisk. He didn’t bother looking up.

“I heard you’ve got a talent for this sort of thing,” Trader said, realizing that niceties would be wasted, and that it would be best to cut to the chase. “I’ve got some ordnance that needs work. You care to take a look?” He didn’t feel it necessary to add that the ordnance had been fine until he’d told Poet to work on it.

“It’ll cost you,” J.B. said simply.

“We’ll see,” Trader replied. “See what kind of a job you do.”

“It’ll be good,” J.B. answered. He said no more. He was still absorbed in his work, and still didn’t look up.

After a pause, Trader said, “I’ll be back.”

He left without another word from the taciturn teenager. As he walked back to War Wag One, through the filth and misery that was Guthrie, he mused on how come a man with such a talent should end up here. He hadn’t originated from here, and he hadn’t been here that long. So what had happened that had forced him to flee wherever it was that he came from and seek to bury himself in this back of beyond pesthole?

Trader was a student of the human condition. Not just because people fascinated him, but because it was a necessity in his occupation. You didn’t learn to read people, and damn quick, then it was certain that you’d end up with a bullet or a knife in your gut, and all your jack in someone else’s hands. So you learned to read people pretty quick. Generally. But this boy was something different. He gave so little away that it was hard to get any kind of a handle on him.

But Trader had a gut feeling. The kid did good work, and he obviously took pride in it. That attention to meticulous detail said something about his nature. And he seemed to be reserved by that nature. If something had made him run, it wasn’t so bad that he was nervous about it. It really did seem as though he just felt it was no one else’s business.

Okay, then, let’s see how he does with the blasters, Trader thought. He found that Poet had finished his allotted task, and he sent him along to the kid with the screwed-up ordnance. Poet returned a few minutes later, shaking his head. Kid had said to come back tomorrow and hadn’t even bothered looking up. Poet found him hard to fathom.

So how the hell the rest of them would take him—especially someone like Hunn—was an idea that kept Trader amused for the rest of the day.

Next morning, Trader felt that he should go and conclude this business himself. Mulling it over while drinking the night before, he’d almost made up his mind to ask the kid to join them without even waiting to see what his work was like. Hell, he could see that from everyone in this rotted ville. The only real question was how the kid would fit in. He’d either fit or fuck off pretty damn quick. So scratch that. The real question was whether the kid would want to fit with them.

Only one way to find out.

When Trader arrived at the ramshackle hut in which J.B. had made his home, he found that the kid was ready and waiting for him.

“Sit down,” J.B. said, gesturing to a chair. Trader eyed it warily. It looked like it might collapse under his weight. He very carefully sat. The kid met his eyes, staring at him as though trying to work him out. It was rarely, if at all, that it was this way around, and Trader found it an unnerving experience. “So,” J.B. said finally, “why are you jerking me around?”

“What makes you say that?”

The briefest of smiles—only the vaguest of amusement—flickered across his face as he gestured to the immaculately cleaned and restored blasters that lay on an oilcloth by the table.

“There was nothing wrong with your blasters. Least, there was nothing wrong till you or one of your people tried to mess them up.”

“What makes you say that?” Trader repeated, keeping his voice even.

“Normal wear and tear, stupe assholes misusing ordnance…that’s easy to spot. Just like it was easy to spot that someone had tried to make these blasters looked misused, and to fuck up the most difficult shit to fix. That just doesn’t happen in regular use. Mebbe one in ten, if you’re unlucky. But not every single one.”

Trader grinned. “You got me. I wanted to see how good you were.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you to join us. I don’t know why you’re stuck in this pesthole, and truth is, I don’t care. But I do know this—you’re wasted here. We could do with someone like you.”

“Whoever messed those blasters for you knew what they were doing.”

“True enough,” Trader agreed, “but while they might have been able to put them right, they wouldn’t have known that they’d been deliberately messed with to begin with. That, Mr. Dix, is a true talent. And I could do with true talent. I’ve got the best convoy in these lands, and I got it by keeping my eye open for opportunity. Way I figure it, we pick up armament to trade cheap that are fucked up, you fix them and we make a good profit. More than we do now. And with you one of us, we get to have the best armory of any convoy should anyone try to mess with us.”

“And I get?”

“Good jack. I look after my people in other ways, too. You play straight with me, you won’t find a better boss nor baron anywhere. I figure that if I treat my people good, they won’t rip me off or run. Mind, you step out of line and I’ll chill you myself.”

J.B. said nothing for some time, just stared at the man in front of him. Trader felt like the young man was trying to stare deep into his soul, to work him out. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was promising: someone this careful was liable to screw up easily.

Finally, Dix broke his silence. “As long as there’s no more stupe tricks or tests like this one,” he said, indicating the oilcloth of blasters, “then I’m in. It’s about time I got out of this no horse shitheap.”

Trader’s face split in a broad grin. “Reckon you’re about right,” he said simply. “Welcome aboard War Wag One.”

Chapter Three

The Present

In the moments since Eula had spoken, a silence had spread uncomfortably over the oddly clustered group. On one side stood Eula and the trader. On the other stood the six friends. J.B. was staring at the young woman. The others were dividing their attention between the Armorer and Eula, trying to fathom what ghost had just snaked from J.B.’s past, and how it would affect them.

J.B. was aware that whatever he said next would be of the utmost importance. The armored wag in the distance was linked to the trader—and probably the young woman who was the convoy armorer—by the discreet headsets they wore. Only now, up close, could he see the small stalk of clear plastic housing the mic as it sat in the trader’s beard. Eula’s was a little more obvious. No doubt they were powerful enough to be picking up every word that was said out here, so close were the two sides.

Problem was, he had never seen this young woman in his life, and had no idea who she was. The name meant nothing to him. The face, likewise. If he said as much, how pissed would these two people in front him be? And if they were, then how much would that affect the actions of the armored wag that lay some distance back? Take out these two and take scant cover, and what chance was there of surviving attack? With the mics, was there even the chance of taking that cover before being picked off?

They were outnumbered and unsure whether the supposed enemy actually was the enemy at this moment. The wrong word was all it would take to make the situation explode.

For a man whose way with words veered between minimal and clumsy most of the time, this was a no-win call. But he had to say something. The weight of expectation was upon him. That was a phrase he’d heard Doc mutter in the past, and he had never understood it until now.

“Listen,” he began haltingly, “you say you know me, but I gotta tell you, I don’t recognize your face, and you’re not that old. I mean, I spent a lot of time with these people over the past few years, and you would have been a child, and…”

He could feel the others watch the trader and the woman, could feel the tension as they waited to read body language, the tightening of their posture as they prepared to act.

The trader looked at the woman beside him. She looked, in turn, with a level gaze at J.B.

“Well?” the trader asked.

She shrugged. “He’s right. I remember him, but it was a long time ago, now. I was just a kid, and he wouldn’t have noticed me back then. Always interested in ordnance. People came second. Bet they still do. Got a point, though. Blasters don’t let you down like people do.”

Was it Mildred’s imagination, or did Eula look just a little too hard at John when she said this last? Was there an undertone there that suggested she should be watched, that she should not be trusted?

Mildred looked along at the others, a sidelong glance intended to disguise her intent. It was hard to tell if they had also picked up on this. Back in the days of her youth, they called it a poker face. Her father would denounce the effects of gambling on a Sunday, but wasn’t averse to a little poker on the Saturday night with a few friends. He always lost a little, but never gambled much. He said it was because he liked the social side of the game, and knew his face was too honest, too open. That was why to take it seriously would have meant ruin.

J.B.’s answer was important. No one knew that better than him. His words were measured, much more than he was used to. He knew that he had to pick each one as carefully as he, usually so dismissive of words, could.

“One thing you learn as you get older,” he said slowly, “is that ordnance is important because it helps people. Get careful with that, and it can turn a firefight, defend a ville—a convoy—and someone sure as shit has to obsess at times, to make sure that can happen.”

Eula, whose face had been thus far so set as to make the stony-faced friends seem open and readable, allowed a flicker of emotion to show. What it may be was hard to tell. Humor? Anger? Exasperation? Perhaps one, perhaps all. It was the briefest of muscle twitches.

“Yeah,” she said slowly, “that’s a good lesson to learn. Hope you didn’t pick it up the hard way.”

“Depends what you think is the hard way,” J.B. countered.

Eula gave the briefest of nods—everything, it seemed, was minimal to the point of almost nonexistence with her—before answering the questioning gaze of the trader.

“Yeah, I think we should ask them.”

This last was cryptic enough to cause a ripple of bemusement to spread across the group. They were wire taut, expecting to have to act in less than a blink of an eye; and now, when they would have expected resolution and action, they were to be faced with a further dilemma.

The trader let a wry grin spread across his dark, bearded face. He raised his hand to his eyes and took off his aviator shades. A small gesture, but a conciliatory one as they would now be able to read his eyes. They were small, set in folds of wrinkled fat that showed a greater age than they would have guessed, and were of a piercing, ice blue. They almost twinkled with humor as he spoke.

“It’s okay, guys. Listen, I’ve got to be straight with you, here. If we wanted to take you out, we could have done it without even breaking a sweat. We’ve got the firepower to do it, and it would have been easy to reduce that shitty little wag you were stuck with to a heap of melted junk metal. No problem. But our tech, and the intel we’ve picked up along the road, suggested that you were the people Eula here has heard of, and we need someone like you right now. So that’s why we stopped and I offered myself up like this. Sure, you could try and chill me. I figure my wag would have taken you out before your fingers had even tightened on the those triggers. Mebbe that’s a gamble, but you don’t get anywhere by playing it safe the whole time.”

Ryan let him speak. This trader was a little keen on the sound of his own voice, and a lot of what he was saying had already been said. But that was good. They’d already learned that the woman’s name was Eula. Ryan was hoping that it would ring a few more bells with J.B.’s memory. Any help they could get would be appreciated. And the trader was letting slip that he was in trouble. Someone like him would only want people like them because he was short of muscle, which meant that he’d let slip a weakness.

“So what’s your proposition?” Ryan said when the trader had left him the time and space to speak.

“Simple, really. I need replacements in my sec force. We had a little run-in with another convoy down the road apiece. It left me a little light on manpower.”

“That’s a mite careless for a man who’s telling us about how good his tech is,” Ryan posed.

The trader nodded. “Sure enough. Trouble is, the tech isn’t always what you need. We don’t have the night-vision shit working on the wag, and one of my rivals decided to pay us a little visit in the dark. His men crept up on us, and I guess I found that my boys weren’t as sharp as they thought they were. Mebbe the tech has been too good to them—to us—and it made us a little soft.”

Ryan was more than a little surprised that the trader had lasted long enough to be here. He seemed to give more and more away freely every time he opened his mouth, and he hadn’t finished yet.

“I guess I should level with you. Eula knows of you because of J. B. Dix, but the stories about you spread across the lands. We should know, we spend most of our time on the road. You used to be with the Trader, right? Guy who was the biggest thing in convoys before he disappeared. Now, there are a lot of stories about him, too, and everyone has their own reason for why he went missing. I figure that mebbe he just made so much jack that he could afford to not lay his ass on the line every day, and that he’s mebbe back where he got his shit in the first place, just enjoying every day.”

He paused, scanning their faces to see if he was right. There was enough feral cunning with the loose tongue to perhaps be looking for a clue as to any great stash that he could uncover. He was far more transparent than he figured, and Ryan wasn’t the only one who had to suppress a smile. Then again, he was the man with the tech and the wags, and they weren’t. So if he was as stupe as he seemed, then he was lucky, too. And that was the most valuable commodity of all.

Their silence just encouraged him to run off at the mouth all the more. Sooner or later he’d tell them exactly what he wanted, but while he was letting this much slip, it wasn’t worth telling him to cut to the chase.

“Yeah, well, if he is, then good luck to him. He earned it the hard way, and I’ll tell you something—when I get the chance, I’m sure as shit gonna go the same way. Meantime, I’ve gotta earn that jack, and I’m down the number of men I need to cover my back. So I’ve got a proposition for you.”

Finally, Ryan thought, but said nothing. The trader continued.

“We’ve got a run to do that some folks think is nothing short of asking to buy the farm. It’s gonna take balls, but the way I hear it that’s something you people ain’t short of. Even the women. That’s cool, if you ladies are anything like Eula, then I’m okay with that.”

Mildred and Krysty exchanged glances. Each figured that this guy was ripe for having a new asshole ripped already, even though there was nothing wrong with the one he had, except that he used it for talking. Not even noticing this, he carried on regardless.

“I need replacement sec, and for a hard ride. I don’t expect you to sign up for the long haul. Hell, I don’t even want that myself. But I’ll tell you what I can offer you. If we make the trip and you join us, there’ll be good jack in it for you. More than that, it’ll get you the hell out of here. ’Cause I’m thinking that right now you got no wag, and no way you can get out of this wasteland in one piece. I figure that does all my arguing for me.”

Ryan considered that: they’d be trusting a man who was too full of himself for the one-eyed man’s liking, and taking on the wild card that was whatever agenda Eula was bringing to the table. On the other hand, there was little to gain by staying where they were.

He looked at his companions. Mildred and Krysty had eyes that told him they would go with it; Doc raised one eyebrow in a manner that spoke volumes; and Jak shrugged, so slight that none but his friends would be able to see it. But it was J.B. whose opinion Ryan really wanted to know. He had known the Armorer longer than anyone, and the men had bonds forged in fire that went even deeper than their allegiances to the others in the group.

J.B.’s eyes flickered for a moment, as though indecision came from the need to search deeper within himself than he usually found necessary.

It was the slightest twitch of facial muscle, a nod that was barely a nod. But it was enough.

Ryan turned to the trader. He spoke slowly, as though he were still undecided. “Well, I guess you have a point, stranger. We’re in a situation here that you could call no-win. Staying here is as good as buying the farm, just stringing out the agony, I guess. But we’re taking a leap into the dark if—and it is if—we take up your offer. If we knew exactly what we were taking on…” He let it tail off, leaving the question unasked.

As he had hoped, the trader grimaced as he tried to hold his feelings in check and not let anything slip. But he was too garrulous, too open for that.

The man would be a sucker on poker night, Mildred thought, seeing where Ryan was leading him.

“All right, all right, I kinda wanted to get you signed up and with the plan before I told you too much, but if that’s what it takes…Okay, it’s this way. I’ve got a cargo of food supplies—some self-heats, dried stuff, fresh produce that we can keep that way with some old refrigeration units we plundered—and a whole lot of clothing. We’re headed across this pesthole stretch of land, headed for the far side. It’s a bastard of a haul, and there’s shit-all in the way of stops along the way. At least, none that I would trust.”

“If they’re anything like Stripmall, then I can understand that,” Ryan murmured.

“My friend, they make Stripmall look like a paradise,” the trader said with a grim smile. “Point is, we don’t have the fuel to keep the wags and the generators for the fresh stuff running if we make stops. We can only do it if we run hell-for-leather across this asswipe land. Hell, even stopping here is losing us valuable time. We can make mebbe one, two brief stops a day if we have to.”

“So what’s your problem?” Ryan asked. “Back in the day, when me and J.B. ran with Trader, we used to make long runs as a matter of course.”

“You ever do the dustbowl?”

“We came this way a few times,” Ryan mused. “Know Trader used to do it before I joined up.”

“Yeah, but never in one long run,” J.B. added. Ryan looked at him. He didn’t know that J.B. knew anything about this territory. He’d certainly never mentioned it in all the years he’d known him. Nor had he said anything while they had been here.

The trader in front of them nodded. “There’s a reason for that. These are the badlands, man. Rough riders and wag raiders. There’s fuck all out here, so they have to do what they can, which means chilling and stealing anything that passes by and isn’t defended by serious hardware. There’s only one convoy that tried the straight run, and it didn’t make it. So now it’s our turn. We need new sec, and we want the best. From what I hear, that’s you people. Reckon fate has smiled upon me—if not all of us—matching us up like this.”

RYAN EYED HIM. The man was trying hard. Maybe a little too hard. So this other convoy hadn’t made it? Ryan wondered if that was connected to the new refrigeration units they had acquired, and the loss of the sec men in a firefight with another convoy. Seemed too much of a coincidence. Still, if he made it seem as if they trusted the trader, then the man seemed too stupe to notice that they were holding out. The woman—Ryan looked at her, her face impassive and inscrutable all the while—was another matter.

“Figure you leave us no choice,” Ryan said in his best ingenuous tone, “but even so, we’d be stupe if we said yes without knowing what kind of ordnance you had.”

“Best you’ll find,” Eula interjected in flat tones. “Better than J. B. Dix will have seen for many a year.” There was a note in her tone that suggested this should mean something to him; if so, it was too obtuse, and the Armorer was left with nothing more than a vague sense of unease as her eyes bored into him.

“You bet it is,” the trader said quickly in a placating manner. “Hell, it’d be impolite to ask you aboard without showing you. Stand down,” he added, holding his ear, obviously directing this into the headset, “we’re coming back. Everything is cool.”

The trader turned, beckoning them to follow. Eula stood back, still cradling the 7.62 mm blaster that looked too large for her. Her impassive face still gave nothing away. She was no threat at present—the manner in which Krysty’s sentient hair flowed free only reinforced this impression—but she would still need to be watched.

The friends paused. The idea of having her, with that blaster, at their backs was not something that anyone would consider ideal. Subtly, Ryan indicated they should go with it. Jak caught Ryan’s eye, and as they fell in behind the trader, the albino teen adopted the unusual position of taking up the rear of the party. Many places in his patched camou jacket concealed his leaf-bladed throwing knives. Reputation may have told how quick the albino youth could be, but experience was the only way to really know the swiftness with which he could move. As he passed Eula, he knew he could move quicker than she could should the need arise.

As they traveled the short distance between their original position and the armored wag, they were able to see more clearly the extent of the convoy. There were four other wags. Two of them were large trailers, closed in on all sides. These were obviously the old refrigeration units. The cabs attached to them had been reinforced with mesh where any glass was visible, armor plating covering the remainder. The old paintwork along the sides of both cabs and wags was pitted and scarred where it was still visible. Camou had been painted over most of the rest. There were also a number of scores and scorch marks that made the friends wonder once more about how they had been “acquired.”

These wags had only blasterports in the cabs. Although they would be hard to damage in themselves, their length and lack of slits made them vulnerable to blind-spot attack. That was probably why they sat in the middle of the convoy, flanked by two wags that carried the rest of the cargo. These were armored, with blasterports and slits. They had been converted, and both Ryan and J.B. could only admire the work that had gone into them. They looked to be solid vehicles, but they weren’t big. If the cabs on the refrigerated wags could hold two people, these only held three or four, tops. Maximum of twelve crew.

The armored wag out front was more impressive. Again, it wasn’t just the size, although it was a heavy-duty predark military wag, dark and heavy in color, albeit a little chipped and faded by combat. It was squat, with tires at front and a caterpillar track at the rear. It had bubble-mounted machine blasters, ob slits, shielded surveillance tech and two large mounted cannon. It could do some serious damage to anything that dared to go up against it.

“How much of the tech in that still work?” J.B. asked.

Eula answered. “Most of the surveillance tech, some of the weapons systems. Much of it was fixable, but it’s a little erratic.”

J.B. looked over his shoulder. “You don’t find that a problem?” he questioned, remembering how Trader had stripped much of the comp work out of War Wag One, preferring total reliability at the expense of some tech.

She shrugged. “It hasn’t failed yet.”

“But what about the tech that needed satellite shit? That can’t be working,” he added.

“I said some, not all,” she snapped, taking it as though it was personal criticism.

By this time they had reached the armored wag, and the trader was running a loving hand over it.

“Hasn’t seen me wrong yet,” he said quietly. “This is it, guys. The convoy. Used to be two motorbikes, but they got wasted in our little, uh, contretemps,” he said, trying to brush past the matter.

“What?” Jak asked.

“An old word, dear boy, not English. I believe he is referring to the firefight he mentioned earlier,” Doc said softly.

“Should fuckin’ say so,” Jak murmured.

“How many people you carry?” Ryan asked. He had noted a look of anger flash across the trader’s face, and he wanted to move things on.

“This takes five people. A full complement of sec, drivers, workers comes to seventeen on a trip.”

“Yeah, and how many you carrying now?” Ryan pressed.

The trader grimaced. “That’s the thing. We lost eight in the firefight.”

“You lost half your people, and you don’t think that was a little careless?” Mildred questioned, unable to contain herself.

“Two went at the back. The bike riders are always the first to cop it,” the trader mused, seeming to ponder her question deeply. “We did salvage the bikes, though,” he added with some pride. “As for the other six…We had a direct hit on one wag that took out three people, two straight away and one after a day. The wags are good and strong, but it was the concussion of the blast that did it for them. Stupe thing is that they were chilled by their own weapons going off in the wag. Pathetic. Two sec bought the farm trying to protect the refrigerators. You can see those bastards are blind, and they had to get out of the cabs. I think we learned something from that. And they did. Just a shame it was too late.”

He paused, seemingly lost in thought.

“And the last one?” Doc prompted. “So far you have mentioned only five casualties.”

The trader shook his head, pensive. “Penn. Best quartermaster I’ve ever had. Just a little too protective of his post, that was all. He saw a group of coldhearts from the other convoy trying to bust into one of the wags and saw red. He was traveling with us, and was out of there before anyone had a chance to stop him. He was shouting at them to stop, firing off without aiming, and they just picked him off. One shot. Bang. Took the poor stupe bastard’s head off. Swear his body kept running for a yard before he went down.”

If Ryan hadn’t believed a word the man had said before this, then now he certainly had no faith. The story was crap. Just like the rest of it. No one who served time on a convoy would be so stupe. Just as no one who had served time would get chilled by their own weapons when their wag got hit. Why were they drawn when they were inside, and unnecessary?

Whatever had really happened, it hadn’t been what the trader wanted them to believe.

For so many reasons, it seemed like a triple stupe thing to do, but for so many other reasons, it was their only option. Ryan found himself saying, “Okay, we’ll join you. But if we’re gonna work together, what do we call you?”

A number of things sprung to mind, but the trader’s answer was, “LaGuerre. Armand LaGuerre.” He stuck out his hand. “But you can call me ‘boss.’ No, only kidding,” he added hurriedly, on seeing the stony looks that elicited.

Saying nothing more, Ryan took his hand, then looked at his people with an expression that communicated his own reservations were as deep as theirs.

At least they had transport out of here.

Chapter Four

Say what you like about LaGuerre, Mildred mused, he’s not as big a fool as you’d take him for. He didn’t survive as a trader by being stupid, and if—as they suspected—the firefight that had deprived him of nearly half his crew had less to do with being attacked than with being the attacker, then he wasn’t the complete idiot he seemed. No, it seemed to her that he had a certain cunning, a certain base instinct that could kick in and override the tendency to let his mouth run away with him. A garrulous yet cunning fool. It was a combination that was volatile, and could only end one way.

The question was, when?

In the meantime, he had been smart enough to keep the friends apart. He had something he wanted from them, and he had found a way to get it without allowing them the space and time to confer, to make plans of their own and put them into action. Did he realize that they didn’t trust him? Or did he just assume that no one trusted him, and in their turn were to be trusted themselves?

Ultimately, she figured that it didn’t matter. The result was the same, no matter what you may surmise. The friends had been divided among the wags of the convoy, and the salvaged bikes had been put to use. It made sense from a sec point of view to use a newly recruited group of proved fighters in such a manner. Hell, she would have done it that way herself. But there was something…Maybe it was just that she didn’t trust LaGuerre. No, screw that, there really was something about the man that suggested he knew this was a good move for him as much as for the convoy. Keep them apart, and they couldn’t conspire.

So it was that Ryan and Jak rode the motorbikes at the back of the convoy—the leader and the most dangerous and quick of the fighters. A coincidence? She didn’t think so. It made sense for the two of them to ride at the rear of the convoy as they were the best suited to combat and the demands of instant response from such a position. But still, it seemed too convenient.

Krysty and herself were now riding shotgun in the refrigerated wags. Doc rode the wag at the rear of the convoy. One of LaGuerre’s men had been shifted from the armored wag to the one directly behind. The purpose of that had been to allow J.B. to ride the armored, lead wag, which was suspicious in itself. At least, it seemed so to Mildred. If they had replaced sec at the rear of the convoy, and in all the other wags, then why not put J.B. in the wag directly behind the armored leader? That would have been consistent. The action that LaGuerre had taken was anything but.

Mildred couldn’t help wondering if this last course of action was due to LaGuerre, or at the prompting of Eula. For now J.B. was in the wag with her, which would give her plenty of time to…Well, to what? What was her link to John; in what way were they connected? Mildred knew John well enough. When he had said that he had no idea who the young woman was, or why she knew so much about him, Mildred had believed him.

So who was she? What did she want? And how would that affect J.B. and the companions?

Whatever the outcome, it was impossible to do anything while they were separated. Come to that, it was proving impossible to get anything in the way of sense out of her current companion. Reese, the driver of the refrigerated wag, was a large woman. Probably 250 pounds of her was crammed behind the wheel of the big rig. Not an ounce of it fat. Her knees looked cramped, even in the space of the cab, as she was over six feet tall. She was dark and heavyset, with crude tattoos on her upper arms and multiple piercings in her upper lip, brow and ears. Hell, she probably had her nipples pierced, but Mildred wasn’t about to ask.

That piercing in her upper lip should have gone through both, sealing her mouth shut. Might as well, for all that Mildred had gotten out of her. When they had first been introduced, and Mildred had clambered up into the cab, Reese had shown her the weapons bay under the dash area and explained tersely that her duty was to keep her eyes open and her trigger finger ready. That was all. Anything to do with the rig itself she was to leave to Reese. The woman made that clear with a propriatorial tone that left nothing to doubt.

And since then, silence. Mildred had tried to ask a few questions—nothing too deep, just general conversation about the convoy and the way in which they usually traveled; would there be rest stops, and when did they generally occur? This last was the kind of question any newcomer to convoy sec would ask, leaving aside Mildred’s real reason of wanting to know when she would be able to communicate with the others.

“Not anyone’s business. Happens when it happens.”

Reese wasn’t hostile. Just so taciturn as to make John seem like that old buzzard Tanner, Mildred thought. Reese kept her eyes firmly fixed on the wag ahead, and on the road ahead of that. Anything else she seemed to view as an irritating distraction.

Mildred noted that the cab was fitted with comm tech, and was in touch with all wags on the convoy. Not that you would know it so far, as it seemed that radio contact was kept to a minimum.

She wondered if the bikes were also fitted with this tech.

RYAN AND JAK RODE the edges of the road, trying to avoid the backwash of dust and dirt as much as possible. A five-wag convoy kicked up a hell of a cloud in a land like this, and it would have choked them to kick in too close to the end of the line. They had masks and goggles, but even these only cut down, rather than eliminated, the problem. Most important was their breathing and their sight. Without those, they would have been chilled either by suffocation, by riding too fast into the back of a wag in front, or by riding themselves into the treacherous blacktop.

The other problem, once you’d solved the simple matter of staying alive, was to do your job. If you couldn’t see jackshit, then how could you expect to see any incoming? In this territory, where wild riders skirted the ribbon in favor of the dense-packed dirt off-road, you had to keep your vision as clear as possible for a 360-degree sweep. So you didn’t just hang in behind—you kept out of the dust cloud that hung over and around the convoy, and you veered off in complex figures that would enable you to double back, get a look behind, and get back into line without hitting a pothole, a crevice, or each other.

Both Jak and Ryan wore headsets that would keep them in touch with the armored wag on point. Trouble was, it was so bastard noisy on the bikes, with the roar of their engines, the rush of the air, and the noise of the five heavy wags, that each man had little hope of hearing any message that may come his way.

They carried on their maneuvers, kept up their guard, each isolated in his own bubble of dust and noise. The only way they’d know if the convoy stopped was by overshooting it.

KRYSTY HAD THE OPPOSITE trouble to Mildred. While Reese was the strong, silent type, the driver of Krysty’s wag was an emaciated old man called Ray. Short, skinny and anywhere between the age of forty and eighty for all that his wrinkled skin could tell her, he was stronger than he looked. It seemed as if she could blow on the old man and knock him down, yet he handled the heavy steering with an ease that was shown in the way he ignored the road and looked squarely at the red-haired woman, speaking in a long stream of consciousness that hardly allowed her the chance to ask him anything. He was obviously relishing the chance to speak to someone again, as the twinkling brown eyes beneath the battered baseball cap betrayed.

If only what he was saying had any real value…

“You come from the east, babe? I used to spend a lot of time in the east. That was back before I joined this crew, mind you. I always say that you can’t beat a real friendly team, and I’ll be frank with you, this ain’t a real friendly team. Not that they’re bad people, mind you. Not at all. I’ll say that for them. Really loyal to Armand. And he does treat us well in return, you have to give him that. But I miss the days when I’d be driving and I was with people who didn’t mind a chat. You ever hear that old word, babe? It means a talk. A talk about nothing. Least ways, a talk about stuff that most people don’t think is really important. See, I use to love being in the east ’cause there were a lot of villes there that still had some of the old tech working in some way. That’s what I will say for Armand, he gets that old tech working. Real good for me as I can have old music and stuff. I love all that. You don’t get that out here so much. The old tech that still works like that, I mean. See, that was good about being back east. Old movies. Gee, it was a different life back then, wasn’t it? But what am I saying, you might not have seen any of that stuff. Ah, you don’t know what you’ve missed. All those old songs. I loved it when they had tech that could still play all that old stuff. I’ve got this real good memory for that sort of thing, and I like to sing while I’m driving. It kinda helps to speed the road along a little, and gives me something to think about…” He began to sing in a cracked tenor.

Krysty was beginning to get a headache.

DOC WAS GETTING along just fine. He was in the wag at the rear of the convoy. If he looked out of the ob slit at the back of the wag he could just about see Ryan and Jak as they weaved in and out of the dust.

“I did not know that young Jak was such an accomplished rider,” he said to himself, “though I would imagine he’s a wow on one of those—dammit, what were they called…Ah! Skateboards. Yes.”

When he turned back to face the interior of the wag, he took in both the view and the warm fug of people forced to live close together. Too close. There were two other inhabitants, one of whom was currently trying to sleep. Her name was Raven, and when he had expressed surprise at her being a redhead, and not jet-black, she had looked at him as though he were insane. Doc, of course, was used to this, and let it slip over him. As of yet, he did not know from whence she had derived that charming name, but no doubt he would elicit this information sooner or later. When her temper improved.

“She’s not normally like this,” said the other inhabitant of the wag, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “It’s just that we’re not really letting her sleep. Tarran, the guy you replaced, he was real quiet. Never used to talk to me much at all, which was a pain in the ass as it gets real lonely and dull on some of these drives. We used to have an old tech disk player, and I’d play some old tunes from before skydark. She used to moan about that, too, so I gave it to Ray in the end. You’d like Ray. Not just ’cause he’s old, like you. But ’cause he never shuts up. Talks kinda odd, like you.”

“Yeah, like you don’t,” Raven moaned from the bunk. “You don’t get me talking nonstop when you’re trying to sleep.”

“No, you had other things on your mind…” The driver spun to face Doc briefly, so that she could lock eyes, convince him of her veracity, before turning back to the road. Her name was Ramona, and she was dark where Raven was pale. “I tell you what, Doc, her moaning used to wake me up. Sometimes she’d let Tarran play with her pussy while she was driving. Damn near could have driven us off the road. Worse, the bitch used to let him drive sometimes, swapping while the wag was still in motion, and suck his dick while he was driving. Damn unsafe.”

“You wouldn’t have said that, you saw the size of his dick.” Raven giggled, her anger subsiding. “No way something that small could have caused any accidents.”

Doc was beginning to get used to the girls. They obviously liked to bicker. Perhaps it passed the long hours on the road. They had both slept, and changed shift, in the time that Doc had been in the wag. And both had questioned him on the connection between Eula and J.B. Both being equally disappointed when he had been unable to offer even the slightest of theories.

“Both begin with an R,” he said by way of nothing. “That’s interesting. Does LaGuerre do that on purpose, I wonder? In the same way that most of his convoy crew are women?”

“Ya know, I take it back,” Ramona replied. “Doc, you’re way crazier than Ray. ‘Begin with an R,’” she said, imitating his tones badly. “What kind of a question is that? You wanna know something about Armand, baby, then you just ask outright.”

“Very perceptive, I must say,” Doc said, amused. “But nonetheless, it was a genuine question. Is it something to do with the way his mind works that he places in the same wags operatives who have identical initials?”

“Man, how many ways and how many words can you use in that question?”

“Whoa—okay, keep talking, this is sending me to sleep all right,” Raven added.

Their words may have been harsh, but their tone was not, and Doc pressed the matter.

“It’s all to do with psychology, madam. Are you familiar with that term?”

“Not as familiar as I hope to be with you, you old hunk o’man, you, sweet talking me like that,” Ramona mocked. “Si-wha’? Listen up, the only reason we’re both on this wag is because we’ve been with Armand the longest, and this is the wag with the jack. He trusts us.”

Doc eyed the interior of the wag once more. There was one seat up front, for the driver. Another at the rear, for the sec man, which he occupied. The bunk on which Raven lay was along one wall, with a makeshift kitchen area—no more than a hotplate and a small icebox—at the foot. A small comm unit and some tech reception equipment was on the wall opposite. An old safe with a combination lock was beside it. The rest of the space in the narrow wag, apart from an even more narrow channel they all used to negotiate the interior, was taken up with the stock that could not have been fitted into the front wag.

“It’s a combination safe,” Doc noted. “You may not know the combination.”

“Yeah, we do,” Raven said, obviously not as bored into slumber as she had made out. “Someone got to know it other than Armand, in case he buys the farm before we get to destination. He changes it every time. Don’t know how he does that, though. Guess he trusts us, but not that much. Must do some, otherwise we could just take the bastard and blow it with plas ex.”

“A fair point,” Doc conceded. “LaGuerre seems to be a deeper thinker than perhaps—if you will excuse me—he appears.”

Both women laughed.

“Armand ain’t exactly what you’d call sharp in some ways,” Ramona mused, “but in others he is, kinda. Guess he’s like all of us, he’s good at some shit, and, well, shit at other shit.”

“His secret, seemingly, is that he knows the dividing line,” Doc suggested.

Ramona thought about that for a moment, pausing only to swear at a particularly deep fissure in the road that she nearly missed. Then she said, “I guess you could say that about anyone, honey. And ya know, you’re right. Most of the driving crew have always been women. ’Cept Ray, but I kinda don’t know about him, sometimes. Quartermaster and sec have always been male. Quartermaster, couldn’t say why. Sec, I guess it makes sense. Most guys are stronger like that. I know I couldn’t have beaten Tarran in a fight of any kind, and Raven there always got herself pinned down…But mebbe that was different. Anyways, Armand does like to use women more than most traders I’ve seen. Course, as we’re all so grateful for work and jack, and it does mean the boy has pussy on tap….”

It gave Doc a mental image that was far from her intent, and for a moment he was transported into a world of surrealism. But Doc was feeling sharp at the moment, and was determined to stay as such. Shaking this from his head, he asked, “And that would include the young woman Eula?”

Both Raven and Ramona laughed at that, the former so hard that she almost fell from the bunk, cursing as she caught herself in time.

“You have got to be shittin’ me, Doc, baby,” Ramona wheezed between gasps of laughter. “Think if he dared to pull it out near that one she’d damn near whip it off with her knife. Mebbe not right off, just leave him something as a reminder of what a bad boy he’d been.”

“Something about her that is real scary, though,” Raven said quietly. “Tell you, Doc, me and her over there have been together in this convoy for some time now, and we get on okay. Hellfire, everyone in here gets on okay with one another, really. That’s what Armand likes. A happy crew does good work, he says. What the sneaky fuck means is that a happy crew ain’t gonna slit his throat and run off with his jack. Anyway up, Eula comes in, and things ain’t quite the same anymore. She don’t talk none.”

“I would suppose that would make you distrust her, as you all seem to be a little on the garrulous side,” Doc murmured.

“Honey, I dunno what that word means, but it ain’t nice, I can tell,” Ramona said. “Ain’t true, either, if it means what I think. ’Cause you ain’t met Reese. She don’t say more than five words a year, and mostly that’s to tell you to fuck off.”

“Reese?”

“Big muscle fucker, traveling with the sister.” Ramona sniffed. “Lucky her…No, Reese is okay, just a little quiet. And scary. But openly. Unlike our gal Eula. She’s too damn quiet in the wrong way. It’s like she’s always brooding on something. Something to hide. She looks at you like you’re shit on her shoes, like she’s got some little list in her head where she’s adding up the good and bad.” She snapped her fingers. “I know what it’s like—it’s like when Armand adds up the jack and stock he’s got and that’s he’s got rid of, see if it balances. That’s what she’s doing. She got something on her back that’s weighing her down, and some fucker’s gonna get it big when she finds out who it is.”

Doc was concerned by that. “And you think it may be my friend?”

“We dunno, do we?” Raven muttered sleepily from the bunk. “But she sure as shit seems to know him. Even if he don’t know her. Think he does and he’s not letting on to you, Doc? No offence, like, but are you sure?”

“I have known John Barrymore for some time now,” Doc said stiffly, “and in times of emergency, the man has always been straight.” His tone then softened as he bit his lip. “No, if he does know anything about her, he is truly unaware of it. It may be a mistake on her part. There was certainly no mistaking the bemusement on his face. Our good Armorer cannot hide certain things. He is controlled, and can mask emotion in combat. But he can be caught on the quick, and this was such a time. Tell me, ladies, what do you know of this Eula?”

“’Bout as much as you, hon,” Ramona answered. “She says she comes from the east, and sure we picked her up there. But she don’t say where, or how she learned so much about blasters and shit. Don’t say much about nothing. Tell you, don’t think even Armand knows much about her. Tell you something else, though—he thinks she’s powerful medicine, and he trusts her judgment.”

“And you do not?” Doc asked, sensing that in her tone.

Ramona gave a guttural laugh. “Hon, I’d trust that bitch even less than I could throw her scrawny ass.”

Raven stirred on her bunk. “See, thing is, we ain’t really got no secrets from each other, any of us. Can’t do if you travel like we do, and for as long as we have. Secrets you’d like to have sometimes, sure, but it don’t work that way. That’s part of being a team, right? Sooner or later it comes out, or you walk. Now, you take Eula. That bitch is so tight it even pains her to piss. But no matter how hard she wants to keep it in, sooner or later it’s gonna come out. And she ain’t the type to walk if even the wildest guess comes close. And that’s what we’re kinda afraid of, right, Ramona?”

“Damn straight,” the driver replied with an emphatic nod.

Doc kept his own counsel for once. He suspected Eula’s secret was inextricably tied to the Armorer. And two taciturn people in the same wag would be oppressive to the point where the pressure would blow.

The only questions were when and how.

THE ARMORED WAG at the front of convoy was the only one to have a clear path ahead of it. Those in its wake were forever driving into a cloud of dust.

Zarir, the silent driver of the armored wag was, however, even more diligent than those who followed him. He was gripped by a paranoia that riders would come out of nowhere and attempt to outrun him. Maybe they wouldn’t even bother with that. Maybe they would just ram into him, hoping they could deflect him from the smoothest of courses, running the wag into a crevice, a ditch, or even a trap. He was a good driver. No, he was the best. But there was always someone out to take that away from you. Well, he’d decided they wouldn’t take that away from him. No. So he stayed tight-lipped, grim and silent as he concentrated on the road ahead with an intensity that made his head pound and ache. That was okay. A snort of something strong when they stopped cleared his head and kept alert for the next stretch. Sure, he hadn’t slept for eight days, but at the end of the run Armand would let him sleep for a week, maybe even more if he needed. Armand was good to him.

Armand LaGuerre didn’t give a shit. As long as Zarir drove fast and true, that was good. As long he stayed silent, it was even better. The rest of the trade crew were garrulous, and there was a time when LaGuerre welcomed that. Hell, even looked for it. And he was still cool with it as long as it was kept to the other wags. But since he’d taken Eula on board, he wanted some silence in his wag. The girl was quiet, and didn’t react well to noise, conversation or questions. Especially the latter. So the chance to get rid of Cody, a talkative bastard at the best of times, into the next wag had been more than welcome. At the girl’s request, the man Dix had replaced Cody instead of riding shotgun in the second wag. LaGuerre was confused by that. Okay, so Eula had really wanted to take the newbies aboard—in truth it had been more her idea to stop for them than his—and she was adamant that she wanted Dix to travel with them. But Cody was a tech man, not a sec fighter. Second wag was safest, but even so…

LaGuerre did not argue with Eula. He hadn’t argued with her since the moment she had joined them. She had found them a little over eighteen months earlier, searching him out in a ville called Evermore, on the eastern fringes of the central badlands. He was in a gaudy house, busy enjoying himself with three gaudies, two of whom were putting on a show while the third made use of the pleasure he was showing at their performance. She had walked in as if she owned the place, asking him if he was LaGuerre and where he was headed.

Most times, if someone did that to him, he would have blown the person’s head off. But there was something about this one—the way she completely ignored the surroundings, not from embarrassment but because she was too focused to notice. There was a kind of calm menace about her. When he asked her why him, she had replied that he was a trader, he was about to leave and she needed to get away quickly.

His first thought was that she had pissed off Baron Chandler, head of Evermore, and taking her on would lead to a firefight with the baron’s sec. She had to have sensed that because she was quick to tell him that her problem was with another ville. She had already traveled a hundred klicks, but she knew she was being followed, and she needed the cover of a convoy to hide her tracks.

It would have sounded bullshit, and dangerous at that, if he’d heard it from anyone else. But from her it was different. It was the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, the serious hardware that was draped around her in a way that wasn’t usual for anyone, let alone a young woman who looked barely old enough to handle a blaster.

Like all good traders, LaGuerre had a nose for a good deal. He may not have been the best trader, but he was better than a lot. She had that air of a rare stash about her. She was something a bit special, and could lead him to a higher level. It got his sense of greed tingling. So he agreed to take her on.

There was one other thing, too. It was on a much baser level, but all things were as one to Armand LaGuerre. It was the way she had looked at his dick when the gaudy slut took it out of her mouth.

He hadn’t had Eula’s pussy. Not yet. But it was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, he just sat and watched. Watched the two of them sit, stand, walk around the interior of the wag, and say nothing to each other even though the very air around them crackled with tension. Eula had been insistent that Dix travel with them, and for his part the skinny guy with the glasses and hat had seemed pleased by that. LaGuerre couldn’t make him out. When he said that he didn’t know her, he seemed to be on the level. Yet the way he kept looking at her from the corner of his eye; the way the few words he said were guarded, almost to the point of being cryptic; the body language as he stiffened and pulled back every time she got close. All of that suggested that he had suspicions of where they may have met.

LaGuerre would love to know that. She had never enlarged on her initial statement to him. A ville about a hundred klicks from Evermore, going east. That could have been any number of villes. Part of the area to the east was fucked—completely uninhabited. Okay, scratch that. Maybe there were a few settlements in the contaminated area, but they weren’t anywhere he or any other trader particularly cared to go. That still left a number of small villes ruled by desperado barons. Not many traders cared to go there, either. Not much jack, not much to barter. So he didn’t know squat about any of them. If she was telling him the truth—bitch was too self-contained and sure of herself to do anything else—then it had to have been one of those.

He’d moved on quickly, and hadn’t been back that way in the year and a half since she’d joined, so there hadn’t been the chance to check out her story. But he knew one thing—the only trader to really make use of those areas had been Trader himself. The man was legend. He’d got richer than anyone, had more of a stash than anyone, done more business than anyone because he’d worked harder. Yeah, and where had it got him? Sometimes you just had to kick back a little and enjoy the fruits of your labors. LaGuerre realized he was wandering. The point of his train of thought was…Hell, what was it again? Yeah, that was it. If this guy Dix had ridden with Trader, along with the one-eyed guy, then he had to have been to some of those villes in the east. Probably the one that Eula came from, the one where she had gotten into some trouble and had to run.

So maybe Dix knew her secret. And, given that she had wanted to search those guys out, and was interested more in him than in any of the others, maybe she knew his.

That would explain why she was even quieter than usual, and he was like a mutie cat on a sun-fried wag roof.

WHILE THIS HAD BEEN going through LaGuerre’s head, Eula had been guiding J.B. through the armory and associated tech held by the convoy. She had explained to him in few words the condition of the armory when she had joined, and the steps she had taken to both improve the quality of what was there, and to add to the inventory, making them stronger. Each blaster she detailed at length, telling him things he already knew, but seeming to tell him these things for a reason.

For the life of him, J.B. could not work out what the code behind her words may be. She was demonstrating her knowledge to impress him. But why? Why would she want to impress a man she claimed to know, but who had no recollection of her?

J.B. was not a man for subterfuge. He could stay impassive when needed—indeed, there were those who would argue that it was a natural state for both himself and Jak—but an outright lie was something he found hard, even in extreme danger. Why bother? If people didn’t like the truth, then fuck ’em. Equally, he didn’t respond well to situations where people were evasive, trying to tempt you into playing their games. Life was shit, hard and way too short for games. Especially games like that.

He had tried to keep his distance from her. Tried to rack his memory and remember her. Tried to even guess what the connection could be. But there was nothing except a nagging feeling of danger deep in his gut. And a growing curiosity over the fact that she had chosen the vocation of armorer. She was impressing this upon him, as though it would somehow open the floodgates of memory.

Well, if that was what she had hoped, then it was a bad call—not even a trickle.

She was in the middle of showing him the comm tech that she had managed to get up and running after they salvaged it from some ruined ex-military wags—carefully avoiding an explanation of how they had come to be wrecked, he noted—when J.B. decided that he could take no more.

“You’re good,” he said simply, stopping her in midflow, “and I want to know where you learned all this. ’Specially so young. Took me years on the road with Trader to amass the kind of knowledge you’ve got. Had some before I joined, but it was only hitting the road and finding shit that helped it build. But you must have grown up with someone who knew this stuff.”

“I did,” she said simply.

LaGuerre’s ears pricked. Ask her more, Dix, he thought.

“So who taught you?” J.B. pushed.

Eula shook her head. “In time, John Barrymore. In time. I don’t give anything away for free. I want from you, in return.”

“What?”

“That’ll have to wait. You need to do some thinking. Think about this, John Barrymore—remember a place called Hollowstar?”

J.B.’s face stayed impassive, but his mind jolted.

Yeah. He remembered Hollowstar….

Chapter Five

The Past

It took a month—no more—for J.B. to settle in to Trader’s way of life, to stop being the new kid, and to start being just J.B. Such was his skill and knowledge, given room to grow by the ordnance that Trader’s people collected on the way, that he became more than “that new guy the armorer,” but became known as the Armorer, just as Trader was Trader. They were the definitive article—their positions used as names, spoken as though there were none other than they fit to carry such a name.

Not that it came easily. Poet knew how good the kid was from the beginning. After all, he was the one who had been sent to look at J.B., assess his skills, then fake the work to test them.

Hunnaker was hostile. She was always hostile to anything new. A loyal and trusted fighter, with a ruthless streak a mile wide, who could always be trusted in times of battle, yet she had a spiky, difficult temperament in her. She was insecure of her position in the convoy, which she prized highly. She measured herself by her standing with Trader, as the convoy was the only family she had, and despite her seeming ability to act and live independently of anyone or anything, there was a little hollow inside of her that craved the familial security of the convoy. Everything revolved around that, and when it changed, then she bristled, and lashed out.

It was a dangerous way to live, especially on a convoy where every day brought the chance for someone to buy the farm, and change was an unspoken constant. Which, perhaps, explained why there were days when all everyone wanted to do—even Trader—was stay the hell out of Hunn’s way.

And she kind of liked it that way. It gave her status in the convoy. Except that J.B. walked in and acted like that was nothing. He didn’t challenge her. That she could take, she could face down, she could do something about. No, he did something far worse—he ignored her. He acted like her moods didn’t happen, like there weren’t days that people edged around her rather than get into a fight. He just didn’t notice.

So she loathed him for some time. It became a subject of discussion among the convoy, and the subject of a book run by Poet on how long until they had a fight, and who would win. Virtually everyone put jack on it—even Trader—and it was a keenly awaited event. Given Hunn’s temperament, and the taciturn and phlegmatic new man, it was only a matter of time, and not much of that.

The fact that it never happened was, as Abe had put it, “jus’ one of the weird shit things happen around here.”

They were up north, where the temperatures drop, and any potential combat had to be undertaken with the added encumbrance of furs and padded clothing. Movement was difficult, threw off timing. Worse, it led to blasters screwing up in the extremes of temperature, which is exactly what happened to Hunn, and how she nearly got herself chilled in the cold.

It was an ambush by a bunch of desperate coldhearts who had been waiting for convoys to raid for too long. They were crazed with cold and hunger, giving them the desperation and madness to take on the convoy in what seemed to be a stupe position. Which was why, maybe, they nearly got away with it. Desperate measures sometimes brought the element of surprise that can turn a firefight. So it was that a steep, rocky pass covered in snow nearly became the graveyard that marked Trader’s passing.

There was no other way through the narrow channel. No signs of life, but still not ideal. If not man, then nature could bite hard. An avalanche could trap or bury them; maybe both. But with no other way through, it was heads down and run for the other side, keeping noise to a minimum. Anything could trigger a rock fall.

Anyone with any sense wouldn’t have started loosing off blaster fire, lobbing grens. But these desperadoes did exactly that. A hole in the track ahead of them from one gren made it impossible to proceed until they could get out and fill in the gap, which was too deep for War Wag One itself to traverse, let alone the other wags in the convoy.

They had to get out and fight, seeking whatever cover they could in the rocks and ice, climbing to where the mad bastard coldhearts were firing on them. The only break they had was that there couldn’t be too many of the opposition, as they weren’t spread along the ridge at the top of the climb.

Hunn was one of the best in situations like this. She was a good fighter, and when she was pissed off she was virtually unstoppable. And she was pissed off right now. She thought it was bad enough being this far up north, where it was cold enough to freeze her tits off; now they were being fired on by a bunch of stupe bastards who might just bury the convoy and not get what they were after. And what was the fuckin’ point of that?

As she climbed, exchanging fire at intervals, she got more and more pissed, the anger building in her until it reached the point where she could see nothing but red mist. She was cold, she was aching because the rocks were battering her through the padding and the furs every time she took evasive action, and she was convinced that she was going to have to walk out of the pass as these stupes were going to bring down the rock walls on the convoy below.

Hunn in a real fighting anger was both a good and bad thing: good because she became a chilling machine, stopping at nothing. Bad for the very same reason. She paid no heed to danger and rushed headlong into it. It made her a spearhead and a liability at the same time. So far she had always been the former, simply because she always came out on top. But one day she would be the latter because she would screw up.

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