Desolation Crossing

by James Axler

  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.”

  R YAN 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 ba
ck. 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?”