by James Axler
He didn't particularly like the older man, but he didn't quite dislike him enough to maim him.
Ryan simply slammed the arm down, let go and sat back smiling, while someone pushed a mug of local beer in front of him.
There was a voice in his ear, a calm, familiar voice that belonged to the man he loved and respected more than anyone else in the whole damned world.
"I'd have sapped you double-stupe if you'd crippled Lex," the Trader said.
"Never thought about it."
"Liar."
Ryan turned in his seat, grinning. "Well…I mebbe thought about it."
"Fireblast, Ryan. You still got a nasty mean streak in you."
"Thought that was a good thing."
"Time and place." The older man sighed. "I was born around forty years after sky-dark. I'm around the mid part of my own forties now, and you're the best I've seen, Ryan. You know it. Lex deserved a lesson. Everyone does, now and again. No reason to put his elbow out."
The grin had vanished. "I said I only sort of thought about it, Trader."
"Times you're like an old scarred fighting man, Ryan. Times you're a fuzz-punk out of the ruins. We're here in Colrada. Stickies been active. Burned half a ville up in the hills. Scabbies got a camp someplace around here. We need our best front team. Lex is our best rear gunner on War Wag One."
"Sure, Trader."
The grizzled figure rose and slapped him across the back of the head. It was a friendly gesture, but it made Ryan's skull ring like a .38 slug through an oil drum.
"Remember it, Ryan."
The black quartermaster, Otis, was waiting for a word with the Trader. "Said to remind you about gassing up."
"Fireblast! Forgot all about it watching these two crazies arm wrestling. Have to show them sometime how it was done in my day."
"Want me to go trade for gas?" Ryan offered, eager to make amends. "I could go with J.B. and a couple of others."
"No."
"Okay."
"There's supposed to be a big redoubt around here. Someone sold me an old map last time I was around Denver ville. Go scout tomorrow."
"Sure."
"I'll come and hold your hand," Hun whispered as the Trader strode off.
"Long as it's just my hand."
"You wish, Ryan. You wish."
Mildred Wyeth held the wrist of the deeply unconscious Ryan, checking his pulse.
"It's way low," she said finally. "I'm real afraid he's gone into a terminal coma."
J.B. stared down into his friend's placid, emotionless features. "I just wonder what the dark night's going on inside there," he murmured.
Chapter Six
COLRADA HAD SUFFERED in different ways during the heavy nuking from the Russians. Parts of the old state that had held silos and missile or military bases had been hard hit, and some regions, particularly close to where what was known as Colorado Springs used to stand, had been totally devastated.
There were still hot spots in a few places.
But the configuration of the Rockies had meant that some places, in the lee of the catastrophic explosions, had been spared. Small communities had been preserved, often completely cut off from the rest of the land for one or two generations. Villes had developed, each with their own warlord or baron.
And what had been concealed before the long winters began, often remained hidden.
War Wags One and Two had been working their way north toward Colrada for several weeks. They'd been picking and raiding down near the Grandee River, where there were still some big herds of cattle. But you had to pay the price that the Yanquis and Mexes wanted.
The Trader had left three men and two women down there in unmarked graves as a part of that high price for beef.
Coming north, they'd managed to locate the old Phanton Canyon Highway
. It wound along a narrow valley toward Cripple Creek, terminating near the little settlement of Victor.
It was high summer, and the sides of the trail were dappled with wildflowers, banks of gold and crimson splashed against the orange rocks. The two armored wags lumbered slowly along the boulder-strewn track, the men and women inside sweltering under the scorching sun. An old thermo had clicked way up into the red band beyond forty degrees centigrade, but the Trader refused to allow anything beyond minimal ventilation. The air-conditioning kept cutting in and out. Each time it broke down there was a burst of cursing from everyone in the steel boxes.
Ryan knew that the Trader had discovered the war wags hidden deep in the heart of the Apps, way north and east. The Trader had a friend called Marsh Folsom, and the two men had ridden together for many years. The wags had now been through about twenty years of hard usage, and it wasn't that surprising that some elements kept malfunctioning.
Now the Trader was leaning behind the driver's seat, his battered Armalite sitting easily in his right hand. He would occasionally lean forward and peer through the ob-slit at the dusty highway snaking ahead of them.
"Camp once we get out this ravine," he said. "Believe there's good water and wood ahead."
Ryan was at his shoulder. Both men wore similar clothes, which were similar to most of the crews of the two war wags: combat boots, mostly with steel toe caps; jeans or denim pants, and a mix of dark blue or brown shirts and jackets. The Trader had done a deal a couple of years ago, accepting a mass of ex-uniform clothes from a dealer near the Lantic coast and getting rid of a large cache of canned food he'd discovered in a small supply redoubt close to the Big River.
The port gunner was leaning against the wall, one hand resting casually on the butt of the bracket-mounted M-16A1 carbine. Her name was July, and she and Ryan had enjoyed a brief affair the previous fall. They had parted on terms that kept them good friends. Lately she'd been spending some time in the company of Hun.
"Hotter than a triple hot spot," she said, opening another button on her shirt and grinning at Ryan as she did so.
"Been here before, Ryan?" the Trader asked.
"Once or twice, passing through after I moved out of home."
Nobody on War Wag One knew where "home" was for Ryan. Nobody knew how he'd lost his left eye, or how he'd got the livid scar that seamed his face from eye to mouth, across his right cheek. It wasn't a question you could ask the one-eyed man.
"Which way?" the driver asked.
As the Trader was blocking his view forward, Ryan swiveled one of the armaglass periscopes and peered ahead. The road forked near the ruins of an old gas station. The Texaco sign had been snapped in half and rested in the dirt. The pumps had remained in place, like a row of patient sentinels, but the gas would have been long, long taken.
"Go right, here. It's about a half mile, close by a river."
The Trader was illiterate and had never learned how to use maps. But over the short years that Ryan had ridden with him, he'd been amazed at the sharp detail of his memory. There didn't seem a track or trail in the Deathlands that he hadn't traveled and remembered, and not a single ville that he hadn't visited during his life.
But like most of the crew of the war wags, nobody knew much about the Trader's background. He was in his early forties, with graying hair. When he could get them, he smoked sickeningly strong black cigars. He ate sparingly, rarely drank more than a single glass of alcohol and was utterly ruthless when the occasion demanded.
But where he originally came from… That was an enigma shrouded in mystery.
The multiwheeled vehicle lurched and pitched as it turned off the road. Through the dusty image in the scope, Ryan could make out the sheen of water, glinting silver through a stand of live oaks to the left of the trail.
Balancing himself against the rolling of the vehicle, he turned the glass around and watched War Wag Two follow them toward the campsite. It was barely visible through the roiling clouds of orange sand that War Wag One sent spiraling into the hot afternoon air.
"Slow. Left by that wrecked building. Flattens out there."
The engines coughed and cut out as the bra
kes were applied. For a moment nobody moved, waiting for the order from the Trader. He picked up the intercom mike off the dash.
"Clear behind?"
"Yo."
"Port?"
"Yeah."
"Starboard side?"
"Clear, Trader."
He leaned forward for a last look ahead, checking that there was no potential threat. "All right. Everyone out. Scouts establish perimeter, and cooks and helpers get water and fires going. Maintenance look at the third axle. Check the bearings. That's it, people. Let's go!"
Fatback, okra and sweet potatoes, cooked in large iron caldrons blackened from age and long usage, comprised the meal. The food was washed down with some good coffee-sub that they'd picked up cheap from a pueblo ville on the edge of Westexas—cheap because there'd been a "misunderstanding" with the baron over how much jack he was paying for his goods, a misunderstanding that had been resolved by the Trader personally cutting off both of the man's thumbs as a lesson in honest dealing.
Ryan lay back on the stubbled, dusty grass, resting his head on his hands. He looked up through the sun-dappled branches of the trees, staring at the darkening sky. As he watched, a chunk of nuke debris came hurtling into the purple atmosphere and burned up in a blaze of ferocious silver light.
Over the years, Ryan had noticed that the amount of incidents like that seemed to have diminished. The chem-storms seemed less frequent and less violent. He'd asked the Trader about it once.
"When I was a kid? More hot spots. Storms were worse. Acid rain near some coasts that'd strip the paint off a wag in a couple of hours, the skin off a man's face in a quarter hour."
J.B. came and sat down by him, gnawing on a knucklebone of ham that he'd begged from one of the cooks.
"Good camp," he said. One of the things about the Armorer that Ryan liked was that he would never use three words if he could get away with using only two.
"Sure."
The river was clean, flowing fast and pure over bare rocks. There was a small stretch of rapids upstream, with a cool, deep pool of stillness at its base. Some of the crew had already stripped off and dived in, snatching a rare chance for a good, safe bath.
The fringe of trees gave shelter from the falling sun, but wasn't thick enough to provide cover for any mutie attack. The low hills around, therefore, were scouted and guarded. Lots of places where the two wags stopped for a night were so dangerous that it meant all sleeping on board, battened down, with a watcher at every ob-slit.
Here in the clean air among the foothills of the Rockies, life was good.
J.B. had taken his Browning HiPower Mk 2 double-action automatic from its holster and was going through his evening ritual—fieldstripping and cleaning, and oiling and reassembling. All was done without even looking down at his scurrying nimble fingers. He'd traded for the blaster a couple of weeks ago, paying an awesome amount of jack to an old man in a log cabin near where they'd camped. The weapon was in immaculate condition. The old man said it had belonged to his grandfather, which took it safely back before sky-dark.
The magazine, with its thirteen rounds of 9 mm full-metal jacket ammo, lay in J.B.'s lap. His spectacles glinted scarlet in the last rays of the setting sun as he looked across at Ryan.
"Should get yourself a better blaster, Ryan. And you need a long gun."
"I can't afford to pay that kind of jack just for an automatic."
"Good as it gets, blaster like this," the Armorer replied. "Ambidextrous safety catch. Thirty-one ounces of efficiency. Must be way over a hundred years old. Mebbe hundred and fifty."
One of the mechanics on War Wag Two, a skinny black guy called Dexter, was a genius on a guitar and often played around the campfires in the evening. Ryan had watched the way his fingers danced over the strings as though they had a life totally their own. As he watched J.B. reassembling the blued-steel automatic, he had the same feeling, admiring a manual skill that he knew he could never achieve.
"You should clean your blaster, Ryan. Last time I looked at it I figured you'd been using it to hammer nails and stir stew."
Stung by the attack, Ryan slowly drew his pistol from the holster on his right hip. It was a battered Ruger Blackhawk revolver that he'd won in a wager in a gaudy-house in some frontier pest-hole up north, close to the snow line border.
"Look at it, Ryan," J.B. said, shaking his head. "Man like you shouldn't ever be given custody of a decent blaster. And look at it. Twelve and a half inches long. Takes a week to clear the holster. And only six rounds!"
"It's a real stopper," Ryan retorted. "Put down a charging stickie."
"Sure. Ten ounces heavier than mine. Big .357 will stop anyone. Grant you that."
"I'd back it against your little blaster, J.B. Get all six in a can top at fifty yards."
It was a sore point with the Armorer that his technical skill with weapons wasn't quite matched by his shooting ability. He knew that Ryan was the better man with a handgun, and it irked him.
"I can put a .50-caliber round through a can top at five hundred paces, Ryan. With my Sharps. Match that!"
"Can't. You got an ace on the line with that one. But I can't crap around with that on my back. Like carrying a shovel when you don't never need to dig a big hole."
J.B. shook his head. "You'll learn, kid."
Ryan clenched his fist. "And don't call me 'kid,' old man."
"Sorry. Nice spot Trader picked for camp."
Ryan stretched, feeling his muscles cracking. "Yeah. Times like this you forget about the chilling. Clean air and the stink of spilled blood's gone."
"How long we been together?" J.B. scratched the top of his head, where his hair was beginning to thin. Only a week ago he'd appeared from a scouting expedition around an old housing estate proudly sporting a brand-new, light brown fedora, which now lay beside him on the warm earth.
"How long?"
"Yeah. Since we met up with Trader?"
"Want the count in days, miles of firefights? Or corpses?"
J.B. sighed. "Beautiful evening, and you have been hit by the gloomy stick."
Ryan laughed. "Sorry. Just there's times that I look ahead. Wonder where we'll both be in ten more years. Still riding with the Trader? Still keeping a finger on the trigger all the time?"
"Rad-blast it! Course not. I'll be a retired gentleman of leisure running the best dealing store for quality blasters in all Deathlands. How about you, Ryan?"
"Married with kids and a spread of good land. Or dead. ¿Quien sabe? Who knows?"
Chapter Seven
"BACK IN TWO HOURS and forty-five minutes, Ryan. No longer."
"Sure."
The Trader looked him up and down, like a general examining a young lieutenant before sending him off on a diplomatic mission.
"The ville died years ago, attacked by scabbies and burned out. Doubt you'll find much worth finding up there. Look out for any clues to a redoubt."
"Lovely day for a walk, Trader," Ryan said.
"Bright sun makes for a good target," the older man replied.
There were five in the recon party. Ryan was leader, with Hun as second. Ben, a tall, quiet relief gunner with dark glasses, made three. Ray was a driver of War Wag Two. Lox was the shortest member of either crew, barely making it to five feet tall, but the effervescent little blond girl was a great auto mechanic.
All of them were armed with a variety of blasters. Ben toted an Uzi while Hun had a sawed-off 10-gauge slung over her shoulders. Ray carried a pair of unmatched European .32s, and Lox had a handmade at her belt, a 6-shot revolver that she'd found on a garbage dump and repaired herself.
Up the slope, away from the river, it was still possible to make out the overgrown traces of the side trail, winding across the hillside, over a hogback ridge and disappearing.
When they reached the ridge, Ryan held up his hand for a pause, looking back to the foaming ribbon of the river and the two dusty war wags, the cluster of small fires.
He automatically checked his wrist-chron.
Ahead of them the trail was less distinct, obscured by low brush and long meadow grass, but it led toward a narrow valley.
It was a bright, clear morning, the sky flawless except for a collection of fluffy cream clouds, far away to the northwest.
"Grizzly country," Ben commented, scanning the higher slopes above them.
Hun grinned. "Heard there's a mutie grizzly around here, a humpbacked sow, flecked silver and gray. Say she ripped the side clear off a trading wag came through here a month ago."
"Glowing night shit!" Ray exclaimed. "That the truth, Hun?"
Ryan didn't want anyone getting jumpy on recon with him. Tight fingers on triggers got people chilled real quick. "You stupe! There's no grizzly like that up here."
"You sure, Ryan?" pressed the woman, her dyed hair like fire in the sunlight. The Trader was always kidding her about her hair, and she was always promising that one day she'd dye it green. Ryan knew Hunaker well enough to guess that she might just do it.
"Sure. Let's go."
The first dozen or so houses they came across were utterly devastated. It wasn't possible to tell whether it was the result of the nuking, or whether they'd been pillaged and burned out in the past few years. Roofs had fallen in and every window gaped, glassless. A swimming pool behind one had a faded mosaic on its stained sides, and it was still possible to make out the design of interlocked human eyes. A small lizard scrabbled in the few inches of water that stagnated in the deep end. Lox aimed her blaster at the creature, but Ryan quickly checked her.
"If I want muties on our necks, then I'll give them a shout."
"Sorry, Ryan."
Hun patted her on the shoulder. "Never apologize, sweetie. It's a sign of weakness."
They continued on. A splash of yellow flowers lined a number of side trails that darted off from up the steepening flanks of the valley.
"Shall we split up and scout around?" Hun suggested.
With five of them, they could protect themselves against any sort of mutie attack. But if they split up into smaller numbers, safety would become less certain.