by James Axler
The Trader had been finishing some business in one of the then typical roaring towns in the center of the Deathlands — not that the situation had changed much in a decade; there was still an abundance of such pest holes scattered about the land — and he had been only too willing to put his foot down when ordered and, in the muttered words of the unseen man crouching behind him, "Get the hell out" fast. The land wag train had been waiting for him and ready to go a couple of klicks out of town. This was clearly no surprise to the stranger, who had chosen his getaway vehicle with great care.
And when they'd both climbed out of the vehicle and the Trader had turned and gazed at the man who was still covering him, he'd made his mind up on the instant. Had known with complete and utter certainty that this was the guy he wanted, the guy he'd been unconsciously searching for for years. With the automatic still pointed unwaveringly at him, at a point just below his heart for maximum incapacitation without, quite, the finality of instant death, he had offered the unknown man a place in his organization. The unknown man, just as swiftly, had shrugged his shoulders, holstered the shooter and accepted.
He called himself Ryan, but had offered nothing else about himself — not his background, close kin, place of origin, taste in women: nothing. In particular, he had not explained why he was on the run or who he was running from. It had taken the Trader some time — about five blasted years — to piece a pattern together, put Ryan into some kind of context. Even now there were blank pages, areas where information was not so much sketchy as entirely absent. But at least he had come to know who Ryan was and why he had landed up in the Deathlands as a runner, an outcast. At least he now knew why the guy refused trips to certain of the Eastern Baronies, why he never spoke about his past, why at times he never spoke, period.
Why he lacked an eye.
It was difficult for the Trader to identify why he had trusted Ryan on sight, and it was especially difficult — almost impossible, in fact — to sustain that trust when he discovered who Ryan really was and what he had done, or at least what he was supposed to have done. That was so grisly a crime, so appalling, so outright wicked an act of sheer malevolence and evil that even by the pretty abysmal standards of what passed for civilization in the late twenty-first century, it had hit an all-time low.
A man who did that wasn't fit to live.
And yet, and yet...
Instinct — his prime, and priceless, asset: worth more to him than all the jack, all the spare change in the known world because it had never yet let him down — told the Trader that this was a man of probity, a man of honesty and integrity, a man of high courage who would never stoop to a mean act or betray a trust.
And so it had proved. From day one of their now-decade-long association, the Trader had not regretted taking the guy on, not for a second. He'd had moments of doubt, one or two — such as when he'd fitted that highly significant, not to say shocking, piece into the jigsaw that portrayed the man's past — but they'd not lasted long. The Trader had backed his instinct and, as far as he was concerned, once again it had not betrayed him.
The war wagon bucked violently and lurched to one side, then righted itself under the skillful hands of its driver, Ches. Things slid off shelves, clattered to the metal-plated floor, Cohn, the radioman, who also handled the navigation, muttered a curse and bent to retrieve protractors, pencils, a steel rule.
J. B. Dix, seated in the co-driver's swivel chair, smoking a long thin black cheroot that looked as unappetizing as the Trader's cigar, half turned to stare impassively back at his chief.
"You want to complain about this road, boss. It's a disgrace."
Despite the gnawing fire in his stomach, the Trader chuckled.
"Teague's territory, J.B. Or what he claims is his. Road care's a low priority around here. He's got other things to occupy his mind."
"Or what passes for his mind."
"Yeah, like how to dig up more of the yellow stuff at less cost," Ryan said. "Or no cost at all."
Dix lifted an eyebrow and Ryan nodded at the unspoken question.
"Slaving."
"He's getting to be a big man. Gotta lotta boot," muttered Dix.
"Come a long way," agreed Ryan.
J. B. Dix sucked on his crudely rolled cheroot. He was the Trader's main lieutenant, known as the Weapons Master. Whereas the Trader was merely a businessman, it was Dix who had the knowledge of weaponry, booby-traps and so on. A thin, intense, bespectacled man with a receding hairline, a penchant for thin black cheroots, a fast but very devious mind and a terse, monosyllabic conversational style, it was Dix the Weapons Master's destiny to become a close personal ally of Ryan's.
The war wag's engine bellowed throatily as Ches took her up the dial. In front of him, across the front of the cab and below the narrow, bulletproof see-through windshield was a bewildering array of screens and dials, button sets and circuit breakers. Not many of these were in use. Originally all, including the huge vehicle's weaponry, had been linked to a central control computer, but as no one had ever been able to figure out how it worked, the Trader's mechs had ripped the guts out of everything and started over. Only the fascia remained, to confuse any hijacker who through some incredible stroke of good fortune might manage to get inside the war wag's cabin.
"The way I see it," said Ryan softly, "he's come a damned sight too far." He stared accusingly at the Trader.
"We've been through this a thousand times, Ryan. My word is my bond. You ought to know that by now. It's the only reason I've stayed in business. Two years ago I took Teague's hand and promised him a fat delivery. That's what we have here, and I can't back out. Fireblast it, man!" he suddenly exploded, "you know damned well I've pulled back on everything! He wanted twenty cases of auto-rifles. He's getting eight. He wanted fifteen boxes of grenades. He's getting six, and those are stun not frag, and he knows we know the difference. I've pared the whole consignment to the bone and he's not going to be happy."
"Too bad. The guy's a leech. He's getting more greedy and more dirty by the hour. He'll screw us if he thinks he can and the way things are, that's exactly what's going to happen."
"I know that," barked the Trader. "I know all about Jordan Teague. Hell, I traded stuff with the son of a bitch, from the very first cache, twenty-five years ago." He took a pull at the cigar, coughed a little, "Or thereabouts. He was a rat then and he's a rat now. I know it. But I shook his hand. The deal goes through."
The Trader swung around and glared at no one in particular. Dix was staring at the radiant ribbon of road, picked out by the twin spotlights located high above the cab, protected by wire mesh against a sniper's bullets.
Darkness clung to the light's penumbra. The highway unwound before them, potholed and rutted.
Ryan leaned against the steel ladder that led up to the MG-blister built into the roof of the cabin. He shrugged, glanced at Cohn.
"How long?"
Cohn said, '"Bout a half hour to dawn. Hills ahead. The road goes up. That'll slow us. Pass through the hills, and beyond that, maybe two hours to Mocsin."
The Trader said, "We stop five klicks out. Take this one and the two big trucks in. If I know Teague, we'll have to wait a day before the bastard'll see us."
"He's getting fancy as well as greedy."
"He's a rich man, Ryan. He knew folks'd come back to gold, knew it'd be in demand someday. So he created the demand, he hurried things along. Smart businessman."
"And prime shit."
"Sure." The Trader grinned suddenly, his face a waxy pallor. "Like every businessman since the world began, or so I'm told. Like me."
Cohn snickered. He checked his pocket watch, reached out a hand and flicked a switch in front of him. Atmospherics crackled loudly, then died. Cohn leaned across the table and began checking out the rest of the convoy.
Ryan walked to the rear of the cabin. There was a passageway that led to the armory, the bunk rooms, the kitchen facility. Over the roar of the engines he could hear Loz, the cook, bawling som
e piratical song or other as he prepared breakfast. To his left were steps leading down to the toilet. He stared down the short shaft up which the Trader has so recently emerged jauntily, waving his cigar. He could still smell the fumes trapped down there, the fumes that, on the Trader himself, powerful as they were, had not quite hidden the even more powerful smell of peppermint.
The Trader was dying.
Ryan knew the Trader was dying. J.B. agreed with him. Both men — war captain and weapons master — had made a compact to say nothing to anyone else, least of all to the Trader himself. The Trader was a proud man; he refused to admit to any physical weakness or debility, and death was the ultimate, final debility.
Ryan had noted the evidence: the racking, lung-shredding cough in the mornings, the sickness he thought no one knew about, the grayness of face, splashes of blood he'd not noticed. It all added up. The disease was eating the Trader up and it was getting worse, heading inexorably toward the final dreadful extremity.
And although there were medicos back in the Apps, the old bastard refused to see them, under any circumstances. Didn't trust them. He'd had a kid brother who had been shot up in the legs years back and had been put to the knife. But the doc had bungled. The kid had gotten gangrene, had died in terrible agony, rotting away before the Trader's eyes. Since then, forget it — no quacks.
Ryan didn't know what to do. For once in his life he felt helpless, useless. The Trader had taken him in, had given him back something he thought he'd lost forever, and now, when the Trader needed help desperately, there was no way of giving it to him.
Ryan went down the steps, clinging to the rail as the big war wag lurched. Crouching in his gun port, the dark-faced kid called Ell glanced around at him as he approached and shook his head.
"Nothing. This is an easy one, Ryan. No problems."
Ryan's mouth twisted slightly.
"Don't put the hoodoo on us, kid. We're not there yet. These hills we're entering..." He made a thumbs-down gesture. "Bad muties. Full of them."
"They won't bother us. Ain't no marauders got half what we got. We could cream 'em up."
"Hasn't stopped others from trying."
Ryan stared bleakly out of the gun port. It was still dark, but dawn raced up behind them. And Mocsin was getting closer by the minute. His mouth twisted up again as he thought of the gross figure of Jordan Teague, self-proclaimed Baron of these territories. Ryan hated the thought that they were carrying arms to him, but he acknowledged that the Trader was right: you kept your word even to scum, unless they really crossed you. If you began breaking your word, folks'd start getting edgy with you, even if they knew all the circumstances. If you broke your word once you could do it twice.
Trouble was, that fat bastard Teague was probably buying guns from other traders, was probably building up an awesome armory. Rumor was strong, too, that in the past couple of years Mocsin had become a hellhole, a dirty beacon that beckoned only the most viciously depraved of men, rad-rats, cannibals, barely human creatures who because of their terrible mutations and deformities had been squeezed dry of any kind of humanity whatsoever.
It sounded to Ryan as if Jordan Teague was gathering muscle for some grim purpose, and the more you traded stuff to the guy the more quickly that purpose would be achieved.
He said, "You keep your eyes wide open, kid. First moving shadow you see, hit it. Hit it hard. Take no chances."
He turned abruptly. He moved back toward the steps and began mounting them. And froze as he caught the sudden shrill squawk from the radio in the cabin above, the glitz of atmospherics, the harsh yell of shock that cracked across the airwaves.
Even as he vaulted up the last remaining steps, the alarm started howling and he heard the Trader shouting, "Brake!"
Ryan slammed across the cabin, reaching up for and grabbing his automatic rifle as he did so, flicking the selector to three-shot and slinging it as he reached the driver's area, clutching the back of Dix's chair as the huge vehicle lost its forward motion.
Cohn was gabbling into his mike, men were tumbling down from the upper chambers and Ryan could hear the thud of boots behind him as more men disgorged from the bunk rooms, the jittery MG-like rattle of rifle checks and mag slams.
"Teague?" he snapped.
"Who knows. Doubtful. Muties, more like." The Trader was ramming a mag up into a battered-looking Armalite rifle as he spat the words out, his face drawn, his eyes flickering around the cabin.
Ryan stared forward. The road ahead, seen through the narrow windshield, was empty of movement — human movement; otherwise, it was alive with tracer streams from the cabin-roof machine gun as the gunner sent firelines exploding up and down the potholed surface, hammering into the rocks that loomed all about.
They were still moving slowly forward, but then Cohn said tensely, glancing around from the radio, "She's out of it. Maybe immobilized."
"Tell 'em to hold on." The Trader gestured to Ches. "Closedown." He turned to Ryan. "Number Four truck. Blown, that's what's happened. Land mine maybe. The rear end, I understand. Now they can't move, and neither can the rest of the train. Can't pass 'em, either. Too damned narrow."
Ryan sprang up the steel ladder into the MG-blister, squeezed himself up behind the gunner's chair. O'Mara, the gunner, was training around, weaving short-burst tracer patterns up and down the road and across, kicking up dust and blacktop chunks, then easing himself back to angle high into the rocks each side. Ryan stared back along the war wag's roof, saw the convoy as a drunken line of lights stretching away and down, those vehicles at the rear still moving slowly, closing up. Three vehicles back from the war wag, fire could be seen, not strong, a dull red glow that flickered feebly against the bright spot shafts from the cab-mounted searchlights on each land wag and truck. But Ryan could see nothing else. No movement, no human presence. No sudden and erratic stabs of red muzzle-flash. He turned to stare frontward again. The road was picked clean for yards ahead, empty of anything.
He said, "Cool it. Don't waste ammo."
He scrambled down the ladder and strode to the radio op.
"What gives?"
Cohn shrugged, puzzled.
"No alarms. Just Number Four's blown. Lost all traction. Everyone else is saying no problems. Four's starting to burn but they reckon they can contain it. They'll have to step outside. I'll tell..."
"No. Wait."
"Hell, Ryan. S'just an old land mine is all. Coulda been there since the Nuke. Been waiting for years. Or maybe fell off a land wag, I dunno. Into a chuckhole. That dink McManus just happened to steer his truck right atop it. Wham!" Cohn stared up at him. "Number Four's gonna burn up unless they get outside to it, and..." he gestured at a clipboard of papers by his side, "...she's got bang-bangs on her."
"Wait!"
Cohn shrugged and went back to his mike as the tall man swung away. Ryan didn't like the explanation about a land mine waiting all that long a time before deciding to blow. It was perfectly possible, but he didn't like it. This pass was too damned narrow. It should have blown years ago. There must have been a hundred vehicles of one kind or another traveling this stretch over the past century. This was the main trekline to Mocsin. It ought to have been triggered before.
Nor did he like the idea that a mine had fallen off a truck grinding up this wrecked road in the recent past. Because if it had simply bounced off somehow, it wouldn't have been primed and ready. In any case, landies were too expensive, too valuable, to leave on a truck where they could pitch over the side or off the back.
"Still nothing?" he said.
Cohn said, "Still tight. 'Cept for Number Four. They're getting a mite twitchy, Ryan."
"Tell 'em to hold on."
There were six exit points on the war wag. One, a hatch to the roof; one at the rear, presided over by two MGs; two toward the rear, one each side, above the back portions of the port and starboard rocket tubes; an escape hatch below the driver's chair, very tight, very secure; and one that opened out, portside, opposite tho
ugh back from the radio table.
Ryan knew without needing to check that now all four main doors were surrounded on the inside by weaponed-up men, ready to sell their lives dearly, five-man squads for each. Nor did he need to check whether all of these doors were primed, for he knew that Ches would automatically have triggered the internal locks electrically as soon as the alarm, now silent, had started yowling over the sound system. That killed the carefully engineered boobies set into the locks themselves. But still no one could simply open up from outside and walk in — door control was on the inside.
The Trader was seated in Dix's chair, ready to take over if Ches caught it somehow. Dix was at the rear, in command there. Two runners were ready, two kids in their late teens, positioned one each end of the long vehicle, in case radio contact died on them or was knocked out. And above, another man had gone to join O'Mara, with a signal lamp. And in each of the massive war wags it would be the same: men jumping to their places smoothly, fluidly, without thinking about it for a second.
Here the five-man squad was flung out around the cabin area: one crouched in the well that dropped to the head, an MG trained at the door; two men in the passageway leading to the bunk-rooms, one lying on the floor, the other flattened against the wall angle; one man beside the radio table, auto-rifle fixed on a point about a foot above the bottom of the door itself; the fifth behind the door, the first to fire, ready to jump into the opening and pour steel-jacketed death into the night. Cohn crouched over his wall transceiver, whispering at it, uncomfortably aware as always that he would be literally a sitting target once the door was open.
Ryan killed the lights, turning the large cabin into a place of shadows weirdly lit by the driver-control lights and lamps in the bunk-room corridor. He pressed two buttons on a small console beside the door, flicked two long bolts, twisted at the handle with his left hand while stabbing a finger at another button on the panel. A small bulb in the panel remained dark.