by James Axler
The blond woman stood tall to the others in her group, especially in these lean days with so many starving. Her clothing was simple, just denims and a heavy white shirt, the shirt worn more to impress folks than anything else, since clean clothing was only a legend in most parts of the Deathlands these days.
Turning her head to scan the horizon, the tanned skin tightened on her neck to expose a thin scar that went almost completely around her throat, a memento from where a rogue coldheart tried to ace her from behind, and failed. One of the fingers on her right hand was oddly bent, a bone break that never healed properly, and on the back of her left wrist was a large puckered area where a stickie had grabbed her with a sucker. Caught reloading, Kate dropped her empty blaster and used a knife to gut the mutie, slicing it open from belly to chin while the creature was still attached to her wrist. The sucker came off as the stickie died, but the skin was permanently damaged. But that was a trade she would make any damn day—a life for some skin.
There were more scars, some badges of honor saving a friend, others dark memories of when she was a slave. Whip marks and brands that only her bed partners saw for a brief moment before the candles were extinguished.
“Looks clear,” Kate said, lowering the binocs to tuck a loose strand of hair behind an ear. The woman wore her pale hair tied off in a ponytail with a piece of rawhide to keep it out of her face. She wore no jewelry of any kind, although there was a junk box full of the stuff in War Wag One, items for trade at the various villes they encountered. The pretty baubles were sure to catch the eye of a baron’s woman.
“But that don’t mean shit this close to the Core,” Roberto stated, checking the load in the sawed-off shotgun that he used as a handcannon.
Clicking the breech shut, he slipped the blaster into the low holster strapped to his thigh. At that height, his right hand hung exactly alongside the grip of the deadly blaster. Fat, greasy shells filled the loops of his wide belt, and a long curved knife was tucked into a sheath at the small of his back. Among his many jobs in the convoy, the first and most important was to watch the Trader’s back. Some feebs thought he loved the woman, but it was much more than that, more than friendship, a deeper emotion based on respect. Recruiting him from a brutal ville, the woman had given him back a measure of self-pride, and that meant more to the man than any fleeting tug of the heart or sweaty roll in the hay. Twice so far he had stepped in the way of lead flying her way, and would do so again without hesitation. The day she crossed the dark river, he would follow her into hell to help plan the escape.
Placing the binocs aside, the frowning Trader pulled out the hand comm and thumbed the transmit switch. “Jake, it’s me,” she said. “Anything on radar?”
“All clear, Chief,” a man answered over the comm, his voice oddly free of the usual distortion.
“Roger,” she replied in old mil lingo. The woman knew that this kind of clear reception was only possible within a hundred feet of War Wag One; after that it got worse with every step taken. But with all of the crap still in the atmosphere from the nukecaust, even the most powerful radio could only broadcast for a few miles in ideal conditions. The military handheld radio the Trader carried had a shorter range than a mile, but still gave her a vital link to every wag at the same time in a firefight. The radios helped turn five wags into a single unit, which closed like a fist around an enemy to crush them with a coordinated strike.
War Wag One had started life as a big rig, but over the years had been built up with armored sides, another engine, machine-gun blisters, sleeping bunks, a kitchen, additional fuel tanks, more wheels, missile launchers, flamethrower and even a working comp to control everything on board the big complex machine.
She stole War Wag Two from a warlord, and it was roughly the same size as One, but without a comp and it carried more armor than blasters, making it a place to fall back to in case of deep shit. Although now six big Harley motorcycles were strapped to the sides as sort of additional armor. The big bikes were loot taken from the Blue Devils. Kate used the motorcycles for recce missions and flank attacks. They were sturdy and fast, able to outrun even the big cats that infested the western plains. But the machines took a lot of time to learn to ride properly, and were as noisy as a bar fight, absolutely useless for a night creep.
Only Roberto rode one constantly, rolling ahead of War Wag One as it crossed the burning desert, testing the ground for boobies and salt domes. Once they blew a tire hitting a big dome—bastard thing was almost a yard deep—but the domes were more annoying than dangerous. Still, it never hurt to have a pointman riding as an outrider in unfamiliar territory.
Behind the two armored transports were the cargo vans, trucks with only minimal armor and a few rapid-fires. Those carried the spare tires, machine parts, ammo, food and such, along with the trade goods: barrels of shine, dried sausages, planting seeds of gene-pure plants and such. There were even some lux items salvaged from the ruins: toothbrushes, jewelry, shoes, dinnerware and books. Lots of books. Those the Trader gave away as a gift after each successful barter with the peaceful baron. The more people knew about rotating crops, fixing plumbing, fixing wags and such, the more prosperous the ville became, yielding an even greater profit on the return trip. More food, better shine for the lanterns and bikes, and with fewer graves filled each year.
There were other traders, of course, mostly small-timers who did more smuggling of fuel and blasters through coldheart country than did any bartering. If they were honest, and didn’t sell nuke water that glowed to fools who couldn’t tell the difference, or deal in slaves, or jolt, then Kate would cut a treaty with them, and sell them a few blasters, and always toss in a book or two.
“Hold on,” Jake said, and there was a moment of softly crackling static from the comm. “Okay, we have a report of blasterfire to the north of here. One mile, mebbe less.”
“Explosions or handcannons?” Kate demanded, looking through the binocs again.
“Blasterfire, that’s all Eric can confirm over the mike.”
Rubbing a hand across his unshaved jaw, Roberto glanced over a shoulder at the parabolic dish on top of War Wag One. In reality it was merely a large ceramic soup bowl with a microphone positioned in the exact center. But the dish collected sounds too faint for people to hear and concentrated them on the mike for Eric to hear at his station inside One. The crippled tech had found the directions to build it from a children’s book of fun science, and more than once the fellow had foxed an ambush by muties or a night creep with the contraption. Yet it was no more than a child’s toy for the preDark whitecoats.
That thought always made Roberto uneasy. There were tales of preDark war machines still functioning in distant lands, randomly chilling folks as if all life was their sworn enemy. War machines that hovered above the ground in legs of wind, and were armed with L-guns even better than War Wag One possessed. Perhaps just tall tales for drunks in a tavern, or creepies told to scare little kids. But the chief gunner for the Trader had a gut feeling that some part of those stories might be true.
“North is toward Rockpoint,” Roberto stated, looking first in one direction, then the other. “But the nuke cloud was east of here. Mebbe just a coincidence, but then again, mebbe the Core and Gaza have declared war on each other.”
“All the better,” Kate said with a hard smile. “That would just make it easier for us to chill them both.”
“Unless they know we’re coming,” Roberto added slowly, as if thinking out each word before speaking, “and are staging a fake fight to lure us into an ambush.”
Gaza and the Core combined—there was a grim thought. With his firepower and their mind demons, the two would be unstoppable and could seize control of the whole of Texas, forging an empire of death across a thousand square miles.
There were always outlanders and coldhearts who didn’t want peace, folks who thrived on chaos. She chilled them at every opportunity, and left them hanging naked with their cock and balls cut off, and her brand burned into
their flesh—a lightning bolt crossing a star. The sign of the Trader.
Once, just once, she caught another trader pretending to be her and using the symbol. She gutted the man on the spot and rammed his heart down his throat right there in the ville bar. Sometimes, she’d hear the story repeated a thousand miles away, always with a lot of new details and embellishments. Good. It put fear into people, and reduced the number she had to ace to stay alive. Chilling was just a task, something she did when necessary. Kate had already seen more death in her life than any dozen people.
“Hopefully not. But either way, we’re ready,” Kate said firmly. “We’ll head for the blasterfire. The nuke ain’t going anywhere.”
“Sooner started, sooner done,” Roberto said, brushing back his hair. “I’ll ride point and take Horta and Jennings along with me for flankers.”
Frowning in thought, the Trader turned and started for the war wag. A curved section of the chassis was swung out, displaying steps to climb inside the elevated vehicle. A guard stood near the opening with an M-16 assault rifle resting in his hands.
“Not this time,” she ordered. “I want everybody behind steel with fingers on triggers, and Eric running the L-gun in case it is the Core. That’s the only defense we have against their tricks.”
“Only have two more charges for it,” Roberto said, glancing at the rear of the armored wag. There was nothing to be seen up there, the delicate laser stored safely inside the transport to protect its focusing lens. A lot of hard work had gone into fixing the weapon and keeping it operational. But when it worked, there was nothing that could stand in its way. When it worked.
“Two charges is more than enough,” Kate stated, nodding to the guard as she climbed into the machine.
Her boots clanging on the corrugated floor, Kate maneuvered past the ammo bins and boxes of MRE packs of the dimly illuminated interior of War Wag One, heading straight to the big command chair in the center of the control room, while Roberto took an empty chair near the port machine-gun blister.
As the door guard closed the hatch with a muffled clang, the crew at the control boards got busy cranking the huge tandem diesels of the rig, casting a rainbow of colors across their faces. As the engines started with a muffled roar, the nuke batteries disengaged and the generators came on-line. Flickering into life, vid screens began to show external views from around the vehicle, and specifically underneath, while the radio crackled the conversations of the drivers of the other vehicles.
At the aft of the big rig, a motionless man behind a tinted Plexiglas blister silently watched Kate settle into the chair and store her rapid-fire in a holster bolted to the armrest. Glancing over a shoulder, she nodded at the long figure ensconced inside a nest of wires running in every direction.
There was only one small door to the blister, and it was mined with antipers C-4 charges inside and out. Nobody was going through without the express authorization of the man in the bubble.
Casting about a trained glance, Kate checked the power levels, fuel supplies, thermos and hydraulics. Everything was in the green, except for a slight drop in pressure on the rear lifts.
“Hasn’t Anders replaced that busted hose yet?” the Trader snapped irritably.
Jake reached out to tap the pressure gauge with a finger. The needle flickered but didn’t rise.
“Sure as shit doesn’t seem like it, Chief,” he said. “We’re still operational, but not by much more than a pecker full of pressure.”
Kate hid her anger. Damn the man! Just because he was the best longblaster shot in the convoy he thought that made him immune to work details! Time for the lazy bastard to learn some the hard truth. “Fine him all candy bars for a week,” she commanded. “He works an extra shift and log the offense. This is the third screwup. One more and he’s gone.”
Every member of the crew scowled at that pronouncement. The road. That was usually a death sentence for anybody cast out of the convoy, unless they could find a friendly baron who wanted a sec man desperately enough to accept a known slacker. Few did.
“My fault, Chief,” Jessica stated, turning away from the radar console. The luminous green arm steadily swept the blank screen, only registering small reflections from the other war wags and nothing more.
“It’s his prob,” Kate corrected, cutting off the tech. “I know you’re bed partners, but every member of the crew hauls their own weight, or pays the price.”
“How about I go tell Anders right now,” Roberto said, rising from his chair. “We can have a private chat.”
Removing her Stetson, Kate hung it on a nearby bolt jutting from the wall. “Just don’t damage him so much that he can’t fix the hose,” she growled.
Roberto nodded in agreement and strode from the control room to head down the central access corridor to the rear of the wag.
“Let’s move,” the Trader ordered, reclining in her chair. “North by northwest, and watch the sand for traps.”
With a gentle lurch, the armored wag rolled into motion and started down the inclined embankment, the other vehicles close behind. Reaching the plains, War Wag One took the point, with the cargo vans clustering close behind, and War Wag Two taking the rear guard. The ground had seemed hard underfoot, but the wheels of the transport sank inches into the gritty material from the tremendous weight of the transports. A tech flipped some switches, and the belly of the wag rose an additional foot.
“Lock it tight, Blackjack,” Kate ordered. “We don’t want to drag belly going over a dune and blow a power line.”
Already doing the job, the man didn’t bother to respond.
Taking a beer from a small fridge, Kate checked the bank of vid cameras and saw armed men and women standing guard at blaster ports along the huge vehicle. So many people depending on her decisions, and so many ways for her to geek things up and ace them all. Sometimes, Kate felt the pressure and had a fleeting urge to be alone again, just an outlander on the run with nobody to discipline and no friends to bury. But this was civilization, the completeness of her world. She was like a baron of a ville, or the captain of a ship at sea, with high, low and middle justice.
Watching the landscape moving outside the Plexiglas of the main window, Kate took another sip of the home brew. Damn her, but this was good beer. They would have to trade with those folks in New Mex more often. The farmers drove a hard bargain, but the brew was worth the price.
After a while, Roberto returned to the control room, the knuckles of his right hand bloody. Kate exchanged looks with the man as he took his chair and used an oily rag to clean his fingers. The skin wasn’t broken anywhere, which meant the blood was Anders’s. Hopefully, the hunter had finally learned his lesson this time. There would be no more chances. He was good, possibly the best, but nobody was irreplaceable. Not even her.
Swaying to the gentle motion of the wag, Kate finished the beer and tucked the bottle away for a wash and refill later. The drive crew was forbidden to drink anything potent on shift, but they made up for that lack when off duty. Only one time had she found a gunner doing jolt, and while on a shift. She shot out both knees and left him helpless on the ground, then took pity and drove over the fool, smashing him into pulp under the wide studded tires of the big wag.
The radar beeped suddenly, making everybody jump, and Kate studied their location on the map on the ceiling. Yeah, somewhere near here the town of Lubbock used to be. The radar was picking up the shattered ruins. But that was mutie land now, with nothing to find but death. The things in the ruins were unlike any other creature in the Deathlands. Twisted monstrosities that couldn’t leave the Great Salt any more than green plants could live in a glass lake. Born in the ancient rad storms, they now had to live in the rad pit and couldn’t leave. Which was so much the better for norms. From what she had heard…
“What the fuck is that?” Jake demanded, leaning into the controls. The purr of the tandem engines eased as the pneumatic brakes slowed the rig to a mere crawl.
“Trouble?” Kate demand
ed, glancing about. There was nothing in sight but some dark sand ahead. The glowing ruins of Lubbock were a long way in the distance.
“Get the missiles hot,” Roberto directed, racking the bolt on his .50-cal. “Anything comes our way, launch on sight.”
As the techs got busy, Kate didn’t want to contradict the man, even though she doubted the weapons would be necessary, but it was always better to be armed than not.
“What do ya see?” a tech asked, craning his neck to look out the windows.
“On our right,” Jake replied, angling the wag to roll alongside the dark line in the sand.
Then the woman looked again at flowing material and realized it wasn’t moving to the motion of the wind, but against it.
“Vid!” Kate barked, and an external camera swung that way and zoomed in for a tight view. As the screen cleared, Kate could tell the moving line wasn’t sand, or salt, but mud. A dirty stream of wet sand!
“It stretches for miles,” Jessica said in a shocked voice. “A stream of water.”
A burly man barked a disbelieving laugh. “In the middle of the Great Salt? Impossible.”
“The hell it is,” Kate muttered, unable to tear her eyes away from the incredible sight.
“Full halt,” she ordered, scowling as war wag crested a low dune. Now before them was a muddy flatland stretching to the horizon.
Swiveling in his chair, Roberto said, “This was desert only a couple of months ago. Now, I’ve seen acid rain turn grassland into desert, but never the reverse. Where the nuking hell did this much water come from?”
“We can follow the stream,” Kate started to say, when the ceiling speaker cracked into life.
“Eric here, Chief,” a voice said. “I have blasterfire to the portside, and coming in fast.” He paused. “And something else, another sound, I can’t really tell what it is for sure. Mebbe rain, or a lot of folks bleeding bad, or—”