by James Axler
“Not nuked, yet,” Ryan replied. “This is just another case of hit and git. Find what we need and make tracks.”
“Munitions are over that way,” J.B. said, waving the others after him as he set off.
Under the Gunz & Amo sign was a warped sheet of presswood laid across a pair of sawhorses. Lined up on the makeshift table were a selection of firearms on offer. The blasters of predark vintage all had barrels orange with rust; mostly single-shot, exposed hammer shotguns with cracked or missing butt and forestocks. Bailing wire appeared to be the repair material of choice.
Ryan scowled at the rows of newly manufactured pistols. The grips had been scrollsawed from one-inch plywood. Pairs of stainless-steel screw clamps held foot-long barrels to the stocks. The barrels were made of plumbing pipe, roughly 10-gauge in bore. There was no safety and no trigger on the single-shot, black-powder weapons. They were fired by a drawback thumb device based on a rat trap spring that drove a nail point into an exposed percussion cap.
They were much more likely to chill the shooter than the target.
J.B. commented in disgust, “The ‘gunsmith’ should be hanged, if he hasn’t already been.”
The other companions hunkered down and started going through plastic bins of loose live centerfire ammo of various standard calibers.
Jak pried a shell from his Python’s cylinder, and tried to chamber one of BoomT’s .357 Mag rounds. It didn’t fit.
“Let me see it, Jak,” J.B. said, holding out his hand. The Armorer thumbed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and closely examined the cartridge. “This case has been reloaded one too many times,” he said. “There’s a hairline crack around the rim. The reason you can’t chamber it is that the triple stupe who reloaded it did such a crap job of prepping the case.”
Whipping out a scarred toolkit, J.B. used pliers to unseat the bullet from the brass. He dumped the gunpowder onto his palm. “This isn’t even smokeless,” he said. “It’s black powder. This ammo is junk, Ryan. There’s no decent reloads in the lot. No point in rummaging through it. Even the rounds that’ll chamber and might be safe to fire are gonna be nukeshit for knockdown power.”
Not to mention the fact that they didn’t have time for rummaging.
“Forget it, then,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to move on. We can still trade for fuel and come out ahead.”
They hurried away from the ammo station, weaving around rows of knives, hatchets, spears and crossbows made from salvaged leaf springs, past heaps of blankets and clothes folks had certainly died in, even if they weren’t chilled for them. Three male shoppers stood buck-naked, showing off their farmer tans while they tried on previously owned sleepwear. Other shoppers sat on the floor, testing battered shoes and boots for a good fit. There were tiers of assorted plastic coolers, piles of moldy tents and sleeping bags and cardboard boxes of junk jewelry, eyeglasses and prescription drugs a century past throwaway dates. A skinny woman in a too big, antique Virginia Is For Lovers sweatshirt was uncapping and sniffing the contents of the half-rolled-up aluminum tubes of ointments and salves. On the far side of the sniffer was a folding table mounded with flatware. It was overseen by a geezer with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard.
“Everybody needs a fork!” the red-nosed hawker informed them.
To no effect.
The companions skirted BoomT’s fresh produce section, then the butcher shop. Slabs of raw meat lay in plastic tubs, unrefrigerated, on the floor. The flesh wasn’t labeled as to species or cut. It looked like chicken, but it smelled more like fish. The rear of the shop was hidden behind a floral print bedsheet strung from the ceiling’s exposed heating ducts. The curtain was thin, and a man, apparently the butcher, was dimly visible through it. He wasn’t alone. Whatever he had penned back there was pleading for its life.
Krysty leaned close to Ryan and said, “Did you notice we picked up a shadow?”
“Yeah, I marked him.” The handlebar-mustached harmonica player had been dogging them around the store, edging closer and closer as if trying to overhear their conversation.
The emporium’s fuel station was a section of floor space covered by a variety of container types and sizes, all with air-tight screw tops. The only other thing they had in common was that they were translucent. That way a prospective buyer couldn’t judge the quality by the color, or lack of same.
J.B. unscrewed a lid from a plastic jug, releasing a whoosh of built-up pressure. He then took a whiff of the contents.
Before J.B. could give his assessment of the product, the musician spoke up. “You don’t want none of that,” he said. “BoomT waters down his gas.”
Ryan took in the deep tan, weather-seamed gray eyes, gnarled, scarred hands, and the densely muscled arms and shoulders. Harmonica Man wasn’t nearly as old as he looked at first glance—a life of brutal work and privation had prematurely aged him. There was a light in his eyes that Ryan recognized, a young man’s light. The silver mouth organ wasn’t his only sidearm. A massive, stainless-steel .45 ACP revolver, a Smith & Wesson Model 625, rode in a beat-up canvas holster low on his right hip.
“Some folks say the fat man pees in it for fun,” the musician added. “Whether it’s stretched with water or piss, it’s no more than seventy octane. Won’t get you far. And it’ll wreck your engines for sure.”
J.B. nodded to Ryan as he screwed back the cap. “He’s right. It’s more crap,” he said. “It’s all crap.”
“If you want not-crap,” the musician said, “then you need to see BoomT’s private stock, the top-quality stuff he hides away for himself.”
“You mean, behind the fence?” Mildred asked.
“No, that’s temporary storage. He’s got a treasure vault down in the basement for the best merchandise. If you go back and complain to him, there’s a slight chance he might let you shop there. But since he’s already got your goods, he’ll probably tell you take it or leave it. You folks should really be dealing with me.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan said. “The deal is done.”
Before the musician could respond, Jak nudged Ryan with an elbow and pointed toward the security cage’s open gate. A sec man was walking out with a brick of their C-4 in his hand.
“Oh shit,” Ryan said.
Breaking into a trot, he and the others managed to cut the guy off before he reached the Winnebago exit. On closer inspection, Ryan could see the sec man had the brick that he had opened in front of BoomT and taken the test wad from.
“Say, where are you going with that?” Ryan asked him.
“Ol’ BoomT found some batteries,” the sec man replied. “He got that detonator’s test light to go on. Come on out and watch, it should be extry good. He’s gonna make himself a swimming pool.”
Chapter Seven
BoomT sat in the shade of his golf cart’s red-striped canopy, eating a whole, cold roast chicken barehanded like an ear of corn. Fifteen feet away, under the baking sun, a quartet of indentured servants grunted and groaned as they swung pickaxes high overhead, slamming them into the ground. They had cracked a seam in the asphalt and were burrowing into the concrete-like compacted clay beneath. The going got easier once they broke through the bottom of the layer of hardpan. They tossed aside the axes, picked up long-handled shovels and resumed work, digging a deep, narrow hole.
A half dozen of his sec men stood around their gargantuan leader with shouldered assault rifles, telescopic sights sweeping the flatland of vacant streets and exposed foundations for potential threats.
Because BoomT was unsure of the consequences when a full kilo of C-4 was detonated, he had decided to err on the side of caution. He sited his experiment as far as possible from the emporium so it wouldn’t be accidently damaged, either in the initial blast or by the debris fall. That meant the swimming pool excavation was going to be much closer to the outside edge of the parking lot than he had originally envisioned.
BoomT could see a man on a bicycle pedaling madly toward him from the direction of the big-box
store, leaving behind a swirling wake of beige dust.
The entrepreneur spit a mouthful of chicken bones over his left shoulder onto the ground. Rotating the slippery carcass, he attacked the breast and thigh on the opposite side. Even One-Eye trying to cheat him by stealing the batteries couldn’t dent his ebullient mood. He was humming to himself as he fed.
What was the point of having a large quantity of high explosive if you didn’t use part of it to blow something up?
He had considered blowing up One-Eye, Pipsqueak and the two other male members of his crew along with the parking lot, but after weighing the risk and benefit, he thought better of it. Cawdor hadn’t risen to the bait about Trader’s hard and humiliating death. The fat man had watched him closely and there had been no reaction to the bad news, nor to the mocking way it had been delivered. Not so much as a finger twitch in response. BoomT couldn’t deduce from that whether Cawdor thought the story was a lie or the truth, or whether he had heard the full account somewhere else and that’s what had drawn him to Port A ville. Because One-Eye’s weapon remained holstered, it didn’t appear that he had come for vengeance and chilling, but to do some straightforward business.
By now One-Eye had already sussed out the shabby quality of the box-store merchandise. He would demand better for his trade, which meant taking him and his crew down to the private showroom, where they could be more easily overpowered and disarmed. BoomT had decided not to chill Cawdor outright; instead he was going to remove the man’s remaining eye with a soup spoon and then turn him loose in the hellscape, helpless and as blind as a bat.
Pipsqueak, on the other hand, was gonna die hard. For BoomT it had been hate at first sight, years ago. Hated his stupid hat. Hated his squinting four-eyes. Hated his ankle-biting stature. Hated his weapons know-how. Hated most of all the fact that, way back when, he couldn’t get Dix to turn against Trader, something that cost him plenty jack.
Of all the ways of chilling at the overweight entrepreneur’s disposal, the biggest crowd pleaser was “death by backside” because it was so painful and prolonged, and at the same time so radblasted comical. BoomT simply positioned himself over a spread-eagled, helpless victim and with his full body weight, sat down. To get up again, he grabbed hold of a tow rope attached to the golf cart’s back bumper and braced his heels; when a sec man drove the cart forward, it raised him to the vertical. With judicious, over-the-shoulder aim, he could break every bone and rupture every organ. Pipsqueak was going to end up a pancake, squashed like the nearsighted little bug he was.
For all BoomT cared, his sec men could use the albino and the geezer for target practice. They preferred shooting at something alive. After an interval of time working under and over him, One-Eye’s tasty sluts would be consigned to Cantina Olé. Scroungers, male and female, would be lined up from here to Groves to have a go at those two. Pay a nukin’ premium, too.
Committing an entire kilo of C-4 to the swimming pool experiment was a crazy extravagance, of that there was no doubt. Essentially it was blowing up a whole lot of jack, but BoomT was in the habit of indulging himself. As he sucked the chicken leg clean of meat, he knew he was worth it.
The hole was finished by the time the bicycle rider skidded to a stop in front of the golf cart.
BoomT tossed away the stripped chicken carcass, wiped his fingertips on the bedspread and set the brick on the seat beside him. He pushed his raspberry mirror shades on top of his head and opened the already torn plastic wrap.
“’Nother chicken,” he said, reaching over his right shoulder with an empty hand. When the response was not immediate, he snapped his fingers impatiently.
From a Coleman cooler strapped onto the back of the cart, a sec man passed him a fresh bird.
BoomT ate with his left hand, rivulets of grease from the corners of his mouth running down his chins, and with his right he inserted the blasting cap and remote initiator into the side of the soft, golden brick.
The cart tipped alarmingly, and its springs shrieked as he slid off the seat. He waddled over to the hole and got down on his knees, dragging his baby-blue toga in the dust. Then he lowered himself onto his enormous belly. To place the charge properly, he had to reach down the hole to his armpit, straining to touch bottom. That he did while holding the roast chicken aloft in his other hand.
When he rose up from the ground, parking lot dirt had mixed with the grease on his chins and chest. Oblivious to the grime he had accumulated, BoomT pulled down his mirror shades and climbed back into the cart, taking a last bite of poultry before chucking the shredded remnant.
“Follow me,” he told the sec men and the slaves through a mouthful of meat. Driving the electric cart one-handed, he cut a quick 180-degree turn and bumped off the parking lot curb onto the wide, deserted avenue. He crossed the street, maneuvering around the wide cracks and potholes, and pulled up in a driveway. A rusting, burned-out semi-tractor and trailer lay overturned across the sidewalk. BoomT drove around behind the wreck and parked the cart.
He had always wanted to own a real swimming pool. One he could jump into to cool off. One he could float around in; with all his fat, he was virtually unsinkable. He imagined himself doing business while bobbing on his back. The golf course’s lake was far too shallow for that, and it was always mucked up with slimy stuff. The water level fluctuated seasonally, too. A real swimming pool required steep, deep sides.
Like a blast crater.
When the others were safely in the lee of the tipped-over semitrailer, BoomT daintily wiped the grease from his fingers onto the bedspread’s fringe. Then he took out the detonator.
“Fire in your hole!” he bellowed.
His sec men stuck fingers in their ears and hunkered down. The slaves did the same, hunkering even lower.
Flipping off the device’s safety, his eyes alight with glee, BoomT pressed the little red button.
Chapter Eight
Ryan made no attempt to stop the sec man from exiting the building with the C-4. The companions had already drawn the unwanted attention of the guards stationed inside the store’s entrance. He told the others in a low tone, “We need to move now, and we need to quickstep. Don’t run until we get outside.”
“Wait a minute!” the musician called to their backs as they left him standing there.
The companions headed for the doors at the south end of the store, purposeful, determined. Their exodus drew some curious looks from other shoppers, but that couldn’t be helped.
When they didn’t wait as the musician had asked, he ran to catch up to them. Walking stride for stride alongside Ryan, he demanded, “Where’re you going in such a radblasted hurry? You ain’t taken out your trade, yet.”
“We got other business, more important business.”
As Ryan took in the man’s confounded face, he imagined he could see the gears of his mind turning over the available facts—under different circumstances it might have been funny. A bad detonator was now a good detonator, now the pack of C-4 was under lock and key, and now the former owners of the precious commodity were hightailing it, empty-handed.
“You bastards,” the harmonica player hissed at Ryan. “The detonator. It’s all about the detonator, isn’t it? You bastards booby-trapped the cargo.”
“Unless you wanna get gut-stabbed and left behind,” Ryan warned him in an even voice, “you’d better shut your yap.”
The warning went unheeded. “That backpack was part of my cargo,” the musician snarled. “I bought the C-4, I paid for it in advance.”
“In times past, possession was considered to be nine-tenths of the law,” Doc informed him as they closed on the guard post at the exit doors. “Of course the very idea of ‘law’ is now relegated to the realm of myth and misunderstanding. And presently none of us possess anything more valuable than our own lives. Which, I hasten to add, hang precariously in the balance.”
“That shit is mine!”
“Not the time to discuss who owns what,” Ryan told him. “What’s done
is done. We can’t get into the cage to disarm the booby trap. We need to get distance from here. A far distance.”
The man with the mustache shut up. From his expression he didn’t like it, but he shut up.
Until that moment Ryan was unsure whether he was going to have to chill the guy on the spot, to cut his throat with one slash of the panga, and dump him on the floor to bleed out under a pile of unwashed, second- or third-hand clothing. Until that moment there was no way of telling whether the musician was going to make a ruckus and turn them in to get back his cache of explosive. In the end, he had made the smart decision. For one thing, getting the C-4 back before it blew up was a fifty-fifty proposition, at best. For another, he knew there was more of the stuff somewhere—“part of my cargo”—and he wanted it.
Ryan thought about the other folks in the store, the shoppers not the sec men. He thought about them for a full five seconds. There wasn’t time to convince the innocent that they should abandon the building, and trying to do that would alert the guards and get everyone trapped inside. It would get everybody dead. The circumstance was unfortunate, but it was out of any of their control. Bottom line: you had to protect your own.
And the corollary: shit happened.
The companions and the harmonica player were forced to stop at the building’s south exit. BoomT’s sec men had set up a narrow, barricaded passage with tables set out for the examination of merchandise. The penalty for shoplifting was the same as the penalty for pretty much everything: death.
One of the sec men checked Ryan’s chit. Noting the fact that they hadn’t picked up any gear, he said, “Why are you leaving?”
“Nature calls big-time,” Ryan lied. “We’ll be right back.”
“You got to go around to the other door if you want back in,” the guard told him as he handed back the slip of paper. “Show them your chit. Move along.”
Beyond the exit door, they stepped into blazing sun and stifling heat. There was no cover ahead; just the wide, mud-encrusted expanse of the mall’s south parking lot. Jak took point, breaking into a jog. The others followed.