One glance across the compound told Crecca his worst fears had come true. Everything had gone wrong. Most of the looter crew lay sprawled on the ground. As the ville sec force advanced on the three parked wags, blasters blazing, one of the wags swerved out of line and came roaring his way.
Chapter Twenty
“What the fuck is that?!” Furlong snarled from the Winnebago’s swivel-mounted driver chair.
The man who was about to dump an armload of spoils into the stripped RV’s built-in booty bins froze as the head roustie lurched out of the shabby throne and bore down on him.
Furlong snatched a crudely framed object from the top of the load. It was a hair painting, made of twisted and braided lengths of human and animal hair in different colors, knotted into flowers and vines. It was stuck to a square board with little globs of translucent yellow glue.
“This is worthless shit!” he said, tossing the painting out the open rear cargo doors. “So is this…and this…and this…” Furlong grabbed other items from the roustie and tossed them out onto the ground, as well. Handmade wooden eating utensils, raggedy clothing, holed-out boots. In a matter of seconds, he had stripped the man of his loot.
The only items Furlong didn’t throw out were a handful of dubious predark trinkets: a broken metal wristwatch without a band, a pair of thick glasses with scratched lenses and some junk jewelry with stones missing from the settings. Gesturing at the heap on the ground, he told the roustie, “Haul back another bunch of crap like that, and you’ll be digging graves. I’m not gonna warn you again. And you tell the others the same. We only want tradeable stuff. No more of that garbage.” As Furlong lumbered back to the captain’s chair, he heard familiar music faintly drifting over from the big top. The swivel throne was turned to the rear so he could oversee the grunt-and-carry work of his subordinates. Overseeing was what he did best. Every time rousties returned to the RV, he gave them the hard once-over, looking for suspicious lumps under their clothing, making sure they weren’t hiding valuable items on their persons. And he kept his eye out for anything especially nice and concealable that he could appropriate for himself when all backs were turned.
So far, there’d been nothing worth the risk. The pickings from Bullard ville had been pathetic.
The clothing liberated from the cabins was patched and threadbare, and even when apparently clean, reeked of composted human manure. The flatware used by the dirt farmers was roughly carved from tree branches. The hand tools and edged weapons were made of rebar chipped out of the fallen highway overpass, and of salvaged, ground-down wag leaf springs. The farmers’ personal grooming items were likewise homemade: corn-cob-and-pig-bristle hairbrushes, snaggle pronged bone combs, toothbrushes that were nothing more than furred-out twigs. Hut furnishings consisted of small, irregular pieces of mirror, faded predark photos, handmade wooden toys, curtains made of strung small and large animal vertebrae. The predark “keepsakes” consisted largely of broken small electronic items and parts of same; plastic and metal odds and ends that 150 years earlier would have been tossed aside. So far, no weapons or ammo had been found. The dirt farmers had all carried their blasters and cartridge belts into the tent.
Furlong figured a ville this well organized had to have hidden away all the good stuff in a safe place, probably under armed guard. The roustie crews just hadn’t uncovered the main storehouse yet. Because Bullard ville was the carny’s biggest target so far, both in terms of population and the number of buildings, the plan was to work systematically, moving from one end to the other, ransacking every hut and lean-to along the way. The looters were under orders to take only the choicest stuff; otherwise the wag bins would get filled up with worthless junk, which would just have to be dumped once they hit the motherlode.
In the wake of their previous mass chillings, booty other than food, blasters, ammo and fuel, the stuff they couldn’t use in the near term, they had either stashed in caches well off the main roads along their performance circuit or carried to one of Deathlands’ primitive trading outposts.