Mebbe human fat, Roberto comprehended, going queasy. Dark night, he never would have thought about that. “Good call, Chief,” he stated, swallowing hard. “I’ll see it done personally. But we’re still taking shine and fuel, right?”
Removing her hat, Kate fanned away the smoke from the burning buildings, the fumes carried a reek of burning flesh that made her cringe. “Damn straight, all we can carry,” the woman added without any trace of humor. “From here we can finally risk a journey to the north.”
Roberto frowned. By that, she meant across the Great Salt. A hellzone considered by many to be the bleeding ass of the Deathlands with its rad storms, quicksand, tornadoes, muties and worst of all, the Scorpion God.
Machine gun fire sounded from somewhere in the ville, ending with a wailing scream, followed by cheers. Sounded like the slaves were free and already equaling some old scores.
“Be a mighty good day when we ace the Scorpion,” Roberto said grimly. “A lot of debts to be paid there, too.”
“More than you know,” Kate muttered, tucking her hat back on her head.
Chapter Eight
Sucking on a dry piece of jerky, Krysty was taking her turn behind the wheel as dawn began to lighten the eastern sky behind the wag. Straight ahead, the bright headlights of the old wag bounced wildly with every irregularity of the ground, and she was forced to slow to a mere crawl to keep from crashing into the occasional hole or rock. She hoped nothing attacked the wag, because at this miserable speed, they couldn’t outrun a fat baron.
When Ryan was driving the wag, at first it had seemed they were following a predark road buried beneath the salt. But soon it became obvious that this was merely a wash, the vestigial remains of a dried river that snaked through the desolate landscape. Aside from the shallow depression of the river, the land was flat and featureless without even mountains on the horizon, the largest dune of sandy salt only a few feet in height. It was as if the world had been sandpapered smooth.
No, it was sandblasted smooth, Krysty corrected, by the bombs of skydark. Whatever had once been here had to have been mighty important in the old days for it to receive such a concentrated bombing. Some sort of military base, or factory town. Had to have been big.
Sitting in the passenger side of the cab, Dean scowled alertly at the endless vista of dried salt with open hostility, J.B.’s scattergun expertly cradled in his hands. The boy carried a harmonica in his shirt pocket, a gift from long ago, and he was slowly getting fairly good on the instrument. But for some reason he felt the music would have been inappropriate. Dean found that he was sometimes a little nervous when it was just him and Krysty, kind of as if he were a small kid being watched over by a parent, instead of a young man of nearly thirteen years standing guard. The weirdly mixed feelings confused the hell out of the boy. Mildred told him it was normal for him to feel that way. He was in transition from childhood to adulthood. Adolescence, it was called. Dean wished it would just pass him by.
Buried under a pile of blankets, the rest of the companions were sleeping in the rear of the vehicle, huddled in a group to share body heat and help fight off the nighttime chill. It had to have been dawn when they arrived at the redoubt, but as they escaped from the installation, the warmth quickly faded from the air and the desert turned deeply cold. Krysty and Dean had the heater under the dashboard to keep them comfortable, but the rest simply had to cope as best they could.
As the sun slowly ascended, it burned away the blanket of polluted clouds and filled the desert with the rosy gleam of predawn, turning everything delicate shades of pinks. Soon the biting chill was no longer whistling into the cab from around the mismatched doors, and the woman turned off the heater to save juice. Once long ago, in an Alaskan redoubt, Krysty had studied a map of the old world. This could be the middle of the Australian desert, literally thousands of miles away from anything. Every drop of fuel needed to be saved until the companions had a better idea of where they were headed.