The Armorer replaced the lid on the last crate he had checked, and sat back on his haunches in front of the black metal racks that housed the crated weapons. He pushed his fedora back on his head and scratched at his hairline. Behind the glass of his spectacles, his eyes glittered with thoughts and ideas that shot across his brain: given the combination of weapons, he was already trying to work out the allocation and placing of certain weaponry in order to maximize the potential for winning.
J.B. was lost in a world of strategies and alternative planning, and so didn’t consciously hear Jenny outside the closed sec door. But at the first whir of the door as it began to move, he whirled around, and was ready for her as she entered the room. He was glad, as from her expression she wasn’t pleased to see him.
“You couldn’t wait for me?” It was phrased as a question but contained more than a hint of suspicion.
J.B. shrugged. “Correll asked me to come down here and take a look around. There was no one about when I got here, so I was just taking an inventory.”
“Trying to find fault?”
“No, you keep a good armory. Everything’s in excellent condition. It’s rare to see that.”
Her attitude softened slightly. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“One thing, though.”
“Yeah?” Her attitude hardened immediately.
“Don’t be defensive. I just want to know if any of these weapons have ever been used.”
Confusion clouded her brow. “I don’t know. I’ve been doing this a few years, but before that…” She paused, thinking back. “I don’t recall any ever being used on an attack. We keep ourselves to ourselves and don’t get many intruders.”
J.B. ignored the way in which the last remark had been pointed and concentrated on the important point. “Okay, so if these are well kept but unused, there’s a few tests we should run.”
“Such as?”
He allowed the briefest of smiles to ghost across his lips at her attitude. “Well, if you’ll stop hitting out every time I say something, then mebbe I’ll get a chance to show you.”
Chapter Six
The trip across the wastelands that lay between the redoubt and the ville of Charity was uneventful for most of the first day. Not uneventful in the sense of nothing happening and it being an easy trek, but rather in the sense of it being a seemingly unending slog of relentless tedium, with nothing to break up the monotony and put marker points or breathing spaces in the day.
There was no other way to tackle the trek on foot than like this. Lonnie, who was leading the expedition, had a chart that had been drawn up from the knowledge of the terrain gleaned by years of patrolling the area, and he also had a portable sextant that Dean recognized immediately as being similar to the one the J.B. used to chart their position in the Deathlands whenever they arrived at a new destination and exited a redoubt.
There was little in the way of shelter and respite along the route, which had to be as straight a line as possible. It was a hell of a distance to Charity, and the only way to do it on foot in the time they had been allocated was to head straight for it. Unfortunately for the party, this meant a day’s long slog across the desert wastes under the harsh and pitiless glare of the rad-blasted sun, walking at a steady pace that was slow enough to preserve some of their precious water by not perspiring too freely with the effort, but quick enough to maintain a steady rate at covering the distance.
They walked mostly in silence, each individual counting his or her steps and keeping time to a steady beat to maintain the pace. It was strange how, after a short while, time began to mean little, and distance even less. All that mattered was the relentless tyranny of the beat, as they kept time with an almost metronomic regularity.
As they traveled, Danny began to lag. Oddly, Doc kept pace well. If anything, the Hellbenders in the party had expected the seemingly old man to be the one who would hold them up. But Jak and Dean knew well enough that Doc knew his limitations, and would cut his cloth accordingly. Doc hadn’t kept himself alive for so long without knowing how to cope with the stresses and weaknesses that time trawling had put on his prematurely aged body. The grim set of his mouth and the dull, lifeless eyes staring ahead, seeing something that was only in his own head, bespoke of the effort he was putting in to the trek. Lonnie, Mik and Tilly were well used to the physical demands of the desert, but Danny had spent most of his short life with his head buried in pieces of old tech, and so was unprepared for the rigors of walking in the desert. Dean dropped back when the youngster began to flag, lending him an arm and walking him into step so that he established a better rhythm to his walk, maximizing the efficiency of his stride. He even whispered. “One-two-three-four-one-two-three-four.” in time with their walk, urging Danny to repeat it as a mantra and so work himself into the pace better.