James Axler – Deathlands

“Mebbe he’ll settle down here in the ville and have lots of little godlings,” Krysty said, grinning.

J.B. shook his head. “Don’t see the lad settling down again for a while. Not after the pain of the disaster of last time.”

He turned to Ryan. “Good moon out there. Wondered if you fancied a short recce into the forest?”

“Hell, why not? Want to come, Krysty?”

“No thanks, lover. Bed sounds good to me. And they can’t keep on drumming all night.”

“HAVEN’T BROUGHT ANY of your thermite bombs with you, have you?” Ryan asked, as the two old friends quietly picked their way along the moonlit path toward the north.

“I know that we’re on the brink of getting them to work. Mebbe if we top off the igniter with that blasting powder that Jak and Doc brought with them. Could do the trick. Not too much time left for experimenting.”

The night was still, with occasional rustling among the undergrowth betraying the movement of the nocturnal denizens of the emerald jungle. The moon was close to full, throwing sharp-edged shadows and turning everything to shades of black, white and silver.

“Like old times,” Ryan said as they walked together, one on each side of the trail.

“Been a while since the two of us went off for a recce together,” the Armorer agreed. “Seemed times when we did nothing else for Trader.”

“Think he made it?”

J.B. turned, his eyes invisible behind the gleaming lenses of his spectacles. “Day I get to spit in his empty eye sockets is the day I accept Trader’s gone from us.”

“It looked bad, that last glimpse that I had of him on that beach.”

“Dark night!” J.B. laughed quietly. “You think that ‘bad’ is enough to chill Trader?”

Ryan grinned. Since there wasn’t likely to be much long-range shooting, he’d left the Steyr back in the hut, despite its Starlite night scope, relying on the SIG-Sauer and the panga to see him through against danger.

J.B. had elected to take the Uzi, carrying it slung over one shoulder, ready for instant use.

They both went for their weapons when a large carnivore that looked oddly like a striped jaguar slunk quickly across the path, only a dozen yards in front of them. But it passed out of sight with only the most cursory, dismissive glance in their direction.

“Must mean there’s not too much movement close by,” J.B. observed, pausing to look behind them.

“Sure. If the slavers were on the road tonight, the forest would know it before we did.”

“Remember that time we were on night recce through the Smokeys?”

Ryan stopped. “Mean the run-in with those inbred sickos that brewed liquor that took the paint off the war wags?”

“No, not them. Ones that used throwing axes.”

“Oh, yeah. Take your head clean off your shoulders before you even knew that you’d been hit.”

“So they said.”

“Yeah, I remember them. You recall that summer patrol in West Texas? We were walking through thick woodland, you and me, on a night just like this.”

“We came across an old mill. Wheel was rotted and moss covered, but it still turned in the flow of a fast stream. Made a grinding noise like a wag crushing an old auto.”

“There was that family living in the mill, wasn’t there? About a dozen of them, and not a single hair on the head of any of them. All bald.”

J.B. laughed. “You asked them why, and the old woman said that you didn’t see grass growing on a busy highway.”

“We both thought she was making a kind of small joke, and we started to smile at her.”

“And the shit hit the fan.”

Ryan slapped his leg. “Bastard skeeter! Yeah, knives and straight razors and a couple of flintlock pistols appeared out of thin air.”

“Time we got out of the place, there was blood dripping through the floorboards onto the dirt.”

“We sure been some places and seen some things,” Ryan mused. “Guess we’ve had our share of luck.”

“Good and bad.”

“Right. You’re right, J.B., we’ve had some of both kinds of luck.”

The Armorer wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve. “How about that business with the limping man, the missing brindled dog and the triple-fat woman who swore that she was able to take three”