“A working wag,” Tant breathed excitedly. The young man drew a bulky revolver from the belt holding his buckskin jacket closed, and lovingly ran his hands over the Parkerized finish of the big-bore weapon. The wooden handle had been replaced with bone long ago. “Must be some baron,” a pretty blonde suggested, and she pulled a long carving knife from her sleeve.
“Or slavers,” another man grumbled, touching a ragged scar that completely circled his thick neck. In his massive hands, he held a metal rod tipped with a razor-sharp radiator fan. The ends glistened, mirror bright in the morning sun. “They got wags. Well, sometimes.”
“We best leave it alone,” an old woman stated. She hobbled a bit closer to the roadway but didn’t cross onto the gravel of the berm. She knew her place. That honor was for menfolk only.
“Let them leave without a toll?” an old man snapped angrily, watching the wag come steadily closer. His face was deeply lined, but not from hunger, and a puckered star on the right cheek marked where he had been shot in the face at close range. His boots were patched, his jacket was lined with the fur of mountain lion and a brace of oiled revolvers jutted from his wide leather belt. “Black dust, what for, woman?”
Her weak eye wandering aimlessly, the old woman scowled down the road and gestured at the strange vehicle. “Are ya daft, Spector? That ain’t be no civvy wag. That’s a war wag, a tank!”
Raising a hand to strike her, Spector held his anger at the outburst, knowing she was only doing so for the good of the collectors. Dimly, he recalled hearing the word before from Grandda. His father’s father had been a great leader of the collectors, siring fourteen children before dying. A mutie had leaped from the belly of a deer they killed one winter and tore off his arms before the others could bludgeon it to death.
Drawing a blaster, Spector squinted against the distance. Naw, couldn’t be a real tank as the wag didn’t have those metal belts on either side that chewed up the streets. It had whatyacallems.
“Tires,” Tant said, loading a massive crossbow. The quarrel was of green wood, but the barbed tip was steel, lashed into place with human hair.
“Blasters,” he added, scowling. “Them there be fancy autoblasters on its top!”
“Autoblasters?” asked a pregnant girl brandishing an ax, a naked child hiding behind her voluminous skirts.
“Fire more slugs than a hundred sec men at once!”
A young man with only the wispy hint of a beard on his jaw curled a lip. “Horseshit,” he declared.
“It’s the truth.”
“Let it pass, Da,” a redheaded boy suggested, the glass bottle in his hands sloshing slightly. The whiskey bottle with its burning rag of a fuse was actually only filled with urine, but most folks thought it to be a Molotov and steered clear of the pretend firebomb.
Pushing back his cap, Spector stood firm before the steady advance of the war wag. “Anybody can pass,” he stated, shifting his grip on his wheelgun. “Long as they pays a toll. This be our road, child! Don’t we sweep away the leaves in the fall and fill in the holes after the snows? Our grandies guarded this here road for the eagle god, and so do we. Ain’t nobody pass ‘less they pays a toll. One can food, one bullet or a day of work.”
The group took heart from the ancient words and formed a line across the long expanse of concrete. Only the faintest suggestions of ruins marked where the mighty booths stood, but those had been destroyed in skydark. There were cracks in the surface, but those had been carefully patched. Every weed was pulled, the loose gravel along the east side raked into neat order and the grassy strip to the west trimmed neatly. Beyond the strip lay the broken remains of shattered concrete, trees growing wild from the cracks, and most of the surface masked by decades of grass and vines. But that wasn’t their side. That was the north, and they were the southbound. The war between the two rival gangs had ended many winters ago in a bloody fight still referred to as Death Day. Now only the south remained to rule the great road of exit that stretched from the mountains to the terrible ocean.
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