“They can’t get through to the ville?”
“No, my lord. Every yard across the neck of the land is patrolled. Not even a water rattler could slip by. No, my lord, your brother and his friends are still in the Loop.”
“His traitor friends, Sergeant,” Harvey said, smiling his crooked smile. Sweat was pouring off his lardy face in rivulets, drenching the ornate cloak.
“Traitors, indeed, Baron,” the sec officer agreed. “We got the dogs leashed. Only place they can be is near the gas store, close by the Sorrow’s banks.”
“What if they get in there?”
“Then they never get out. We’ll have ’em like flies in a bottle. Shall we all lead on after the dogs, my lord?”
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“Lead on, bleed on, read on, weed on, bleed on and on.”
The sergeant turned away, face schooled to impassivity from years of working for Baron Harvey Cawdor.
the gas store was a squat, ugly building isolated at the end of a narrow trail that cut off the main road away from the ville. It dated from before the holocaust, but nobody had ever known what its use had been. An old woman once told Ryan that she’d heard from her gran that it had been used for taking and storing ice from the Sorrow, be-fore the turbulent river had been called by that name and before the nuking had upset some of the shifting rocks underpinning the Shens, making the Sorrow the untamed terror it now was.
Trees grew thickly around the store, which measured around thirty feet square. The walls were of stone, held together by crumbling mortar. There was a window at the rear that had been filled in a century before. The door was of iron, secured by a massive padlock, now rusting. Knowing what the price of failure would be, nobody from the ville or the country around would have dared to try to break into the baron’s own store of gasoline. The liquid was stored in metal drums, placed along the inner walls of the building.
One of the greatest necessities in all of Deathlands was gas-for the wags and for powering generators that were generally the sole source of power in most villes. Occa-sionally a cache would be found hidden in redoubts from before the winters. But this was of superior quality and greatly valued. Most gas came from near the Gulf of Mexico and from places in the high plains country, where it was crudely refined by small, highly armed communi-
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ties. Front Royal got most of her gas from a ville close to what had once been the border with Canada.
The store held several thousand gallons.
Ryan led them there.
Chapter Thirty-One
the door was a little way open, the inside of the gray building-its walls splashed with a sickly lichen-in al-most total darkness. The dogs had brought the hunt straight to it, past the mangled corpses of the other hounds. The sergeant had ordered them held back on long leashes, keeping anyone from going near the store until the baron himself arrived to give them his orders.
Any conversation was difficult against the thunderous roar of the Sorrow, pounding its crazed route toward the distant sea.
The sec officer refused anyone the chance of going closer, keeping them back in a skirmishing line at the edge of the clearing. A couple of men held the horses while the rest of the party dismounted and waited, carbines at the ready, for further orders. Eventually Baron Harvey Caw-dor came up, swaying in the high-pommeled saddle, humming a tuneless song to himself. With the help of a half-dozen sec troopers he battled his way to the ground, immediately deciding that he wanted to be back on his horse.
“To be able to see better, Sergeant,” he explained in ringing tones.
“Yeah, my lord.” It took several minutes before the grossly fat man was once more in the saddle of the shire stallion.
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“We’ve got ’em caught, eh?” Harvey bellowed, though the sergeant stood patiently waiting right at his stirrup. “Caught?”
“In the gas store. Looks like they shot off the old lock. Or, likely, smashed it with a stone or the butt of the car-bine.”