The boy’s father’s name was Renz Boydson, and his wife was called Mixy. Their son had been birthed as Boyd, but most times he was just called Boy. Renz’s father was
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Jorg, and his woman, who was no relation, answered to Valli.
Renz was a traveling repairman. He was good with tired old machines that seemed past their best old washers and rad-trans equipment, as well as generators and wag en-gines. The big trailer that was hidden among the trees held a primitive lathe and a mass of tools he’d been collecting for years.
The Boydsons made a fair living, though they fre-quently had to run the gauntlet of hostiles or double-crazies around the eastern fringe of the heart of the Deathlands. It was the wag that gave them life, food and security. The chassis was off a Mercedes camper, with parts of a Volvo body grafted onto it. The engine was re-liable and exceedingly powerful, but so heavy on gas that Renz had adapted the interior to hold five twenty-gallon cans.
The wag had once belonged to a stupe preacher, who’d got it from a woman trader who’d seen the light through his hellfire sermons.
Renz had got it from the preacher, whose corpse, cleaned of flesh, now rested at the bottom of an old quarry, eight miles from Flanders. A bullet from Renz’s Luger had been drilled through the center of his fore-head.
Renz, hands in the air, glared at the strangers. His first waking thought had been muties, then he’d guessed that some other trader or traveler had followed them and run the ambush. But these six weren’t like anyone he’d ever met. Valli was weeping quietly at his elbow, and he snarled at her to shut up with her sniveling.
The leader was obviously the man with the patch over his left eye. He was tall and well built, wearing dark clothes and a long coat. He was hefting a blaster such as
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Renz had never seen. The second-in-command was the small man with the battered hat and the glinting glasses who carried a machine pistol.
“Keep quiet and give us no trouble, and you get to live some more,” the man with the eye patch said. “We want the wag. Nothing else.”
“Mebbe some stew,” the young boy said. He didn’t look much older than Boy, but he walked with a terrify-ing air of crazed menace. With hair like spun snow and eyes like the embers that glowed in the middle of the fire, the boy looked like something built by a mountain sha-man for a midnight ritual.
One of the attackers was a dotard who looked even older than Jorg, and he was holding a handgun that had two barrels.
Renz looked at the two women. Despite the danger to them all, he felt himself stirring excitedly. The tall, slen-der blonde wore clothes that seemed designed to beg a man to take her. And the other, a few years older, had hair like living flames. Both women also had blasters, holding them with ease that only comes with experience and use.
The wind soughed through the branches of a grove of fragrant sassafras trees to the west, brightening the ashes of the fire, stirring dancing spurs of orange and yellow from the smoldering ends of the branches.
“Yer take wag and we’ll all done get chilled,” Renz said, addressing his words to the one-eyed man.
“You get to live. The keys in it, Jak?”
“Yeah. Juiced and ready t’go.”
“Start it up. No, I guess you’re right ’bout that stew. Smells good. Krysty, you an’ Doc serve us out a bowl each.”
The meat was rancid, with a ragged lace of rotting gristle around each piece, but the turnip greens and sweet
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potatoes were fresh and good. Renz and his family sat to-gether, guarded, watching with sullen resentment. Jorg had begun to moan at his son for letting them be taken so easily.
“Chillers come out the brush and take food and the wag. You sit there and don’t do nothing to stop them.”
“Shut the flap, you old ass-lapper. They got the blast-ers, ain’t they?”
“You ain’t worth doodlysquat, you little fucker!”