“Leave ’em!” Ryan ordered. “Save ammo. Let ’em go.”
Ryan was ramming the twenty-five-round loaders into the magazine clip, feeding the nitrocellulose caseless rounds. J.B. had dropped the empty cartridge mag to the wag’s floor, plucking another from one of his infinitely capacious pockets and slotting it home with a satisfying click.
“One crawling away this side,” Krysty said. “Looks like a broken thigh. Shall I waste him or let him go, Ryan?”
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“Let him be. Jak, get ready to move. Doc, you and Lori go and shift that spiked rail from ‘cross the road. Krysty, stay here and keep watch. Me and J.B.’ll get down first and check out the body count. Chill any that are still moving.”
“Check,” the Armorer said, drawing the small Tekna knife from its sheath on his belt.
“Ryan? “Krysty said.
“Yeah?”
“One thing?”
“What is it? Best get moving and over the river. Might be more of the squatters.”
“Sure. But how d’you know?”
“You hear them putting on finger knives?” Jak asked.
Ryan grinned, moving a half step toward Krysty, then wincing as his boots slithered in the sticky pool of the dead couple’s blood. “Better get this dreck cleared out ‘fore we cross the Susquehanna,” he said. “How did I know? It kept nibbling at me that there was something wrong ’bout that burning truck. Then, just as we was coming to the bridge, the woman said something that brought it clear.”
“She was talking about how he looked after the wag,” Krysty remembered.
“Yeah. You saw it, burned out. Settled in the dirt up to the hubs and raw red rust everywhere, the fire still smol-dering.”
Krysty looked puzzled. It was Jak who made the con-nection first. “Sure. Bastards! If’n fire only just burned, it’d be clean metal.”
Doc Tanner had been listening with great interest. “I see it now. The oxidation of the exposed metal was old. Days old. Weeks old.”
“Mebbe months old,” J.B, added. “Could have been pulling that butcher’s scam for fucking months. Survi-
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vors from the ambush. Get a lift. Then open the throats of the driver and shotgun and let in their mates. Easy as catching a legless mutie.”
“And the way it was sitting there,” Krysty said. “Now that you say it… Gaia! What a stupe I was. I can see it in my mind’s eye now, and it’s obvious it was a real old wreck, set by the track and fired with some brush. Drop of gas and oil and it smokes like a fresh killing ground.”
“And they’d have been eaten us!” Lori exclaimed, kicking out at the slumped corpse of the woman. “Can-nies!”
“Right,” Ryan agreed. “Now you all know what you gotta do. Clean this wag and tidy up out there. Then we can move on again.”
It took only a half hour to finish off the wounded men and wash out the bloodied interior of the big wag. Then Jak cranked up the engine, and they rolled south toward the old Maryland state line.
Chapter Seventeen
“I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
I wish I were a maid again.
A maid again, I ne’er can be,
‘Til…
“Can’t you hold this fireblasted wag steady on the road, Jak?”
“Sorry, Krysty. Tree felled and blocked us. Had to go around.”
It had taken them three days to get from the Susque-hanna, across the northern angle of Maryland and into the edges of Virginia. The road had been appalling and the weather worse.
Twice they’d been hit by ferocious chem storms, as se-vere as anything Ryan or J.B. had ever encountered. The gales had come shrieking from the east, bringing a biting salt rain and hail that battered at the metal roof of the wag. Lightning lanced to earth all around them, filling the air with the dry taste of bitter ozone. The thunder was so loud that any conversation within the vehicle had to be shouted.
At the height of the storms Jak had stopped driving, unable to see more than a couple of feet ahead. Mud fell from the skies and streaked the armored glass, coating it with a thick layer of gray-orange slime.
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