“How much?” Ryan asked.
“Not ‘nough,” the boy replied.
“In the cans?” J.B. asked.
“Drier than an old woman’s tits. Guess ’bout ten miles. Mebbe fifteen.”
They all looked at Ryan. “You recognize where we are?” Krysty asked. “Ring any chimes from boyhood?”
He shook his head. “Never hunted much north. This trail don’t seem much used. Main tracks were south and west of here. Old 1-81 was the wide one. Pa had trouble
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with guerrillas coming from the mountains to the west. Shen raiders. They used that interstate with fast wags. Light armor. Stole horses and cattle and women. Surely missed the stallions and the seed bulls.”
“But you believe we may be somewhat in the im-mediate vicinity of your ancestral home?” Doc asked, scratching his chin, his mind immediately wandering off the subject. “Why, ‘pon my soul, I declare that I have a dire need of a shave, my friends. Forgive me while I go to attend to my ablutions.” The old man vanished toward a slow-moving stream behind the wag.
Ryan shrugged. “I guess we got to be close. Can’t say… Fireblast! I don’t think I’m doing right bringing you along on this.”
Krysty clucked her tongue and moved closer to him, but he shook his head.
“No, lover. I mean all of you. If’n Harvey once finds out I’m within a hundred miles, he’ll put the dogs out af-ter me. After us. And he must be able to call on…mebbe a hundred sec men or more. As well as having every bas-tard village and hamlet for twenty miles around under his heel.”
“Wouldn’t be here if’n I didn’t want to be,” J.B. re-plied.
“And me,” Lori insisted defiantly. “We’ll killed your brother together. Shan’t I?”
The others laughed at the girl’s serious face, Ryan fi-nally joining in.
“Okay, friends,” he said. “But when my brother has us roasting over a slow fire, don’t any of you put the blame on me!”
jak caught some trout and roasted them over a slow fire of hickory wood, the scent making everyone’s mouth
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water. The fish were delicious, the tender flesh all but falling off the slender bones.
“What’s time, J.B.?” Jak asked, laying back on a shelf of thick moss, legs crossed, his stark white hair spread out behind him like a bride’s veil.
“Twenty-five of eight,” the Armorer replied, check-ing his wrist chron.
“We should be moving on,” Ryan said, belching ap-preciatively. “Those fish were double-ace. Hardly ever get fresh eating. Did you have self-heats and spun soya in your day, Doc?”
“What, may I ask, do you consider to be ‘my day,’ Ryan?”
“Before the long winter, course.”
“During my time in the 1990s, I found the quality of cuisine execrable.”
“That mean it was good, Doc?” Ryan asked.
“It means it was shit, Ryan.” The old man grinned. “Tinned and frozen and packaged and freeze-dried and irradiated and processed. Little better than these appall-ing self-heats. But remember that my time was also back in the late 1800s, before I was so cruelly trawled forward as part of Cerberus.”
“What was food like then? In real old times,” Jak asked.
“Ah,” Doc sighed. “Like those trout. All food was fresh. Well… most food was fresh. Chicken and mutton and beef and turkey. Salmon and trout and bass. Vege-tables from your own garden, with no having to take a rad count first. Cream so thick I swear you could cut it with a kni fe. But what is the merit in such talk? Let us enjoy the occasional marvelous food like these tender fish.”
“Had good food as a kid, back at the ville,” Ryan said. “Cooks made me a special sort of a pie with apples and
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oranges in it. Called it ‘Master Ryan’s Surprise,’ they did.”
“By the three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed, leaping to his feet in dismay.
“What the…?” Ryan said.
“Your name!”
“What?”
“Your name,” Doc repeated. “Your name is Ryan Cawdor. We all call you by that name, do we not? Indeed we do.”
Ryan didn’t understand. But he was used to the occa-sional way Doc’s synapses disconnected and produced only babbling. Krysty also stood up, eyes lighting up as she realized what Doc was trying to say.