They entered the building, and Ryan approached the loft. A ladder made of hammered-together two-by-fours stretched from the ground to a dark opening. Motioning for the others to remain where they stood, Ryan put his foot on the first rung. The old, dry-rotted wood broke beneath his weight with a crack that sounded unnaturally loud. That sound was instantly followed by another—a terrible masculine scream of utter wordless fury erupting from above.
A dark, ragged shape plummeted from the opening in the underside of the loft, all flailing limbs and screaming sound. The scream ended abruptly as if a volume-control knob had been turned down. The sound replacing it was a shrieked, “Get on out of here, you hairy sons of whores!”
He was a wiry, craggy man, incredibly grimed and browned. His mouth worked in a snag-toothed snarl beneath bewhiskered lips. A foot-long sharpened shard of metal was gripped in his right hand, with strips of cloth wrapped around the handle.
Though shock and surprise had rooted everyone to the ground, the man was moving. He made a clumsy, stabbing motion, but Ryan was faster, blocking the thrust with his left forearm and knocking the knife from the man’s hand with a slashing swipe of his blaster.
Jak and Krysty lunged forward, pistols questing for a clear target, even as the two men grappled. Ryan didn’t use his fists on the man, and he resisted the instinct to shoot him dead. He seized the man by the frayed collar of his ragged coverall and pivoted deftly. The man flipped over Ryan’s outthrust hip and slammed full-length to the floor. A cloud of dust mushroomed up around his body. He lay groaning and gasping, trying to regain the wind the impact with the ground had driven out of him.
Ryan kneeled beside him, quickly joined by J.B., Krysty and Jak. “Who else is with you?” he snapped, prodding the deeply rutted forehead with the bore of the SIG-Sauer.
The man had no breath to answer, but he shook his head vigorously, flinging fine particles of dust from his salt-and-pepper hair.
“Get the others inside,” Ryan said to Krysty. “The place isn’t much, but at least it’s out of the sun.”
By the time Mildred, Dean and Doc had entered the storage building, the man had regained enough air to talk. His gray eyes passed over everyone, then fastened on Ryan. His gaze became fierce, and he reached up, one hand closing tightly over Ryan’s forearm. His mouth worked. “Cawdor? You come to take me back?”
Ryan stared at the man for a numb, silent second.
The gray eyes shifted to J.B. “Dix? Is Trader with you?”
Ryan and J.B. exchanged blank glances. “Who are you?” the one-eyed man demanded.
Leathery, bristled lips peeled back over rotten stumps of teeth. “Don’t recognize me. Been a long time. A long time, yeah.”
“What’s your name?” J.B. asked.
“Danielson. Gunner. War Wag One.”
The name was only vaguely familiar to Ryan. He dredged his memory for a face to put to it. J.B. made the connection before he did.
“Dark night!” he exclaimed. “Danielson!” He turned toward Ryan. “Remember? Trader gave him the boot for holding out on some stuff from a stockpile we found around Detroit.”
Danielson husked out a raspy laugh. “Yeah. Old field telephones. Weren’t worth a crap to anybody. Obsolete before the nuke, even. Trader threw me out, anyhow.”
Ryan strained at his memory and came up with nothing, but he accepted J.B.’s words at face value. Trader had only a few rules, but he strictly enforced them. If Danielson had been kicked out of the organization for violating one of them, he was only one of dozens over a period of many years.
“How long ago was that?” Ryan asked.
“Long time, like I said. Seventeen, eighteen, mebbe nineteen years. I’m no clock-watcher. What are you doing here in the Barrens?”
“We might ask you the same thing,” J.B. retorted.
Danielson grunted. “Can I sit up?”
Ryan trained the blaster on him. “Do it slow.”
Groaning, the man hitched himself up on his elbows, then onto his backside. He looked past J.B. and Ryan to the rest of the group.