James Axler – Road Wars

The store was a converted church, though the weather had done most of the actual converting. Lightning had felled the top of the spire, and a quake had brought down the rear part of the tower. The small stained-glass window, dedicated to a long-dead worthy, had disintegrated into dusty, colored splinters. A sign, protected by the porch, still proclaimed Today Belongs to Man but Forever Belongs to the Almighty.

There had been extensive logging in that part of the Cascades during the past few years before skydark, and the woods were still veined with the faint remnants of the trails. One of them brought Trader and Abe out onto a shallow promontory, overlooking the ragtag ville.

They stood together, concealed by the fringe of shadow, checking the place out.

“Man who rushes in is the man who gets hisself carried out,” the older man muttered.

“True,” Abe agreed, his right hand resting on the butt of the big Colt Python strapped to his hip. His left hand was plucking nervously at his drooping mustache.

On their previous visit, when they’d been given the pulque, there had been elements in the place that had made Abe feel distinctly uncomfortable.

In the old times, with the two war wags, Abe recalled visiting hamlets in the dark backwoods of the Smokies and the Shens, blue-misted, triple-poor places.

This place was reminiscent of those poverty shacks.

There’d been a boy, seeming close to fifteen, shuffling around the store with a broom. It had been several minutes before Abe had spotted what was wrong with the lad. His feet were on backward, facing behind him.

And there had been the group sitting around the potbellied stove, half a dozen men, all of them looking as if they were members of the same inbred family. They had thin hair, the color of rain-beat straw, and pale blue eyes with dropping lids.

When Abe and Trader had first walked into the place, there had been a sudden silence so intense that you could have heard a moth fart.

When they finally left, Trader had said that he had thought for a moment it was going to be a time to put the top up and the hammer down.

There’d been comments about outlanders, not quite loud enough to be heard, that produced noisy laughter and much spitting and hawking.

Abe had wanted to get out as quick and easy as possible, but it was like he feared. Trader wasn’t the sort of man to turn his back on trouble.

After downing the first slug of the milky homebrewed liquor, Trader had walked to stand by the group.

“Sounds to me like there’s some good jokes being told,” he said, as quiet as a rattler moving through soft sand. “Like a good joke myself. How about telling them to me and my friend here?”

One of the men stood, uncoiling from an ancient armchair with rusting springs sticking out of it. Abe had put him at way over seven feet, with a myopic stoop. He carried a sword at his belt, with filthy golden tassels dangling from the hilt.

“Outlanders don’t get to hear jokes.” The voice seemed to come from the bottom of a dry well.

“That so?”

“Yeah.”

Trader cradled the Armalite in his arms like a mother with her firstborn child. He stared into the man’s face and nodded.

“Then you’d better keep the jokes quiet until after we’ve gone. That way we don’t hear anything we shouldn’t hear, and nobody gets to be hurt.”

Abe waited while seconds stretched into millennia. The hairs at his nape were crawling with a life of their own. He was ready to draw and dive behind a sack of dried peas, putting a couple of rounds into the group of men.

But the moment passed.

The giant glanced at his friends, but he didn’t see any great desire to get involved in something that would leave blood on the floor. Possibly their blood.

“TRADER?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“We just going to walk in and take what we want?”

“Sure are Abe, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Trader shook his head. “My memory’s getting like an interstate sign. Crammed full of holes.”