James Axler – Road Wars

“What is it that we want?”

“Jug or two of that home brew. Salt. Saw some apples. Wouldn’t mind if they got some fresh milk or butter and a new-baked loaf or two.”

“Didn’t see any of that when we were there before. Just a lot of dirt and some crazes who looked like they all had the same father and a load of different mothers.”

Trader laughed and slapped Abe on the shoulder, nearly knocking him off his feet. “Might not be enough of you to feed a bear cub, Abe, but you’re a ballsy little bastard. Now, let’s go kick the rednecks’ asses.

ABE BLINKED. It was like a bad dream, where you think you’ve been someplace before.

The store was precisely the same as it had been for their previous visit. Same old woman leaned on the filthy counter, and the same bunch of men sat around the stove.

And there was the same silence when he and Trader walked in, broken by the enormously tall man, sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him.

“Well, looky, looky here. If it’s not Daddy Outlander and little baby Outlander, come to see who’s been sleeping in their beds.”

Trader ignored the man. He walked up to the counter and rapped on it with the butt of the rifle, jerking the old woman out of a daydream.

“Got any bread?”

“Makin’ some ‘morrow,” she mumbled.

“So you can just fuck off in the forest and find yourself a good pile of bark and some dead beetles and make do with that, Daddy Outlander.” The others greeted the man’s heavy-handed attempt at a joke with sycophantic laughter.

Trader turned around. There was a tension to his wiry, muscular body that Abe remembered from times past. He readied himself for the violence that he guessed was waiting in the wings to run onto the stage.

“Enough,” Trader said.

“Now, what does that mean, old-timer?”

Chairs scraped back and everyone got to their feet. The old woman behind the counter hastily took down a framed picture of a racehorse.

“It means that we came in here, real peaceable, not looking for any sort of trouble.”

Which wasn’t quite true. The idea had been to go in and take what they wanted by threat of arms. But things had moved so far and so fast that it didn’t much matter.

“Might not want trouble, you gray-haired old bastard, but you sure found it now.” A cackle of laughter erupted from the smallest of the litter, a youth with a scar at the corner of his mouth, skinnier even than Abe.

“Yeah. Insults our ville, don’t he?” A fatter man cracked his knuckles while he grinned at Trader and Abe.

“This your ville, is it?” Trader asked, courteous and polite, as if he were asking a priest the time of day.

“Sure is.”

“My mistake, friend. I mistook it for a shithole in the dirt filled with dead worms that used to fuck their grandmothers.”

Trader’s words, delivered with the same gentle calm, hung in the air, almost as if he’d somehow carved them into the slabs of dusty sunlight that filtered through the open door.

“That about does it,” Abe whispered.

The immensely tall man drew his sword from its sheath and flourished it with such vigor that he sliced open a bag of nails, hanging from the rafters. He dodged them as they spilled around him, his blue eyes fixed on Trader.

“You You’re dead, old man. You’re walking around and suckin’ air, but you’re deader than a rusty bucket. Was goin’ to just kick you around some, but not now.”

“Loudest-talking corpse I ever did see, Abe,” Trader commented, firing the Annalite from the hip.

The boom of the blaster was deafening in the small building. The bullet hit the giant through the center of his belly and exited behind in a spray of blood and torn intestines, breaking a window at the side of the store.

“Land o’Goshen!” the old woman exclaimed, her eyes rolling up in their sockets as she fell to the floor behind the counter in a dead faint.

“You shot me, friend,” the tall man said, left hand exploring the neat hole just above his belt buckle.