The Armorer blew into the pan, removing the last particles of dust. “Yeah. The other thing that it’s going to become is hard traveling if we don’t get ourselves some more gas in the next day or so.”
“I always liked walking,” Ryan said.
“I noticed that. Ever since we first met up, Ryan. I’ve known you as a man who liked walking. Just about as much as a pig likes flying.”
DURANGO, AND THEN up on 666 across Utah and into Nevada. That was just about as far as they’d bothered to make any detailed plans. Both of them knew that trying to schedule a long journey of more than three or four days over any part of Deathlands was about as pointless as Russian roulette. Often with the same result.
There could be a severe chem storm, with teeming rain so acid that it would strip the paint off a wag in forty minutes or a man’s flesh from his bones in a great deal less. Or quakes or one of the volatile volcanoes that had been brought back to life by the massive nukings of skydark, fires or flash floods, falling trees or major earth slips. Or you might even run into an unmarked radiation hot spot.
And that didn’t include the strong probability of encountering big trouble from either four-legged or two-legged animals. Norms or muties. Or both.
Trader used to say that a man who planned anything beyond the end of his own nose was likely to have it hacked off.
“MORE TREES.” Ryan was driving, watching the changing landscape through the narrow ob slit at the front of the LAV-25. J.B. sat in the top of the turret, head and shoulders out in the fresh morning air. His fedora had been jammed on tight to avoid its being snatched off by the breeze.
“Say again.” The Armorer wasn’t bothering to wear his earphones. Apart from a couple of tumbledown and isolated hunters’ cabins set way back off the blacktop, they still had seen no sign of human life.
“Getting plenty of trees now.”
“Yeah.”
Ryan wished he hadn’t bothered to say anything at all. It was such an obvious comment. But they hadn’t exchanged a single word for over an hour, and he felt a slight social pressure to keep the contact open.
“Colder, too.”
“Yeah.”
There had been a faint drizzle falling for an hour or so, from about the time they approached what would have been the old state line into Colorado. It had made the highway slick and treacherous, particularly in places where the gradient had been affected by quakes or earth shifts.
At an isolated crossroads, miles from anywhere, Ryan had noticed the tracks of another wag. He’d slowed, drawing J.B.’s attention to them. The Armorer had climbed out on the top of the eight-wheeler, reporting that they looked like threadbare tires off a four-by.
Ever since the long winters, motorized transport had been at a premium. The metal-working skills were still there to repair the mechanics of the remaining vehicles, but making tires when the supply of rubber in Deathlands was almost nonexistent was a lot more difficult.
And gas that even remotely approached the purity of predark supplies couldn’t be found anywhere. But crude processing plants down in west Texas and in Louisiana offered a product that just about reached acceptability.
One of Trader’s great strengths had been based on the time he’d found vast supplies of gas from before skydark, a hundred miles or more north of Boston. Buried in a massive military installation, like a redoubt, there’d been enough to keep the pair of powerful war wags, which he’d discovered in the Apps a quarter century earlier, on the road for many years.
Ryan found his mind turning more and more toward the elusive figure of his old leader.
For many months he had been utterly convinced that Trader was dead, gone off like a wounded animal into the forest to seek a quiet, dark place to suffer through the last agonies of what most of the crews of the war wags had been certain was an abdominal rad cancer.
The whispers around the villes, frontier pestholes and gaudies that the Trader still lived had come to Ryan like bolts from the clear blue sky.