And his first reaction had been that this was all the stuff of legend.
Then the whispers had become more frequent, about a grizzled man, short on temper and long on nerve, carrying the ubiquitous battered Armalite among the flaming fall leaves of New England; down on the coral keys of the extreme southeast; shuffling through the ghoul-haunted streets of the old Windy City; trapping beaver in the Shens; clearing out some comanchero bandits from a ville a spit away from the Grandee; fighting a duel with a trio of weird Mohawk sisters perched among the spidery remnants of a ninety-story skyscraper in the burned-out blocks of lower Manhattan.
Stories, stories, stories.
It was the repetition of these mythic tales that began to preoccupy the thoughts of Abe, until the skinny ex-gunner couldn’t live with the doubts. He needed to go and turn them into certainties, one way or the other.
As the wag rolled toward Durango, J.B. was at the controls, leaving Ryan plenty of time for his own thoughts, riding shotgun across a deserted landscape.
But he still couldn’t get his mind clear on what he really thought about Trader. The message now removed any doubts that the old man was still this side of the dark river. And that, if things went well, Ryan and the Armorer might be seeing him again within the next couple of weeks.
“Then what?” The words were whipped away by the afternoon breeze, into the pine-scented air.
Would Trader expect them to rejoin him? Or would he want to assume the leadership of their small group? Neither of them were ideal options for Ryan.
In fact, he figured that he didn’t truly relish either of them at all.
THE BLACKTOP RAN across a stretch of open prairie, a broad plateau of sun-bleached turf surrounded by banks of tall, dark pines. J.B. was driving the big wag.
“Looks like someone’s been fanning the grass here,” he called back to Ryan.
“Yeah. Noticed. But it seems from up here like some kind of army’s been marching through. Grass is all trampled down and muddied.”
There was a swath of worn turf at least four hundred yards wide, stretching from east to west, as far as Ryan could see. As the LAV went closer, he noticed that there were piles of animal droppings everywhere.
“Cattle,” he shouted. “See the hoof marks as well as the shit. Lot of cattle.”
“Could be one of the local tribes of native Americans,” J.B. replied. “Mebbe moving from one hunting ground to another, taking all their animals with them.”
Ryan stood up higher to get a better look, steadying himself with both hands on the sides of the turret. If the Armorer was right, then it had to be a tribe of hundreds and hundreds of people to leave a track of that size.
To one side of the open space, nearly in among the fringe of the forest, he could see half a dozen coyotes, squabbling over a raggled carcass of what looked to be a calf. But it was too far away to be certain.
“Any villes round here?” he yelled.
“Don’t have the maps with me. Can you come down and get them? Check it out.”
Ryan found the tattered atlas and traced the thin wavering lines with his forefinger, trying to work out just where they’d gotten to. You didn’t travel long in Deathlands before realizing the old road maps were only the most rudimentary guides to human habitation.
Some of the biggest cities of the predark United States, such as Washington, D.C., itself, had been vaporized in the first few hours of the final megawar. Most had been hit hard and repeatedly, sometimes destroying the buildings. In other cases the enemy had utilized neutron technology that chilled all life but left the artifacts untouched.
Many of the smaller settlements had vanished forever, particularly those that were sited close to any of the legion of missile bases that composed the bedrock for the Totality Concept of national defence.
“There’s a place called Wetherill Springs. Dot on the highway. Ten miles or so from here.”
“Engine’s run a it hot.”
“Say again. Use the mike.” He dropped the atlas back down into the cabin of the wag and put on the earphones to listen to J.B.’s voice.