James Axler – Road Wars

Chapter Three

“Where is Trader?”

“What?”

The sepulchral voice, coming out of the blackness of midnight, jerked Abe awake. He had been dreaming of a fabulous gaudy slut from Canon City who’d been the proud and notorious owner of sixty-inch breasts. The owner of the filthy gaudy, when a customer asked what her speciality was, used to reply that with a little help she could sit up.

Abe had been lying spread-eagled in a meadow of lush grass, while the whore sat astride him and lowered her breasts over his face, nearly suffocating him.

It had been a good dream, and Abe was reluctant to return to real life.

“What?” he repeated irritably. “Who said that?”

“Where is the man called Trader?”

The fire had long died, leaving only the ghostly residue of powdery white ashes. Abe knew that there were trees around them, mixed conifers, thicker than hairs on the back of a hog. But they were invisible. There had been a moon earlier, while he and Trader sat around eating the chunks of charred rabbit meat, telling familiar tales to each other. Then a bank of cloud had come up from the west, dropping the temperature and leaving the bitter flavor of salt, flat on the tongue, from the Cific Ocean. Trader had warned that there might be rain before dawn.

Abe felt a burning deep in his belly, which he figured came from a crock of home brew that an old woman had sold them two days earlier. She’d claimed that it was real pulque, distilled south of the Grandee. It had the right, slightly milky color, but it tasted of kerosene.

He belched, trying to ease the pain, but all that happened was a spurt of sour bile filled his throat. He spit it out, still not fully awake.

“Trader, that you?”

The voice had sounded like Trader’s, but why in the name of skydark would the old man be asking where he was? It didn’t make much sense.

“Trader? You havin’ some kind of black-dog dream over there? You feeling all right, Trader?”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Trader of course, you triple-stupe mutie son of a bitch!”

“You’re Trader, Trader.”

There was a long stillness.

Abe waited, aware of the endless nocturnal sounds in the forestthe light breeze sighing through the tops of the pines, a dog howling far off, in the direction of the small vilie, the faint breath of a hunting bird ghosting past, its large eyes circling in its ceaseless quest for prey.

“I know that. I know I’m Trader, Abe, for Christ’s sake! Why did you say that?”

Even in the few weeks that he’d spent with Trader after his long quest to find him, Abe had learned that the old man’s temper hadn’t improved with the passage of time.

“Must’ve been dreaming, I guess.”

His waking vision was improving, and Abe could actually make out the shape of his companion. He saw the powerful figure, sitting up, the quilted sleeping bag falling off the broad shoulders, the mop of thinning gray hair and the pale blur of the lined face, the right hand fumbling for the stock of the ever-ready Armalite at his side.

“I never dream, Abe. Did I ever tell you that?” He didn’t wait for the reply. “Man who dreams is a soft man, and a soft man is the one you see lying under six feet of cold, cold ground. I ever tell you that before, Abe?”

The skinny ex-gunner from War Wag One shook his head. “Don’t believe you did.”

“What’s the finest meal you ever ate, Abe?”

That was something else about the new Trader.

He was far more occupied with the past than Abe remembered him being when he had been the scourge of the ungodly and the unrighteous, the length and breadth of Deathlands.

“Don’t recall. Must’ve been ten thousand shit meals. Not many come back as being any good.”

“Once had red snapper, cooked on a little stove on a boat out of Mobile, down on the Gulf. Caught it, fried it and ate it, all in a half hour. Sunshine on the deck and the sea as flat as Kansas. It was the afternoon of the morning we took out that camp of stickies near a shingle beach. You recall?”