“Can’t say I do, Trader.”
“Sure you do. Old mutie, chief of the tribe, got a knife through his belly. Spilled out a piece of his gut. You gotta remember this, Abe.”
“Not properly, though it rings a kind of distant bell, Trader. Go on.”
“Where was Yeah. Shithole bastard falls down in his panic to get away from the guns of the war wags. Sort of snags this loop of his gut on a jagged hunk of a broken tree. Might’ve been a sycamore. Or a pinon. Anyway, up he gets, screaming shrill like a pig at the fucking gelding.”
Now the story was making sense to Abe, but he was sure it hadn’t been stickies by the Gulf. His memory was that it had been a camp of scalies up in the Rockies, and the victim had been a woman, not a man.
But he wasn’t about to contradict Trader when he was in full flow.
“Doesn’t notice that a part of his intestines was caught up tight as a tick. Off he runs” Trader laughed, a slow, grating sound in the darkness.
The woman had been naked, breasts jiggling as she tried to get away from the withering fire from the brush around the camp. Her mouth had hung open like she was trying to swallow the world around her. Now Abe remembered it real well.
“He starts trying to run for the sea. Expression on his face like the earth’s turned upside down. Trips a couple of times, but be doesn’t look down. By now the piece of stomach’s around thirty feet long. No, forty feet if it’s an inch. Still see the color of it. Course, in the end it pulled him short like he was on a cutting rope. Sat him down on his ass, with the stupest look I think I ever saw on a man’s face. Couldn’t believe what had happened.”
Abe remembered that Ryan Cawdor had put a bullet smack between the wretched woman’s eyes from the M-16 he was carrying in those days.
“I took my Armalite and chilled him with a single round through the middle of his piggy mutie face. Don’t never say that the Trader doesn’t show mercy, Abe.”
“I wouldn’t, Trader. I wouldn’t.”
The figure lay down again. “You reckon that Ryan and J.B.’ll come running, Abe?”
“We sent out enough of those messages. Only takes one to get through.”
“How long ago was it?”
“Three weeks, give or take a couple days. Thing is with Ryan, nobody knows where he might be. Anywhere in Deathlands. Jumps here, there and everywhere.”
Trader yawned. “I wish you wouldn’t wake me up in the middle of the rad-blasted night, Abe. Just because you want to wag your jaws, chewing over the old meat.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Abe. You know that it’s a sign of double weakness.”
“Yeah. We going hunting again tomorrow, Trader?”
“Thought we might pay a visit to that ville where the old woman sold us the pulque. Or whatever mutie piss it was.”
“We don’t have any jack, Trader.”
“Day that Trader needs jack is the day they lay the lid down on the long wooden box.”
“What we got to barter?”
The man alongside him moved, and Abe heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being cocked. “That answer your question, Abe?”
“Yeah, Trader.”
” So, did you say you figured that Ryan would be up here soon?”
“Can’t promise it, Trader. But I’m sure that he’ll come, as long as he gets the message. Can’t say fairer than that.”
“Good. Ryan was the best, you know. I always figured that he’d be the one to pick up the cards when I laid them down.”
“Shit doesn’t always hit the bowl like you expect, Trader, does it?”
“It doesn’t, Abe. Still, I gotta get some steep. Tomorrow’s another day.”
Chapter Four
“Been a long time since we did this.”
“Too long?”
Ryan considered the question. “I guess that what Krysty says about life is right.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t ever close yourself off from trying new experiences. Or reliving old ones.”
J.B. was leaning back against one of the eight wheels of the LAV, his hands folded across his stomach, his eyes closed behind the glasses. “Guess that’s true. Mildred says change is healthy. Then the next minute, she says that she likes things staying the same. Never know with women.”