“You can say that again, friend.”
“I said that you never know with women.”
Ryan laughed. “Like Doc said, there’s nothing like an old joke, and that’s nothing like an old joke.”
The morning had passed easily, both men finding it easy to pick up the threads of their close relationship.
In their early days with Trader, as fiery young bloods, they had often been sent off on dangerous missions as a twosome. Later, as they rose through the war wag hierarchy, there had been less time alone together.
And more recently, since they had broken from Trader and traveled across Deathlands through the mat-trans gateways, there had always been others with them.
J.B. yawned. “This riding along sure gives you an appetite. Any more of that shortbread?”
“We eat at this rate, and they’ll find us starved by the side of the highway before we’re even across the state line into Colorado. Yeah, there’s a few crumbs.”
“Love the vanilla flavoring that Mildred put in them. She’s a real good cook, you know, Ryan.”
“Course I know it. Eaten enough of her food, haven’t I? Think we should be moving on?”
“Trader’s waited years for us. Figure he can wait a few minutes longer.”
“Easy to say that when the old terror’s not standing in front of you.”
The Armorer laughed. “Remember that pompous baron of the ville near the Washington Hole?”
In the last of all wars, Washington, D.C., had been the first of the major casualties, vanishing into dust, spray and lethal radiation in the initial seconds of the final conflict, though it was to be followed into infinity in the next three or four hours by most of the other heavily populated centers of civilization throughout the predark world.
Now there was a crater, a huge basin of total desolation filled with a vast lake of noxious, muddy water. It was still a notorious nuke hot spot, where once the Capitol and the White House had stood. In that great wilderness of dirt, devoid of any life, nothing remained.
Nothing in the Washington Hole.
“I remember him. Dark-skinned with a rad cancer eating away his nose.”
“That’s the one, Ryan. Got drunk and started lipping off. Said that Trader was a fish-eyed cowardly bastard. Thought the old man was back with the war wags. Said he wasn’t frightened of him and he’d say the same to his face.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Next thing he knows he’s got a mouthful of the butt of the Armalite and he’s spitting teeth and blood all over the place.”
J.B. stood, brushing a few flakes of the vanilla shortbread from his leather jacket and adjusting the angle of his well-worn fedora.
“Move on?”
“We’ve made real good progress since dawn. Your turn to drive again.”
“Keep it an economical average and we can stretch the gas twice as far as putting the pedal to the metal.”
Ryan nodded. “Been lucky with the weather so far. Get us good tans sitting up on top.”
It had been truly beautiful. The sun had risen gently into a sky of finest blue. Once they were off the dirt road from Jak’s spread, they’d been on blacktops all the way. Apart from the occasional ribboning effect of the undulating quakes, there’d been no problem.
During the first five hours of their journey, they hadn’t seen a single living person, seen hardly any living creatures.
A pure white carrion crow had adopted them for several miles, wheeling and darting only a few feet above the head of J.B., who’d been out on top of the turret at that point. There’d been the ubiquitous coyotes, always looking as though they had some important and rather dubious business to transact, slinking along at an easy lope, devouring the miles, dodging the fragile balls of tumbleweed. They’d only once given the vehicle a sideways glance, then carried on and ignored it.
Once a massive mutie rattler had coiled itself across the highway, only a hundred yards in front of the armored wag, whipping its fifteen feet of speckled brightness out of the way at the last moment, its angry rattle clearly audible above the roar of the engine.
Apart from the usual desert lizards and scorpions, scuttling across the sand-blown roads, that was the full extent of what they’d seen.