James Axler – Road Wars

“Settle down with Mildred, and lay the blasters aside,” the Armorer said.

“Yeah, all that. And mebbe raise a family while there’s time,” Ryan added.

“TIME FOR BED.” Ryan stood and stretched, feeling a wonderfully warm indolence sliding through his body. “You’ve been real kind, Al.”

“Sure have,” J.B. said. “We were lucky to find you up here. Need more of that luck to find Trader.”

“If he’s alive.” Ryan yawned. “Been months since Abe sent us the message.”

Al reached out cautiously for his glass, draining the last drops of the golden liquid. “Abe is a small man with a mustache and Trader carries an Armalite. An older man?”

“We didn’t tell you that!” Ryan exclaimed, suddenly suspicious, his hand reaching for the SIG-Sauer.

“Please, please. The gun is the last resort of the emotionally immature. You mentioned Trader was an older man. The rest is what I’ve heard from the local people. Strangers are rare up here, and not always welcome.” He sighed. “Particularly when they go around with blazing weapons.”

J.B. glanced across at Ryan, both of them totally taken aback by the old hermit’s revelations. “You’re saying that you’ve heard about Trader?”

“I’m sorry to say that I have.”

“Been some deaths?” Ryan said, letting his hand fall away from the butt of the blaster.

Burgoise nodded. “You’ve traveled Deathlands for many years. You know how the bush telegraph operates. Packmen and travelers carry stories and news. Births and deaths and marriages. My father used to call it ‘hatched, dispatched and matched.’ Bad news and good. Sad and happy. Strangers and dangers. It often takes less than a day for word to race a hundred miles and no man can quite explain how that happens.”

Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Know what you mean. So you’ve heard a lot about Abe and Trader?”

“I didn’t know the one name. Not for sure and certain. But the rumor was constant that the older man was indeed the legendary Trader.”

“And?”

There was a pause. The wood in the hearth crackled and spit, sending sparks out onto the stone flags. “It was not properly seasoned,” Al said, his blind eyes closed, as though he were quite alone.

“Deaths,” J.B. prompted.

Burgoise ticked them off on his fingers. “There was a man slain in a store in a dirt-poor ville in the back-country. It may be that the blame lay not entirely with your companions. A posse was raised. They are all family in those places where father lies with daughter and brother with sister. Then a woman was killed and some men by a bridge across a river.”

“This was during the chase, was it?” Ryan asked, knowing that at such times Trader became totally ruthless, single-minded to the point of casual brutality, sometimes past that point, taking personal survival above all.

“It was. But I doubt you can wipe the slate clean on those grounds.”

“Posse still after them?” J.B. asked, staring into the flames of the fire, as though a part of his mind was out among the snowy hills with his old leader.

“No.”

“Gave up?” Ryan queried.

“Dead.”

“All of them?”

Al nodded. “Every last man and boy. My informant spoke of somewhere between eight and ten of them.”

“He ambush them with his Armalite? And Abe’s got that cannon of a Colt Python. I reckon they’d outgun any backwoods posse most days of the week.”

“No, Cawdor. When they found what the scavengers had left of the corpses, it was still clear how they’d met their ending. Each one had his throat cut open.”

Ryan bit his lip, trying to imagine a scenario that would have led to Trader choosing to take out so many pursuers in that particular way.

J.B. was a little ahead of him. “At night, while they were sleeping. Backtracked and crept up on them in the early hours when they were out it.”

“I never figured for Abe being any use at that kind of attack. Tracking and silence weren’t that high on his list of things he did well.” Ryan’s finger reached to touch the deep scar that ran from the corner of his good right eye down to his mouth, thinking deeply, rejecting various ideas, finally deciding. “They caught Abe. Held him. Thought they were safe with just one old man out there, all on his own in the cold and the wet.”