James Axler – Trader Redux

The second stickie was coming toward him in a curious shuffling walk, holding a short steel blade in a clawed left hand. It brushed at the air with the knife, as though it were in total darkness instead of the dim half-light.

“Crorn?” it called. “Where you, Crorn?”

Ryan realized that the stickie was virtually blind, as well as being badly crippled. One shrunken leg dragged behind it, rustling across the steppes of ancient print.

For a passing moment he thought about sparing the mutie. It would be child’s play to slip past it and escape out of the store, back safe to the others.

But where there were two stickies there might be more. This poor disabled creature could raise the alarm, bring others of its vile, butchering tribe.

“Crorn? Brother?”

Ryan waited for the perfect moment. He stooped a little and let the point of the panga find the mutie’s heart, almost on its own, sliding past the questing little knife, through the ragged, buttonless shirt of patchworked cotton, angling the eighteen inches of honed steel slightly upward, between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left side of the stickie’s body. Ryan twisted the hilt as he withdrew the panga.

“Gone, Crorn” The voice was no more than a bat’s whisper in the stillness.

Ryan watched him kneel, then seem to carefully select a spot to lie and die. The books beneath him turned soggy from the flowing river of dark blood. Some of it touched the dented edges of the big book on Dickens that had saved Ryan’s life, staining the ruffled pages.

When the only sound in the bookstore was his own breathing, the tall, powerfully built one-eyed man found his blaster amid the clutter of books and picked his way to the door, pausing a moment to read the poster tacked to the plaster wall.

He grinned and walked out into the evening.

THE BOLT CLICKED on Trader’s Armalite as Ryan neared the smoky camp fire, alongside the Volvo wag. “That you, friend? Sounds like your walk.”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“You smell of Had a run-in with stickies? Shit on a shingle, you did! I can smell their corpse stink on you.”

Ryan nodded. “Two of them in the bookstore. One came close to selling me the farm.”

J.B. was poking warily at a chunk of meat over the flames. “You took care of them?”

“Yeah.”

“Any more?” The Armorer had uncoiled with that effortless, economical fluid movement that characterized everything that he said or did, reaching out for the Uzi that was only inches from his hand.

“Reckon not. Couple on their own. But we could sure think about keeping a watch.”

Abe walked a few steps away from the wag, staring into the gloom toward the collection of tiny stores at the heart of Scottsdale. “Could go and take us a look,” he suggested. “Make double sure.”

Trader spat in the dirt. “No. Divide a small force and you got no force at all.”

“They didn’t have blasters?” J.B. asked. “Don’t see armed stickies very often, but when you do” He let the words trail into the darkness.

“No. Ragged-assed pair of poor bastards. One little knife between them.”

“How come we didn’t hear the sound of your SIG-Sauer, Ryan?” Trader asked suspiciously.

“Used steel.”

“Nothing better than cold steel,” the older man agreed, nodding wisely.

Ryan laughed, suddenly remembering the way that he’d managed to save himself from the first, nearly lethal attack by the mutie. And the poster that had been tacked to the wall of the bookstore.

“Got a new saying for you, Trader. Explain it, mebbe, later tonight.”

“What?”

” ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.'” He grinned at the bewilderment on everyone’s faces.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Judas didn’t prove so amenable when Sukie decided that she was feeling a little tired on the steep descent and wanted to ride on his back.

He twice turned and snapped at her arms, once nipping a fold of flesh just below the elbow, making her cry out at the unexpected pain.

“You ungrateful son of a bitch, mule,” she yelled. “I saved you from a beating and then you do that to me, pretty up and biting good!”