“Trader’s lived long enough. What was that?”
There had been a muffled yell, sounding only a couple of hundred yards away from them, farther in, toward the center of the ville.
The noise wasn’t repeated.
Trader came running, doing up his pants with his left hand, the Armalite gripped in his right, almost like a prosthetic extension of himself.
“Hear that?”
Ryan nodded. “Man shouting. That direction.” He pointed with his SIG-Sauer.
“We’ll go take a look.”
“Trader.”
“What?” The man turned to face his one-eyed companion. “What’s eating you now, Ryan?”
“Why are we going in?”
“Look see.”
“Why?”
“Never knew you ask that kind of question, Ryan.” The older man was confused. “I don’t get it. Honest, I don’t. There’s a problem here?”
“When we rode with you, Trader, and you said for us to follow you, we knew there was always a reason. Jack. Trade. Blasters. Save someone. Save ourselves. Pay a debt. Collect a debt. Always a reason.”
“Sure.” Trader nodded and ran a hand across the top of his cropped, grizzled hair.
“So, why are we going into the middle of a ruined, rad-blasted ville?”
“See what there is to see. Hear what there is to hear. Come on, Ryan, sure you aren’t losing your nerve for a little adventure? By oak and ash! Wouldn’t have ever thought that of you. Not in the old days.”
Ryan looked away for a moment, trying to control the unexpected burst of violent anger that came grinning up out of the back of his mind. Without his being aware of it, he was suddenly on the edge of a flaring rage. The scar across his face began to throb like a fiery heart.
“Drop it.” J.B. had stepped quietly in between the two men, the M-4000 12-gauge threatening neither of them, threatening both of them.
“No problem.” Ryan bolstered the blaster, passingly wondering at how tight his index finger had been on the trigger. “No problem at all.”
Trader seemed momentarily out of his depth. “I’ll be hung, quartered and dried for the crows. It never used to be like this, back then.”
“Back then was a different world, Trader. Different rules. Different strokes.”
Trader didn’t reply for a moment, looking once at the sky. “Might get some sun later. Be good. Let’s go in a tad closer, shall we?”
THEY PASSED THE RUINS of Boeing Field Airport, and there was still no sign of life.
There had only been one sign of death.
A body lying crumpled in a leaf-choked gutter, its throat cut in a great bloodless gash. The busy predators had been at the naked male corpse, and there wasn’t much left of the face or the exposed extremities.
“Where did all the blood go?” J.B. asked, staring down at the remains. “Nothing on the highway. Not a sign. Wound like that it must have come spurting out like the fountain of life.”
Ryan knelt. “Rain wouldn’t have washed it away, would it? Still have been staining on the concrete.”
“Unless the stupe was chilled someplace else and dumped here,” Trader stated.
Ryan straightened. “Wellyeah, never thought of that. Could be.”
“Could be,” J. B. agreed, looking embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of such an obvious explanation.
“Young men nowadays.” Their former leader grinned, delighted at how he’d scored over them. “Plenty of gall but no sand. No imagination.”
He strode off northward, ever closer to the long-stilled heart of the metropolis.
“MERCER ISLAND,” Trader said, pointing to their right. “See where there used to be a big bridge over to it. Main interstate east ran over it.”
“Seals.” Ryan had spotted the silky movements of the gray hunters, moving through the dark waters of Lake Washington. “That part of the sea?”
“Figure so. Don’t know if it always was. I know there was some triple-bad quake damage not far off the north of the ville. Cific got through in places.”
The open vistas of the suburbs were gone.
The three companions constantly had to detour around the crumbled wreckage of towering buildings, picking their way with the greatest of caution, never knowing when a block of stone might tip them into a blind abyss. A lichen-covered shambles of jagged, powdery rock, with the rusting remains of the supporting substructure emerged here and there, like the bloodied spears of giant adversaries.