James Axler – Trader Redux

“BY THE THREE KENNEDYS! ”

It was early morning. Doc had been checking the cinches on Judas, and the mule had rolled a baleful eye at him and made a determined effort to take a hunk out of the old man’s skinny rump.

“You sure about taking that animal, Doc?” Mildred asked, allowing her concern to show through.

“Judas and I intend to sink or swim together, my dear Dr. Wyeth.”

“I can see the sinking easily enough, Doc,” Krysty said. “Just that I don’t get quite such a clear picture of the two of you swimming.”

“Let me do the worrying, dear madam.”

Jak squinted out of the shadows of the porch, toward the low smudge of mountains where Doc was headed. “Look like thunderheads,” he said.

“The wind may blow and crack its cheeks, Master Lauren, and we shall give neither jot nor tittle for it. For we are bound for the far places.”

“Come back safe, Doc,” Krysty said.

“Of course.” The morning breeze ruffled his mane of silver hair. The sword stick was jammed down the side of the saddle, along with the two packs of provisions. Jak had pressed Doc to take along a rifle for hunting, but he’d been firmly refused. “I have my Le Mat for close combat work. Anything beyond fifteen feet is, I fear, also beyond my eyesight.”

“You remember everything that we’ve all told you about safe camping, Doc?” Krysty folded her arms across her breasts, feeling a sudden chill.

“But of course. Near sweet water. Endeavor to keep rocks to my back. Beware of the Hun in the sun. Don’t allow the bastards to grind you down. Never eat at a restaurant called Mom’s Place. Look for the spoor of malign creatures. Sleep with the blaster under my pillow. Though I don’t have a pillow with me on my odyssey. Don’t draw to an inside straight. Never lend money to a Republican. The first cut is the deepest. Never borrow money from a Democrat. Talk is cheap, but the price of action is colossal. Keep your dreams as clean as silver.”

Mildred held up her hand. “Enough, Doc!”

“Main thing is take care,” Jak told him.

They watched him go.

“Man on a skew-backed mule.” Mildred laughed. “Look at the way his bony legs stick out both sides of Judas. Nearly scrape the ground. All he needs is a stovepipe hat and he’d be the spitting double of Lincoln.”

“Who’s Lincoln?” Dean asked.

“IF ONLY MAN COULD TURN back the clock, Judas,” Doc said, as the memory of Emily and his lost family filled his mind. “The thought that tortures me most, in the dark hours of the night when death is closest, is that the white-coats turned the clock forward for me, but they lacked the skill to return me home again to see my love once more.”

Doc was talking about the trawling experiment that had ripped him away from his young and lovely wife and two beautiful children, that had torn him from comfort and security to the nightmare of Deathlands, where death waited gibbering in a thousand nightmare forms.

“I may choose not to return to my friends,” he said, hardly noticing that the mule was moving slower and slower, taking advantage of his lack of concentration.

Now that he’d said it out loud, Doc was slightly shocked at the idea.

Yet, it had been something growing inside his mind for many months.

It was often difficult to recall his life in the distant past. Emily was clear in his memory, and Rachel and little Jolyon. But so much else had vanished into a blurred patchwork of confusion.

Friends were particularly hard to remember.

But he thought that he had never had friends of the caliber of Ryan, Krysty, John Barrymore Dix, Mildred Wyeth, Jak Lauren and young Dean.

“Greater love hath no man but that he will lay down his life for a friend,” he said.

Yet he had found that he was increasingly yearning for solitude.

A time to himself.

A time to try to shake out the cobwebs that gathered in the west wing of his addled mind.

“A time to reap and a time to sow. A time to think and a time to dream.”