James Axler – Trader Redux

“What did you trade?”

“His life, Ryan. All of them. Told them that I’d come down and pull their lungs out of their asses if they didn’t do like they’d been asked.”

“How’re things back down in the Southwest?” Abe asked. “How’s Jake and”

“Button that up, gunner!” Trader snapped. “First thing is shelter, then food and then fire. After that we can spend the whole night talking about where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing.”

Ryan glanced behind him, checking that the figure with the dog on the ridge hadn’t reappeared. But the land was still deserted, the watery sun glinting off the snow.

THEY WERE ON WHAT LOOKED like an old blacktop that had been superseded some time in the late 1900s by a wide, elevated interstate. The newer highway had collapsed, its piers and bridges tumbling in the quakes that rumbled the land during the long winters.

But the ancient, lost road remained.

It writhed over the wooded country like a dog trying to rid itself of fleas, but it made for easier walking than the muddy, freezing trails that they’d begun on.

The skirmish line had reasserted itself, with Abe leading, followed by Trader, Ryan and J.B.

The skinny ex-gunner held up a hand, two fingers extended, and pointed ahead to the right.

“Company,” Ryan said. “Couple of strangers.”

Then he saw them. Less than a quarter mile away were two men, well wrapped in wolf-skin coats and muffling scarfs. Each carried what looked like hunting rifles.

Trader gestured with his Armalite, beckoning Ryan to one side of him, J.B. to the other, not noticing that they were already moving. Abe fell back to join the other three.

The pair was within eighty paces when they stopped, both holding up a hand in a gesture of peace. “Hi, there!” called the one on the left.

Ryan realized they were both quite young, probably in their early teens.

“Hi,” the Trader replied, holding his beloved Armalite at his right hip, the barrel pointing in the general direction of the young men.

“Come far?”

“Been hunting back yonder,” Trader told him, hitching a thumb toward the eastern horizon.

The other teenager spoke. “Seen anyone?”

Abe answered. “Feller with a dog on the ridge. Hour or so ago, I reckon.”

“Ah, that’ll be our pa. Went out after breakfast with ol’ Bess, finest coon dog in Deathlands. We figured to mebbe join up with him this afternoon.”

“Live around here?” Trader asked.

“Small horse ranch, three miles west and then north off a spur trail.”

The other youth laid a hand on his brother’s sleeve, as if he were warning him about speaking too openly to the quartet of outlanders.

Trader ignored the movement. “How far from here to the skirts of Seattle?”

“Reach them by sunset, if you want to,” the slightly taller teenager replied.

“Not many wants to go that close to the cannies and ghoulies livin’ there.”

“Cannibals?” J.B. asked.

“So they say.”

It wasn’t any surprise. The sprawling, nuked ruins of virtually every major American conurbation were a breeding ground for every kind of mutation and social perversion.

Ryan suddenly felt the short hairs raising on his nape. Something didn’t set quite right here. The body language of the two youths was just that fraction out of kilter, a tenseness above and beyond meeting the potentially hazardous situation of four strangers on a snowy highway.

As if they were waiting for something.

Someone?

“You’d be welcome to stay the night at our place, if you don’t take to the skirt of the ville,” said the shorter teenager. “Have to be one of the barns, but it’d beat a lot of other places at a frosty time.”

“Real kind,” Trader replied.

His blaster had started life as one of the early AR-16 models, originally designed to deliver 7.62 mm rounds. But over the years the Armalite had seen a great number of reworks and changes. Now it had yet another flash-suppressor and had been rechambered to fire twenty rounds of the more common 9 mm ammo.

He leveled the rifle at the taller of the strangers and shot him through the chest, at the same moment yelling the single word “Ambush!”