James Axler – Trader Redux

J.B. held up his hands. “Can you still keep a way clear of me, Abe? Just for a while longer.”

The Armorer had been correct.

There was yet another narrow trail, this time winding up toward the rim of the gorge.

It was a hard climb, but J.B. kept Abe plodding on by pointing farther south along the vast waste of the canyon. “See the way the cliffs get higher a few miles that way?” he said. “Lucky we aren’t trying to scramble out there.”

“Bad enough here,” the gunner panted, sitting down cross-legged in the dirt, sweat trickling down his pale face, dripping off the drooping ends of his mustache.

The Armorer was scanning the land around them, concentrating on a heat-hazed blur, about five miles to the south, right on the edge of the sheer drop.

“Some kind of redoubt or something up ahead,” he said. “Seems like I can see smoke coming from it.”

“We going there or going around it?” Abe asked. “Food and drink’d be good.”

“Hemp rope around the throat wouldn’t be so good. Who knows? Let’s take this journey a single step at a time. And start by reaching the top.”

Abe groaned. “You’re worse than the Trader, J.B., you know that?”

He got a short, terse laugh in reply. “You think that, Abe? After your time with him? The one great truth about Deathlands is that nobody, repeat nobody, is worse than Trader.”

NEAR THE TOP, the trail began to widen out. The crest of the climb was barely a hundred feet above them, and Abe had become far more cheerful, ignoring J.R’s warnings to slow down and watch where he was going.

“I can see clearly now,” he claimed.

“You said something like that when you walked into a backfiring skunk, Abe. And I tell you whatroses and violets you still aren’t.”

The gunner grinned, hesitating only to wipe perspiration from his eyes. “Jealous you can’t keep up with a lively stud like me? That it?”

J.B. didn’t bother to reply. He could already see the spiked tops of a thick grove of pines on the plateau above the canyon. Another four or five minutes and he could relax, sit down and take the weight off his legs. The muscles in his calves had tightened during the climb, and he had a ferocious headache from the dazzling sun.

The trail seemed to have almost disappeared, but the way was obviously straight ahead, down for fifty yards or so into a shaded dip that was filled with miniature pinon pines, no more than six feet tall, then up the last stretch to the top.

For the past hour or so they’d been kept close company by a number of brightly colored wild birds, red-winged jays and mutie crows with brilliantly iridescent chest and wing feathers. But now, oddly, they had all vanished and the morning had become totally still and silent.

J.B. stopped and eased the Uzi off his shoulder, feeling a sudden profound disquiet.

“Abe, stay where you are for a moment.”

But the warning was too late. The little gunner, in the sunbaked hollow, had felt something brush against his ankle and was standing very still, looking around him with paralyzed horror.

Chapter Twenty-One

Doc Tanner had picked up a fair bit of first aid over the years, and he hastened to put into practice what he could remember.

“Shade. Check not swallowed tongue. Head to one side. Nothing blocking breathing. Pulse steady. Loosen clothes. Leave that for a moment. Then look at wound. Nasty. Lot of blood. What in perdition can have happened to the lady?”

He kept up his muttered commentary as he carefully lifted the unconscious woman from the dirt, wheezing at her weight, feeling a stab of pain in the small of his back from the effort. He struggled to carry her and lay her gently down in the shade of a nearby fallen ponderosa.

“Why, I do resemble poor mad Lear, holding his dead daughter enfolded in his arms.”

Doc rather liked the fantasy, and struggled to recall some of the lines from the Shakespeare play. But all he could remember was rather a lot of roaring and thespian bellowing and spraying of actorplasm. He decided that this wouldn’t be of much help to Sukie Smith of Hildenville.