James Axler – Trader Redux

Reluctantly he’d rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, showing the swelling, bright crimson against his parchment skin that ran from the back of the hand, over the wrist, past the elbow, up toward his shoulder. It looked like the aerial map of some red-etched river drainage system.

Mildred had immediately lanced the infection, cutting deep through the nail, to its root, using a pair of thin-bladed dressmaking scissors. Pus had spurted into her face as she pierced the core of the wound, some of it hissing on the hot top of the iron stove, filling the kitchen with its foul stench.

During her medical training she had once attended a bad car crash, and had to work under cramped and dangerous conditions, with no anesthetic available to her and without proper surgical instruments. But there both the injured had been deeply unconscious, and both had survived.

Jak had been very much conscious.

Krysty had offered to try to use her Earth Mother skills to send him into a trance that would have taken him away from the worst of the pain.

But he’d refused.

“Lose control and never know when get it back,” he’d explained to her.

He chose to stand rather than sit at the table, laying his swollen hand flat on the grained pine. He closed his red eyes and took slow, deep breaths, the veins standing out in his forehead like whipcord.

But he never made a sound during what Mildred knew had been the most vicious pain.

She’d bandaged the finger, reassuring him with totally false confidence that he would be fine and that there was no risk of amputation. The teenager was a fast healer and didn’t prove her wrong.

They’d also had a scare with a brace of lean coyotes that had managed to dig a hole in the back of the bam where they kept the horses.

But the scavengers had reckoned without the venomous spleen of Judas the mule.

Dean had heard the ruckus and rushed out, holding the Remington 580 that he’d snatched off the wall. He arrived in time to put a .22 slug through the angular skull of the surviving coyote, where it lay on its side, bleeding from the mouth, its ribs splintered from the kicking Judas had given it. The other was dead in a corner, its neck broken.

“WHAT DO WE DO if they don’t come back?” Mildred asked.

“I figure that the chilling of Trader, Ryan and J.B. would be big news and we’d get word. Eventually. They got a reputation, for better or worse, all through Deathlands.”

“What’s he like?”

“Trader?”

“Yeah.”

Krysty sniffed as she considered the question. “Got dust up my nose,” she said. “Remember I only knew Trader for a very short time. J.B. and Ryan rode with him for most of their adult lives.” She grinned. “For better or worse.”

“You like him?”

“That’s about the same as asking if you like a I mountain or a river or the sky. Trader isn’t a man you can compare with anyone else.”

“I get the picture of someone like a sort of colossus from ancient myths. Striding out across the land with that blaster of his.”

“His Armalite.”

Mildred nodded. “Yeah. Sort of a person that you took care not to cross.”

“Sounds right. I think the nearest I can tell you is that Trader resembles a grizzled old wolf. Leader of the pack. Not a breath of doubt about that. Could be entering his last season before someone younger, stronger and faster comes along. But he hasn’t come along yet.”

“When I ask John about him, he gets a real funny look in his eyes, like he’s remembering a tough but fair father. Know what I mean?”

Krysty smiled. “Course I know. Ryan’s the same. Father he never had. And I think that Trader sees the two of them as the sons that he never had.”

Mildred looked out of the window, at the endless desert. “And they’re out there, someplace.”

“They’ll come back. Mebbe not today. Not tomorrow. Could be weeks, I guess. But I know in my heart that they’ll return safely to us.”

There was a sudden barking cough from the porch and a barely muffled oath.