In the several days following their departure from the crumbling, burned-out ville of Hightower, there was only a single attack made on the foursome.
Ryan was at the wheel, looking for a good place to hole up for the night. They’d passed a strung-out collection of shotgun shacks, with hollow-eyed women and silent, naked children playing with snarling mongrels in the dirt.
A toothless man had waved a Kentucky musket at them, shouting a stream of curses. And one of the younger women, who looked to be eighteen going on seventy, had run a few steps after them and thrown a couple of flints at the wag.
Banks of trees had lined both sides of the muddied blacktop, dolorous pines that still dripped from an earlier rain, standing shoulder to shoulder, without even room for a man to squeeze between them.
Ryan hadn’t heard the noise of the shot above the pounding roar of the powerful engine, but he’d glimpsed the puff of black-powder smoke amid the shadows from the corner of his right eye, and caught the pinging of the ball as it hit the steel at the side of the cab, close by him.
Trader had been sitting with him and he’d immediately levered a round into the Armalite, kneeling and peering into the forest. But Ryan had simply pushed the pedal to the metal and taken them along out of range and out of danger.
“No point wasting a bullet,” he’d said.
They stopped a couple of miles down the highway. There had been a bright smear of lead, denting the bodywork, twenty inches from the window.
“Close,” J.B. said, rubbing at it with his finger. “Smoothbore homemade. Still, might have made a big hole if it had hit you.”
Trader laughed. “Sure. And if the coon hound hadn’t stopped for a piss it might’ve caught the rabbit.”
Abe had looked around. “We stopping here for the night? Trees are near.”
Ryan had answered the little gunner. “No. Just wanted to take a look at where the bullet bit. Go a few miles farther. Upgrade stops a mile or so along.”
“How long before we reach New Mexico and the spread? We made good time.”
“Way we’re going, route through the edge of Phoenix looks best. Not all that far from there. Up on old Sixty and then we’re almost home. Could do it in three days.”
Trader grinned. “So far, so good. Reminds me, boys. I ever tell you”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Your friend up in Peoria. Caught by stickies on the thirtieth floor of a ruined department store. You told us.”
But Trader wasn’t listening. “Friend of mine, Crazy Dog Kalin. Was up in Peoria, working as a bounty hunter for a local baron. Got caught alone on top of the fortieth floor of a big old store. Bunch of stickies. Ran right out of ammo after he’d put half of them on the last train to the coast. Only way out for him was over and down. There were men on most floors, and they heard him falling. All the way to the sidewalk, old Crazy Dog kept on shouting ‘So far, so good.'”
The other three echoed the repetition of the punchline. “So far, so good.”
ALL OF THE ARMORER’S traveling maps had vanished during the quake and flash flood, so most of the journey was being reconstructed from memory. Trader had been for pushing east at an earlier point. But Ryan and J.B. had opposed him, pointing out that it would mean crossing a lot of totally arid desert with only the meanest pesthole for water.
Abe hadn’t had any opinion to offer.
So, they’d chosen moving in a southerly direction as far as Phoenix.
That part of the predark United States of America had suffered mixed fortunes during the brief mega-cull of the nuke holocaust and the long winters that followed it.
Innumerable missile bases and scattered silos held all sizes and shapes of rocket-fired weaponry. During the last accelerating years of the “new” cold war, uncounted trillions of dollars were poured into research for ICBMs as well as the smaller defensive missiles. The new range of nuclear weapons were hidden all across the Colorado Plateau, backed up by new redoubts and storage bases and triple-secret research units.