James Axler – Way of the Wolf

“Trading?” the lead rider asked.

“The very thing.” Doc grinned, showing his unnaturally perfect white teeth.

The gang members were mostly young, Ryan noted, but they had all the moves down. It wasn’t anything military or a result of organized drills. They ranged the way a pack of natural predators moved against a possible enemy—or a potential victim.

Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner gave them the impression of a victim, which was why Ryan had delegated him spokesman. Doc was nearly six feet three inches in his stocking feet, but built as gangly as a stork. Silvery white hair framed his face, blowing in the gentle wind that came at them from the east, making it brush his shoulders. He’d washed his clothes in a small stream the group had camped by overnight. The dress shirt hadn’t come entirely white, and wouldn’t without some strong detergent and bleach. Still, it looked presentable with the black string tie and the Victorian black frock coat that held a greenish hue and luster that time had ground into the garment. Black pants and cracked leather knee boots completed the look. The lion’s-head walking stick—really a sword stick—was an affectation of Doc’s, not a necessity.

“Could of done your trading in town,” the stranger said. He was a big man, broad across the shoulder and narrow at the hip, almost looking too large for the dappled gray mare beneath him. Like the other men, he wore chaps over denim jeans and a sheepskin coat with the sleeves roughly hacked off. A violet-and-white-striped bandanna circled his head. Blue tattoos of knives and naked women and impossible monsters marked his arms and face, making him one with the rest of the group.

Ryan knew the purpose of the tattooing was to bind the group together. Once marked, there was nowhere the recipient could go without his history catching up to him. It tied him to the band forever.

“I could have,” Doc agreed, “but the forest is my theater, and here I owe no man.” He looked pointedly beyond the speaker to the man at the center of the group. “I had been told that any business conducted within the ville had to pay a tariff to the sec chief.”

Ryan and his companions knew the “sec chief” from an earlier recce. They’d come out of a mat-trans unit in what used to be southern Kentucky early the previous day, worn and lathered from the events at the mall. The jump had been a hard one, and Doc had slept most of the preceding twenty-four hours recovering from the effects.

Living off the land in the Berland Mountains region was easy pickings for the survivalist group. What wasn’t so easy was finding ammo for their weapons. All of them were running low after the last bit of killing, and the redoubt they’d arrived in had contained no ammunition, but did yield many items they could trade for what they needed. Then Ryan had heard about Hazard, the nearest ville, from a hunter he’d met in the deep woods the previous evening, when he and Jak had been tracking mule deer.

According to the hunter, the sec chiefs name was Liberty, and he ran Hazard’s buffer zone, keeping the area clear of muties. The people put up with the band of coldhearts as long as no violence was directed at any of the citizens. Now Liberty sat in a horse-drawn buggy that had once been an old Ford convertible sedan from predark times. The front end had been cut out, leaving the steering intact. Two horses stood in traces before the vehicle.

Lean, his face clean shaved but shadowed by tattoos, his hair cut short enough to show more tattoos on his scalp, the man sat impassively with his legs in the rear seat and his butt on the trunk. A Winchester lever-action rifle leaned against the seat at his side.

A dwarf in silver-and-blue livery occupied a makeshift bench seat across the empty space where the engine had been. A wriggled scar pulled his mouth out of line as he gazed at Ryan. There weren’t as many tattoos on the little man, but they were there just the same. The dwarf adjusted the traces.