“No,” J.B. told him. “This is the easy part. Putting it in.”
Jak released his hair. “Okay.”
J.B. went out of sight and muffled cursing wafted up from the floor.
Yawning mightily, Ryan rubbed his eye and cracked the vertebrae in his neck. “Somebody else can drive for a while,” he announced. “I’m too bastard tired to see straight. And any more of that damn MRE coffee and I’ll start pissing black. Got to get some sleep.”
“I’ll take over,” Mildred offered, sliding into the driver’s seat. The steering wheel was too high and she adjusted it downward. “Been driving since I was sixteen. My father had a pickup truck I used to borrow.”
“We better get some shut-eye,” Ryan said, making a rough bed out of some moth-eaten Army blankets. “It’ll take us a while to reach the town, ruins, whatever. Two-hour shifts.”
Doc covered a yawn himself. “Ah, the arms of Morpheus claim us all. To visit the land of Nod seems an unparalleled Bacchanalian delight.”
“Done,” J.B. reported, stepping into the vehicle and sliding the door closed. “And catching some z’s sounds mighty good.”
From his prone position, Ryan tossed the man a blanket. J.B. made the catch and laid it on the floor as a cushion.
“Seats are more comfortable,” Doc stated, lying lengthwise across several of them, the armrests folded out of the way.
“And then I kiss the floor when I roll over,” J.B. said, covering his face with his fedora. “So I might as well start off here.”
“I’m fine,” Dean said. “Wide awake.”
“Me, too,” Krysty added. “Just had a nap.”
Tightening the harness to fit her smaller frame, Mildred eased the tank into second gear, bypassing first entirely. “Then you two take first watch. Krysty, starboard guns, Dean, port.”
“Done.”
“Yes, Mildred.”
The physician started the twin engines and engaged the clutch. Leviathan lurched as if it had been kicked. Bucking and shaking, it start to roll and soon was moving with a steady rattle at fifteen miles per hour.
“Hardly better than walking,” Mildred muttered, making a mental note to herself to watch the pressure and not burn out the clutch. Lord alone knew if they had a spare. Then a thought occurred and she killed the interior lights rear of the machine guns.
“Thanks.” Rolling onto his side, Ryan slid his SIG-Sauer under the makeshift pillow and ordered himself to sleep. It worked at first, but every dip and hole jarred him awake again. Privately, he was beginning to regret his wishing for a war wag. Flat tires, bad wads, mechanical breakage, and they made one hell of a target for raiders. Right about now, a mat-trans jump, even with the sickness, was starting to look pretty good.
SEVENTY MILES to the east, a cold wind moaned over the bare stone battlements of a medieval-style tower, the tallest edifice among many such buildings. The design of the granite-block complex with its distant outer walls was primitive, crude, a brute force-approach to architecture. However, platoons of sec men sporting autofire blasters patrolled the heights in grim resolution, hand-rolled cigarettes of local tobacco dangling from their tight-lipped mouths. The smokes offered only a small source of fleeting warmth against the bitter winds that flowed down from the surrounding mountain range like an invisible river of ice.
In the cobblestone courtyards below, ragged slaves pushed ramshackle carts of withered winter vegetables and hauled buckets of muddy water past
an ominous array of high wooden gallows. Several of the dangling nooses were occupied by the remains of outlanders. The rotting bodies had been left in full view of all, both as an object lesson to other would-be troublemakers, and to lure in crows for the Citadel larder. No food of any kind was never wasted in Novaville.
Every movement and expression of the shuffling workers was duly scrutinized by fat overseers for any hint of rebellion, their own faces gleaming with health, coiled bull whips of knotted leather held in callused hands. Dressed in bulky military jackets and predark jumpboots, the guards still shivered from the omnipresent cold and looked eagerly for any excuse from the prisoners to vent their displeasure at this onerous duty.