we’re in deep shit. I hadn’t counted on the bastards lacing us up. Didn’t seem
necessary. Thought they were just gonna shove us in with a bunch of armed
goons.”
He didn’t tell her that, hog-tied as they were, he thought their chances of
surviving were precisely nil. Untied he had options. Like this he might as well
be a fish in a barrel.
She said calmly, “I think I can get my wrists free.” Her voice was oddly
neutral. She said, “Where are they taking us exactly?”
“To the Trader first. I guess Strasser wants to get him out of the way before
moving onto the train. Always a chance our guys may wake up, and if he gets
inside the war wag and trucks before that happens, he’s laughing. But no way is
that talking skull gonna hijack all that materiel. Right about now, J.B. should
be blasting his way out of the bank, unless the goons tied him and Hun and the
others up, which I doubt.”
“Blasting?” she said incredulously.
“Yeah. Strict policy. All of us, since way back, are stuffed to the gills with
explosives, or at least the means of creating explosives. An idea I had years
ago, worked it out with J.B. Just in case we get caught by bad guys, we have all
kinds of shit concealed in our clothes, our boots, our webbing. The bad guys
take our pieces off us, grenades, knives, all that. The obvious. They don’t
bother to look at our boots for false inner soles, or check every stitch, every
button. Some of us have big plastique-cored buttons on our long coats, others
have wiring sewn into special pouches. You can’t even feel it. Don’t worry about
J.B. He’ll make out.”
“Now I know why your bunch is talked about like it is,” she said. “As special
people. Sure is forward planning!”
“It’s no big deal. It’s called survival. These days you need all the help you
can think up.”
“Right. In this wonderful country where you could probably live your entire life
without getting raped, abducted, murdered, eaten…without seeing a—what did you
call it? Plague pit?”
His mind flew back to the scene in War Wag One, her angry face as she argued
with him. It all seemed centuries ago.
“Great memory you’ve got,” he growled. “In any case, it’s still true. But when
you’re in our kind of business, even when you have a fierce rep, doesn’t do any
harm to take precautions.” He muttered, “And all this crap just proves my
point.” His mind shot back again to the war wag, which triggered off another
thought. “How the hell did Strasser manage to get his hands on you, anyway?”
“I didn’t keep taking the tablets. Your medic kept giving me tabs, said they’d
calm me. I didn’t want to be calmed, so I didn’t take them. She kept saying it
was crazy to think of heading on for the Darks. How was I going to do it, how
was I going to travel? All that. So when she breezed off I snuck out and hitched
a lift.”
“You what!”
“You had two container rigs, arctic. I climbed aboard of one of them. It was
getting dark, so no one spotted me. When the convoy parked I slipped off into
some bushes. I watched you drive out in the buggy, thought of hitching onto that
but there aren’t too many hand holds. So I walked to Mocsin. Had to keep in
cover because a lot of buggies started passing me, heading out of town, back the
way I’d come…”
Ryan thought, his stomach suddenly souring, Yeah, backup for the guys Strasser
already had watching the train, the guys watching us. Probably what she saw was
the bunch that actually tranked the Trader.
“Then I bumped into some kind of patrol on the outskirts. They were all right at
first. Oafish, but all right. I could handle them. What they couldn’t figure out
was where I’d sprung from, so I told them I was with the Trader, with you. I
mean, I figured that was okay. But then they started getting heavy, pushing me
around. I told ’em that if they didn’t quit pissing me off they were going to be