hoard of goodies, but a Stockpile—a major Stockpile, maybe far bigger than any
of the ones that had been unearthed so far.
Anybody who was anybody now knew that, before the Nuke, the government of the
day, a government that had ruled the whole land, north to south, west to east,
had been rumored to have squirreled away stuff in deep-cast ferroconcrete
bunkers. Now it was an established fact. Some had been discovered, opened up.
There was a guy who called himself the Trader who’d found two and turned them
into a business. He’d started off by chugging around the Deathlands in steam
trucks a couple of years before, but now he was using gasoline. Gasoline! And
trading guns in every direction. He was heavily weaponed himself too, as guys
who’d tried to hijack him had discovered to their cost.
The shit was there if you could find it, but from what Dolfo Kaler had learned,
the Stockpiles found up to now were small. The nagging suspicion he had was that
if there really was something up in the Darks—and if it was a Stockpile—it was a
big one: And that was why he didn’t give a fart about Jordan Teague’s little
fiefdom. If what he suspected was true, and if he could get his hands on it, he
could turn himself into king of the known world.
Dolfo Kaler’s mind lovingly dwelt on boxes of guns in their original greased
wraps, pristine fresh, never used. Crates of grenades. Heavy armament. Trucks.
Tanks. Oceans of oil.
Power.
So he went out. He took fifty men, all of them hand-picked from his own garrison
mixed in with others from his contacts in the East. Hard-bitten dog soldiers.
Didn’t give a nuke’s hot ass about anything or anyone.
It was a mighty expedition. Seeing it, even Jordan Teague got broody. But then
it had to be, because others had heard the summons—the siren call that drifted
into men’s minds from the Darks. Others had hit the road on the hundred-klick or
so journey under the sulphuric skies, across the parched earth, through the
leprous forests that grew around the foothills of the Darks.
And none had ever come back.
Which meant there must have been a strong contingent of maniacal muties barring
the way to it.
Dolfo Kaler knew how to deal with crazies. Blow ’em away. He bartered, he
finagled, he called in every long-term debt he had out, and in the end every man
jack of his team had an automatic rifle of some description and a stack of
rounds. He also acquired seven MGs, four flamethrowers and a supply of precious
fuel and two bazookas. Not to mention a box of grenades and a launcher.
And then he set out.
There were six big steam trucks, snorting and grinding and belching black smoke,
and they shifted butt one fine spring morning when the skies were not as yellow
as usual and a hazy red fireball of a sun was doing pretty well in its struggle
to penetrate the haze. There must have been half of Mocsin on the edge of town
to see them off, waving crudely fashioned flags and whooping and hollering fit
to burst. Maybe three thousand souls to watch the biggest thing to happen to the
town in decades.
Kurt remembered it. He remembered it very well. It had happened on his birthday,
and his ma and pa had taken him to see the cavalcade as a birthday treat. Kurt
remembered yelling with the rest of them. He didn’t really know what he was
yelling for, except that just seeing those huge, lumbering steam trucks lurching
out of town was exciting enough—the most exciting thing that had ever happened
to him. And the guys in the trucks, yelling, too, caught up in the glamour of it
all, waving their pieces above their heads, all clearly itching to fire a few
shots to finish the celebration off but not daring to because ammo was ammo
then, and you didn’t waste one single round of it.
And Kurt remembered the payoff. The horror of that day, maybe four months later,
with the late summer sun blistering down through the haze, a light wind whipping