He had overlarge eyes, black rimmed, deep hollowed. His mouth was wide and thick
lipped. His nose was a slight bulge above the mouth, with two tiny orifices; his
sense of smell was almost nonexistent.
He rose to his feet, snapped long slender fingers. Another figure, overtall and
with very long arms, slipped from behind to hand him a pair of powerful glasses.
The man with the faintly scaled skin took the glasses and put them to his eyes
and adjusted them.
There were maybe fifteen vehicles in the convoy, including three big war wagons.
The man nodded. The Trader. Only the Trader carried that amount of punch.
The Trader was a hard nut to crack. No one had ever managed to take him, though
many had tried, both muties and norms. In many ways the Trader was the most
powerful man in the land. He had hardware, high powered and deadly, and plenty
of it; he had fuel supplies, secret and well hidden, known only to him and his
captains, his closest and most trusted confidants; he had contacts, from the
civilized East to the primitive West, from the suspicious North to the outright
barbaric South. He dealt in weapons, a trade built up over twenty years or more.
But he bartered and sold other merchandise, too: food, clothes, gadgets, fuel,
generators, wisdom, knowledge. He even dispensed justice in the more outlying
regions, in the tiny scattered hamlets hundreds of kilometers from the huge
Baronies of the East and South.
He was trusted and he was fair, but he was no simp and his revenge could be
devastating. All who knew of the Trader knew the tale of the Eastern town that
had tried to mess with him, a town of low morals run by an ambitious madman. The
exact nature of their mistake had been lost over the intervening years, but the
outcome was retained in the memories of most who had dealings with him. The town
had been destroyed, razed to the ground, wiped from the face of the earth. He
had spared no one. Such had been his fury that he had massacred the inhabitants
to a man, woman, child. And animal. He had not even spared the animals, had not
taken them for himself but instead had slaughtered the herds and left the
carcasses, and then moved on.
It was a lesson. You did not mess with the Trader.
Sure, there were other traders, men and women who traveled the Deathlands in
convoy, bartering and haggling, stealing and slaving, picking up merchandise
here, selling it there. But none of them traveled the Trader’s routes, none had
his expertise, and none had his nose for the hidden Stockpiles that the pre-Nuke
military men had laid down more than a century before.
Those were the plums that everyone wanted to pick, the hidden man-made caverns
scattered across the land, stuffed with hardware, fuel, weaponry; the secret
silos that the governments of the day had ordered to be constructed against a
time when the world might be in ruins and power shifted solely to those with the
muscle and the guns to hold on to it. The irony was that the Nuke had been so
devastating, so ferocious, so unbelievably swift that chains of command all over
the world had been destroyed more or less at a stroke, and their secrets had
been lost with them, lost for nearly a century.
Now they were being uncovered slowly, very slowly— secrets hidden from most of
those who had inhabited the land once known as the United States.
And mostly they were being uncovered by the Trader, who traveled the land,
north, south, east, west; who probed and poked and dug and excavated; who
journeyed far into regions no man had trod for a century, regions no sane man
wished to tread. It was said that the Trader had trekked deep into the heart of
the fiery southwest where hurricane-force winds howled across a moonscape where
nothing grew, no man lived. It was said that his land wagons had specially
reinforced and adapted roofs because he journeyed deliberately into regions
where the acids could strip a man to his bones in a second. It was rumored that