face used to be red-brown, vigorous, alive. He breathed out slowly, then kicked
the flush pedal beside the bowl. The hell with it…
He reached up and opened a small cabinet fixed to the wall. Inside were shelves
of bottles and jars. His eyes took in the various colors, considered the
positions of each container. As he could neither read nor write, it was the only
way he could distinguish their contents.
He took down a bottle of green liquid, uncapped it, wiped the neck with his rag,
took a long swig. He shook his head, washing the stuff around his mouth, then
threw his head back and gargled noisily. The bellow of the engine drowned all
sounds. He spat into the small hand-basin beside the closed gunport and twisted
the tap, and water from the tank in the roof washed the green liquid away.
He put the bottle back and lit a cigar. That would take the smell of peppermint
away, right enough. The Trader chuckled, forgetting for a second the terrible
ache in his guts as the thought hit him that the mouthwash, plus the other
bottles of the same stuff from the same cache, was probably the only mouthwash
within a few hundred thousand kilometers of him. Weird stuff. Stuff that had
been stored deep down someplace, freak material survivors of fire and ice, and
often to be found in huge amounts, “factory fresh” it sometimes said on the
labels. There weren’t many of these finds, but there were some, and they were
mighty strange in their bright packaging and their huge quantities. Such caches
were usually buried deep under rubble, and if it was a huge, sparkling supply of
mouthwash that you found after all that digging, you were more than likely to
think it not worth the effort. Except the Trader. He liked the stuff. He liked
the joke inherent in luxury products suddenly found in quantities far out of all
proportion to their usefulness.
He slapped at his face, his cheeks, hard, to get some color back, breathing in
sharply, squaring his shoulders. He took a long pull at his moldy old cigar and
let the smoke drool out of his mouth. Then he pulled open the door.
The Trader moved fast down the narrow passageway outside. On his right was a
machine-gun blister, occupied by a dark-skinned youth who briefly nodded to him
before letting his eyes flick back to the port above the gun and to the rushing
darkness outside the bulletproof glass.
The Trader, cigar firmly clamped between uneven yellowed teeth, walked on,
climbed some steps, pulled himself into the main cabin area of the vehicle.
It had once been a mobile army command post—long, long ago, back when there’d
been an army to command. It had been his very first acquisition, maybe a score
and a half years ago. He and Marsh Folsom had discovered it while escaping from
a bunch of cannies in the Apps, or the Applayshuns as some old folks insisted on
calling them. A rockslide, old, maybe triggered originally by Nuke tremors, had
uncovered a vast man-made cavern, reaching deep into the heart of the thickly
wooded slopes. Inside was Golconda. That was what Marsh, a man who’d read books,
had said as they’d stared in awe at the rows and rows of parked vehicles, all
kinds, all types, that stretched away from them into the gloom. The MCP had been
the nearest, a huge mother, though not as huge as she was now.
Over the years the Trader had added to it, fixing gun ports here, rocket pods
there, machine-gun blisters everywhere. His engineers—once he’d started up in
business, recruited reliable men, using the Applayshun cavern as his main HQ—had
fixed pierced-steel planking double thickness all around it, modified the
interior and rewired it to his specifications, adapted and strengthened it. It
was now a death-dealing juggernaut, capable of considerable speed on the flat,
with retractable tracks for the rough terrain over which it surged with
incredible vitality for its bulk. It was also the flagship of the Trader’s fleet
of war wags, land wags, trucks, powered vehicles and personnel carriers.
The Barons of the East had their ramshackle armies, their trucks, their