of their holes to grab what was left after the collapse.
It was true that the Nuke had not destroyed everything, and it was equally true
that somehow thousands had managed to make it through those long years when it
was said that the sun had died. From what the Trader had heard from that
generation, it was a time of horror and a time of terror, and in many ways it
had gotten worse when, especially in the East, the seasons had slowly begun to
return and people had started to drag themselves into the daylight of a new and
terrifyingly transformed world.
But having acknowledged his culpability in the matter of trading in the kind of
materials that might better have been left undiscovered, he nevertheless felt
that in some small way he had also been able to lift people back onto their feet
again by rediscovering creation. For in these strange and secret Stockpiles were
generators, survival equipment, processed food that could last for centuries if
necessary, tools, fuel, the means to learn, the means to expand, the means to
grow. All this, too, the Trader had hauled around the Deathlands, leaving
communities better equipped to battle with the ever-looming dark that still
threatened to overwhelm what was left.
And whereas before he’d been greedy, careless in his dealings, now he was more
scrupulous, more circumspect. Now there were things he discovered, then swiftly
reburied. He still broke out in a sweat when he recalled the time, five or six
years before, when Ryan and Dix had followed up a lead left by Marsh Folsom and
found, buried in the hills of what had once been a place called Kentucky, an
immense collection of sealed airtight drums, tens of thousands of them, all
neatly tabbed and docketed, all with that deadly and unmistakable symbol stamped
into their casings.
The juice they called nerve gas. Hundreds of thousands of liters of it.
The same kind of shit that had rained down during the Nuke, from both sides,
leaving an appalling legacy behind it, a legacy that still lingered and would
still linger for decades, maybe generations, far into the bleak future.
They’d closed down the cavern, the Trader and Ryan and Dix, buried the entrance
under a controlled landslip, destroyed all the paperwork that had led Marsh
Folsom into pinpointing the area as a Stockpile possibility in the first place,
and hoped for the best. It was all you could do, but it still gave the Trader
nightmares when he slept, still gave him the shakes when he awoke.
Because there was always the outside chance that some other guy might just fall
over it, even buried as it was…somehow, sometime. There was always that chance.
Some guy by no means as scrupulous, some guy who might well figure out a way
actually of using it, of bringing even more horror to a world already stuffed
with horror up to the gullet.
There were times when the Trader felt burdened with the immense weight of
secrets he had uncovered, the vast power he had but could not use, the huge
guilt load he— and he alone now that Marsh Folsom had gone—inescapably carried.
Sure, he had Ryan and Dix. The situation was tight with them as with no one else
he could think of. But they had only arrived in the past ten years. Less. They
had not been with him since the beginning, all those years ago. The weight they
carried was lighter by far than the tremendous and often crushing burden that
seemed at times ready to pulverize his soul.
And now the blood. That was a new and special weight on him because, apart from
anything else, it put a horizon to his life… a horizon that he was inevitably
getting closer to by the month. By the day.
By the hour.
He sucked at the cigar, took it out of his mouth, blew smoke into the air. His
head buzzed, his arms and legs felt as though they’d been fashioned out of lead.
He felt old. He felt he knew what it must be like to be 110.
He was only fifty-three.
“You okay?”
“Sure I’m okay. Can’t a feller take a crap once in a while?”