him like the plague.
“Scale.”
So much for Fat Harry and all his shit about the Trader’s winding his operation
down. Scale had a good mind to drive to the tubby bastard’s trading post and do
extremely unpleasant things to him. Like, for instance, flay the skin off him, a
layer at a time, then salt the nukeshitting piece of human-shaped garbage down.
There was so much flesh on the bastard that it might take some sweet time. And
maybe he’d salt him after every crapping layer.
“Scale. Listen!”
And if it wasn’t for the fact that right now he didn’t have enough gas to make
such a visit possible, and in any case that sneaky fat man had built his trading
post like a fortress and regularly cleared scrub, shrub and bush from all around
him so he could always see who was coming, and had ass-licked the muties who
lived in the region so they were all well disposed toward him, Scale reckoned he
fire-blasted well would go take a trip and sort the fat lying sweaty hog out. As
it was…
“Scale!”
Scale swung around savagely, one arm extended like a steel rod. It hit the man
with the long arms on the side of the throat and slammed him over sideways,
making him gag and splutter. The long-armed man felt gingerly at his throat as
he scrambled to his feet.
“No need for that, Scale.”
“Every need.”
“Scale, we gotta get outta here. Damned fast.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we could regroup, huh, Scale? Hit these bastards when they least expect
us!”
Scale stared at him, no expression on his face but cold fury in his eyes.
“I ought to kill you. Kill you now.” His voice was an icy whisper.
Scale would do no such thing for the simple reason that big as he was, powerful
as he was, kingpin of his own group of mutants as he certainly was, by force of
personality and force of arms, he could not drive a powered vehicle, and the
long-armed man was his personal wheelman. Scale had simply never bothered to
learn the mechanics of driving. From the time he was a child, Scale had always
been able to make others do his chores for him, and driving was something he
left to the long-armed man.
Scale stared down at the scene below.
Mouth gaping, the long-armed man watched, too— watched as the high back of the
big trailer rig behind the leading war wag suddenly swung away and down,
crashing to the road and forming a long ramp down which surged a small armed
personnel buggy.
A second buggy roared down the ramp after the first. Then a third. The rig was a
massive buggy pen.
Not for the first time in the past quarter hour, the long-armed man cursed the
crassness of Scale, the vaulting ambition that had driven him to take on the
Trader. The Trader and his men were legends in the Deathlands. Attacking them
had been an act of sheer madness from first to last.
The long-armed man knew what was at the heart of it, and who was at the heart of
it. The strange and sinister being who sometimes called himself the Warlock,
sometimes the Sorcerer, sometimes the Magus, who made fleeting visits to the
Deathlands bearing weird old-world artifacts: sometimes weapons, sometimes
gadgets whose exact purpose often took a long time to explain. The long-armed
man was afraid of the Warlock, with his terrifying half face and his steel eye,
and his two tightly leashed companions.
It was the Warlock who had let loose the stickies, maybe three, four winters
back. He had brought a couple to a small township to the west, suddenly
appearing one day in his armored truck with them in tow. One had died—had
suddenly sickened, just wasted away, much to the Warlock’s displeasure—but
Wolfram the carny man had taken the other, taught it tricks, carried it off.
Free, of course; the Warlock did not take coin or cred for any of the
merchandise he brought to the Deathlands, possibly because most of it was of no
use to man or beast. Even so, the Warlock gave away everything, useless or not.