The long-armed man could never figure out how the Warlock existed, or even where
he existed. Some had tried to discover that, but they’d never come back with a
location. In fact they’d never come back, period.
And then, the long-armed man recalled, maybe a year after they’d first appeared
there suddenly seemed to be stickies everywhere. Some said the Warlock had
created them, but that was just foolishness. No one could create men. Except
God. And it was well-known that God did not exist. You only had to look around
you to see that.
Whatever, a small army of stickies had come out of the northwest and that was
it. Most had attached themselves to Scale’s troop of marauders, and the
long-armed man was dead certain that was entirely because of the Warlock, There
was the time Scale had ordered him to drive over two hundred klicks to a tiny
hamlet in the foothills of the Darks, The long-armed man had been told to stay
put, sit in the land wag for as long as it took for Scale to conduct his
business, ostensibly a visit to this real high-class cathouse the ville boasted.
But two hundred klicks for a screw? Hell, Scale must’ve thought his brains were
addled. The man with the long arms had never discovered the real reason for that
somewhat clandestine visit, but shortly thereafter the stickies had appeared,
and you didn’t have to be a genius to connect the two events.
So, he thought now, the Warlock was sure as hell behind the stickies and now
this particular bunch of stickies was no more, were just lumps of fried meat,
and the Warlock, if the long-armed man was correct in his assumptions, was gonna
be oh so pissed.
The Trader’s buggies were converted panel trucks, drastically converted. The
lead buggy seemed to bristle with weaponry. There was an MG-slit for the front
passenger seat, another MG rear-mounted in the roof. Two stubby barrels jutting
out of the front looked like cannon. Poking out of the enclosed rear was what
seemed at a distance suspiciously like a mortar barrel, and running along the
driver’s side, underneath the door, was a long tube.
The long-armed man watched gloomily as the buggy hurtled along the narrow space
between trucks and roadside, its front-MG sputtering flame. Rounds flayed a
bunch of semi-fried stickies trying to regroup beside the huge bulk of the war
wag in the center of the convoy. Stickies seemed able to take handgun bullets,
even automatic rifle fire, but they didn’t have a hope against the jolting
velocity, the flesh-rupturing force, of nearly point-blank MG tracers. The buggy
cleared a path, jolting on its shocks as it careered along the rutted road, its
bulk smashing into dazed survivors, hurling them to one side.
The three buggies raced and weaved around the parked trucks as a murky
Deathlands dawn crept up from the east, sharpening the picture, turning the
shadows of tall rocks into pointing, accusatory fingers. Men were now disgorging
from the trucks, heavily armed and grim visaged. Pockets of resistance were
being mopped up swiftly and professionally, and the long-armed man knew that
time was running out, that any moment now the Trader’s death-dealing squads,
angry and vengeful, would be opening up the tunnel under the road, scouring the
rocks for snipers.
And heading up here.
“Scale! We gotta blow!”
Parked in the cave behind the two muties was a jeep and two small trucks, and
what remained of Scale’s force, tense and nervous, knowing that everything had
gone disastrously wrong, that it was a shuttleup of the first magnitude. A
narrow rocky track ran from the cave mouth, dived through wind-sculpted
boulders, paralleled the blacktop far below before curving around to the south
and slicing through the hills down toward the ugly seared plain and their
campsite, maybe five klicks away. Once there…
“Scale!” The long-armed man’s voice was high pitched with panic.
“Quit yappin’. Let’s go.”
Scale swung around and headed for one of the trucks. A man with deep, hollow
eyes and a nose that drooped to his upper lip, joining with it in a flabby mass
of graying skin, said in surprise, “You not takin’ your jeep, Scale?”