privilege, either in creds or in kind. For that reason not a lot of travelers
actually made it through the town, the toll being hair-raisingly high. If you
argued the toss, you ended up six feet under and your goods and chattels, which
included both kith and kin, went straight into Jordan Teague’s treasury. If you
paid up, it usually broke you, and you either signed on as a miner so that you
could earn back what you’d paid out in toll-—a laughable ambition—or you simply
parked your steam truck and van where a few hundred other hopefuls had parked
theirs and tried to find some kind of honest employment in the district. There
was now a vast shantytown of rusting trailers, buggies and rigs sprawling out of
the south end of town.
Those who resided in the town and its environs did not so much live as exist,
and it was a miserable and squalid existence at that. Most took refuge in booze
or happyweed, sometimes both, and brought up their children in wretched
circumstances with the ever present fear that one day Strasser’s talent spotters
would home in on them. Pretty young girls and pretty young boys were always
needed for the recreational activities of Strasser’s security goons. Then, once
the bloom had gone from them, the kids were consigned to the various gaudy
houses that lined the streets in the center of town.
Sure, commercial life, of a kind, went on. People made clothes and mended boots
and shoes; people reared hogs and horses, built timber-frame houses, had small
farmsteads outside of the peripheries where root vegetables, corn and wheat were
grown. The mech trade was the real thriver: mechanics, welders, machine
repairmen were all highly prized. Men and women who were skilled mechs could
command ace jack. Even Jordan Teague had to pay for skill. He had to keep up his
fleet of land wags and trucks. Maneuverability was essential in the Deathlands.
“You’re not listening to me, Ryan.”
“True. I was thinking about Mocsin.”
“Don’t waste your brain,” growled the Trader. “We wanna be in and out of there,
smooth and fast.”
Ryan laughed.
“Fat chance! Bastard could keep us hanging around for days. Then we finally get
the ‘audience’ with the great man. Then we have to point out that he’s only
getting less than half because we got hit by marauders. Then he gets mad and
stalks out on us. Then we wait around for—”
“Yeah, yeah,” the Trader muttered. “I know all that.” His face suddenly twisted,
his mouth snapping shut like a steel trap as he snorted explosively through his
nose. His right hand slid inside his worn leather zip-up and clutched his gut.
“Nukeblast this… indigestion.”
Ryan stared at him. “See the medics about it,” he said.
“Damned warlocks, that’s all they are,” the Trader grunted. “Piss-artists. The
day I let some no-good incompetent get his mitts into me’ll be the day after
I’ve kicked it.” He wiped an arm across his brow, leaving a smear of grime from
the soiled jacket sleeve. “Indigestion is all. Bastard cook. Poisoning me. Needs
changing.” He gestured at Ryan. “Do something about Loz, Ryan. Get a new cookie.
That’ll cure me.”
Night was falling. Deathlands night. The sky was a lowering bottle green greased
with angry flame-red streaks. Dark clouds were boiling up behind them, though it
was doubtful that they were rain clouds. In front of them, the mountains were
picked out in an extraordinary diamond hard and brilliant radiance, strange
luminance backlighting the sharp-toothed serrations of their peaks. A bitter
breeze whipped the dust at his feet.
Ryan shivered, closed his long fleece-lined coat, stamped his boots. He said to
the Trader, “We still heading south after this number?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. It’s too near to the Icelands up here. At night you start to breathe
sleet chips.”
The Trader laughed raucously.
“You’re getting soft, Ryan. When you’ve had twenty years or more of this crap,
you don’t notice it.”
Ryan watched the busy scene below. The land wags, trucks and two of the war wags
were parked in a wide circle off the road. Fires were being built outside the
vehicles’ perimeter, massive constructions of logs and thorn and brush scrub and