He liked Hunaker—she was smart and she was tough and she was an excellent shot,
especially with the MG— although there was nothing between them and never had
been and never was likely to be. It was unnecessary. In any case Hunaker was bi,
although she had a leaning toward her own sex. At the moment a particular
favorite was a girl called Ange who held the radio op’s chair in War Wag Three.
From the back of the buggy, where he was sitting with his feet up on an ammo
box, J.B. said, “Oughta have a better intelligence net.”
Ryan said, “Who? Them or us?”
“Them. Us. Both. But us particularly. Tighter. Been meaning to talk to the Old
Man about it.”
“You’ll be wanting a secret police net next.”
J.B. snickered.
Ryan flicked the wheel a fraction to avoid a mangy-looking dog, then righted the
buggy.
They relied for intelligence on live-in friendlies in all of the areas they
visited—towns, cities, hamlets, trading posts—and on scuttlebutt that drifted
like the wind across the length and breadth of the Deathlands. Often they knew
the bad news—massacres, atmospheric devastation, heavy marauder presence—long
before those who lived near where it had occurred. Just as often, however, the
first evidence of a tragedy was when one of their land wag trains stumbled
across it: a ville, maybe, that was a ville no longer, merely a desolation of
blackened piles of rubble and a hell of a lot of ash, with a population that
consisted mainly of rotting corpses, often savagely mutilated or lacking heads
or arms or legs or sexual organs. Or all of these items.
Ryan swung the wheel as something crashed from a mountain of trash ahead of
them, picked out by his roof spotlight. “Guns!” he snapped.
The something was a large box. It hit the road, bounced across the road, slammed
into the piles of garbage opposite. There was a minor avalanche of muck as its
impact vibrated through the pile. The road was now even narrower.
Ryan glimpsed a black shape scuttling along the right-hand garbage line and
relaxed. It was a rat, a mutie rat at that, big as a full-grown dog.
“Forget it. A rat.”
“Great,” said Hunaker, her eyes still narrowed as she glared through the
sighting screen. “We eat tonight!” She turned and yelled back to Hovak. “See
what I mean? At least there were no mutie rats in Mocsin a couple of years back.
Four-legged variety, anyhow.”
“Keep by your pieces,” said Ryan. “I got a bad feeling about this place.”
It was in his mind to turn back right now, get out of town, gather up the rest
of the convoy and head out to where the main train was and then beat it.
Ryan took a right after the block where Mocsin’s main bank had once stood. Still
stood, actually, although now it functioned as a center-of-town HQ for
Strasser’s security goons. Ryan didn’t like to think about what at times went on
in the bank’s former vaults. It was better not to think about it. Or rather, he
thought grimly, more cowardly.
Here the place was a blaze of light from brilliant spots up on the roof. He
noted the heavy coils of barbed wire that fenced the area off from the rest of
the street. Here at least the garbage had been cleared away. There were three
black vans parked inside the barbed-wire perimeters, but Ryan could see no sign
of human presence. The windows of the building were all heavily barricaded.
He turned into a side street where there was more light, much less trash. Here
was the gaudy house area. Here were the gambling and drinking bars where groups
of miners were let loose, in turn, once every six weeks. They came into town in
Teague’s convoys with jack in their pockets, the younger ones with hope in their
hearts, determined to pay off what they owed to the city of Mocsin’s tax and
toll coffers. Somehow no one ever did pay off what was on the debit side of the
ledger. Some went straight to where their wives and loved ones had shacked up,
only to find them gone. Vanished. Disappeared. No one knew where. No one cared