J.B. was looking around the cafeteria area. “Not many good ways to go in Deathlands, Mildred.”
“Suppose not.”
Jak and three of the Navaho had already moved off, behind the serving counters and the cash registers, through the swing doors into the kitchen area.
It was Two Dogs Fighting who came out, his voice ringing beneath the vaulted roof and raw stone.
“Fine cold water and packages of soup and other things to eat. It is good.”
“Probably got their own artesian well built in. Still functioning after all these years.” Ryan called out to Jak, who had just stuck his head around the door. “Try mixing up some of the soup stuff. See what it smells like. See what it tastes like, but be triple careful.”
“Sure. Eaten predark stuff before. Not cans. Shit. Packages all right.”
“We’ll take an hour’s break,” Ryan said to the others. “Get a chance to rest after the walk. Eat and drink.”
“And be merry,” Doc offered. “For tomorrow we shall surely die.”
“Today is a good day for dying,” Sleeps In Day stated. “We will see that.”
” CORDON BLEU CATERING it isn’t,” Doc said, pulling a face as he considered the green plastic bowl of cold watery gruel on the table in front of him.
“Least I don’t think it’ll poison you.” Mildred sipped at it cautiously. “like a mixture of camel piss and grit.”
“But it’s good camel piss.” Krysty grinned.
THE MEAL WAS OVER, and Ryan led the group along the path.
“Wonder why the General and his men haven’t bothered to explore this part of the caverns?” Krysty asked the one-eyed warrior.
“No need, I guess. Looks like the door through to the service part of the caves just ahead of us there.”
They were surprisingly solid, made from what seemed to be a good grade of sec steel. There were triple dead bolts in the center and massive bolts at the top and bottom. Their size and thickness went some way toward answering Krysty’s question. “Now it begins,” Ryan said.
Chapter Thirty-One
Abe had gone hunting.
It was a cold, clear night, and the lights flickered like tiny diamonds all over the outskirts of what had once been the powerful ville of Seattle. Trader had been scouting down there a couple of times, finding what he expected to find.
Like virtually every other of the large predark urban sprawls, the ruins of Seattle were a killing ground for the freaks and the mutie butchers. The topless towers with shattered windows loomed over cross streets filled with the rubble of the ancient nukings.
Norms rarely strayed into those pocket of paranoid violence, unless they sought something that they couldn’t get anyplace else, which normally meant either jolt or bizarre sex. The quest for either could seriously damage the health.
Trader had gone out of curiosity, mingled with his own natural arrogance that there was nowhere in Deathlands where Trader feared to set his foot.
“Never has been and never will be,” he muttered, sitting by the small, bright fire and sipping at the remnants of a bottle of distilled mescal.
Abe had accompanied him along the meanest of streets, covering his old leader’s back, his stainless-steel Colt Python questing at every twitching shadow.
It was late evening now, with a coolish breeze coming off the Cific. Trader had lost track of the days, something that he’d noticed seemed to be happening a lot more recently than it had in the old days.
He still wore a weather-beaten chron on his wrist. Won it in a poker game from a one-legged whore in ChimayBarbie? Barbara?
Abe had only been gone for about an hour, after some of the plentiful deer that roamed the hills.
It crossed Trader’s mind to wonder what was happening to the dozens of messages that they’d sent on their way through the breadth and length of Deathlands. The wording had faded a little from his mind, but the gist of it was that Abe had tracked down the Trader, proved he was alive, confirming the trickle of rumors that had begun within weeks of his faked disappearance.
“Not faked,” he said. “Not the right word. Really meant it. Didn’t want to be found.”
The message had gone with every merchant and packman that he and Abe had been able to find anywhere in the vicinity of old Seattle.
The message had told of the success and warned that they would stay around that part of the Northwest for three months, urging speed in responding to the warning.
Mebbe Ryan Cawdor hadn’t got the message.
Mebbe he didn’t care.
Mebbe he was chilled, propping up six and a half feet of cold earth.
“No,” Trader said loudly. He realized the bottle was empty and lobbed it away into the blackness, waiting for the satisfying tinkle of broken glass. But there was no sound at all. The bottle must have landed in a bed of soft moss.
Ryan wouldn’t be dead, nor would J.B. Neither of them was capable of dying, no more than Trader himself.
“Live forever,” he muttered, aware that his tongue had grown a little too large for his mouth. The liquor was burning at the ulcer that had plagued him for years, as if fifty red ants were biting all at once.
Unbidden, an image of the face of Ryan Cawdor swam into Trader’s mindthe unruly hair, dark and curling, tumbling down over the one good eye, an eye of chillingly pale blue; the puckered scar seaming the right cheek from mouth to eye; the black patch tied over the missing left eye, destroyed many years ago by Ryan’s older brother, Harvey; the lips, thin and cruel, capable of both humor and compassion.
“Son I never had.” Trader nodded owlishly. In all of his rangings and his dealings he had always wanted Ryan to inherit his power.
But things just hadn’t turned out that way.
No point in anyone weeping over the past, over all of the roads and choices not taken.
The hillside to both right and left of Trader’s camp had once been scattered with expensive housing, aimed at the upwardly mobile young businessmen and women of Seattle. It had taken only one Russian nuke, slightly off target, confused by the defensive comp-scrambler system, to wipe the slopes clear, taking off roofs and folding the walls in like so many cardboard dominoes. The heat flash carbonized flesh, blood and bone into a human-shaped smear on a garage door, melting glass in window frames and turning the sand in play pits into rippled glass, exploding the Saabs and BMWs and Volvos in the manicured drives.
Now there was hardly any sign that there had once been a community of little boxes among the woods.
In the first few days that Abe and Trader had been hunting and camping in the hills above the ville, they’d been approached by a number of the locals, sounding them out. Who were they? What were they doing? They explained that there were dues to be paid for being on someone else’s land.
Trader had done some explaining back, using his well-worn Armalite to emphasize some of his more obvious points.
He lay down flat on his back, knotting his fingers behind his head, aware of the misplaced and broken knuckles on both hands, relics from his early teen days when it was fists before knives. Before blasters.
“Where I step, the flowers die,” he said, lips peeling off his teeth in a wolfish grin.
Trader yawned, suddenly feeling tired. The awareness that he wasn’t as young as he’d like to be had come to him very gradually, beginning several years ago. A couple of kids had been enlisted into War Wag Two as general gofers. Neither was more than seventeen. One had been part Kiowa and the other black. The wags had been camping by a large nameless lake, someplace up in the Rockies.
The crews had been relaxing, skimming stones across the placid, mirrored water. Trader had always been the best at it, selecting flat, round pebbles, snapping them away underarm, watching them bounce fifteen or twenty times.
That evening the two newcomers had both easily outthrown him. Trader flexed his shoulders, remembering how he’d tried to do better. The spirit had been goddamn willing, but the flesh was treacherously weak.
“Where did they” He tried to recall what happened to those two boys. “Jud and Skip.” Poor Jud was certainly dead, his throat cut by a mutie woman in the backroom of a store-cum-gaudy west of the Mohawk Gap. Skip had just
“Just vanished,” he said, like so many of the faceless names and the nameless faces from the long years of the past. Just vanished.
The fire was dying and Trader sat up again, breaking some of the thicker kindling across his knee and tossing it into the heart of the embers, where it quickly flamed and crackled, bringing a wave of fresh heat.