“Trouble with that coldheart is that every time he says something, you get the idea that there’s a whole lot more he won’t say,” Ryan mused quietly, keeping his phrasing a touch cryptic in case he should be overheard too much.
Krysty silently agreed, a feeling of nausea sweeping across her when she considered Harvey and Jenna. What kind of a power base were they attempting to build, and would the sec chief use this attack as a means of getting rid of his baron? They continued in silence for some time. Gradually, the path grew wider, the shrubbery and undergrowth less dense. The ruins of the buildings that constituted this section of old Seattle became more and more visible. They were also more whole than the fragments that remained deeper into the forest.
The path widened into an old road, with the fragments of a sidewalk still barely visible through the creepers. Storefronts and apartment buildings became apparent, and once again the city took on the aspect of what, in the predark world, Mildred had heard of the remains of Angkor Wat, the Vietnamese city in the jungle. Vietnam had been a buzzword for the generation before her, and was now just a memory, but for Mildred as she looked around, she figured she had an idea of what the ruined city had to have looked like to U.S. Army units who had stumbled on it in the middle of war.
Except that Angkor Wat had taken thousands of years to evolve to the ghostly jungle city, whereas the nukes and rad mutation had achieved this in a fraction of the time.
In the silence of the march, J.B. had time to think. The difference between this section of old Seattle and the area where he and Ryan had met up with Trader and Abe again—it seemed like forever, though it couldn’t have been that long—was immense. The way in which rad-ravaged nature set up areas of complete contrast was frightening. The way there had been dense forest on one side of the redoubt and virtual desert on the other when they had arrived…
The train of thought brought the Armorer back to the Illuminated Ones. He didn’t entirely share Ryan’s views on the remnants of the old secret society. Although the bizarrely clothed sec force they had encountered on the old blacktop had arrived in a working wag that sounded well tuned, and they had the laser blasters that worked okay, still it seemed to J.B. that they had been far too keen to firefight and ask questions later. They seemed to have the tech, while Alien’s ancestors had kept the ideals. So even if there was a stockpile of old tech they were sitting on, even if their Erewhon was the promised land away from the struggle and shit of everyday Deathlands living, there was no guarantee they would want to share it. And if there were more of them, with those laser blasters, then it would be a very uneven firefight to get pulled into.
He knew Ryan better than almost anyone. He trusted him, both as a man and for his tactical judgment. But even so, the Armorer’s more suspicious and cautious nature could see them getting themselves caught beyond a rock and a hard place.
His train of thought was lost as the war party, straggling slightly but still fairly compact, turned a corner and reached an old intersection he recognized too well.
On the left was the old apartment building where they had stood on an upper floor and observed the Sunchildren. Ahead of them stretched the road out of the old ville. The two-lane blacktop was about an hour’s march away, and on the other side of it the ville of Samtvogel.
Say an hour and a half at their current pace. J.B. breathed in the hot air. It was less humid now and would soon become dry. The heat would also be direct as there would be no deflecting vegetation.
It was going to be tough. They would be exposed, and although there was no chance of their being ambushed, it did mean that they would have to stand and fight if a rival party advanced. There would be no cover.