Prologue

The travelers’ campfire raged against the oppressive blackness of the surrounding deep woods. The one-lane, dirt-track road that had brought them all to this lonely place was no longer visible beyond the bubble of light created by leaping flames and sheets of sparks flying into the overcast sky. These wayfarers, their faces starkly lit, crouched as closely as possible to the blaze, both for warmth and safety.

Night in Deathlands was a scary time.

Night was when the beasts hunted, creatures whose size and appetites had been magnified by the radiation effects of the global nuclear holocaust of generations past. Night was also the time when packs of mutants—known variously as stickies, scabies, scalies—roamed the countryside in search of living victims. Of Deathland’s many terrible predators, these monsters were arguably the most dangerous—cunning, ruthless and capable of unthinkable violence.

Accordingly, when Deathlands folk were caught at night in the open, it was safer to dispense with sleep altogether, to light a big bonfire and feed it until dawn, with a loaded blaster held cocked in one’s hand. Along with their readied weapons, the travelers each gripped a jar filled with a colorless, homemade, distilled hard spirit. Before sundown, these folks had been strangers on the road. Justifiably wary and suspicious, they had been prepared to defend themselves from one another, to fight to the death if necessary to keep their meager goods and their lives. Now that they had supped together, and washed down the meal of char-roasted jackrabbit with plenty of white lightning, they were passing around hand-twisted black cheroots, and laughing and telling stories like old friends.

Sooner or later in such an amiable gathering, when tongues had been loosened, when guards had been lowered, when the heat of the fire mingled inextricably with the heat of the liquor in the belly and brain, the subject turned to a man whose exploits, both heroic and commercial, were the stuff of legend. He was known simply as Trader.

While more than a few men and women made their daily bread by running Deathland’s dangerous and unreliable roads, by swapping quantities of this for quantities of that, only one of their number merited the name Trader with a capitalT . Over the years, he had earned a reputation for hard dealing and uncanny luck, a genius for finding the secret stockpiles of goods hidden by the United States government prior to doomsday. Trader and his crew plied the ruined highways and back roads in heavily armored convoys, dispensing looted blasters, bullets, fuel, medicine and canned food to whoever had the necessary jack, or its equivalent in barter goods. He specialized in moving predark weapons, which were as vital as food and water in Deathlands, a place where no law, no social order offered protection from hunting packs of muties and the radiation-altered beasts of the field, or from bands of “norm” human marauders that preyed on the unwary and the foolish.

Of all the Trader stories that circulated around the nightly campfires of the hellscape, and around the crowded gaming tables at the gaudy houses in the villes, the one most often told was, not surprisingly, the most disturbing. It spoke of a private revenge so vicious that it inspired shock and loathing in a thick-skinned people accustomed to accounts of savagery. And because the vengeance it described was so complete, it inspired wonder, as well, wonder at the impenetrable darkness of one man’s soul.

On this pitch-black night, in this place surrounded by thick woods, along this scrap of a road two days walk from the nearest ville, beside this roaring fire, a man with a long, weather-seamed face and a pale, wispy beard began the familiar tale on a personal note, as did almost everyone who ever recounted it.

In a loud, clear voice, he said, “I know a man who knows a man, who come on the place known as Virtue Lake the morning after Trader did the dirty deed.”

Heads nodded appreciatively around the fire. Sometimes the witness’s name was Bob, sometimes Tom or Jim, but he was always “a friend of a friend.” The gathered men and women carefully set their blasters between their boots and, cupping hands around half-full jars, leaned closer in order to better hear, hoping to pick up a new fact or a fresh twist.

“This man, name of Bob,” the storyteller went on, “was three hours walk from Virtue Lake when he started smelling smoke. Of course, Virtue Lake always had a peculiar downwind stank to it, which come from the refinery’s tall stacks, but right off Bob knew this was different. It had a sharpish, burned-wood tang, more like a forest fire. As he topped the rise that overlooked the ville, off in the distance, through the smoke haze squatting on the dry lake bed, he saw the dust from Trader’s convoy, heading west.”

“Below him, everything built by the hand of man was charred to cinders. The whole ville was flattened to the ground like a giant’s foot had stomped it. All them triple-swell gaudies you heard so much about were gone. Baron’s big house was gone. Squatters huts down by the lake shore were gone. Warn’t no sign of the big old predark oil refinery, neither. Up until that very day, hundred years after skydark, it’d still put out a passable grade of gas, though some folks claimed it was cut fifty-fifty with goat piss.”

“Bob started down the hill to have himself a better look-see at all this nukin’ strangeness. Where the refinery used to be, there was nothing but a great big hole in the ground. And it was on fire. Bob thought he heard someone screaming down at the bottom of the hole, but he couldn’t get close, what with the pillars of flame and oily black smoke shooting up from the pit.”

The storyteller let his audience ponder this image of damnation while he paused to wet his whistle with a swig of sixty-proof hooch. Refreshed, he resumed the tale.

“The stank in the ville was like nothing Bob had ever smelled before. He had to cover his face with a rag or puke his breakfast jerky out his nose. Stank of death it was, rank, foul, nasty ripe. It was plain to Bob where it was coming from. Everywhere there was bodies laying about. Close to the refinery pit, the corpses were all blown to pieces. Arms, legs, heads scattered in with the piles of smoking trash. Farther off, where the gaudies used to be, the dead folk were whole and their bellies was already swelling up in the heat of the sun. Some looked like they’d been poisoned to death, their faces had gone all black, tongues black, too, and sticking out, dried green froth on their tight-stretched lips. See, Trader hadn’t just done in the ville’s sec men. Everybody was dead. Hundreds of people. Too many for Bob to count. Women, children, little bitty babies. The sheep and goats in the livestock pens were chilled, too. All the corpses left unburied as a warning by Trader

“

The man sitting next to him piped up, “Don’t do me no wrong, unless you want some of the same.”

The storyteller nodded in agreement; that indeed was the grisly message Trader had set adrift in his wake.

The baron of the ville, he was a crazy, sick fuck, and the people who lived there were by reputation all liars and sluts, chillers and thieves. Or they were slaves working the refinery until they dropped in their chains. The kind of place where, even if he was careful, a man could wake up dead for no good reason. Now Trader, he was never one to turn down a profitable deal no matter who it was with. Point of pride to him. Brung his goods up the pike and expected a fair return for the effort, even from Satan himself.

“I’m not gonna lie to you. No one knows for sure what happened at Virtue Lake because there were no survivors left to tell the tale. But it’s a safe bet that the ville done Trader a biggish wrong, and in return Trader made them pay, biggish.”

“A hard man,” someone on the other side of the campfire said.

“Don’t come no harder,” the storyteller agreed.

In Deathlands, hardness was the personal quality that counted above all else. It made the difference between living and dying. And between just dying, and dying well. In that regard, Trader’s legend shone like a hammered steel icon, an icon that was polished nightly by folks he’d never laid eyes on.

“Huzzah to Trader!” one of the women exclaimed. And with a ragged chorus of “huzzahs!” they all drank a toast to his name.

Afterward, a man on the far side of the fire said, “I heard even the flies on the dog shit was dead.”

“Yeah,” another woman added, “and I heard even the buzzards wouldn’t touch all them swoll-up bodies. Circled and circled high overhead, then just flew off with empty bellies.”

On cue, the storyteller delivered the anecdote’s customary final line. “Some people say all the bones are still there, right where they fell, right where Trader left them.”

Satisfied that the tale had been told right, the travelers leaned back, settling into their own private reveries as they lifted jars to thirsty lips. To chill a man or two, or even a woman or two, over some soured business deal was one thing, but to lay waste to a whole damned ville was another. Beside the fire’s roaring heat, with white lightning filling their veins with courage, each of the travelers took a moment to ponder the question of whether, under similar circumstances, he or she would have had the solid-brass balls to do what Trader had.

To chill them all.

Around the bright circle, no one smiled. No one spoke. Some closed their eyes and pretended to doze. In their secret heart of hearts, as well as they knew their own names, they all knew they could never hope to measureup to Trader’s terrible revenge.

Of course, as was often the case withmyths told around campfires, thetruth about what reallyhappened at Virtue Lake was an altogether different story