Chapter Four

Ryan stopped the one-man scout buggy on the side of the road, picked up his spotter scope and got out. From the top of the high, rounded hill, he looked down on the settlement of Virtue Lake, which was about four miles away. Between him and the ville was a yellowish brown dust bowl; all that was left of a lake were a few scattered ponds, stagnant and rainbowed with crude oil. Dominating the far landscape, jutting out on what had once been a peninsula, was Baron Zeal’s oil refinery. Its three tallest smokestacks poured forth black smoke, adding to the haze that overhung the valley. Tall blue flames flickered and danced from a series of shorter stacks, as the refinery by-products were burned off. Even at that distance, Ryan could hear the sound of the plant, a sawing, low-pitched hum.

According to local lore, the industrial complex predated the nukecaust by twenty years; it had survived the disaster with tumbled smokestacks, but remained otherwise intact. A handful of townsfolk, descendants of the original workers, it was said, continued to run the petroleum-cracking plant on a very small scale, selling gas by the jug out of their shanties. That was before Zeal took over the entire operation by force. He had brought in his own slave labor, and used it to push the refinery to predark half capacity. The source of the crude oil that fed the cracking plant lay under the existing lake. Zeal had had the body of water drained to make it easier to drill his wells.

The draining of Virtue Lake had created a hideous sunken plain, dotted by makeshift oil rigs along the far shore, andtransected by lines of pipe leading to storage tanks up on the former peninsula.

Even though an inferior-grade gasoline was hard to come by in Deathlands, the enterprise was a great success, and that success encouraged a boomtown atmosphere. Gas was more precious than gold to would-be industrialists, fuel traders and road pirates, and they lined up to trade the yellow metal for it. The promise of food and shelter and easy jack drew desperate people from the far-flung corners of Deathlands, people who came willingly to work and ended up as slaves to the company store. Because of the influx, the ville’s population had soared to nearly one thousand. To service the needs of the refinery workers, and recoup most of the wages he paid out, Zeal had set up the gaudy houses that lined either side of the main street, and put a handful of his cronies in charge. In return, he got a huge percent of the gross from the moonshine, green beer and gaudy sluts.

Beyond the wells and the refinery, stretching along the former shoreline, was the ville. Ryan could see the sprawl of shanties that surrounded the gaudy houses on all sides. A haze of bluish oil smoke overhung the buildings and the lake shore. Stair-stepping up the bluff, at the far end of the lake bed, the houses were better built, and the topmost and largest structure sat on a shelf cut into the side of the cliff. Baron Zeal’s big house overlooked the ville, the refinery and the wells, and its compound was protected by a perimeter wall made of stockaded logs.

Pointing the scope back to his side of the lake, Ryan saw there was still only the one way into town for Trader’s convoy: a narrow dirt road that ran around the edge of the dried-up shore. As the road bent around the far side, before it reached the edge of the ville, it was cut by a barricade of oil drums and heaped steel automotive scrap. Baron Zeal’s sec men manned the barricade from barracks that stood on either side of the road, and Ryan knew they would most likely be demanding a heavy toll for passage in or out.

Then he heard the low rumble of vehicles coming up behind him.

He turned to see War Wag One lumbering over the ridge top in a cloud of dust. Behind it came the daisy chain of the convoy. The MCP stopped atop the rise, and Trader, J.B. and Hunaker jumped out of the starboard-side door and stepped over to the viewpoint.

Trader scanned the ville in the distance through a pair of binoculars. “Looks meaner than the last time I saw it,” he said. “Baron has added to his sec force. Only used to be one barracks next to the barrier.”

Poet climbed from one of the smaller war wags and immediately took up his usual position at Trader’s elbow. He always made sure he had the ear of the boss, and it was a habit that never failed to piss Ryan off.

After one look at the approach to the ville, Poet said, “If we take the convoy through the gate down there, we’re going to have a hell of time getting out. They’ve staggered the barricades so there’s no room to turn around. If we’re caught under fire inside the fence, K-turning all these wags is going to be a bitch. And then we’ll have to blast our way back through the barricade. Trader, we’re bound to lose transport wags and people.”

Ryan smiled. Once again, the man had revealed his broad yellow stripe.

“Only if Zeal plays us wrong,” Trader replied.

“Expect the worst,” Poet said, “and you’re never disappointed.”

As Trader considered this, Ryan stepped up and put in his own two cents worth. “Why should we give a damn how many sec men Zeal’s got?” he said, glaring straight at Poet. “If he tries to pull something on us, there’s more than enough firepower in War Wag One to flatten the place.”

“Mebbe so,” Trader agreed, “but I’d hate to lose any wags or cargo this early in the circuit just to prove you’re right. We’ve got a whole lot of miles to cover before we head back home again. Knowing how Zeal operates, I want to make rad-blasted sure he’s got something worth trading before we move our goods any closer.”

Ryan opened his mouth to say something more, then thought better of it. He knew his words would have been wasted. Not because Poet was necessarily right. In situations like this one, where large amounts of weapons and ammo were to be transferred, and where the other party had a long history of bad business, Trader always followed the same procedure: keep the cargo at a safe distance, count the gold or whatever and only then make the exchange.

It was Poet’s turn to smile.

Ryan felt a sudden rush of heat under the skin of his face and an insensate fury building inside his chest. Once again, it was all coming to a head. Expectation and reality dovetailing. He wasn’t disappointed. This time, he knew the outcome would be much different. As he stared back at Poet, he thought that soon he would find a way to chill the war captain before he chilled him.

At Trader’s direction, the wag drivers circled their vehicles in a defensive position on the hilltop, with the transports clustered in the middle and the war wags on the outside. When they were parked in that formation, on triple-red alert, no attacking force could touch them. Once the staging was complete, Trader waved Ryan over.

“Get a couple of the miniwags unhooked from the tow bars and ready to roll,” he said. “We’ll take a small scout party down to meet Zeal and scope out things.

“Abe, you’re in charge until I get back. If there’s trouble, you know what to do.”

“Roger that, Trader,” the gunner said. “We rocket the shit out of them from up here.”

It was no idle threat. The MCP’s clusters of 2.75-inch HEAP rockets could turn the refinery into a blazing inferno in seconds.

Ryan hurried to uncouple the miniwags. They were bigger than the scout car he had been driving, big enough to hold three people each, with a driver in the front seat and a pair of passengers behind. The camouflage-painted, all-terrain vehicles had huge, knobby tires and a ground clearance of a yard to the skid plates of their undercarriages. The M-60 machine gun mounted on the roof was accessed by the backseat passengers through an armored sunroof.

Poet, J.B. and Trader got into one of the minis. Ryan, Hunaker and Samantha the Panther climbed into the other.

With Trader in the lead, Ryan steered the miniwag down the winding, rutted road. Zeal didn’t run any gas-tanker wags of his own on this track. He made his customers, who were desperate for fuel, come to him. That meant that transport and security were their problems, not his.

The squalor Ryan had seen from a distance became even more of a horror story as they approached the outskirts of Virtue Lake and the trash heap of shanties where the slaves lived. The air was thick with the smell of sulfur, wood fires and human excrement, and it seemed to vibrate with the grinding roar of the petroleum-cracking plant that ran nonstop.

On both sides of the road were abandoned, bullet-riddled vehicles. Ryan hadn’t seen them from the hilltop because they had been pushed nose-first into the drainage ditches. Most of them faced away from the barricade, windshields shot out front and rear. Glass glittered everywhere on the road’s shoulder.

“Some of the baron’s satisfied customers?” Samantha the Panther said as Ryan braked to a stop behind Trader, who had come up against the barricade’s closed hurricane-fence gate.

“Not customers,” Ryan said to the mutie black woman. Sam’s “special equipment,” exceptional nightsight and hearing, was well-hidden in a lean and muscular but otherwise norm woman’s body. “These wags never made it into the ville. Check out the barriers on the other side of the gate.” He pointed at the staggered concrete-block obstacles that forced an approaching driver to make a series of tight, alternating turns in order to reach the ville’s exit. It was an obstacle course that gave the sec men plenty of time to aim and fire.

“Those folks stopped on this side of the barrier,” Ryan said, “then turned and tried to beat it back up the road. They were running away from the barricade when the sec men blasted them from behind.”

“Fuckers,” Hun growled.

The baron’s security men stepped out from behind the cover of the barriers with their autoblasters leveled at the two miniwags. The blasters were a variety of beat-up-looking predark Beretta KG-99s, a couple of short-barreled 9mm Heckler & Koch machine pistols with 30-round clips. The dozen sec men wore a uniform of sorts, a long-billed, dark blue cloth cap, a bulletproof vest, khaki BDU pants and combat boots.

The beady-eyed guy in charge, who was so fat he couldn’t close the Velcro tapes on his armor vest, waved his machine pistol at them through the wire of the gate. “Get out of them wags,” he ordered. “And keep your hands in the air and away from those MGs.”

Trader climbed out of the lead miniwag, hands raised. Ryan and the others did the same.

“Now,” the fat sec man said, “real careful, I want you to put your blasters on the ground and then take three steps back.”

Trader put down his Armalite, then nodded to his people. Ryan unholstered and laid down his .357 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk.

Once they were disarmed, the fat sec man waved for the gate to be opened. Right away, he waddled over to Hun and Samantha and sized them up appreciatively.

“Bringing in a couple of fresh whores, are you?” he asked Trader. “We could sure use them. Tired of banging the same sour-faced slags.”

The other sec men grunted in agreement.

“You got it wrong, bud,” Trader said.

“Think we’d better give them a tryout first,” the fat guy said, ignoring Trader’s words. “Yeah, you two come on in the barracks with me. I got some friends in there who want to meet you, too. Gonna give you a welcome party.”

When the threat didn’t seem to faze either of the women, the fat guy leered viciously and added, “We’ll crack your bones real good. Get you nice and loose for the lineup on Saturday night.”

Still no reaction.

Sensing big fun, the other sec men crowded in for a closer view.

“Though I’m partial to the dark meat,” the head sec man went on, “the one with green hair is mighty interesting. Makes a guy curious, you know, to see if it’s the same color down there. Mebbe I’ll take me a bit of a look-see right now

” He reached out and grabbed Hun by the left wrist, then snatched hold of the front waistband of her BDU pants.

Ryan saw Hun’s free hand dip into her back pocket With the speed and precision that came from much practice, she undipped her knife’s black Zytel handle from the cloth, then thumb-wheeled open a wickedly serrated blade four and a quarter inches long.

A blast of pure adrenaline slammed Ryan’s brain. Joy!

That jagged, G-2 stainless-steel edge could slice through a standing length of one-inch manila rope in a single swipe. It went through muscle and tendon even easier. Maybe Hun couldn’t cut off the arm with one slice, but she could part the meat down to the bone, rendering both the arm and the groping hand useless deadwood for the rest of the sec man’s miserable life. Assuming, of course, that the slob didn’t bleed to death on the spot.

Ryan made no grab for his leg-sheathed panga. The two-to-one odds against them weren’t as bad as they seemed at first, what with the sec men standing so tightly packed. Ryan guessed that they would hesitate to shoot one another, which was exactly what they were going to have to do if they wanted to chill all of Trader’s crew. Like Hun, he was confident in his own speed with the edged weapon. In the seconds that remained before all hell broke loose, he measured the distances and picked his angles. The panga, with its massive blade and eighteen-inch overall length, could sever a man’s arm at the wrist. Or, in a pinch, even cleave a head free from a stoutly muscled neck.

In this instance, its edge wasn’t put to the test.

Trader let out a growl and intervened, shoving the fat man back with a solid straight arm to the chest.

“Unless you want more trouble than you can handle,” he said, “you’d better back off and tell Baron Zeal that Trader’s here.”

“Trader?” the fat sec man said. “If you’re Trader, where’s your fucking convoy?”

“That’s between me and Zeal. Go tell him I’m here, and I want a face-to-face right now.”

“If you got no convoy,” the sec man said, “you and your friends are dead meat. All except the pretty, pretty whores. They’relive meat.” He smacked his lips nastily.

Ryan watched as the fat man slowly walked back through open gate and laboriously climbed into a dented wag. As he sat behind the wheel, the vehicle groaned mightily on its springs and sagged on the driver’s side. After slamming the door, he gunned the engine and headed toward the center of the ville.

“Dumb fuck didn’t have a clue how close he came to singing soprano,” Hun said as, behind her back, she broke the top-lock and folded up her predark SOG one-hander.

“Both of you better watch yourselves extra careful,” Trader told the two women.

Then to everyone, he said, “And don’t chill anybody unless they give you no choice. We’re way outnumbered here.”

As they waited by the side of the road for the fat man to return, the other sec men whistled and made catcalls to Hun and Sam like a pack of lovesick mutts. After seeing how Trader had backed down their leader, they kept their distance, though.

Meanwhile, Poet surveyed the peninsula, or what he could see of it from the road. Without seeming to, he was looking for weak points. Ryan had to admit that the older guy was damned good at seeing the big picture. He’d had lots of practice. Poet would say if they did this and this, then they could break out, or break in. And for at least as long as Ryan had been riding with Trader, Poet hadn’t been wrong yet.

The one-eyed man didn’t care. He had hated the man on first sight, hated Poet’s gimp arm, which so reminded him of his older; brother Harvey’s gimp leg. He hated the way Poet always hovered around Trader, offering advice, and hated the way the man always listened to it. It made him recall how his brother Harvey had hovered around their father, filling his head with lies, maneuvering, setting him up for the big fall.

Harvey, sick with the lust for power, and stuck in the middle of the order of rightful succession, had arranged for the murder of Morgan, the eldest of the three sons. When he’d discovered this unspeakable treachery, Ryan had done his best to explain it to his father, but he couldn’t make the man see who Harvey really was. Baron Titus had always believed Harvey; he was blind to the evil beneath his son’s twisted exterior. In the end, Harvey had robbed Ryan of everything—family, friends, estate, fortune, even his eye. And he had cast out his own younger brother, alone and half-blinded, into the wilds of Deathlands. A universe so quickly turned on its head, perverse, and unrepentantly so, had taught Ryan the hardest of lessons: that a man had to be prepared at all times for betrayal. From a brother, by an overt act of cruelty; from a father, by an act of omission. This was the template of Ryan’s reality, and the wellspring of his terrible anger.

Others in the crew, including Trader, saw the conflict between the two advisers as a simple matter, stemming from the fact that Ryan coveted Poet’s job. Jealousy really had very little to do with the animus. After all, Ryan could appreciate the skills and accomplishments of the other members of the crew without feeling somehow less important, or physically threatened. But not when it came to Poet. Never with Poet.

From day one, he had been on his guard, hand on his weapon, determined this time to strike first.

After fifteen minutes had passed, the fat sec man returned. He stopped on the ville side of the gate, leaned his head out the wag’s driver’s-side window and shouted, “Trader, you ride with me up to the big house. The others have to stay down here in the ville.”

“Not acceptable,” Trader replied as he stepped closer to the wag. “We travel together.”

“Then the ideal’s off,” the sec man said. “Baron Zeal says only you can enter his stockade. He give me these tokens for your crew to use in the gaudies.” He showed Trader a small cloth bag tied at the top with a thong. “So they can amuse themselves while you and he discuss business. Tokens are good for brews and screws.”

The fat guy tossed the bag to Trader.

“What about their blasters?” Trader asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” the sec man said. “They can keep them. So can you. We don’t take people’s blasters unless they mess up. And then we take them off their dead bodies after we shoot them all to hell.”

Trader nodded to his crew, who immediately bent and picked up their blasters. As Ryan reholstered his Blackhawk, he saw Hun check the chambers in her 10-gauge, double-barreled, side-by-side riot gun.

“Mighty big piece for a pretty little lady to carry,” the head sec man commented through the driver’s window.

“I like a big blaster,” she said, snapping the barrels shut with a flick of her wrist.

“Then you sure come to the right place,” fat guy said, grinning as he pointed down at himself.

Hun smiled back. “And you’ve come to the wrong one.”

“Going in alone might not be so smart,” Poet said to Trader.

It was one of the rare times that Ryan openly agreed with the war captain. “Zeal might try and take you hostage,” he said.

“It’ll be okay,” Trader assured him as he handed over the bag of tokens. “The baron knows he’s got nothing if he chills me. The convoy will just move on to the next ville on the list and off-load the new blasters there. He doesn’t want that to happen. Just keep together and stay on your toes. After the meet with Zeal, I’ll find you.”

WHEN TRADER GOT in the front passenger’s seat of the sec man’s wag, his weight only partially righted the driver’s-side tilt of the vehicle. Cranking the steering wheel hard over, and puffing from the effort it cost him, the fat guy turned the wag and accelerated for the center of the ville.

They drove past row after row of shanties, some made of scrap sheet metal, some made out of tree limbs and plastic sheeting, all of it spilling down the grade to the shoreline of the dry lake like the slope of a garbage dump. An inhabited garbage dump.

In the middle of the dirt road, standing in a spreading mud puddle, was a big tanker wag. Since the lake had been drained, water had to be trucked into the ville. Sec men were doling it out to townspeople who were lined up with plastic jugs or buckets. Trader watched as the sec men put a mark of their forearms with an indelible ink marker. It meant they’d had their share. Water was rationed, as was everything else in Virtue Lake. If you didn’t work, you didn’t drink. There were few women in the line, and even fewer children. All of them were dirty looking, with sores and scabs.

They gave the fat sec man and his passenger looks as he drove by.

Looks that could kill.

The ville was divided into three parts, which Trader recalled from his last visit here. First came the garbage dump-slave quarter, which Zeal’s sec men didn’t waste their time patrolling. In this area, people built their shacks wherever they could find room, with whatever materials they could find or steal.

The second part of Virtue Lake consisted of the predark company town that had supported the refinery before skydark. At the heart of the ville were two facing rows of mini-strip malls that had once housed the supermarket, the optician, the pizza takeout restaurant, the video store, the doughnut shop, the dry cleaner, the coin laundry and the auto-parts store. Now they housed the ville’s single-story gaudies.

Zeal hadn’t bothered to change the facades to suit the buildings’ new tenants. He’d left the signs and marquees as they were. After all, the refinery workers weren’t picky; they just wanted a warm place out of the chem rain to rut and get blind drunk. Though it was midday, men in various stages of drunkenness spilled out of the open doorways onto the mini mall parking lots. Loud music blared from open doorways. On the other sides of greasy plate-glass windows, naked women danced on tables, enticing the wandering crowds to enter. Trader noticed that sec men drove through this area in armored wags.

Per capita, there were more gaudies and saloons here than anyplace Trader had ever seen. Workers earned not only water, but moonshine and slut time, which they paid for with the baron’s tokens. The refinery ran twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts. So did the gaudies.

As they drove past the Quick-Way Market, four sec men hurled a pair of drunks out the front door. They landed on their bellies on the asphalt a good distance away and didn’t move.

Past the end of the main street, the road started to wind up the bluff. There was a clear border here, from the falling down slum to the predark tract houses that the engineers and workers of the oil company used to live in—houses that were now occupied by the gaudy operators and refinery bosses. More armed sec men on the prowl patrolled this area, assigned to keep out the riffraff.

The fat sec man slowed as he approached a wall made of ax-sharpened logs, two stories high. The logs were bound together with coarse rope, and they marked the limits of the baron’s compound. On each of the facing corners of the wall, little log huts peeked up above the level of the spikes; they were the machine-gun posts that controlled the road leading to the gate. Trader could see sec men moving behind the blaster ports. Recognizing the wag, they didn’t bother tracking it in their sights.

The log gates opened at once, the massive doors swinging inward.

The sec man drove onto the packed-dirt courtyard and stopped. Trader saw that a walkway below the top of the spike logs connected the MG posts. It also offered 270-degrees’ worth of firing positions, down onto the ville, the dry lake and the road. The other side of the compound abutted the front of the bluff, and was protected by it. To the left of the main gate was a sec-man duty shack; taking up about half of the space inside the wall was Zeal’s private residence. Also built of logs, it had a sheet-metal roof and a wide porch that faced the wall’s gate.

The fat sec man jerked a thumb at the bug-splattered windshield. “Up the steps to the big house,” he said. “Make it snappy, Trader. The baron don’t like to be kept waiting.”

Trader got out and started across the compound. Immediately he drew an escort of armed sec men, one of whom relieved him of his Armalite. They led him through the door and into the baron’s mansion.

The front room had high ceilings with exposed rough beams; the floors were made of polished wood. Dominating the room was a massive stone fireplace and mantel. Above the mantel, up the front of the fireplace, was a collection of mounted heads—some animal, some human. The humans, which were all male, appeared to be screaming, glass eyes bulging, jaws agape, tongues extended. The skin of their faces had an unnatural, burnished red color.

“Admiring my little trophies, Trader?” asked a husky voice behind him.

Trader turned and faced the self-appointed ruler of Virtue Lake. Lundquist Zeal was dressed in a floor-length robe made of dense brown fur that might have been mink. As the tall man teetered toward him, Trader caught a flash of bare white, spindly leg and thigh, marked by a tracery of blue veins.

The baron was naked under the long coat.

The idea made Trader wince; he winced again as he took in Zeal’s unusual choice of footwear. Where in rad blazes, he asked himself, had the bastard found a pair of red stiletto heels in size eleven?

On either side of the baron, more sec men stood with their handblasters drawn.

“You chilled all those guys by yourself?” Trader asked, gesturing at the wall of heads.

“No, but I did the taxidermy myself,” Zeal replied. “Lifelike, aren’t they? I designed the display as a tromp l’oeil. It’s like they’re sticking their heads through a hole in the wall.”

If that was the case, Trader thought, then something really, really terrible was happening to them on the other side. “Amazing,” he said.

“One does what one can to alleviate the monotony.” Zeal cultivated the reputation of being as crazy as a shit-house rat. If Trader hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the bastard was even further gone than that. He might have figured the baron had caught himself a case of the oozies and that the disease’s little spermoid-wormoids were happily eating thousands of tunnels in his brain. But Trader was no triple stupe.

Though Zeal sported the gaudy slut makeup and the high heels, he wasn’t effeminate. He lumped around in those high-heeled women’s shoes like a drunken spider. He dressed that way for the shock effect, in order to become even more a figure of hatred and fear. The idea being, with a guy who looked as rad-blasted queer as he did, you never knew what the fuck he’d do, or when. It no doubt helped the baron control both his slaves and sec men.

“Do you want something to drink?” Zeal asked Trader. “I have everything from champagne to rye whiskey.”

“I’ll drink with you after we finish our business.”

“Fair enough. Where are my blasters and ammo?”

“They’re safe. They’re close by.”

The baron scowled at him. “I sense an element of mistrust. That makes me very unhappy.”

“Well, don’t take it personal,” Trader said with a laugh. “In case you haven’t heard, I don’t trust anybody. That’s how I stay in business. Before we make the switch, I’d like to see the color of your gold.”

“And if I refuse?”

“We move on.”

“And what if I won’t let you?” Zeal asked, raising a crookedly penciled eyebrow.

“We level the place, and then move on.”

The baron searched Trader’s face for a hint of weakness.

He found nothing in the eyes, in the line of the mouth. Nothing that could be used to gain advantage. “Very well. Follow me.”

With the sec men bringing up the rear, the baron led him through the big house, toward the end of the building facing the bluff. The mansion had been furnished to suit Zeal’s taste, which ran to everything gaudy. Garish, violent paintings clashed with upholstered sofas that clashed with rugs. The rooms were obstacle courses, thanks to his collection of perfectly godawful crap.

Zeal stopped in front of a diorama made up of objects that had been traded for fuel. Trader couldn’t read the nameplates, but he recognized one of the life-sized statues. Marsh Folsom had once shown him a picture of a red-haired clown known in predark times as Ronald. Made of hollow plastic, it was positioned in a conversational setting with three female fashion mannequins dressed in black garter belts, thong panties and stiletto heels, and to one side, as if conspiring, a pair of short hairy men wearing fur togas. To Trader, these last two looked like swampies.

Zeal didn’t explain the purpose of the odd tableau. At a signal from the baron, his henchmen moved the big clown out of the way, opening up the access to the far wall. Zeal slid his hand along the paneling until he found a hidden catch. The panel slid to one side, exposing a door.

“Turn your head,” he told Trader. “I have to disable the boobies before we can proceed.”

Trader put his back to the baron. The two swampies had definitely seen better days. Chunks of plaster were missing from their elbows and cheeks. Their fur wraps were moth-eaten. Why anyone would want to make a statue out of a swampie was a mystery to Trader. Of course, if he could have read the nameplate, he would have realized they were a pair of Neanderthal replicas looted from a natural-history museum in Chicago.

“All right, come ahead,” Zeal said.

The door opened onto a hall hacked into the limestone bedrock. The ceiling and walls were buttressed by peeled logs. The baron took a torch from a stanchion and set it ablaze. Then he and Trader followed the corridor, which wound back into the bowels of the hillside, before it finally ended in another door. This one was steel with massive hinges. Again the baron directed Trader to turn his back.

After a moment, Trader heard the metal door creak open behind him.

“All right, come on.”

Zeal’s treasure room was a chamber roughly ten by ten, lined, floor, walls and ceiling, with rough-sawed boards. In the flickering torchlight, Trader could see a row of strongboxes along the foot of the far wall.

“The shipment we arranged was ten crates of predark autoblasters,” Zeal said, making no move to open the chests. “Unfired blasters. Ten to a crate. Still in factory packaging. And the ammo was to be two hundred rounds per blaster, which makes it twenty thousand rounds of government-issue, caliber-compatible, full-metal jacket.”

“You got it,” Trader said. “One hundred blasters, with ammo, in exchange for fifty pounds of gold.”

Zeal leaned down and opened one of the chests. Heaped gold flashed in the torchlight.

Trader stepped closer and took a look. What he saw was a collection of old wedding rings, earrings, cuff links, fountain pens and wristwatches. But most of the volume was made up of predark dental gold no doubt sourced by grave robbers: crowns, chunks of filling, bridgework. The precious metal was no longer used in dentistry in Deathlands, where bad teeth were simply pulled.

“May I?” Trader asked, gesturing at the contents. “Of course.”

Trader dipped his hand in and picked out some samples. After examining them, he dumped the lot back in the box. It wasn’t what he’d expected. “Our deal was for pure gold.” he said. “Half this shit still has teeth in it. Or it’s just ten-karat plating. Our arrangement was that I’d be paid in ingots of pure gold. Is this all you’ve got?”

“Gold is gold.”

“Not if it’s like this. What else have you got to trade?”

Zeal dipped a hand into the pocket of his fur coat and pulled out a slender glass vial filled with an amber liquid. He unstoppered it and handed it to Trader, who held it up to the torch.

“Not too close to the flame,” the baron warned him.

Trader took a sniff. It was gasoline, all right. He put the test tube to his lips and took a sip. He swished it around in his mouth for a second, then spit it onto the floor. “Not more than seventy-five octane,” he pronounced. “If I put that sheep piss in my wags, it’s going to make them knock like rad blazes. Nukin’ hell, it’s no better than your so-called gold.”

“You don’t have to use it yourself,” Zeal told him. “You can trade it somewhere on down the line. Other villes will be happy to get it.”

He was right, of course. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“I’ll give you three drums of gas for every blaster,” the baron said.

“We’re talking fifty-five gallons?”

“Of course.”

“Make it six drums, and I’m only delivering ten blasters with a hundred rounds each.”

“I’ll pay you six drums per blaster for the original one hundred.”

“No way. I can’t haul that much extra fuel. Won’t be any room in my transport wags for anything else.”

Zeal frowned, but then completely surprised Trader by conceding the game without further argument.

At 330 gallons of gas per blaster, even with the hundred rounds thrown in, the baron was getting reamed, big time. And he had to know it. When presented with such a thorough, no-kiss screwing, a hard-nosed businessman like Zeal should have gone ballistic and threatened to chill Trader and his entire crew.

Instead, ever so amiably, the baron said, “Now that the deal is set, let’s go back into the big house and get ourselves some refreshments.”

A shiver passed up Trader’s spine, like someone had just walked over his grave.