Chapter Nine

“I got three haunch of deer meat,” Loz told Trader as he read over the list he’d written on a much folded scrap of paper. He scratched his hairy earlobe with an inch-and-a-half-long stub of Number Two pencil. “Not big ‘uns, though. Enough for five, mebbe six days if we stretch it real thin with taters and roots and such like.”

Trader stood with his back to the wall of the cramped galley, arms folded over his chest. Loz, the cook for War Wag One, was also the food supply master for the whole convoy and, as such, he always knew how much fresh trail meat they had left in stores. It was hard to keep raw meat for long inside the wags. There was no refrigeration, and the air-conditioning systems didn’t work often, or well. After a week, the vehicles started to smell like slaughterhouses; a few days more and it got really bad.

“Then we’ll be sucking the bones on the last night?” Trader asked.

Loz nodded. “Course we got MREs up the bummocks.”

“I hate to break into the quick heats so soon,” Trader told him. “It’s bad for morale. Crew always expects new meat, and plenty of it, at the start of a circuit.”

“Well, there sure ain’t no sign of big game around here,” Loz said. “Not enough feed on these hillsides to hold them. But come evening, there should be plenty of small stuff for the pot. Rabbit. Bird. Groundhog. I do a real nice jugged groundhog. Leave the head, feet and claws on, for extra flavor. Man, you’ll be sopping up the brown juice with your hardtack.”

“Long as you take the hair off, I’ll eat it,” Trader said as he turned to leave.

“Shit, boss,” Loz said through a broad grin, “hair’s the best part.”

Trader exited the galley and headed up the narrow, windowless companionway toward the port-side door. He intended to track down each of his drivers and let them know that he wanted one member of each wag crew to do some hunting for the pot come sundown.

Despite the wind outside, it was hotter than hell inside the MCP. The hilltop was a treeless knob of dirt and rock, so there was no shade to park beneath. Using War Wag One’s battery-powered fans was a luxury under any conditions. And in the present situation, Trader knew he didn’t want to draw down the level of stored current. If things went sour during the exchange with Zeal, he figured he would need all his available battery power for floodlights and the like. A prolonged firefight could run well into the night.

Always nice to see who you’re chilling, he thought.

He was halfway down the corridor when he heard muffled explosions outside, a cluster of them, like a short string of firecrackers popping off under a wet blanket. He didn’t know what they were; he knew only what they weren’t. They weren’t frag grens, blastershots or incoming HE rounds. He spit out the stub of his cheroot and ran for the closest exit. As he did so, he was thinking two things. If it was an attack from Zeal’s sec men, he had to contain and repulse it. If it wasn’t an attack, he had to keep his crackerjack blaster crews from raining all of hell’s fury down on Virtue Lake. The second cluster of explosions, which burst virtually on top of the MCP, convinced him that the convoy was, in fact, under assault.

“J.B.! J.B.!” he shouted.

The Armorer appeared ahead of him, at the far end of the corridor. Right off, Trader could see something was very wrong. J.B. was moving strangely, staggering off balance, like the wag was rocking from side to side. Before Trader could reach him, the man slumped to his knees on the deck, his face going purple, greenish foam ringing his lips.

At the same instant, something tickled deep in Trader’s lungs. He tasted battery acid, and his heart began to flutter wildly. Suddenly everything became clear to him. Horribly, horribly clear. Trader turned and rushed back the way he had come, the strength draining from his legs with every step. Gasping, he reached up to the interior wall and slapped the power switch to the wag-to-wag intercom system.

“Hit the fans!” he shouted into the microphone. “It’s nerve gas! Hit your fucking fans!” Whatever the poison was, it wasn’t quick. And it wasn’t painless.

As Trader slipped helplessly down the wall to the floor, his whole skin was on fire and his heart felt squashed in his chest, crushed into a space so terribly small that it could barely beat against the surrounding pressure. Likewise, each agonized breath took all his effort; he couldn’t even manage to whimper. He labored against the pain and the terror for what seemed like an eternity, then both seemed to miraculously lift.

Trader realized he was looking down on his own body from a vantage point along the ceiling of the corridor. He watched his own legs kick and jerk, and his head bang against the floor, leaving a broad smear of blood. It didn’t matter.

The pain was no longer part of him. It belonged to the body, the sad, dying physical form to which he felt not the slightest kinship.

When Trader looked up, instead of seeing the MCP’s ceiling, he was confronted by a widening, brightly lit aperture, like the canal of birth. Or resurrection.

RYAN, HUN AND POET arrived at the viewpoint as the second volley of gas grens burst amid Trader’s circled wags.

Each of them knew instantly what was going on, that the smoke released wasn’t CS or CN, announcing an attack on a superior force with a barrage of nonlethal gas would have been nothing short of suicidal. Each of them knew that the wild rumors about Shabazz’s stockpile were true. They were too far away from the hilltop to do anything but watch in horror as the nerve agent settled down over the convoy.

“The fuckers!” Hun sputtered in frustration and outrage. “The dirty fuckers!”

Ryan and Poet stared in silence at the swirling gray mass that now hid the circled wags from view.

After a minute or two, the steady breeze had whipped the clouds of gas away from the convoy and dispersed them. Ryan raised his spotting scope to his eye. He could see the bodies on the ground, sprawled, in the center of the circle. So could Poet, who looked through his own binoculars.

“Is anybody alive?” Hun demanded. “Could anybody still be alive?”

Before either of the men could answer, there came a series of three tightly spaced blastershots.

“Signal,” Ryan said at once.

“Yeah,” Poet agreed, turning his gaze back down the road to the ville. “The all-clear.”

Out from the barricade came a line of sec wags. They roared up the road toward the hilltop, and as they did, they honked their horns.

Ryan caught movement around the convoy, four figures quickly advancing from the far side of the knoll.

“It’s Shabazz,” Ryan said, lowering the scope.

“Let me see,” Hun insisted, taking it from him. “Son of a bitch! The bastards are turning over the bodies on the ground, making sure they’re chilled.”

Actually it was worse than that.

Shabazz and his crew were dragging the fresh corpses to the very center of the ring, then lining them up side by side, like trophies of the hunt.

“They’re smiling and laughing,” Poet said. Ryan grabbed his scope back from Hun in time to see the bearded road pirate, Shabazz, wave his men over to War Wag One. They cracked the port-side door, climbed in and started to pull the bodies out. They threw them out the doorway in a heap, like bags of cement.

Ryan saw them throw Trader out. His body was limp when it hit the ground. It didn’t move.

Under the circumstances, this was something Ryan expected. But surprise or not, the sight of his dead leader treated like so much garbage was more than he could handle. His anger exploded, and it exploded close to hand.

“You got him chilled!” Ryan snarled at Poet, hurling down the spotting scope. “You gutless sack of shit!” Poet growled a curse under his breath. What happened next occurred in the space of a heartbeat It occurred because the two men involved were both in their prime, both skilled in the deadly arts and hard-focused on chilling. Their handblasters cleared holsters and came up simultaneously. Ryan’s thumb locked back the Blackhawk’s hammer as Poet dropped the safety on his own side arm.

They were standing close, virtually toe-to-toe. There was no room for either of them to maneuver. No time for one to try to block the other’s draw or deflect the aim.

The muzzle of Poet’s Colt Government Model came up hard against Ryan’s mouth. And as it did so, Ryan jammed the barrel of the Blackhawk under the older man’s chin. The one-eyed man smiled, letting the muzzle of the Colt push between his lips and grate against his front teeth. Point.

Counterpoint.

Two coldhearts locked together—three eyes, unblinking.

Both warriors had drawn their triggers hard up to the break. All that separated either one from oblivion was an ounce or two of pressure on the other man’s index finger.

Ryan smelled the familiar sweetness of blaster solvent, and he tasted its poisonous bitterness. Somewhere, miles away, Hun was yelling something at him. Ryan couldn’t make it out. He thought she might have been slugging him in the back, too. Hard to tell. He was that tightly focused and caught up in the moment. What he had in his right fist was what he had wanted all along. An ending. No fear. Just fury. And fulfillment.

In Poet’s eyes, Ryan saw a landscape of resignation, as flat and smooth as his forehead. The older man was ready to die. Maybe he even wanted it a little bit. Then Poet opened his mouth a crack, and words came out of his throat in a hoarse rush. “As sure as this blaster’s in my hand, I will send you to hell, Ryan, but I am not your demon.”

Ryan gave the Ruger a savage twist, making the front blade sight cut into the skin of the older man’s throat. “What the fuck do you know aboutmy demon?” he demanded.

“Only what I said, that it isn’t me. It’s somebody else.”

“Never said it was you,” Ryan hissed. “No, but you let yourself think it. And you acted like it was me from the moment we crossed paths. A man calls things by their true name. Always by their true name.” Ryan blinked. Despite himself, he blinked. The true name of his demon was Harvey. His own brother Harvey, who, out of greed and envy, had murdered their brother, Morgan, who had cunningly turned their father against Ryan. Harvey, who had slashed out Ryan’s left eye and had driven him from family, friends and ancestral home. Hun moved in closer beside them. She had a deft touch. Her quick, light fingers slipped between hammers and firing pins and locked down, preventing them from firing, for an instant at least. “Enough of this!” she exclaimed. “Stand down, the both of you. We got enough trouble without your blowing each other’s brains out for no good reason.”

Neither man moved. They stood on a tightrope, face-to-face over the abyss.

“I got no grudge against you, Ryan,” Poet said in a voice without a trace of emotion. “Even after this thing here, I got no grudge.” He still held the Colt Government Model pressed hard between the younger man’s lips. After a pause, he added, “And I will prove it to you.”

With that, he slowly drew his arm back and lowered the blaster to his side.

Ryan stared at him, stone faced, with that one icy blue eye. The Ruger was still angled under Poet’s chin so as to take off the better part of the back of his head. Ryan didn’t move a muscle.

“If you’re going to do the deed, for nuke’s sake get the fuck on with it,” Poet told him after a full minute had passed. “I’m getting tired of standing here, waiting.”

Ryan let him wait another fifteen seconds before he dropped the hammer to half cock. As he lowered the weapon, he said, “You were on the last train west, War Captain.”

“So were you, Ryan. Window seat.”

Hun gave them both hard pushes on the shoulder to get their attention. “Question is, what are we going to do now?”

“I know what I’m going to do,” Ryan said, unslinging the bolt-action Remington from his shoulder. He flipped up the lens caps and raised the stock to his cheek. “I’m going to get me some payback.”

Before he could acquire a target on the opposite hilltop, Poet reached out and grabbed the heavy barrel six inches from the muzzle crown. He twisted it aside and down.

“All that’s going to do is put them onto us in a hurry,” he told Ryan. “If any of the others are still alive, we can’t help them if we’re running to save our own skins.”

“And if they’re all dead?” Hun asked.

“Then we can’t exact the maximum revenge.”

Ryan reslung the Remington .308. Like it or not, he could see the man had a point.

That made two.