Chapter Ten

Trader came to, gasping, as he was hit in the face by a bucket of water. Not only did he have the worst headache of his life, but it also felt like someone had been trying to stove in all his ribs.

And someone still was.

“Guess who?” Shabazz said as he reared back a leg and booted him another good one in the side.

Groaning, Trader struggled up on one elbow. He shook the dizziness from his head and forced his eyes into focus. His heart sank at what he saw. It looked like everyone in the crew but him was dead. Bodies still lay all over the inside of the convoy circle. Zeal’s uniformed sec men and Shabazz’s crew of road pirates were busily going through their pockets, stripping them of valuables.

The fat sec man hunkered over Sam had another idea in mind. He had pulled her T-shirt up over her collarbone and was mauling her bare breasts with one hand while with the other he tried to get the waistband of her fatigue pants undone. He was so preoccupied with his own animal satisfaction, he didn’t seem to care who was watching, and Trader could tell that the tub of guts wasn’t going to stop until he got everything he wanted.

“Ain’t all of them dead,” Shabazz said, noticing where Trader was looking. “At least not yet, anyway.”

The fat sec man had to have been squeezing Sam really hard, because she woke up with a start. And she came out of unconsciousness fighting and kicking. The sudden violence caught her molester by surprise. Like the other females in Trader’s battle crew, the Panther was no frail sister. If she wasn’t stronger than most men, she was a hell of a lot faster. And she knew instinctively, without mulling the pros and cons over in her mind, exactly what needed to be done. First she lashed out with a vicious flat-footed left leg kick to the fat man’s groin that paralyzed him, gape mouthed, in his squatting position. Then, before he could stagger back out of range, she followed up with the knockout: a solid snapkick with her stronger leg to the point of the chin.

Her boot made a funny sound as it connected with that flab-shrouded jut of bone. It sounded just like a dry tree limb breaking underfoot.

The fat man’s chin snapped up, pointing at the sky; his thunder thighs caved, splitting wide apart as his flabby butt dropped. He hit the ground flat on his back, and as he did, his legs slowly straightened in short, twitching movements; his arms remained limp and still. He lay there with his mouth hanging open. There was some blood, leaking from his lips, but not much. He wasn’t breathing as far as Trader could see. His bugged-out eyes stared up at the sun.

It was all over so fast, it left the baron’s sec men and Shabazz’s crew just standing there, gawking.

Sam was already up on her feet, jerking down her T-shirt to cover herself. Then she had her hands up, her feet moving, eager to kick some more ass if she got the opportunity.

“Grab that crazy bitch!” Shabazz shouted.

In a rush from all sides at once, the sec men overwhelmed the black woman. They held her arms pinned behind her back and fastened manacles to her ankles and a wide metal collar around her throat, all three joined by short lengths of chain. Trader had seen that type of restraint before. They were used to transport slaves to market and to lead the condemned to the gallows. Sam was then forced to her knees with blaster muzzles against her head. She grimaced in pain.

Trader watched Shabazz walk over to where the fat man lay like a beached whale. It was plenty hard to stay alive with a busted neck. Especially a break right up around the jawbone. Trader squinted hard at the body and decided that he still had a little bit of life left, after all. The blood-flecked lips moved, opening and closing. No sound came out.

Shabazz drew his Desert Eagle, aimed at the man’s upturned face and, without a word, fired once. There was a tremendous boom and flash; the head flew apart, and chunks of skull and brains pelted the shins of the assembled pirates. There was little if anything left of the fat man from the shoulders up, just a smoking crater in the earth.

“Now, get this stinking pile of nukeshit out of the road,” Shabazz snarled at the baron’s sec men.

“Nice stroke, Sam!” Trader shouted over to the woman, who despite her predicament and her discomfort, immediately brightened.

Shabazz pressed the Desert Eagle’s muzzle to the top of Trader’s head. “Won’t have no more of that hoo-ha, now,” he warned. “Any of your people act up from now on, and I’ll start chilling. Won’t be no fooling around. Just chilling. You understand?” Trader nodded.

Shabazz and two of his crew jerked Trader to his feet. He couldn’t have stood without their help. Before he completely regained his senses, they had clapped an iron collar around his neck and manacles around his ankles. As with Sam, all three iron bands were connected by lengths of stout chain. The chain sections were made short on purpose, so a captive couldn’t fully straighten or run far without falling on his or her face.

“Well, well,” Shabazz said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. “The mighty Trader ain’t so rad-blasted mighty now, is he?”

Trader said nothing. He was looking over the bodies of his crew and was grateful to see most of them were stirring now, either on their own, or thanks to kicks or punches from the enemy.

Most, but not all.

There were a dozen or so stretched out to one side who weren’t moving, and nobody was bothering to kick them awake. To Trader, it looked like the corpses were already going stiff. There was green foam around their open mouths, and their tongues were all swollen and sticking out black.

Because Trader always handpicked his crews, he knew all their names, knew if they liked to joke or if they were cold fish, knew if they had families waiting for them back at the cavern. At that instant, his sense of failure was personal and complete. This disaster was, ultimately, his responsibility. No sooner had the feeling of defeat surfaced than he shut it down, slammed the door on it. It was of no help to those who were still living. He had to keep his mind open, alert for the opportunity to make things right.

While he looked on, the baron’s sec men clapped the chains on every surviving member of his crew, then they forced everyone into a line. J.B. got shoved in behind him. Ahead of him was Samantha. The sec men linked up all the neck collars, running a long, single length of heavy chain through the iron rings welded at their fronts.

When this was done, and the sec men had moved away, J.B. said softly to Trader’s back, “We lost eleven.”

“Mebbe they’re the lucky ones,” Sam said.

Trader ignored the remark. Shabazz’s crew was splitting up and piling into the doors of his wags, which in the confusion and suddenness of the gas attack hadn’t been sealed. Nor had their external mines been armed. One by one, the pirates started up their engines. What pissed him off most of all was the sight of Levi Shabazz’s hairy head sticking out of War Wag One’s driver’s compartment vent hatch. The bastard was in control of everything he valued.

Under a heavy hand, the MCP’s engines roared to life. The exuberant Shabazz revved the wag hard and long, holding it at redline until Trader was sure it was going to throw a piston. It didn’t, though. Shabazz shifted it into low and drove it alongside the line of prisoners. When he reached the head of the line, he braked and shouted to his crew, “Hook them up!”

Two of the road pirates grabbed the first man in the line and connected his neck collar to the rear bumper of the MCP. Counting Trader, there were thirty-three captives in tow.

The sec men shot their blasters in the air as War Wag One started to lumber down the road. The chain jerked tight, making Trader and the others stumble forward, forcing them into lockstep behind.

Over his shoulder, Trader could hear J.B. cursing. He let loose with an unbroken string of expletives as they staggered in the cloud of dust and exhaust thrown up by the MCP.

He stole a quick glance behind. All the other commandeered wags were following.

“J.B.!” he growled. “J.B.!”

The swearing stopped. “Yeah, Trader.”

“Still got your watch?”

“Yeah.”

“How long until the internal boobies blow?”

Sam, hearing this, looked over her shoulder with wide eyes.

“We got a little more than three hours before they kick off.”

“Be plenty dark by then,” Sam said.

“No way, Panther,” J.B. said. “When those charges of mine go off, it’s going to look like dawn.”

“What about the externals?” Trader asked him. This to confirm his own belief.

“They aren’t set, far as I know.”

“Then we’ve got to figure out a way to arm at least a couple of them.”

“Going to be tough,” Sam interjected, “the way things stand now.”

“Pass the word,” Trader told both of them. “Send it up and down the line. Anybody who gets the chance should try to trip one of the switches, if they can do it without being seen.”

It took the better part of an hour for the column of prisoners and booty to creep down to the outskirts of Virtue Lake, an hour with no water, amid choking dust, under an afternoon sun that was ragingly hot. The line of wags approached the barricade with a mad honking of horns.

Because he was being towed in the middle of the chain gang, the only time Trader could see ahead was when the MCP angled around a bend in the road, and then only if the breeze blew the dirt cloud to one side. When this happened, he could make out a large gathering of people at the entrance to the ville, people waiting for them to arrive.

The assembled crowd sent up a rousing cheer as the MCP crept through the gate, then started to zigzag through the obstacle course.

The pelting of captives began almost at once. Yelling and hooting, the mob started to throw rocks and garbage. As Trader covered his head with his arms to keep from being coldcocked, something cold, brown and nasty splattered against his leg. From the stink of it, it was fresh pig shit. He saw the celebrants had plastic buckets of the stuff lined up at intervals along the parade route, and they were reaching in bare-handed for gobs to throw.

“Chill them! Chill them!” someone shouted.

Trader could see that not all of the townspeople were participating in the abuse. In fact very few of the assembled folk were actually throwing stuff. Most stood silently behind the active ones, watching in silence. The active ones also appeared to be the best dressed and the best fed.

Trader figured that they were the ones destined to share in the spoils of the robbery, the family members of the sec men and other Virtue Lake bigwigs. As for the mute, ragged mob standing behind them, he could only guess that they had been made to turn out at blasterpoint, or that it gave them some small comfort to see others in a worse plight than they were.

It was a miracle that no one in his crew was felled by one of the flying stones. Rocks whizzed past Trader’s head and hurtled into the crowd of tormentors on the other side of the road, which made them duck and so spoiled their aim.

When War Wag One reached the mini-malls with its human chain, it pulled into the left-hand parking lot, drove all the way to the end and stopped. The wags immediately behind followed it in and pulled up close before stopping, as well. Because there were so many vehicles, some were left out on the road, idling.

Shabazz jumped onto the roof of the MCP and shouted to the drivers directly behind him, “You park here.”

Then through cupped hands, he called to the wags still standing in the road, “Park in the other lot!” He waved them in that direction.

While those drivers turned their wags into the mall opposite, the ones who had pulled in behind the MCP shut off their engines. Then they exited the vehicles and slammed the doors shut.

Trader figured it was probably now or never when it came to arming the booby traps. Stuck in the middle of the line, there was no way he or J.B. or Sam could reach the nearest wags. They would have had to drag thirty other people along with them. The only person who really had a chance was the guy at the back end of the file. Because of his position, he had some freedom to move wide to the right or the left. His name was Betters. He was a sawed-off little guy who talked in a funny high voice, real squeaky and hoarse, like someone had his balls torqued down in a bench vise. Triple-mean bastard, though, because he had taken so much shit all his life about the way he talked. Betters didn’t hesitate when he saw his opportunity. He hopped to the right and dived under the nearest war wag, chain and all.

“Get that stupe out from under there!” Shabazz bellowed.

It took a minute or two for his crew to accomplish this because Betters had himself a good hold on the wag’s undercarriage, and because the crew members chained up next to him did everything they could to slow down the process, in the end, they had to pull him out by his heels.

Betters stood up to his full height and looked over at Trader, not smiling with his mouth, which was a grim little slit, but smiling with his eyes. The booby was armed.

The blastershot came out of nowhere. It came so unexpectedly it even made Trader flinch. It took poor Betters in the middle of the chest. A big puff of dust rose from his shirtfront, and a fist-sized gob of purple shit blew out the middle of his back. The man dropped dead on the spot.

“Cut him loose from the others,” Shabazz said, lowering the lever action Marlin carbine.

He turned to Trader and said, “I told you no more acting up, otherwise there’d be chilling.”

Trader watched the sec men as they uncoupled Betters’s corpse from the line. Mean little shit. Hard as granite rock, right down to his core. Not a man to grieve or shed tears for. A man to be proud of, though. One of Shabazz’s crew had squatted, halfheartedly looking under the wag, where Betters had crawled.

The pirate straightened almost immediately. Like his boss, he probably figured the dead guy didn’t have time to do any damage to the vehicle. Hell, he didn’t have anything but his bare hands to work with.

“Keep a close watch on the wags,” Shabazz told his drivers. “Keep the gaudy-house drunks from crawling on them or in them.”

With that, he climbed back in the MCP’s driver’s compartment and pulled the monster wag out of the lot and back on the road. The line of humans, less one, followed like a living tail.

About a quarter mile farther on, Shabazz pulled up next to a hut made of corrugated sheet metal, stuck his head out the driver’s vent and started to holler at the four men sitting on inverted five-gallon buckets in the strip of shade. They got up, but were in no hurry to do his bidding.

“Is that it?” Sam said, pointing at the rows of barred grates set into the ground. “Is that the jail?”

The jail facilities of Virtue Lake consisted of nothing more than a series of rectangular pits, six by six, hacked into the bedrock. There were about fifteen of them, all roofed over with iron bars. Inside there was no shelter from the sun, except early in the morning or late afternoon, no shelter from the chem rain, if it decided to pour.

One by one, the four jailers unlocked and opened the doors to half the cells, then hauled out the prisoners and let them go.

Dazed and weak-kneed, the freed men wandered off in the direction of the shantytown. There were no women in the pits, Trader noticed. He guessed female offenders were forced to serve out their sentences elsewhere, unless they were too old to attract even the blind drunks.

The jailers then unhooked Trader and his crew from the MCP and started pulling the heavy chain through their collars. As the crew members were released, the jailers used the butts of their shotguns to push them into the pits. The drop was no more than six feet. Trader could just stand up inside. The shorter J.B., who stood beside him, had plenty of headroom. In one corner of their cell was an overflowing shit bucket.

Shabazz sneered down at Trader through the open door. “Now, don’t go and make yourself too comfortable,” he said. “You won’t have these fine accommodations for long.” Then he booted the cell door hard over, and the bars clanged shut.

After Shabazz turned away, J.B. did a quick survey of the walls and floor.

“Well?” Trader said as the Armorer straightened.

“Good news is the rock isn’t that hard. Bad news is, we can’t use the plastique I got tucked into my bootsole.”

“Why’s that?”

“If I blow the bars above, the side walls will cave in on us. They’ll bury us alive. Not to mention the fact that a chunk of C-4 big enough to do the door will probably take our heads off, too. There’s no place to hide from the blast in here.”

Trader glared at the bars just over his head and then at the narrow walls. None of his crew was stupid enough to try it. Not while they still thought they had a chance to survive. “All the cells looked the same to me,” he said.

J.B. nodded. “Me, too.”

“Then nobody’s going to be able to blow the doors.”

“Not and live to tell the tale.”

“How long do we have on the internal charges?”

J.B. looked at his watch. “We got one hour and forty-nine minutes until all the wags blow.”