Chapter Thirteen

Trader was helpless, chained by the neck to the base of the refinery’s interior wall. It was all he could do to tear his gaze from the slowly rotating tank and the long line of leaping blue flames. He forced himself to look elsewhere, to look for a way to save those in his crew who still had a hope in hell of surviving. It was hard for him to concentrate, surrounded by awesome noise and head-spinning stink.

In his wide travels, Trader had toured the insides of a few of Deathland’s functioning refineries, but none of them had operated on anywhere near this scale. Zeal, it seemed, was trying to make up for the lack of quality with quantity. The refinery’s main structure was three stories tall; the ceiling high overhead was mostly obscured by the sides of towering steel processing and holding tanks, by the series of metal catwalks that stair-stepped them and by the blue exhaust haze that hung below the rafters. Above the steady, grinding roar of pumps and blowers was the shrill, cluttering whistle of steam safety valves pushed to their limits. The once polished concrete floor was crazed and chipped, and stained by caustic chemicals.

Everywhere Trader looked, the machinery and the pipework was held together with duct tape, rags and baling wire. Zeal’s refinery was falling to pieces in a million places, all at once. In a place this large, there were many hundreds of thousands of parts that could fail, and when they eventually did, if they couldn’t be replaced, they had to be repaired with whatever was at hand. Accordingly, separated pipe joins and cracked valve casings were turned into great lumpy gnarls of rust that constantly hissed or dripped, or did both.

Though the plant had been originally designed to be comp automated, Trader knew that skydark’s global electromagnetic surge had to have cooked all of its printed circuits, the same way it had cooked every other circuit that wasn’t safely tucked away in a deeply buried, blast-hardened bunker. In order to make the place functional again, Virtue Lake’s nukecaust survivors had had to disconnect all the useless comp controls and jury-rig manual operation. Sometime thereafter, Trader decided, the refinery’s network of conveyor belts had to have fallen apart. There was simply nothing available that was strong enough to replace them, though there was still some evidence that attempts had been made. Tanned animal skins just couldn’t withstand the weight of fuel drums. With the conveyor system permanently out of commission, the heaviest items in the place, the fully loaded fifty-five gallon barrels of gasoline, were moved by human power. Slave power.

Trader watched as laborers struggled to lift their impossible burdens. Some of them were laughing uncontrollably, their minds numbed and befuddled by the overwhelming sulfurous stench of cooking crude oil. Some laughed even as they were flogged to their knees by their pinstripe-overalled overseers.

The look-see was fruitless. Trader saw no opportunities for escape. He did have a strong sense of the refinery’s impending total collapse. Roof. Walls. Everything finally vibrating apart and ending up in a heap and cloud of dust.

Not that he figured to live long enough to see it.

Like the rest of his crew, he sat with his back against the refinery’s interior wall, with his butt on the cold concrete. The baron had separated him from the others, and chained him by the neck to a heavy steel I beam. The crew members were connected to one another by a long chain that passed through their ankle restraints. In front of them was a stainless-steel tank ten feet high and fifteen feet long. Its entire surface, except for the ends, was blackened with soot. The tank had been turned so it rested horizontally, and the large pins at either end were attached to a series of gears, which were driven by a gas engine, and allowed the huge tank to be rotated.

It was rotating now at slow speed, one revolution every thirty seconds or so.

And as it revolved, something inside thumped.

And screamed.

It screamed loudly enough to be heard over the deafening roar of the cracking plant.

The “something” went by the name of Wisehart. He was a balding, bearded man who’d ridden with Trader for three years, working as a mechanic, driver, gunner, a jack-of-all-trades. Rumor had it that Wisehart had three or four wives spread out over the breadth of Deathlands, and a passel of kids who were going to inherit his stocky frame, wide nose and evil sense of humor. Short of a miracle, it looked like Wisehart had sired his last.

Under the belly of the elevated tank and running its full length was a row of gas burners, and from the row of burners a wall of blue flame leaped up a good four feet.

Trader could hear the thunk-thunk-thunk of Wisehart’s bare feet hitting the inside of the wall of the tank as he jogged to keep from coming in direct contact with the red-hot steel.

Baron Zeal teetered over to where Trader sat and said, “Normally I would gradually decrease the tank’s rotational speed, and increase the height of the flame. To keep his feet hard to it. In this case, however, I don’t have the time to waste. Stop the tank and drop the flame!” he directed two of the bosses.

The tank stopped turning, and the fifteen-foot row of gas flame winked out.

The baron stepped over to the porthole-type door at one end of the tank and pounded on it with his fist. “Where are the wags boobied?” he shouted at the steel. “How do we disarm them? Tell me now and I’ll let you out.”

A gabble of sounds came from within the cylinder, high-pitched, unintelligible.

“I think we’ve finally cracked your precious code,” Zeal taunted Trader.

Then to Shabazz, he said, “Get the damned door open, so we can hear what he’s got to say.”

The rogue trader undogged the door and swung it back.

Smoke and steam rushed out, as did the sweet, unmistakable smell of roasted flesh, which cut through the refinery’s petrochemical fog like a knife blade.

Zeal reached in the doorway and snatched hold of the man inside. He took him by the root hairs of his beard and pulled his head out of the circular opening. Wisehart’s face was a crimson color, the fringe of hair above his ears drenched in sweat. “Well?” the baron demanded. “What are you saying? Let’s hear it!”

“I said, ‘Fuck you, sir,’” Wisehart croaked from his parched throat. “Fuck you very much, and can I go around again?”

Trader’s men and women broke out in a chorus of hooting laughter, stamped their feet and rattled their chains.

With a brutal shove, the baron forced Wisehart’s head back inside the tank, then slammed the door shut himself. “Turn on the heat,” he told the bosses. “Turn it up to half.”

As the line of flame licked along the underside of the tank, Zeal again approached the grim-faced Trader. “Like I said,” he went on, “I usually stretch the whole process out, varying the speed of rotation and the temperature. I find that I get the best results over a three-to four-day period.”

From inside the tank, there came a terrible cry, then a violent thumping as Wisehart tried to jump away from the heat.

“You’ve already seen some of my finest work.”

Trader glared at Zeal. No way was he going to ask what the bastard was prattling on about.

“On my chimney,” the baron explained. “Oh, I stumbled onto it, really. Just playing around here in the refinery. I learned that after a certain number of hours of intermittent slow roasting, the muscles of the human face lock up permanently. The end product makes a most unusual and striking decoration, don’t you think?”

Trader’s eyes glittered as he recalled the double row of tortured heads. Inside the tank, Wisehart’s screams were becoming more and more frantic.

“I don’t think he’s going to talk, after all,” Zeal said with a heavy sigh.

The baron nodded at the bosses, who cranked the flame up to the maximum. The resulting heat was so intense that the crew cringed against the wall, raising their arms to shield their faces. Within the smooth-walled tank, there was nowhere to shrink to.

Trader stifled the urge to cover his ears and block out the terrible shrill screams, something Zeal would have taken pleasure in seeing. Wisehart knew he was going to die the moment he was selected by the baron. He knew that the code of silence was part of what Trader demanded of his crews. No matter what was done to you, you could never, ever give anything up.

It took several more interminable minutes before the thumping and screaming finally stopped. Over the roar of the flames and the hiss of the gas jets, Trader could hear the sizzle of flesh as it cooked furiously.

After another minute or two, Zeal ordered the fire dropped and the tank reopened. This time, dense clouds of rank smoke poured out the doorway. Smoke from burned hair, clothing, skin, all mixed together.

The bosses reached into the opening with pairs of long-handled iron tongs and with considerable effort pulled out the smoking body and dumped it unceremoniously on the concrete floor. The eyeballs were cooked dead white, like a poached trout’s. Half the face had been scorched off, right down to the red skull bone.

Not entirely a success, from an artistic standpoint.

But every member of Trader’s crew rose to his or her feet and began to cheer and clap hands, applause for the dead man’s courage. He had kept to the creed.

The display of respect and defiance hit Zeal hard. Trader noted anger, even outrage on his hideously painted face. This was the very last thing he had expected to see.

“You!” the baron yelled at Samantha, jabbing a finger in her face. “You’re next.”

J.B. scrambled to his feet. “No, take me!” he shouted.

“No, over here,” said someone at the other end of the chain. “I’m up for it!”

Then, as if on cue, all thirty-one of them, Trader included, were yelling the same thing, rattling their chains at him, mocking him.

“Take me! Take me!”

It warmed the cockles of Trader’s flintlike heart.

“Zeal!” Abe hollered out. “You’re just jealous ‘cause she’s got a better ass than you do!”

“Hers has probably been rode less, too!” J.B. bellowed through his cupped hands.

Trader thought the baron was going to have a stroke. His face purpled, and he staggered on his four-inch heels as he waved his arms wildly about. “I’ll cook you all!” he shouted at them. “I’ll melt you down to tallow and make candles out of you! I’ll burn every one of you insolent bastards twice!”

Shabazz put a hand on Zeal’s shoulder, then leaned close and whispered something in his ear. The baron stiffened. He stopped waving his arms, and he closed his open mouth. Shabazz whispered some more. From the ugly look on his face, it was something mean.

After a moment of one-sided discussion, Zeal seemed to get himself under control. When he turned and stared at Shabazz, the pirate trader nodded, a sly smile spreading over his hairy mug.

“All right, Trader,” Zeal said, “you’ve made your point. None of your crew will talk, even if I roast every one of them for a week. If there’s no way to disable the mines, then we can’t use your wags. Bottom line is, we need your wags. Shabazz and me are ready to do business with you.”

Trader’s crew didn’t cheer the victory, even though their necks had just been saved. They knew better than to make a ruckus when their boss was closing a deal.

Trader took the measure of Zeal’s face. What had made him change his mind about chilling them all? What could Shabazz have told him? Under the smeared blue-and-purple war paint, the clotted black mascara, there was an evil luster to the man’s eyes.

Whatever it was, it was nothing but trouble; Trader was sure.

From the frying pan into the fire—that kind of trouble.