Chapter Nineteen

Shabazz nudged Zeal as Trader emerged from his quarters a full five minutes after a servant’s knock had awakened him. The man looked pounded. His face was deathly pale. There were pain lines deeply etched around his eyes. And he walked with an agonized, almost bowlegged gait.

“Rough night?” Zeal asked as his guest struggled up.

“I’ve had worse,” Trader replied.

“Yeah,” Shabazz said, “look on the bright side.”

Trader stared out the window and saw that it was still dark. “Up kind of early, aren’t we?”

“We’ve got some things to do before we get on the road,” Zeal told him. “Do you want something to eat before we go?”

It seemed to Trader that there was a taunt in the man’s voice. He glared at Zeal for a long moment, wishing he had a blade or blaster close to hand, then he grimaced and licked his dry lips. “No, thanks,” he said, shaking his head, “I think I’ll pass on breakfast, if it’s all the same.”

Outside the big house, the armored pink Lincoln awaited them in the courtyard, as did a fleet of sec wags and crews. Trader climbed into the back of the Lincoln with Zeal and Shabazz, then the whole entourage started to roll down the hill.

Looking at the expressions of his fellow passengers, Trader had the feeling that they both were on the verge of breaking into laughter. Their private joke wasn’t a secret, of course. It was still burning like a red-hot poker deep in Trader’s guts.

The pink Lincoln stopped at the bottom of the hill. Outside, wag doors slammed shut. Trader couldn’t see out the side or rear windows because they were completely blocked by armor plate, and the driver’s ob slit was too narrow and too far away.

“Don’t get your butt all in a twist,” Shabazz said to him. “We’re picking up a transport wag to carry your crew to the convoy.”

“Now, that’s thoughtful,” Trader said.

The Lincoln started to move again. At slow speed, they drove another half mile or so before they stopped again. When Shabazz cracked the rear door and got out, Trader could see they’d arrived at Virtue Lake’s subterranean prison.

“You let the jailers know which crew members you need,” Zeal told him. “I want only one or two to a wag. You just point them out, and the jailers will free them from the cells. Then tell your people to get into the transport. Tell them if they make trouble, they’ll get chilled.”

Trader slid across the seat and stiffly exited the pink wag. The jail cells were lit up by the glare of the surrounding sec wags’ headlights. He started walking toward the rows of cells. His backside felt like it had been augered. Repeatedly. It was the worst case of Montezuma’s he’d ever had.

What he had been ordered to do right now was even scarier. And certainly as painful. Zeal was making him choose the ones who were probably going to live—at least they were going to have a chance. By default, he was also choosing the ones who were going to die. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to do it, of course. A commander operating in a free-fire zone like Deathlands had to make those kinds of regrettable decisions too often, decisions forced on him by circumstances, by a strategic situation outside his control. It was just that he’d never faced the prospect of sending so many of his people to their deaths all at once.

As Trader walked along the cells, he saw faces he knew well; some of them he’d ridden with for many years. Faces hopeful, prayerful, even, of an impending release. Trader continued on without stopping. There was crushing disappointment, shock, maybe even an accusation of ultimate betrayal in their eyes.

“Hey, Trader! I’m down here!” a familiar voice said.

He looked down at Abe, who was staring at him through the bars, and shook his head. Trader walked on.

“Hey!” Abe shouted.

Trader didn’t stop. Walking on was a hard thing for him to do, hard to see the surprise and hurt on his old friend’s face.

Though all the members of the convoy were good at what they did, or they wouldn’t have come along, Trader could only take the very best for the job as he saw it. That meant leaving some of the regular drivers behind so he could take the men and women who were the better fighters in close quarters, with everything on the line. That meant taking the young ones.

He freed J.B. and Sam from their cell first. Two of the jailers reached down and hauled them up from the stinking pit.

“Tell your jailers to get these fucking shackles off them!” Trader shouted over at Zeal. The effort cost him mightily; for a second he thought he was going to pass out. But the wave of dizziness passed.

After their ankle chains had been removed, and Trader had waved off the jailer, J.B. took a good look at his face and exclaimed, “Man, what’d they do to you?”

“Tried to poison me last night,” Trader said matter-of-factly. “Guess I was too tough for them. Won’t give them another chance, though. I’m on a no-food diet until we put these bastards behind us.”

“Sure you’re all right?”

“My legs are still kind of shaky, but don’t worry about me, I’ll hold up just fine.”

Trader moved on down the line, calling for this one or that one. When he was done, more than half of his crew members remained in their cells. The freed ones stood close to him, awaiting their orders.

“We’re going to make a little unscheduled side trip with the baron and Shabazz,” he told them. “Seems he’s got a looting he needs some help with. Wants to use our war wags and transports to facilitate things.”

“What’s in it for us?” Sam asked.

“We help him,” Trader said, “and he lets us roll out of here. Our wags will have sec men and Shabazz’s crew inside. They’ll be the ones manning the weapons systems. From what I gather, the people in control of Zeal’s target aren’t too friendly. We can expect some serious blasterplay sometime today. Stay alert.”

Trader didn’t have to say more to them. And there was really nothing more he could say, under the circumstances. He couldn’t predict what was going to happen in the next few hours, so he couldn’t give them hard and fast orders. The situation was fluid, and likely to remain so for a while. The crew members knew to look for their main chance, and he trusted them to recognize it when the time came.

After he directed his people toward the transport, Trader got back in the pink wag.

Zeal’s wide grin showed off the lipstick on his front teeth. “Bet they were glad to see you,” he said. “At least the ones you let out of jail.”

Trader said nothing.

Miffed that he didn’t get a rise from his captive, the baron leaned over the back of the driver’s seat and smacked his wheelman on the side the head. “Let’s roll, you numskull!” he said.

It took another four minutes to reach the mini malls where the convoy was parked. The baron’s entourage paused while the tape barriers were removed, then the line of sec wags and the transport advanced down the main street and stopped across from the parking lots.

“It’s up to you which of your crew rides where,” Zeal told him as the other trader pushed the door open. “But I want you to ride in the big wag with Shabazz.”

Trader joined his people beside the transport, made his assignments and the crews filtered off to their respective wags. The first thing they did was to clear the external mines. They did it quickly and surreptitiously, flipping the detonator switches as they pretended to check drive shafts and Cat-track turnbuckles.

Once they had all the wags idling, Zeal leaned out of the rear of the Lincoln and waved for Trader to join him. When he stepped up, the baron said, “We need to make one stop before we leave the ville. Have your wag crews follow in line behind us.”

After Trader had arranged that, he got back in the Lincoln. Zeal’s driver led the motorcade around the block, and if Trader’s sense of direction was correct, in the direction of the dry lake. They didn’t travel far before stopping again. Shabazz exited the vehicle and gestured for Trader to get out, too.

When he did, he saw that they were in the ville’s warehouse area. A big group of workers was standing in front of the open bay doors of a long, windowless, concrete-block building.

“What’s all this?” Trader asked.

Zeal answered from the Lincoln’s back seat. “We need to make room for our new cargo,” he said. “Have your people open the doors of your wags’ cargo holds. My workers will unload it all for you.”

Trader shouldn’t have been stunned, but he was. At his sides, his hands clenched into fists. He was being ripped off, royally, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. His heart thudding in his throat, he walked down the line of idling wags, telling his people what had to be done.

Some gave him incredulous looks. Others looked angry, and they had a perfect right to be. After all, the assembled cargo was the result of months of their collective effort, and here they were giving it up without a fight.

Seeing the early-warning signs of protest in his drivers’ eyes, Trader held up his hand for silence. Now wasn’t the time.

Because the wags were so carefully and fully packed, and because the baron’s underfed, underpaid workers were in no particular hurry to get the job done, it took better than two hours for them to completely unload all the wags. For two hours, a stream of crates, boxes and drums flowed from the open doors of the convoy into Zeal’s warehouse. By the time the job was finished, the inside of the once empty building was choked, wall to wall, with liberated goods.

The sight of it all sitting there, all taken from him, and with nothing whatsoever to show for it, made Trader’s stomach clench hard. A stab of white-hot agony pierced his bowels, and he had to put out a hand to the side of the Lincoln or drop to his knees.

Whatever they’d done to him, one thing was sure—he wasn’t completely over it yet.

Shabazz was watching him intently and, from the smirk on his face, enjoying what he was seeing.

“If that’s the lot,” Zeal said as he exited the back of the Lincoln, “it’s time to go.”

“Come on, Trader,” Shabazz said. “You and me are riding together. If you’re real good, mebbe I’ll even let you drive.”

As Trader and Shabazz started for the MCP, Zeal headed for one of the smaller war wags. The baron waved impatiently at the sec car parked alongside. The back door of the wag popped open, and a tall, skinny figure was thrust out, into the waiting arms of a pair of sec men. The sec men then pushed the old man in the strangely cut coat and tall leather boots toward the war wag ahead of Zeal, who gave him a series of cuffs to speed him up.

Trader only had that fleeting, ultimately forgettable glimpse of the old man before he was shoved headlong through the doorway of War Wag One by Levi Shabazz. In the corridor inside, J.B. and Sam were waiting for him. They both looked highly agitated.

“For nuke’s sake, just keep it together,” he said as he limped past them. “Don’t do anything crazy. Don’t do anything at all.”

“But these bastards robbed us!” Sam said as she fell in behind him.

“We can replace the barter goods,” Trader told her. “We gotta bide our time if we want to turn this thing around.”

“What are you jabbering about?” Shabazz said as he climbed into the corridor. “Get up forward, the lot of you.” J.B. and Sam followed Trader up the narrow hall. He couldn’t help but check out each open doorway. It pissed him off to see Shabazz’s crew at every turn, nosing around in the bunk rooms, turning the galley upside down. Anything not nailed down was going to be stolen or eaten—that was for sure. What fried Trader the most, though, was seeing the road pirates monkeying around with the MCP’s various weapons—fingering the rockets, pawing the machine guns in their blisters, even toying with the rear-firing cannons. He identified deeply with this machine, and with its firepower, which was, after all, a product of his own imagination and sweat.

To Trader, it felt like they were playing with his privates.

There was plenty of room in the MCP’s driver’s compartment for all of them. They could stand or they could sit in the jump seats along the rear wall. The first thing Shabazz did was to shoo his crewman out of the driver’s seat.

“Stand over there by the door,” he ordered the man as he plopped down in the worn contour chair behind the steering yoke. “And keep your blaster pointed at these three.”

The crewman drew his wheelgun from its shoulder holster, aimed the double-action .38 Colt at belt height and held it steady.

“You can fill me in on the forward-facing fire controls as we go,” Shabazz told Trader over his shoulder. With that, he gunned the big engines, and with a lurch, they set off at the head of the file.

The driver’s compartment window hatches were undogged and tipped up to let in the breeze. Trader watched the MCP’s headlight beams sweep over the ville. When they rumbled past the jails again, Shabazz honked the air horn at the jailers, who waved and whistled back at them. The sun was just breaking over the tops of the distant hills when they reached the barricade. Shabazz had to slow down considerably to wind his way through the obstacle course of offset concrete bulwarks.

The violent lurching from side to side started Trader feeling weak again. He thought for a second he was going to have to make a mad rush for the head. Then he belched, and lava came up in the back of his throat. It left an evil taste in his mouth—metallic, rancid. He gritted his teeth and swallowed hard.

“What does this red button do?” Shabazz asked, holding his thumb over the cannon trigger.

Trader didn’t feel up to explaining. “J.B.,” he said, “you tell him. Tell him anything he wants to know.”

“That’s right, J.B., you tell ole Shabazz all about it.”

Trader was only half listening as the Armorer detailed the sighting and fire control for the fixed cannons. It was only the beginning of a long interrogatory. Shabazz wanted to know about the rocket pods, about the Cat tracks, about the maximum ramming speed.

“Sounds like you’ve got big plans for War Wag One,” J.B. commented.

“Sure do.”

Sensing an opportunity, Trader pulled himself together.

“Yeah, so how about your finally letting us in on them? After all, we’re all in this together now.”

Shabazz reflected on this for a few seconds, then said, “Sure. Why not. Place we’re headed is a pass. It’s mebbe twenty-five klicks from here. Guarded by a band of inbred maggots.”

“These inbreds, they’re what’s keeping you from what you’re after?” Trader asked.

“Yeah, they’re blocking the way to Spearpoint.”

Sam and J.B. glanced at Trader. The question on both of their faces was the same: was this shit for real? He shrugged.

Hell if he knew.

Hell if he cared.

“Must be some triple-tough maggots if you need something like the MCP to get through them,” Trader said to Shabazz.

“They got the place well defended. There are steep rock walls on either side of the road, makes it like driving in a ditch. These inbreds have cut deep trenches across the road to trap any wags trying to use it. They got heavy-caliber machine guns, and the droolie bastards know how to use them. It’s like a shooting gallery.”

“A setup like that would make it pretty tough going for Zeal’s regular sec wags,” J.B. said.

“Make it suicide,” Shabazz agreed. “I know because we already tried that, of course.”

“Of course,” Trader said. “So, that means these inbreds are probably not going to be surprised to see you again.”

“Mebbe not, but when they see what we brought with us this time, it should make them squirt shit.”

Trader thought about Ryan, Poet and Hun, about how maybe they were already chilled. About even if they weren’t, how slim the chances were of their being able to stop and defeat an entire convoy. If there was no rescue attempt forthcoming, Trader and the others were going to have to try to overpower Shabazz and his crew without a diversion from the outside.

The bearlike trader had to have been reading his mind.

Over his shoulder, Shabazz called out to his crewman, “Better put some leg irons on these three. And make triple sure the black bitch is cuffed good and tight. Hate to see our passengers get themselves into trouble.”