Chapter Seven

 

 

 

The two men walked quietly through the early-morning forest. It had been cold in the middle part of the night, and dew was dripping from the dark needles of the pines. The trail was soft with mulched leaves, making it easy to keep silent.

 

At a turn in the track they surprised a doe with a fawn, feeding from the tender shoots in the undergrowth. One of the men instinctively raised a weathered old Armalite rifle to his shoulder, then shook his head and lowered it again.

 

"Might as well beat a drum to let the sons of bitches know we're coming," he said.

 

The deer stared at the two human intruders with large, frightened eyes, then spun and darted off into the protection of the shadows, the little fawn following at his heels in a gawky, skipping leap.

 

"Your lucky day, young fellow," Abe said, his breath feathering out in front of him.

 

 

 

THE VILLE WAS a nameless collection of scattered huts, around the sides of a bowl-shaped valley. A wide river flowed flatly through the settlement, with plum trout rising to the swarms of flies in the muddy hollows.

 

The store was a converted church, though the weather had done most of the actual converting. Lightning had felled the top of the spire, and a quake had brought down the rear part of the tower. The small stained-glass window, dedicated to a long-dead worthy, had disintegrated into dusty, colored splinters. A sign, protected by the porch, still proclaimed Today Belongs to Man but Forever Belongs to the Almighty.

 

There had been extensive logging in that part of the Cascades during the past few years before skydark, and the woods were still veined with the faint remnants of the trails. One of them brought Trader and Abe out onto a shallow promontory, overlooking the ragtag ville.

 

They stood together, concealed by the fringe of shadow, checking the place out.

 

"Man who rushes in is the man who gets hisself carried out," the older man muttered.

 

"True," Abe agreed, his right hand resting on the butt of the big Colt Python strapped to his hip. His left hand was plucking nervously at his drooping mustache.

 

On their previous visit, when they'd been given the pulque, there had been elements in the place that had made Abe feel distinctly uncomfortable.

 

In the old times, with the two war wags, Abe recalled visiting hamlets in the dark backwoods of the Smokies and the Shens, blue-misted, triple-poor places.

 

This place was reminiscent of those poverty shacks.

 

There'd been a boy, seeming close to fifteen, shuffling around the store with a broom. It had been several minutes before Abe had spotted what was wrong with the lad. His feet were on backward, facing behind him.

 

And there had been the group sitting around the potbellied stove, half a dozen men, all of them looking as if they were members of the same inbred family. They had thin hair, the color of rain-beat straw, and pale blue eyes with dropping lids.

 

When Abe and Trader had first walked into the place, there had been a sudden silence so intense that you could have heard a moth fart.

 

When they finally left, Trader had said that he had thought for a moment it was going to be a time to put the top up and the hammer down.

 

There'd been comments about outlanders, not quite loud enough to be heard, that produced noisy laughter and much spitting and hawking.

 

Abe had wanted to get out as quick and easy as possible, but it was like he feared. Trader wasn't the sort of man to turn his back on trouble.

 

After downing the first slug of the milky homebrewed liquor, Trader had walked to stand by the group.

 

"Sounds to me like there's some good jokes being told," he said, as quiet as a rattler moving through soft sand. "Like a good joke myself. How about telling them to me and my friend here?"

 

One of the men stood, uncoiling from an ancient armchair with rusting springs sticking out of it. Abe had put him at way over seven feet, with a myopic stoop. He carried a sword at his belt, with filthy golden tassels dangling from the hilt.

 

"Outlanders don't get to hear jokes." The voice seemed to come from the bottom of a dry well.

 

"That so?"

 

"Yeah."

 

Trader cradled the Armalite in his arms like a mother with her firstborn child. He stared into the man's face and nodded.

 

"Then you'd better keep the jokes quiet until after we've gone. That way we don't hear anything we shouldn't hear, and nobody gets to be hurt."

 

Abe waited while seconds stretched into millennia. The hairs at his nape were crawling with a life of their own. He was ready to draw and dive behind a sack of dried peas, putting a couple of rounds into the group of men.

 

But the moment passed.

 

The giant glanced at his friends, but he didn't see any great desire to get involved in something that would leave blood on the floor. Possibly their blood.

 

 

 

"TRADER?"

 

"Yeah, what is it?"

 

"We just going to walk in and take what we want?"

 

"Sure are Abe, isn't it?"

 

"Yeah."

 

Trader shook his head. "My memory's getting like an interstate sign. Crammed full of holes."

 

"What is it that we want?"

 

"Jug or two of that home brew. Salt. Saw some apples. Wouldn't mind if they got some fresh milk or butter and a new-baked loaf or two."

 

"Didn't see any of that when we were there before. Just a lot of dirt and some crazes who looked like they all had the same father and a load of different mothers."

 

Trader laughed and slapped Abe on the shoulder, nearly knocking him off his feet. "Might not be enough of you to feed a bear cub, Abe, but you're a ballsy little bastard. Now, let's go kick the rednecks' asses.

 

 

 

ABE BLINKED. It was like a bad dream, where you think you've been someplace before.

 

The store was precisely the same as it had been for their previous visit. Same old woman leaned on the filthy counter, and the same bunch of men sat around the stove.

 

And there was the same silence when he and Trader walked in, broken by the enormously tall man, sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him.

 

"Well, looky, looky here. If it's not Daddy Outlander and little baby Outlander, come to see who's been sleeping in their beds."

 

Trader ignored the man. He walked up to the counter and rapped on it with the butt of the rifle, jerking the old woman out of a daydream.

 

"Got any bread?"

 

"Makin' some 'morrow," she mumbled.

 

"So you can just fuck off in the forest and find yourself a good pile of bark and some dead beetles and make do with that, Daddy Outlander." The others greeted the man's heavy-handed attempt at a joke with sycophantic laughter.

 

Trader turned around. There was a tension to his wiry, muscular body that Abe remembered from times past. He readied himself for the violence that he guessed was waiting in the wings to run onto the stage.

 

"Enough," Trader said.

 

"Now, what does that mean, old-timer?"

 

Chairs scraped back and everyone got to their feet. The old woman behind the counter hastily took down a framed picture of a racehorse.

 

"It means that we came in here, real peaceable, not looking for any sort of trouble."

 

Which wasn't quite true. The idea had been to go in and take what they wanted by threat of arms. But things had moved so far and so fast that it didn't much matter.

 

"Might not want trouble, you gray-haired old bastard, but you sure found it now." A cackle of laughter erupted from the smallest of the litter, a youth with a scar at the corner of his mouth, skinnier even than Abe.

 

"Yeah. Insults our ville, don't he?" A fatter man cracked his knuckles while he grinned at Trader and Abe.

 

"This your ville, is it?" Trader asked, courteous and polite, as if he were asking a priest the time of day.

 

"Sure is."

 

"My mistake, friend. I mistook it for a shithole in the dirt filled with dead worms that used to fuck their grandmothers."

 

Trader's words, delivered with the same gentle calm, hung in the air, almost as if he'd somehow carved them into the slabs of dusty sunlight that filtered through the open door.

 

"That about does it," Abe whispered.

 

The immensely tall man drew his sword from its sheath and flourished it with such vigor that he sliced open a bag of nails, hanging from the rafters. He dodged them as they spilled around him, his blue eyes fixed on Trader.

 

"You You're dead, old man. You're walking around and suckin' air, but you're deader than a rusty bucket. Was goin' to just kick you around some, but not now."

 

"Loudest-talking corpse I ever did see, Abe," Trader commented, firing the Annalite from the hip.

 

The boom of the blaster was deafening in the small building. The bullet hit the giant through the center of his belly and exited behind in a spray of blood and torn intestines, breaking a window at the side of the store.

 

"Land o'Goshen!" the old woman exclaimed, her eyes rolling up in their sockets as she fell to the floor behind the counter in a dead faint.

 

"You shot me, friend," the tall man said, left hand exploring the neat hole just above his belt buckle.

 

"I'll shoot anyone makes a bad move." Trader covered the other five with the Annalite. "Get us some food, Abe, if you can find anything in this midden worth the eating or drinking."

 

"You fuckin' killed me. No call Hurts like a kinda spear in me." His face was working with shock and pain. "Pay for this, you will. Both of you. Won't just walk away"

 

"Watch us. Better put that steel on the floor, young fellow. Right now!" The crack of command rang out.

 

The fat young man dropped the straight razor from his right hand, so clumsily that he almost managed to cut himself. "You'll be fine, Luke."

 

"Not unless you got a good doctor in this place, son," Trader said. "Hole that bullet made in his back means you'll be burying him before sunset."

 

The sword fell from the weakening fingers, point first, sticking in the splintered planks of the floor, where it quivered for a few seconds until it became still.

 

Abe hadn't found much worth taking, but he'd snatched two green bottles of what he hoped were pulque as well as some jerky and a handful of biscuits. "Best get out, Trader," he said.

 

The skinniest of the group facing them gave a short, barking laugh. "Trader! Who you joshin', stranger? Trader died ten years back."

 

"Then your friend here got himself chilled by a ghost," Trader replied, backing toward the door, making sure that Abe was covered by the Armalite.

 

"Company out here," Abe stated, peering through the dusty glass of the door into the street. "Old man, three women and one I ain't sure of."

 

"Carrying?"

 

"One's got a sawed-down. The old man." Abe felt a momentary pang of worry as he realized that the "old" man was probably younger than Trader. "The others don't have any weapons, but it won't take long."

 

"You bastards are dead for that," said one of the shocked group of men, watching their friend down and dying. "Hunt you like the dogs you are."

 

"Heard that a damned lot of times." Trader glanced over his shoulder at Abe. "Take out the guy carrying the scattergun, and we'll be able to shake the friendly mud of this wholesome ville off our boots."

 

Abe inched out of the door, aware of a hum of movement, like a wasp nest after someone's poked a stick inside it. The old-timer with the sawed-down looked at him, seeing the gleaming blaster in his hand. He turned on his heel and scuttled away, realizing that he was on a loser.

 

"Gone," Abe called.

 

"Fine." Trader swiveled the Armalite across the men. "First one to stick his nose out the door gets it blown away. Not a threat. A promise."

 

"You are the Trader, aren't you?" one of them said wonderingly.

 

"So they say." He fired a bullet into the ceiling, shaking down the mummified corpse of a large brown rat and several pounds of powdery rust.

 

Then he was outside, running fast, heading around the corner of the ruined church toward the trees, Abe close at his heels. Someone fired a single echoing shot from a black-powder musket, but the ball went nowhere near either of them.

 

A lean mongrel snarled and snapped at Trader, but he smashed its skull open with the butt of the rifle, not even breaking step.

 

"Was it worth it, Trader?" Abe panted, as they got among the friendly shelter of the pines. "Didn't get away with much worth having."

 

"Always worth it. You don't try, then you don't succeed, do you?"

 

Far behind them they could hear shouts and a single, piercing woman's scream. Abe guessed it was either the dying man's wife or sister or mother or daughter. In a ville like that it could have been any combination of the four.

 

And a man's voice, like a bear, bellowed, "You can run, but you can't hide from us, outlanders! We know the woods and the valleys, and we'll catch you."

 

"Fuck off!" Trader shouted, bending over, leaning against a tree, fighting for breath.

 

"Blood for blood" The howl followed them as they struck the steep, winding trail that would lead back safely to their hidden camp.

 

The biting anger in the voice pursued Abe into his dreams that night.