Chapter Ten

 

 

 

The third day of the journey began with a bright sun peeking over the hills to the east.

 

"Hope this weather lasts," J.B. said, wiping the skillet with a handful of fine white sand.

 

Ryan was busily stamping out the glowing, smoldering remnants of their morning cooking fire. "I figure that the farther north and west we drive in the wag, the colder and wetter it's going to become."

 

The Armorer blew into the pan, removing the last particles of dust. "Yeah. The other thing that it's going to become is hard traveling if we don't get ourselves some more gas in the next day or so."

 

"I always liked walking," Ryan said.

 

"I noticed that. Ever since we first met up, Ryan. I've known you as a man who liked walking. Just about as much as a pig likes flying."

 

 

 

DURANGO, AND THEN up on 666 across Utah and into Nevada. That was just about as far as they'd bothered to make any detailed plans. Both of them knew that trying to schedule a long journey of more than three or four days over any part of Deathlands was about as pointless as Russian roulette. Often with the same result.

 

There could be a severe chem storm, with teeming rain so acid that it would strip the paint off a wag in forty minutes or a man's flesh from his bones in a great deal less. Or quakes or one of the volatile volcanoes that had been brought back to life by the massive nukings of skydark, fires or flash floods, falling trees or major earth slips. Or you might even run into an unmarked radiation hot spot.

 

And that didn't include the strong probability of encountering big trouble from either four-legged or two-legged animals. Norms or muties. Or both.

 

Trader used to say that a man who planned anything beyond the end of his own nose was likely to have it hacked off.

 

 

 

"MORE TREES." Ryan was driving, watching the changing landscape through the narrow ob slit at the front of the LAV-25. J.B. sat in the top of the turret, head and shoulders out in the fresh morning air. His fedora had been jammed on tight to avoid its being snatched off by the breeze.

 

"Say again." The Armorer wasn't bothering to wear his earphones. Apart from a couple of tumbledown and isolated hunters' cabins set way back off the blacktop, they still had seen no sign of human life.

 

"Getting plenty of trees now."

 

"Yeah."

 

Ryan wished he hadn't bothered to say anything at all. It was such an obvious comment. But they hadn't exchanged a single word for over an hour, and he felt a slight social pressure to keep the contact open.

 

"Colder, too."

 

"Yeah."

 

There had been a faint drizzle falling for an hour or so, from about the time they approached what would have been the old state line into Colorado. It had made the highway slick and treacherous, particularly in places where the gradient had been affected by quakes or earth shifts.

 

At an isolated crossroads, miles from anywhere, Ryan had noticed the tracks of another wag. He'd slowed, drawing J.B.'s attention to them. The Armorer had climbed out on the top of the eight-wheeler, reporting that they looked like threadbare tires off a four-by.

 

Ever since the long winters, motorized transport had been at a premium. The metal-working skills were still there to repair the mechanics of the remaining vehicles, but making tires when the supply of rubber in Deathlands was almost nonexistent was a lot more difficult.

 

And gas that even remotely approached the purity of predark supplies couldn't be found anywhere. But crude processing plants down in west Texas and in Louisiana offered a product that just about reached acceptability.

 

One of Trader's great strengths had been based on the time he'd found vast supplies of gas from before skydark, a hundred miles or more north of Boston. Buried in a massive military installation, like a redoubt, there'd been enough to keep the pair of powerful war wags, which he'd discovered in the Apps a quarter century earlier, on the road for many years.

 

Ryan found his mind turning more and more toward the elusive figure of his old leader.

 

For many months he had been utterly convinced that Trader was dead, gone off like a wounded animal into the forest to seek a quiet, dark place to suffer through the last agonies of what most of the crews of the war wags had been certain was an abdominal rad cancer.

 

The whispers around the villes, frontier pestholes and gaudies that the Trader still lived had come to Ryan like bolts from the clear blue sky.

 

And his first reaction had been that this was all the stuff of legend.

 

Then the whispers had become more frequent, about a grizzled man, short on temper and long on nerve, carrying the ubiquitous battered Armalite among the flaming fall leaves of New England; down on the coral keys of the extreme southeast; shuffling through the ghoul-haunted streets of the old Windy City; trapping beaver in the Shens; clearing out some comanchero bandits from a ville a spit away from the Grandee; fighting a duel with a trio of weird Mohawk sisters perched among the spidery remnants of a ninety-story skyscraper in the burned-out blocks of lower Manhattan.

 

Stories, stories, stories.

 

It was the repetition of these mythic tales that began to preoccupy the thoughts of Abe, until the skinny ex-gunner couldn't live with the doubts. He needed to go and turn them into certainties, one way or the other.

 

As the wag rolled toward Durango, J.B. was at the controls, leaving Ryan plenty of time for his own thoughts, riding shotgun across a deserted landscape.

 

But he still couldn't get his mind clear on what he really thought about Trader. The message now removed any doubts that the old man was still this side of the dark river. And that, if things went well, Ryan and the Armorer might be seeing him again within the next couple of weeks.

 

"Then what?" The words were whipped away by the afternoon breeze, into the pine-scented air.

 

Would Trader expect them to rejoin him? Or would he want to assume the leadership of their small group? Neither of them were ideal options for Ryan.

 

In fact, he figured that he didn't truly relish either of them at all.

 

 

 

THE BLACKTOP RAN across a stretch of open prairie, a broad plateau of sun-bleached turf surrounded by banks of tall, dark pines. J.B. was driving the big wag.

 

"Looks like someone's been fanning the grass here," he called back to Ryan.

 

"Yeah. Noticed. But it seems from up here like some kind of army's been marching through. Grass is all trampled down and muddied."

 

There was a swath of worn turf at least four hundred yards wide, stretching from east to west, as far as Ryan could see. As the LAV went closer, he noticed that there were piles of animal droppings everywhere.

 

"Cattle," he shouted. "See the hoof marks as well as the shit. Lot of cattle."

 

"Could be one of the local tribes of native Americans," J.B. replied. "Mebbe moving from one hunting ground to another, taking all their animals with them."

 

Ryan stood up higher to get a better look, steadying himself with both hands on the sides of the turret. If the Armorer was right, then it had to be a tribe of hundreds and hundreds of people to leave a track of that size.

 

To one side of the open space, nearly in among the fringe of the forest, he could see half a dozen coyotes, squabbling over a raggled carcass of what looked to be a calf. But it was too far away to be certain.

 

"Any villes round here?" he yelled.

 

"Don't have the maps with me. Can you come down and get them? Check it out."

 

Ryan found the tattered atlas and traced the thin wavering lines with his forefinger, trying to work out just where they'd gotten to. You didn't travel long in Deathlands before realizing the old road maps were only the most rudimentary guides to human habitation.

 

Some of the biggest cities of the predark United States, such as Washington, D.C., itself, had been vaporized in the first few hours of the final megawar. Most had been hit hard and repeatedly, sometimes destroying the buildings. In other cases the enemy had utilized neutron technology that chilled all life but left the artifacts untouched.

 

Many of the smaller settlements had vanished forever, particularly those that were sited close to any of the legion of missile bases that composed the bedrock for the Totality Concept of national defence.

 

"There's a place called Wetherill Springs. Dot on the highway. Ten miles or so from here."

 

"Engine's run a it hot."

 

"Say again. Use the mike." He dropped the atlas back down into the cabin of the wag and put on the earphones to listen to J.B.'s voice.

 

"Said that the engine's starting to run hot. I topped up the oil last night, and it took more than I figured it would. Could mean trouble."

 

Having originally taken the LAV-25 as part of the spoils of a firefight, Ryan knew how lucky they were to have it at their disposal for their odyssey to Seattle. It was a damnably long journey, and to try to complete it on foot would have come close to being impossible. If the wag broke down on them now, in such an isolated region, it would be difficult even to try to steal some alternative form of transport.

 

And it would likely mean the spilling of blood.

 

The highway passed across the plateau, then snaked away into the woods. It commenced to climb within the mile, going along the eastern flank of a narrow valley with a white river foaming at its bottom. There was a row of roofless, windowless vacation cabins on the far side of the water, reached by a rusting bridge.

 

Ryan considered suggesting an early halt there for the night, but the derelict buildings offered little cover.

 

"Good grade ahead," J.B. shouted.

 

Ryan had taken off the earphones again, sitting right out on top, one arm hanging onto the muzzle of the cannon. He'd hoped that they'd have reached the large ville of Durango by that evening, but the blacktop had been in poor condition earlier in the day and it had slowed them. If Wetherill Springs really existed, it might be the best they could hope for.

 

The road became steep, and Ryan could feel the shuddering of the big engine as it labored upward. Twice the gears slipped, and he heard J.B.'s fluent cursing.

 

He crawled cautiously forward and lay flat, calling through the driver's ob slit. "Think we should give it a break for a while? Sounds to me like it might burn out, way we're going."

 

"How far to the top?"

 

"Good three miles or more. Difficult to be certain with the way it twists and turns like a gaffed salmon."

 

"All right. Looks like a pull-off ahead."

 

 

 

RYAN COULD SEE the waves of heat shimmering above the engine as J.B. opened it up. And he could also detect the faint smell of overheated oil, so familiar from the years of riding with war wags One and Two.

 

"What's it look like?" he asked.

 

J.B. straightened and pushed back his fedora. "It looks to me like we might be walking the rest of the way to Seattle."

 

"Bad as that?"

 

He took off the spectacles and peered up at the sky through them. "Covered in dead flies," he said. "Bad as that, did you say?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"No. But something's burning out down there. I reckon we have enough oil on board to keep going another three or four days. Mebbe more."

 

"Mebbe less."

 

The Armorer nodded. "Right."

 

"Let her cool off."

 

"Sure. Better keep a real careful eye on the gauge tomorrow and the other tomorrows."

 

Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Longer we go without walking, happier I'll be. Just going for a leak."

 

"Right. Have one for me, will you?"

 

Ryan grinned. He walked across the blacktop and up a narrow dirt road that cut away into the trees. He'd just unzipped when he heard a noise behind him and turned around to see a full-grown African lion crouched less than twenty paces away.