Desolation Crossing

“I need replacement sec, and for a hard ride. I don’t expect you to sign up for the long haul. Hell, I don’t even want that myself. But I’ll tell you what I can offer you. If we make the trip and you join us, there’ll be good jack in it for you. More than that, it’ll get you the hell out of here. ’Cause I’m thinking that right now you got no wag, and no way you can get out of this wasteland in one piece. I figure that does all my arguing for me.”

Ryan considered that: they’d be trusting a man who was too full of himself for the one-eyed man’s liking, and taking on the wild card that was whatever agenda Eula was bringing to the table. On the other hand, there was little to gain by staying where they were.

He looked at his companions. Mildred and Krysty had eyes that told him they would go with it; Doc raised one eyebrow in a manner that spoke volumes; and Jak shrugged, so slight that none but his friends would be able to see it. But it was J.B. whose opinion Ryan really wanted to know. He had known the Armorer longer than anyone, and the men had bonds forged in fire that went even deeper than their allegiances to the others in the group.

J.B.’s eyes flickered for a moment, as though indecision came from the need to search deeper within himself than he usually found necessary.

It was the slightest twitch of facial muscle, a nod that was barely a nod. But it was enough.

Ryan turned to the trader. He spoke slowly, as though he were still undecided. “Well, I guess you have a point, stranger. We’re in a situation here that you could call no-win. Staying here is as good as buying the farm, just stringing out the agony, I guess. But we’re taking a leap into the dark if—and it is if—we take up your offer. If we knew exactly what we were taking on…” He let it tail off, leaving the question unasked.

As he had hoped, the trader grimaced as he tried to hold his feelings in check and not let anything slip. But he was too garrulous, too open for that.

The man would be a sucker on poker night, Mildred thought, seeing where Ryan was leading him.

“All right, all right, I kinda wanted to get you signed up and with the plan before I told you too much, but if that’s what it takes…Okay, it’s this way. I’ve got a cargo of food supplies—some self-heats, dried stuff, fresh produce that we can keep that way with some old refrigeration units we plundered—and a whole lot of clothing. We’re headed across this pesthole stretch of land, headed for the far side. It’s a bastard of a haul, and there’s shit-all in the way of stops along the way. At least, none that I would trust.”

“If they’re anything like Stripmall, then I can understand that,” Ryan murmured.

“My friend, they make Stripmall look like a paradise,” the trader said with a grim smile. “Point is, we don’t have the fuel to keep the wags and the generators for the fresh stuff running if we make stops. We can only do it if we run hell-for-leather across this asswipe land. Hell, even stopping here is losing us valuable time. We can make mebbe one, two brief stops a day if we have to.”

“So what’s your problem?” Ryan asked. “Back in the day, when me and J.B. ran with Trader, we used to make long runs as a matter of course.”

“You ever do the dustbowl?”

“We came this way a few times,” Ryan mused. “Know Trader used to do it before I joined up.”

“Yeah, but never in one long run,” J.B. added. Ryan looked at him. He didn’t know that J.B. knew anything about this territory. He’d certainly never mentioned it in all the years he’d known him. Nor had he said anything while they had been here.

The trader in front of them nodded. “There’s a reason for that. These are the badlands, man. Rough riders and wag raiders. There’s fuck all out here, so they have to do what they can, which means chilling and stealing anything that passes by and isn’t defended by serious hardware. There’s only one convoy that tried the straight run, and it didn’t make it. So now it’s our turn. We need new sec, and we want the best. From what I hear, that’s you people. Reckon fate has smiled upon me—if not all of us—matching us up like this.”

RYAN EYED HIM. The man was trying hard. Maybe a little too hard. So this other convoy hadn’t made it? Ryan wondered if that was connected to the new refrigeration units they had acquired, and the loss of the sec men in a firefight with another convoy. Seemed too much of a coincidence. Still, if he made it seem as if they trusted the trader, then the man seemed too stupe to notice that they were holding out. The woman—Ryan looked at her, her face impassive and inscrutable all the while—was another matter.

“Figure you leave us no choice,” Ryan said in his best ingenuous tone, “but even so, we’d be stupe if we said yes without knowing what kind of ordnance you had.”

“Best you’ll find,” Eula interjected in flat tones. “Better than J. B. Dix will have seen for many a year.” There was a note in her tone that suggested this should mean something to him; if so, it was too obtuse, and the Armorer was left with nothing more than a vague sense of unease as her eyes bored into him.

“You bet it is,” the trader said quickly in a placating manner. “Hell, it’d be impolite to ask you aboard without showing you. Stand down,” he added, holding his ear, obviously directing this into the headset, “we’re coming back. Everything is cool.”

The trader turned, beckoning them to follow. Eula stood back, still cradling the 7.62 mm blaster that looked too large for her. Her impassive face still gave nothing away. She was no threat at present—the manner in which Krysty’s sentient hair flowed free only reinforced this impression—but she would still need to be watched.

The friends paused. The idea of having her, with that blaster, at their backs was not something that anyone would consider ideal. Subtly, Ryan indicated they should go with it. Jak caught Ryan’s eye, and as they fell in behind the trader, the albino teen adopted the unusual position of taking up the rear of the party. Many places in his patched camou jacket concealed his leaf-bladed throwing knives. Reputation may have told how quick the albino youth could be, but experience was the only way to really know the swiftness with which he could move. As he passed Eula, he knew he could move quicker than she could should the need arise.

As they traveled the short distance between their original position and the armored wag, they were able to see more clearly the extent of the convoy. There were four other wags. Two of them were large trailers, closed in on all sides. These were obviously the old refrigeration units. The cabs attached to them had been reinforced with mesh where any glass was visible, armor plating covering the remainder. The old paintwork along the sides of both cabs and wags was pitted and scarred where it was still visible. Camou had been painted over most of the rest. There were also a number of scores and scorch marks that made the friends wonder once more about how they had been “acquired.”

These wags had only blasterports in the cabs. Although they would be hard to damage in themselves, their length and lack of slits made them vulnerable to blind-spot attack. That was probably why they sat in the middle of the convoy, flanked by two wags that carried the rest of the cargo. These were armored, with blasterports and slits. They had been converted, and both Ryan and J.B. could only admire the work that had gone into them. They looked to be solid vehicles, but they weren’t big. If the cabs on the refrigerated wags could hold two people, these only held three or four, tops. Maximum of twelve crew.

The armored wag out front was more impressive. Again, it wasn’t just the size, although it was a heavy-duty predark military wag, dark and heavy in color, albeit a little chipped and faded by combat. It was squat, with tires at front and a caterpillar track at the rear. It had bubble-mounted machine blasters, ob slits, shielded surveillance tech and two large mounted cannon. It could do some serious damage to anything that dared to go up against it.

“How much of the tech in that still work?” J.B. asked.

Eula answered. “Most of the surveillance tech, some of the weapons systems. Much of it was fixable, but it’s a little erratic.”

J.B. looked over his shoulder. “You don’t find that a problem?” he questioned, remembering how Trader had stripped much of the comp work out of War Wag One, preferring total reliability at the expense of some tech.

She shrugged. “It hasn’t failed yet.”

“But what about the tech that needed satellite shit? That can’t be working,” he added.

“I said some, not all,” she snapped, taking it as though it was personal criticism.

By this time they had reached the armored wag, and the trader was running a loving hand over it.

“Hasn’t seen me wrong yet,” he said quietly. “This is it, guys. The convoy. Used to be two motorbikes, but they got wasted in our little, uh, contretemps,” he said, trying to brush past the matter.

“What?” Jak asked.

“An old word, dear boy, not English. I believe he is referring to the firefight he mentioned earlier,” Doc said softly.

“Should fuckin’ say so,” Jak murmured.

“How many people you carry?” Ryan asked. He had noted a look of anger flash across the trader’s face, and he wanted to move things on.

“This takes five people. A full complement of sec, drivers, workers comes to seventeen on a trip.”

“Yeah, and how many you carrying now?” Ryan pressed.

The trader grimaced. “That’s the thing. We lost eight in the firefight.”

“You lost half your people, and you don’t think that was a little careless?” Mildred questioned, unable to contain herself.

“Two went at the back. The bike riders are always the first to cop it,” the trader mused, seeming to ponder her question deeply. “We did salvage the bikes, though,” he added with some pride. “As for the other six…We had a direct hit on one wag that took out three people, two straight away and one after a day. The wags are good and strong, but it was the concussion of the blast that did it for them. Stupe thing is that they were chilled by their own weapons going off in the wag. Pathetic. Two sec bought the farm trying to protect the refrigerators. You can see those bastards are blind, and they had to get out of the cabs. I think we learned something from that. And they did. Just a shame it was too late.”

He paused, seemingly lost in thought.

“And the last one?” Doc prompted. “So far you have mentioned only five casualties.”

The trader shook his head, pensive. “Penn. Best quartermaster I’ve ever had. Just a little too protective of his post, that was all. He saw a group of coldhearts from the other convoy trying to bust into one of the wags and saw red. He was traveling with us, and was out of there before anyone had a chance to stop him. He was shouting at them to stop, firing off without aiming, and they just picked him off. One shot. Bang. Took the poor stupe bastard’s head off. Swear his body kept running for a yard before he went down.”

If Ryan hadn’t believed a word the man had said before this, then now he certainly had no faith. The story was crap. Just like the rest of it. No one who served time on a convoy would be so stupe. Just as no one who had served time would get chilled by their own weapons when their wag got hit. Why were they drawn when they were inside, and unnecessary?

Whatever had really happened, it hadn’t been what the trader wanted them to believe.

For so many reasons, it seemed like a triple stupe thing to do, but for so many other reasons, it was their only option. Ryan found himself saying, “Okay, we’ll join you. But if we’re gonna work together, what do we call you?”

A number of things sprung to mind, but the trader’s answer was, “LaGuerre. Armand LaGuerre.” He stuck out his hand. “But you can call me ‘boss.’ No, only kidding,” he added hurriedly, on seeing the stony looks that elicited.

Saying nothing more, Ryan took his hand, then looked at his people with an expression that communicated his own reservations were as deep as theirs.