Desolation Crossing (7 page)

He had tried to keep his distance from her. Tried to rack his memory and remember her. Tried to even guess what the connection could be. But there was nothing except a nagging feeling of danger deep in his gut. And a growing curiosity over the fact that she had chosen the vocation of armorer. She was impressing this upon him, as though it would somehow open the floodgates of memory.

Well, if that was what she had hoped, then it was a bad call—not even a trickle.

She was in the middle of showing him the comm tech that she had managed to get up and running after they salvaged it from some ruined ex-military wags—carefully avoiding an explanation of how they had come to be wrecked, he noted—when J.B. decided that he could take no more.

“You’re good,” he said simply, stopping her in midflow, “and I want to know where you learned all this. ’Specially so young. Took me years on the road with Trader to amass the kind of knowledge you’ve got. Had some before I joined, but it was only hitting the road and finding shit that
helped it build. But you must have grown up with someone who knew this stuff.”

“I did,” she said simply.

LaGuerre’s ears pricked. Ask her more, Dix, he thought.

“So who taught you?” J.B. pushed.

Eula shook her head. “In time, John Barrymore. In time. I don’t give anything away for free. I want from you, in return.”

“What?”

“That’ll have to wait. You need to do some thinking. Think about this, John Barrymore—remember a place called Hollowstar?”

J.B.’s face stayed impassive, but his mind jolted.

Yeah. He remembered Hollowstar….

Chapter Five

The Past

It took a month—no more—for J.B. to settle in to Trader’s way of life, to stop being the new kid, and to start being just J.B. Such was his skill and knowledge, given room to grow by the ordnance that Trader’s people collected on the way, that he became more than “that new guy the armorer,” but became known as the Armorer, just as Trader was Trader. They were the definitive article—their positions used as names, spoken as though there were none other than they fit to carry such a name.

Not that it came easily. Poet knew how good the kid was from the beginning. After all, he was the one who had been sent to look at J.B., assess his skills, then fake the work to test them.

Hunnaker was hostile. She was always hostile to anything new. A loyal and trusted fighter, with a ruthless streak a mile wide, who could always be trusted in times of battle, yet she had a spiky, difficult temperament in her. She was insecure of her position in the convoy, which she prized highly. She measured herself by her standing with Trader, as the convoy was the only family she had, and despite her seeming ability to act and live independently of anyone or
anything, there was a little hollow inside of her that craved the familial security of the convoy. Everything revolved around that, and when it changed, then she bristled, and lashed out.

It was a dangerous way to live, especially on a convoy where every day brought the chance for someone to buy the farm, and change was an unspoken constant. Which, perhaps, explained why there were days when all everyone wanted to do—even Trader—was stay the hell out of Hunn’s way.

And she kind of liked it that way. It gave her status in the convoy. Except that J.B. walked in and acted like that was nothing. He didn’t challenge her. That she could take, she could face down, she could do something about. No, he did something far worse—he ignored her. He acted like her moods didn’t happen, like there weren’t days that people edged around her rather than get into a fight. He just didn’t notice.

So she loathed him for some time. It became a subject of discussion among the convoy, and the subject of a book run by Poet on how long until they had a fight, and who would win. Virtually everyone put jack on it—even Trader—and it was a keenly awaited event. Given Hunn’s temperament, and the taciturn and phlegmatic new man, it was only a matter of time, and not much of that.

The fact that it never happened was, as Abe had put it, “jus’ one of the weird shit things happen around here.”

They were up north, where the temperatures drop, and any potential combat had to be undertaken with the added encumbrance of furs and padded clothing. Movement was difficult, threw off timing. Worse, it led to blasters screwing up in the extremes of temperature, which is exactly
what happened to Hunn, and how she nearly got herself chilled in the cold.

It was an ambush by a bunch of desperate coldhearts who had been waiting for convoys to raid for too long. They were crazed with cold and hunger, giving them the desperation and madness to take on the convoy in what seemed to be a stupe position. Which was why, maybe, they nearly got away with it. Desperate measures sometimes brought the element of surprise that can turn a firefight. So it was that a steep, rocky pass covered in snow nearly became the graveyard that marked Trader’s passing.

There was no other way through the narrow channel. No signs of life, but still not ideal. If not man, then nature could bite hard. An avalanche could trap or bury them; maybe both. But with no other way through, it was heads down and run for the other side, keeping noise to a minimum. Anything could trigger a rock fall.

Anyone with any sense wouldn’t have started loosing off blaster fire, lobbing grens. But these desperadoes did exactly that. A hole in the track ahead of them from one gren made it impossible to proceed until they could get out and fill in the gap, which was too deep for War Wag One itself to traverse, let alone the other wags in the convoy.

They had to get out and fight, seeking whatever cover they could in the rocks and ice, climbing to where the mad bastard coldhearts were firing on them. The only break they had was that there couldn’t be too many of the opposition, as they weren’t spread along the ridge at the top of the climb.

Hunn was one of the best in situations like this. She was a good fighter, and when she was pissed off she was virtually unstoppable. And she was pissed off right now. She
thought it was bad enough being this far up north, where it was cold enough to freeze her tits off; now they were being fired on by a bunch of stupe bastards who might just bury the convoy and not get what they were after. And what was the fuckin’ point of that?

As she climbed, exchanging fire at intervals, she got more and more pissed, the anger building in her until it reached the point where she could see nothing but red mist. She was cold, she was aching because the rocks were battering her through the padding and the furs every time she took evasive action, and she was convinced that she was going to have to walk out of the pass as these stupes were going to bring down the rock walls on the convoy below.

Hunn in a real fighting anger was both a good and bad thing: good because she became a chilling machine, stopping at nothing. Bad for the very same reason. She paid no heed to danger and rushed headlong into it. It made her a spearhead and a liability at the same time. So far she had always been the former, simply because she always came out on top. But one day she would be the latter because she would screw up.

Like this day.

The ascent was hard, but she didn’t care once the anger took hold, blinding rage, blotting out every other feeling, every other concern. She didn’t even register that she had reached the top of the ridge, had picked her way along to the enclave where the bunch of coldhearts this side of the pass had ensconced themselves, didn’t even register as she raised the Uzi, sighted the bastards, squeezed on the trigger.

Her weapon jammed, and Hunn cursed, making the
coldhearts aware of her presence, making them turn and sight on her. She realized that her luck had run out.

Knowing there was no time to take cover—there was none on top of the ridge anyway—she had closed her eyes and prepared to buy the farm. Then the air was filled with blasterfire.

Hunn realized that she was still alive and opened her eyes to see the Armorer standing over the bodies of the coldhearts, the barrel of his mini-Uzi still smoking—or was that her imagination?—as he stepped over them and came to her.

“Cold and heat make the fuckers jam. Need to keep them so that the temperature is as constant as possible. Under your coat when you climb next time, okay?”

He didn’t say anything else, taking the Uzi from her and checking it as he spoke, then handing it back to her.

They were lucky enough to get the hell out of the pass without a rock fall trapping them, some serious digging when the other group of coldhearts had been flushed out enabling them to fill the pit in the road enough to pass over it with some degree of ease. The Armorer never said anything to anyone about what had happened up on the ridge. Hunn certainly wasn’t going to, if he wasn’t. And she appreciated that he made no big deal of it.

No one knew why, but from that day all bets were off. It wasn’t as though there was any sign of friendship, but the bristling atmosphere that she had exuded every time she was near J.B. vanished. There was a respect, grudging at first, then growing into a mutual admiration society that had bets being returned, much to Poet’s disgust.

Abe had watched this from a distance. Trader’s right-hand man, if not for a bout of dysentery when they had
sampled the crap food in Guthrie, he would have fulfilled the tasks allotted to Poet in recruiting the Armorer. But in a way he was glad, as it gave him a chance to assess the newbie from a distance. He was just about the only man in the convoy who hadn’t placed a bet, but had never said why. Who would have believed him from the evidence before their eyes, except maybe Trader.

Abe saw that J.B. and Hunn had more in common than was obvious. Both had their defense mechanisms in place—her spikiness, his taciturnity—to keep people at bay until they chose. Both were dedicated to their work. Both had something in their pasts that they wanted to remain that way, and both would open up only when they were ready. That was why they had butted heads: like attracted like, but also caused suspicion as—even on an unconscious level—recognizing like made a person wary.

Time went on, and Abe watched as they got each other’s backs in situations of danger. He wasn’t surprised. He once said to Trader: “You know, long as we’ve got those two on the team, then there isn’t any way anyone’s going to come through us. Long as we got them, then we’ve always got the backbone of a strong team. They might be loners, but they know how to bat for the team.”

Trader could sometimes wish that Abe didn’t have that old baseball card collection they’d found in a redoubt. He talked like people still played sports—like they still had time to take out from the harsh need to exist—and expected people to understand. But once you worked out what he was talking about, the thoughts if not the words made sense.

Trader had made many finds over the years that he could call good. He was coming to consider that one of
the best hadn’t been in finding any goods or jack, but in finding a man.

John Barrymore Dix.

So it was that the Armorer settled in, became a fixture such that no one could remember a time before he was there. But it was only a year.

Only a year before Trader returned to Hollowstar.

“WHY ARE WE GOING to this dead and alive pesthole?” J.B. asked as War Wag One rumbled along a rut-filled highway, the convoy the only vehicles on a four-lane road that headed away from the mutie growth of trees, creepers and plants that thrived in the chem-laden rains of the region, and toward a sparser, clearer region where the bleached-out and burned remains of civilization showed how the nuke damage stood as monument to skydark.

“Because it is,” Trader replied cryptically. He enjoyed the look of puzzlement in J.B.’s eyes, mirrored by his spectacles.

“And that’s an answer?” he said finally. “More like a fucking puzzle.”

Trader smiled enigmatically. “You work it out, son. It isn’t difficult.”

It had been an easy ride. There were only a few isolated settlements—most too small to even be called villes—out in this stretch. The poisonous nature of the soil made it hard to farm. The equally poisonous flora of the region was also little incentive. And if that wasn’t enough, the few examples of fauna that could thrive in such conditions made for a new definition of the term hostile. Good for travelers as it also dictated that any marauding bands of
coldhearts in the region wouldn’t get far before the local environment claimed them. Bad for travelers as it meant they had to get through the region as quickly and as easily as possible.

Farther east there was very little: beyond the rad-blasted mutations of this region were the hotspots where the nukes had hit, and the land was virtually waste. Nonetheless, there were a few settlements, bands of survivors who had managed to make a life rather than buy the farm in the aftermath of nuclear winter, and had adapted to their conditions before birthing those who would be their descendants.

And they all had a need to trade.

Abe explained it to J.B., seeing the young man’s still puzzled expression.

“Boy, how d’you think you hooked up with us? How many convoys had come through that pesthole you found yourself in? Not many, I’d guess. But Trader, see, he pays attention to detail. There are little places like Guthrie, like Hollowstar and the lands beyond, where there are people who want to buy. They got something to sell, too. It might not be much, but if you only go once a year or so, then it makes the trip worthwhile for us. And they’re desperate for what we’ve got, willing to pay. ’Cause no one else can be bothered.”

J.B. nodded. In the year that he’d been with them, they had headed for the big settlements, the larger villes, the areas where there was a large population. And they’d made good trade, that was for sure. But always with other traders there just before or just after, people whining about how little they’d gotten, or how much they were going to get. It figured that if there were places that were hard to get to, then few would bother. Except Trader. J.B. had been with
him more than long enough to know that attention to detail was what made him the best.

So he wasn’t alarmed when Hunn took War Wag One off the highway at a turn-off that led to a place called “Ne J rsey,” according to the sign that hung precariously over the narrower ribbon of road. The vibration of the convoy on the ruined road made the metal posts supporting the sign shake, the once-strong metal now wasted and eaten by the environment, looking as though it could crash down on any of the wags in train.

“Always looks that way. Puts people off, but never comes down.” Abe sniffed. “Least ways, not yet.”

“Why not stick to the main roadway?” J.B. asked. “Looks safer.”

Trader grinned. “Everyone comes this way the first time thinks that. Hell, even got caught that way ourselves first time out.”

Abe chuckled. “Shoulda heard the cursing when we had to turn back. Only found this turn-off because he—” he pointed at Trader “—was so stubborn he didn’t want a totally wasted journey.”

Seeing J.B.’s questioning look between them, Trader elaborated. “You carry on down the highway, all you get is it ending in a big fuck-off landslide where part of the old county got a hit. Must’ve been some kind of quake thing going on, as you can see nothing but this big, empty hole for what seems like forever. The other side is…Well, shit, I dunno, but I’d bet not much can live over there.”