“Brought your own sluts along, I see,” BoomT said, sizing up Krysty and Mildred. “That was good thinking. Whores in these parts are scab-assed and wide-reamed. Still can’t attract no decent help around here.”
“They’re fighters,” Ryan informed him. “They’re not sluts.”
BoomT raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, whatever you say, One-Eye.” Then he winked at Mildred, theatrically adjusted his crotch beneath the bedspread and blew her a kiss.
Mildred was marksman enough to quickdraw her ZKR 551 and put a bullet through the middle of his forehead. Mebbe it would have only given him a headache. It certainly would have brought answering fire from all sides. Her expression stayed deadpan and her blaster remained in its holster.
“So, did you hear the news about Deathlands’ famous Trader?” BoomT asked, his little black piggie eyes full of glee. “Word has it your old runnin’ buddy croaked buttugly, sitting in a warm pile of his own dung and squawling for his mammy.”
The Port A ville entrepreneur’s chuckle was a series of rattling, glottal full-stops. Among the sec men, there were appreciative grins and snickers all around. BoomT’s enforcement crew practically worshiped him. After all, so far he was unchillable. They were terrified of him, too, and also with good reason.
As Ryan recalled, Trader had gotten the better of BoomT in their last encounter by turning the tables and pulling a last-second double-switch. The fat man was always running a game of some kind, and it usually involved sleight of hand, like some variation on three card Monte. It wasn’t healthy to try to return bogus merchandise, either. BoomT’s customer service department was a firing squad.
“Guess what goes around comes around,” BoomT said merrily. “You know, as righteous payback for that extry-special evil he did at Virtue Lake. All them mamas and papas, them helpless little kiddie-widdies. Chilled like gophers down a hole. You were there at Virtue Lake, right by his side, as I remember the story. Mebbe hard justice is about to bite you in your ass, too?”
Ryan made no comment.
“You got nothing to say on the subject, Mr. One-Eye?” BoomT prodded.
The fat man had that right. No way was Ryan going to let himself be diverted from the task and sucked into a lopsided, losing gunfight. It was time to pull the cat out of the bag. He unslung the backpack, took out a golden, plastic-wrapped brick and underhand-tossed it over to BoomT. “We’ve got ten kilos of that,” he said. “What’ll you give us for it?”
BoomT’s piggie eyes widened, and he sniffed at the C-4 like it was a loaf of fresh-baked bread. “If this shit really goes bang,” he said as he weighed the brick in his hand, “you can have whatever the fuck you want.” After glancing at the attached blister pack, he chucked the parcel back to Ryan. “What I want first, though, is a demo blast with that remote detonator.”
“You got it,” Ryan said without missing a beat. Trying to read the fat man’s face was like trying to read a seventy-pound suet pudding. Although BoomT’s eyes had lit up when he recognized the explosive, that didn’t prove he had been expecting it.
Ryan and his companions looked outwardly calm, even bored at the proceedings, but that was hardly how they felt. The radio signal trigger was indiscriminate. It was universal. Using it to fire a demonstration blasting cap would also set off the cap stuck in the booby-trapped brick in the bottom of the backpack, which would set off the plastique at their feet and turn them all from solid flesh and bone to glistening pink vapor faster than a person could blink.
As Ryan set to work preparing the test charge, Krysty, Mildred, Doc, J.B. and Jak hunkered down in the skinny strip of shade cast by the Winnie. So far it looked like Ryan could have removed the detonators from the load without risking anything. There was no time for coulda, shoulda, woulda. After he rigged a golf-ball-size clump of C-4 with a blasting cap and radio-controlled initiator, he carried the wad of plas-ex a safe distance to the middle of the parking lot, set it down, then walked back.
In front of BoomT he pretended to put in both of the detonator’s batteries, but expertly palmed them instead.
Three card Monte.
Ryan flipped off the detonator’s safety and tried the test circuit. Of course, the little green indicator light didn’t go on. “Uh, it doesn’t light up,” he said, showing the dark indicator to BoomT. “Mebbe the bulb’s burned out,” he said. “I’ll try the blast switch. Fire in the hole!”
The sec men, traders and companions took cover, but when he hit the switch nothing happened. He tried it several times. “I guess the nukin’ thing doesn’t work. Probably none of the detonators work. That’s the breaks.”
“Guess you’re shit out of luck, then,” BoomT said.
“Nah, there’s still the detonator cord,” Ryan countered. “That’s the sure way to test the C-4, and there’s plenty of extra cord and blasting caps to blow up the rest of it.” He used his panga to cut off a yard length of the white braid and recrossed the parking lot. After removing the radio initiator, he crimped the blasting cap to the cord and set the safety fuse alight with a wooden match. This time he hot-footed it back to the RV.
“Better duck and cover,” he told the others as he hurried around the front bumper.
An instant later came the solid whack of an explosion. Even though the plastique wad was small, its power was most impressive. Not just the ear-splitting bang, either. Flying shards of dried mud rattled the far side of the Winnie and peppered the wall of the box store, turning to puffs of dust on impact. As the echoes faded, in the middle of the parking lot a cloud of pale dirt mixed with smoke climbed into the sky.
“So, do we have a trade?” Ryan asked the entrepreneur
.
“You’d be looking for what?” the fat man said.
“Ammo for our blasters, traveling rations, stuff we can carry.”
“Go on inside and help yourselves,” he said, scribbling out a chit and giving it to Ryan. He waved for a sec man to take charge of the backpack, warning him, “Put that someplace safe.”
As BoomT slipped his raspberry shades back on, Ryan turned with the companions toward the store’s entrance.
“Wait a minute now, One-Eye,” the fat man said, “I want that bum detonator, too.”
Ryan shrugged as if he couldn’t imagine why BoomT would want the useless piece of junk. Of course he could imagine why. The fat man either didn’t believe it was broken, or he thought he could fix it. Because it wasn’t broken, and the problem could be easily repaired, Ryan had tried to slip the thing into his pants pocket. Called out, he had no choice but to comply. “Forgot about it,” he said as he handed over the detonator.
A dozen or so men were running toward them from the direction of the gaudy and the small-time trader queue. The guy who played harmonica was leading the pack. Ryan guessed the explosion was the most thrilling thing that had happened in Port A ville in weeks. The scroungers and loungers wanted to find out what it was all about.
Ryan and the companions fell in line behind the sec man carrying the C-4. Behind them were two AK-armed escorts. Ryan still didn’t know for sure, but it didn’t appear that BoomT had any advance warning about the shipment of explosives. Sooner or later, however, the fat man was going to open the detonator case and find no batteries inside. Suspicious by nature, it would immediately occur to him that he’d been somehow, someway flimflammed. To confirm that, his first act would be to power up the “bum” detonator and test it for himself. The companions needed to be miles gone when that happened.
The plate glass in the box store’s entry doors had been replaced by sheets of split and delaminating plywood. Just inside the entrance, four assault-rifle-armed sec men stood guard behind a hardened blasterpost, keeping shoppers from trying to use it as an exit. Traffic flowed one way in and one way out. It was at least ten degrees cooler than outside.
The place was much as Ryan remembered it from his days with Trader. Above a wide expanse of gutted floor space, the drop ceiling had long since fallen away, exposing overhead wiring, heating ducts and drooping wads of water-stained insulation. The smell was particularly hard to forget—a combination of smoke from the torches and candelabra that lit the windowless showroom, and moldy funk. Dirt-encrusted footpaths crisscrossed the gray sheet flooring, winding through an indoor junkyard. Loot pillaged from the far corners of the hellscape was piled in heaps and in neat rows. Crudely lettered signs hung from the ceiling, indicating at a distance what kind of goods were on offer in the area beneath. Wag Stuf. Tules. Cloz. Vedgies. Meet. Hardwhere.
“Costco, post-Apocalypse,” Mildred remarked as she took it all in. “There’s even Muzak Monkees.” Somewhere out of sight a hundred-year-old audio tape was playing at top volume. Scratchy violins made violent tempo downshifts, as if the entire string section had been plunged chin-deep in a tar pit. Predark music to shop by.
“Mildred, I do not see them,” Doc said, looking around. “Where are the monkeys? They’re playing the music?”
“No, Mu-zak. ‘Daydream Believer.’”
She reacted to Doc’s blank look with a curt, “Oh, never mind.”
They followed the sec man carrying the C-4 backpack to a screened-in enclosure on the left. BoomT kept his extra-special spoils stacked behind floor-to-ceiling hurricane fence reinforced by steel pipe. A guard sitting inside on a disintegrating couch with a machine pistol on his lap had to get up and unlock the cage.
With a sinking feeling in his gut Ryan watched the C-4 change hands. The die was cast. They couldn’t very well demand to examine the pack they’d just traded and then disarm the brick in front of witnesses. Revealing the booby trap would surely get them chilled. Ditto for starting a blaster battle inside the store to recover the goods—they didn’t have enough ammo for that.
After the cage clanged shut, the three-man escort left them to their shopping.
“Are we nuked, or what?” Krysty said in exasperation.
“Not nuked, yet,” Ryan replied. “This is just another case of hit and git. Find what we need and make tracks.”
“Munitions are over that way,” J.B. said, waving the others after him as he set off.
Under the Gunz & Amo sign was a warped sheet of presswood laid across a pair of sawhorses. Lined up on the makeshift table were a selection of firearms on offer. The blasters of predark vintage all had barrels orange with rust; mostly single-shot, exposed hammer shotguns with cracked or missing butt and forestocks. Bailing wire appeared to be the repair material of choice.
Ryan scowled at the rows of newly manufactured pistols. The grips had been scrollsawed from one-inch plywood. Pairs of stainless-steel screw clamps held foot-long barrels to the stocks. The barrels were made of plumbing pipe, roughly 10-gauge in bore. There was no safety and no trigger on the single-shot, black-powder weapons. They were fired by a drawback thumb device based on a rat trap spring that drove a nail point into an exposed percussion cap.
They were much more likely to chill the shooter than the target.
J.B. commented in disgust, “The ‘gunsmith’ should be hanged, if he hasn’t already been.”
The other companions hunkered down and started going through plastic bins of loose live centerfire ammo of various standard calibers.
Jak pried a shell from his Python’s cylinder, and tried to chamber one of BoomT’s .357 Mag rounds. It didn’t fit.
“Let me see it, Jak,” J.B. said, holding out his hand. The Armorer thumbed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and closely examined the cartridge. “This case has been reloaded one too many times,” he said. “There’s a hairline crack around the rim. The reason you can’t chamber it is that the triple stupe who reloaded it did such a crap job of prepping the case.”
Whipping out a scarred toolkit, J.B. used pliers to unseat the bullet from the brass. He dumped the gunpowder onto his palm. “This isn’t even smokeless,” he said. “It’s black powder. This ammo is junk, Ryan. There’s no decent reloads in the lot. No point in rummaging through it. Even the rounds that’ll chamber and might be safe to fire are gonna be nukeshit for knockdown power.”
Not to mention the fact that they didn’t have time for rummaging.
“Forget it, then,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to move on. We can still trade for fuel and come out ahead.”
They hurried away from the ammo station, weaving around rows of knives, hatchets, spears and crossbows made from salvaged leaf springs, past heaps of blankets and clothes folks had certainly died in, even if they weren’t chilled for them. Three male shoppers stood buck-naked, showing off their farmer tans while they tried on previously owned sleepwear. Other shoppers sat on the floor, testing battered shoes and boots for a good fit. There were tiers of assorted plastic coolers, piles of moldy tents and sleeping bags and cardboard boxes of junk jewelry, eyeglasses and prescription drugs a century past throwaway dates. A skinny woman in a too big, antique Virginia Is For Lovers sweatshirt was uncapping and sniffing the contents of the half-rolled-up aluminum tubes of ointments and salves. On the far side of the sniffer was a folding table mounded with flatware. It was overseen by a geezer with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard.
“Everybody needs a fork!” the red-nosed hawker informed them.
To no effect.
The companions skirted BoomT’s fresh produce section, then the butcher shop. Slabs of raw meat lay in plastic tubs, unrefrigerated, on the floor. The flesh wasn’t labeled as to species or cut. It looked like chicken, but it smelled more like fish. The rear of the shop was hidden behind a floral print bedsheet strung from the ceiling’s exposed heating ducts. The curtain was thin, and a man, apparently the butcher, was dimly visible through it. He wasn’t alone. Whatever he had penned back there was pleading for its life.