Читать книгу Plague Lords - James Axler - Страница 11

After the companions had motored three miles up the road, Ryan signaled for a pull over and parlay. As the dust settled around them, Krysty, J.B., and Jak killed the motorcycles’ engines and everyone dismounted. No longer in motion, they felt the full impact of the sweltering heat.

The first words out of Ryan’s mouth were, “Check your ammo.”

The one-eyed man didn’t have to check his own. Every round he had left was loaded up, seven shots in the Steyr’s box mag, a full 15-round clip in the SIG-Sauer. While the one-eyed warrior unslung his longblaster and stood lookout, Krysty, Mildred, J.B., and Jak started their round counts. Doc, the deep creases of his prematurely aged face rimed with dirt and sweat, retired to a wide sandstone boulder at the side of the road.

Ryan watched the time traveler take a seat on the low rock and carefully lay down his sword stick. Doc dug black-powder reloading gear from his frock coat’s pockets.

More than once over the years Ryan and J.B. had tried to talk him into switching over to a weapon-chambered centerfire, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Doc was one hard-headed Victorian son of a bitch. No matter what they said, he always argued that the proof was in the chilling. And that he had never had a problem doing that with the 250-year-old LeMat. Privately, J.B. assured Ryan that someday the radblasted thing was going to explode in his hand like a frag gren.

Doc prided himself on how fast he could reload his treasured if obsolete weapon. And Ryan had to admit he was plenty fast. Since the immediate danger was miles behind them, Doc gave the chambers and both barrels a quick going over with the bore brush to scour away the worst of the burned residue. He lined up the first chamber with the hammer at halfcock and the muzzle aimed skyward, then unsnapped the pistol’s jointed rammer from its barrel clip. He measured the powder, poured it into the shallow chamber, and levered the rammer to seat a lead ball on top of it. After flicking away the little ring of excess lead the lip’s tight fit trimmed off, he put dab of grease over the bullet to lube the barrel and keep the sparks from other chambers from causing spontaneous ignition when they fired. Rotating the cylinder a full notch, he proceeded to load the next chamber, and the next, and the next, and so on. His rate of speed was as steady as his hands. After he finished the ninth chamber he securely snapped the rammer back into its clip.

The .63-caliber shotgun chamber he loaded last, using a homemade wooden ramrod to seat the aft wadding, grapeshot and front wadding. He capped all ten chambers, lowered the hammer into one of the safety notches between nipples and slipped the massive blaster back into its hand-tooled Mexican holster.

Just under five minutes had elapsed from start to finish.

In the meantime, the other companions had taken stock of what was left of their ammo. J.B. had six high-brass rounds in his M-4000’s tubular magazine. Mildred and Krysty had full cylinders in their revolvers. They had used up their speedloaders; between them they had eight loose shells. Jak had two .357 Magnum bullets left in his revolver and nothing in his pockets. Of the six, only Mildred and Krysty could swap cartridges back and forth interchangeably as they both carried .38 Specials. They evened things out with Jak, giving him a couple of bullets each. Jak could fire their .38s in his .357, but they couldn’t shoot his cartridges because of the Magnum’s longer case.

J.B. was the first to dig into one of the looted backpacks.

“Well, lookee here!” he exclaimed, holding up a plastic-wrapped, gold-colored brick for all to see.

Taped to the outside of the kilo of C-4 was a sealed blister pack that contained blasting caps and electronic trigger, radio detonator and two sets of lithium batteries—one to set off the cap, one for the remote detonating device. As a backup, there was also a coil of thick, white blasting cord.

Ryan and the other companions quickly dumped out the contents of the other five packs. There was no ammo. No food. No water. Just predark plastic explosive and detonators. There was enough plastique piled in the middle of the road to turn a square city block into rubble.

“Well, we know the stuff still works,” Mildred said.

“Stickies found that out the hard way,” Krysty said. J.B. turned the brick over in his hand and read the text on the packaging. “Check the address,” he said, showing Ryan what was written.

“What is the significance of the label?” Doc asked, staring down at a brick he had picked up.

“Back in the day,” Ryan explained, “when J.B. and me were running with Trader, there was a rumor going around about a predark industrial plant in western New Mex, where the government used to turn high ex into C-4. Supposedly the finished product was stored in deep, blastproof bunkers in the desert. Looks like our dead scroungers stumbled on the motherload.”

“Worth big jack,” Jak said appreciatively, toeing the pile with a boot tip.

“To the right buyer,” Mildred said. “The trouble is, we’re a long way from the nearest baron.”

Ryan nodded. Mildred was on target, as usual. HE was a useful tool in the defense of territory, and in taking territory away from someone else; it was a weapon of war. For the hellscape’s smaller scale, everyday business of robbing, extortion, forced servitude and the like, it was serious overkill.

“It’s still worth plenty to a middleman,” Ryan countered. “We’ve got to find someone who has what we need, short-term. Ammo, food, water and gas for the bikes. If we can trade away a small part of the stash, we can haul the rest of it east, where it will bring the most jack. Check the fuel in the bikes.”

They unscrewed the gas caps and J.B. peered inside each of the tanks.

“Fuel levels are pretty much the same,” he told Ryan. “Not enough to get all of us to Louisiana, that’s for sure. If we’re lucky we can get mebbe another twenty miles before we start to run out. Radblasted stickies burned up all the extra gas in their victory dance.”

“Then we’re going to have to detour south to trade for bullets and supplies,” Ryan said.

“Why south?” Mildred asked. “Beaumont is due east on this road. We’ve easily got enough gas to get there. Couldn’t be more than ten miles.”

“Beaumont is a no-go,” J.B. said emphatically.

“It was hit hard on nukeday,” Ryan elaborated. “Nothing there but glow-in-the-dark rubble and twisted steel. Trader always gave it a wide berth and beelined his convoys for Port Arthur ville on the Gulf shore. If the head man down there is still the same, he’s a thieving pile of crap—”

“A giant thieving pile of crap,” J.B. interjected.

“—but,” Ryan continued, “it’s still the closest place to swap some of the C-4 for what we need.”

Jak used a hand to shield his unsettlingly red eyes from the glare as he looked up the road. “Port A ville mebbe thirty miles,” he said.

If the companions had been riding solo, Ryan knew they might have made it on the little fuel they had. They wouldn’t split up, though. Not a chance under these circumstances. Not of their own volition.

“How much water have we got?” Mildred asked J.B.

The Armorer produced a scarred, two-liter plastic bottle from his backpack. It was half-full of a cloudy, slightly brown-tinged liquid. There was a layer of fine sediment at the bottom. Ryan took the container; the sun beat down on his head and shoulders, the heat sang in his ears as he held it up for all to see.

“That’s it?” Krysty said.

“That’s it,” Ryan said. Another question had to be asked, even if he already knew the answer. “We can drink it all now, or we can drink it later. What’s it going to be?”

The companions were accustomed to privation, to hard, long marches over difficult terrain. The consensus was to drink it later, when they really needed it.

The companions repacked the C-4, saddled up and rode off at a steady, fuel-conserving twenty-five miles an hour. The breeze blowing over Ryan’s sweat-lubed body felt like air-conditioning.

ABOUT AN HOUR DOWN THE ROAD, J.B. lost power first. As he dropped back, his engine went dead and he and Mildred coasted to a stop. Krysty and Jak braked their bikes and turned back to join them.

“I make it we’re still five or six miles from the edge of Port A ville,” Ryan said as he swung off Krysty’s backseat.

“Too far to push the bikes in this heat with so little water,” Mildred said.

The motorcycles were valuable, all right, but they weren’t worth taking the last train west for. Certainly not when they had sixty kilos of operational plastique to trade.

“Jak,” Ryan said, “scout ahead and find us a good spot to hide the bikes. If we can barter some gas in Port A ville, we’ll come back for them later.”

Doc dismounted from the motorcycle’s rear seat and the albino sped away. Jak returned a few minutes later with a typically terse report. “Gulch behind rock pile, not see from road,” he said. “Quarter mile up.”

They abandoned the three motorcycles in the shallow ravine, about one hundred yards from the edge of the ruined two-lane highway. It was a good location, and they could easily find it again from the sandstone outcrop.

Before they set off they shared the last of the water, which amounted to a couple of good swigs per person.

The companions left the gulch lugging one extra backpack each, about twenty-five pounds of additional weight.

It took them almost three hours, walking at a steady pace to reach the outskirts of Port Arthur. They smelled the ville long before they saw it. The faint sea breeze carried a raw stink of sulfur. As they advanced on the southwest horizon, the skeletal, rusting ruin of the predark oil refinery came into view. Its storage tanks had ruptured long ago, spilling their precious contents into and poisoning the surrounding soil. The wide street in front of them was lined by tangled, fallen telephone and power lines and jumbled poles, and by cinder-block-rimmed foundation holes and concrete slabs sprouting stubs of plumbing and curlicues of electrical conduit. The few houses that remained standing sported caved-in roofs and buckled or bowed walls. In the aftermath of skydark, countless Category 5 storms had bored inland from the Gulf. The high-water marks were greasy brown stains on the canted, twisted eaves, stains from crude oil released from the refinery’s ruptured tanks, oil floating atop the flood. As a result of the mixing effect of the water and the weather, every square foot of ground was littered with some bit of predark rubbish.

Across the panorama of decimated flatland the companions were the only things moving. Port A ville’s residents had retreated like dogs into the deep shadows. Without air-conditioning, the brutal heat of the day was something best slept through.

The farther south they walked, the stronger the brimstone odor got. To a discerning nose it was as much swamp gas as petrochemical—the odor of wet rot and mold. It was coming from the direction of Port A ville’s waterfront downtown, now permanently flooded thanks to the overall rise in sea level. That rise, Ryan recalled, had also swallowed up most of Pleasure Island, the 18-mile-long, man-made island on Sabine Lake. The expansion of the lake and seawater had turned one-third of the habitable land between Groves ville and Port A ville into a marshy, fetid waste. Along the former Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which paralleled downtown, a motley fleet of traders’ sailboats would be moored to the bases of partially submerged, rusting loading cranes.

Two blond boys in holed-out T-shirts popped out from behind a cinder-block foundation and cut across the deserted street in front of them. Both were barefoot; one of them wore shorts, the other was bare-assed naked. They were carrying a five-gallon bucket of water between them, trying not to spill the contents as they headed for a small cinder-block structure. Metal-roofed and one-story, it looked like a power company or road maintenance shed. Windowless. Eight by twelve. The only door had been crudely sawn in two horizontally—the Dutch door was a way to get some air circulation. The top part of door was open. The inside looked dark and dank and blistering hot.

“Hey, how about a drink of that water?” Ryan shouted at the kids.

They stopped, turned and put down the heavy bucket. “Gimme a shotshell,” the taller of the two said. He was the one wearing shorts. He was seven or eight.

A broad figure appeared above the maintenance shed’s Dutch door, stepping from darkness into the light. Naked from the waist up, Mama held a rust-splotched, fold-stock AK-47 pointed skyward, her finger resting on the trigger guard. She was a big woman with stringy brown hair, huge flabby arms and massive breasts. Cradled in her other arm, a baby contentedly nursed on one of her dirt blotched, stretch-marked dugs.

“That’s the price,” she shouted hoarsely. “Pay it or fuck off.”

Krysty muttered a curse under her breath, and her emerald eyes flashed with anger.

Appropriate anger.

The compensation being demanded was outrageous.

Ryan hated like hell to give up one of their precious few cartridges, but he had to keep the bigger picture in mind. They’d come a long way and they needed to drink now and rehydrate if they were going to be clearheaded when they got down to the business of bartering their loot. “We’ll pay it,” he said. “Give the boy a round, J.B.”

The Armorer ejected a live shell from his scattergun. He handed it to the kid, who checked the primer and shook the shell next to his grimy ear. His eyes lit up and he smiled gaptoothed at his mama.

“Go on,” she said, gesturing with the flash hider and ramp sight of the battered AK.

The companions took turns at the bucket, drinking their fill. The water was sweet, cool and fairly clean.

When they were done, Krysty said to Mama, “We paid you for the water, now what do we owe you for the air?”

At a signal from their mother, the kids kicked over the rest of the bucket on the ground. That was followed by a caustic stream of profanity and death threats from the tiny family.

“Friendly town, isn’t it?” Mildred remarked as they carefully backed away and continued on.

“Make no mistake about it,” Ryan said, his voice deadly cold, “this isn’t your run-of-the-mill hellpit. This is the radblasted end of the line, the last outpost on the Gulf coast before the Dallas-Houston death zone. Folks don’t end up in Port A ville by choice. They end up here because they were driven out of the eastern baronies on account of who they were or what they did. I’m talking about the lowest of low—diseased gaudy sluts, jolt fiends, coldheart robbers and crazy chillers. The traders who come through here specialize in looting the interior’s hotspots, and robbing the scroungers who got there first. They’re used to taking the biggest risks, to chilling first and never asking questions after. Keep your eyes open and your blaster hands free. From now on, we’re triple red.”

After another couple of miles of deserted gridwork streets and sprawling ruination, they came to the intersection of two main roads, and in the near distance, the remains of an enormous predark shopping center. Almost all of its structures lay in piles of fractured concrete. There was no telling what had brought the buildings down: storms from the Gulf, earthquake, flood, demolition. Any or all of it was possible.

The parking lots were covered in layers of dried mud and in places trees grew up through cracks in the asphalt. Visible from a quarter mile away, four huge letters hung crooked on a concrete-block building’s lone surviving wall.

“They sold ‘ears’?” Jak wondered out loud.

“No,” Mildred said. “No, the S must’ve fallen off. It’s Sears.”

Before she could elaborate, Ryan urged them on. “Let’s keep moving,” he said. “We’ve still got some ground to cover.”

Maintaining the 450-yard buffer, he led them over swampy, trash-littered, former backyards and between cinder-block foundations, filled with stagnant, black water, around to the west side of the mall. From this angle, they could see almost all of the complex’s connecting interior corridors and colonnades had collapsed in on themselves. A single big-box store was still standing.

“That’s BoomT’s,” Ryan told the others as he signaled a halt.

The entrance to the three-story building was shielded by a pair of Winnebagos sitting on their rusting wheel rims. A mob of people waited in the heat to pass single file through the gap between the RVs. Some wore heavy backpacks; some stowed their trade goods in homemade wags and dog carts. Those were the small-timers. There was a separate queue for big-time traders—a lineup of horse-drawn carts, motorcycles, pack mules and tethered-human bearers at the back bumper of the Winnebago on the right, along the building’s windowless facade. Everybody stood under the watch of crude blastertowers at the corners of the roof.

As Krysty scanned the setup through minibinocs, she said, “How does the operation work?”

“Small-timers are dealt with by BoomT’s sec men,” Ryan said. “Before they get to go into the building, the sec men put a value on their trade goods. The customers get a chit, which they can use for any of the goods inside up to the amount of the chit. Inside there’s a drop-off area for newly bartered stuff. Folks find what they’re after and hand back the chit. The exit’s on the south end of the building. Can’t see it from here.”

Krysty passed the binocs to Mildred, who had a look-see and said, “Who’s the fat man coming out of the Winnie on the right? He’s as big as a Sumo wrestler and it looks like he’s wearing a chenille bedspread. Good God, look at that flab!” She tried to give Ryan the binocs.

The one-eyed man waved her off. He didn’t need magnification to identify the man lumbering onto the tarmac. “That would be BoomT in the flesh,” he told the others. “He handles the major trades and shipping deals himself.”

“What are all those pinkish blotches on his arms and back?” Mildred asked as she took another look through the binocs. “He seems to have a skin condition.”

“Yeah, from bullets,” J.B. answered. “Those are wound scars. Definitely a hard man to chill.”

“A lot of folks have tried to put BoomT in the ground,” Ryan said. “He’s put them all there instead. It’s the flab that protects him, that and all the muscle underneath. He’s one powerful son of a bitch, and he’s a lot faster than he looks. Rumor has it, he can snap a grown man’s neck with either hand.”

“Need a dead-center hit with an RPG to take out that giant tub of guts,” J.B. added.

“BoomT opened up shop about fifteen years ago,” Ryan went on, “after scroungers started going into the hot zones to the north and west to look for spoils.”

“By ‘spoils,’ I take it you are referring to undiscovered caches of predark manufactured goods?” Doc said as he accepted the binocs from Mildred.

“Correct,” Ryan said.

More than a century after the Apocalypse, there was still no large-scale manufacturing in the Deathlands. The necessary machines, the understanding of engineering and assembly-line processes had all gone extinct, along with democracy, the forty-hour work week and cable TV. In actuality, nuclear Armageddon had turned back America’s clock more than two hundred years, to before the Industrial Revolution. The United States of America had devolved into a feudal, agarian and hunter-gatherer society.

“Trader never trusted BoomT,” J.B. said.

“He had good reason,” Ryan said. “Big Boy over there is a double-dealing, backstabbing mountain of crap. And we don’t have enough ammo left to defend our booty. If we take more spoils with us than we’re willing to lose, chances are we’ll lose everything and get ourselves chilled in the bargain.”

“So, we’ve got to hide most of the C-4?” Mildred said. “Where?”

“I know a good place farther south,” Ryan said, waving on the companions.

Circling wide around the south end of the mall, through the shimmering waves of heat they could see a pair of four-mule carts crawling for the line of moored sailboats at the water’s edge. The heavily laden wags rolled on scavenged auto axles and wheels down the cracked and granularized street.

Between the mall and the distant water was a wide expanse of rolling, undeveloped land. There were stands of mature trees; some bare-limbed and dead, some living. Among the twists and turns of the landscape stood patches of irrigated fields that were bordered by little clusters of field-hand shanties.

“From the lay of it, I’d say it used to be a golf course,” Mildred said.

It was a golf course no more.

It had become the breadbasket for Port A ville and vicinity.

Local folk had abandoned the city streets in favor of the open space. The soil there was unpolluted, and there were no wrecked buildings that had to be cleared before it could be cultivated. The former Babe Zaharias Memorial Golf Course was, in fact, the path of least resistance.

Ryan led the companions across the mule-cart route, past the imploded shell of the former links’ clubhouse, and onto what had once been a lush and rolling green. The farm fields on either side weren’t fenced. No field hands were in evidence. With the sun straight overhead, it was too hot to do grunt work. No heads appeared in the doorless doorways or glassless windows of the huts, either. If the laborers were inside, they were dozing soundly through the suffocating heat.

The companions climbed a shallow grade, then passed through a stand of tall trees. In a shallow bowl below, out of sight of the surrounding fields, was a water hazard that had once challenged golfers. The small lake’s surface was choked with mats of chartreuse algae.

Ryan led them down to the shore, then handed J.B. his scoped longblaster and said, “Leave your C-4 here and head up to the ridge on the far side of the lake. Make sure no one is spying on us from that direction.”

As J.B. trotted away, Krysty put two and two together and said, “We’re hiding the explosives in the water?”

“It won’t hurt the C-4 because it’s sealed in plastic,” Ryan said as he dumped the contents of his backpack onto the bank. “Everybody take out one detonator blister pack,” he told the others.

The companions unshouldered their loads and did as he asked.

“Put the batteries in your detonators,” Ryan said as he put batteries in his. When they were all ready, he added, “Now try the test button.”

All of the remotes lit up. Green for go. They were functional.

The one-eyed man pried the two tiny power cells from the black plastic case and slipped each of them into a different pants pocket. “Okay, now remove the batteries,” he said. “Hide them in your gear separate from the detonators. We don’t want some drooler arming one of the remotes and pushing the ‘fire’ button by accident.”

As Doc pocketed his depowered detonator he shook his head and said, “Batteries in, batteries out. Dear Ryan, I must admit to puzzlement. For the life of me I cannot fathom your intent.”

He was not alone.

“Where are you going with this, Ryan?” Krysty said.

“I’m just buying us some getaway insurance.”

With the point of his panga Ryan carefully slit the plastic on one of the bricks along a lengthwise seam. Using the components from a blister pack, he quickly rigged the two-kilo block of plastique for remote detonation. Then he pressed closed the slit he had made in the plastic wrap. Because it stuck to the explosive material, the incision was almost undetectable. He repacked the backpack with ten parcels of C-4, putting the rigged brick near the bottom.

“Now any of us can detonate the entire load if the shit hits the fan,” he said.

“We better all be a long ways off when that happens,” Mildred said. “Twelve kilos of plastique is going to raise some dust.”

“But, Ryan, anybody else can set it off, too,” Krysty protested. “Why did you leave the detonators and batteries in the load we’re going to trade?”

“Had no choice,” Ryan told her. “For all we know, BoomT is expecting this C-4 to show up. He could have contracted the dead scroungers to bring it to him from New Mex. And if he did, he could know there were supposed to be remote detonators included in the deal. If the detonators are missing when we show him the goods, you can bet the farm he’ll have his sec men search us. When they find what they’re looking for, it’ll take the play away from us. If the detonators are in the mix, BoomT isn’t going to dig deeper, and we’ve still got our hole card.”

“So, we show up with the C-4 instead of the traders he contracted with?” Mildred said. “How’s that going to go down?”

“BoomT won’t care who makes the delivery or who he pays for the C-4,” J.B. said. “He sure as hell isn’t going to care what happened to the scroungers. That’s the kind of shit-snake he is.”

“But it is possible that he was expecting the arrival of all six backpacks,” Doc interjected.

“In that case, he’ll be happy that one actually showed up,” Ryan said. “We’ve got a believable story. His pet scroungers were chilled by stickies. We salvaged a single load. Hell, it’s almost even true.”

The one-eyed warrior sat on the grass, untied his boots and kicked them off. “No sense in more than two of us getting wet,” he said. “Jak, gather up a couple of backpacks of C-4 and wade out with me.”

Leaving his own pack on the bank, Ryan hoisted three others and moved slowly into the warm water, careful to tear the smallest possible rip in the algae mat.

The albino kicked off his boots, grabbed up the remaining unbooby-trapped packs and waded out to midthigh. The two of them sank the packs under the water, holding them down until all the trapped air bubbles escaped. As they backtracked their path to shore, they brushed together the torn edges of the bloom.

Ryan and Jak carefully dried their feet on the grass before putting on their boots. When Ryan stood, he waved for J.B. to hurry down from the lookout.

“I am still at rather a loss here,” Doc confessed. “What exactly is your larger strategy?”

“If we can get cartridges and gas in trade for the one load of C-4,” Ryan told him, “we can lug the fuel and the sunken explosives back to the bikes, and ride on east to Louisiana in style. If we can’t get gas, we’ll have to find transport by water, or keep walking. If things go sour with BoomT, and we have enough of a head start, we can come back here and recover the rest of the C-4. If not, we can leave it where it is for now and come back later.”

After J.B. rejoined them, Ryan retrieved his long-blaster, shouldered the last backpack of explosives and said, “Let’s go cut ourselves a deal.”