[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
flourished when by all rights they ought to have gone under, been ravaged by
the fireblasting drivers and muties and crazies who roamed the land. At least
with weapons they'd stood a chance.
The fact was, whichever way you cut it, a weaponless burg didn't have a hope.
Not now. Not in these wild times. The Trader has seen what could happen to
such communities too often to deny this. There had been many towns, mostly of
a strong religious persuasion of one kind or another, that had denounced
violence, renounced weaponry; that had proclaimed a new era of peace and
harmony following the Apocalypse. All had fallen prey to the men of violence
who had renounced nothing. Sometimes they had merely been invaded, enslaved.
Sometimes, dreadfully, serfdom had been the least of their woes.
The Trader acknowledged to himself and to those closest to him that the blame
for many of these atrocities had to find its way back to him. He sometimes
wondered how in hell what passed for civilization these days had managed to
make it through the past hundred years or so, not only through the Cold, which
by all accounts had been grim enough, but beyond, when folks had started
crawling out of their holes to grab what was left after the collapse.
It was true that the Nuke had not destroyed everything, and it was equally
true that somehow thousands had managed to make it through those long years
when it was said that the sun had died. From what the Trader had heard from
that generation, it was a time of horror and a time of terror, and in many
ways it had gotten worse when, especially in the East, the seasons had slowly
begun to return and people had started to drag themselves into the daylight of
a new and terrifyingly transformed world.
But having acknowledged his culpability in the matter of trading in the kind
of materials that might better have been left undiscovered, he nevertheless
felt that in some small way he had also been able to lift people back onto
their feet again by
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%2...20Adrian%20&%20Laurence%20James%2
01.0.html (55 of 335) [12/24/2004 11:16:08 PM]
d8
rediscovering creation. For in these strange and secret Stockpiles were
generators, survival equipment, processed food that could last for centuries
if necessary, tools, fuel, the means to learn, the means to expand, the means
to grow. All this, too, the
Trader had hauled around the Deathlands, leaving communities better equipped
to battle with the ever-looming dark that still threatened to overwhelm what
was left.
And whereas before he'd been greedy, careless in his dealings, now he was more
scrupulous, more circumspect. Now there were things he discovered, then
swiftly reburied. He still broke out in a sweat when he recalled the time,
five or six years before, when Ryan and Dix had followed up a lead left by
Page 34
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Marsh Folsom and found, buried in the hills of what had once been a place
called Kentucky, an immense collection of sealed airtight drums, tens of
thousands of them, all neatly tabbed and docketed, all with that deadly and
unmistakable symbol stamped into their casings.
The juice they called nerve gas. Hundreds of thousands of liters of it.
The same kind of shit that had rained down during the Nuke, from both sides,
leaving an appalling legacy behind it, a legacy that still lingered and would
still linger for decades, maybe generations, far into the bleak future.
They'd closed down the cavern, the Trader and Ryan and Dix, buried the
entrance under a controlled landslip, destroyed all the paperwork that had led
Marsh
Folsom into pinpointing the area as a Stockpile possibility in the first
place, and hoped for the best. It was all you could do, but it still gave the
Trader nightmares when he slept, still gave him the shakes when he awoke.
Because there was always the outside chance that some other guy might just
fall over it, even buried as it was& somehow, sometime. There was always that
chance. Some guy by no means as scrupulous, some guy who might well figure out
a way actually of using it, of bringing even more horror to a world already
stuffed with horror up to the gullet.
There were times when the Trader felt burdened with the immense weight of
secrets he had uncovered, the vast power he had but could not use, the huge
guilt load he and he alone now that Marsh Folsom had gone inescapably
carried.
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%2...20Adrian%20&%20Laurence%20James%2
01.0.html (56 of 335) [12/24/2004 11:16:08 PM]
d8
Sure, he had Ryan and Dix. The situation was tight with them as with no one
else he could think of. But they had only arrived in the past ten years. Less.
They had not been with him since the beginning, all those years ago. The
weight they carried was lighter by far than the tremendous and often crushing
burden that seemed at times ready to pulverize his soul.
And now the blood. That was a new and special weight on him because, apart
from anything else, it put a horizon to his life& a horizon that he was
inevitably getting closer to by the month. By the day.
By the hour.
He sucked at the cigar, took it out of his mouth, blew smoke into the air. His
head buzzed, his arms and legs felt as though they'd been fashioned out of
lead. He felt old. He felt he knew what it must be like to be 110.
He was only fifty-three.
"You okay?"
"Sure I'm okay. Can't a feller take a crap once in a while?"
The Trader glared at his war captain as he strode across the wide cabin.
Raven-
haired, the young man called Ryan Cawdor stood just over six feet in his boots
yet seemed far taller. The Trader had known instantly, the first time he'd
seen Ryan, that here was a man he could not only entrust with his life, but
one who could inspire trust in others, a man for whom other men might well lay
down their own lives.
That was a dangerous power to own, and there was no denying that Ryan could be
a dangerous man. Rangy, limber, yet powerfully muscled, with that shock of
thick night-dark curly hair, that single eye, intensely, chillingly blue, able
to penetrate to the very core of a man's being, and the long scar slash from
corner of eye to corner of mouth that no amount of sunlight could burn brown
and that at times of stress and fury seemed almost to glow with a livid
fire this man was a fierce and relentless war captain. Yet that was by no
means the whole story, as the Trader
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%2...20Adrian%20&%20Laurence%20James%2
01.0.html (57 of 335) [12/24/2004 11:16:08 PM]
Page 35
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
d8
well knew, for Ryan was no mindless human bludgeon intent on berserk savagery
to gain a particular goal, but a cunning, wily fighter, a realist, a
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]