predark woodland. A few hardy specimens had survived and they provided what little cover there was for the small, reinforced sec post, dug down into a trench and reinforced to two feet above ground level.
“Hey, what you two assholes got there?” yelled the sec man in the trench, his head alone visible above the reinforcements.
“They got something?” a second voice queried, his head also appearing above the reinforcement. Whereas the first sec man had a lean face framed by long, greasy black hair, the second had a bullet head on which the hair was savagely cropped. He also had what looked like a cigar clamped in his jaws, billowing a foul smoke.
“How d’you know it was us, Deke?” Hafler whined.
“The man Upton here says assholes, can only mean you two,” Deke replied with a beatific grin.
“Fuck you,” Hafler grumbled, which only made Deke laugh harder.
Upton, who was as tall and rangy as the shape of his face suggested, scrambled out of the sec dugout to examine what the two men were carrying. He prodded the Armorer’s inert body with the end of the remade Sharps rifle he was carrying. “So where you find this one?” he asked mildly.
“Weirdest thing. We covered this well in south—”
“Silborg and Denning—lazy fucks,” Upton interjected, nodding wisely.
“Exactly,” Sim continued. “One of the wells was blocked and when we looked down it, what did we find but laughing boy, here. Fuck knows how he got there, but there he was, blocking the water flow.”
“Never seen him before and he don’t look like one of the scum,” Upton mused. “So not a mutie and not on convoy. A real little mystery.”
“Only until the bastard wakes up. Xander’ll get it out of him.”
“Yeah, but we’ll probably never get to know,” murmured Deke, who had clambered out of the dugout to join them and had his Lee-Enfield .303 slung casually over his shoulder. Out on this post, the men eschewed SMGs in favor of rifles with which they could pick off any threat at distance.
Sim shrugged. “Xander’s baron. Guess it’s his right to know and his right to tell us or not.”
“Mebbe…but I’m curious.”
“Curious chilled the cougar,” Hafler said solemnly. They all looked at him. “Something my mama used to say,” he added weakly.
“Really?” Deke asked innocently. “All she used to say to me was ‘more, more…harder, harder.’”
Three of the four men laughed hard. Hafler managed a weak smile. Because, unlike Upton and Sim, he knew that Deke was only being truthful.
“Fuck it, can’t stand around here all day. We’ve got meat to deliver before it goes off,” Sim said, gesturing to Hafler to pick up the Armorer’s feet. Bidding their farewells, they left the two sec men to return to their post in the dugout and carried on toward their ville.
Another half mile brought them to the outer defenses of the ville. Their path across the scrub crossed a couple of dirt tracks and then finally met up with an old two-lane blacktop that was scarred, pitted and twisted by the quakes and ravages of the nuclear winter, but was still basically traversable. It was used regularly by the convoys of traders that came in and out of their ville, both as a stop-off to rest awhile and as a trading post. When they came to the blacktop, they turned right and headed toward the ville, clearly visible now.
It was a squat ville, with buildings no bigger than two stories high, all either the remnants of the predark suburban development or constructions that had been erected around the existing buildings, cobbled together from whatever materials could be found or traded. It gave the ville a lopsided, nightmarish look. A settlement filled with strange angles, abutments were used to shore up buildings that otherwise may have collapsed. Everything was either brown or gray. Color faded quickly in the heat and dust, and even black soon washed out. A pall of smoke hung over the whole area, coming up from the businesses and homes beneath. Even this far out, a buzz of noise could be heard. It was never quiet.
Encircling the ville, broken only on the blacktop by two heavily reinforced steel and concrete bunker houses that acted as sec posts, was a barrier of old barbed wire. Sharp fragments of steel and metal glittered here and there up to a height of eight feet. It had taken a long time to erect the fence. Sim still shivered at the memories of being on the construction crews. Some of the men had fallen onto the wire while putting it together, and were either sliced to ribbons by the metal and glass and bought the farm through blood loss, or died slowly and painfully from the poisons carried on the old barbed wire.
They approached the sec posts, grim and forbidding. You couldn’t see if they were occupied or by how many men, but anyone inside could see you coming from a distance of several miles.
Sim and Hafler were only about a half mile away and they were known to the sec crews. So, as with the earlier sec post, they were greeted by sec men who came out to meet them. All three sec men were dressed in dusty combat fatigues, carrying AK-47s. All walked in the same way, as though they were still wary, even though they knew the approaching duo. The only differences were their heights and builds.
“Who’s that?” asked one of them, shorter and rounder than the others. “I don’t recognize him.”
“You wouldn’t,” Sim began, the weariness evident in his voice as he told the story once again. They were waved through the sec post and they gratefully entered the boundaries of the ville, marked by a banner that hung limp in the still air, strung between the two sec posts. Its lettering was faded against the bleached-out cloth, but still readable.
Duma.
Sim and Hafler had seen it so many times they didn’t even acknowledge it as they passed under, continuing their trudge toward the heart of the ville.
The noise grew from a buzz to a clamor as they entered the area of population. The ville was built around a system of tracks and roads hacked into the dust bowl, radiating either side of the blacktop, which cut through the ville. From one end of Duma you could see clearly the sec posts guarding the road leading out on the other end. Dwellings and businesses were one and the same, with everyone trying to hustle something from where they lived and slept. Most had signs outside selling goods and commodities of all kinds, some were bars and some were gaudy houses. There was no division between the trade area and the living area, and children ran wild among the streets, trying to steal trinkets and dried fruits and meats from their displays. Adults chased them and beat them if they caught them.
Only two areas differed from the rest of the ville. A cleared space on either side of the blacktop, fenced in and guarded, offered parking for the wags of the trading convoys. The ville’s baron figured that the convoys would spend more jack in the ville if they could leave their wags protected by his force—for a small consideration, of course.
The other area lay to the right of the blacktop from the direction they had entered. The fenced-off area, with three old buildings inside, represented the baron’s personal dwelling and trading space. It was the only place where people weren’t allowed to walk freely. A trickle came in and out to conduct business of one kind or another, but they were regulated by the two sec men who stood, in dusty fatigues, at the only gate in the fence.
This was where Sim and Hafler headed, carrying their prize. J.B. was still unconscious, had remained so throughout the journey. Somewhere deep in his subconscious
