slope. “You nuke-suckers weren’t shit when it came to being guards.”
Jak, sitting on the Armorer’s left, stiffened and snarled. J.B. touched him lightly on the arm.
“You got one thing right, friend,” J.B. said. “We aren’t shit.”
“Don’t crack wise with me, you sawed-off little—”
The first two fingers of J.B.’s right hand lashed out and snapped the backs of the tips against Bub’s blond-stubbled jowl, as quick as a diamondback strike. They did no damage, but stung. Bub shook his head once and blinked, totally off balance.
Which meant that when J.B. brought his left hand whipping around in a hooking palm-heel strike that mashed Bub’s already generally shapeless nose across his face, the blow slammed the back of the goon’s skull into one of the heavy uprights rising from the periphery of the truckbed. Bub’s moaning subsided, he clutched his face as blood trickled between his fingers and down his spine. It began to diffuse in thin, red spiderweb nets through the sweat coating his thick neck.
“Hey!” the younger of the two guards yelled from the rear of the truck. “Hey! Stop that! I’m warning you!”
He raised his M-16. J.B. smiled placatingly and held up his hands, palms forward, to show that he was unarmed and innocent of ill intent. The other guard, older and obviously case-hardened, just rolled his eyes and gave the Armorer a tough look.
“Man’s got a point,” Mildred said bitterly. She sat across from J.B. with her knees up and her arms around them. “Some defenders we turned out to be.”
“No talking!” the young guard exclaimed, jabbing the air with his weapon.
J.B. ignored him. Notwithstanding the initial fuckup about ordering the prisoners to keep hands behind heads, the raiders had obviously run this drill before. As if to emphasize the fact, the older guard was toting a 12-gauge Browning A-5 autoloading shotgun sawed-off to the gas check, a pretty serious crowd-control implement. If the prisoners got seriously frisky, and particularly if they showed signs of trying to make a break for it, the guards were ready, willing and able to commence some serious blasting.
But it was also obvious the raiders needed bodies and they needed lots of them—warm, fully functional, and not leaking from extra orifices. So the captives enjoyed a certain amount of leeway.
“We just got caught flat, Millie,” J.B. said. “The wind, the sun, the bright blue sky—we got loose and careless, and now here we are.”
“Be quiet!” the younger guard shrilled, flourishing his longblaster wildly. “I told you! I’ll shoot! I will!”
“Cody,” the older man growled, “knock off that shit before I lay this mare’s leg up alongside your empty damn head, won’t you? Who gives a rat’s red ass if the bastards talk?”
Cody sank into sullen silence. The older man held on to the upright at the front-right corner of the bed with his left hand. The other held his sawed-off across his drawn-up knees. He stared back at the captives from a face as hard and flat as a cast iron pan.
Mildred’s eyes caught J.B.’s. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but he realized it just looked like somebody was turning a nut at the back of his head and tightening the skin around his mouth. He knew he couldn’t piss down her leg and tell her it was raining—her of all people. But she and he were paired, and he felt he owed it to at least try to do what he could to keep her spirits up.
He thought of Ryan and had to look away. He took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief he removed very gingerly from his pocket. After a few moments he put the specs back on and faced the black woman again.
Mildred was still gazing at him with curious fixity. Once she had his eyes back she let her own run meaningfully down toward his scuffed boots.
He nodded, slow and slight, a motion that would be lost to anybody not studying him a lot more closely than anybody but Mildred Wyeth seemed to be in the general jouncing and jostling induced by the truck banging along across the desert. The frisking he and the others had gotten had been professional but cursory. The sec men were looking for weapons. It didn’t occur to them that J.B. might have a full lock pick kit concealed on his person, much less a couple of odds and ends, including more picks and mebbe a weapon or two; and never in a thousand years would they suspect what might be hidden in, say, a hollowed-out boot heel.
Then J.B. shrugged. “Don’t see we got much choice but to take the cards as we’re dealt them,” he said, “than play them as they lay.”
She frowned.
“With Ryan dead—”
“Ryan not dead,” Jak said firmly.
J.B. looked at him sharply. The albino youth patted himself on the solar plexus. “Feel here if was.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Jak,” J.B. said with quiet determination.
Jak’s eyes lit up in anger. “Listen—”
“Take it easy, you two,” Mildred said. “We got to stick together right now.”
The traveler sitting to Mildred’s right cocked his head. “What about that bitch of Cawdor’s?”
Mildred’s elbow jabbed hard into the traveler’s ribs. Air oofed out of him. “Oh, sorry, Seymour. You just take it easy now. And remember it’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”
He glared at her and rubbed his side. He said no more, though.
A woman toward the front of the wag had gotten agitated. “So that’s just it?” she demanded. “We just let them shoot down our friends and loved ones and scarf us up as slaves, and that’s it? End of story?”
“You got a better idea, Maisy?” asked a heavy black-bearded man in coveralls patched in variety of colors.
The woman gazed wildly around at her fellow captives.
“They got the drop on us,” J.B. said, loudly but very controlled. “And that’s all there is to it. Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”
The woman at Maisy’s side took her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. The hard-bitten guard tipped up his scattergun until its foreshortened muzzle pointed at the nowovercast skies. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change expression. But the implication was clear.
There would be no more conversation out of the captives. Not because of any silly rules, but because they were getting themselves all stirred up, talking. If they got too stirred up, it would make more work for him.
That wouldn’t happen. And even though the shot-column didn’t spread out any too quick even from a barrel that short, the odds were pretty good that whoever the coldheart picked as designated troublemaker wouldn’t be the only one to cop some .33-caliber double-aught balls.
The captives clammed up. But J.B. thought he heard Jak mutter, deep down in his throat, “Ryan not dead.”
HEAD DOWN, back bowed beneath the weight of the pack she carried, Krysty trudged toward the lowering sun.
She had begun to feel, not hope—never hope, never again—but
