were usually so packed with yard-long flat worms that even a starving man wouldn’t touch their meat, the companions hadn’t seen anything alive. Not so much as a fly. The landscape had been scoured clean.
“Cold fire means he’s still a couple days ahead of us,” Krysty said. “We may never catch him.”
“Could be he’s running on jolt,” J.B. suggested.
The potent combination of methamphetamine, narcotic and hallucinogen was Deathlands’s recreational drug and painkiller of choice. If the thief was staying high on jolt, he could keep walking despite hunger, keep walking until his feet fell off.
“The dam isn’t far, now,” Ryan said. “Another five or six miles, at most. Good chance that’s where our friend will have set up camp.”
The dam was their only hope. The bastard had either stopped there with whatever water he had left, or there was water in the bottom of the reservoir. If neither was the case, they were all headed for the last train west. The companions gathered up their coats and packs, and trudged on.
Exhaustion, dehydration and the flat monotony of the trek made it difficult for Ryan to maintain his mental focus. His thoughts kept wandering back to the carnage they’d seen up-canyon. Dying of thirst was one of the worst ways to check out. There was terrible pain. Delirium. And a slow, lingering slide into death. The guy who’d blown off his own head had witnessed his friends’ suffering, and taken a short cut. Ryan imagined that with his last breath, as he’d pressed that shotgun muzzle hard to his chin, he had cursed the thief to hell.
Betrayal wasn’t unusual in the Deathlands.
It wasn’t a kinder, gentler, I-feel-your-pain kind of place.
Sympathy was in shorter supply than cased ammo.
Individual survival was all that mattered in the hellscape. Survival at any cost. A brutal philosophy that Ryan Cawdor had been steeped in since birth. Over time, his friendships, his battles, and his relationship with his son, Dean, had widened his horizons. Ryan no longer dismissed out of hand the idea of risking his own skin for the sake of strangers, or in fighting for a just cause instead of a thick wad of jack from the highest bidder. And he still grieved the disappearance of his son.
After another hour of walking, as they rounded a sharp bend in the rim, the valley broadened enormously before them. Eight miles ahead, the canyon necked down again, and the sun blazed off a barrier of white concrete nearly as high as the rim. At the base of the dam, there was water; not a great predark reservoir, but a modest lake bounded on three sides by green, furrowed fields and stands of low trees.
As if that wasn’t miracle enough, there was also the ville.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, thumbing his glasses back up the slippery bridge of his nose.
From a distance, it was like skydark had never happened.
Like the flooding of the canyon had never happened, either.
A mile or two from the near shore of the lake, stone and brick buildings clustered around a central square with a little park in the middle. The largest building was three stories tall with a clock tower. On the far side of the city center stood a row of grain silos. A black strip of two-lane highway paralleled that end of town. The road petered out in the middle of the plain, either buried under shifting sand or ripped away by receding waters.
“Little Pueblo,” Mildred said. “Just the way I remembered it.”
“’Tis indeed a wonderment,” Doc prononunced. “Further evidence that the hand of the Creator works in mysterious ways.”
“I’d say it was more a case of the laws of physics, working predictably,” Mildred countered.
“And whose hand lies behind the laws of physics?” Doc asked with a confident grin.
“Why does there have to be a ‘hand’?”
“Touché, dear Mildred. I am sure we would all like to hear your explanation.”
“On nukeday, the water was five hundred feet deep over the town,” she said. “All that liquid acted like a giant cushion to protect the buildings from shock and blast effects of incoming airburst missile strikes. My guess is the dam didn’t get off so easy, and that’s why the reservoir disappeared.”
“Could have been a near-miss with an earthshaker warhead,” J.B. suggested. “Those babies had an effective blast diameter of five hundred miles.”
“That would explain how the entrance to that redoubt got uncovered,” Ryan said. “The ground tremors brought the whole cliff down. Cracked the dam open, too.”
“I don’t see any people moving, anywhere,” Krysty said, squinting against the glare. “And there’s got to be people. Not just our water thief. Somebody’s been tending those fields.”
With rifle scope and binocs, Ryan and J.B. surveyed the terrain downrange.
There was something else wrong with the picture.
Unlike most other inhabited outposts in Deathlands, Little Pueblo didn’t have a defensive berm of piled dirt and debris.
There were no perimeter gunposts. No fortified gates.
J.B. lowered the binocs. “I suppose there could be snipers and spotters up here on the rim,” he said. “Although they wouldn’t be much use.”
Ryan had to agree with that assessment. The canyon was so wide that much of it was beyond the range of even super-high-velocity, .50-caliber milspec rounds. Cap-and-ball weapons would be about as effective as chucking rocks. Snipers spaced out on the rim couldn’t protect the ville from a large invading force—they couldn’t concentrate enough fire to turn back attackers. The best they could do was harrass. And then only during the day. That was the problem with rim-based, spotter outposts, too. They’d be useless at night. Even if somehow they saw the invaders coming, they wouldn’t be able to direct defensive ambushes in the valley.
“It’s like they don’t give a damn if they’re overrun,” J.B. said.
“Or they know it isn’t going to happen,” Ryan said. “What do you mean ‘they know’?” Krysty asked. “They’re sitting on an oasis in the middle of a radblasted desert. The nearest ville of any size must be 150 miles away. A gang of blackhearts that sets out for Little Pueblo isn’t going to be in shape to rob it by the time they get here. If they get here.”
“How would robbers even know it existed?” J.B. said. “After the reservoir was built, the ville’s name was probably taken off all the maps. It sure wasn’t on the one in the redoubt. Only way to find Little Pueblo would be to stumble onto it by accident. Then you’d have to walk out again to gather a chilling crew. And then walk in again to do the looting.”
“It’s a safe bet that’s never happened,” Ryan said. “If it had, folks down there would know the desert wasn’t enough to keep trouble out. And there’d be perimeter defenses. “
“Bastard thief got in, maybe two days ago,” Krysty reminded them.
“He could be swinging from a tree right now,” J.B. said. “Or else his head’s on a stick in the middle of that square. No way of telling what kind
