He had overlarge eyes, black rimmed, deep hollowed. His mouth was wide and thick lipped. His nose was a slight bulge above the mouth, with two tiny orifices; his sense of smell was almost nonexistent.
He rose to his feet, snapped long slender fingers. Another figure, overtall and with very long arms, slipped from behind to hand him a pair of powerful glasses. The man with the faintly scaled skin took the glasses and put them to his eyes and adjusted them.
There were maybe fifteen vehicles in the convoy, including three big war wagons. The man nodded. The Trader. Only the Trader carried that amount of punch.
The Trader was a hard nut to crack. No one had ever managed to take him, though many had tried, both muties and norms. In many ways the Trader was the most powerful man in the land. He had hardware, high powered and deadly, and plenty of it; he had fuel supplies, secret and well hidden, known only to him and his captains, his closest and most trusted confidants; he had contacts, from the civilized East to the primitive West, from the suspicious North to the outright barbaric South. He dealt in weapons, a trade built up over twenty years or more. But he bartered and sold other merchandise, too: food, clothes, gadgets, fuel, generators, wisdom, knowledge. He even dispensed justice in the more outlying regions, in the tiny scattered hamlets hundreds of kilometers from the huge Baronies of the East and South.
He was trusted and he was fair, but he was no simp and his revenge could be devastating. All who knew of the Trader knew the tale of the Eastern town that had tried to mess with him, a town of low morals run by an ambitious madman. The exact nature of their mistake had been lost over the intervening years, but the outcome was retained in the memories of most who had dealings with him. The town had been destroyed, razed to the ground, wiped from the face of the earth. He had spared no one. Such had been his fury that he had massacred the inhabitants to a man, woman, child. And animal. He had not even spared the animals, had not taken them for himself but instead had slaughtered the herds and left the carcasses, and then moved on.
It was a lesson. You did not mess with the Trader.
Sure, there were other traders, men and women who traveled the Deathlands in convoy, bartering and haggling, stealing and slaving, picking up merchandise here, selling it there. But none of them traveled the Trader's routes, none had his expertise, and none had his nose for the hidden Stockpiles that the pre-Nuke military men had laid down more than a century before.
Those were the plums that everyone wanted to pick, the hidden man-made caverns scattered across the land, stuffed with hardware, fuel, weaponry; the secret silos that the governments of the day had ordered to be constructed against a time when the world might be in ruins and power shifted solely to those with the muscle and the guns to hold on to it. The irony was that the Nuke had been so devastating, so ferocious, so unbelievably swift that chains of command all over the world had been destroyed more or less at a stroke, and their secrets had been lost with them, lost for nearly a century.
Now they were being uncovered slowly, very slowly — secrets hidden from most of those who had inhabited the land once known as the United States.
And mostly they were being uncovered by the Trader, who traveled the land, north, south, east, west; who probed and poked and dug and excavated; who journeyed far into regions no man had trod for a century, regions no sane man wished to tread. It was said that the Trader had trekked deep into the heart of the fiery southwest where hurricane-force winds howled across a moonscape where nothing grew, no man lived. It was said that his land wagons had specially reinforced and adapted roofs because he journeyed deliberately into regions where the acids could strip a man to his bones in a second. It was rumored that he had even penetrated the mountains overlooking the bleak western coastal strip, had viewed like a conqueror of old the steaming lagoons, the long jagged fjords thrust deep between craggy peaks, and had sailed the simmering seas below which vast cities lay crumbling and rotting as they slept an eternal sleep.
All this was said; much of it was true. And the proof was the hardware, the strange and incomprehensible artifacts, the sealed crates of exotic foodstuffs he brought back time and again after each trawl through the Deathlands.
The man called Scale handed the glasses back to his companion. He gazed up at the dark sky broodingly, calculating that there was an hour to dawn. No hint of a smile crossed his face, but his dead eyes had come alive.
He said, 'Trader.'
Not 'a trader,' noted the man with the very long arms.
'We take him?'
'Sure.'
'We take the Trader?' The long-armed man was dubious.
'Sure.'
The man thought about this, staring at the line of lights wobbling far away. It seemed to him that Scale was about to bite off more than he could chew. It seemed to him that Scale was in danger of choking himself to death.
'He's heavy.'
'So are we.'
'Not like him.'
Scale shrugged.
'We hit him in the dark. Three war wags. Front, middle, rear. Can't turn in the pass — too narrow. So go for them and hit 'em hard. We got the muscle. We disable the middle so it blocks the road. Rear trucks can't go forward, front can't go back. We hit both ends, simultaneous. Ain't got a prayer.'
The man with the long arms pondered this. In principle it sounded good, the perfect ambush. But — the Trader? He bit his lower lip with three sharp, filed-down teeth, the only ones in his mouth.
'He got muscle. Plenty muscle.'
'Sure. So have we.'
'Not like him.'
'We do it.'
The long-armed man turned to stare down into the darkness cloaking the patiently waiting band of men below.
'Hellblast, Scale, we already got us a catch. Two land wags, truckin' out to the Darks.'
The man with the faintly scaled skin shook his head irritably.
'Ain't enough. Any case, it's the ammo. Trader, he's got plenty ammo, plenty guns. Big mothers.'
'Plenty men, too,' the long-armed man pointed out.
'Nah. He travels light, from what I hear. Lot of big wind about his manpower. These days, he travel light.'
'Where'd you hear that?'
'Fat Harry. Last time there. Said the Trader was gettin' to be an old man, thinkin' of quittin'.' He chuckled suddenly, a dry, sour sound. 'We'll hurry it along. Quit the fucker ourselves.'
'I dunno, Scale. The Trader.' The man shook his head glumly.
'Don't forget,' said Scale, 'what we got.'
'We ain't got nothuf.'
This time the man with the faintly scaled skin laughed aloud, his eyes wide and crazy.
'We got the stickies, idiot! We got the stickies.'
In the lead war wagon, in a small toilet cubicle to the rear, the Trader was being sick. He knelt on the swaying floor, gripping the sides of the aluminum bowl, and heaved four or five times, finally slumping back on his heels against the wall of the cubicle. He was sweating. He wiped his brow with a rag, then wiped his lips, carefully, almost delicately. The noise of the war wag's powerful engine thundered in his ears and he was glad of it. It meant no one could hear him or what he was doing. He clambered to his feet, a powerfully built man with stiff, grizzled hair, and stared down at the contents of the bowl dispassionately. He knew exactly what to expect.
Blood. But this time more of it than ever. Almost looked as if he was hawking his whole nukeshitting guts up.
Hanging over the can was a mirror that bounced gently, clacking with every bump and lurch of the vehicle's wheels and tracks over the rutted road. The Trader stared at himself thoughtfully, a face he saw every day of every
