firm solution. You had to have weapons to defend yourself. In an ordered world, maybe, you relied on those forces you yourself set up to guard your rights and liberties, hold the peace, defend the weak against the strong. And even then, even in the most orderly society there might ever have been, there would still be those who secretly sought evil and who therefore preyed on the less fortunate.
And what if those who carried the weapons, those whom you'd set up, turned against you, were corrupted by the very power you had bestowed upon them? It happened. It always happened. Marsh Folsom, who knew about these things, had said it had happened all the time, throughout recorded history.
Because the trouble was that for some people power was a heady drug. The more they had, the more they wanted. It was that simple.
And yet it seemed to the Trader, thinking about such things, arguing the problem out with his captains through the long watches of the night, over many years, that though in a sense he'd been dead wrong to let loose all that vicious ordnance he'd discovered, in a sense he'd been dead right.
There was no denying that he had armed certain communities, deep in the wilder reaches of the Deathlands, that, because of him, had stayed intact and had 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 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 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.
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 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 pragniatist who would battle against all odds, yet knew to the instant when to retire in good order, when to conserve his forces.
The circumstances of their first meeting had not been auspicious. It was hard to think about trusting a person when that person had a heavy-caliber automatic jammed into the back of your skull and was whispering in your ear that one stupid move would bring about instant dissolution of the brain pan.
At the time the Trader had been sitting at the wheel of his personal war buggy, and in fact just five seconds before had unlocked it and climbed in after checking that all the locks were secure and no one had been tampering with them.
So much for security. So much for the antipersonnel device that ought instantly to have taken the arm off any guy who so much as touched the outside of the damned door.
But Ryan was good with locks — although even he now acknowledged the superiority of J. B. Dix when it came to the lock-picker's art. It was one of Ryan's finer points, the ability, if a guy was more skillful than he, to recognize the fact and admit it. And also, of course, he was on the run. These elements combined meant that the Trader's super-secure and seemingly impregnable war buggy was easy meat.
The Trader had been finishing some business in one of the then typical roaring towns in the center of the Deathlands — not that the situation had changed much in a decade; there was still an abundance of such pest holes scattered about the land — and he had been only too willing to put his foot down when ordered and, in the
