the roof. In the back huddled the others, four of them now. The fifth lay in a widening pool of gore.
The stickies seemed to have calmed down somewhat, maybe mesmerized by the explosion of the jeep. Stickies liked explosions — the bigger, the more eruptive, the better; they liked looking at the flames. But the bastards never gave in. They'd be up there now, waiting their chance, waiting to create more mayhem. He glanced at his rearview mirror, saw the other truck still clinging to his tail, but his own and its dust obscured the entrance to the canyon. He couldn't tell if the two buggies were coming up behind.
The truck hurtled along the flat of the canyon, swooped up and out of it into a grove of trees that drooped with dirty yellow foliage. They were in a wide natural valley, a part of the mountain's foothills, and the camp was almost dead center, a small hamlet of old huts and cabins clustered along one end of what had once been a huge lake but was now only a dirty little pond of muddy, brackish, just about drinkable water. In the distant past it had been a thriving community, a summer resort for wealthy people who came there to fish the lake and climb the mountains for fun. But of course the long-armed man knew only rumors of such things, was in fact puzzled by the notion that people once crawled up steep precipices as an enjoyable relaxation.
He said, 'What we gonna do, Scale?'
Scale, still gripping his piece, muttered, 'Gonna fuck me the red-hair.'
The long-armed man shot a startled glance at his leader. Had he heard right? The noise and clatter of the speeding truck was not good for conversation but the long-armed man could usually get the gist of something that was not yelled at him. He could have sworn that Scale had said something about fucking the red-haired girl. But that couldn't be right. There were priorities, for God's sake.
'Scale?'
'Uh?'
'What we gonna do? Them buggies bound to find us. They're gonna cream us.'
Scale's head jerked around, his thick-lipped mouth gaping, his eyes wide and crazy, the gun in his hands suddenly jammed into the side of the long-armed man's head.
He shouted, 'So you do what you wanna do! I'm gonna get me the red-haired bitch!'
The long-armed man slewed the truck to the right and into a narrow bush-lined tunnel. The vegetation all around them was parched, but it was still alive; it seemed able to survive, just, in this hostile environment, fed perhaps by the tiny trickles of water that still infiltrated the earth from off the hills. There were no birds in the valley and the long-armed man had never seen any animals. Anything on four legs automatically got eaten. Just about anything on two, as well.
The truck shot out of the tree-lined avenue and the long-armed man swung the wheel and skidded around into what had once been a blacktopped parking lot next to a ruined building that, a century ago, had been a shop selling guns and fishing tackle. A weather-faded signboard was fixed to the facing wall on which the words McPartland Brothers could just be discerned, if there had been anybody there who could actually have read them.
But this was a decaying ville; the art of reading had long departed it. The roofs of cabins were holed, although that didn't matter much since rain was no problem in this part of the Deathlands. Walls of some of the shacks sagged, unmended. Others had no walls at all, were simply wood frames with rotting bits of blanket draped around them, or tarps, or old animal hides brought from elsewhere when Scale had discovered the place and moved his band in. Maybe a few human hides, too. Smoke drifted from some of the chimneys.
The lake lay a few hundred meters to the north, most of it parched, just cracked mud now, the dark water far away toward the center. Across the other side the hills rose up sheer, a frowning, gloomy mass of peaks that brooded over the valley.
Sluttish women in filthy robes wandered toward the truck, most of them at some stage of pregnancy or other, although childbirth here was even less of a problem than the rain. Most of the babies were stillborn. Those that survived were usually sickly and weak, with a variety of ugly ailments and, often, limbs where no limbs were supposed to be. There were some healthier-looking children but these, without exception, were what remained from various land wag trains once the adults had been massacred. Scale saved the females, if they were young and looked strong, kept them as a kind of harem until he grew tired of them, when he tossed them to the men. And if the women thought they got it bad from Scale, they got it a hundred times worse from the men — usually a hundred times at a time.
The long-armed man brought the truck to a halt and shivered. Most of those hundred men were dead now, those in the two trucks probably all that were left. Maybe a dozen men, unless there were a few stragglers in the tunnels still, or hiding out in the rocks above the highway. Hellblast it, he thought, the women outnumber us.
He said, 'The stickies, Scale. What we gonna...'
Scale jabbed at him with the automatic rifle.
'Out.'
'Scale, I'm your wheelman! They'll kill me, they'll suck me apart.'
Scale was smirking, licking his rubbery lips.
'I'll get me another wheelman. Out.'
Completely over the edge, thought the long-armed man wildly. He was suddenly dying to urinate.
He jammed down the door handle, smacked the door open and flung himself out of the cab, diving to the parched and sparsely grassed earth. He hit the ground, somersaulted, was up on his two legs and running, charging through a group of women who were staring at the truck with lackluster eyes. His breath coming in great wheezing gulps, he came to a stop and swung around.
Nothing. The stickies were no longer on the truck's roof nor clinging to the sides nor, as far as he could see, underneath either. He stared at the other truck, which was braking in a cloud of dust behind the first. Nothing there. Maybe, he thought, they'd hopped off as the trucks were speeding through the trees. In which case they were still around. He glanced fearfully at the wooded area they had come through, but he could see no unnatural movement in the trees. Maybe they'd simply beat it, got disgusted with the whole jig and cleared out. Hah! He said out loud. No way. No way, my friend. Stickies had one-track minds.
And what about the Trader's buggies? Where in hell's name had they got to? No sign of them. No sound of them, either. Had they just given up the chase, turned around and headed back the way they'd come, to the road, satisfied after their single kill?
But that didn't seem too likely. In one respect the Trader's warriors were akin to the stickies: they had one-track minds.
Ryan's nose wrinkled. The stench from the camp below was like a fist between the eyes. Months, maybe years, of rot contributed to that smell: bad food, excrement, urine, dead bodies flung anywhere to decay. A stomach-churning stink, a monstrous miasma that, he thought grimly, if you could distill it and bottle it, would probably be as efficient in destruction as strong poison. Not that those who existed down there would notice anything. They were surely used to it by now, and worse.
'Hell, Ryan, we're gonna need masks to go down there.'
'Yeah, pretty ripe.'
'Ripe ain't the word.'
'Don't worry, Abe. Couple of mortars should do it. We don't need to go in blazing.'
They were crouched on a low, bush-topped bluff that overlooked the pest hole of a camp from the south. Ryan had spotted the two trucks while dealing with the jeep, but then held back from following them too closely. It was easy enough to watch where they had gone, even more simple to follow at a distance and hide the two buggies in the trees that grew this side of the canyon.
'See.' Ryan pointed down at the cluster of buildings, to one building in particular, larger than the rest and built away from the center. 'That one. Seems to be in better shape than the others, and it's bigger. Old storehouse probably. That'll be where the honcho hangs out, and that'll be where the weaponry and fuel will be stored. And the explosives. The honcho'd want to keep an eye on all that valuable shit. Hit that and we solve the problem.'
'What about all those guys? We let 'em live?'
'They aren't going to be zipping around attacking land wag trains now. They'll be lucky to survive out the
