anyone who entered their enclave. They'd also found three more crates back in the Apps. The LAPA had excellent performance, and Ryan preferred it to any of the longer autorifles that because of their length were more unwieldy in an urban situation. He carried the LAPA in a looped rig inside his long coat and could pull it fast.
On his right hip was a SIG-Sauer P-226
On his left hip was the panga scabbard, the panga itself now holstered within easy reach on the buggy's door. From his belt hung four grenades — frag — and three mag pouches for the SIG. Inside his long coat, two each side, were four sticks for the LAPA.
Behind the drive seat was an Ithaca 37 pump S-shot with pistol grip and stock and a Mossberg 12-gauge bullpup 8-shot with sights fore and aft and compacted stock. Canvas panniers on both doors sagged with cartridges.
The buggy itself, like all the buggies run by the Trader, bristled with external and internal weaponry: cannon at the front and a fixed mortar, and two M-60s, one poking out from behind an armored shield at the front, and the other rear-mounted through a roof blister with a wide traverse. Pierced steel planking, double thickness, had been fixed to the buggy's exterior.
In firepower at least Ryan felt reasonably safe, reasonably secure; that was the most you could feel in a hostile situation. And this was most definitely a hostile situation.
The fronts of most of the shops and bars here had been boarded over, glass clearly being in short supply. Where doors were left open, light from kerosene lamps and candles spilled out onto filthy sidewalks strewn with trash. Men stood in the open doorways, staring out at them, faces bleak and cold, uncompromising. He saw a couple of guys spit in their direction as the buggy edged its way along.
There was both tension and hatred here that he could feel even through the pierced steel planking. It was something palpable. He'd had no idea Mocsin had reached such a state, such a grim pitch. He'd been under the impression, if he'd thought about it at all, that Jordan Teague's grip on the town was steel strong, that any hint of opposition to his rule had been squashed flat over the years by Strasser's security force. Now, tooling along this garbage-and car-strewn street, he was not so damned sure.
Hovak, the kid who manned the mortar but who was now squatting behind Hunaker's seat, gazing over her shoulder, said, 'Why d'you say that, Hun?'
'Say what?'
'Running out of control.'
'Hell! All this crap on the road, on the sidewalks, dummy. Guy like Teague oughta know by now, after twenty years or whatever, you don't let all this shit pile up like this. Asking for trouble. Perfect sniping positions. You wanna hold a town, you have nice wide roads, nice clean thoroughfares so the opposition can't hide.'
She reached inside her jump jacket and took out a pack of ready rolled. She offered one to Ryan who grunted and shook his head. She poked one in her mouth and lit it, then pushed a hand through her bright green hair. She said, 'Am I right?'
Ryan said, 'Yeah, as always.'
He liked Hunaker — she was smart and she was tough and she was an excellent shot, especially with the MG — although there was nothing between them and never had been and never was likely to be. It was unnecessary. In any case Hunaker was bi, although she had a leaning toward her own sex. At the moment a particular favorite was a girl called Ange who held the radio op's chair in War Wag Three.
From the back of the buggy, where he was sitting with his feet up on an ammo box, J.B. said, 'Oughta have a better intelligence net.'
Ryan said, 'Who? Them or us?'
'Them. Us. Both. But us particularly. Tighter. Been meaning to talk to the Old Man about it.'
'You'll be wanting a secret police net next.'
J.B. snickered.
Ryan flicked the wheel a fraction to avoid a mangy-looking dog, then righted the buggy.
They relied for intelligence on live-in friendlies in all of the areas they visited — towns, cities, hamlets, trading posts — and on scuttlebutt that drifted like the wind across the length and breadth of the Deathlands. Often they knew the bad news — massacres, atmospheric devastation, heavy marauder presence — long before those who lived near where it had occurred. Just as often, however, the first evidence of a tragedy was when one of their land wag trains stumbled across it: a ville, maybe, that was a ville no longer, merely a desolation of blackened piles of rubble and a hell of a lot of ash, with a population that consisted mainly of rotting corpses, often savagely mutilated or lacking heads or arms or legs or sexual organs. Or all of these items.
Ryan swung the wheel as something crashed from a mountain of trash ahead of them, picked out by his roof spotlight. 'Guns!' he snapped.
The something was a large box. It hit the road, bounced across the road, slammed into the piles of garbage opposite. There was a minor avalanche of muck as its impact vibrated through the pile. The road was now even narrower.
Ryan glimpsed a black shape scuttling along the right-hand garbage line and relaxed. It was a rat, a mutie rat at that, big as a full-grown dog.
'Forget it. A rat.'
'Great,' said Hunaker, her eyes still narrowed as she glared through the sighting screen. 'We eat tonight!' She turned and yelled back to Hovak. 'See what I mean? At least there were no mutie rats in Mocsin a couple of years back. Four-legged variety, anyhow.'
'Keep by your pieces,' said Ryan. 'I got a bad feeling about this place.'
It was in his mind to turn back right now, get out of town, gather up the rest of the convoy and head out to where the main train was and then beat it.
Ryan took a right after the block where Mocsin's main bank had once stood. Still stood, actually, although now it functioned as a center-of-town HQ for Strasser's security goons. Ryan didn't like to think about what at times went on in the bank's former vaults. It was better not to think about it. Or rather, he thought grimly, more cowardly.
Here the place was a blaze of light from brilliant spots up on the roof. He noted the heavy coils of barbed wire that fenced the area off from the rest of the street. Here at least the garbage had been cleared away. There were three black vans parked inside the barbed-wire perimeters, but Ryan could see no sign of human presence. The windows of the building were all heavily barricaded.
He turned into a side street where there was more light, much less trash. Here was the gaudy house area. Here were the gambling and drinking bars where groups of miners were let loose, in turn, once every six weeks. They came into town in Teague's convoys with jack in their pockets, the younger ones with hope in their hearts, determined to pay off what they owed to the city of Mocsin's tax and toll coffers. Somehow no one ever did pay off what was on the debit side of the ledger. Some went straight to where their wives and loved ones had shacked up, only to find them gone. Vanished. Disappeared. No one knew where. No one cared where. Some might be found in the gaudy houses. It was often the case that a dispirited miner, after a week-long search of the town, in his misery, his need for some kind of affection, even if high priced, would turn to the brothels and discover his missing wife there, all dressed up and no place else to go. Some really had vanished, possibly into Strasser's dungeons, possibly into his perverted half world where they became tormented playthings in the strange and vicious 'games' he and his goons initiated. Faced with this kind of horror on top of everything else, the miner would drink himself into insensibility and continue thus until it was time to hop aboard the convoy and head back to the mines once more, care of Jordan Teague. Some went on a smash, a bender, a rampage, and that was as good as committing suicide. And for those who survived, after one bout of heartache and horror, after one 'rest period' in which you discovered
