James Axler - Pilgrimage to Hell

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 week of every month of every year. But older, definitely older. Much older than yesterday, a hell of a sight older than last week. White, too. Unhealthy looking. Once his face used to be red-brown, vigorous, alive. He breathed out slowly, then kicked the flush pedal beside the bowl. The hell with it...

He reached up and opened a small cabinet fixed to the wall. Inside were shelves of bottles and jars. His eyes took in the various colors, considered the positions of each container. As he could neither read nor write, it was the only way he could distinguish their contents.

He took down a bottle of green liquid, uncapped it, wiped the neck with his rag, took a long swig. He shook his head, washing the stuff around his mouth, then threw his head back and gargled noisily. The bellow of the engine drowned all sounds. He spat into the small hand-basin beside the closed gunport and twisted the tap, and water from the tank in the roof washed the green liquid away.

He put the bottle back and lit a cigar. That would take the smell of peppermint away, right enough. The Trader chuckled, forgetting for a second the terrible ache in his guts as the thought hit him that the mouthwash, plus the other bottles of the same stuff from the same cache, was probably the only mouthwash within a few hundred thousand kilometers of him. Weird stuff. Stuff that had been stored deep down someplace, freak material survivors of fire and ice, and often to be found in huge amounts, "factory fresh" it sometimes said on the labels. There weren't many of these finds, but there were some, and they were mighty strange in their bright packaging and their huge quantities. Such caches were usually buried deep under rubble, and if it was a huge, sparkling supply of mouthwash that you found after all that digging, you were more than likely to think it not worth the effort. Except the Trader. He liked the stuff. He liked the joke inherent in luxury products suddenly found in quantities far out of all proportion to their usefulness.

He slapped at his face, his cheeks, hard, to get some color back, breathing in sharply, squaring his shoulders. He took a long pull at his moldy old cigar and let the smoke drool out of his mouth. Then he pulled open the door.