James Axler - Desolation Crossing

LaGuerre would love to know that. She had never enlarged on her initial statement to him. A ville about a hundred klicks from Evermore, going east. That could have been any number of villes. Part of the area to the east was fucked—completely uninhabited. Okay, scratch that. Maybe there were a few settlements in the contaminated area, but they weren’t anywhere he or any other trader particularly cared to go. That still left a number of small villes ruled by desperado barons. Not many traders cared to go there, either. Not much jack, not much to barter. So he didn’t know squat about any of them. If she was telling him the truth—bitch was too self-contained and sure of herself to do anything else—then it had to have been one of those.

He’d moved on quickly, and hadn’t been back that way in the year and a half since she’d joined, so there hadn’t been the chance to check out her story. But he knew one thing—the only trader to really make use of those areas had been Trader himself. The man was legend. He’d got richer than anyone, had more of a stash than anyone, done more business than anyone because he’d worked harder. Yeah, and where had it got him? Sometimes you just had to kick back a little and enjoy the fruits of your labors. LaGuerre realized he was wandering. The point of his train of thought was…Hell, what was it again? Yeah, that was it. If this guy Dix had ridden with Trader, along with the one-eyed guy, then he had to have been to some of those villes in the east. Probably the one that Eula came from, the one where she had gotten into some trouble and had to run.

So maybe Dix knew her secret. And, given that she had wanted to search those guys out, and was interested more in him than in any of the others, maybe she knew his.

That would explain why she was even quieter than usual, and he was like a mutie cat on a sun-fried wag roof.

WHILE THIS HAD BEEN going through LaGuerre’s head, Eula had been guiding J.B. through the armory and associated tech held by the convoy. She had explained to him in few words the condition of the armory when she had joined, and the steps she had taken to both improve the quality of what was there, and to add to the inventory, making them stronger. Each blaster she detailed at length, telling him things he already knew, but seeming to tell him these things for a reason.

For the life of him, J.B. could not work out what the code behind her words may be. She was demonstrating her knowledge to impress him. But why? Why would she want to impress a man she claimed to know, but who had no recollection of her?

J.B. was not a man for subterfuge. He could stay impassive when needed—indeed, there were those who would argue that it was a natural state for both himself and Jak—but an outright lie was something he found hard, even in extreme danger. Why bother? If people didn’t like the truth, then fuck ’em. Equally, he didn’t respond well to situations where people were evasive, trying to tempt you into playing their games. Life was shit, hard and way too short for games. Especially games like that.

He had tried to keep his distance from her. Tried to rack his memory and remember her. Tried to even guess what the connection could be. But there was nothing except a nagging feeling of danger deep in his gut. And a growing curiosity over the fact that she had chosen the vocation of armorer. She was impressing this upon him, as though it would somehow open the floodgates of memory.

Well, if that was what she had hoped, then it was a bad call—not even a trickle.

She was in the middle of showing him the comm tech that she had managed to get up and running after they salvaged it from some ruined ex-military wags—carefully avoiding an explanation of how they had come to be wrecked, he noted—when J.B. decided that he could take no more.

“You’re good,” he said simply, stopping her in midflow, “and I want to know where you learned all this. ’Specially so young. Took me years on the road with Trader to amass the kind of knowledge you’ve got. Had some before I joined, but it was only hitting the road and finding shit that helped it build. But you must have grown up with someone who knew this stuff.”

“I did,” she said simply.

LaGuerre’s ears pricked. Ask her more, Dix, he thought.

“So who taught you?” J.B. pushed.

Eula shook her head. “In time, John Barrymore. In time. I don’t give anything away for free. I want from you, in return.”

“What?”

“That’ll have to wait. You need to do some thinking. Think about this, John Barrymore—remember a place called Hollowstar?”

J.B.’s face stayed impassive, but his mind jolted.

Yeah. He remembered Hollowstar….

The Past

It took a month—no more—for J.B. to settle in to Trader’s way of life, to stop being the new kid, and to start being just J.B. Such was his skill and knowledge, given room to grow by the ordnance that Trader’s people collected on the way, that he became more than “that new guy the armorer,” but became known as the Armorer, just as Trader was Trader. They were the definitive article—their positions used as names, spoken as though there were none other than they fit to carry such a name.

Not that it came easily. Poet knew how good the kid was from the beginning. After all, he was the one who had been sent to look at J.B., assess his skills, then fake the work to test them.

Hunnaker was hostile. She was always hostile to anything new. A loyal and trusted fighter, with a ruthless streak a mile wide, who could always be trusted in times of battle, yet she had a spiky, difficult temperament in her. She was insecure of her position in the convoy, which she prized highly. She measured herself by her standing with Trader, as the convoy was the only family she had, and despite her seeming ability to act and live independently of anyone or anything, there was a little hollow inside of her that craved the familial security of the convoy. Everything revolved around that, and when it changed, then she bristled, and lashed out.

It was a dangerous way to live, especially on a convoy where every day brought the chance for someone to buy the farm, and change was an unspoken constant. Which, perhaps, explained why there were days when all everyone wanted to do—even Trader—was stay the hell out of Hunn’s way.

And she kind of liked it that way. It gave her status in the convoy. Except that J.B. walked in and acted like that was nothing. He didn’t challenge her. That she could take, she could face down, she could do something about. No, he did something far worse—he ignored her. He acted like her moods didn’t happen, like there weren’t days that people edged around her rather than get into a fight. He just didn’t notice.

So she loathed him for some time. It became a subject of discussion among the convoy, and the subject of a book run by Poet on how long until they had a fight, and who would win. Virtually everyone put jack on it—even Trader—and it was a keenly awaited event. Given Hunn’s temperament, and the taciturn and phlegmatic new man, it was only a matter of time, and not much of that.

The fact that it never happened was, as Abe had put it, “jus’ one of the weird shit things happen around here.”

They were up north, where the temperatures drop, and any potential combat had to be undertaken with the added encumbrance of furs and padded clothing. Movement was difficult, threw off timing. Worse, it led to blasters screwing up in the extremes of temperature, which is exactly what happened to Hunn, and how she nearly got herself chilled in the cold.

It was an ambush by a bunch of desperate coldhearts who had been waiting for convoys to raid for too long. They were crazed with cold and hunger, giving them the desperation and madness to take on the convoy in what seemed to be a stupe position. Which was why, maybe, they nearly got away with it. Desperate measures sometimes brought the element of surprise that can turn a firefight. So it was that a steep, rocky pass covered in snow nearly became the graveyard that marked Trader’s passing.