emerged from the cover of the old school bus. As they did, they could see that Eula was scoping them. She turned to the trader and nodded. She was satisfied they were who they were supposed to be, which was some kind of comfort, Ryan figured. At least they were safe…for now.
Eula spent the longest time staring at J.B. Her expression was unfathomable, and it made the Armorer feel uncomfortable.
“You don’t remember me, do you, John Barrymore Dix?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, a smile played across her lips. “Don’t worry. It was a long time ago. And no one noticed me back then. No one.”
Chapter Two
The Past
Guthrie was a nowhere ville, a small pesthole of huts and small hovels constructed from the debris that could be scavenged. The people made some desultory attempts at farming, but the nature of the dustbowl soil meant that the few crops it could produce were stunted and lacking in nutrients. It was off the beaten tracks and ruined blacktops that still crosscrossed the midwest, and those who lived there had a legend that they only landed up there because they got lost on the way to somewhere else. The ville itself was named after the guy who was the first to erect a little hut that fell down many times before others stumbled on him and built a few little huts of their own.
J. B. Dix had ended up in the pesthole ville of Guthrie in much the same way as anyone else who arrived there: by accident, and less than willingly. The skinny youth was quiet, slight, wiry, and wore spectacles that he was almost always polishing. He never said a word if he could help it, although if a person got him talking about blasters, that was another matter. You couldn’t shut him up, and he’d talk about stuff that no one else in Guthrie gave a shit about. So after a while they stopped asking. And he stopped talking.
What they really wanted to know was where he’d come from, why he’d landed in Guthrie and what the hell had happened to cause him to run. But any attempt to broach that subject was met with a greater silence than was usual. And it wasn’t just a matter of his being a quiet kid. There was something else there, a kind of menace that said it would be a real bad idea to mess with him.
So no one did. Except for Jeb Willets, who was big and muscular and therefore so out of place in Guthrie that he was able to bully his way around the ville. He figured the little kid with the bad eyes would be an easy mark. And at first he’d seemed right. He’d taken him by surprise and landed a few blows that seemed to knock the hell out of the kid. But Dix was sly—a feint, a foot, a use of balance that the lumbering Willets wasn’t used to, and the big man was on the ground, unconscious.
Then the thing that really made them leave J.B. alone: while Willets was unconscious, the skinny kid wired his shack to blow with some explosive he’d made. Then, when Willets was recovered, Dix took him at knifepoint and made him watch as the shack blew.
No one stepped in. The truth was, they all wished that they could have done that to the man. Willets was broken, and left the ville soon after.
And no one asked J.B. any questions. They left him alone. He liked it that way.
Of course, a man had to live. And one of the few things that he ever let out about himself was that he came from Colorado way, from a ville called Cripple Creek. He said nothing about family, but only mentioned it by way of saying that since he was young he’d been fascinated by blasters and explosives, and had educated himself in seeing what made them work, taking them apart and putting them back together again in better working condition than he’d found them. He knew the predark histories of the things, and he’d tell you about them while he was taking your beat-up old blaster and making it shiny like new.
The kid had a talent. It was the one time he didn’t shut up, and no one wanted to know, but nonetheless you had to give it to him.
So most of the time you’d just leave the blaster with him, and let him bring it back to you when it was done. That was fine. You paid him jack if you had any, or else you gave him food or supplies of some kind. There were convoys that passed in or near from time to time, and there was usually some service or some goods that Guthrie could use for exchange.
It wasn’t living, but it was existing. You didn’t buy the farm, and that was enough for most people. It was enough for the young J. B. Dix, for now.
That changed when Trader chanced upon the shanty.
“WHY DO WE ALWAYS end up in shit heaps like this?” Hunnaker moaned, idly scratching at herself; she could already feel the bugs starting to bite. She looked out of War Wag One at the expanse of dust, ordure and ramshackle buildings that made up the ville. “We’re supposed to be the best, so why do we bother?”
Trader bit the end off a cigar, spit it over her shoulder and out into the dirt, then clamped the smoke between a grin that threatened to split the graying stubble that covered the lower half of his face.
“Hunn, sometimes I can’t believe how stupe you can be. For someone so smart, you don’t do a lot of thinking. How do you reckon we got to where we are? I’ll tell you,” he went on, not giving her a chance to answer, “it’s because we pay attention to detail. You never know what’s out there until you’ve looked. That’s how come I found the stash that set us up, and that’s how come we keep getting bigger while all those other traders just bitch and whine and wonder how we did it.”
“And you reckon we’ll find something here?” she questioned, her tone leaving her doubt all too obvious.
Poet leaned over them both. “Ever known Trader to be wrong?”
She looked at both men, who were grinning at her.
“There’s always a first time,” she said flatly.
Trader and Poet were still laughing sometime later, when they took a look around the ville. By the time they’d finished, the smiles had gone and they were figuring that maybe Hunn had been right. There was nothing in this pesthole to interest them. They’d made some sparse business, just for the sake of it, and because Trader had a few commodities, he was overstocked with that he could afford to let go at a low rate. Never knew when they might come back this way, and they wanted a hospitable rather than hostile reception. Come to that, it would ensure they left on friendly terms, rather than in the wake of a firefight. Because these were mean folk, more so than in many other places. The misery of their existence saw to that.
So it looked as though this little detour would draw a blank, and it would be little more than just some wasted fuel.
Until the one thing that had been nagging at Trader the whole while suddenly clicked in his mind.
“You notice something about these folk?” he asked Poet in an undertone.
“Other than they’re being meaner than a mutie rattlesnake with a jolt hangover?”
Trader’s grin returned. “Yeah, other than that. Take a look at their blasters.”
Poet allowed himself a surreptitious study as they walked, before answering. “Nice gear. Wouldn’t like to have to face them down with those, even with all the ordnance we carry.”
“Too true, Poet. But think about it. This place is knee-deep in its own shit, with nothing to offer us in any way…to offer anyone who passes through. So how come they have such good ordnance?”
“Let me ask a few questions,” Poet replied.
Which didn’t prove too hard. There was only one bar in the ville, and although the brew it purveyed was of a poor quality—indeed, Poet felt he’d drunk better sump oil than this filth—it was all the locals had, and they were more than happy to let a lonely traveler spend some jack on getting drunk with them. He had plenty to spare, it seemed, and was more than happy to spend. Get him drunk enough and there was the chance of rolling him, boosting the local economy and getting one over an outlander, which was always a local favorite.
Except that Poet had drunk more, and far better, men under the table than lived in Guthrie. And for all its foul taste, the local brew was nowhere near as strong as