LITMIR.BIZ

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from bullets,” J.B. answered. “Those are wound scars. Definitely a hard man to chill.”

      “A lot of folks have tried to put BoomT in the ground,” Ryan said. “He’s put them all there instead. It’s the flab that protects him, that and all the muscle underneath. He’s one powerful son of a bitch, and he’s a lot faster than he looks. Rumor has it, he can snap a grown man’s neck with either hand.”

      “Need a dead-center hit with an RPG to take out that giant tub of guts,” J.B. added.

      “BoomT opened up shop about fifteen years ago,” Ryan went on, “after scroungers started going into the hot zones to the north and west to look for spoils.”

      “By ‘spoils,’ I take it you are referring to undiscovered caches of predark manufactured goods?” Doc said as he accepted the binocs from Mildred.

      “Correct,” Ryan said.

      More than a century after the Apocalypse, there was still no large-scale manufacturing in the Deathlands. The necessary machines, the understanding of engineering and assembly-line processes had all gone extinct, along with democracy, the forty-hour work week and cable TV. In actuality, nuclear Armageddon had turned back America’s clock more than two hundred years, to before the Industrial Revolution. The United States of America had devolved into a feudal, agarian and hunter-gatherer society.

      “Trader never trusted BoomT,” J.B. said.

      “He had good reason,” Ryan said. “Big Boy over there is a double-dealing, backstabbing mountain of crap. And we don’t have enough ammo left to defend our booty. If we take more spoils with us than we’re willing to lose, chances are we’ll lose everything and get ourselves chilled in the bargain.”

      “So, we’ve got to hide most of the C-4?” Mildred said. “Where?”

      “I know a good place farther south,” Ryan said, waving on the companions.

      Circling wide around the south end of the mall, through the shimmering waves of heat they could see a pair of four-mule carts crawling for the line of moored sailboats at the water’s edge. The heavily laden wags rolled on scavenged auto axles and wheels down the cracked and granularized street.

      Between the mall and the distant water was a wide expanse of rolling, undeveloped land. There were stands of mature trees; some bare-limbed and dead, some living. Among the twists and turns of the landscape stood patches of irrigated fields that were bordered by little clusters of field-hand shanties.

      “From the lay of it, I’d say it used to be a golf course,” Mildred said.

      It was a golf course no more.

      It had become the breadbasket for Port A ville and vicinity.

      Local folk had abandoned the city streets in favor of the open space. The soil there was unpolluted, and there were no wrecked buildings that had to be cleared before it could be cultivated. The former Babe Zaharias Memorial Golf Course was, in fact, the path of least resistance.

      Ryan led the companions across the mule-cart route, past the imploded shell of the former links’ clubhouse, and onto what had once been a lush and rolling green. The farm fields on either side weren’t fenced. No field hands were in evidence. With the sun straight overhead, it was too hot to do grunt work. No heads appeared in the doorless doorways or glassless windows of the huts, either. If the laborers were inside, they were dozing soundly through the suffocating heat.

      The companions climbed a shallow grade, then passed through a stand of tall trees. In a shallow bowl below, out of sight of the surrounding fields, was a water hazard that had once challenged golfers. The small lake’s surface was choked with mats of chartreuse algae.

      Ryan led them down to the shore, then handed J.B. his scoped longblaster and said, “Leave your C-4 here and head up to the ridge on the far side of the lake. Make sure no one is spying on us from that direction.”

      As J.B. trotted away, Krysty put two and two together and said, “We’re hiding the explosives in the water?”

      “It won’t hurt the C-4 because it’s sealed in plastic,” Ryan said as he dumped the contents of his backpack onto the bank. “Everybody take out one detonator blister pack,” he told the others.

      The companions unshouldered their loads and did as he asked.

      “Put the batteries in your detonators,” Ryan said as he put batteries in his. When they were all ready, he added, “Now try the test button.”

      All of the remotes lit up. Green for go. They were functional.

      The one-eyed man pried the two tiny power cells from the black plastic case and slipped each of them into a different pants pocket. “Okay, now remove the batteries,” he said. “Hide them in your gear separate from the detonators. We don’t want some drooler arming one of the remotes and pushing the ‘fire’ button by accident.”

      As Doc pocketed his depowered detonator he shook his head and said, “Batteries in, batteries out. Dear Ryan, I must admit to puzzlement. For the life of me I cannot fathom your intent.”

      He was not alone.

      “Where are you going with this, Ryan?” Krysty said.

      “I’m just buying us some getaway insurance.”

      With the point of his panga Ryan carefully slit the plastic on one of the bricks along a lengthwise seam. Using the components from a blister pack, he quickly rigged the two-kilo block of plastique for remote detonation. Then he pressed closed the slit he had made in the plastic wrap. Because it stuck to the explosive material, the incision was almost undetectable. He repacked the backpack with ten parcels of C-4, putting the rigged brick near the bottom.

      “Now any of us can detonate the entire load if the shit hits the fan,” he said.

      “We better all be a long ways off when that happens,” Mildred said. “Twelve kilos of plastique is going to raise some dust.”

      “But, Ryan, anybody else can set it off, too,” Krysty protested. “Why did you leave the detonators and batteries in the load we’re going to trade?”

      “Had no choice,” Ryan told her. “For all we know, BoomT is expecting this C-4 to show up. He could have contracted the dead scroungers to bring it to him from New Mex. And if he did, he could know there were supposed to be remote detonators included in the deal. If the detonators are missing when we show him the goods, you can bet the farm he’ll have his sec men search us. When they find what they’re looking for, it’ll take the play away from us. If the detonators are in the mix, BoomT isn’t going to dig deeper, and we’ve still got our hole card.”

      “So, we show up with the C-4 instead of the traders he contracted with?” Mildred said. “How’s that going to go down?”

      “BoomT won’t care who makes the delivery or who he pays for the C-4,” J.B. said. “He sure as hell isn’t going to care what happened to the scroungers. That’s the kind of shit-snake he is.”

      “But it is possible that he was expecting the arrival of all six backpacks,” Doc interjected.

      “In that case, he’ll be happy that one actually showed up,” Ryan said. “We’ve got a believable story. His pet scroungers were chilled by stickies. We salvaged a single load. Hell, it’s almost even true.”

      The one-eyed warrior sat on the grass, untied his boots and kicked them off. “No sense in more than two of us getting wet,” he said. “Jak, gather up a couple of backpacks of C-4 and wade out with me.”

      Leaving his own pack on the bank, Ryan hoisted three others and moved slowly into the warm water, careful to tear the smallest possible rip in the algae mat.

      The albino kicked off his boots, grabbed up the remaining unbooby-trapped packs and waded out to midthigh. The two of them sank the packs under the water, holding them down until all the trapped air bubbles escaped. As they backtracked their

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