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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?"
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"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
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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.
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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
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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, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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