Radio Hope (Toxic World Book 1) (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

“He wants what?”

Abe put his elbows on his desk and frowned at Annette. The gunslinger merely shrugged and chomped into her sausage roll. Being next to the bakery, the office was warm and there was always good food. Pity about the company.

“Jackson wants you to sponsor a friend of his for associate status,” Annette repeated.

Abe leaned back again and stared at the ceiling.

“The nerve of that fellow
. And who is this friend of his?”

“Somebody
named Olivia.”

Abe snickered
, as if the idea of Jackson having a girlfriend was amusing.

“And her last name
?”

“She doesn’t have one. She was a foundling.”

“She isn’t from Toxic Bay, is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“She better wash before she comes into town.”

“So you’re going to say yes?” Annette asked.

Abe shrugged. “What choice do I have? You saw how pig-headed he is. He said all or nothing and he meant it, and he knows we need him.”

“How are you going to justify her nomination to the council?”

“I’ll make something up, don’t worry about that.”

“Oh, and he wants a gun too.”

Abe scowled. “He seriously expects the head of the Merchants Association to arm a Blamer?”

“Only a loan.”

“Was this part of the all or nothing deal?” Abe asked warily.

“No.”

“Then the answer is no.”

Annette shifted in her seat. “We’re going into the wildlands.”

“You and Mitch can handle it. You’re going out to scout, not get into a fight.”

“Avoiding a fight isn’t always ea
sy. Is Ha-Ram going to carry a gun?”

“Yes, but don’t expect much
marksmanship.”

“What about ammunition?”

Abe blinked. “What about it?”

“We need spare ammunition.”

“I’m sure you and Mitch have plenty. I’m giving Ha-Ram some out of my personal supply. I can’t give you any more, not with this group just over the mountains.”

Annette shook her head. This trade was looking worse and worse.

Abe reached behind the desk and brought out an old army pack. “Here. The pack is a loan; return it and any unused food to me once you get back. There’s enough for ten days in there, crackers and dried meat and some fruit and vegetables. Best if you leave immediately.”

“Immediately? I have things to do. I haven’
t even said goodbye to Pablo.”

Abe frowned. “Am I paying you
to play with your kid? Mitch and Ha-Ram are already ready. Pick them up, dig Jackson out of whatever toxic whorehouse he’s in, and get going.”

Annette ground her teeth. “It’s barely dawn. We’ll be gone by noon.”

Abe’s face reddened. “I said—”

“And I said I need to say goodbye to Pablo. I need to do some winter trading too. With the cultist threat the market will have scattered by the time we get back. I’m leaving at noon.”

“Now you listen here. . .”

“All or nothing.”

Abe sat back in his chair and glared. Annette wondered how often he heard the word “no”. He didn’t seem accustomed to it.

The merchant slapped his hand on his desk and stood up. “Fine. Now hurry up and g
et what you need to get done. Meeting’s over. I need to get out and watch The Doctor and Marcus deal with the scavengers. No telling what those two will get up to behind my back.”

Abe h
ustled her out of the office, locked the door behind them, gave her one last sharp look, and left without saying goodbye.

Annette went into the front room, where Pablo sat munching a roll
and waiting for her. She got there just in time to see Abe storm out the front door.

“Is that the guy sending you away?” the boy asked.

“Yeah.”

“He looks like an asshole.”

“Yeah.” Annette nodded. “C’mon, kiddo, we have some shopping to do.”

Walking out the gate they passed through an open field. New City rules dictated nobody could build anything within two hundred yards of the walls, and nothing more than a tent within four hundred yards. Annette was glad to see that Clyde had kept that rule
strictly in place. If it came to a siege the guards manning the walls would need a clear field of fire. Annette spotted a couple of citizens clearing out some bushes that had grown in the past couple of years.

The rumble of an engine made them turn.

“Cool!” Pablo shouted.

The city’s lone forklift came trundling out of the gate, carrying a concrete barrier in its metal arms.
Rachel sat behind the wheel. She took a turn right outside the gate and lowered the arms, setting the concrete barrier down next to the gate. A loud
beep beep bee
p
sounded as she backed up, then stopped as she shifted into first gear and headed back inside.

Pablo jumped up and down. “Awesome!”

Yeah, awesome
,
Annette thought
.
They’re going to set out concrete barriers just in case these religious nutcases have a vehicle to smash through the gate.

“I want to drive one of those!”

“When you’re older maybe you can learn.”

Annette turned to go but Pablo hauled on her hand.
She laughed. The little tyke was getting strong.

“Let’s stay and see it again.”

“We have shopping to do.”

“Just one more!”

“Oh, all right.”

A minute later
Rachel drove back out with another barrier and set it down next to the first. Pablo waved and the woman grinned and waved back.

“OK, kiddo, let’s go.”

“Oooooh!” Pablo moaned.

“C’mon. I’ll get you some sweets in the market.”

The trade fair was now in its third day and in full swing. An open area in the middle of the Burbs acted as the biggest market in the whole region, and with the citizens having brought in their harvest, every scavenger within two week’s walk had come here to trade. Stalls were heaped with everything from fresh produce to baling wire. Men, women, and children haggled over trades, sending up a riotous noise.

Annette smiled. This was the noise of civilization, or something close enough. It was a hell of a lot better than the wildlands. She looked at the scavengers, some sick, many scarred, all thin. She’d been one of them once, long ago.

But not now, and never again.

“Ow! Mom, stop holding my hand so tight.”

“Sorry, Pablito.”

They stopped as a herd
of sheep passed across their path.

“How did it go last night?” she asked her son.

“OK,” Pablo shrugged.

“Are Marcus and Rosie nice?”

“They’re fine.”

“What’s wrong?
”

“Do you have to go?”

“Of course, kiddo.”

“It’s to fight
those bad guys, right?”

“I won’t be fighting them, just spying on them.”

Pablo looked up at her. “Only spying? No shooting?”

Annette bit her lip.
When Pablo was eight she’d been hired to track down a thief who had bolted for the mountains. She found him all right, and found a bullet in her gut a second later. She came back on a stretcher. By some miracle The Doctor pulled her through. Pablo didn’t leave her bedside for a week.

“No shooting,” Annette said.

They looked through some clothing stalls and Annette picked out a homespun wool jacket for Pablo. He’d grown out of the last one and she traded that plus some tokens to $87,953 for it. Roy had given her a month’s pay in advance since it was market time. At a food stall she got him some maple syrup candy and while Pablo made a mess on his hands and face she browsed through a stall with a selection of books.

The woman was selling all kinds. Some were instruction manuals about mechanics and electricity, and of course those went for the highest trades
. She wasn’t interested in them, though. Her only skills were shooting straight and raising a son and you don’t need books for that. Instead she went for the cheap books, the books most people passed over without opening. They were the books with stories in them. For a precious few minutes her worries disappeared as she sorted through them all.

There was an incredible selection, one of the best she’d seen at the
market. Annette read anything she could get her hands on but her favorites, and the ones she always traded for, were what she thought of as the “quiet stories.” These weren’t about wars or spaceships or politics from the Old Times; they were about people. The quiet stories usually took place in small towns or on farms, back when the only thing a farmer would shoot at would be the occasional fox trying to get into the henhouse. The problems in these stories were always trivial—the bad people were never really all that bad, and the heroes only worried about things like getting a bigger house or whether someone they liked felt the same way toward them. She wished she had problems like that. When she had one of these wonderful books she’d lie on her bed and get lost in that long-ago world. Pablo knew not to interrupt her during these rare peaceful moments. Sometimes he’d snuggle up next to her and just lie there as she read, content to see his mother happy.

Annette
hated the fact that she couldn’t give him a life like in those books, but what parent could? Did those times ever really exist?

She traded for three promising-
looking titles and turned to Pablo, who now had maple syrup covering most of his face.

“Let’s go back to the bar. I need to get some gear and you need to clean yourself up.”

At this early hour, $87,953 was closed. Annette was surprised to find Roy awake. He was going over some figures in his account book, wearing his new purple reading glasses. He looked up at them and grinned at Pablo.

“Well, the wanderer has returned! How’s it like to live inside the walls?”

“We saw Rachel using the forklift!”

“Cool!”

“Marcus and Rosie treating you right?”

Everyone knew they were good people, but she didn’t like leaving him with strangers.

“They’re OK. I got a room to myself and last night we had rabbit stew.”

“I could have taken care of him, you know,” Roy said.

“It’s safer for him inside the walls.”

Roy only nodded, a hurt look on his face. Annette felt a twinge of guilt. Pablo had grown up with Roy and they were like grandfather and grandson. But she felt a lot better about going away with Pablo somewhere safe.

“Wish you weren’t leaving,” Roy said at last.

“Frank
can hold the fort while I’m gone.”

“He’s a good man but he doesn’t have your style.”

“He can snap the average scavenger in half. That’s all the style he needs in the Burbs,” Annette laughed. Turning to Pablo she said, “You go wash up, I need to get the rest of my gear.”

Annette went into her room and stuffed a few essentials into the pack Abe had given her.

Loaned her
,
she corrected herself
.
Nothing’s for free with that guy.

She put in a spare pair of socks, underwear,
a blanket, and a waterproof tarpaulin. Her .38 revolver and spare ammunition were on her gun belt as always. She strapped the holster to her double-barreled twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun to the side of her pack, put on the pack and tested the draw, then added her spare shells to a side pocket.

Taking off her pack again, she knelt down beside her bed and pulled out a rifle case. Unzipping it
, she pulled out a Dakota T-76 Longbow sniper’s rifle with telescopic sight. She cradled it lovingly in her hands. It was the best gun in the Burbs or New City. Clyde had begged to trade for it, everyone had begged to trade for it, but she said no to them all.

What had Jackson said? “Information is power”? Maybe sometime
s, but the ability to pierce military-grade body armor at 1,500 meters was more powerful than any information she’d ever know.

She took out a nearly empty box of
.338 Lapua Magnum rounds and slid one into the rifle’s magazine. Her mouth set into a grim line when she saw that only left four extra bullets in the box. She took the bullets out, stuffed them into her breast pocket, crumpled up the cardboard box, and set it on a pile of kindling next to her stove. Zipping up the rifle case again, she strapped it to the pack, put the pack on her back, and returned to the front of the bar.

Roy and Pablo were sitting at the bar laughing and playing coin football. Pablo shot a coin through the goal Roy made with his fingers and cheered.

Annette’s gut tightened. “Time to go, kiddo.”