Skylock (18 page)

"Don't drink too much or too fast. You'll heave your guts out and only need more."

Ahead, Baker returned from his own battlefield appraisal. Unaffected as always, he munched on a liberated ration meal, already getting a spring back in his step. To him the whole matter was viewed with the jaded indifference of an old-time mall shopper. Wiping a daub of grease from his fever-blistered mouth, he pointed a spoon as he gave Trennt his assessment.

"Break and drop rocket tubes up yonder. Shithouse fullo' spent Eastern Europe shells. Fanned patterns in the sand show three, maybe four midsize hovercraft headed northwest."

"Bandits?" asked Trennt.

"Wouldn't think so."

Baker exhibited his food can as proof.

"Vittles and water cans ain't been touched. Only well provisioned soldiers would settle for combat trinkets and leave everythin' else. Damn lucky for us."

Trennt concurred. "Recognize the trucks?"

Baker touched fingers to a nearby fender with the acumen of a horse trader.

"French design made under license in Argentina."

Geri's shout clanged across the battle site like cold iron.

"Hey! Hey! This one's still alive!"

The wounded man was dressed in unmarked fatigues, same as the others. Yet something in his bearing seemed a bit more refined: higher class—possibly an officer. His skin was pallid and loose. Eyes hung half open, locked on some desolate, private vista which was fast approaching.

The soldier's clothes were blood soaked from midchest to his knees. The desert fabric was split by shrapnel, which'd turned his intestines into a bulging sieve of shiny blue-red coils. Pain seemed beyond him though, mercifully displaced by the body's own opiate of shock.

Trennt knelt beside the soldier. Capping his breath against the man's overpowering stench, he asked, "Who are you?"

The black eyes drew back from their trance. They touched on Trennt, then dropped to the brown pudding pooled in his own lap. The soldier's face twisted with confusion. He seemed suddenly bewildered and annoyed, uncertain of it all.

He raised his eyes and closed them. Tears squeezed from their corners. With great effort he half whispered, "
Este es el dia de los difuntos
."

Trennt recognized the words as Spanish. But his own smattering of functional phrases was long behind him.

"He says, 'Today is the day of the dead.' "

It was the woman. Though obviously distressed by the soldier's wounds, she also knelt and placed a comforting hand to his cheek.

"Como se llama?"

He groped for a missing name tag, then plopped back. His lips fumbled with a tongue grown too thick to meet the task.

"
No importa,
" he said, shaking his head with feeble despair. "
No importa
."

The woman poured a warm trickle from the canteen to her fingertips and moistened the soldier's scorched lips. She lifted his head and touched his mouth with more. But it dribbled pitifully off his chin, raising new smears of crimson in the brown crust of his belly wound.

Her effort did raise the man's consciousness, though, enough to listen and comprehend as she whispered slow and gently. Words soft as a new mother's loving coo gave him strength. In return he offered a few slurred phrases and chanced a gaze about.

The soldier saw the nearest corpses and some emotional words spilled from his lips. His hard sobs became a raging cough that sent him rapidly spiraling back toward shock.

She rested his head gently against a truck tire pillow and stood.

"He says he has failed them all."

Trennt studied him. "Any chance of finding out what they were doing here?"

"Maybe looking for us," she replied tersely, then added, "I'm going to find a compress to cool his head."

A touch of sarcasm flared as she paused beside Trennt. "It is okay to waste a little of his own water on him, isn't it?"

Trennt didn't answer, granting her permission by merely stepping aside to let her pass.

The pistol shot startled them both.

Before them the soldier sat artificially erect, as if someone had just called his name. In the next moment he softened and gracelessly toppled over. To the side, Baker casually viewed the man's shattered temple, reholstering his gun.

The woman charged back and bulled her way past him. She froze, utterly horrified by what lay at her feet.

"He was gut-shot," Baker reasoned pragmatically. "No fixin' it and no time to spare on somethin' that kin take a long, painful spell to get over. Now he don't have a problem and neither do we."

Her face crumbled in total revulsion and disgust.

"You killer!" she screamed in Baker's face and turned to include Trennt. "Both of you, killers! Don't you feel anything? Care for anything?"

Trennt looked at the dead man, then shared a glance with his bewildered partner. Though oddly annoyed himself, he also knew the reality of the situation and didn't criticize the remedy.

Instead, he grabbed the woman by an arm, again confronting the deep, emerald green of her hating eyes.

"He's right, lady. Our problems here are both over. Now walk around and gather up all the food and water you can find. Baker, let's see if we can make one good truck from all these pieces."

The shooter nodded. "Grips, Pard."

An hour's work yielded a bounty of supplies. Fuel to stoke a few hundred miles hard travel. Top-notch desert sun garb. Water and rations enough to last a week. Spare tires and containers were transferred and lashed down to the most roadworthy vehicle.

Pausing as they prepared to leave, the woman cast a final glance at the carnage left behind.

"After taking what was theirs, I don't suppose you'll make time to properly bury them, either."

Trennt fired the truck's engine, shifting into gear and looking straight ahead.

"Nope. Now climb in."

Equipped with adequate transportation, Trennt pushed even harder. Moving dead west, they drove almost nonstop. Five full days elapsed. Then there she sat.

Stuck before them as an abstract sculpture was an oceangoing freighter. Erect and alone in a vast sea of gravel, she rested like a giant toy boat left high and dry after its bathtub ocean had drained.

Her hull plates were black as obsidian, polished by gritty desert winds to a dark gloss. The ironwork of her upper decks shone like powdered cinnamon. Any name plates or registry were long gone. She was simply there.

Dunes had piled against her port side. They were packed into a steep, natural ramp that rose and spilled onto her broad angled deck like a great walkway. Assorted tracks and trash about her marked times of periodic habitation. But further investigation was broken off by a disembodied voice.

"Kinda blows your mind, huh?"

The dumbstruck trio looked about. Cloaked in the stark shadow of the ship's stern was the dim stick figure of an old man. Grizzled as a prospector, he stood beside a makeshift teepee tucked in the cool leeward side of her broad rudder.

He wore a tattered pair of old military fatigue pants. Around his wrist was a hammered copper bracelet, gone dark green with age. A dull beaded chain hung around his neck, sporting an oval medallion that framed a crude, three-pronged member, one reminiscent of a long-tined fork.

The old-timer started toward them. A well-worn Chinese SKS rifle hung loose and low in his grip. Dangling the mummified claw of an ancient rabbit's foot, a bleached-out bush hat was crushed firmly over his terrain-hardened eyes. Even in this barbaric land, his torso was bare.

"Yeah, kinda blows your mind," he repeated. "Big ship like this, here in the middle of nowhere. Freaked the hell out of me when I first came across her, too."

Baker snapped his shotgun up, halting the man's approach.

"Who're you?"

The old-timer carried on another couple of steps before stopping near the ramp. He regarded Baker's weapon, sweeping quick, appraising eyes to the people and vehicle behind them. He then raised the forked medallion at his throat.

"Peace, friend. Easy on the trigger. No one's looking to rumble."

Trennt approached the man. Up close, he looked glazed a walnut brown, almost flame broiled. Once he must have been muscular, but his build now was eroded and waxy with age, yet still exhibiting plenty of wiry vitality.

Faded blue outlines covered much of his skin like a rash. Tattoos ran in a sprinkling of stars across the backs of his hands and the Statue of Liberty spanned the inside of one forearm—all impressive artwork and evidence of certain toughness. But the real statement was chiseled in a clump of ancient shrapnel wounds shining across his upper chest and a dim snarling bulldog adorned with four powerful letters: USMC.

A long, coarse ponytail of pure white hung down over the old man's spine. He pulled thoughtfully at a matching white Pistol Pete moustache as he stared back.

One crusty old turd, thought Trennt. A desert crazy? Maybe. But there was no lunacy in those piercing eyes. And something valuable translated from his body language—a scent of experience mixing with the powerful sweat dousing him now.

"My name's Trennt," he offered, feeling a quick gut-level kinship with the man. "That's Ivory Baker. And this is—" He realized that he'd forgotten her name.

"Geri Litten," she declared.

The old-timer grinned tentatively, working to make a connection between the odd trio and their out-of-place truck. He turned first to Baker, still with his gun barrel leveled.

"I asked you to put that away once, dude."

"Baker!"

The shooter glanced at Trennt, only lowering the gun with much reluctance.

"Noah Snipes," said the old man plainly.

"Wha'cha doin' out here?" questioned Baker.

"Wha'cha doin' out here?" he fired back.

"We were in a plane crash, nine days east," said Trennt. "We need to make the nearest town and get the woman back to her people."

"My people are dead!" Geri snarled.

The old-timer pulled a drawstring bag from his cargo pocket. Still regarding the bunch, he thoughtfully ground some pale leaves into a thin twist of paper. Lighting it, he drew heavy on smoke that carried a nip of burning twine.

"Lucked out there," he continued. "Rendezvous starts in Freeville a few days from now. Headed that way, myself. Pickers will start meeting up here tomorrow. We make up one big wagon train and cover each other's goods for the last push to town. Then one whole week of partying like rock stars."

The old-timer spared a moment to smile in anticipation. He then raised his carbine to the brazen military stenciling brushed on the truck behind them.

"Won't have no trouble over it with the people gathering here. But I'd ditch that ride before you ever think about pulling into Freeville. Otherwise you'll find yourself trying to answer beaucoup questions you can't answer—or walk away from."

"How's that?" asked Trennt.

"Detachments from half a dozen countries got claims staked thereabouts. They kind of run the place and make law as they see fit. You show up in a beaner truck loaded with bullet holes and you might just disappear."

"What should we do with it?"

"Plant it. I'd strip off those extra fuel cans. That loose ammo is a premium item, too. Pile the stuff on my truck to sell off like trade goods. Then take that machine a couple of dunes over, peel off those rims, and bury it in the sand."

"What'll you give for the salvage?" Trennt asked, opening the door to a bargain.

The old-timer smirked, half annoyed. "Hell, dude, I'm no trader. I'm a scout."

Trennt looked him hard in the eyes. "That's what I mean."

"Ride to Freeville is on me," he huffed. "No charge."

"No, I mean later."

The old-timer settled back, regarding Trennt head to toe like some odd, fresh-caught specimen. "You do, huh? Where?"

"Wherever I might find the plane we were on."

"Thought you said it crashed."

"We did. In a passenger capsule. The rest flew off on autopilot in that big EM storm. You must've seen some of that, even out here."

The old-timer nodded.

"That I did. But there's also beaucoup square miles of boonies for a plane to crash out here."

"This one is different. If we find it or not, just say 'yes' to helping us try and all that gear is yours. Here and now. Don't even need to start off until after Rendezvous."

The old man thumbed his hat back amiably.

"I admire your sense of character, Cap. You've known me for all of ten minutes and make an offer like that? I could lead you off somewhere and cut all your throats in your sleep."

"That you could do tonight," Trennt countered. "Because we're going to spend it here, with you."

The old-timer shouldered his carbine and after a final study of Trennt, motioned up the sand ramp. Like so many other alliances forged from necessity, the rugged "picker" fraternity had become a clannish bunch, protective of their own. And a key to their acceptance of an outsider was to arm that person with their nickname.

In a picker camp you might ask around for someone by name and never find him. But set with his "handle," you were on the inside track. And in that regard, a very powerful connection was about to be made.

"We'll ditch your rover later," said the old man, leading the way. "Come on, I got some ration chow making topside in a solar cooker. And that's what they call me, 'Top.' "

"This old girl was from China," he continued without breaking pace. "Loaded with TV sets. All rotted now. So a little stink comes up from below deck after dark. But once the sun goes down and that desert night sets in, all her iron stays warm as an electric blanket."

Trucks began appearing on the horizon around noon of the next day, drawing in from the southwest and east. In groups of two vehicles, or five, or eight, their riders were every bit as shabby and trail-worn as their scarred and dented machines. But to a person, all shared the same infectious happy mood—spirited and ready to spend the next seven days on some heavy-duty R and R.

They were nearly fifty trucks long by the time they made the primary trade route. Once a main coastal artery, it was now a nameless run of packed clay, scabby blacktop, and buckled concrete. Following its track north, the formidable column made the stark coastal ledge a day later.