“Yeah, mine too. I think the war like affected that whole generation. But it was okay, I mean, if I ever meet a steel Postie pop-up target, I’ll know how to kill it.” He laughed and scribbled something on the clipboard. “Okay, I put you down as a freelance guard. The boss’ll be cool with that. Lived in Urbs his whole life, came to Charleston for the money, man, old fart is scared to death of Posties.” He shrugged, easing the van up in the line that was finally beginning to move. “I’ve been drivin’ this route for five years and there’s never been a Postie get close that those guys,” he gestured to the machine-gun turret mounted on the top of an eighteen wheeler, “didn’t saw in half before it even got close to us.”
“Does that happen often?” Her eyes were round.
“Nah.” He offered her a stick of gum, popping one in his own mouth. “About every other run. It’s a pain in the ass because then the whole convoy has to stop while they take the head for the bounty.” He made a gagging gesture. “Well, we usually don’t actually stop. They just lose their place in line and we slow down a bit.” He gestured to the trucks again. “Every one of those guys has a boma blade tucked away up there, so it doesn’t really take any time at all.”
They had pulled up to the gate while he was talking, and he handed the guard her range card and his own, showing the guard the Colt .45 by his seat and the second one in the glove box. “The boss won’t mind you because the extra shooter drops our convoy fee.” He shrugged and took their cards back from the guard, handing her hers and tucking his own back in his wallet.
It took another fifteen minutes for the guards to clear the other vehicles and the group to begin the drive back to real civilization.
“Next stop, Columbia.” He cranked the volume on the stereo slightly, glancing at her curiously. “So where are you headed, anyway?”
“Cincy.”
“Oh. Well, you can, like, ride the whole way then. That’s cool.” He looked uncomfortable for a minute. “I’ll just have to pretend you got out in Knoxville, when the convoy zone ends.”
“Will I get you in trouble?”
He thought a minute and shook his head. “Nah, not really. The boss isn’t too bad a guy. If he finds out I’ll just tell him it was part of your fee for riding guard from here to Knoxville.”
“So what do you haul?” she asked politely, glancing over her shoulder into the back of the van where several packed aquariums bubbled away, air exchanges sticking up several inches above the sealed lids.
“Blue crab. Like, live, you know? Buncha rich dudes in Chicago like their fresh seafood.” He shrugged.
“So why you and why not one of them?” She waved at the lines of semis ahead and behind them.
“Oh, like, it’s a niche market. They’re carrying frozen stuff, and, well, some of ’em have iced down live oysters and clams and stuff. Crabs are just incredibly fussy about live travel. But a little of the right stuff in the water so they aren’t too crabby,” he grinned, “and you can pack a lot of the little buggers into the tanks.”
“So, what, they’re too drugged up to rip each other to bits? What’s that do to them as food?”
“Basically,” he agreed cheerfully. “Like, put ’em in a clean, salt-water tank and in like six hours or so they’re clean. And crab valium doesn’t really affect humans, anyway, you know?”
She politely ignored that the inner dimensions of the back of the van seemed to her practiced eye to be just a bit smaller than the outside would normally indicate.
Business out of the way, he seemed more inclined to listen to his music than chat. That suited Cally fine. It must have been ten years since she’d had the time or need to take the overland route out of Charleston and she let her eyes glaze over watching the miles and miles of pine forest, punctuated by the occasional burn zone and abat-meadow.
It was only as they approached Columbia a couple of hours later that the now mixed pine and hardwood forests gave way to cleared fields of cows and crops, each field bordered by widely spaced sensor poles.
“I guess the bounties cover the costs of the sensors and the power to run them,” she said.
“Those bounty farmers are some strange birds. Get at least half their money off stalking bounties, spend half of that fighting the abat and grat. Real loner kinda dudes. Then there was one of ’em about fifteen years ago went totally off his nut and got caught breeding Posties. It was before my time, but he’d had a Postie God King next to his land. Seems he’d made a deal with it to deliver heads of Postie normals just up from nestlings in exchange for half the take. It was, like, really nasty what they did to him when they caught him.”
“How’d they catch him?” she asked politely, since Marilyn wouldn’t remember the story.
“He was always delivering twice the bounty of the other guys around him. I guess somebody just got suspicious. Next time the Postie God King made delivery, they had surveillance on him and everything.” He stuck a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. “What was real weird was when they traced the Postie back to where it had been living. Man, it was like a freakin’ magpie’s nest. Tinfoil, polished pennies, chromed bike bars and car parts and stuff, even some gold. The Postie must have been bughouse nuts, too. I mean, what are the odds.” He shrugged and they drove on in silence until the convoy began to slow as the front vehicles reached the gate into Columbia Trading Station.
Entry through the gates was much faster than exit from Charleston had been. The Columbia guards obviously wanted to keep the gates open as short a time as possible, admitting the entire convoy and closing the big steel slab behind them before beginning the paperwork.
As he waited his turn to sign in he waved across the large parking lot to a squat building with gas pumps in front of it. One of the tankers in the line had pulled around to the side of the building and was unhooking hoses.
“I’ve gotta top off my gas after I get through here. It’s just the way they do this convoy thing. Won’t let you leave unless you’re full. If you want to go stretch your legs or buy a drink or, like, other stuff, this is the last stop until Spartanburg Station in three hours.”
As a tourist, goggling was normal, so she took the opportunity to get a good long look at everything while she went up to the station building to wait in line for the restroom. The place hadn’t changed much in ten years. The asphalt of the big parking lot had been resurfaced at some point, but not too recently. They hadn’t expanded the walls any — it would have just been more perimeter to man in an emergency. Oh, the store was stocked a bit better, and there were a few more children trailing around with the occasional farm wife doing some shopping, but mostly it was the same old general store, feed and seed, and bounty processing center. She bought a glass of apple cider and some gingersnaps and went back out into the parking lot. The single mechanic’s bay was taken up with work on a tractor today. Fortunately no one in the convoy seemed to need it. Over by the incinerator the bounty agent was paying off on a few Postie heads. She wrinkled her nose as the shifting wind wafted over the unforgettable stench of ripe, dead Posleen mixed with motor oil and exhaust fumes. She took her snack back towards the van, farther away from the grisly trophies, walking past one of the refrigerator trucks that was offloading a few crates of fish and perishables for the station store and loading some crates of spring greens and assorted poultry and dairy products. A semi was unloading a couple of crates of miscellaneous merchandise but, not being refrigerated, had nothing to take on to fill the space left.
She looked around at the various trucks and buses, and the occasional car, and sighed. It would probably be at least fifteen minutes before they got moving again, and there just wasn’t a lot more to see. She pulled out her PDA and spent the rest of the break clicking through the daily news.