His eye caught Krysty, farther forward, managing a thin smile as she winked at him. Realizing, in the heat of the combat, how glad he had been to have her with him, safe and unharmed.
"Got an ace down the line at six of 'em settin' up a launcher," said Hovak from her mortar position high up.
"Do it," ordered the Trader. He turned to the slit at his shoulder and watched.
There was the whoomph of the heavy mortar being fired, and the war wag rolled to counter the blast. For a second or so everyone fell silent, waiting. Ryan had once read an old book about submarines, and he guessed it had been like this waiting after a torpedo had been released and was running.
"Right in the cross hairs," yelped Hovak triumphantly, banging her gloved fist on the side of the seat. Ryan joined in the general chorus of cheers at her success.
Ryan picked his way to the stern of the war wag, moving Rint out of the rear observation port. Setting his eye into the soft rubber socket of the backward-facing periscope, he used the self-centering gyro system to focus on what was happening back at their camp.
The sec men were coming out of the forest, seeing their prey escaping, their ambush failed. At a word of command from the Trader the shooting had ceased, and the war wag rolled on northwest, then westward on the crumbled remains of a two-lane blacktop.
Ryan adjusted the focusing screw, turning the milled edge until the faces of their attackers swam into sharp detail. He saw the usual brutish, vulpine expressions that he knew from Baronies and communes all over the Deathlands. Small men with a taste for cruelty.
He ranged along the line, stopping at one of the sec men who pushed through to the front.
"Strasser," he breathed.
The high-definition, directional mikes at the back of the war wag were out of action, but he did not need them to know what Strasser was shouting after them. The whole set of the man's body told it all.
The gaunt body, taller than any of his men, agitated with anger. As Ryan watched him, Strasser pulled off the visored cap and threw it in the mud, kicking it with his boots. Rain glistened on the bald skull, trickling over the thin cheeks, into the host of a mustache. Ryan grinned with wolfish satisfaction as he saw there was still blood clotted around the police chief's mouth where the thrown pistol had struck him.
Strasser was shaking his fist at them. Far behind him, in the fast-brightening dawn, Ryan could make out a monstrous column of greasy smoke rising from the tomb of Jordon Teague.
The ruined tomb of Mocsin.
As they drove steadily toward a kind of safety, the Trader took to his bunk once more, the rush from the action leaving him drained and sallow. Ryan organized the crew into their usual rotas, as far as was possible with their shrunken force. Only then did he find a quiet spot and sit down to relax. After a while Hunaker came to join him.
"Have a word, Ryan?"
"Yeah. What?"
The woman seemed oddly ill at ease, rubbing her cropped green hair, adjusting the slim-bladed knife on her hip.
"Come on, Hun. What's got you? Still feelin' for Ange?"
"No. Well, some I guess. She was a sweet kid and I figured we might... Oh, burn all that, Ryan, it's over and out. That's not what..."
"What?"
"When we was back in Mocsin, me and Sam an' Koll an' J.B. was talkin' and we..."
"Hun. You want me to pull your helldamned liver up through your neck?"
"No. Why d'you..."
"I'm tired. Just say it."
"Sure." With a rush, like a swimmer entering cold water. "We was talkin' 'bout you and we thought nobody knows what your name is. Ryan. Just Ryan. Got to be another name. Not even J.B. knew it."
Ryan grinned at her. "That all?"
"Yeah. You don't mind me askin' like this?"
"No. Why should I? It's Cawdor. Ryan Cawdor. Not a secret, Hun."
"Ryan Cawdor. That's not too special, is it? So how come you never told nobody before?"
"I guess because nobody ever asked me before."
They smiled at each other, a look passing between them that held a certain kind of gentleness as War Wag One, now the only war wag, ground deeper into the Darks.
Chapter Thirteen
Kurt died just before sunset on the next day.
The flight from the blazing carnage of Mocsin and the horrible death of his only friend, Fishmouth Charlie, finally and irrevocably tipped the balance of his mind into madness. The war wag's medic, Kathy, did what she could, loading him with sleepers, but it was obvious that the shrieking had taken him over.
"Claws an' teeth! Claws an' teeth!"
Over and over and over again, even when the drugs were shutting down the lines. Even when his eyes were closed and his pulse had eased, still the peeled lips kept moving. The charred skin of the face twitched as though worms crawled through the muscles around his mouth. Always the same. Always about the fog that he'd seen, long months back, on his terrible journey into the peaked wilderness.
"Claws an' teeth."
The two-lane blacktop had given way to the broken and weed-infested concrete of a wider highway. It made for generally better motoring for the war wag, enabling Ches or Hunaker to drive on at a steady pace. All the doors were open and clean air flowed through the vehicle, purging it of the stench of sweat and death. Ahead of them, the mountains grew closer and more threatening. Their tops smoked with windblown snow.
Now and again they had to slow down because of the results of the great holocaust a hundred years before. Many times the solid road turned into corrugated ribbons of distorted stone from the effect of the nuking. Bridges were often down, embankments collapsed.
"Claws an' teeth."
Once, with Ches at the helm, face taut with concentration, they maneuvered along a ledge through an earth-slip, with less than a hand's span either side. On the right a wall of glistening gray mud, speckled with fragments of dolomitic limestone. On the left, a long, long drop to a tumbling river. The Trader was still spending most of the time in his bunk, his coughing fits audible to everyone in the war wag. J.B. and Ryan Cawdor shared the leadership of the party, taking six hours on and six off.
Apart from the Trader's declining health and Kurt's raving madness, the war wag was running smoothly. Every cog turned as it should, and everyone knew his or her role. Krysty was wise enough to keep out of the way, offering help when she could. The only other outsider was the stranger called Doc.
Once they were safely away from Strasser and his murderous sec men, J.B. and Ryan told Koll to bring the old man to them in the nav room.
"Here he is." He deposited the shambling wreck at the door.
"Leave him be. Close that door, Koll."
Doc's fingers knotted nervously like newborn rattlers. It was the first occasion that Ryan had been able to find a little time to speak to Doc and Ryan studied him. There was something about the man... something in addition to his brain-blasted condition that Ryan could not put a finger on.
"Sit down," said J.B., motioning to one of the steel-and-canvas chairs.
"I am most obliged, sir. Most obliged."
"You're called Doc? And Teague and Strasser treated you like shit."
"Indeed, I fear that there is considerable truth in that terse observation, Mr..."
"Cawdor. I'm Ryan Cawdor. This here is J. B. Dix, the weapons master on the war wag."
Doc made a courtly bow, removing the battered hat from his thinning gray hair, which hung around his shoulders like an unhealthy growth on rotting meat. His boots were cracked and worn. The shirt was faded to the palest of yellows and his coat was torn and smeared with what looked to Ryan like gobbets of pig shit. Yet, despite all that, the old man had style.