by James Axler
“Best drink around here. Icepick don’t mix too much shit in with the brew, try to make the alcohol last longer. And he does the best moonshine in the whole of Duma. Swears it was something that was in his family way before the nukecaust. ’Course, he’s also full of shit, so I wouldn’t trust that part. Drink will blow your head off, though.” Esquivel grinned as they settled themselves at the bar.
“Sounds good to me,” J.B. agreed, as the sec man ordered for them.
When the glasses, filled with a grayish brown spirit, were in front of them, J.B. picked his up and turned around to cast an eye over the bar. It was full, most of the patrons either standing by the bar or sitting around a handful of tables that were scattered across the small floor. Chairs backed into one another and it was easy to see that the later it got and the drunker and more stoned the patrons became, the more likely it was for fights to break out. Most of the trade seemed to know one another and were clustered into small groups around the tables, arguing and laughing loudly by turn. The women with them were gaudies, some not even bothering to look anything but bored, who were hired for later in the evening.
Music was provided by a black guy who sat in the corner, playing a guitar and picking, singing an old song about giving love a bad name. J.B. had another flash of memory, someone once telling him that music was a universal certainty that survived all and had common themes. Songs survived where people didn’t. A flash of someone who talked in a long-winded, odd fashion that wasn’t always understandable…but was somehow familiar.
A few cheers and a smattering of applause made him realize that the musician had finished. He was replaced by a white guy with a set of drums, who stared to beat out a series of slow rhythms.
“This is worth watching,” Esquivel murmured in his ear, ordering another two shots of the spirit. Its coarse, woody taste wasn’t exactly pleasant, but J.B. appreciated the warm glow it left as it slipped down his gullet.
As the drummer continued, a woman came into the room from the back of the bar. Moving to the drumbeat, she began to strip slowly. With his attention half-focused on the audience, J.B. found it hard to get into what she was doing. The effect she had on the crowd was fascinating, as quiet spread over them, their concentration rapt.
“Enjoying your first night in Duma?” someone whispered in J.B.’s ear. And unless he had changed sex, it wasn’t his sec escort. The Armorer turned to find Ella-Mae at his elbow, a grin on her face and a glass of the liquor in her hand.
“Guess you might say that—though I’ll wait and see what happens next before I really make up my mind,” J.B. replied, indicating the area where the woman held court.
“Would have thought you could guess that,” she said. “Or at least guessed why Es bought you here…likes his jollies a certain way.” With which she indicated the stage, where the woman was pleasuring herself.
“Dark night,” J.B. whispered as he turned to watch the woman.
The drunk and stoned patrons whooped and hollered, but J.B. found it all a little strange. He had the vague notion that he’d seen some weird sights over the years—even if most of them were lost to him now—but this was one of the strangest simply because he’d never seen it done in a bar.
“Not doing much for you?” Ella-Mae whispered in his ear.
“Can’t say it does,” J.B. replied mildly. “But then, I didn’t know this was going down. You, on the other hand…Well, mebbe it does it for you.”
“Okay, that makes us even,” she replied with a grin. “You gotta drink somewhere and most places have something going on. As it happens, Jessie there is a nice girl when she isn’t onstage. But then, everyone’s got to earn jack.”
“There must be other ways,” J.B. mused.
“Not under Xander,” she answered, unable to keep the edge of bitterness out of her voice. “I’m lucky and I don’t forget it. I can’t forget it.”
J.B. looked at her. There was a fire in her eyes that was appealing. Ella-Mae obviously took no shit from anyone and was hurt for those she knew who had no other options. She was a deep woman and he found that fascinating. Certainly, if he could trust her, she’d be a good ally in this ville.
The roars coming from the performance area suddenly alerted him to the fact that something was going on. Turning, he could see that a drunk had his pants around his knees and was trying to get his flaccid member to respond enough to join the woman’s performance. He was so drunk that the woman was able to scramble around and get to her feet. The drummer had stopped and had dropped his drums, pulling a length of metal pipe from down the front of his pants. He held it like he knew how to use it.
J.B. looked around. The situation was still fairly good-natured. The men just wanted to have fun and weren’t about to let a drunk spoil things. Besides, who wanted to use blasters in an enclosed space like this? Chances were that you’d buy the farm accidentally by your own hand. Esquivel was talking to two sec men who had dropped by the bar on patrol. None of them looked particularly concerned.
But Jessie was about to change all that. Looking down at the drunk, still on his knees, she stood with her hands on her hips, and spit, “Shit, boy, it’d take three of you to make me happy.”
J.B. winced. What was about to happen was obvious. Next to him, he heard Ella-Mae suck in her breath. “Get ready to fight,” she murmured to him.
With a roar, the drunk rose from the floor, nearly tripping over his pants, and flung himself toward the nearly naked woman, lust now replaced by rage and humiliation. The drummer stepped between them and swung the metal pipe, connecting with the side of the drunk’s head and knocking him sideways, blood splattering from the cut on his temple.
The drunk’s compadres flung over their table, making for the drummer. But the room was so crowded that in doing that they clattered into surrounding parties of drunk and stoned customers, who also responded in kind.
Within thirty seconds, the bar was a heaving mass of fighting humanity. Backed up against the bar, J.B. could only dodge as glasses and a chair flew over his head. Roaring incoherently, one of the customers aimed a punch at the side of J.B.’s head. The Armorer parried with his left arm, blocking the blow, and chopped at the man’s windpipe, knocking him back. That left him unable to defend himself as one of the man’s friends tried to swipe at him with a broken chair leg. Before it could reach the Armorer’s skull, Ella-Mae swung a haymaker that hit the assailant on the point of the jaw, driving him backward.
“Head for the door—cover our backs,” J.B. yelled above the fracas, receiving a cursory nod from the dark-haired mechanic. He looked around, but there was no sign of Esquivel or the other sec men. But in the heaving, brawling mass, anything was possible.
Side-by-side, the two began to fight their way out, using their fists and feet to carve a path. A couple of times, one or the other had to yell a warning as pieces of table or broken chair flew about the room. But they had the drop on the majority of the crowd, as they were still relatively sober. Attacks were easily blocked and they formed a formidable duo, each hitting home on their targets with controlled force.
They managed to reach the door with only a few glancing blows and spilled out onto the sidewalk with a few drunks who fell in their wake.
“Fuck it, you know how to show a girl a good time, dontcha?” she gasped, leaning over and trying to catch her breath. Her shirt was ripped and she had a couple of bruises on her cheek and above her left eye, but was otherwise unmarked. The Armorer could feel an ache in his still-mending ribs and a small cut was opened under one eye, but otherwise any bruises were lost on his still-healing face. He couldn’t feel anything fresh.
He laughed.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” he asked between breaths.
“Told you, I’m no one’s gaudy and some don’t like the word no,” she explained. Pulling herself upright, she pointed over J.B.’s shoulder. “Here’s your bodyguard, late as usual. Es was probably around the back waiting for me to get you out. I’ll see you aro
und,” she added enigmatically, blowing him a kiss before turning and melting into the crowd.
J.B. watched her, then felt a clap on his shoulder. He turned to see more sec men pouring into the bar behind the Hispanic’s shoulder. Esquivel was bruised, with a deep cut over his forehead, staunched by the torn-off sleeve of his shirt. He had a wild gleam in his eyes.
“Hey, J.B., man,” he roared, barely containing his amusement. “Welcome to Duma!”
Chapter Ten
“Man, look at the state of you this morning.” Esquivel laughed as J.B. entered the kitchen. The Armorer sat down at the table and Liza put a plate of food in front of him.
“Don’t you ever want your pretty face to heal up and give us the benefit of your good looks?” she added, so much to Esquivel’s amusement that he almost choked on his coffee.
“Yeah, ha-ha, very funny,” J.B. muttered. “You don’t look so great yourself,” he directed at Esquivel, who had a bandage tied around his forehead and a swollen eye that was a vivid red and purple.
“Ain’t me you got to worry about, it’s Budd and Olly. The old guy ain’t gonna be happy with you late and looking so suave,” the sec man countered.
J.B. ate in silence, pondering this. It was important that he bond with Olly if he was going to work here. The old man would be unbudgeable and stolid, but his son may have more flexibility. After he had finished, he and his sec shadow went to the grens room, where the old man and his son were at work, transferring a new load of gas grens from the wooden crates in which they’d arrived into the specially built metal cabinets in which Budd stored them.
“Well, well, glad you could be bothered to join us,” the old man said, stopping work and applauding sarcastically as J.B. entered. “I’m sorry a little work detracts from your time fighting and womanizing.”
“Think what you like,” J.B. said in as noncommittal a tone as he could muster. He noticed that Olly said nothing as he walked over to the crate and picked up one of the grens. It was of a type he’d seen before, a U.S. Army issue from the mid-twentieth century. Except these were in the worst condition he had ever seen. Some of them were unstable, with the metal pins corroding—partly from exposure to moisture and partly from where the constituents of the gas within were breaking down and eroding through the casing.
“Where did these come from?” he asked.
“Trader called Simms sold them to Xander. Claims he got them from a ville down in the swamps. Guess that would account for the way in which the outer’s got a little rust and damage,” the old man replied.
“Tell Xander he’s been had. And if I was you, I’d get the jack back and get this shit out of here now. The pins are metal, but the casing is a kind of polycarbon. That erosion is where the gas inside is eating it away. Listen, you keep these here and one of them could go at any time, take the whole place with it if it starts a chain.”
“The hell it will,” the old man bristled.
Olly had taken the gren from J.B. and was examining it. “I figure he might be right,” the youth said softly. “I told you that wasn’t any metal. What do you say we put these back very carefully, then you send Es over to ask the baron where Simms is right now?”
Budd was breathing heavily, pissed that his son had sided with the outlander he saw as a threat, yet realizing that Olly was right. Still, he couldn’t admit to J.B. being correct.
When the old man refused to speak, J.B. turned to his shadow. “Olly’s right—I reckon Xander’ll want his jack and an explanation. And get a couple of sec men up here to carry these cases—ones with safe hands, okay?”
As Esquivel left the room, Olly carefully placed the gren back in the box. “Guess we’d better be triple safe getting the others out of the store,” he said to J.B., adding, “Then, I was wondering if you’d give me a little help with something.”
Budd left them, refusing to speak, the anger almost visibly coming off him. Neither J.B. nor Olly mentioned that, but packed the grens carefully. When four sec men appeared, J.B. directed them on handling the cases, then joined the youth in the lower-level blaster room.
As he entered, Olly was already holding a Heckler & Koch MP-5. “This is the blaster I mentioned last night, though you might have forgotten after a night out with Es,” he added with a grin. “There’s something fucked about the firing mechanism, but I can’t work out why it jams. Mebbe you could take a look at it.”
It was a piece of bridge-building that the Armorer appreciated, and he took the blaster from the youth. Examining it, he was able to identify a fault in the MP-5, where a small piece of the mechanism had been dented in combat, causing it to catch and jam. The two men stripped the blaster and J.B. showed Olly how to effect a running repair on such a fault. Again, J.B. had to have known that through experience, but how he had acquired the knowledge was still a blank.
From there, Olly took J.B. through the stock that Xander had acquired in this section of the armory. Budd had already shown him this, but the youth was making a gesture.
They were in the middle of stripping and reassembling a mini-Uzi, with J.B. showing Olly how to increase the rapidity of assembly, when Esquivel appeared.
“Pigs in shit, boys, pigs in shit.” He grinned. Olly made an obscene gesture at the sec man, but was laughing as he did so. Then Esquivel’s mood sobered. “J.B., my man, you’re about to learn what justice means in Duma. Xander’s sent some of the boys out to find the scum who sold him the grens. Fool’s still in the ville, they reckon, and there’s another little matter that he wants you to see attended to.”
J.B. looked from Esquivel to Olly and back again. The youth looked a little sick. “I’d forgotten it was today,” he said in a small, low voice.
“Dude, I know Chino was your bud, but he overstepped. Everyone’s got jack here and they can always get a little more. But Xander has to have his part of the action, you know that.”
Olly said nothing, just managed to nod slightly. “We’d better get going,” he said to J.B., leaving the Uzi half-assembled.
J.B. shot a questioning glance at his shadow as Olly departed. Esquivel shrugged and said softly, “Olly used to play with this guy when he was a kid. See, you know what I was saying about jack being everything here? Mebbe sometimes it can be harsh. We live well, better than any other ville I’ve seen, but that has its price as well.”
J.B. followed Esquivel, philosopher and sec man…. Well, maybe you needed to be, to get by in Duma.
As they left the Armory compound, J.B. could see that the streets were as full as ever, but this time everyone was headed in the same direction, toward the blacktop that bisected the ville. Thinking about what the sec man had said to him, J.B. took note of the people around him.
It was easy to differentiate between the ville dwellers and those who were serving on trading convoys. The latter were dirtier, more disheveled and even at this time of the morning were showing signs of hard drinking. Whereas the ville dwellers were conspicuous in their better clothes, their healthier look. Things that came from a higher level of living, with more jack to buy goods and more goods to use and then sell on as surplus.
The way in which the two-lane blacktop bisected the ville now began to make a lot of sense. Xander—and his father before him—had taken this ville and built it up, choosing the blacktop and this part of the dust bowl deliberately, realizing the potential of having weary convoys traversing the wastelands and needing a little rest and recreation.
It had made everyone who lived there rich. But to keep that safe, it required a strong and noticeable sec force. Hence the fact that every sec man J.B. had seen was dressed the same way and carried the same kind of blaster. Looking out for them, he lost count of how many after a while. It took a lot of jack to keep so many men and get so much matching equipment to make them so conspicuous. Then again, it needed to be spent if Duma was to cling on to what it made and remain secure to any degree from an outside attack.
J.B. realized that Xander was showing him a lot of faith because he ha
d heard stories of J. B. Dix that made him out to be the best in the whole of the Deathlands. If he was Dix—and he had no reason to doubt this, even though he could never swear to it—then he would have a good life if he lived up to expectation. But he was suddenly aware of what it took to keep Duma this rich, the part he would have to play in this and the potential cost to himself if he stepped—or even appeared to step—out of line in any way.
“Hey man, you’re quiet. What’s the problem?” Esquivel asked as they approached the blacktop.
“No problem. I just think I’m realizing something,” J.B. replied.
“I did try to tell you,” Esquivel said simply. “But I figured you might need to see it up close.”
The crowds gathered around the blacktop were densely packed and it was difficult to make out exactly what going on at the head. As the Armorer and his shadow pressed through, the crowd parted for the sec man and whispered and pointed at J.B. He heard a few of the muttered comments and gathered from them that working in something like the armory was an exalted position, one of those jobs that didn’t give you the shitty end of the stick, something that the workers of Duma aspired toward. For J.B. to be carried into town a wreck from the bottom of a well and then appointed heir-in-chief to Budd was something that caused resentment in some quarters. He’d have to be careful of this: but not now. This would be a different lesson entirely.
As the two men pushed their way to the front of the crowd, it became clearer what was going on. A wag stood in the middle of the blacktop, detached from the enclosures of wags that stood on either side of the ribbon. It was battered and scarred, an old predark truck that had been reinforced with metal sheeting on either side and now stood silent by the side of the blacktop. It was a simple transporter to be loaded and unloaded, not a sec wag. Two men stood beside it, one a sec man, recognizable by his uniform. J.B. thought it may be one of those he had eaten with the previous evening, but he couldn’t be sure. The other man was tall and thin, with long, straggling brown hair that blew across his face. He was unshaved, dressed in a denim shirt that was open to the waist, combat pants that were dusty and stained, and unlaced combat boots. He had a number of pendants hanging around his neck and metal bracelets jangled on each wrist. He looked like he’d spent too long on the road. He also looked like he had fouled himself with fear.
