James Axler Deathlands 035 Bitter Fruit

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times."
Mildred just studied the man.
"But," he said softly, "I am just as unforgiving as Bodb. And I am the Prince
here at
Wildroot. There is no one to say me nay and stay my hand." He raised his
eyebrows. "Do we understand each other?"
"Sure," Mildred said. "Clear as a goddamn bell. But you haven't told me why I
should worry about dying later instead of dying now."
"Because," Boldt said, "I've not decided whether you should die at all. Yet.
You amuse me, and you represent a gateway, of sorts, to the past. A link to
the world my father knew and hated." He snapped his fingers.
Two guards stepped into the room, dressed in green but wearing silver-worked
patches on their blouses. One of them drew a knife and slashed at the ropes
that bound her to the chair.
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"Come," Boldt said imperiously, turning his back and striding down the
hollowed-out hallway. Another guard stepped in front of him, uncovering the
bull's-eye of a large lantern and banishing the darkness in the blue glow.
Mildred rubbed circulation back into her arms as needles of pain tracked
through her legs when she stood. She wanted to ask about J.B., Doc, Ryan and
the others, but she had the feeling the man wouldn't reply. Instead, she
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followed.
NEW LONDON RESEMBLED a growth sprouting out of dead scars. What Ryan guessed
was the center of the ville featured leaning and broken stone buildings
sometimes as high as five and six stories. Most of them had sheared off
somewhere around their midpoints, leaving broken and blunted fangs pointed
skyward.
He studied the ville from the back of the jeep as Gehrig lit another cigar.
Ryan felt all talked out from the past two hours of constant grilling by the
raider captain. The jeep continued following the well-traveled dirt road
leading into New London, passing horse-
drawn wags and ox carts going both ways. Most of the wag drivers and cart
drivers got over readily enough, but none of them appeared especially glad to
see Gehrig or his men.
"Thorpe started from survivors gathering in the ruins," Gehrig said over the
roar of the jeep's transmission. He shifted in the seat, putting a foot up
against the dashboard and heaving out a long streamer of smoke. "Right after
the nukestorm. When I was a kid, I
talked to some of the old men who lived through those times as small brats
themselves.
Children were considered a liability in those days. Not many of them made it.
But the ones who did, mate, they can tell some stories."
Ryan ran his eye over the area. A ten-foot wall surrounded the ville, put
together with metal scraps, stone and wood. Barbed wire curled along the top
of it.
"Not much food to be had here for a while," the raider captain said. "Thorpe's
founders turned to cannibalism for a time. Started 'finding' a lot of dead
kids who'd perished from one misadventure or another. According to the
old-timers, it was easier for a young sprout to have a misadventure than some
middle-aged, distrusting soul armed with a blaster of his own."
The jeep rumbled across the road and came to a stop at a heavily guarded
checkpoint.
Steel barricades blocked the entrance.
Glancing up, Ryan saw the guard posts were heavily occupied. "Ville seems
capable of
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"Yeah," Gehrig agreed. "Took some time. Way things worked around here, most of
the foodstuffs were canned and dried right here. Close enough to the sea that
fish was a staple, but there was a number of bios weapons that got ruptured in
the nukestorm.
Leftover bastard shit from World War II that was never claimed because of
international treaties about the stocking of such things, then couldn't be
gotten rid of easily without embarrassment. When the bios ruptured, they
poured mists and fogs down into the low places that lasted for months and
sometimes years. Wiped out the fishermen, and the folk left over had to
relearn most everything. Drove all of the fish deeper out into the seas, too."
The post guards scanned the caravan. Ryan watched as the twin .50-caliber
machine guns and a 20 mm cannon farther up the wall stayed trained on the
vehicles. A half-dozen guards came from under a trapdoor in a berm and created
two groups of three, working their way hurriedly down the sides of the
caravan.
When they finished, the man in charge came up beside Gehrig. "Have a nice
run?"
"Well enough," the raider captain replied.
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