Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [14]
Hella sat atop Daisy and watched the security men. If any of them tried to push on ahead, she’d let them go. But if any of them attempted to draw a weapon on Stampede, she would drop them.
“Sir.” Riley’s voice was calm as he rode his ATV beside Pardot. “I don’t think that smudge is from a dust storm either. It looks like smoke.”
“According to the maps—”
Hella snorted in disgust at that. Maps were almost useless in the Redblight. Maps showed where things might be, where they should be, if they hadn’t been destroyed, but they didn’t keep up with all the things that could get a person killed.
Pardot glared at Hella for interrupting him. “There’s a village ahead of us.” He sounded like a petulant child.
“Not exactly a village, sir. It’s a trade camp. Deener’s Crossing. They’ve got supplies and goods to barter for there. That was one of our scheduled stops. But the place is also a target for roving marauders.” Riley looked at Stampede. “I think we need to do what he says.”
Pardot grimaced as he swallowed a sharp retort. “Get it done quickly, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.” Riley touched two fingers to his headgear in a small salute. The face shield winked shut. “We’ll be back soon as we can.”
Or you won’t be back at all. Hella thought that but she stopped herself before she said it because she didn’t want to jinx them.
Hella took the lead, riding low on Daisy as they followed the trade track worn through the thick trees and brush. Animal hooves as well as tire treads had left impressions on the soft ground, and the trail was concave from years of wear and tear.
Instead of riding on the trail, though, Hella kept Daisy ten meters off to the left, following in tandem. Stampede and the security men followed a hundred meters back, and the silenced drives of the ATVs never reached her.
She listened to the birds chirping around her, to the scurry of lizards, rabbits, and ground fowl cutting through the brush. If those noises hadn’t taken place around her, she would have known someone else was nearby. Riley and his men probably wouldn’t have known that. They were used to relying on night vision and thermal imaging systems built into the hardshells. Those were useful crutches for someone not born to the wilderness, but anyone not used to the forest was a cripple. Technology didn’t help a neophyte understand the language of the feral world around them.
When she’d been younger, Hella had been fascinated by tech, mostly because her body was full of nanobots that she didn’t understand. She’d fallen in love with the gadgets and gizmos hucksters had brought out for barter. Stampede had pointed out the inherent weaknesses in the systems, that circuitry could fail, power supplies could drain, and that she would lose the natural sense she had of the world. Reluctantly, then, Hella had bypassed the devices that had so amazed her.
She sniffed the air too. Much of what happened in an area could be sensed on the breezes for someone who’d trained to notice such things. The odor of burned wood and fuel pinched her nostrils.
Another eighty meters on, she urged Daisy up the incline toward the trail. A bridge spanned Flatbottom Creek there, one of those steel-and-concrete remnants from the old world that had somehow survived the past one hundred fifty years of strangeness. Bits and pieces of the old highway that had once led to the bridge shoved up through the earth in places.
Hunkered in the lee side of a massive oak tree, Hella peered down the length of the bridge. It was almost a quarter-klick long. In a few places, holes gaped in the expanse. Still, it was navigable on horseback or by groundcrawlers such as the ATVs Riley and his men rode. Surplus steel had been taken by scavengers, and