Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [28]
“I’ll let him know.” Riley paused. “Get a good night’s sleep, Hella.”
“Sure.” Hella’s cheeks flamed and she didn’t dare look at Riley or Stampede. “Thanks.”
After a brief hesitation, Riley walked away.
“You’ll want to watch yourself around that one, Red.” Stampede’s voice was slow and measured.
“Because he’s interested in me as something more than a scout?” Hella fixed Stampede with a defiant glare.
Stampede twitched an ear in irritation, and his nostrils flared. “No. Because I don’t like the way he looks at you.”
“He looks at me like I’m a woman. And whether you like it or not, I am a woman. I’m not a little kid anymore.”
“You’re also not as experienced as you think you are. Somebody like Riley will turn you inside out.”
Hella pushed herself to her feet. “I’m going to go check on Daisy.”
Stampede nodded but didn’t say anything.
Angry, Hella took her pack and walked over to the tree where she’d left the mountain boomer. She didn’t want to be mad at Stampede but she was. There were things she needed to learn, and she didn’t need Stampede blowing over her shoulder while she learned them. It was frustrating.
She also didn’t want to be so interested in Riley, but she was that too. She knew she didn’t trust the man completely, but that was all right too. Making a choice between Stampede and someone else wasn’t anything she wanted to do soon. She was certain that Riley would be nothing more than a diversion, and a diversion wasn’t a commitment. In fact, someone such as Riley—someone who would be gone soon—might be the best diversion to have.
At least having him around made her feel different.
CHAPTER 8
Blossom Heat lay at the bottom of a small valley. Hella reined in Daisy and gazed down the hill. Even with her sunglasses, the bright, noonday sun hurt her eyes a little. She was soaked in her own clothing from baking in the heat. The chain-mail shirt chafed against her skin. And it stank.
Hella stood up in the stirrups and stretched her legs. Daisy shifted beneath her, anxious to be off again. The lizard’s keen olfactory senses had picked up the scent of cured meat coming from the trade camp. Carnegie, the trade camp’s owner, kept a couple of hunters on permanent retainer to track feral pigs in the surrounding area. There were always fresh hams and barbecue for sale at Blossom Heat.
At Riley’s command, two of the hardshells on ATVs sped down the wide trade trail toward the camp. Hella fell in behind them. She knew even a klick away that she already wore gun sights on her chest. Snipers manned the towers on the four corners of the camp. Riley’s men were more confident than they had any reason to be.
From her present vantage point, she could see over the five-meter-high metal walls that surrounded the trade camp. Before the Darkness, when the collider had unleashed unholy hell to rewrite the world, the trade camp had been a supply station along the superhighways that had crossed the old world. Carnegie had books with pictures that showed the camp as it had been. Of course, nearly all of that had changed, and Hella wasn’t certain that the pictures in the book were even anywhere around the Redblight.
The burly gorilloid stared Riley in the eyes and didn’t flinch. “Not all of you are coming inside the camp.” His voice was a raspy growl that sounded more animal than human, but he could be easily understood.
“That’s absurd.” Klein Pardot strode up to the gorilloid and looked him over.
Faust was impressive too look at. Standing two meters tall, he was broad and heavy with slabs of muscle, and he was armed to the teeth. Bandoliers of .50-caliber rounds for his assault rifle crisscrossed his thick chest. Four grenades hung like fruit. The two handguns in shoulder leather were matched by two more at his