Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [42]
Despite the number of the dead lying around her and the number of salvagers working them, Hella moved slowly and carefully. She took her prizes methodically.
She was on her second trip back through the battleground, skirting a still-smoking crater, when she realized Riley had fallen into step with her. “What are you doing?”
“Came to check on you.”
“I’m fine.”
Riley looked tired and anxious. His restless gaze wandered around the dead and all the destruction. “About what you did to save Dr. Trammell—”
“I was just doing my job.” Hella didn’t want to talk about the woman. If she did, she was afraid that she would unload on Riley for helping keep the woman drugged. “Just part of the service.”
“No, it wasn’t. That was a brave thing.” Riley shook his head. “I don’t know if I would have dived over the wall and gone down into that bloodbath.”
Pride and embarrassment warred within Hella. She was glad that Riley had noticed her helping rescue Colleen. She liked the idea that her actions had made an impression on the man. And she was at once irritated at feeling that way. She didn’t like not being in control of how she felt or what she thought.
Hella knelt and fished a bandolier containing three magazines from under a file of dirt near a crater. The magazines held rounds that Stampede could use in his rifle. She hung the bandolier over her shoulder and stood again. “Stampede was the one that rescued Dr. Trammell and me. We wouldn’t have made it out of there without him.”
“If you hadn’t reached Dr. Trammell, Stampede would never have gotten there in time. A handful of my men have told me that. I don’t mean to take anything away from Stampede, and I’ve already thanked him. So has Dr. Pardot.”
“I wish I hadn’t missed that.”
Riley grinned in the shadows of the open face shield. “Yeah, well it doesn’t happen very often, I can promise you.”
“Why are you working for Pardot?” Hella kept walking and Riley kept pace. “Isn’t there someone else you can work for where you come from?”
“I’m a security guard, Hella. That’s what I was tasked to do while I attended school. But I wanted to see more of the world.”
“You went to school?”
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
Hella smiled at him and shook her head. “You seen many schools while you’ve been out here?”
Riley sighed and shook his head. “No. They don’t have schools here?”
“Not many in the Redblight, no.” Hella pointed back at Blossom Heat. “Trade camp’s got a school, but probably not like you’re used to. You can’t learn to be a security guard there, but you do learn how to defend yourself when you travel the trails or stand post inside the camp. If you don’t learn, you die.”
“Then what do you learn?”
“How to work at a trade camp. They teach you to read and write, some math, and maybe some kind of skill. Repair work mostly. Or maybe you get taught how to build buildings, furniture, stuff like that.”
“How did you learn to be a scout?”
“On the trails. Same as every other scout. There’s no other way to learn, and your marks come hard and quick. You fail, you get burned. If you were around long enough, your friends feel sorry you’re gone. If not, they just burn you to prevent disease.” Hella spotted a bit of shiny metal under an armadillo corpse, which didn’t appear to have been moved yet. The body covered another magazine. She knelt again and slipped a small skinning knife from her boot.
With quick, deft movements, she sliced through the dead biker’s pockets and emptied the contents, checking her haul before she slipped it into a leather bag that hung around her neck. The take wasn’t much. A worn pocketknife, a couple of rings that didn’t look silver and held glittering stones that looked artificial, a few ancient coins that really didn’t have any worth anymore, and a green and white disk. She read the writing on the disk.
“Blue Skies Casino.”
“That’s a poker chip.