Wasteland Blues by Scott Christian Carr, Andrew Conry-Murray Page B

cache of unexpected resources, not the least of which was his knowledge of the Wasteland. Without Leggy, Derek knew their chances of survival beyond the mountains would be slim. And then there were the army cities that Leggy had talked about. The ones with the weapons. Derek had no idea where such places might be hidden, but Leggy could lead them right there.
    Derek hated to admit to himself that he wanted—needed—Leggy to make the journey with them. And he hated even more that Leggy might abandon them. He gripped the shaft of his knife. It would be easy to cut Leggy’s throat right now, so that everybody lost. Derek would prefer that to seeing Leggy choose the Paladins and send the three of them packing. He lay on the cot, nursing his spite, waiting to see which direction his heart pushed him.
    ***
    Leggy didn’t sleep. He pondered Silas’s offer. This should have been an easy decision. Rejoin the Paladins. He would be Nicodemus again, not an old feeb whose name itself was a mockery. The Paladins would be a much better choice than riding into the blasted nightmare beyond the mountains with a sociopath, a brute, and a religious fanatic.
    He’d joined up with the Paladins about a year after turning in his guns to one of Rasham’s road bosses in Santa Cruz. His tenure with the recovery crews had been instructive, and it put a bit of silver in his pocket, but he’d been tired of putting his ass on the line only to make Rasham richer. Sure, he could’ve demanded a bigger piece of the pie for himself, and Rasham was sensible enough to give ambitious types an opportunity to pick up more of the take, but it would’ve meant staking his own money, outfitting a caravan, training his own team…Nicodemus wasn’t interested.
    He’d spent the next year wandering the coast, north as far as Corvallis where the acid storms had given everything a glazed and melted appearance, where the buildings were crumbling and the people were, more often than not, burned and scarred.
    Then he headed back south.
    He stayed awhile in Santa Cruz, bunked out on the boardwalk beneath the rusting skeleton of a roller coaster. It was there he’d shacked up with a lady named Betsy.
    I f scouting for a hauler was a frenetic nightmare of heat and dryness and violence, Santa Cruz was a slow, soupy dream of quiescence. His thirsty pores had lapped up the damp air coming off the briny ocean, and he could feel his skin softening and loosening around his brow and on his cracked palms. He’d wiggled his toes in the sand and raised his hands in salutation to the hot ultraviolet sun.
    He and Betsy ate fish and wild dog, and smoked a weed that Betsy had called shemp , which grew like kudzu in the hillsides.
    But as weeks turned to months, Nicodemus was surprised to find himself uneasy. The damp sea air made him moldy. The shemp made him slow. When a trio of itinerant bikers nearly got the jump on him and Betsy one evening, Nicodemus knew it was time to go. He tried to persuade Betsy to come inland with him, but they both knew she wouldn’t. And so he left her, and when he found himself in Moses Springs with no money and no fuel, he’d signed on with the Paladins.
    Leggy sighed as he remembered those days. The Paladins were paid by a consortium of trading hubs to keep the roads passable, which meant trying to stay a step ahead of the bugs, muties, bandits that fed off travelers and traders. In short time he’d risen to the rank of captain, leading men on long missions, negotiating deals with new villages, extending the Paladins’ circle of influence. Could he have that again?
    He shifted in the cot. Something in his heart held him back from accepting Silas’s offer, and it took many hours before he could unknot it. At first, he’d told himself that he didn’t owe these boys anything. They’d dragged him along at knifepoint, for Chrissakes. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he did owe them something.
    As the stars outside the