He suddenly thought, the Darks.

He said, "You were heading for the Darks. Was that where this wild blue yonder all started?"

She scowled at him.

"Still heading," she said.

"You're what!"

"Still heading. Still heading for the Darks."

Ryan said, "Come on!"

"Don't patronize me," she said through her teeth, the angry look back in wide green eyes.

Ryan held up his hands in mock surrender.

"I'm not patronizing. I'm trying to be realistic. You got any idea what's in between Mocsin and the hills? One hundred klicks of wilderness is what. You gonna walk it?"

"I'll get a buggy."

"How? You got any creds?"

"I'll sell my body."

"As to that," said Ryan, "there's quite a bit of competition in Mocsin. Andit's regulated. Andthe pay's piss poor. Andit's a hell of a life. And..."

She shot him a withering look.

"You don't maybe consider I have a touch more class than the majority of my working sisters?"

Ryan tapped his teeth with a fingernail and looked her over with amusement.

"Here it is," he said, his eyes locking on to hers. "You have more class than I've seen in five years."

"Only five years? How blasted gallant." Her tone was sardonic. "Don't bother with the honey talk. I can get by."

Ryan stood up and leaned against the steel-faced wall. He went on as though she hadn't said a word. "But that of course only makes it worse. You wouldn't start out in the back-street sleaze pits, you'd go straight to the top. And that means you'd start off with Jordan Teague, the fattest hog in the territory. You'd not only supplant all his harem, which means they'd be gunning for you the whole time, but you'd have to put up with his personal habits and sexual demands, which are by no means couth."

" 'Couth!'" She laughed suddenly. "That I like!"

"When Teague's finished with you — only take a month at the most, he has a low boredom threshold — you get passed down to his chief of police, Cort Strasser. Teague's just gross, raunchy. Strasser on the other hand has very strange and violent tastes. Whips, torture, humiliation. I don't believe Strasser likes women very much."

"Okay, okay." Her voice was tight. She said quietly, "Is it any wonder people want to escape..."

"If you've been around," Ryan said, "you know very well that not every city, town or hamlet is the same as Mocsin. Sure there are plague pits all over the place, but you could probably live your entire life out without seeing one."

Krysty stood up, faced him, her deep green eyes diamond hard, defiant. She swept a swath of scarlet hair from her face and it tumbled back over her shoulders. Ryan felt sudden and intense desire for her.

She looked at him and said, "I'm going on to the Darks."

Chapter Six

"And check your boots," said the Trader through his cigar smoke. He waved the cigar at J. B. Dix. "See they do it, J.B."

"Don't worry. They always do."

"You, as well."

J.B. didn't say anything. He glanced at Ryan, a pissed-off expression on his thin face.

"And don't look like that!" barked the Trader. "I know what I'm talking about! It's the little details. You forget the little details, you might as well be dead. Hell, you forget 'em and you will be dead!"

Ryan reflected that it was ever thus when they were approaching what the Trader invariably referred to as a "pest hole" — town or area controlled not by men and women with a certain standard of civilized behavior, but by men and women for whom there was no law but their own, no rules but those that they invented on the spur of the moment to satisfy some passing whim or desire. Mocsin was just such a place. It was not the worst, but it was well up — or, depending on how you looked at it, down — the scale.

Back a hundred years or so it had been typical small-town America. A long main street with cross streets cutting it into blocks. A movie house, a bank, a couple of realtors, ice cream and pizza parlors, supermarkets, drugstores, bars, a half dozen greasy spoons, a couple of upmarket but still essentially tacky restaurants, a Lutheran church, a sheriff's office with a small jail facility for drunks to dry out in, two motels. The edge-of-town streets had trees on them, well-shaved lawns in front of medium-sized dwelling places for the moderately well-off. There was a small industrial complex: a machine-tool plant, a couple of lots where electrical components were stamped, a coast-to-coast shipping warehouse, a small plastics factory. Near the industrial part of town the homes were drabber, the streets grimier, the bars grubbier, the nightlife darker.

Mocsin dwellers of the past, had they been able to skip a hundred years into the future, would have both recognized the old hometown and not recognized the old hometown. The outline was there. The bank was there, the church, the movie house: everything was still in its place. The Nuke had not hit Mocsin, just the aftereffects.

The bank wasn't a bank anymore, the church wasn't a church, the movie house wasn't a movie house. There were places where you could eat, places where you could sleep, places where you could buy food, but in no sense of the words were these places restaurants, hotels, stores. All were more or less rat pits. What flourished in Mocsin were the bars and the gambling houses and the whorehouses. Perhaps "flourished" was not quite the word: there wasn't a hell of a lot of bartering strength in Mocsin, except at the top.

The top was represented by Jordan Teague, who certainly had his fair share of flesh; and his so-called chief of police, Cort Strasser, somewhat less well endowed in body, though not in brain.

Strasser, nowadays, ran things. Teague still gave the orders, was still very firmly in charge, but Cort Strasser kept the show on the road, did all the hard graft necessary to keep things from falling apart completely. Largely this meant cracking down viciously on anyone or anything that looked as if he, she or it might buck the system, a system that had grown up over a period of twenty years, based on Teague's highly dubious claim but iron grip on the gold mines to the southwest of town.

The road through Mocsin was the main route to the northwest and the north. Travelers, heading into the Rockies in the hopes that there they would find fresh fields, had to pass through Mocsin and consequently had to pay for the privilege, either in creds or in kind. For that reason not a lot of travelers actually made it through the town, the toll being hair-raisingly high. If you argued the toss, you ended up six feet under and your goods and chattels, which included both kith and kin, went straight into Jordan Teague's treasury. If you paid up, it usually broke you, and you either signed on as a miner so that you could earn back what you'd paid out in toll — a laughable ambition — or you simply parked your steam truck and van where a few hundred other hopefuls had parked theirs and tried to find some kind of honest employment in the district. There was now a vast shantytown of rusting trailers, buggies and rigs sprawling out of the south end of town.

Those who resided in the town and its environs did not so much live as exist, and it was a miserable and squalid existence at that. Most took refuge in booze or happyweed, sometimes both, and brought up their children in wretched circumstances with the ever present fear that one day Strasser's talent spotters would home in on them. Pretty young girls and pretty young boys were always needed for the recreational activities of Strasser's security goons. Then, once the bloom had gone from them, the kids were consigned to the various gaudy houses that lined the streets in the center of town.

Sure, commercial life, of a kind, went on. People made clothes and mended boots and shoes; people reared hogs and horses, built timber-frame houses, had small farmsteads outside of the peripheries where root vegetables, corn and wheat were grown. The mech trade was the real thriver: mechanics, welders, machine repairmen were all highly prized. Men and women who were skilled mechs could command ace jack. Even Jordan Teague had to pay for skill. He had to keep up his fleet of land wags and trucks. Maneuverability was essential in the Deathlands.