The oily black cloud rising over the ridge told her she was close.

  She came from the west, because you never approached Tire Town from the east. That was the direction of the prevailing wind. But sometimes the winds shifted. The blackened stains on the ridge and the little puffs of soot that rose with each step of her worn old boots told her that.

  From under the visor of her battered baseball cap, a relic of the Old Times from some team no one alive had ever heard of, she surveyed the land around her. To the north lay a series of jagged peaks, high enough to block the smoke the rare times the winds shifted to the north. Beyond that, she knew, ran the river, low and sluggish and muddy but able to irrigate the farmland that kept Tire Town eating.

  Closer around her, a few bare shrubs and some sickly grass struggled to grow in the rocky, blackened soil. The trail she walked bore the marks of carts and foot traffic. She even saw tire tracks from what might have been a vehicle.

  A movement up ahead and to the left of her path made her slow and ease her AK-47 into the Ready position, slung low over one shoulder, muzzle pointing down to show she meant no trouble but ready to jerk up in a lightning flash to fire. The safety was off. The safety was always off.

  She checked the straps on her small pack to make sure they were tight and wouldn’t interfere with handling of her gun. Then her hand strayed down to the .38 long-barreled revolver at her hip to make sure it was loose in her holster.

  All this she did in less than two seconds without her even being aware that she was doing it. Years of k-slinging had made each movement as unconscious as it was quick.

  Her sharp eyes took in every detail, and dismissed any possible threat. A few hundred meters ahead, and about twenty meters off the path, a couple of scavengers—a man and a boy, both scrawny and covered in soot—were busy digging. The ground showed the low undulations of buried ruins. The two were looking for material from the Old Times to trade. Several pits scattered around the area and a small pile of plastic, rubber, and a few lengths of wire showed they hadn’t had much luck.

  That didn’t seem to dampen their eagerness. Both worked with a will, using homemade shovels fashioned out of branches and sharpened wedges of sheet metal.

  “We’ll have better luck today, son. I can feel it. There’s buried treasure in these ruins.”

  “That’s right, Pa. We just have to hit the Mother Lode and we’ll be sitting pretty!”

  She got halfway along the track to them before they even noticed her. When they did, their attitude changed in a flash.

  The boy ducked behind the man, yanked a slingshot out of his belt, and loaded it with a pebble from his pocket. The man hefted his shovel.

  “We don’t have nothing you want,” he said.

  She stopped, not because she was afraid but because she didn’t want to spook them.

  “I’m just passing through to Tire Town.”

  “We don’t have nothing you want,” the man repeated.

  “I can take your eye out at a hundred meters,” the boy boasted.

  “Hush, son!”

  The woman smiled. “I bet you can. Looks like a nice slingshot. I bet you shoot rabbits and squirrels all the time with it.”

  The boy stood a little taller. “I bag dinner most nights.”

  She nodded. That was probably true. Digging in ruins was no way to make a living, and yet they didn’t look like they were starving. Much.

  “Well, I won’t risk my eyes by trying to take whatever’s in your food bag. All I want is a room and a shower and a chance to do some trade in the market.”

  She started walking again. Slowly. The two scavengers watched her as she passed by on the track and continued toward the ridge.

  “Hey!” the man called after her.

  She turned.

  “Watch out for Crazy Joe’s men. They ain’t got no discipline anymore.”

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  She nodded. “I’ll do that.” She had no idea who Crazy Joe was. It didn’t matter.

  Continuing on her way, she kept an eye out for more movement. This track wasn’t much used. From what she remembered from the last time she had come through a year back, most people arrived from the north, trading for fresh food from the farmland before heading into Tire Town; or from the south, where there were still decent pickings in one of the ruined cities if you were willing to suck in a bit of radiation. There was nothing to the west.

  That was why she had been there.

  The ridge was cut by a shallow ravine. The trail led up and through it. Jagged cliffs to either side didn’t make for any good firing spots. They were too rounded, meaning that anyone lying in wait up top wouldn’t be able to see into the ravine. The crumbly nature of the rock would make it risky to try to edge much down the slope.

  That’s why the two men stood right smack in the middle of the trail.

  They didn’t try to hide themselves. They obviously felt they didn’t need to.

  One held an AK in the Ready position. A later model, probably made by one of the last of the Chinese Warlord States but she’d have to get closer to tell. The other had an old rifle that looked like it had been salvaged from a dump. Maybe he had traded it from those two scavengers back there.

  Stole it, more likely.

  He also had a revolver in a worn old holster at his hip. That worried her more.

  She did not slow her steady walk toward them.

  They both wore camo and had the blackened clothing and skin of Tire Town residents. Even with the ridge and the prevailing wind heading the opposite direction, she could smell the place now.

  She could smell danger too, from the way those two smiled at her.

  The woman got to fifty meters before the guy with the AK shouted, “That’s far enough.”

  She stopped.

  “I take it you’re Crazy Joe’s men.”

  The two chuckled and glanced at each other.

  “That’s right,” the man with the AK said, puffing up his chest. “Famous across the Eastern Wastes!”

  “Never heard of you before ten minutes ago.”

  “Don’t let Crazy Joe hear you say that,” blustered the man with the crappy old rifle.

  The guy with the AK gave him a silencing look, then turned to the woman and studied her.

  “There’s a trail tax.”

  The woman got into the Stance. “Is that a fact?”

  The man with the rifle barked out a laugh. “Look at her, Carl. She thinks she’s a k-slinger!”

  Carl wasn’t laughing. He’d gotten into the Stance too—turned a bit away from his opponent, one foot firmly placed before the other with the legs wide and slightly crouched, left hand on the muzzle of his AK ready to whip it up to the firing position, right hand open at his chest to grab onto the front of the weapon as it came up and the left hand moved to the trigger.

  “Step aside,” the woman said. “We don’t have to do this.”

  “No, we don’t. Turn around and leave or pay the tax. There’s no profit in killing people coming to trade, if that’s what you’re coming for.”

  “And what’s the tax?” she asked. Not that she cared. She just wanted to give them time to reconsider.

  “We look through your pack and decide based on that,” Carl said.

  “Or look through your pants,” his pal with the rifle said.

  Her eyes flicked to his. “I’ll kill you slow.” She looked back at Carl. “You I’ll kill quick.”

  The guy with the rifle stopped snickering. Slowly he slung it, then moved his hand to the holster at his side.

  So he wasn’t as dumb as he acted. He knew that rifle wasn’t worth a damn.

  Silence. She decided to break it.

  “I don’t pay tax.”

  Another silence stretched out for several long seconds.

  “Well, that’s a damn shame,” Carl muttered.

  “Yeah, it is,” the woman agreed.

  They brought their AKs up at the same time. She got hers to the firing position a fraction of a second earlier.

  The shot cracked through the air and Carl jerked back, the back of his skull gouting blood. She ducked and swiveled to find the other man still drawing. She put a bullet through his skull too. He was dead before Carl’s body hit the ground.

  She had been lied about killing him slow. A gut shot or a throat shot gave someone a chance to fire back, and she didn’t take chances. Not even with an idiot like that.

  The k-slinger skirted to the side of the path and hunkered down beside a boulder, looking in every direction to see if there were more sentries. After a minute, she sprinted further up the path to another boulder and got behind that. Bit by bit, she worked her way up and over the path’s climb to the descent on the other side. Carl and his stupid friend had been the only two guards at the pass.

  Below her, in the valley beyond the ridge, spread Tire Town.

  Tire Town got its name from a huge tire dump from the Old Times. It was massive, nearly a mountain, a testament to the days when everyone had a vehicle and tires had to be replaced constantly, leading to the huge waste pile she saw before her.

  But like those scavengers back on the trail knew, Old Times waste was now buried treasure. Beside the huge mound of black rubber stood a thudding, belching power station cobbled together about ten years ago by an enterprising group of engineers. It burned the tires to produce electricity. The founders of Tire Town had also sunk a well and found a reliable source of pure water, or at least as pure as you could expect these days. With a ready supply of power and water, and a supply of food from the farmland to the north, it wasn’t long before Tire Town became the biggest settlement in a month’s travel.

  Spreading out around the power station, and tied to it by a spider’s web of wires and cables attached to poles, were the slapped-together homes of more than two thousand people. Most of the larger houses and businesses, and all the public buildings, had power. At night the streets were lit. Water was free. If it wasn’t for the constant noise and the smoke that even now seared her lungs, it would be paradise.

  She turned back to the two dead bodies on the trail. There hadn’t been such a greeting on her previous visits. Paradise had changed.

  It didn’t take long to strip them. Each had a good supply of trade tokens that she pocketed. In a bag she found some bread and jerky that she added to her almost empty food stores. The weapons she took part way up the cliff and hid in a crevasse. She’d have to retrieve those later. Hopefully it wouldn’t rain in the meantime.

  Squaring her shoulders and keeping her AK ready, she walked into Tire Town.