Radiant Dawn Read Free Page B

one twist of his bad hand. He apologized, got a field splint from aisle five and went back to work. Buggs was a good cashier.
    "Judas git home, he's doing it again!"
    Pop Sickle doffed his helmet and commenced to scratching at his bald pate. The wound flaked and slobbered clear plasma tears into his helmet. The albino's scalp glittered like the bowels of a geode, adorned with crystalline keloid scars; his bare skull shining through the bloodless sores. He swam in flooded uranium mines, reservoirs tainted with mercury and illegally dumped DDT. He glowed in the dark, made the geiger counters go batshit on aisle nine. He paid cash.
    Storch cocked an ear, heard an engine, civilian RV wheels chewing gravel. The RV hove into view and came to rest in front of his store, a gargantuan refrigerated biosphere on wheels. With it, an ambitious tourist could colonize Venus. The cabin door popped open with an audible hiss and a middle-aged couple climbed out. Banana Republic togs, urban cowboy boots, no sunburns. The man had a video camera on his shoulder. Tourists. Plastic in high impulse-buy gear.
    "Buggs, behind the counter. Hi, don't you scare 'em off, or you can start paying rent for that bench. And go wash yourself, you're making everything stink like fucking formaldehyde." Storch felt the headache coming on.
    Buggs behind the counter, Storch eyeing the tourists as they ogled the wares. City-slicker types video-sightseeing, insurance against Deliverance-style yokels, snaps from the fringe for the folks back home. They poked around the surplus goods, Storch thankful he took down his father's exhibit of SS regalia, wishing Harley was here to handle these idiots so he could get back to work. The Army taught him to obey orders and like it, but not to look like he enjoyed sucking up. The tourists, conspicuously not bargaining or asking questions, not trying on doughboy helmets or gas masks: just swiveling, scoping through the camera for the folks at home. Sidling up to him, needling the local yokel suddenly the main attraction. He recoiled from the greedy camera in his face.
    "So, are you folks survivalists?"
    "Everybody's a survivalist, mister. We just cater to those who take their survival seriously." His father's words, sounding stupid from his mouth. "Death Valley is a harsh place. You may or may not've noticed, in your RV, out there. It takes a lot to stay alive here. We sell most of it."
    "There a lot of militia groups around here?"
    Question hinky from a tourist. Storch smelled fuzz. "None that I know of. We get a lot of hermits. People who just want to be left alone."
    "Death Valley is the last refuge of the true individualist," Buggs chimed in.
    The camera homed in on Pop Sickle as he approached the checkout. The old mutant jumped back like a bushman afraid the infernal device would steal his soul.
    "Mister, I'm gonna have to ask you to turn that thing off."
    The tourist-wife stepped in front of the camera, did a bizarre little wave. "I think we've seen everything we came to see. Mother?" Too late, Storch spotted the kinky wire jacked into the camera running up the tourist's polo shirtsleeve, the plastic dong sticking out of the back of the camera. Antenna?
    The doors blasted open, black Kevlar-suited berserkers stormed Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply. "Down, get down!" guns in faces, jackboots on ribs.
    The end of Zane Storch's world had come.
     
    Storch and Buggs grabbed for sky, but Pop Sickle let out an eerie bleat and made for the back door. Phut Phut Phut: three shots in the old morlock deflating him like a boiler bag half-full of rancid clam sauce. An armed and armored stormtrooper braced Storch like an invitation to dance, all his hand-to-hand training jamming common sense, he can take the guy and feed him his rifle, but eight more like him? And the tourists have automatics, and Buggs down behind the register to appease the fucker on the counter, Storch's last glimpse of his cashier a bloody gash from a rifle barrel on