The woman’s eyes went hard. Yeah. They needed food. I’d been bargaining for years. I knew the tells.
“Or,” I added before they could respond, “We could play nice, you could let us through, and offer us permanent free passage in return for a favored trade agreement.”
Her eyes squinted. She had no idea what I was talking about. Starvation had likely turned her brain to mush, and despite the attack on the kid, which could have been a mistake for all I knew, I felt sorry for them. Which was all kinds of stupid.
Much more gently than I intended, I said, “You give us free passage. Forever. And every time we pass through we trade for coal. To prove our good will, when we come back this way, we’ll trade. And to start this agreement, you’ll give us a half load of coal in recompense for the kid who’s recuperating after your attack.”
“He killed two of ours,” the woman defended, and continued before I could respond, “What’syourearnest money?”
“Don’t you be giving my food away,” Cupcake whispered into my comms, her tone harsh.
I thought about Logan. There were farms along the way there. I raised my eyebrows as if surprised. “Canned vegetables, of course. And within one week, a load of good clean soil.” I thumbed at the quad Cupcake was driving. “Enough to fill the bed and a small trailer too. Seed potatoes and some vegetables. For coal.”
The woman looked at the ATV and tried to manage a sneer. She wasn’t very successful. “How many vegetables?”
“Within one week, that Quadro and a small trailer load of coal for,” I lifted three fingers of my left hand, “three seedpotatoes.” I opened my hand once and said, “Five kilos of eating potatoes. Ten tomatoes or the equivalent canned. Ten peppers. A kilo of salt.”
Starch, vitamin C, flavors.
Cupcake grumbled in my comms.
“Youcan’t eat coal,” I said, the words widely spaced, “and clearly you aren’t trading with anyone for food. All veggies we trade with will have seeds.”
Now Cupcake cursed in my ear.
“To recap, any time we come through and present you this,” I tossed the roadhouse’s colors on the ground near the feet of the man who had reacted to Jacopo’s shooting, “you allow us free passage. This makes you favored trading partners with the owners of those colors. Me. I’ll take your coal and anything else interesting you dig out of the rock, and I’ll sell it and split the profit with you sixty-forty, my way. If I don’t sell it I’ll return it to you intact.”
“Seventy-thirty. Our way.”
Take no shite.
“No negotiation. Food for your coal and our free passage. Sixty-forty. Accept or die.”
The woman pretended to consider my offer. “How soon will you come back?”
“We’ll be back through within two days with vegetable proof of earnest intent, to pick up a half load of blood-money coal.” Or we’d be dead. That was a possibility. “We’ll be back with the rest of the trade twenty-four to seventy-two hours after that. The big guy with the beard and/or the cute blonde in pink on the ATV will handle all trades. If things work out between us, I have connections in Charleston, Charlotte, Raleigh, and a dozen other cities for your coal and your other ores.” The electric grid was a thing of the past. There wasn’t enough water to run the huge pre-war hydroelectric dams, and the few nuclearpowerplants that hadn’t been bombed into nuclear waste didn’t send power to the backcountry anymore. Electricity—if people had the equipment—was solar, wind, or was generated by coal. “I can get your product out and bring you farming soil, goods, whatever you need.”
Her mouth turned down in a hard frown that looked more like hope than anger. She turned her head back to the man in clean jeans. He gave a small nod. “Done,” she said.
Later, before we pulled away from the stone wall, I said, “Well. That was interesting. I’ve never done a deal facing the possibility of a barrage of bullets.”
“I have,” Jagger said, his voice managing to sound amused and grim all at once. “It’s how we met.” He gunned his bike and swung into point.
Back at the roadhouse, Jolene laughed into comms, saying, “You’s turning into an old softie, helping out them miners.”
They were teasing me. I had a feeling it should have made me mad, but somehow instead I had a case of the warm fuzzies. Again. This was the second time this year. If this kept up I’d become a sweet little lady, all smiles and baking cookies. I was a fighter, not a cookie baker. A shudder ran through me. “Bloody hell,” I swore. And followed after Jagger. He had picked a place for us to camp for the night, and I was ready to crash. Tomorrow would be hard.
???
The road into Logan had been freshly graveled and smoothed. Rock was cheap in West Virginia, but it made for difficult driving at any speed higher than thirty kilometers per hour, even for the ATVs. It was slow travel for our convoy, which made us targets. Mina was frustrated at the lack of speed, at the rocksspitting from our tires, and the unexpected slide outs. The little psychopath growled curses under her breath.
The slow speed allowed us to survey likely farms to trade for canned veggies and, once in town, gave us time to take in the scenery as the sun began to set. The town was spread out on what was left of the Guyandotte River and its tributaries. The tallest building in town was seven stories. Before the war, Logan had slid into crime and violence. During the war, the town’s decline was reversed as the Four County Mine brought in workers, businesses, and money. Lots of money. Then an alien Bug ship beamed the mine into slag, ended the war, and law and order collapsed. Things had been rough for years.
Now, the place looked pretty good. There was no trash on the streets. Garbage bins were tucked out of sight. Laundromats were open. Diners and grocery stores were open. We even passed a newspaper office, with a giant printing press in the glass window and three people printing a newspaper, like back in the old days.
As we rode through the midtown, Jolene sent me a personal comms request. She filled me in on her and Gomez’s most recent discoveries about the unmarked dark riders. They had discovered how the riders were getting around: unmarked box trucks. The two had also discovered that the riders had help getting around on back roads from militants, who had embedded themselves into local law enforcement. They’d had to dig deep for the deputies’ names and personal info, drilling into multiple sheriff’s offices’ encrypted systems, and into the security system and files of the military bases, where they had found even more names and info into a conspiracy that indicated something big was going to happen, and soon.
“Shining Sugah, mind if I expose all these po-lice’s nasty doin’s to their upline bosses and their Internal Affairs offices?” Jolene asked.
