Wasteland King (4 page)

N
ormally Bill Yonkovitch didn't stop for hitchers. Caution was the best policy, especially when hauling big loads over long distances. You never knew when luck might sour itself up like a bennies high gone bad, itching under your skin and turning the world into a funhouse distortion of paranoia.

Nope, best to stick to caffeine, safety, and keeping the cab clean. Maybe he didn't make as much by following the rules, but on the other hand, he'd been driving for years without a wreck, so that was good enough.

After Maria, he never wanted to be surprised again.

“Where you headed?” Bill scratched under the band of his baseball cap, squinting at the road.

The guy was out walking without a bag or anything, a shock of dark hair almost woolly-dreadlocked moving in time to his steps. At first Bill thought it was a hallucination, but he solidified at the side of the road and the brakes grabbed without any real direction on the driver's part.

Sometimes it was like that, even if a man didn't want surprises, the world conspired to force him out of his nice safe shell. Always best to grudgingly go along, because otherwise the road would choose another damn thing to throw at you down the way, one maybe not so pleasant or easily fixed.

“West,” the man said, clearly enough. Hair hanging in his face, but he didn't look dirty. Sand crusted his boots, good well-worn Frye's brown leather. You could tell a lot about a man from his shoes. These had seen hard use, and he'd waded in something before trudging through sand—but he'd knocked them clean before he climbed into Bill's cab.

Which made Bill feel pretty charitable. Politeness was always good. “California coast, huh? You local?”

A flash of white teeth, under that mop of hair. “No. Thank you for stopping.”

“I don't normally,” Bill said. Was it nervousness, beating in time to his heart? The doctor said his ticker was fine.
Should last another twenty years or so,
he'd laughed, and Bill laughed with him.

You sort of had to, when they informed you how much longer your sentence ran. In front of the windshield, the gray road ran, and there was nothing to do but put the tires on it and speed along.

“Then I thank you again.” The hitcher had a trace of an accent, maybe, which would explain the hair. You saw all types on the side of the road. A certain number of them were bad sorts, and you mostly couldn't tell unless you got stung. That was why Bill kept the Louisville Slugger with its lead core in the back, and the ax handle always tucked in its custom sheath on the left side of the driver's seat.

Now, despite the politeness, Bill was wondering why he'd stopped to pick the guy up. “The heat can really get to a guy out there. It'll make you crazy. Desert's nothing to fool around with.”

“I'm used to it,” the man said. “I lived in a swamp.”

“Down south? That's wet heat. It'll drive you crazy too, but in a different way.”

“Have you seen both?” The hitcher sounded genuinely curious.

It was nice to talk to someone every once in a while. “Oh, yeah. I been all over. Me and Betsy here.” He tapped the dash, a proprietary movement. “Coast-to-coast. Can't stay in one place too long. Get itchy.”

“Do you have a home, then?” Thoughtfulness in the soft baritone. Good voice. The man could do radio, if he wanted to.

Bill grinned. “Used to. Now I've got a mailing service and a sleeper cab. Better that way. Just roll all over the country. Rent a room when I feel like it, sometimes.”

“Like a snail. Your home on your back.”

“Some days it feels like it. You?”

“A house. In the swamp.” A shrug. “But home is different.”

“It always is.” Bill nodded sagely. You often came across philosophers on the road. They were everywhere, from the tired utilitarian waitresses to some of the slow, dreaming Hell's Angels, the slipstream driving all thoughts but
make it big someday I'm gonna
out of their heads. Other truck drivers ran the gamut from materialists to downright spiritual—not to be confused with
religious
. The one poststructuralist trucker Bill knew had decided the Lower 48 weren't avant-garde enough and went to do short hauls in Alaska, where the crazy ran deep enough to suit him.

A sign flashed by—
BARTON
10
MI.
Now that was an asshole armpit of a town, he'd only stopped there once. “How far you going, son?”

“A long way. But the next town is fine, really.”

“You may not want to with hair like that.”
Not to mention, well.
These days you couldn't even give that sort of warning without maybe hitting a touchy spot. “This part of the country's… well, you know.”

“Just like everywhere else.” A bitter little laugh. “You can't get away from it.”

Which made his passenger a cynic, maybe. Or just a realist. “What if you could?”

“Don't know. Went somewhere a long time ago, because I was told it didn't matter there. The thing is, something matters everywhere. If it's not one thing, it's another.”

This was shaping up to be one interesting conversation. Bill settled himself further in his seat, Betsy settling herself too, into a good even speed. It was a nice morning. “So where did you eventually end up? That swamp?” If he had found a corner of the South where things didn't matter, that was outright miraculous.

A place like that would be worth knowing about.

“Too soon to tell.” Did the hitcher sound amused? “There's a girl, though.”

“Oh, now.” A deep rich chuckle worked its way up out of Bill's gut. He was putting on some pounds—long distances did that to you. Not enough getting out and walking. “I used to have one that felt like home.” Maria's face, with the engaging gap between her front teeth and her humming in the kitchen. Waking up to that slow wandering melody had filled Bill with something very much like… well, he wasn't quite religious, so maybe
heaven
wasn't the word.

But it was damn close. Just like the opposite when he woke up one fine sunny morning and realized she wasn't coming back.

The stranger gave him a moment or two, then asked the reasonable question. “What happened?”

“She foreclosed. What about yours?”

“She wants to kill me.”

Oh, man.
“That's the best type.”

“I don't blame her.”

“Then, brother, pardon my French, but you may be fucked.”

“No pardon needed, good sir.” But the young man tensed. “There. You can let me out there.”

“What?” Bill took his foot off the gas. “You'll have to walk through Barton, then.”

“Maybe.”

A few minutes later, the man brushed his hair back and reached for the door handle. He paused. “You are a good mor—ah, a good man. I wish you luck in finding your own home.”

“You're sitting in it, son,” Bill said, and made one last attempt. “Sure you don't want to ride a bit further?”

“Not today.” A firm handshake, callused hand warm and hard against his own, and the young man hopped out of the cab. He headed for Happy Harry's Stop 'n' Sip, and Bill Yonkovitch never saw him again.

He also didn't notice the faint smear of gold on his hand, sinking into his own skin. Later that day, he bought a scratch ticket at a little stop-and-rob on the outskirts of LA. He didn't realize he'd won for three weeks, but by that time he'd already met an exhausted waitress in Nevada who almost passed out bringing him a chef salad. He took Deirdre to her apartment that night, slept outside in the cab of his truck, and when he woke up the next morning she'd left a note on the windshield with her number.

They lived a long happy life, childless in an RV, crossing and crisscrossing the States. And Bill, wiser than most, never picked up another hitchhiker.

That last one, he felt, was enough.

A
sere dust-choked afternoon found Robin holding Pepperbuckle's ruff, leaning against the sidhe dog's warmth and eyeing a patch of improbable green. Tiny winking gems of light coruscated around her, the damn pixies chiming nonsense and borrowed words from every language, both sidhe and mortal, as they fluttered. They darted close and away, their little mouths round O's of excitement as they hit the edge of her personal space, their daybleached globes of foxfire turning dark blue before they zoomed away again, laughing their tiny mad chuckles, as if her presence both dyed and tickled them.

Seen from above, the greenery was no more than a small divot in an endless sea of heatshimmer sand. It would glitter, a moment of emerald fire, before the eye found something else about the immensity of dun dust, rock, and greengray sage to fasten on instead. A mortal would forget it, or think it a hallucination, a mirage oasis, or possibly a stand of something spiny around thick sulphurous water.

It was, in fact, an oak tree. Sandy wilderness cradled it, the Veil curdling in thick folds around its thick trunk, and the fingers of its curve-bordered leaves caressed the oven-dry breeze. Its branches sheltered a pool of greenery, light and dark moving in mellifluous leafshade, and its bark had a thick, smooth reddish cast, as if the tree had been poured instead of grown.

A heartsblood oak, a nail piercing the real and more-than-real, crouched in the desert, and Pepperbuckle had led Robin straight to it. It was as they approached, Robin's heels almost sinking in deep sand despite the chantments on them and her velvet coat-cloak flapping, that the pixies appeared, crowding thick as clotted cream. They showed up wherever the Veil was rent or curdled, tiny crowding things with gossamer wings and needle-sharp teeth. She was too weary to try to dispel them, and who would understand that they'd seen her if they went carrying tales? Nobody listened to pixies, and their language changed from one wingbeat to the next.

The giant redgold dog heaved a sigh as he stepped into the liquid shade, and so did Robin. She sagged and pushed the hood back, freeing her chopped hair with a grimace, and patted at her throat before she remembered, again, that her locket was gone.

Jeremiah Gallow had it. Was he dead, and the golden gleam in his pocket while he moldered?

What
she
had was black velvet, the pipes at her belt, and the small wickedly curved knife welling with its own translucent green poison. The boll Gallow had given her, stuffed in a pocket with a blue plastic ring. And Pepperbuckle, who led her to the tree and sank down to sit, his shoulders rising while his haunches dropped. The hound grinned, tongue lolling and his sharp gleaming teeth exposed, well pleased with himself.

“Good boy,” she husked, scratching behind his ear just where she'd seen her sister caress stray dogs in their long-ago childhood, just where he liked it. He leaned into the touch, his dark-blue eyes half closing. “Best boy.” She peered up at the tree's branches, moving in slow semaphore.

The milk had helped, but her throat was still a little raw. Rest would help even more, and oaks were good trees. Heartsbloods didn't have dryads lurking in their trunks, but they were sidhe all the same. Some said they spied on all that happened in their shade but never spoke, preferring secrets to blackmail. Others held that their movements were a language all their own, but even highborn fullbloods didn't live long enough to learn it.

A very few whispered that they reported to one sidhe only, but nobody knew
who
. Summer, Unwinter, or someone else, what did it matter? The important thing was, she could rest here, and so could Pepperbuckle.

At least, until dusk. Unseelie had to wait for true night before they could begin hunting her afresh during Summer's half of the year. It was small consolation that Summer might not have known Robin was still alive—or, more likely, sane enough—to be hunted, though.

Am I sane?
She shuddered, scratching both of Pepperbuckle's ears now. The sidhe hound wriggled with delight, his head dropping. The milk had restored him, too.

The tiny chiming of the pixies made her wonder about the teenager in the small store, miles away by now. Why had pixies bothered to show themselves? It wasn't like them to take interest in a lowly Half, even if she was Summer's erstwhile errand girl. They'd intervened when she rode an elfhorse through a city to draw Unwinter away, too, and that had been strangely unlike them as well.

That was an unpleasant thought, and she shuddered afresh. Pixies clustered both of them, their glowspheres brighter in the liquid shade. “Go away,” Robin murmured, but not very loudly. Conserving her voice was safest. The music under her thoughts, running wide and deep as a silent river, was full of piping chimes now, too. If she listened, maybe she could translate their chatter, but who would want to?

Best of all would be to climb into the branches and wedge herself in a convenient place. Her ams and legs ached just thinking about it, though the milk and creamer was a steady comforting glow behind her breastbone. In the end, she sank down next to Pepperbuckle, and the dog turned a few times before settling among the roots with her. Robin put one arm over his shoulders, grateful for his warmth, so different than the choking dust-dry mortal heat outside, and shut her eyes.

Sleep wasn't long in coming, but before it swallowed her completely she felt tiny pinprick-pats on her face, her throat, her wrists, her hands. The pixies didn't bite, they merely smoothed their tiny hands over her, their deep indigo glow sinking into her, a drugging calm. Pepperbuckle's eyes closed halfway, and the dog watched the shadows and the tiny lights with benevolent interest as the mortal wind rattled and rasped.

A heartsblood oak is a nail, and the mortal world runs around it like softened wax, slow but sure. The world outside that particular bubble of branch, bole, and shade blurred like dye on wet paper, and the tree carried its cargo serenely through a long, warm afternoon.