Enduring Armageddon (36 page)

Candy knelt before me with a smile and placed her hand on my crotch. I squirmed away and squeaked, “I’m really okay. I would prefer to just go ahead with our meeting. I don’t need anything else.”

The minister slapped his hand on the desk and the girl sucking his dick gave out a squeal of shock. “I knew I liked you. A man of business after my own heart,” he said loudly. “What can I help you with?”

I noticed that his “purely business mind” didn’t mean that Monique was going to cease her duties, so I moved ahead with my pitch. “I’m Chuck from Carlsbad, New Mexico. We’re interested in opening up trade with New El Paso.”

“Carlsbad, huh?” he murmured while he stared past the blonde’s nude backside to a map on the wall. “How far away is that from here?”

“It’s about a hundred miles to the northeast,” I answered. “We made it here in a little over three days.”

The minister looked from me to the door. “Are there others with you?”

“It’s just me and my traveling companion, Alejandro. He’s a Changed and we were told that you won’t meet with them.”

“Damn right,” he replied. “Seeing those nasty freaks makes my dick go limp and the girls wouldn’t like that at all. Would you, girls?” They both responded in the negative.

“So, what is it that you have that we want and what is it that we have that you need?” he asked me. I thought his choice of words were interesting. He asked about items that they
wanted
and the items that we
needed
. Clearly he was used to being the one who held all the cards in trade negotiations.

“We have green leafy vegetables and some root vegetables,” I replied. “We need medical supplies, baby formula and personal use items.”

“We have all of those things that you just mentioned. You came from the northeast, did you—ah, yes, Monique. Here it comes. You ready to swallow it all, baby? I don’t want to get anything on my clothes.”

I averted my eyes as the disgusting pervert came into his slave’s mouth. She continued to work it for a little while longer and then assisted him in tucking himself away and pulling up his pants. She gave me a sticky grin that told me she was just as strange as he was.

“So relaxing,” he said in a dreamy voice. “You really should try one of them, they’re both great at what they do.”

“No, thank you. Yes, we came from the northeast. Actually, we came down Highway 62 and then up 1437 to New El Paso.”

“Hmm? Oh yes, so you came up the main route. Then you noticed our substantial farming system with irrigation from the underground aquifer and powered by our power generation equipment?”

“Yeah, I saw all of that.”

“Okay, so you’ve seen that we have no need of your vegetables.”

My heart sank. I’d at least hoped to get one trade for medical supplies completed using the Carlsbad, New Mexico location as a ruse. “Alright then, I guess we’re done,” I said dejectedly.

“Not so fast, Chuck! We don’t need your vegetables, but what we do need is manpower. You see, New El Paso is looking to be the regional supplier of the foodstuffs that we produce in those fields and eventually the provider of power for everyone. We need more workers in both of those areas if we are going to be the prominent community in the southwest.”

I knew that they were really making a push for a larger army, but I wisely kept my mouth shut. “How many people live in Carlsbad these days?” the minister asked.

Shit
. I wasn’t prepared to answer the question. “I don’t know, probably—” A knock on the door saved me from answering.

“Come in,” the minister called towards the door.

Two men came in carrying trays. One was laden with a large tray of potatoes and some type of meat while the other had two plates and two glasses of water. They set it all down on the desk and bowed before walking out of the door.

“Ahh, lunch is served. Please, Chuck, eat your fill, we have plenty of vegetables here in New El Paso.” He speared a piece of meat and savored the flavor. “We’re also the lead producer in the region of goat meat. It sounds disgusting at first, but with varying the spices, our chefs have become very adept at cooking them. They breed like rabbits and as an added bonus they help dispose of trash and the damned cactus that seems to pop up everywhere.”

I’d never had goat and it had been months since I had real meat so I gladly piled it onto my plate and ate everything that I saw. The girls periodically pulled a piece of meat from one of our plates and Candy made sure that her tits rubbed against my face every time that she leaned in for another bite. The two of them made a show of licking any spilled sauce off of each other’s naked bodies. The minister watched it with amusement.

After our lunch was complete, the minister sat back and rested his hands across his full belly. “Ahh,” he sighed, “I am full. So, before our bountiful feast arrived you were going to tell me the population of Carlsbad.”

“We have around eight thousand people,” I guessed.

“Eight thousand! How have that many people survived together in one location? What else are you eating? Do you have an army to protect you from the wasteland creatures that are attracted to that large of a population?”

“Uh, maybe a little less?” I amended. “We don’t really keep a list of who comes and goes. We have a large force of police that help keep the uh, wasteland things away.”

“Hmmm, well this police force must be pretty good then.”

“Yeah, they keep everything away and keep our population safe.”

“Then they’re not really an army?” he asked pretending to not be interested.

“No, I guess not. They’re very good at what they do though.”

“Well, we have supplies to trade, enough for your entire population, but it seems that the only thing that you have to offer us is manpower to help work in our fields and power generation platforms.”

“I don’t know if people would be willing to leave their homes. We have a pretty nice life there,” I replied.

“We have a lot to offer for your people and we provide…entertainment for all of our permanent residents. I’d be willing to give you a few first aid kits as a gesture of goodwill if you go back to your community and tell them of all the positive things we have here in New El Paso.

“It’s clear by the way that you devoured that goat that you don’t have a steady source of meat,” he continued. “We have a freely elected government, a very brisk bartering economy, electricity, running vehicles, an almost never-ending list of supplies that we recover from Old El Paso, fresh food, security, hell, we even have sporting events and a bustling night life. Most of these things are absent in wasteland communities.”

“Of course I’ll go back and let everyone know. I’d be willing to bet that you’ll get hundreds, maybe even thousands, of new residents based on the air conditioning alone,” I said as I gestured vacantly into the air around me.

The minister pushed a button on his desk and one of the guards was at the door instantly. “Go get two EMT medical kits and give them to that mutie that came here with Chuck. And don’t harm the fellow when you hand him the kits.”

The man nodded and closed the door. The minister leaned back again and unzipped his pants. “Candy, your turn,” he said. “God damn, I love making a deal. It turns me on! Last chance to get in on this before you get back on the road.”

I declined as politely as I could force myself to be.

“That has to be one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen,” I muttered to Alejandro as we slowly walked our horses back down Main Street towards the front gate.

“I bet it was tough. Must have been very difficult for you seeing those naked girls, I’m sure!” he replied.

“It was so much stranger than just the sex slaves though. They’re not interested in foodstuffs, but he was extremely interested in how many people we had, even more so about how many police and security personnel we had. I don’t have any idea about how many people live in Carlsbad. Hell, we didn’t even know if it still existed. I made it sound like they had a large population and he seemed a little concerned by the amount of people that I said that they had.”

“How many people did you tell him lived there?” Alejandro asked.

“Eight thousand.”

Alejandro snorted a laugh out the side of his mouth. “I bet he about shit his pants.”

“Yeah, he seemed concerned that there were so many people. I wasn’t sure that Cara was telling the truth, but after meeting with that guy, I think that they really are raising an army to try to take over the area.”

“So, what does that mean for us?”

I thought about his question for a moment as we walked. Rusty’s head hung low right behind my shoulder and his breath warmed my neck and made me feel like someone was watching me. It reminded me of the feeling of being constantly on the edge during our evacuation south. It was a feeling that I didn’t want my family to experience anymore.

“We’re only 150 miles from here. These people are planning to turn this region into a war zone. It may not be the same scale of warfare that I saw up in Illinois because obviously there are less people still alive down here, but that doesn’t mean it will be less violent or senseless.”

“I think you’re right,” Alejandro agreed. “If history has taught us anything about human psychology, then it would be that we want what others have and will do terrible things to get it. That goes for empires as well. Once a group has stabilized their area, they will inevitably want to expand it.”

I looked sidelong at him and nodded. “What I’m trying to say is that even if New El Paso takes over the west Texas area peacefully, there’s going to be another group that wants their resources after that,” he continued. “I wanted to see it for myself, and I’ve made up my mind about what’s going to happen. Hell, we didn’t even know about the racism that was happening here, that by itself is going to spill over soon, you can sense it. There’s going to be war for land and resources between.”

I agreed with him and then I thought of another aspect to this whole convoluted mess. Those groups of people who were still alive up north where the weather was too cold for farming would eventually hear that the entire continent wasn’t in a deep freeze and they’d come south, which would mean even more war. “Balmorhea was a blessing at first,” I responded. “The position right near I-10 was a perfect spot, but I think it’s actually a liability now that we know what’s going on outside of those walls. The interstate will be a natural conduit for these armies to use as they travel.”

Alejandro’s scarred face made his expression difficult to read, but I could tell that he didn’t like what I was about to suggest. “You know as well as I do that this is coming. Maybe not this year, but it will be the next or the next after that. We need to move farther into the wasteland away from the road and isolate ourselves from everyone for a few years until the fighting is over.”

We walked in silence for a block, both of us leading our horses. The wall loomed ahead of us and the gate was open. Beyond the gate, I could see the shantytown and the Changed sitting beside the street, waiting for the next traveler to come through so they could beg or trade their goods for food. This was a scene that was only going to get worse as local warfare took hold of the region.

Alejandro placed a hand across my chest. “Someone from out there just told me that the crowd plans to jump us and steal whatever we got from the Ministry of Trade.”

“How did you—oh, the telepathy. I keep forgetting.”

“The same person told me that we could go to the north exit and ride around the city.”

I considered it for a moment and then replied, “What if that person who’s giving you the ‘warning’ is actually the one planning to ambush us? Is that why he’s directing you to the north?”

“Yeah, there’s no way of telling. The Main Street gate is the main entrance to town, so it makes sense that it’s the most heavily guarded, we have no idea about that northern gate.”

“Let’s mount up and ride as fast as we can out the main gate,” I said. “There are only a few blocks where the village is close to the road so we should be able to make it through pretty quickly.”

He nodded and then walked around to the side of Bob and stuck his foot in her stirrup. He pulled himself up with a grunt and I took it as my cue to get up on Rusty as well. We double-checked that all of our supplies were properly tied down and that the medical kits were secured before making the final approach to the gate.

Ramsey, the young guard who’d gone to high school with Cara, was still at the front gate. He waved as we got closer and asked, “Hey fellas, y’all leavin’ already?”

“Yeah, we’re gonna go back to Carlsbad with the Trade Minister’s proposal,” I said. “Hey, have you heard anything from the crowd outside?”

He scratched idly at his scraggly beard. “Now that you mention it, it’s been just the opposite. We’ve had a really quiet day other than when you came in. Why, what have you heard?”

I glanced at Alejandro who replied, “Someone told me that the crowd was gonna jump us outside because they knew that we had food.”

Ramsey looked over our meager supplies. “You guys must not have that much food,” he mused. “But these are desperate times. You get that message from one of the Changed?”

Alejandro nodded his head. “Did you guys work out a deal with the minister?” the boy asked.

“Yeah. He gave us these medical kits as a sign of goodwill,” I stated. “We’re taking his proposal back to our community.”

“Okay, good enough for me,” Ramsey said. “Wait here a minute.”

With that he leaned over and said something to Chris, who glared at Alejandro in unmasked hatred. Then Ramsey trotted off towards the way we’d come and went into the first building along the street. The horses shuffled their feet impatiently while we waited for the guard to come back.

There were some muffled shouts and we could hear loud noises coming from inside the building. It sounded like men preparing for war. I’d heard those exact sounds before, when I lived in Virden. Hell, I’d
made
those sounds as we tried to psych ourselves up for battle. I didn’t want to have to fight our way out of town and through the crowd both, but if I had to I would.