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cocking it and aiming it at the kid. The kid rolled his eyes, gently pushed the barrel aside to point at the Wound instead. The adult guard’s eyes followed the barrel, looked down it at a smirking Trip.
    “Howdy,” Trip said, tapping cigarette ash out the window.
    The guard grunted, gave his kid a dirty look, and got to his feet. He unsteadily stepped up to the Wound , keeping the Kalashnikov aimed at the bridge of Trip’s nose. “Business?” he asked, his words slurred. His breath stank of hops and ethanol.
    Trip gave him a practiced, charming half-mouth crooked smile. “Emptying your city vault in the dead of night,” he said, earning a jab from Rudy’s elbow.
    The guard just stood there, body slowly wavering from side to side, squinting at Trip like he was trying to decide if he’d really heard what he thought he’d heard. While he pondered, he snapped his fingers back at the kid. The kid reached behind the keg and grabbed a milk jug half-filled with frothy amber beer. He took a long swig for himself, then handed the jug to the adult.
    Keeping the Kalashnikov pointed at Trip, the guard slugged down a good portion of the beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and scowled. “Pretty stupid to tell me that, isn’t it?”
    “I’ve got a good attorney.” Trip thumbed at Rudy.
    Rudy leaned in and gave the guard a friendly two-fingered salute. “I mostly specialize in maritime law, but I have been known to do some pro-bono criminal defense work from time to time.”
    The guard squinted and laughed, lowering the Kalashnikov. “Pair of jokers, eh?” He jogged his head back at the kid. “Open the gate, Kevin.”
    The kid walked over to the gate and mounted a tire-less, rusted ten-speed, kept upright between blocks of concrete. The bike’s chain was connected to a complex pulley system. As the kid pedaled, the gate rose.
    “All right,” the guard told Trip, waving at the gate with the beer jug, “go on with you. But no shooting kids or raping animals — we ain’t barbarians here.”
    “We’ll try to remember that,” Trip said, twitching to have the Wound ease forward through the gap.
     

     
    “You know, call me crazy, but I think that guard was drunk,” Trip said, the Wound making its slow way down Shunk’s mostly deserted cracked asphalt main drag.
    “Lucky bastard.” Rudy idly picked fuzz out of his belly button with his thumb. “He probably gets paid in beer.”
    Trip hit the brakes and laid on the horn as an old woman in a shawl and sequined halter top stumbled into the Wound ’s path. She shot Trip a viscously dirty gap-toothed glare and the finger before walking on, taking another swig from the milk jug of beer grasped tight in her wizened, arthritic hand. “Towns that let their guards be drunk on duty don’t ever have anything worth guarding. I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”
    Rudy looked up, pulled his t-shirt-shirt down. “It’s just that kind of town. A party town. At least they’ve got somebody at the front gate. That’s a good sign.”
    Trip got the Wound moving again. “Bet their rifles weren’t even loaded.”
    “There’s money here.” Rudy sniffed his thumb and shrugged. “I can smell it.”
    “What you’re smelling ain’t money.” Trip pointed his cigarette out at the shacks lining the drag. They were built out of whatever could be salvaged after the decades of chaos that had made the wasteland the Wasteland: Irregular chunks of salvaged plasterboard and sheetrock, rusted, dinged-up corrugated iron sheets, and banged-up car trunks and hoods, with cell phone cases used as decorative mosaic roof tiles. Nothing new, nothing fitting together correctly. “Look at this place. It’s like it isn’t even in the same country as Cali. Or even Jersey. It’s a mess. A good nuking would improve it. It looks like a bunch of drunken idiots built it.”
    Rudy shrugged, smiling. “They probably did.”
    “They’re not gonna have anything worth the