Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) by James Axler

up in the guard towers tracking their every step. BoomT hadn’t lasted as long as he had and built his mercantile empire by luck alone. The fat man had an animal cunning and instinct for danger. He was capable of ordering an indiscriminate preemptive strike on the entire parking lot, if he sniffed out so much as the slightest threat.
    The big-time queue had shortened considerably while they were gone. There was only one group of traders ahead of them, now. Five men bearing heavy backpacks awaited the judgment of the proprietor.
    BoomT sat in a canopied golf cart, out of sniper sight in the lee of the southernmost Winnebago’s bow. Clipped to the underside of the canopy’s frame were a pair of ComBloc RPGs, their plastic pistol grips in easy reach.
    If anything, the man was bigger than Ryan remembered. His five-hundred-pound, six-foot-eight-inch bulk took up the entire bench seat. Rolls upon rolls of pendulous, sweating flab hung from his chest. Close up, the gunshot scars on his torso and arms were clearly of varying calibers, waxy divots ranging from .380 Auto to 7.62 mm NATO. A mountainous wedge of shoulders and neck peaked at a head shaved to black stubble. Long wisps of beard hair trailed from his sloping cheeks. Instead of shoes or boots, he wore homemade sandals of tire tread. Boots his size were hard to come by.
    To protect his eyes from the sun and to conceal the focus of his attention, BoomT wore raspberry-mirror-lensed, wraparound sunglasses.
    The vast, bedspread-swaddled hipster impatiently waved his sec men forward to uncover the next batch of goods on offer. As he did so, he tossed a pale, slender rib bone onto the pile of other bones on the ground beside him. From the size of the heap it looked like he’d already eaten eight or nine of whatever the species was. He licked his fingers, one by one, and daintily wiped them on the edge of the coverlet.
    The sec men shoulder-slung their fold-stock AKMs, opened the tops of the traders’ overloaded packs and pulled out fistfuls of assorted predark fasteners. It was all salvaged nail by nail, screw by screw. It had to be. Screws and nails were no longer manufactured or imported. Without metal fasteners, building or repair of large structures was difficult, if not impossible. Without those once taken-for-granted items, folks were forced to live in tents, lean-tos, stone or log huts, or caves.
    One of the sec men approached his boss and held out the sample for examination. With a fingertip BoomT casually flicked out a few badly rusted, bent nails and stripped-slot screws. “Looks like thirty percent is useless shit,” was his verdict.
    Then he addressed the traders. “If there are rocks in your packs, I’m going to use them to sink you to the bottom of the bay. Is that understood?”
    The traders grimaced in response.
    BoomT wrote out a chit and handed the scrap of paper to the sec man with a warning. “Don’t give them this until you make sure there are no rocks.”
    The fat man shifted on the bench seat to take in the next trader in line. When he saw who was standing there, his mouth dropped open. He pushed his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose and squinted through slits for eyelids.
    “As I live and breathe, it’s One-Eye Cawdor!” he roared. Then he looked over at J.B. and added, “And fuck me triple dead if it ain’t the Pipsqueak, too.”

Chapter Six
    “Brought your own sluts along, I see,” BoomT said, sizing up Krysty and Mildred. “That was good thinking. Whores in these parts are scab-assed and wide-reamed. Still can’t attract no decent help around here.”
    “They’re fighters,” Ryan informed him. “They’re not sluts.”
    BoomT raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, whatever you say, One-Eye.” Then he winked at Mildred, theatrically adjusted his crotch beneath the bedspread and blew her a kiss.
    Mildred was marksman enough to quickdraw her ZKR 551 and put a bullet through the middle of his forehead. Mebbe it would