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gladji beri rama…
”
    Somebody had once told Eddie that English was his second language, and he
didn’t have a first one. Even he could tell, though, that this wasn’t any kind
of language you could find on Planet Earth. It was like that Speaking in
Tongues shit they did over at the Dog Soup Tabernacle up in Silver City.
    “…
saso ti da mati natno, zara ti raguesta di la ramo…
”
    “Listen,” Eddie said. “What happens if you die? You die, what do I do? How do
I get on this more money than I can imagine you were talking about?”
    “…
maso si nami lama
—what the
fuck
are you talking about, you scavenging
little shit?”
    Instantly, Trix Desoto was lucid, and lifting her head to glare at him
cold-eyed. It wasn’t even like she was fighting off the pain. That switch thing yet
again; a completely different person had been switched on in her like a light.
    Eddie found himself feeling shamefaced under her direct and contemptuous gaze.
    “All I mean is,” he said, not a little shamefacedly, “is that I don’t know
what any of this is about. I don’t know who to call. You die on me out here,
how am I gonna know who to call?”
    “Then my advice to you would be to drive like a motherfucker and just hope I
don’t.”
    The light of coherence snapped off and her head fell back.
    “
Slami makto, shaba tlek na doura rashamateran…
”
    Eddie drove.

3.
    Las Vitas was little more than a glorified truck stop: a settle-down because,
what the hell, folks just sometimes still have to stop somewhere. A cluster of
second-string services around the dead remains of a TexMexxon station.
    The station itself had croaked near around twenty years ago, so far as those
who were in a position to know had told Eddie Kalish. Bolt-on hydrogen-fusion
technology had not been kind to the dealers from the days when vehicles needed
their regular fix of hydrocarbons.
    What Las Vitas had was communications. With the C&C rig totalled back at the
site of the ambush, Las Vitas was the nearest place that Trix Desoto could
make whatever calls she needed to make.
    That, at least, had been the plan.
    “Shit…” Eddie checked the scene and then just kept on going. “Gangcult hit
it hard and serious—maybe the same guys did you. This was heavy-duty.”
    The big, vestigial
TexMexx
sign which had served as an accretion point for
Las Vitas was down, the dishes strapped to its superstructure shattered or
scattered. That had probably been the first order of business: take out the comms before they could get off a signal to the US Cav.
    And vehicles that might have been stopping over were long gone, save for a
flipped-over garbage truck with a hole punched through it. Prefab cabins were
just smoking polycarbon shells; the jerry-built structures that had been
thrown up from local materials in the first place merely ash.
    Reddish-brown smears dotted on the levelled concrete expanse where trucks and
road-trains had once parked; weird little organic lumps that you didn’t want
to look at in case you worked out what they were.
    The ruins of Las Vitas still smoked gently. The fires had had maybe an hour to
burn down. If survivors were going to be crawling out of—or back to—the
wreckage then they would have done it by now. Las Vitas had been
zombie-towned—in coming weeks and months it would turn into a ghost town, but for the
moment the meat was just too fresh.
    Eddie kept his eyes on the pristine blacktop and just drove, mind working
furiously. Such as it was. Only one immediate possibility occurred.
    “Las Vitas is a bust,” he said, wondering if Trix Desoto could even hear him
through her babbling. “There’s only one thing for it. We’re gonna have to try
Little Deke.”
     
    Last time Eddie Kalish had seen Little Deke had been in the rear-view mirror,
as the guy was bringing up a scattergun and loosing off as Eddie tooled the
stolen RV out of his compound.
    Eddie had come across the thing, half-buried under a collection of old
dune-buggy