Wasteland Taxi part 1

Post Apocalyptic taxi service

    "This guy's f*****g nuts" was all I could think. Sitting across from a bony little man who's age could only be estimated as being somewhere between 65 and 900 years old. If he'd been standing he would have been about 5' 3". The faded stocking cap he wore on his head seemed like it used to be blue. Hell, maybe it still was under the years of road dust. His wrinkled face hid behind a scraggly beard and the thickest glasses I'd ever seen. His long, hook shaped nose seemed to be obscenely pointing the way to his crotch as he sat there explaining the particulars of our pending business deal in his broken wastelander version of English. As I looked over his fragile skeleton like body clad in a loose fitting sleeveless grey shirt and worn, red shorts I wondered how I got myself into this weird situation.
    My name's Burke. Clive Burke. I came to a bar on the edge of the world to meet this little man known to me as Reesh, or maybe Reese. Like I said, he speaks the broken English of a wasteland dweller. 'Dusters' we call them. I would never have normally have dealt with anyone from the wasteland, but he can do a particular job for me, and like it or not, that had value to me. The job was to transport me and my niece across the wasteland to a research outpost on the other side.
    You see, Reesh was what we call a 'duster taxi'. Wastelanders crazy, stupid, or just plain suicidal enough to drive us 'city folk' through the wasteland. With raiders, pirates, and mutants populating the most of the wastelands, that was no small undertaking. Literally all of the dusters thought city folk were all rich and powerful, and that makes us a target. Even the duster taxis could be dangerous if you were from the city. Or at least what was left of the civilization that we still called cities.
    I'm told that the cities and wasteland all used to be something called a 'nation' known as the united states. Then, after a string of events known only as 'the disasters' to me, there was no more nation. Only the wasteland surrounded by barely habitable communities we called cities that were becoming less and less populated due to the plague. I used to hear the older generations pass down the stories about how things were before the disasters. They said that there was no wasteland. No irradiated zones. No mutants or raiders. Only great cities that reached up to the skies. Then, after the disasters, the wasteland was created and nobody could live there anymore. Nobody sane, anyway. They told me that the wasteland reached from some place called 'Tennesee' to a place called 'Utah', which was where I now sat staring at this strange little man, trying to understand just what the hell he was saying.
    "Yesh, me's have lotsa good motor. Fasht motor. Getsh dere no raidersh. Shafe."
    I definitely understood that last word. "Safe?" I asked, skeptically.
    "Well," Reesh grinned. "Dem'sh radiersh not catch ush, for de way. Mebbe not sho shafe, but get deresh okey dokesh, no ouch."
    "Transport for two, then?"
    "Yesh, one and one."
    "How much?"
    "Sheven greensh."
    "Jones said five."
    "Sheven. Five getsh box." Box was the duster word for dead. I wasn't sure if he meant that if I tried to pay less he'd kill me himself, or if anything less than what he was asking for wouldn't come with a garuntee, if you catch my drift.
    "All right, seven. But I can't pay all of it until we get there." Reesh grinned at me in an unsettling way.
    "Dash how we do'sh. Norm. Shun go down tommorrow, be dere." And with that Reese began to drink his piss warm excuse for water as if I wasn't there anymore. So I got up from the table and left. How the hell did I let myself get talked into this?
    My niece Olivia was the important cargo here. There were some scientists trying to cure the plague on the other side of the wasteland, and they'd heard of her. Olivia had gotten the plague and had been one of the lucky few to survive it even though it had taken my brother and sister in law. She wasn't the first, but nobody who had recovered from the sickness had lived long enough to get to the research facility in someplace I'm told used to be called Atlanta, Georgia. See, if you could survive the plague, you were a very valuable person, and that meant a lot of people were going to try to control you. That's always ended up the same way for the valuable person. 'Box', as Reesh had said. Trouble was, I didn't have the five green I had thought I was going to have to pay, let alone seven. I was really hoping that the scientists would have what we needed to pay. After all, they were the ones who wanted Olivia to get there. I certainly didn't have any personal designs on travelling through the wasteland.
    I thought about whether or not this was going to be worth the effort as I walked down the dusty street to the motel I'd left Olivia at. I mean, a cure for the plague sounded pretty nice, but this trip was practically suicide. Reesh was supposed to be the best, though. I definitely didn't see it, but the whole thing had been set up by some friends I trusted, so I guess he's the best, somehow. But a trip through the wasteland? I mean, like, all the way across it? Such things just weren't normally attempted. But I guess the cause was good enough for the risk. Besides, if we stayed here it wouldn't be too long before somebody heard about Olivia and took her to sell her to the highest bidder, so I guess we had no choice.
    I got to the motel and walked up to our room. I knocked twice, then a pause, then three times, then another pause, then once. The code Olivia and I had worked out so she would only open the door for me. The door swung open and there stood my ten year old niece Olivia, with her dirty blonde hair hanging in her face, hiding her pretty green eyes.
    "Is everything good, uncle Clive?" She asked. Hurrying to get inside and lock the door, I replied, "Yeah, but the guy wants seven green to do the job."
    "But we don't have seven."
    "Well, we didn't have the five I thought it was going to cost, so I guess it doesn't matter. Just don't mention that we don't have it when you meet him."
    "But he's a duster. If we don't pay he'll kill us and eat our brains!"
    "That's just a story, they don't really eat brains." I actually had no idea if it was true or not, though if even half the stories I'd heard about dusters were real it probably was, but I wasn't about to say that to a kid. Besides, the part about him killing us was almost certainly true, so it didn't really matter anyway. "Let's just eat something and get some rest, we've got a long trip ahead of us and it starts tomorrow at sundown."
    We ate the last of our beans mostly in silence and settled into our cots to get some sleep. Just as I was laying my head down I heard Olivia say "We're going to die out there, aren't we uncle Clive?"
    "No sweetie. We're going to be taken care of, I promise. Get some sleep. It's going to be hard to sleep on the trip, and you want to be as rested as possible when you meet the scientists, right?"
    "Okay, uncle Clive. Goodnight."
    I didn't sleep much that night.