Chapter Twelve

The sun had already begun to drop low in the sky as Ryan, Poet and Hunaker descended the far side of the hill, out of sight of the ville, with the goal of infiltrating Virtue Lake and freeing wags and captives. The choice of route had been Poet’s, and though Ryan had problems with it, he hadn’t been able to come up with a safer, faster alternative.

Because they were on foot, and because the only road terminated in a barricade and what amounted to a firing squad of sec men, they couldn’t go in that way. To circle behind the ville would have taken them the better part of the night. The best way in, as Poet had explained, was over the dry lake bed. And they didn’t dare wait until dark to make a start because of the hazards of traveling over an unfamiliar landscape full of sink holes, tar pits and the devil knew what else. They had to take advantage of the last of the daylight, both for safe movement and for cover. Poet had then pointed out something that Ryan had already considered—if they headed toward Virtue Lake from the west, the setting sun would help hide them from anyone who happened to be looking in that direction.

One by one, they shinnied down a steep gully that emptied onto the lake’s silty floor.

Ryan moved into the lead, without hesitation. The two men had agreed on the division of responsibility, based on experience and skill. Discussion of the matter had been unnecessary. The man with the best eyes, or in this case the best eye, always took point. Ryan set off across the flatland, quickly crossing the stretches of open ground, slowing when he came to some cover.

There wasn’t much growing in the lake bed, mostly needle grass, in scattered clumps, which he took great pains to avoid. The nests of fine spikes were as tough as tempered steel, and if stepped on by a careless traveler, could easily pass through the sole of a boot and into the foot. A deep-tissue infection was almost guaranteed. Such an infection meant amputation or death, and more often than not, the former merely preceded the latter by a matter of days. There were other weeds, as well, also widely spaced. Some were noxious smelling, meaty like unwashed humanity or an abattoir; others smelled so strongly of licorice that it made the breath catch in the throat. None of the wild plants were taller than waist high.

As far as Ryan could see, there were no trees of any kind in the lake bed. Probably because the crude oil that had leaked from the pumping wells had poisoned the soil for large vegetation. There were ponds of black, tarry liquid everywhere he looked. The wells and their toolshed made up the only real cover to be had, and they, too, were widely separated.

Ryan estimated the distance to the edge of the ville at two miles as the crow flew, which was how he led the way. He knew a zigzag course would increase their chances of being seen. It was better to come straight on, as much as possible. A straight-on target was much harder to pick out against the steady glare of sunset. He lined up his course well to the right of the refinery’s tallest smokestacks. Flames gushing from a shorter rooftop pipe glowed orange against a landscape backdrop now tinted with rose.

As he entered another stand of waist-high weeds, he heard sudden, violent scuffling sounds ahead, a shrill squeak, then silence.

The three companions froze in midstep. Ryan pointed in the direction of the last sound, then reached down to his leg and unsheathed his panga. Whoever, whatever it was, there would be no blasterfire because it would give them away. Stealthily the trio advanced, and when they were very close, Ryan signaled for them to fan out. Then he crouched low and parted the weeds with the point of his panga.

In a tiny clearing in the middle of the weed patch, a figure hunkered over a freshly killed rabbit. The man was nearly naked, his body covered with dirt, his hair matted against his head, his long beard a tangle of grease and burrs. Great weals, lash marks, festered along his shoulders and buttocks. Ryan watched as he slashed at the carcass with a sharp piece of broken glass, splitting the hide around the neck, stripping it down around the back feet. He then began to eat like a wild animal. Taking the raw flesh between his teeth, he hacked it free with the edge of the glass, and bolted it down without chewing. He made soft, whimpering sounds as he attacked the meat.

Ryan waited until the others were in position before he stood and stepped forward, his panga at the ready. The man blinked at him in astonishment, lowering the carcass, his mouth, chin and beard smeared with blood, then he turned to run. He ran right into Hun and Poet. Dropping the rabbit at once, he raised the piece of glass to defend himself.

“No yelling,” Ryan said in a soft, calm voice. “No yelling, and we’ll let you live.”

“Then you’re not some of Zeal’s sec men?” the man croaked.

“Not likely,” Hun replied with a snort. “Who the fuck are you?”

The wild man tucked his glass knife into the side of his greasy loincloth, leaving the rag-bound handle sticking out. “I’m called Paste,” he said. And to further explain who and what he was, he lifted the stiff mass of hair that was his beard, showing them the iron collar still welded shut around his neck. “Baron had me for a slave in his refinery. Meant to work me to death, like all the others. I seen that part coming.”

Paste looked hungrily at the dead rabbit on the ground and made another whimpering noise.

“Go ahead,” Ryan said.

The ex-slave fell on the carcass. He gave the meat, which had fallen in the sand, a perfunctory dust-off before he went at it, tooth and nail. In two minutes he had the thing stripped of flesh down to the coiled bowels. Ryan was pretty sure he planned on eating the guts, too. The smell in the clearing was already ripe; it didn’t need the added aroma of rabbit shit. He stopped Paste before he could rip into the intestines and said, “So you escaped from the refinery?”

The man let a coil of greenish gray bowel slip from between his teeth and burped resonantly.

“Got away two weeks ago, by my best reckoning,” he said. “Been hiding out here in the lake bed ever since. Hoping to stow away on some wags hauling gas out of here. When I saw that big convoy pull in earlier, figured I had my big chance. Then the baron went and captured it.”

“Our convoy,” Poet said.

“Took your people away, too,” Paste stated. “Took them for slaves. I seen that.”

“Where might he have taken them?” Hun asked.

“Well, there’s the jails for a start. Over past the gaudies. Bunch of holes dug in the ground with bars over them. If some of your crew is female, and under forty, most likely they’ll spend some time in the gaudies, on their backs or bellies, but sooner or later all of them will end up in the refinery, which means they’ll be dead in their chains in mebbe a week, depending on the work detail they draw. Some chill off even faster than that.”

“How did they get you?” Ryan asked.

Paste scratched his chin, then shook his head in disgust. “Truth of it is, I come here willingly. I was tired of scraping the rad-blasted dirt to grow my own food and half starving for all my sweat. I believed what I was told about easy work, full plates and good wages. Walked right into a death camp, smiling from ear to ear.”

“Did they send sec men out here after you?” Poet asked.

“If they did, I never saw them. You know, I don’t think they even noticed I was gone. Things are kind of loose in the refinery. Hundreds of workers inside. Nobody in charge knows their names. It’s always ‘Hey, you!’ Why bother learning a crew’s names if they’re going to be dead so quick? There’s lots of noise and confusion, too. All the time, men and women keeling over from the heat, or getting burned, or crushed, or legs cut off, and the bosses just make the other workers shovel them to one side to die. Let them bleed out over the sewer grates because it don’t make such a mess that way. Some people lose their will to live, right off. Eyes go dim. Stop eating. Won’t talk. Others think they can survive if they take advantage of their fellow slaves, make them do the hardest work while they slack off, steal their bread and water when they’re too tired to eat. Can’t blame them, though. Guys like that are just trying to make the best of a bad situation. Trying to come out on top. Me, I seen it right off that there was no way to win. I told myself that the refinery would grind me up and spit me out, dead. Only thing to do was escape, even if I got chilled trying.”

“How’d you get away?” Ryan asked.

“Me and this other guy named Harris were chained side by side by the ankles, working on some leaky steam pipes at the lake end of the refinery. They always pair you up like that when the job is real dangerous. They put the neck collar and ankle chains on and hook you to someone else so it’s harder to run. And if one person tries to make a break, both get whipped half to death.”

“Anyway, like I said, Harris and me were seeing to these cracked steam pipes. Everything in the place is falling apart. It was real hot work, and with the steam pouring out it was hard to see what we were doing. We were trying not to get too badly scalded, had rags wrapped over our hands. Then I don’t know, something just blew up. I think Harris touched something he shouldn’t have. I know I didn’t. The both of us got blown right off our feet, and we landed ten feet away from the pipes on our backs.”

“I looked over at Harris and there was this hole in his chest. I mean big.” Paste showed them the full span of his hand. “He must’ve got nailed by a three-inch iron plug from one of the steam pipes. Blood poured out of him in a river, and his legs were kicking. Something came over me as I watched him dying. Right quick I lay on top of him and smeared his blood all over my shirt. I put it on my face, too. Then I lay back beside him and pretended to be dead. The bosses came by, took one look at us and told some other workers to drag the bodies off. They didn’t even bother to check to make sure we were both hurt. They unhooked the ankle chains. They always unhook the chains before they move the bodies. It’s easier that way. They took me by the wrists and ankles and slung me over in a corner on a pile of oily rags. They threw Harris on top of me. I waited until no one was around, then I lit out the big old hangar doorway as fast as I could, ran down to the lake bed and hid myself. I’ve been keeping low during the day, coming out at dusk to hunt for food. You’re the first folks I’ve seen up close in two weeks.”

Ryan slid the panga back into its sheath. “We’re going into the ville to rescue our wags and our crew.”

“And deliver some biggish payback for the ones Zeal had chilled up on the hilltop,” Hun added.

“If you come along with us and show us the way to our friends,” Poet told the wild man, “you’ll get your ride out of here—my word on it. You’ll ride in style.”

Paste’s face took on a tortured expression as he weighed the pros and cons, then he shook his head. “Nope. Won’t do it. I don’t never want to see the inside of that place again. I don’t care if I die out here on this dry lake. Starve. Die of thirst. Snakebite. Anything’s better than the tank. And if they catch me as a runaway, that’s where they’d put me, straight off.”

“What’s the tank?” Hun asked.

Paste seemed to draw into himself, head lowered, shoulders huddled, back slumped. He refused to explain.

“We’ve got to be going,” Poet said after a moment, “before we lose all the light. You take your rabbit and go, too. And you keep an eye on the road. When you see us rolling out of the ville in our wags, you come running. You done us a favor, Paste. You’ll get your ride out of here. You just tell them Poet said so.”

Without a word, the wild man scooped up the remains of the carcass and vanished through the weeds.

“Sad bastard,” Hun said. “Eating raw meat and guts like that. Think he’s crazy from what he’s been through?”

“Hard to say,” Poet said. “As to the raw rabbit, he don’t dare risk a fire out here, even if he had the wherewithal to start one.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right. But still, there was something in his eyes that made me think he wasn’t all there. Like he’d stripped the gears inside his head.”

“Sun’s going,” Ryan said, putting an end to the discussion. He took the lead again.

A quarter mile from Virtue Lake, the light started to turn purple and soft. The dancing orange fires in the shantytown and the fires from the refinery were reflected, along with the last of the sunset, off the glass windows of the bosses’ houses on the hill, and off the tall, dominating marquee of the Quick-Way Market. The crosswind had stopped, and Ryan could smell the ville, its petro stink, its human stink. The baritone rumble of the plant was a constant droning in his ears.

They moved on a dead run the last three hundred yards. The slave shanties drifted all the way down to the edge of the dry lake, onto a dusty beach. They were a shambling mess of dwellings, most sharing walls, if not roofs. There was no thoroughfare between them, just a narrow, winding footpath, down the middle of which a sewage ditch had been hacked. It was really nothing more than a shallow latrine as there was no extra water to push the excreta into the lake bed. As Ryan led his companions up the path, he saw open rubbish fires here and there. A few laborers were huddled around them, even though the evening was very warm and still. They looked over as Ryan, Poet and Hun passed. They didn’t look for long, though. The sight of the holstered blasters and shoulder-slung longblasters made the slaves avert their eyes. Blasters always meant trouble. Maybe they thought they were a trio of sec men or three coldheart robbers.

At any rate, no one shouted a challenge.

Perhaps, Ryan thought as he moved quickly on, life started to mean too damned much when you could feel it leaking out of your body day by day. You could see yourself getting weaker and weaker. See the muscle shrinking, see the skeleton showing around the eyes and cheeks. Death crawling up on you like a chill wind. Maybe the slaves needed a warming fire of burning plastic and old greasy rags because the fire in their bellies had gone out.

At that moment, Ryan’s own inner fires were raging. If he felt no personal loss for the dead members of the crew, he felt a sense of violation at the other crimes: the theft of the wags and the imprisonment of the surviving crew. And above all, taking Trader hostage.

He no longer blamed Poet for the disaster on the hilltop. Or himself, either. After all, even Trader, who knew practically shit-all about everything, hadn’t seen the gas attack coming. The only way to have avoided it would have been for them to pack up and roll the convoy out, turn tail and ran. And that was something Ryan had refused to consider then, just as he refused to consider it now.

He was fairly certain that Shabazz couldn’t have used up all of his nerve gas in the assault; he had counted only six grens popping off. Damned things came in crates of twenty, which meant the pirate trader had to have the rest of his supply close at hand, probably hidden somewhere in Virtue Lake. There was no defense against the gas, no antidote to the neurotoxin. Ryan figured the strong wind blowing at the time of the attack was the only reason everyone in the crew hadn’t been chilled. It pushed the gas away from the convoy before lethal doses of it could seep into the wags.

Trader had come across caches of the stuff before in hardened bunkers. Ryan knew because he’d been with him when the gas grens were found. Trader always made sure the bunkers were covered back up, real carefully. Handling predark nerve grens was a risky business. After sitting around for a century, the canisters sometimes leaked, and the chemicals inside often became unstable. If there was a leak or a blowout, you could be dead before you knew it.

Even so, Trader could have found plenty of buyers for the weapons. But he said there was some merchandise that should never see the light of day. He said there weren’t enough people in Deathlands as it was. And those that were here, were only just now crawling up out of the muck and ruin of post-skydark. Trader reckoned that chemical weapons could drive their heads back under again, maybe forever.

Ryan never thought about things like “forever.” The present always seemed to put more than enough on his plate.

On either side of him were walls made of tattered, clear plastic sheeting. He looked into dirt-floored private chambers so small that a man had to curl up in a ball in order to lie down. There was more than one man curled up in them, too. Piles of workers, in fact, sleeping the sleep of the nearly dead until the blast of the refinery horn roused them to make their next shift.

What kept them all here? he wondered. Not the fence across the road. Shit, they could bypass it and light out over the lake as Paste had. Not the blasters of the sec men. Though the baron’s thugs were well armed, there weren’t enough of them to hold back a mob this size. It wasn’t the chains, either, because most of the workers weren’t hobbled with manacles. It wasn’t even the rad-blasted desert landscape that surrounded the ville. Four days walk would put an escapee well out of the badlands and another day would put him in sight of the nearest ville. If it wasn’t any of those things, then what was it? What made the slaves give up their lives so meekly?

Ryan was thinking about this dilemma with one small part of his mind. With the rest, he was searching the jumble of roof lines, the sagging walls, the doorless doorways for potential threats. Even so, he didn’t see the small, quick figure step out into the lane behind him.

“Hey, you!” came a high-pitched shout at his back.

Ryan turned and looked down at someone he recognized. It was the young, would-be panga thief.

“You lying bastard,” the boy said. Then he quoted Ryan, throwing his own promise back in his face. ” ‘I’ll give you some food on the way out. My word on it.’ “

“It couldn’t be helped,” Ryan told him. “I got no food with me now, either.”

The boy glared up at him. “My stomach’s growling so loud, One-Eye, that I can’t even sleep. Got any zealies left?”

“No.”

“What are you three doing down here anyway?” The boy sized up Hun and Poet suspiciously. “Looking to get yourselves chilled? Don’t nobody come down here unless they have no choice.”

“Got a proposition for you,” Ryan said. “What’s your name, son?”

The boy stiffened and took a step back. “I don’t never do that kind of thing,” he said angrily. “You want sex, go to a rad-blasted gaudy.”

“You got it all wrong,” Ryan assured him. “I’m talking about a scouting job.”

“You got nothing to pay me with.”

Ryan reached down to his leg and half raised his panga from its sheath, showing him the wide blade and its bright, razor-sharp edge. “You help us out and you get this.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “The blade?”

Ryan nodded. “Your name?”

“They call me Guy-ito.”

“Spanish sounding,” Poet said.

The boy shrugged. “What sort of scouting you need done?” he asked. “Must be something biggish or you wouldn’t part with your stabber.”

“We need to find our crew that Zeal took away, and our wags.”

“What you gonna do when you find them?”

“That’s our business.”

“Finding them ain’t gonna be hard,” Guy-ito said. “Not being seen by the sec men—now, that’s gonna be hard. I got to say, you don’t look like the folks living around here. You look more like road pirates, or coldheart mercies.” The boy stood up straight and puffed out his scrawny little chest. “But you come to the right scout. Far as the big stabber goes, you got to pay me off when I show you what you want to see. I can’t be hanging around while you do your business or the sec men will chill me for sure.”

“Fair enough.”

Ryan could see that heads were starting to poke out of doorways, the corners of sheets of plastic being pulled back so furtive eyes could stare out at them. The stink as he stood over the sewage ditch was gut-wrenching. “Lead the way,” he said.

“Stick close, now,” Guy-ito told them. “The path winds some, and it’s hard to find if you lose it. No sec men ever come this way.”

The kid immediately took off at right angles to the lane they’d been following. The track he took was no wider than a deer trail, and there were obstacles that were hard to see in the failing light. Almost at once, they came upon a broad heap of overturned fifty-five gallon oil drums that had been thrown out as scrap from the refinery. They were without tops or bottoms, and people were sleeping in them. Sometimes two or three.

A little farther on, right in the middle of the trail, lay a dead man. He’d been stripped to the skin, his teeth were bared, eyes nothing but whites as they stared blindly up at the first stars of evening. There were muddy boot marks on his pale chest and stomach where other pedestrians had carelessly trod. The boy vaulted the stiff corpse, as quick as a spider. Ryan trotted around, then had to double-time to catch up.

It was hard for the one-eyed man to maintain his bearings, what with all the cutbacks and roundabouts the boy was taking. Inside the middle of the shantytown, the press of haphazard structures was so tight that he couldn’t see so much as a foot beyond the shacks that surrounded him on all sides. Only the stars overhead told him that they were progressing, if slowly because of the elaborate route, in the right general direction.

The narrow, twisting path opened suddenly on a wider patch, sort of a clearing that was maybe ten by ten, in middle of which was an oil drum with a rubbish fire burning in it. A half-dozen men stood around the drum. They were taking turns cooking big rats skewered, ass to mouth, on thick metal wires. They hadn’t bothered skinning their supper. Once the meal was cooked, they drew back to eat the hissing, smoking meat.

Ryan sensed their fear as they first caught sight of him, then their hate. They lowered their food. Their hands dropped to the shadows where cudgels had been leaned. The one-eyed man reacted automatically. Smooth and fast, the Blackhawk cleared hip leather, and as it came up, his thumb prying back on the hammer spur made the hefty weapon go click. Ryan wasn’t worried about touching off a few rounds now. A bit of blasterfire in the middle of the shanties wouldn’t attract much attention. And even if it did, no sec man in his right mind would venture in to find out what was going on.

“No!” Guy-ito yelled at Ryan as he darted between the warrior and the cluster of workers.

Then to the men, he said, “We’re just passing through. Nothing to get twitchy about. These folks mean us no harm.”

“Mebbe we mean them some harm,” one of the men said, smacking the head of his club into the palm of his hand. “Got no entertainment tonight. Gaudies all shut down.”

“They all got blasters,” Guy-ito said.

“We can see that. Mebbe we’ll take them. And them good boots.”

There was a murmur of approval around the blazing oil drum.

Ryan took one step, wide to the left, giving Poet and Hun, who stood behind him, a clear zone of fire.

“They’re gonna stick it to old Zeal,” Guy-ito said. After a moment of stony silence, the man doing most of the talking barked a laugh. “Better get on with it, then,” he said. “And good luck to you.”

“Yeah,” the man standing next to him added. “Pipe a lead pill up his butt for me.”

The workers watched with amusement as Ryan, Poet and Hun carefully circled them and moved on.

Ryan was starting to see how and why the people of Virtue Lake had earned their reputation as chillers and thieves. The baron had turned them into little more than animals, making them grub through the refuse for rats to eat, forcing them to live in their own stink and filth, working them to death in his refinery. No wonder they chilled and robbed whenever the opportunity came their way.

Their docile acceptance of Zeal’s authority and subjugation still puzzled him. He had been around slaves, and near slaves, before. In his experience, they were usually broken in spirit, if not in body. How had Zeal broken so many? Not with his outlandish clothes and makeup. Not with the terrible nature of the work. Or the sec men. Then, how? The unanswered question gnawed on the surface of his brain; it itched as he jogged after Guy-ito.

Ahead, above the shacks, he could see the roofline of one of the strip malls. They approached the structure from the back side. Guy-ito’s path skirted the edge of the shanties until he came to a narrow gap in the dwellings. He stopped and waved Ryan forward for a look.

What the one-eyed man saw didn’t please him. He looked end on at the mall. It was completely roped off with yellow plastic tape. Inside the barrier were half of the convoy’s wags. Outside the barrier was a line of armed sec men. He was amazed to see the damage the blast had done. One of the wags was entirely gone; there was a pit in the ground where it had been parked. Beside it, half-canted into the hole, were the remains of a transport. All that was left of it were the frame rails and axles, and the farside front door. The rest had been sheared away.

The row of gaudies had likewise been hammered by the explosion. They were dark and deserted. Nothing moved inside the tape barrier.

As far as the workers were concerned, the novelty of the blast had worn off. They no longer stood around staring blankly at the devastation. Instead, they wandered, drinkless, shitless, along the ville’s main road.

Although Ryan was confident that the sec men wouldn’t risk a volley of blasterfire into the parking lot for fear of setting off another explosion, he knew that freeing the wags was going to be tough duty.

Then he felt the slightest of tugs at his leg. His right hand swept down and caught the scout trying to lift the panga again.

“Hey! We had a deal,” the boy said, only letting go of the handle reluctantly.

“We still do, Guy-ito,” Ryan said. “But we’re only halfway there.”