Chapter Twelve

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IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the morning.

They had walked only fifty paces into the development when they saw a large board, fixed to a triangle of steel scaffolding. It was covered in clear plastic and riveted to a wooden backing, the whole thing smeared and stained by the weather. J.B. went up to it and wiped his sleeve over the plastic, calling to the others, showing unusual excitement for such a taciturn man.

For once it would be absurdly easy for them to orient themselves.

“Come here! It’s a map of where we are. A map from before the long winter!” He fumbled in one of his capacious pockets for one of his favorite long, thin cheroots, then let his hand drop as he remembered that he’d smoked the last one too many mornings and too many thousands of miles behind him.

The others gathered around, reading the notice. Doc read it aloud for Lori, rolling the prose style.

“Live Oak Crescent is a master-planned community of topclass condominiums and townhomes, set on the edges of the picturesque Atchafalaya Swamp. Affordability is our watchword. These homes are richly appointed, light, and surprisingly spacious. Each has a separate video and audio room, along with a relaxanasium in stripped afromosia teak veneer. Hot tubs are optional extras that you’ll all want to add to your dream home.”

“What a load of stinking shit,” muttered Finnegan. “They look like little fucking boxes, right next to some more fucking little concrete boxes and some more right over there.”

Doc continued on. “The community center at O’Brien and Stewart features Miami Beach styling with swimnasium, tennisarium, sun deck and crafted gabled shingled roofs. Live Oak Crescent is simply the state of the top art in living convenience. Realistically priced, beginning at $250,000.”

“Is that a lot of jack, Doc?” asked J.B, “Seems so to me,” replied the old man. “Upon my soul, but this must have been going on just before the ultimate madness wiped away our world. Toward the end of the year 2000. Yes, Mr. Dix, I should have said a quarter of a million greenbacks was a lot of jack, even then.”

Ryan was trying to make sense of three or four lines at the bottom of the notice, set in tiny print. He read the lines over to himself.

“Qualified buyers, based on 3.2% deposit… monthly P&I payments for years one thru fifteen of…low 1.8% loan fee. The APR is 17.35. Ask our salespersons for details of zoning, fees and state and federal association costings and taxes. Where applicable.”

It might as well have been written in Russian for all the sense it made to him.

“You can see where we are and where the place stretches out. There’s the center of the ville,” said J.B., pointing to where the roads seemed to converge on something called the Senator Fitzgerald Hackensacker Memorial Shopping Mall.

Most of the main landmarks in West Lowellton were on the map: the Counselor Zak Robbins Playpark, near the narrow river that wound through the ville; the Charles C. Garrett Olympic Pool and Tennisarium; the Neal R. Langholm Golf Course, straddling the river. The main shopping area was shaded with a faded purple overlay, and the location of several motels was shown, including the Snowy Egret on the far side of town, near where West Lowellton oozed out from the edges of Lafayette. A Holiday Inn was only a half mile or so from the dramatic crimson arrow with the message: YOU ARE HERE.

“First time in years I’ve known where I am,” commented Ryan Cawdor.

The houses around them were mainly single-story, stained green with mosses and lichen. Most of their windows and doors were still intact, though several of the roofs had collapsed where damp had seeped in and rotted the supporting timbers. “Where do we go?” Lori asked. “I figure that one of them motels could be our prime target,” replied Doc. “From the excellent state of these buildings, it’s reasonable to believe they might be more than adequate for shelter.”

Ryan shook his head. “I just don’t believe this place. Doc, you got knowledge like no man I ever met. I never seen houses all together like this from before the long cold time. How come it…? How?”

“Neutron missiles, like we figured. They seed the land with them, and the physical structures aren’t hardly touched. Within about ten days, ninety-eight percent of living creatures are on their way across the dark river from which there is no returning.”

“You mean they fucking die, Doc?” said Finn. “Yes, Mr. Finnegan. That is what I mean.”

“Then what’s happened to all the fucking bodies?”

 

AS THE BRIGHT, dry summery morning progressed, they saw them everywhere. Tumbled, scattered bones on the edges of the sidewalks. On porches. In gardens. Bits of ivory among the overwhelming shades of green. Here and there some creatures of the nearby wild had feasted on the bodies, ripping apart the skeletons. There might be a single long, straight femur, its end gnawed smooth. Or a skull, grinning emptily, yards from the skeleton it had once topped.

“It’s a boneyard,” said J.B.

“Yeah. I seen bodies, dried up like old leather, in some of the redoubts we found over the years with the Trader. You know?”

“Sure. Like husks. Lips peeled off yellow teeth. All of ‘em grinning at us. I recall that. But this is just bones, white as snow.”

It was an unusually long speech for the phlegmatic Armorer. But it was a sight to stir anyone’s imagination.

A century ago, the whole town had been blasted away from above. Its streets and houses had been scoured clean of inhabitants. Families had been destroyed with the demonic breath of the neutron bombs. Russian submarines off the coast had lain still and patient and received the signal that told them this was no drill. No false alarm. No testing situation.

And the people had died and the houses remained. It was a cemetery, fifty miles wide and forty deep. Only in the swamps had people survived; many of their descendants were now muties. They avoided the ruins of the old villes, fearing the contamination they once harbored. The whole of West Lowellton was like some giant time capsule, frozen since that dread January day a hundred years ago.

Ryan was fascinated and wanted to investigate each home and shop they passed. But J.B. warned him of the need for food and shelter.

“That Baron Tourment’s going to have patrols of sec men after us, Ryan.”

“Sure.”

“Look at ‘em later.”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

 

THERE WERE surprisingly few buggies or wags of any kind. Ryan’s guess was that when the alarms started to shrill, lots of folks would have headed out of town, away from the missiles they knew would wipe away their homes. But nothing had prepared them for the reality of Armageddon. All the flix that Ryan had seen in old redoubts had warned about painting windows white to cut down the flash-blast. Blankets soaked in water over doors. Sandbags. Refuge under stairs and in storm cellars. Brown paper bags over your head.

It hadn’t been like that. Best way of saving your kin from the long agony of rad-poisoning was to take out the pump-action scattergun and blow everyone’s head off, and finally kiss the warm barrel yourself.

Some had done that. Ryan had seen the corpses, half the bone of the head missing, the corroded ten-gauges still between the clenched jaws.

There was one saloon wagon in a side street, its tires long rotted, stripped down to metal by years of high winds, blasted by sand. The glass remained, though its surface had been hazed until it was opaque. A branch off a nearby lime tree had fallen over the hood. Krysty moved it, revealing two stickers, peeling off the chrome fenders.

One said, “I brake for children and animals and patriotic Americans.” The second one said simply: “Happiness is the biggest L.R. Missile.”

Doc shook his head, saying nothing.

 

AROUND NOON they found a street showing a full row of shops. Ryan couldn’t get over the amazing sight. He’d seen old vids, flix and pix in mags. This was small-town U.S.A., standing there in front of his eyes. All that was missing was folks.

Some of the windows were broken, and there was clear evidence of looting. Also, the streets here were free of bones. As they stepped along, keeping to one side, Ryan glanced in at the storefronts.

Names clicked by, some registering, some not. Some of them had sold products he’d heard of. Some of them were obscure and incomprehensible.

What was Alice’s Tofu Joint? What was tofu? Some kind of food, he guessed, from a placard as faded as a Brady daguerreotype.

Pick’n Mix. Garry’s Auto-Tuner—best muffler service in West Lowellton. Ynez Lobos, Realtor. Ryan didn’t know what a realtor was, but he figured it was someone who looked after other people’s houses for a fee.

“This is fucking way-weird,” said Finnegan, spitting at a red hydrant in the street,

Tien & Quarter. Circuit City, West Lowellton Estate Protection. German shepherds, man-killers. Armed patrols around the clock and back again. Save your loved ones and your possessions. Let us do the killing for you.

“Sounds like the Deathlands now,” said J.B.

Guns. Guns. Guns. Guns. The storefront shouted the word again and again. The Armorer paused, wiping at the glass. In sticky gold letters, some of which were missing, the name of the ex-owner from the year 2001 declaimed itself.

Angus R. Wells. A native of Louisiana from birth. Carry arms—it’s your right.

“Empty,” said J.B. disappointedly. “Not a blaster left in the place.”

“Guess the Cajuns must have taken ‘em,” Ryan said, stepping around a dead snake that must have been close to fifty feet in length when alive.

The Armorer shook his head doubtfully, swatting away a hornet with his fedora. “Guess not.”

“Why?”

“This place closed up in January 2001. It would have had the best and latest blasters of the day. What they called car guns and house guns. Small caliber, pretty pistols. Berettas and Colts. Big mothers like the later Pythons and the Pumas. And hunting rifles from Spain and Czechoslovakia.”

“Sure.” Ryan wouldn’t argue with J.B. when it came to discussing weaponry.

“I seen what them double-poor dirties had. Old black-powder muzzle-loaders and muskets that were old before the winters came. Nothing from a store like this one here.”

They moved a little farther on. Krysty stopped, tugging at Ryan’s sleeve and halting him, while the others waited.

“What is it, lover?”

“I heard those swampwags again. Way off, behind us.”

“That’s no problem. If’n it comes to a firefight in a place like this, we could take on the whole of the baron’s fucking sec-men army.”

“There was something else.”

“Yeah?”

“Whistling.”

“I heard a whistle,” said Lori, her blank face lighting for a moment.

“You did? When?”

The two women looked at each other. Lori answered Krysty, fumbling for the right words. “Soon gone. Not a long time. High and… weak.”

“That’s it. Very high frequency, Ryan. Repeated pattern of notes. Like a signal.”

“Ahead or behind us?” asked J.B.

She pointed wordlessly down the street, in front of them.

“Far off?” asked Ryan.

She shook her head at the question. “Difficult, love. All these buildings. Not used to it. Even back home in Harmony it wasn’t like this.”

“I doubt, Miss Wroth, if there are many places like this left in the whole of the United States of America. I beg pardon. In the whole of Deathlands.”

 

AT RYAN’S ORDERS, they spread out even more.

They covered both sides of the sunlit street, their blasters ready, their nerves stretched tight with tension. In this part of West Lowellton the greenery hadn’t gained so much of a stranglehold, and the street was still fairly clear and the buildings mainly undamaged.

Ryan squinted so that the line of small stores became hazy, the outlines blurring and softening. And it became like an old vid from before the wars. All it lacked were the smiling, bustling throngs of women and children, busy at their shopping. And there were no cars. All the old vids seemed to show roads jammed with wags.

On the right was an ice-cream parlor, its sign fallen down and disintegrated into splinters of chipboard. Another realtor’s sign boasted that it found houses For the people and by the people. There was also a store selling do-it yourself outfits for home security, ever a barometer of social fears and neuroses.

One of the roofs that had given in to the ravages of a hundred years was composed of red shingles. It had been called the something Hut; the first word had vanished.

They first saw the graffiti in an empty lot next door.

It was sprayed in a shimmering white paint, in ornate, rolling letters three feet high, on the wall of a hardware store.

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND. KEEP OUT ALL LIVING DEAD AND FRENDS OF THE BARRON.

The paint reflected the sun, making Ryan blink.

“Over there,” said Krysty, pointing to more painted lettering. This time it was scrawled across the main window of T-Shirt City.

Looking around, Ryan crossed over to examine it. TEN MORE STEPS AND YOU DEAD, it said.

He reached out with the index finger on his right hand, hugging the G-12 in his left hand. Touching the rolling letters, he stared in disbelief at his finger.

Sticky and fresh with its smear of white paint.

 

Chapter Thirteen

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IT’S LIKE THE DMZ in ‘Nam,” said J. B. Dix. “Read ‘bout, it, No-go region, for both sides. What we heard ‘bout this Baron Tourment, he controls most of the land round Lafayette. But not this ville of West Lowellton.”

“White wolf,” said Ryan. “Or snow wolf. Take your pick. What we heard back in Moudongue, it’s renegades. Gang of wolf’s-heads. Outlaws.”

“Slumgullions,” commented Doc Tanner.

“How’s that?” asked Finnegan.

The old-timer bared his strong yellow teeth in a ferocious grin. “Good word, is it not? A cant perversion of the tongue, but it sounds like what it means.” Licking his lips, he savored the word again. “Slumgullion. A rowdy fellow, living beyond the law. And as we are all aware, to do that you must be honest.”

There were times when Doc simply didn’t make any sense to anyone.

Bedrock bedding prices. Buy now—tomorrow may be too late.

The white lettering was inside a store window a few yards down the street. But it was obviously written before the neutron missiles were dropped over the Louisiana bayous.

“What do we do, Ryan?” asked Krysty, glancing up and down the street. Behind them, a small armadillo scuffled across the street, but otherwise the avenue was deserted.

“We could try and make it through the swamps to the gateway. But I figure them Cajuns are going to be looking for us. And there’s those dead and alive fuckers to keep clear of.”

“What about that warning?” asked Finn, pointing back at the first of the freshly painted signs.

“Place like this—” Ryan began, pausing as he looked around the rows of long derelict buildings, “—place like this could get you cold-cocked from anywhere. Man with a good blaster could pick us all off before we got a sight on him.”

Both Ryan and J.B. had outstanding memories for trails and maps, and both had a clear sense of where they were in relation to the rest of the ville. If the Baron that everyone was shitting their pants over ruled most of the region, then West Lowellton looked like the best venture, they decided. But if there was this street-gang holding it, then they had to find some place large in which to hole up.

“Big motel,” suggested J.B.

“Yeah,” Ryan nodded. “Yeah. There was something called a Holiday Inn. We passed it ‘bout a half mile back. Be a good place.”

“There was an old vid-house near there, with a real pre-chill name. The Adelphi.” J.B. shook his head at the absurdity of the names in the prenuke ville.

“Probably showing some anticommy prop-vids. I read that was all they showed round that time.” Finnegan was leaning against the wall of a store, Barney’s Beanery, that had once sold health foods. There was an addition to the sign: and gun store.

Faded by thousands upon thousands of days of sun and wind, there was some crude lettering on the wall of a store across the street.

“GOD WANTS YOU,” it said.

Underneath it, in the same white paint as the earlier graffiti, was written: “THEN LET HIM FUCKING COME AN GET ME.”

Krysty heard the sound first.

It was a faint tinkling noise, thin and metallic, a long way from where they stood. It had an insistent rhythm, clicking away, first two fast beats, then a slow one. Two fast, one slow.

Ryan considered running for the rows of neat white houses behind the stores to lie in ambush for whomever was coming. But it didn’t take a tactical genius to figure out that their attackers would have better local knowledge than they did.

“There’s a chill in here,” said Finnegan, flattening his snub nose against the dusty window. “Just bones heaped together.”

“Nothing else? No blasters?” asked J.B. “No. Big poster on the back wall, half-torn. Says, ‘Brownsville Texas is the fucking pits.’ Oh, and one other over a door. Big heart with the words ‘I love Lafayette.’ That’s all they wrote.”

The chinking sound was growing closer. Krysty looked at Ryan. “You know there’s two, mebbe three of them, doing it?”

“I can hear that.”

“So?”

“Let’s go find us that Holiday Inn place we saw on the map.”

Grimacing, Doc straightened, pushing at the base of his spine with his right hand. “I fear I am not so supple as once was. Did you say we were all going to seek out a Holiday Inn in which to rest?”

“Yeah, Doc.”

“Then let us trust that the best surprise we get will be no surprise at all.”

“Sure,” replied Ryan, wondering what the old man was babbling about.

 

THE LARGE SIGN that had once welcomed Kiwanis, Elks, baseball teams and homecoming queens had rusted and fallen to the dirt, probably half a century ago.

“What the fuck is a Kiwanis?” muttered Finnegan, not really expecting an answer and not getting one.

As they left the shopping street on the edge of West Lowellton, the metallic drumming seemed to fade away. Krysty swore she heard someone laughing, crazed and long, but she might have been mistaken.

Ryan led them at a brisk pace, with the Armorer at the rear constantly checking that they weren’t being followed. Here the streets were narrower, with older properties built on either side. Most had rickety mailboxes, many still showing the dragon’s-head logo of the West Lowellton Comet and Advertiser. Off the main drag they saw more sun-bleached bones scattered here and there. On a wooden porch several skeletons were jumbled together as if a family had chosen to die together.

The sun shone through the long branches of the whitebeam trees that lined the dappled suburban streets. Intermittently they came upon the rotting remnants of automobiles, their tires long gone, settled on their hubs. They were overwhelmed by the visible tragedy of the Big Chill of 2001. It wasn’t like just reading about it, or hearing from some old tapes. This was now and this was real.

The Holiday Inn stood on a slight mound in the center of a maze of small waterways. Some had silted up; some had dried to lush valleys of moss; some still flowed with gurgling muddy water, The motel itself was a sprawling single-story structure, originally painted white and built with central pillars and columns in the American Colonial style, On its western flank a tall sycamore had died and fallen, breaking three windows. The flowering shrubs that once bad been carefully tended now ran wild, with azaleas and bougainvillea rampant, clear across the circular drive and parking spaces, flooding into the railed swimming pool with its turquoise slide. The permanently green Astroturf was covered with lichen.

The six of them stood and stared. Finn spat onto the dusty road, then started and peered down by his boots. “Fucking tracks, Ryan.”

Ryan mentally cursed himself for being so careless. He’d been so interested in seeing this motel, preserved like a fly trapped forever in yellow amber, that he’d been ignoring basic safety. Like keeping his eyes open.

Finnegan was correct. The thick dust on the blacktop was overlaid with the familiar tracks of the swampwags. He knelt down to run his fingers lightly over the marks, then, stood and scrutinized them from a different angle. He walked a few paces toward the imposing bulk of the motel, looking back at the tracks.

“They all turned here, J.B.,” he said. “They come this far, then they go right around and head back toward the main part of the vile.”

“Yeah. I read it that way.”

“Mebbe this Holiday Inn place marks the edge of Baron Tourment’s secure territory.”

Ryan looked at Krysty. “Could be, lover. This gang runs part of West Lowellton. This baron maybe hasn’t enough sec men to come clear out the nest of rats.” That made sense.

They could imagine no other reason why the tire tracks should stop so abruptly about a hundred paces before the tangled skein of waterways and narrow bridges that circled the building.

From the south came the sullen rumbling of thunder. A deep purple cloud moved menacingly along the southern fringe of the sky, its upper edge touched with vermilion.

“Nuke storm on the way,” said Finn.

“No,” said Doc.

“What?”

“Not a nuke storm. I spent a summer here, way back in… my mind sort of trembles when I try and recall dates and places. I spent a vacation with Emily… Was that her name? Emily?”

Only once since Ryan Cawdor had met Doc Tanner had the old man mentioned Emily. It was just another ill-shaped piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the man’s mysterious past.

“Go on, Doc,” urged Lori. “Please.”

“It was out near Baton Rouge. Rained, so we got busted flat, roads turned to rivers. Dark at noon, so’s you couldn’t see a hand before your face. Lord, but that was a time. Emily cried on my shoulder, and she lost her kerchief that day. Lace-trimmed. Sky like this. But there was a pool of clear gold light, straight over our heads—we saw it. Looking up, like a road to the throne of the Lord Himself. Emily wasn’t much on religion… She… seen an eagle in that light.”

The voice was fading, as it often, did during Doc’s recollections. This one had gone on longer than most. Ryan prompted him gently.

“And the sky was like that? Purple and red at the edges?”

“All around. This eagle. Emily…was it with her? Or later, after I’d… they trawled and… I recall a line or two of verse by…” The brow furrowed with the effort of concentration. “By Oliver Makin. ‘The bird that flies above the clouds knows only the sun, and his storms are sun-storms. Yes, that was it, I believe. I always thought that a pretty conceit. I’m sorry, I fail to remember why…”

Lori squeezed his hand. Ryan was struck by the way Doc Tanner mixed moments of the highest intelligence with long hours of near senile meanderings.

“So, it’s not a fucking nuke storm,” said Finn. “Least that’s good news. But it still looks like the skies are going to fucking piss all over us.”

“Best get inside the building,” said Ryan. “I’ll go first. J.B.?”

“Yeah?”

“Bring up…”

“The rear. I got it, Ryan.”

 

THE RELICS of several automobiles were parked in the overgrown lot at the side of the building. Over the main doorway there was a kind of archway. Beyond it was a pair of double doors, one with the glass cracked clean across from corner to corner. Ryan, the G-12 at the ready, stepped lightly toward the entrance, sniffing the air like a prowling panther. The green scent of the luxurious vegetation filled, his nostrils.

“Should we go in, Ryan?” asked Finnegan.

“Fireblast! Why not?”

The door was stiff, creaking on dry hinges. Ryan kicked away a pile of desiccated leaves heaped in the entrance; they rustled loudly. With the sun behind them, the group filed through the door one by one into the cool dark vestibule; the air felt almost clammy on the skin. Last to enter, J.B. pulled the door shut.

“Shall I stay here and cover our asses?”

“No. If’n there’s hunters after us, this place is too big to cover until we’ve checked it out. Safer to keep together.”

The Armorer nodded.

“Be quicker if we split up,” suggested Finn. “Mebbe me, J.B., Doc ‘n’ Lori could go one way, you ‘n’ Krysty go the other, and meet up back here in the… what the fuck is this big room?”

“Called the lobby, my dear Mr. Finnegan,” replied Doc Tanner. “By the three Kennedys! This place brings back such a flood of memories.”

“Tell us ‘bout them, Doc,” said Ryan, but the old man was already going on ahead, pushing through a second set of glass doors, with ornate brass handles shaped like the heads of twining alligators.

The rest of the group followed him into the cavernous lobby. It was a place of deep and swimming shadows, with large chairs and sofas set about circular tables. The walls had paintings of the bayous, streaked with dark and light greens. To one side was a long desk marked Registration; across the lobby two passages led off to the left and to the right. The one on the left carried a sign in a sinuous gold script: Cajuns’ Bar & Atchafalaya Dining

Ryan inhaled deeply, tasting the old, old dust, stale and flat. He closed his eyes and licked his dry lips, savoring the feeling of being inside a creature dead a hundred years. It was a feeling he had known before, when he and the Trader had first discovered the sealed entrances to a redoubt, locked away since before the big winter. But this was different. This was not an arid military storehouse but something that had lived and bustled with activity.

“Okay, Finn. Krysty and me’ll go left. Rest of you go right. Meet back here in—” he glanced down at his chron, “—in ‘bout an hour. Watch your triggers. Don’t want to chill each other.”

Their boot heels muffled by the thick pile carpets, four of them went cautiously off, vanishing around a corner. Ryan turned and grinned wolfishly at Krysty, noticing that her long scarlet hair was shimmering and moving gently on its own, though there was no draft to stir it. “Hear anything? Feel anything?” he asked. “Just a lot of love for you,” she whispered, her voice almost vanishing before it reached him. “Nothing living?”

She shook her head slowly. “Smell reminds me of how Mother Sonja used to take out our winter clothes, back in Harmony. She’d open up the closets that had been shut tight all summer, and the smell… it was kind of like this. Dry and musty.”

Ryan walked to the long desk. There was a notice neatly printed on a board. “Jerry Suster call home soonest.” Under it, hastily chalked, was the single word: “No-show.”

The place showed every sign of a rapid and disorganized withdrawal, with clipboards, pens, cards and small change scattered everywhere. At the far end of the desk Krysty found a round metal drum, with a printed label behind clear plastic. “How far to your next Holiday Inn destination? Allow us to make your reservation.”

“See how far we come from Alaska,” said Ryan.

Krysty flipped open a slot on the front of the drum, revealing hundreds of alphabetically arranged rectangular cards. As she began to turn the drum, the cards quivered and began to collapse into tiny shards of dry paper, disintegrating in her fingers. “By Gaia!” she exclaimed. “All rotted away.”

“Figure there’ll be a lot of that. We found that natural materials like wool and cotton all rot in a few years, and artificial materials like plastic last longer.”

“Look.” She pointed to a rack of colored cards with shiny, laminated faces, hanging on the wall.

They carefully inspected the curling pieces, feeling how brittle and fragile they were, like some ancient manuscript discovered in a cave. These were brochures that described tourists attractions within a reasonable drive from the motel. Ryan had actually heard of some of them, like Disney World and Epcot. Many featured smiling families on holiday, wearing bright shirts and shorts.

“Bayou buggy trips,” said Krysty. “In swampwags.”

Another card showed some caves, eerie and dank, with an official of some sort in a buff uniform and wide brimmed hat pointing out a massive stalactite. “Tuckaluckahoochy Caverns, only thirty miles from Lafayette, first discovered in 1996,” read the caption.

“Mebbe food in the kitchens,” suggested Ryan. “We found lots still usable. If’n its tinned or freeze-sealed, its edible.”

They found a corpse in the Atchafalaya Dining Room.

Sinews of gristle still held most of the skeleton together. It sat at a table near the door, the skull rolled forward, resting against an overturned green bottle. The left leg had become detached, and the left are was loose, the fingers stiffly penetrating the maroon carpet. The right arm was on the table, the calcified fingers clutching a shot glass with a dried brown smear at its bottom. There was nothing apparent to indicate how the person had died.

A long plastic-coated menu rested against a glass candlestick, and Krysty picked it up. Angling it to catch what little light there was, she showed it to Ryan.

“ ‘A prime rib of beef, one of our forever and a day favorites, with choice of rice or potato, our crisp’n fresh house salad, bakery rolls and whipped butter.’ Sound good, lover? Guess I’ll have that. Or maybe, ‘the shrimp platter, out of the bay yesterday, served with toasted almonds and pineapple rings.’ ”

Ryan looked over her shoulder. “I’ll take the deep-fried breaded cheese sticks for a starter, or the egg rolls and mustard sauce. The chef’s salad with… what the fuck’s a julienne of ham? And what are olives? Never heard of ‘em. A stuffed flounder and crab meat stuffing. Heard of a crab but not a flounder.”

“It’s a fish, I think.”

“Right now I’d settle for anything.”

“How ‘bout bird shit on rye?” asked Krysty.

“Sure. As long as it’s good bird shit.”

“Let’s go look in the kitchen.”

They couldn’t believe their luck in the back. Right by the bat-wing doors was an open closet door. Inside, a dozen hand-torches hung, on hooks next to a push-button power pack, Ryan pressed the red switch a few times, and the bulbs began to glow, brighter and brighter.

“Solves a problem. Take one, and we can come back for the others.”

The torches threw a bright narrow beam that lasted about ten minutes before needing recharging. The light was reflected off the polished metal of pots and pans sitting neatly in racks. The shelves at the far end of the kitchen were stacked with all kinds of tins and packets. Krysty let her light explore them.

“The packets have probably gone off, but there’s plenty of tins. Ready meals in sealed cartons. Gumbo… what’s that?” She peered at the label. “Oh, yeah. Freeze-dried collard greens, fatback and chili. Irradiated and reconstituted pulk salad. Sounds like enough. What d’you say, lover?”

Ryan shone the torch on his own face, the harsh beam highlighting the sharp contours of his cheeks and mouth. “Don’t you see my tongue hanging out? We’ll look round some, then meet up with the others. Bring a spare light with you.”

 

MANY OF THE DRAPES were still drawn, letting in only a murky, filtered sunlight. Here and there doors to rooms stood open, with sharp-edged bars of brightness thrown across the corridors.

“Why the dead not smell? Quint chilled the dead. Some days he did not, and the dead smell.” Lori wrinkled up her nose in disgust at the memory.

“Too long a time has passed, dearest,” replied Doc Tanner. “The flesh rots slowly, and mortifies. Gradually it all dries, and the maggots feed on it. After a few years slip by, there is nothing left for the maggots, and they too die and rot slowly and very quietly the corpse becomes sinew and bone. Nothing else remains. Nothing to smell anymore.”

“Guess for a few weeks West Lowellton sure must have fucking stank like a summer slaughterhouse,” added the sweating Finnegan.

J. B. Dix, hefting the Mini-Uzi, stepped into one of the rooms on the right of the corridor. The drapes were half open, and the waves of light illuminated countless motes of dust suspended in the air. Beyond the window, greenery was pressed against the glass. In a corner, termites had evidently worked their way in, destroying some wood at floor level.

He looked around. Two double beds, huge by comparison with all the other beds the Armorer had ever seen. It looked like neither of them had been used, the covers as tight and square as when they had last been made up in January 2001, probably by some Puerto Rican maid. There were lights mounted on the wall above each bed, and a painting of a cowboy riding a spirited Appaloosa stallion. A low bureau faced the beds, with a polished black vid set upon it. A round table with two chairs in dark plastic hide stood against the window in an ugly little grouping with a spidery lamp. J.B. walked over the carpet, breathing slow and easy, seeing his reflection approach a massive mirror screwed over a washbasin in pastel pink. Glancing around to make sure the others hadn’t followed him in, the Armorer winked at himself and tipped his fedora. There was a long pink bath and a pink toilet, sealed in some kind of clear plastic. A small label pasted to it read,

“Sanitized for your protection”. Beneath it the water was long gone.

Drinking glasses on the basin were also sealed tight. J.B. reached over and turned one of the chromed taps, not surprised to see that nothing happened. No leaking drops of rusty water. No hissing and gurgling in the pipes. No skittering insects.

“J.B., come look in here!”

Quick and light as a cat, the Armorer darted across the corridor. Finn was in the doorway of an identical room, with Lori and Doc at his elbow.

“What?”

“Couple of chills. In the bed.”

J.B. stepped past him, his eyes surveying the place. The thick shades were down almost to the bottom, letting in little light. But there was enough to see the two leering skeletons in the bed on the right. There were a couple of open valises on the floor and several empty bottles on the table, two glasses next to them.

Doc pushed past the Armorer, straight to the smaller table at the head of the bed. He picked up a white plastic container and shook it to show it was empty. Peering at the label, he replaced it where it was.

“What is it?” asked Lori.

“Morphine derivative. Very strong sleeping tablets. There were some fifty or so, I would hazard a guess. Now there are none.”

“They chilled themselves?”

“Yes.”

Finnegan whistled. “I can’t ever figure someone doing that.”

The old man patted him gently on the shoulder. “That is a sad comment on the times in which we live and the life that you must lead, my dear young friend. You must be aware that when civilization ended, it was not utterly unexpected. There was a time of warning for some. Only for some.”

“Some ran,” said J.B.

“One day, Mr. Dix, I shall entertain you with the tale of the man who had an appointment in Samarra. You can run faster than the wind, but Death will always o’ertake you. These two had warning, and they chose to die together, in each other’s arms, perhaps with some good corn liquor to warm their passing. It was a more dignified departure from life than many enjoyed.”

“That is sad,” Lori said quietly.

“Yeah. Let’s leave ‘em,” agreed Finnegan, leading them out of the suite of death.

 

RYAN AND KRYSTY found bodies in half a dozen rooms in the Holiday Inn of West Lowellton. Most were in the beds.

Not all.

One skeleton was in the bathtub. The pale pearlized sides were streaked with clotted black marks, thick around the top. In the bottom, almost hidden by the slumped pelvis, was a slim razor blade, its edges dulled with the long-dried blood. The skull hung forward, drooping in a final disconsolate slump. Shreds of long gray hair were still pasted to the ridges of the head.

The right hand, which had been dangling outside the tub, had become detached and lay in an untidy heap of carpals and phalanges on top of an open book. “What is it?” asked Ryan.

Krysty stooped to pick it up, keeping her finger between the open pages. “The Bible. Whoever it was got in a warm tub and opened up his or her veins. Uncle Tyas McNann told me it was how the old Greeks and Romans used to take their lives.”

“What chapter was he or she reading?” Krysty examined the heading that the dead fingers had marked, stumbling over some of the unfamiliar language. “It’s from the New Testament—the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians.”

“Who were they?”

“Some old Romans or Greeks, I guess, lover. It’s open at chapter thirteen.”

“Read a little, Krysty.”

The girl began, her voice rising with the mouth-filling phrases of the King James text. “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly.”

She stopped there, turning her face to his, and he saw the tears streaking her cheeks. “One day, Krysty…” he said.

 

THEY MET UP AGAIN in the lobby about half an hour later. All were subdued by the macabre experience of touring the luxurious mausoleum. Lori had been crying, and Doc Tanner was showing worrisome signs of retreating once more into a catatonic madness. His eyes had become hooded, as if they’d been painted with a thin veil of beeswax. Occasionally he would mutter. “Madness,” or “Oh, the horror of it all… The bastards! Insane, criminal bastards!”

Ryan took them to the kitchen, gave everyone a torch and showed them how to prime them with the pushbutton. He and Finn and J.B. took a spare light to hang on their belts. He and Krysty also showed everyone the supplies of food.

It seemed like there’d be no way of heating anything up, but Finn went fossicking around the storage closets, emerging with a red cylinder of camping gas. Lori teetered off and brought in pans of discolored water from the streams around the motel, heating them and tipping in the unappetizing powders, stirring them to form a bland thick soup. Krysty added some salt and pepper from the metal condiment containers on the tables in the Atchafalaya Dining Room.

Finnegan disappeared through the heavy doors of the Cajuns’ Bar, which were covered with shreds of rotted maroon velvet, He returned with a dozen bottles in his arms.

They sat and drank, mostly in silence. Some of the wine was still drinkable, despite having stood untouched on shelves for almost a century. Best was a couple of quarts of imported French brandy, thick and sweet, to be savored on the palate, with a fiery kick that didn’t register properly until it was well down the throat.

“Bar was filled with bones. Must have been the best parts of ten to fifteen people all jumbled in the joint. Some was women. Remains of some fancy shoes in among the ribs and skulls.”

Ryan stopped spooning up the reconstituted mush to look at the chubby gunman. “What’s that, Finn? Bones all jumbled up?”

“Yeah.”

“Then someone had been in that part?” Finnegan considered the question, belched and took another sip of the brandy. “Got to be right. Fucking right, Ryan. Only place in this gaudy that the chills had been moved at all. Yeah. Looked like bottles were gone. Gaps on shelves,” It was late afternoon.

The sun that had shone so boldly through the morning had vanished, drifting away under a leaden-gray cloud cover.

Through chinks in the faded drapes, the lights from the torches flickered and danced. They could be seen outside, across the waterways.

They could be seen by the crouching figure in ragged leather breeches and jerkin. A figure with eyes like fire and hair white as snow.

 

Chapter Fourteen

« ^ »

THE RAZOR-EDGE OF THE DAGGER methodically chopped and cut the crystalline powder. The chopping made it as fine as ground flour, separating it into narrow lines no thicker than a stalk of wheat, no longer than a man’s middle finger. The surface of the mirror was dulled and scored with a thousand tiny scratches, from years of use. It was an artifact that predated the short war, brought in by one of the sec patrols, handed first to the sec boss, then on to the baron himself.

The drug, a powerful hallucinogenic mixture of cocaine, heroin and mescaline, had been brought by swampwag to the baron’s headquarters from a tumbledown dock a few miles from Baton Rouge. It had been part of a shipment carried by a battered clipper ship from Trinidad. Its country of origin had once been called Colombia, but now had no name at all.

The Baron knelt beside the glass-topped table, his legs stuck awkwardly behind him, his great head lowered over the mirror. In his right hand he held a thin tube of beaten gold, made for him deep in the swamps by one of the living dead who had an unusual skill with metals.

The tube traveled slowly along the line of the drug, known as “jolt,” from its sudden and strong effect on users. Baron Tourment snorted at it, the powder disappearing as the tube went along one line, then down the next, taking four lines in total.

Immediately shutting his eyes, holding his face between his two huge hands, he waited for the rush. In the whole of Deathlands it was doubtful that there was a single man of science with the pharmacological knowledge to understand how jolt worked. But its effects were always the same.

“Uh,” grunted Tourment as a kick of pain speared through his sinuses, bursting behind his eyes. His head shook uncontrollably, rolling from side to side. He tried to keep his eyes squeezed shut, but the force of the spasm jammed them open, the pupils rolling sightlessly. His fingers grasped convulsively and his toes drummed; his walking frame clattered on the wooden floor of the suite. After the first spasm of pain, the drug moved differently, attacking the cortex, closing down on the short-term memory of the frontal lobes. The power of a shot of jolt lasted from three to five minutes, depending on its purity and on the strength of the user. Baron Tourment could afford to pay for the best, but his giant body absorbed the drug too fast for his own pleasure. Its effects rarely lasted for more than about three and a half minutes. But what a two hundred seconds they were! A tumbling passage through time and memory and imagination, into scenes of desolation and horror. Scenes of horrific violence that made the giant black man press his fingers against his swelling erection. Twice he laughed loudly, making the guards outside the door shudder and glance fearfully at each other. When the Baron was jolting, his mood was even less predictable than usual. A sec man who’d once entered at the wrong moment had been taken out, clutching his own spilled intestines. The baron had laughed then.

But Tourment used the jolt for one special reason. In the last thirty seconds or so, it clouded the mind, and a form of madness followed. The Baron was the seventh son of a seventh daughter, and had always had a little of the power of seeing. As the jolt worked its way into the abandoned corridors of the mind, it sometimes increased his precognition, his powers of doomseeing. Sometimes it granted him remarkable insight into a potential advantage.

Or a potential danger.

Since the strange death of the auguring bird and the passing of the old woman, Baron Tourment had been uneasy.

Outsiders had come into his demesne. He still believed in his heart that the strangers must be mercies: hired guns from outside the ville. Maybe from the north or farther east. Mercenaries! Brought in by the young boy in West Lowellton.

“Should have purged ‘em,” he muttered, his voice thickened by the jolt.

How could they have afforded it? Mercies, to go against him! It must have been his generosity in leaving them with a little in previous years. That was his mistake, and they used it to hire blasters.

Now the jolt was cartwheeling through the ridges of his skull. He lay flat on the floor, which was the only safe place to be after snorting several lines of jolt. The eyes were open, staring wide and blind, the hands so contracted that the nails drew half moons of blood from his pale palms.

“Ten thousand doors to death,” he whispered, his sibilant voice dying against the velvet drapes that covered the doors and windows.

He was in the bayous. Naked and alone, beneath a sky that was slashed with green clouds. The mud rose to his groin. He tried to run but without his prosthetic aids he kept falling. His face was vanishing beneath warm, clinging mud that filled his ears and nose and eyes and open mouth. He tried to scream, but the slime choked him.

Someone was pursuing him, someone who always dodged aside when the baron tried to look behind him into the gathering darkness.

As he rose from the wallowing sludge, he glanced down. Saw that his penis was covered with big scaly leeches, drawing a million specks of bright blood that dappled his thighs and matted in his pubic hair.

On the floor of the Best Western Snowy Egret, the huge roan arched his back; openmouthed, he silently screamed his terror. Sweat burst from his forehead; sweat soaked his shirt.

The person behind him was approaching. He could almost feel his hot breath on his naked back. His ears caught the scraping sounds of horns and claws against the branches as his pursuer pushed through, struggling toward…

Toward…?

The jolt was bringing him to a violent mental climax. The vision was nearly there, as he’d hoped. The truth about the strangers might be revealed to him in a moment of vivid revelation.

He was exhausted, panting for breath, his whole body now coated with the blood-sucking leeches. The experience was so appalling that he wanted to fall to his knees and vomit. But then he might get caught by… by what was closing in on him.

It was near.

The sec guards outside the suite heard moaning and panting through the thick door. Then an agonized scream of chilling horror, and Baron Tourment’s voice, shrill and gained, barely recognizable. The same phrase, over and over.

The one-eyed man kills me! The one-eyed man kills me! The one-eyed man kills me!

 

Chapter Fifteen

« ^ »

RYAN’S SUSPICION THAT others had been in the Holiday Inn within the past few months were reinforced when it became apparent that the slogan painter had been at work. The white letters were dry, but from their condition it was obvious they hadn’t been there long.

They were on a wall that ran from the back of the restaurant toward the abandoned swimming pool, with its crust of dried leaves and moss.

The message was simple.

“COME HERE AND YOU DIE.”

Ryan picked the best place he could find from which to mount a defense. It had once been a games room with all manner of vids and pinball machines decorated by archaic and oddly beautiful artwork and names like Red-zapper and Wackamole. There was also the yawning maw of a cracked, dust-filled Jacuzzi.

The room had only two doors, one of which had strips of reinforced steel across it, and could be locked and bolted. J.B. studied it, puzzled about the necessity for that kind of security in a games room. He liked the fact that since the room overlooked a deep waterway, there was no way an attacker could sneak through a window. From the swirling disturbances in the gray water, it looked like it was well-stocked with piranhas.

Ryan organized the group into pairs for guard duty, and with help from J.B. and Krysty, arranged a rotation of shifts. They decided that since they could easily lock one of the doors to the games room, only the other one had to be guarded. After some consideration, Ryan said, “We need another guard farther down the corridor that leads to that place where we first came in. What’s it called? The…” He glanced surreptitiously at Doc.

The old man responded as Ryan hoped he would. He was evidently recovering from his earlier gloom.

“The lobby, Mr. Cawdor.”

“Thanks. We’ll split up like this.” He stopped. “Doc, I don’t want any shit from you. I know you want to be with Lori. But we’ve got only three trained guns now—me, J.B. and Finn here. So, Doc, you go with Finn; Lori with J.B.; and Krysty with me.”

“All right” was all the old man said, removing his dented stovepipe hat and dropping Ryan a low courtly bow.

During their first break from guard duty, Ryan and Krysty found themselves a room down the corridor from the games area, one with no heaps of bones in it. Tugging back the covers on the king-size bed, they cosily snuggled into it. Wary of intrusions or disturbances, they removed only a minimum of clothing.

Ryan had deliberately split the bottoms of his dark gray pants so that he could pull them off over his high combat boots. He kept on the brown shirt, still stained with mud and with Henn’s blood. The G-12 went on the floor beside the bed, the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm pistol beneath one of the two pillows.

Krysty kicked off the magnificent cowboy boots she’d found in the cold redoubt only days back. The chiseled silver points of the toes gleamed in the pale moonlight that filtered through the rotting drapes; the moon also brought the silver spread-wing falcons on the sides to a cold sheen. Krysty rolled down, the khaki coveralls, sliding her thin panties to her knees.

Entwined, they abandoned themselves to their passion. She sighed once as he entered her, her eyes wide open, looking directly into his face. In the moonglow the hooked nose and narrow cheeks made him look almost like some ferocious bird of prey, hovering above her, about to tend her. It was an exciting thought.

 

THEY WERE AWAKENED during, the night by a brief, vicious thunderstorm. Only Doc Tanner slept through it. He lay on his back on the floor of the games room, his mouth hanging open, snoring stentoriously, almost drowning out the howling wind, and the pounding rain.

All of them were awake, up, and dressed by six in the morning.

“What the fuck is there to eat?” asked Finnegan. “Not more of that doomie shit! I look at it in the fucking bowl, and I can’t recall if’n I’m just going to eat it, or if I’ve already eaten it and barfed it back up.”

“I farted all night,” said Lori, smiling in her simple way.

“Ryan, me and the girls’ll go explore some of the houses we passed. Didn’t seem too badly damaged or nothing. Got to be tins and bottles. Anything’s better than this stuff.”

Seeing that both Lori and Krysty were willing, Ryan nodded his approval. “Sure. Take care. Watch out for any gangs and the baron’s sec men. He sounds a mean mother.” Ryan consulted the chron on his left wrist. “It’s nearly six and a half. Leave at seven. Be back by… by eleven. If you run into trouble, fire three spaced shots, and we’ll come running.”

 

JUST BEFORE SEVEN, Ryan found Krysty in the suite where they’d made love the night before. She was pulling the sheets across the rumpled bed.

“Fireblast it, lover! No one’s going to complain that we’ve messed up their room!”

Krysty smiled, shaking her head to tumble the unique hair out of her eyes. “Guess not, Ryan. But Mother Sonja brought her daughter up proper.”

Slumping into a well-padded armchair, he watched her gracefully move and his eye was caught by something white beneath the bed. He knelt down, peering at it, giving a sudden, barking laugh. “What is it?”

At his beckoning finger, she joined him on the floor; saw what made him laugh, and laughed also. It was a neat square card, the printing hardly faded in a hundred years.

It read: “Yes. We have even dusted under here.”

 

AFTER FINN AND THE GIRLS left on their foraging expedition, the others passed the time in their own ways.

Doc browsed among the postcards in the dusty lobby. Picking up one from a pile of leaflets, he took it to Ryan.

“Attractions in West Lowellton and nearby Lafayette,” he said. “What a center of activity this must have been before it became a gigantic catafalque.”

“What’s that?” asked J.B. “Sounds like some old siege weapon.”

“A building to house the dead, Mr. Dix. Like this entire continent. Oh, but if I had known then what I know now.”

“What’s that, Doc?” asked Ryan, sensing a chance to uncover whatever bizarre truth lay behind the man called Doctor Theophilus Tanner.

“Ah, no.” Doc wagged his finger. “One day, perhaps, my dear young man. But not now.”

“When? You know my past, Doc. How ‘bout yours? Come on. It can’t be that mysterious.”

Doc fumbled with the lion’s head atop his ebony sword stick and coughed. “If I were to tell you, Ryan, then I vow you would not believe it.”

“I would, Doc. Come on. Now’s a good time. Just you, me and J.B. here.”

“I’m sorry. ‘We must fight on the darkling plain, swept with confused alarms,’ Ryan.”

“How’s that?”

“A great singer once sang that we must keep our dreams as clean as silver, for this may be the last hurrah. Oh, had he but known the truth of that, so few years later.”

“Doc,” said Ryan. “Tell us.”

The old man ran a hand through his long gray hair, flipped through the leaflet in his hand, then blandly changed the subject of their conversation.

“I see we are but six miles from Interstate 10. Nine miles from the Evangeline Race Track. Once I visited the Kentucky Derby. Such a day, Ryan.”

J.B. shook his head and walked away, checking the perimeter of the Holiday Inn. Ryan knew that Doc wouldn’t open up until he was good and ready, or until some freak of chance broke the crystal goblet of his secret.

“A mere thirty miles from Longfellow’s Evangeline Oak. That would be a national treasure to behold. Probably there are few such left in the Deathlands.” Ryan couldn’t be bothered to ask what this oak tree was, guessing that any explanation would only increase his confusion.

“Does that say anything about where you can find food hereabouts?”

“No. It tells us that this establishment had kennels, but that dogs were not allowed in the 136 rooms. Also that we are but fifteen miles from the campus of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Their library would be a trove of interest, Ryan. It is probably intact, if vandals have not destroyed it.”

“You can’t eat fucking books, Doc.”

“There is a witty response to that rational observation, Mr. Cawdor, but it escapes me for the moment.”

He opened his hand, allowing the booklet to flutter to the carpet like the last dead leaf from an irradiated tree.

 

THE MORNING PASSED.

Doc went and curled up in a corner, sleeping like a child.

J.B. vanished for an hour and returned to tell Ryan that he thought it might be possible to start an emergency electrical generator. “Better than the hand-torches. Shall I try?”

“Why not?”

Ryan wandered the deserted corridors, encountering the occasional skeleton, and tried to fathom what it must have been like back before the nuke winter.

In the corner of the motel where the fallen tree had hit, termites had tunneled in, undermining the foundations and making one entire wing dangerous; there were huge cracks in the walls and ceilings. Ryan gazed out through the glass, which had been dulled over, the hundred years of the scouring action of the wind. He looked across the oily waters that snaked around the building to the towering live oaks that, obscured, the nearby road.

The sky was clouding over again. From old books Ryan had learned that in olden times the weather was often the same for days on end. Bright and sunny through the summers, clear and crisply cold through the winter. That was hard to imagine. Ever since his youth at his father’s ville of Front Royal back in Virginia, he’d known the weather only to change rapidly, within hours, perhaps a dozen times in a single day. A sunny sky would be soon overtaken with chem clouds, and violent storms would soon erupt, quickly flooding rivers and canals. In parts of the Deathlands, the winds and acid rain could strip the skin from a person in minutes. There might be snow in July in what had been called Arizona, and blistering heat around the sculpted peak of Mount Washton, in the far north, on a January morning.

Here, deep in the South, humidity and a clinging, sweating heat seemed the order on most days. Fortunately, it was cooler inside the motel. Looking out the window, Ryan saw huge insects, wings iridescent, dart over the warm streams. Far to the north, there was the familiar jagged lace of purple lightning. The rumble of thunder never reached him.

Realizing that the double-paned windows might also prevent him from hearing warning shots from Krysty and the others, he moved quickly to the main entrance, pushed open the stiff glass doors and emerged into the warm damp morning. Immediately he heard the harsh sound of swampwag engines. It came from the suburb of West Lowellton, not too far away, where his three companions had gone scavenging.

He spun on his heel, sprinted into the echoing lobby and shouted for J.B. and Doc. Returning to the arched entrance, he flattened himself against the red brick wall.

“What is it? Shots?”

“No. Listen.”

“Wags. Those swamp buggies. Real close. Half mile, mebbe less.”

Doc Tanner approached briskly, his cane clicking on the stone floor. His Le Mat pistol was tucked into his belt in a piratical manner, and his hat was at a rakish angle.

“I fear I slumbered, and…I can hear engines. It sounds like those—”

“Swampwags, Doc. Yeah.”

“Go or stay?” snapped the Armorer tersely.

“Stay,” was Ryan’s immediate response. “It figures they’re mebbe searching for us. With six of us running round, they double their chances of getting us.”

“And halves the odds,” said J.B.

“Yeah, it does. But we stay.”

“Should we not be looking for a defensive position?” asked Doc. “In the event of their coming here?”

It was a difficult decision. Judging by the noise of the engines, there were at least a half dozen of the floundering buggies in the vicinity. That could mean thirty or forty men, maybe more. It didn’t much matter if they were Cajuns or the baron’s sec guards. A firefight out in the open would have only one ending. But if they waited in the motel, they could cause untold havoc among any attackers, perhaps stand a better chance.

Overlaying the rumbling of the swampwags was the noise of gunfire. It sounded like thin material ripping as the high velocity bullets exploded in short bursts. J.B. looked at Ryan.

“If they got ‘em cold, they’re chilled by now. If not, they’ll make it out of there. Best we can do is wait and see.”

“That’s how I see it, too.”

Doc Tanner pounded the stone wall. “Those young girls! Stouthearted Finnegan! By the three Kennedys, gentlemen! Can we stand here and allow them to be slaughtered?”

“Yeah, Doc, we can,” replied J.B.

“Yeah, Doc, we can,” repeated Ryan. “We go after them, and we’re there with too little, too fucking late. Don’t think I don’t care about Lori or that fat tub of guts Finnegan. And you know how much I care ‘bout Krysty Wroth. But in this life there’s only one real certainty. Fuck up and you lose.”

“But they may have died.”

“We all do, Doc,” said J.B. quietly.

 

GUNFIRE CRACKLED for about two and a half minutes. Then came the unmistakable sharp cracks of a couple of stun grens, then more gunfire for around a half minute.

Then just the swampwags throaty roar and the shouting of a confusion of orders.

“Best find a place where we can blast ‘em if’n they come this way,” suggested Ryan.

“You think they might have been…killed, Ryan? Or taken?”

“Yeah. Mebbe they’ll take what they got and pull out. Mebbe not. All we can do is listen and wait. If they aren’t here in an hour, then I guess it means they’re not coming. Not yet, anyway.”

 

RYAN CHOSE THE KENNELS. Partly outside, they were connected to the motel and also gave them access to some low scrub that concealed a dry river bed stretching southwest. The three of them went there, waiting and listening, their blasters cocked and ready.

There was no further shooting, and the shouting faded. Soon the buggies could be heard drifting away, seemingly toward the main part of the swamps.

Within half an hour, the natural sounds of insects and the wind in the live oaks had resumed. The clouds that had threatened rain earlier in the morning had broken up, leaving only a veil of high thin mist that filtered the sun into an orange blur.

“Ryan? Let’s go see what happened.”

“Wait, Doc. Keep quiet and wait. Don’t move or speak till I say so.”

Time crawled by. Ryan tried to keep his mind off Krysty Wroth. Her face, voice, body. The only woman who’d ever meant more than a fleeting fuck to him. Common sense told him that along with Lori and Finn, she had probably been chilled. The sec men of the baron, with their superior firepower, had sent them all to buy the farm.

Unless…

“Unless he wanted prisoners,” he muttered to himself, hardly aware he’d spoken at all.

It was a hope. Best he’d got.

 

IT WAS SEVEN MINUTES past noon, by his wrist-chron. At twelve he and the others had decided to go and find out what had gone down on the edges of West Lowellton. And to bury their dead.

If Krysty, Lori and Finn had been taken, it wasn’t going to do them any good to rush in like a blinded steer charging into the shambles.

It was still seven minutes off noon, by his wrist-chron, when he caught the whisper of stealthy movement somewhere behind them, inside the motel.

He shrank back into the narrow stone kennel, fingering the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. The noise sounded like the plastic end of a blind-pull, tapping on glass in the wind. But the wind had fallen, and the air was still.

The tapping came again. Three, spaced out, then two, closer together. Then more tapping, repeating the same pattern.

“It’s Finn,” Ryan whispered, warning Doc and the Armorer. “Cover me, J.B., while I make a run for the door. Then Doc, then you.”

In thirty seconds they were all safe inside the motel, the security door locked behind them, the steel bolt thrown across it.

“Finn!” called Ryan. “Finnegan, we’re here.”

They heard footsteps, dragging a little, moving slowly toward them along the corridor, from the direction of the games room and the main entrance.

“That you, Finn?” There was a note of tension in Ryan’s voice. “Speak up.”

“It’s me.” The words sounded as if they’d been uttered by someone who had witnessed an unspeakable horror. At Ryan’s side, Doc shuddered convulsively. “Yeah, it’s me. Only me.”

 

FINNEGAN WAS ONE of the toughest of all of the Trader’s longtime blasters. He’d been in more firefights than he’d spent night in beds. He drained most of a quart of Jim Beam, spitting on the floor, wiping the back of a bloodstained hand across his mouth.

“Now?” asked Ryan.

“Sure. Heard ‘em coming. Krysty heard ‘em first. But there was a lot of the fuckers. Ten or more of those fat-tired mothers. Looked like someone seen us. Told the baron. Sent out the sec men. We holed up in a square of houses. Pretty little places, I guess. If you like fucking pretty. Lot of bones round there. We’d got us some tins and packets of freeze-dries. Real nice. Shrimps and sauce and all.”

He took another swig from the bottle. Doc looked as though he was going to interrupt him, then changed his mind and reached out for the bottle to take a pull on it himself. He passed it on to Ryan, who shook his head, and J.B. took a single mouthful, rinsed it around and spat it out.

“I took the front, Krysty on the flank. Put little Lori safe as I could round the back.” He glanced at Doc. “Best as I fucking could.”

“How many men? What blasters they carry?” Finn sighed, looking at J.B. through narrowed eyes. It was obvious he was ragged, near exhaustion. “Some of the swampwags were bigger. I guess mebbe fifty or more of the fuckers. Most got old M-16s. Carbines. Some got Browning pistols. Nothing big. Two of the buggies had gren launchers. They were good. Smart fucker in a white suit giving the orders. Had a couple of shots at him. Made him duck. Got mud an’ shit all over him.”

“Go on,” said Ryan.

“Not much to tell. Too many of ‘em. Figure I chilled seven or eight. Not great at street firefighting. Kept moving. They made a rush, got between me and the girls. No way I could get back. No way.”

“No way, Jose,” muttered Doc mysteriously.

“Dead or taken?” That was the big question. Would there be burying and revenge, or rescue?

“I figure taken. You hear a couple of stun grens go off?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan,

“That was it. I went in the front and out the side of a house, doubled back to kill whatever moved. Fucking weird. Put out a triple burst from the old H&K here.” He patted the silenced gray submachine gun on his lap. “All hit him in the throat. Fucking head fell right off. Never seen that before. Clean as a big axe. Rolled round my fucking feet and fucking near tripped me over. That was when I heard the stuns. Ran up into the loft of an old frame house. Looked down. They were loading the girls into one of the wags. I had a go, but it wasn’t no good. Near got caught. I tried.”

“Sure. Never thought any different, Finn. You couldn’t save ‘em, then no man could.”

Finn nodded, taking another long, bubbling draw at the bottle, draining it dry, then let it drop from his hand with a dull clunk.

The room was silent. Ryan wondered when the sec men might be back, guessing that they’d be reporting to the sinister Baron Tourment with their prizes. They’d interrogate Krysty and Lori to find out all they could about how many there were, about arms, strength. And if the girls didn’t cooperate, they’d use stronger measures.

“Time’s wasting,” said Ryan. “They’ll guess we might come in after them. Be ready.”

Never for a moment did Ryan, J.B. or Doc consider just walking away. It would have been easy to head for the gateway and shut the door. Move somewhere else. And with the unreliability and random quality of the mat-trans systems, there was no way they’d ever come back to Louisiana. It wasn’t like it used to be with the Trader.

Back then, with a small army traveling together, if you got left, then you got left. It was the survival of the mostest that counted. That was the rule, and every man and woman with the warwags knew that. You lived and you died by those rules.

Now there were just the six of them, moving together through an alien land where hostility was the norm and friendship was suspect. That meant you went out on the edge for one of the others.

One of the codes was a man didn’t just close his eyes and ride around.

The three men looked at each other in the dusty, dimly lit room, each absorbed with his own private thoughts.

The stranger’s voice, coming out of the darkness by the door, made them all jump.

“You ‘gainst Baron?”

Ryan answered. “Well, we ain’t fucking for him.”

“Then we ought talk.”

In the dim light, the newcomer’s white hair flared like a vivid magnesium torch.

 

Chapter Sixteen

« ^ »

MEPHISTO WAS THOROUGHLY pissed off with what had happened.

His best ivory suit-was ruined. Soaked in salt water, sodden with orange-gray mud, and liberally smeared with gator shit.

Baron Tourment wasn’t that concerned for the health and well-being of his sec men. But to have eight corpses to dump into the bayous in a single day couldn’t just be overlooked—and there were four more men with serious gunshot wounds to tend.

All that lay on the crimson debit side of the day’s accounting. But there was an entry to be made on the credit side.

He had two prisoners, both fairly unhurt. And as a bonus, both were female, and both young and attractive.

They had a few cuts, bruises and scratches, nothing worse. Except that the stun grens always left victims partly deaf for a couple of hours, often caused a little bleeding from the ears and nose and mouth, and frequently burst tiny capillaries in the eyes, making them pink and sore.

Mephisto was in the storage room in the basement of the old Best Western Snowy Egret Inn, only a few miles away from the Holiday Inn in West Lowellton. Half a dozen of his best men were stationed in the corridor, and the guards around the perimeter had been doubled. The Cajuns had spoken of six people: four men and two women. Mephisto had very nearly gotten himself chilled by a fat man in what looked like a dark blue uniform. The zipping burst of lead had missed him only by a fraction of an inch and had actually torn a hole through the padded left shoulder of his suit.

It was rare that his verbal exchanges with Baron Tourment involved any humor. Even grim humor. But after he had made his initial report, the baron had looked at the state of his beloved suit.

“It looks to me, Mephisto, like you got yourself elected out there.”

He’d replied, “No, baron, but I surely got nominated real good.”

His lips curled into a smile at the memory. The deaths of the men had creased Tourment’s heavy brow, but the news that two women were bound and unconscious in the basement had brought a flash of white from his excellent teeth.

Now Mephisto waited for his lord and master to arrive to inspect the prisoners.

The rooms had two tables; the tops were scored and scarred, even scorched in places. The floor was bloodstained. Being questioned by Baron Tourment was not a gentle experience.

One table held the blonde. A tasty dish for the baron. She was very tall—close to six feet was Mephisto’s guess. Her long hair was the color of summer corn in the old vids, and her red skirt, topped by a red blouse, showed most of the smooth thighs. Boots in crimson leather reached way over her knees, with high heels that must have added five or six inches to her stature. The boots had tiny silver spurs that made a delicate tinkling sound as the girl struggled with her bonds, moaning and clawing her way back toward consciousness.

“Delicious,” whispered the sec boss. But the other woman was even more amazing.

Though an inch or two shorter than the blonde, she was beautifully built, with firm thighs and fine, proud breasts. Mephisto glanced toward the door, wondering whether he dared risk being caught stripping either of the women for his own pleasure; he decided immediately that he didn’t dare. This girl wore coveralls streaked with drying blood from when she’d taken the neck out of one of the sec men who tried to close in on her before they used the stun grens. She still had on the most amazing pair of boots that the sec boss had ever set eyes on. But it was the hair…

Hair that was brighter than any fire. Redder than a chem cloud sunset across the bayous. Long and thick tresses, clotted with mud, tumbled over the girl’s shoulders. Mephisto moved closer, extended a hand tentatively to touch the hair,

“Lord Jesus!”

He spun on his-heels, his eyes wide with panic, face pale with terror, afraid that his forbidden Christian oath might have been overheard. If it had, then he was a dead man. Although standing up and breathing, he’d be as dead as a pair of gator-skin boots.

But the hair. It had moved under his fingers. Moved and tangled itself around his palm with an infinitely gentle-slowness. The silken hairs had actually responded to his touch. Mephisto again looked over his shoulder and hastily crossed himself, whispering the words “Sweet Jesus.”

These strangers weren’t ordinary mercies, hired from some frontier ville farther west in Tex-Mex. They weren’t drunken outlander pistoleers who’d slit a throat for a handful of jack and a gaudy whore. Then who were they?

Behind him the door swung silently open on its oiled hinges. Mephisto heard the creaking of the baron’s leg-supports. His ears caught the rhythmic chunking of one of the ice-making machines out in the kitchen units beyond. “Are they awake, Mephisto?”

“Coming around.”

“And we know nothing of them?”

“Nothing. Fine clothes and boots.”

“Weapons?”

“Yeller hair had only a small pearl-handled PPK. Slut’s blaster, .22. Nothing else.”

“Red hair?”

“Pistol. But a man’s gun. Real stopper. Name on it’s Heckler & Koch. Real handsome pistol. Silvered finish. Holds thirteen rounds of nine mil.”

“The fat man who clipped you?” Tourment loomed over the helpless women, his giant shadow stretching across the floor and onto the far wall of the underground chamber. He leaned forward, stumbling, steadying himself on the shoulder of his sec boss; he winced at the frightening power of the pincering hand.

“He… he had a sub, firing triple bursts. I guess a big handblaster as well. He was good. Most of the dead were on his sheet. But both of the women also blasted men forever into the dark night.”

“The big, big question, Mephisto, is: who are they? And where do they come from? Are they friends come to aid our snow wolf? That most of all. Six was the word from the village?”

“One was shot. Six left.”

“Where, then, are the other three?”

“In hiding. I figure that they’re with the West Lowellton gangs.”

Tourment laid a hand on the thigh of Lori Quint, just above the top of her high boots. She stirred but still didn’t come round.

“I should have known, Mephisto, When my men didn’t return… I should have known that this was bad.”

“Shall I stay, while…?” He hesitated, knowing what slippery ground this was.

“While I talk with these two little peaches? No. Go now. Wait, and I’ll call you when I’m done, and you can come back and…” The sentence drifted away into a menacing silence. The sec boss left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him, glad of the chance to go to get washed and changed. He knew that Tourment wouldn’t be wanting him for some time.

 

KRYSTY WAS REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS. From the long years; of her mother’s training, she knew how to control her body: keeping still, maintaining a steady breathing, keeping her eyelids from fluttering. Giving no clue at all that she was reawakening.

It had been clear almost as soon as the swampwags came thundering in from every quarter that the three of them were in deep trouble. The fight had been short-lived, ending with the gray stun-grens sailing toward them. Now her wrists and ankles were tied, her body strained into a cross. Her hearing and sense of smell were extremely acute, and she lay very still, listening, trying to work out where she was and who was there.

Lori had a distinctive smell, just as Ryan did, and Doc. Krysty knew that she was there, close by. Finn carried the characteristic smell of a fat man who sweated a lot. He wasn’t in the room with them, but that didn’t mean that he was safe. Maybe the baron’s sec men had him somewhere else; maybe he was dead.

There was a strange creaking sound, like metal and leather under stress. And another smell. Sweat. But it was hardly human. A sour, feral scent like an animal’s, overlaid with some sort of perfume. Heavy breathing, like that of a ponderous old man laboring to climb steps.

Krysty cautiously opened her eyes. She saw a giant black man who supported his bulk with a metal frame, leaning over the sleeping Lori at a table only a few feet away.

The man wore a fine midnight-blue suit, clearly hand-sewn. A wide leather-and-silver belt around his stomach supported twin holsters, the flaps buttoned down; she couldn’t tell if he were carrying blasters. His back was half turned, so all she could see was his short neatly-trimmed curly hair.

The chamber was underground. All her wakening senses told her that; besides, it had no windows. There were white strips of light in the ceiling, and serpentine protrusions of different-colored pipes. The room was about forty feet square, Krysty judged. She closed her eyes again as she suddenly, overwhelmingly, caught the stench of fear that permeated the cellar. There was blood there, as well.

Her heart sank.

 

PRECISELY AT THE MOMENT that Krysty was recovering from the effects of the stun grens, Ryan Cawdor, J. B. Dix, Doc Tanner and Finnegan were staring at the peculiar apparition that suddenly stood before them, leaning against the frame of the door.

“We ought talk.”

Ryan, like the others, had immediately swung his gun toward the stranger, who showed no awareness of his own vulnerability.

He was the strangest person that Ryan had ever seen, even in ten years of traveling through the Death-lands, with its many nuke-ravaged muties.

Around nineteen years old, Ryan guessed. Very short. Barely five three, weighing around 120 pounds. But “thin” wasn’t the right word; “lean” was a lot better. The lad looked well-muscled and powerful. He wore pants and a vest of leather and canvas, dyed in irregular patches of brown, gray and green, giving a camouflage effect. Ryan had a keen eye for a fighting man, and he instinctively felt that, despite the boy’s slight stature, he was someone to be reckoned with. He held himself well, leaning against the door, his body tensed like a steel spring. Ryan also noticed that the thick material of his clothes glittered here and there, and he guessed there were small pieces of keen-edged metal sewn in. There was no sign of a concealed blaster. But Ryan’s intuition told him that the stranger would be a knife man.

But above all it was the head and face that drew attention.

The face was thin and pinched, like a starved rat’s. The nose was narrow, with a crooked scar sliced across it. Another jagged, cicatrix seamed the left cheek, tugging the corner of the mouth upward in a crooked smile. The most startling feature of the face was the eyes. Set in caverns of wind-scoured white bone, they were a brilliant glowing red. Like twin rubies set in ivory. The lad’s skin was pallid beyond belief, like some creature that had spent its existence beneath a damp stone. And the hair.

A tumbling mane of purest white, fine as spun silk, dazzling in the dim light.

“You’re the snow wolf,” said Ryan. “That question?”

“No.”

“Yeah. That’s what call me.” He seemed more economical with words than even J. B. Dix.

“Spray painter. Run West Lowellton.”

“Yeah.”

“And you are no friend to Baron Tourment?” asked Doc Tanner.

There was the first sign of a smile. “If’n he was drowning, I’d piss in his face. That answer it?”

“Why are you here? And what’s your name?”

“Jak Lauren. I’m here ‘cause sec men taken women. See why you’re here. See if you help us. We help you.”

“My name’s Ryan Cawdor, Jak. This is J. B. Dix, Finnegan, and Doc Tanner.”

Each of the party got a long blank stare from the penetrating eyes and the briefest of nods.

“Where from, Ryan?”

The answer was a finger, pointed roughly north.

“Going?”

The finger swiveled and pointed roughly south. The gesture got a snatched grin.

“Want help?”

Ryan glanced at the others, seeing the faint gestures of agreement. “Could be, Jak. First we talk some.”

“Sure.”

 

LORI AWOKE, already struggling against the tight cords that bound her to the table. She realized immediately that it was useless. The monstrously tall figure of Baron Tourment loomed over her, his right hand between her spread legs.

Before she could speak, the girl saw Krysty staring intently at her from the table at her right.

“Try not to tell him anything,” hissed the flame-haired girl.

“No,” replied Lori, her voice trembling as she fought against nausea from the hangover of the grens that had scrambled her brains.

Tourment turned to look at Krysty, his voice calm and serene. “Open your mouth again, slut, and I’ll rip your tongue out from its roots.”

She closed her eyes again, using all her self-control to maintain her breathing and not panic. Maybe Finnegan had escaped, she told herself, and Ryan would find some way of rescuing them,

Krysty swallowed hard at the realization that she had never felt so frightened or so helpless in her entire life.

 

RYAN AND THE OTHERS listened to the albino boy rattle off his account of life in West Lowellton. How Baron Tourment controlled the whole area, apart from a section of West Lowellton. Some of what he told them they already knew, or had guessed. The baron made his headquarters in another big abandoned motel, not far away. Jak Lauren’s gang consisted of about forty fighters. Most of them men, was all he’d give out. He was also careful about his weapons.

“Broke in armory year back. Baron knows what we got. Knows we got enough to stop him looking for firefight. Mebbe beat us, but take knocks that’d cripple him. So it’s a standoff.”

Ryan was fascinated by the boy’s talk about his plans for West Lowellton and Lafayette, once the tyrannical fist of Tourment was removed from the land.

It revealed a spirit that somehow reinforced all the good things he and Krysty had talked about. Why it was important that they didn’t give up. Why there was a point in going on. Because there was already a kind of future. All a man could do was strive to make it better. Move on through the land and leave it just a little cleansed.

“Lafayette’s got big library. Lotsa books. Old vids. Got the viewers working again. We got big plans, Ryan. Set up windmills to bring power. Got some gasoline, but not enough. Baron don’t have that much gas. We can make ‘lectrics with wind. There’s ways using tides and all. We gotta try.”

“Sure,” interrupted Doc. “What you say, young fellow, is feasible. Can be done. Only if you got peace.”

Jak nodded his head, the veil of fine white hair floating about his narrow face like a drift of snow.

“Sure. That’s it. But we can’t beat Tourment. Less’n we got help.”

“From us?” asked J. B. Dix.

“Yeah. We help get women back. You come in with us and wipe out the giant.”

“And set up your windmills?” The lad shook his head angrily. “That’s not all. You outland stupe! Drain the bayous. Bring back good land for crops. Stop the way we live. Moving and blasting and eating and moving on.”

Doc Tanner coughed. “Classic piece of optimistic sociological growth, gentlemen. Boy wants his people to have time and freedom to make the quantum leap from being primitive hunter-gatherers to having a settled agrarian culture.”

“That’s what we want, old man?” asked Jak. “You understand all them words. I read ‘em. Taught myself. I heard them words. Yeah, that’s what we want.”

Ryan sat quietly, listening and thinking. This raggedy kid, not yet twenty, had plans and ideals like nothing he’d heard before—not in all his time in Deathlands. If ever they had found a case, a reason to live, this could be it. He blinked his good eye as he realized that for a moment he’d forgotten about Krysty and Lori, so deeply had he been affected by this broad picture of purging the area of Baron Tourment and his evil.

“You help us with the women, and we’ll help you? That the deal?”

“Sure. We got a base in an old vid-house a mile from here.”

“Kid?” said Finnegan.

“Yeah?”

“You run this pocket army? You run it?”

“Me.”

Finn sucked at his teeth. “How come a kid like you is boss blaster?”

“I killed more sec men than anyone else.”

 

WHEN BARON TOURMENT unzipped his pants and un-peeled his cock, holding it in his right hand, standing near the head of the table where Lori was tied, the girl screamed.

Once.

Krysty winced as the massive man slapped Lori across the face, the blow as sharp as thunder. The girl’s cheek reddened, and blood trickled from her nose. Her eyes rolled in their sockets, and she moaned, knocked stupid by the force of the blow.

“Keep it quiet, whore,” he said, still showing no anger in. his voice. “I’ll have every tooth in your jaw knocked out with a hammer. Then I’ll fuck you in the mouth so hard you’ll feel it in your fucking guts. It’ll choke you to death if I don’t drown you when I come. So why not be good?”

Krysty started to flex her muscles, ready to draw on her secret power, knowing that she could snap the cords, and maybe even take the towering baron. And after that?

After that, they’d be alive, and he’d maybe lie iced on the floor.

But the baron stepped away, pushing his erection back out of sight. “Later. Right now it’s questions and answers. Then it can be pleasure.”

Lori still sobbed quietly.

 

JAK REFUSED FINN’S OFFER of a slug of thick, sweet brandy. “No. Best we go and meet others. Talk battle plan. Not much time. Baron has a way with women that’s fast and ugly.”

Ryan stood up, stretching, holding the G-12. Jak Lauren glanced at it. “My eyes saw that. Said it wasn’t like any normal blaster.”

Ryan held it out. “Fifty-shot automatic. Caseless bullets. Carry ‘em in pockets.” He didn’t mention their reserves of ammo back with their clothes and supplies at the gateway. “Four point seven by twenty-one mil. No recoil, and it’s real quiet. Single, triple burst or continuous. Night sight. Nice gun.”

The boy looked at it enviously. “Ten of those, and we wouldn’t need your outland help.”

A question came to Ryan. “Jak? How do you know where we come from?”

“Out the swamps. The old secret place. There’s stories our fathers told that one day folks’d come from there and help us. Has to be you.”

Ryan nodded. “Let’s go then. One other question?”

“What?”

“How old are you, Jak?”

“Fourteen last midwinter.”

 

THE BARON SWAYED on the tensioned struts and webbing that enabled him to stand upright on his weak legs. His fingers on the aluminum handle of the door of the cellar, he looked back at the two women, helpless on the tables. “Later,” he said.

Lori’s left eye was closed shut, purpled with a deep bruise. Her panties were around her knees, and her thighs were both scratched and bitten. The blouse was torn open, baring her breasts. Her pale skin showed bloody furrows, narrow as coffin nails. Krysty was untouched.

As Baron Tourment had loomed over her, grinning, his hands working like steel traps, she had looked directly into his eyes. “I have the Earth power, and I swear by Gaia that if you harm me I’ll kill you.”

He had straightened and left her, staggering clumsily on his steel-bound legs.

“You threaten me!” He was unable to hide his shock, and also, she noticed with a grim satisfaction, unable to conceal the touch of fear.

As he paused on the threshold, he looked venomously at Krysty Wroth. “Later, firehead. You’ll beg for death after… after you tell me.”

“Tell you what, cripple?”

The taunt failed to rile him. He even managed a laugh that echoed hollowly. “Tell me all I want.”

Krysty had a little of the gift of doomseeing, and she realized that Tourment also had something of the gift. Or the curse. He must know about them. That was partly how he’d got to them. But if he had questions, then he had only some of the answers.

“You know nothing,” she mocked. “Nothing. You would torture women to pierce your own blindness.” “What?”

“You fear the snow-wolf boy. And now you fear all of us.”

“No. I have you and her. Soon I will have the other four.”

So Finn had escaped. That in itself was a small victory for Krysty.

“A mouthful of dirt and slime is all you’ll have. A gift.”

Baron Tourment laughed. “Who makes me this gift, you gaudy slag?”

“The one-eyed man,” she replied.

The door of the cellar slammed with such crazed violence that the lock splintered apart as the Baron burst out, away from the girl.

Krysty and Lori were left alone to wait.

 

Chapter Seventeen

« ^ »

ONCE INSIDE THE DOORS, Doc Tanner closed his eyes, standing still, hands folded in front of him. Like a pilgrim reaching the shrine of a blessed saint, he seemed transfixed with a deep religious awe. “Lordy,” was all he said. “What is it, Doc?” asked Finnegan. The old man smiled with an infinite gentleness so unlike his frequent grouchiness that Finn took a startled step backward, “Should have said to me, ‘What’s up, Doc?’ That would have been right. But forgive me, Finn. I know I ramble on.”

“Tell us ‘bout it, Doc,” urged Ryan. “Something wrong with him?” asked Jak Lauren, who’d been leading the way.

“Nothing’s wrong, young man. Nothing. It’s just that I can recall things you…” He shook his head, rubbing at his eyes. “Got a speck of dust in ‘em. No, it’s just walking in this establishment brings back such a flood of memories. Oh, my dear Emily! How she… Give me pause, gentlemen!”

Ryan, J.B. and Finn looked away, embarrassed by the old man’s weeping. Jak Lauren and several of his tatterdemalion gang looked on, bewildered.

All around them, the dusty lobby of the Adelphi Cinema, West Lowellton, silently waited.

Doc pulled out his kerchief with the swallow’s-eye design and raised it to his beaky nose to snort into it with a bellow of noise. Sniffing, he looked around at the others. “Your pardon, gentles all. You cannot possibly imagine how, after all this time… Oh, such an eternity! It still has that flavor. Warm velvet plush, overlaid with dust. A little sweat. Darkness and flickering lights. Laughter and tears. Popcorn and Babe Ruths. And magic. That above all. I can still savor the magic.”

“You remember vid-houses, Doc?” asked Ryan. “There hasn’t been one open in Deathlands that I know of in a hundred years.”

“I heard of one up in Jersey,” said Finn. “Then I heard it was a gaudy porn-place.”

The interruption gave Doc a moment to recover. He looked sideways at Ryan. “Very nearly, my dear Mr. Cawdor. But shall a butterfly be broken on a wheel or an old dog taught new tricks? No.”

“Time’s wasting,” interrupted Jak Lauren. “Blood’s flowing and there’s dying.”

He led the way into the interior of the building. As with the motel, Ryan was fascinated with this living artifact from the prenuke past. A pinhole glimpse of the dead America.

Ryan had noticed a small plaque on the outside wall, telling the world that “The Adelphi Cinema was opened officially on September 24, 1989, by Senator John J. McLaglen.”

It was a squat, rectangular building, with a faintly Spanish or Moorish look to it. Pale fawn stucco had weathered down to near white. A marquee awning, with vertical slit windows above it, had once held news of forthcoming attractions. On one side Ryan had seen a glass cubicle where he guessed tickets and food and cigarettes had once been sold. A peeling, faded notice warned, “The Surgeon General has determined that the more you smoke, the faster you die.”

There were around thirty of the gang around the building. Ryan had been impressed with Jak’s grasp of military security. They had been escorted back from the Holiday Inn, with guards ranged on either side of them, covering a couple of blocks in each direction. They carried a bewildering range of battered blasters, most of them either handguns or old hunting rifles that had their origins in Spain or Czechoslovakia. Pistols came in all shapes and sizes, virtually all showing signs of having been welded or having the bore enlarged. In the first couple of minutes Ryan spotted Colts, Pumas, Pythons, Brownings, Enfields, Webleys and Smith & Wessons, with a few Russian Stechkins and Makarovs. Predictably, because of the comparative ease of making ammo, there were some very old Colt Navys and Walkers.

Lauren’s renegade unit was comprised mainly of men and a lesser number of women, between the ages of fifteen and thirty, with some of them older. They all looked scruffy, in patched clothes. And all of them looked as though they never quite got enough to eat.

The one characteristic that they shared, and that set them apart from most of the population of Deathlands—those that weren’t muties, that is—was an alertness, a hair-trigger readiness; jumpy and sharp, their eyes were constantly on the watch. They were a bunch of ordinary people doing the best they could. Ryan thought then about what Jak had told them about his hopes and plans, and once again felt how much he wanted to help the snow-haired lad. But still at the core of his heart was Krysty Wroth. As he followed the slight boy through the swing doors into the auditorium, he was already calculating. How many men? Day or night? Frontal raid or try to sneak in? Whatever happened, there were men and women in the old cinema who would be dead within twenty-four hours. You didn’t slice through someone’s carotid artery without some of their blood splashing all over you.

“Quiet!” yelled Lauren, holding up a hand for silence. “These them. Got good guns. Help, we help ‘em get women away baron. This is big one, friends. We hit hard and mebbe win forever.”

There were about a dozen of what Ryan figured were the top hands in the outfit. All had the killer look around the eyes and mouth. It was immediately obvious that they didn’t much care for having four strangers suddenly in their midst.

“Why the fuck we need ‘em, Jak?” asked a tall woman whose lower jaw was disfigured with a livid scar zagging across her neck.

“You don’t need us, lady,” replied Ryan. “Way I see it, if you keep alive and Tourment doesn’t get no stronger, in about fifty years you might be able to put a real fucking fright up him.”

There was a general relaxing of tension, and some of them laughed openly. The woman spat on the floor and turned away in obvious disgust.

“I don’t like a bad winner, lady, but I sure hate a fucking sore loser,” added Ryan, pushing it deliberately, knowing that this wasn’t a place to back off even an inch.

“Let it lay, Zee,” snapped Jak. “We voted and they’re in.”

“These women he got… mean a lot to you, brother?” asked the woman, still not beaten.

“Do muties shit in their pants?” he replied, getting a bigger laugh and even a grudging half smile from Zee.

Jak shook his head. “That’s enough. There’s some serious talk to go down. We know his place. Even got plans from city files. What we didn’t have was blasters and mercies. Now we got ‘em.”

Finnegan didn’t much like that. “Not fucking mercies, kid. We go where we want and chill who we want to chill. You need us more’n we need you, kid.”

Suddenly there was a flicker of light, and Jak was in a classic knife-fighter’s crouch in front of Finn, the blade dancing from hand to hand, faster than the eye could follow.

“Don’t call me kid, fatso.”

Ryan knew better than to try and step into a scene like this. Finn, despite his chubby, amiable exterior, was a bloody-handed killer and was quite capable of drawing on the boy and spreading him all over the far wall. If that happened, things would get hot. “Don’t call me fatso, kid.”

Jak was balanced on his toes like a wind-blown feather, watching Finnegan, red eyes locked on the older man’s face. “You got balls, fatso.”

“Kids like you, they got lotsa gall but no fucking sand. I could drop you before you could use the knife, kid.”

Lauren grinned wolfishly. “Sure you could. You’re here cause you’re good, fatso. Heard you chilled some sec men this morn. You draw, you mebbe hit me, but you’re on your fucking back looking up at sky, wondering why you wanted to be a prick.”

Ryan could see a real risk, after the first combustible moment, that they might talk each other into killing each other.

“That’s it,” Ryan said, feeling the ripple of disappointment around him. For a kid of fourteen, Jak Lauren had some serious respect from his people. They really thought he could take Finn.

Maybe he could. Ryan wasn’t going to find out. “It’s gone noon,” he said, showing his chron around. The place was badly lit, with a row of flickering lamps, in glass bowls with swimming fish engraved on them. At one end of the sloping room was a massive maroon curtain with golden tassels draped across it. From what he recollected, Ryan guessed that there would be a screen behind it.

“Sure has. You’re right, Ryan.” The slim knife disappeared as quickly as it had sprung to his hand. Though Ryan was watching him intently, he hadn’t seen where the boy had hidden it.

“We talk about how we do this?” asked J.B., moving casually against the right-hand wall. It was second nature for the Armorer to seek out a position where he had his back against something solid.

Jak half bowed to him. “Sure. Talk plan. Can’t go until after dark. They’re too ready. Tourment’s no fool. Before talk, we’ll show something to you. Rare. From before the quick sick came.”

“Food?” asked Finnegan, omitting the “kid” this time. “Sure. Always ready. Talk. Then go in and get the prisoners.”

Ryan spotted something in the use of the word. Something that meant more than just Lori and Krysty. “How many prisoners, Jak?” he asked. “Three.”

“Three?”

“Yeah. Night ‘fore last. Mephisto sec men snatch squad got lucky. Picked up my father. This time tomorrow Tourment’ll have killed them all.”

“Then let’s get to it,” suggested Ryan., The boy nodded, solemn-faced, the cascading white hair framing his skull like a silver halo.

 

Chapter Eighteen

« ^ »

KRYSTY WROTH WAS ANGRY with herself. Angry that she’d let her emotions govern her good sense. Mother Sonja’s often repeated motto, Strive for Life, had been momentarily forgotten.

It was scant consolation that Baron Tourment’s evening roll call would be two sec men short.

 

THEY’D COME IN a couple of minutes after the giant ville chief had lumbered clumsily out. They were both small, with sallow complexions, looking as though they’d been standing out in the rain for too long. When they spoke, she heard the nasal tones of the bayous and guessed they came from Cajun stock. The one with a small mustache looked around thirty; the other, with a three-day stubble on his chin was nearer twenty. Both men carried greased M-16 blasters.

There hadn’t been time for Krysty to do more than hiss a warning to the sobbing Lori to try to hold out and tell the baron nothing. Then the sec men were walking cockily to stand between them.

“Yellow hair or red?” one said.

“Yellow.”

“Why?”

“Already got her snatch warm and waiting. Red’s got hers sewn up in her pants. Baron might guess if’n we cut her naked.”

The one with the mustache, called Neal, ran a hand under Lori’s disarranged skirt, giggling as she wriggled at the touch, “Warm and wet, Alain. And yellow as a possum’s guts.”

Krysty had tried. “You do that one more time, you sack of cancerous pus, and I’ll snake on you to the fucking baron.”

“He don’t care,” said Alain, nibbing a hand thoughtfully over his rough chin. “Long as we don’t do no mortal hurt. He don’t give a fuck.”

“Why not do yellow first? Then fuck red in the mouth; and see how she likes it.”

“I’d bite it off, if it’s big enough to get my teeth in.”

Both guards laughed. “First off, Alain here’d push the muzzle of his old blaster half a foot up your fucking nose, bitch. You even set your fucking teeth in me, and they’ll be wiping your fucking brains off the ceiling.”

It crossed Krysty’s mind to let them. Lie there and blank her mind clear of what was happening to her. She could do it. She’d done it before, back in Mocsin with the sec boss there. Kurt Strasser. Before she’d met Ryan Cawdor.

But there was Lori.

The girl, despite her bizarre upbringing, had an oddly unflawed innocence. If Krysty lay there and allowed these two brutish pigs to do what they wanted, she knew they wouldn’t stop at a simple fucking. That would just set them on other ways of humiliating and hurting them both.

“Gaia, help me,” she whispered, closing her eyes, trying to relax and draw on the immense power of the Earth Mother. Part of Krysty’s mind told her this would be futile. But she recalled what Ryan had said about leaving a place a tad cleaner than when you came to it. That she would do.

The cords that bound her ankles and wrists were made of waxed whipcord, tied so tightly that there was blood seeping from under the nails of her fingers and toes, burst from the swollen flesh. The pain had been easy to control, but she worried that she might not be able to function well in a fight.

“Help me, help me, help me,” she repeated, drawing on the strength in the way that her dead mother had taught her, way back in Harmony.

“Be real good fucking this. Better’n that ‘fayette slut with boils on her tits,” sniggered Neal.

“Yeah.”

“Me first.”

“Sure. Like my bun well buttered,” cackled the younger man.

Drool hung from the corner of Alain’s narrow mouth. He put his head back and laughed again, and Krysty saw the way the cords of his neck stood out like strips of thin iron.

The girl took a deep breath, her mind wandering back unbidden to a fine summer’s day in Harmony. She would have been around sixteen years old then and filled with devilment. Carl Lanning, a fresh-cheeked boy who would pluck her cherry, was the son of the blacksmith, Herb. The lad had teased Krysty about her powers, challenging her to show him. The forge had been deserted; the fires had slumbered with a dull red glow, and the hammers were ranged on the walls. She’d picked up a freshly hammered iron shoe, the holes rough-edged and silver. “Go, Krysty,” Carl had encouraged her, watching. He’d fallen silent, unbelieving as she’d gripped the horseshoe, putting a surge of incredible strength into her hands and wrists. She twisted it as though it was saltwater taffy, then, dropped it to the floor of the forge where it rang like a bell.

Peter Maritza and Uncle Tyas McNann had learned of her trick, taken her into the smoke-scented parlor and sat her beneath the framed picture of a racehorse called Skyrocket. They had taken her to task for abusing her unique gift, warning her she must use it sparingly and wisely. “Only when you must girl,” Peter had said.

Now, watching the two men prepare for their corrupt sexual pleasures with the helpless Lori, Krysty’s lips moved.

“Now I must, Uncle.”

Both men had their backs to her, fumbling with their trousers, their blasters laid on the stone by their feet.

“Gaia, help me,” whispered Krysty, feeling her energy increasing until it seemed as though her body might burst with it.

The cord around her right wrist snapped with a sharp sound, like a metal spring failing. The left followed only a moment later. She began to sit up, the bindings breaking together as she flexed both legs.

“What the fuck!” said Neal, looking around. Alain hopped off balance, his eyes wide as saucers in his pinched face.

Even Lori, lying still, opened her eyes at the crack of the cords disintegrating, unable to believe what she saw.

Gripping the table’s edge with both hands, Krysty pushed herself off, aiming her feet toward Neal’s face; the tapered heels of her boots sledgehammered toward his mouth.

“You…” he began, the word rammed back into his throat as Krysty’s boots struck.

The power of her attack was utterly devastating.

The silver-patterned leather heels hit the sec guard plumb in the center of his gaping mouth; the blow tore his lip into tatters of bloody flesh, splintering his few remaining teeth into shards of bone. His lower jaw cracked like a dry twig, dislocated, the awesome force actually ripping it from its socket so it flapped loose as he staggered backward. He was momentarily lifted clear off his feet.

But the effect of the kick didn’t stop there. Krysty pushed off like a gymnast, her boots crushing Neal’s nose, destroying both cheekbones, pulping the left eye to watery jelly. Fragments of bone were driven upward through the soft palate into the lower part of the brain, beginning the irrevocable process of death.

Alain was still teetering, his trousers falling to his ankles and revealing a shrinking penis and sagging balls. Had his reflexes been honed, there was a split-second when he might have gone for his blaster and shot Krysty, while she was still recovering her balance, nearly slipping in Neal’s spouting blood. But his hands went in panic to his groin as his eyes searched for a way out. His mouth opened with the beginnings of a request for mercy. “Lady…” he began.

“I don’t have the time,” she hissed, swinging around, pivoting on the right foot, the left lashing out toward his abdomen.

This time it was the toe that did the damage. The craftsman who had worked away, chiseling silver into points to ornament the western boots, could never have dreamed a hundred years ago how lethal those elongated tips could be.

Though Alain tried to fend off the kick with his hands, he might as well have tried to throttle a cyclone. Three fingers were crushed and broken, the thumb on the right hand agonizingly dislocated. The foot powered on, puncturing his scrotal sac, transforming his testicles to crimson rags of gristle, nearly severing his penis. With the cracking of bone, the entire pelvic girdle opened up. The guard staggered back, banging against the table, his face as white as parchment, a mask of silent pain. Falling to his knees, he collapsed, blood fountaining from his ruined groin, legs kicking and jerking spasmodically under the colossal shock.

Turning from the dying men, Krysty effortlessly snapped the cords at Lori’s wrists and ankles.

“How did you kill them like that?” stammered the blond girl, instinctively hoisting her panties back to their rightful position.

“I guess it’s ‘cause I’m a fucking mutie, girl.”

“Can you open door?”

Krysty shook her head, feeling the familiar wave of weariness touching her temples. Using the powers always left her drained and enfeebled. It was the price that her mother had warned her that she must pay.

“Too tired. Must sit down, or I’ll…” At her feet, the body of the younger sec guard finally ceased thrashing. Blood oozed silently across the floor. There was no sound from beyond the bolted door to indicate that anyone had heard anything from inside.

Lori swung her long legs elegantly over the side of the table and rose. She put her arms around Krysty, hugging tier tightly and feeling how the red-haired girl was trembling.

“Be fine,” she said. “Them fuckers dead. Got what wanted. Don’t cry, Krysty. Be fine. I won’t talk. Nor you. Even if that giant mutie mongrel kills us. One day Doc and Ryan and J.B. an’ Finn’ll do for him. Beg pardon, but it’s fucking true.”

 

KRYSTY WROTH WAS STILL ANGRY with herself. If she’d waited, then a better chance might have come. A chance to chill the baron himself and go out on that. Or even a glimmer of a break. Now she’d have to invent a story that the men had freed her and that she’d been lucky enough to take them by surprise. It would be some hours before her strength would return.

Her acute hearing caught the noise of Tourment’s clumsy braces creaking outside; then the bolt grated back. She held tightly on to Lori’s hand to keep herself from trembling.