Chapter Nine

After a bowl of steaming-hot vegetable soup, Dean seemed to recover some of his natural vitality, though Ryan still insisted that his son should ride in the bed of the wag driven by Johannes Forde.
"Rest of us'll walk," he said.
"I can walk," the boy protested.
Ryan pointed at him, his face stern. "This doesn't come under the heading of something we can talk about, Dean. You ride. Probably not far to this ville of Bramton."


THE TRAIL WOUND between bayous, passing unbelievably ancient mangroves, draped in the veils of Spanish moss. The water was still and a muddy brown, lapping at the edges of the embankments that carried the road.
The rig went first, Forde sitting relaxed on the seat, Dean at his side. The filmmaker allowed the boy to take the reins of the pair of bay mares, while he leaned back, the gentle wind tugging at the fringes of his jacket, a skinny black stogie helping to keep away the mosquitoes.
Ryan walked behind the high canvas-topped wag, with Krysty at his side. J.B. and Mildred brought up the rear of the group, with Doc and Jak in deep conversation between them.
"Like to watch his movies," Krysty said.
"Me too. All my life I haven't seen that many. Most of them were bits of vids, played on battery-powered machines that was like watching the pictures at the bottom of a deep well."
"When we reach the ville?"
"Hope so."
"You never been to Bramton?"
Ryan shook his head. "Nearest I came was when we first met up with Jak."


"AND YOU NEVER VISITED this community when you lived close by, Jak?"
"No, Doc. Gotta remember there's Cajuns and Native Americans and trappers and all sorts. Not many big villes after skydark. Travel's often tough. So you stay close by where you're birthed."
The old man nodded, glancing around him, just catching a splash of movement on the far side of one of the swampy pools to their left. "Upon my soul! What was?"
The albino smiled, showing his teeth between pale lips. "Brother gator."
"There are many of those creatures around the swamps, are there not?"
"My father once told me that anywhere around bayous you're likely less than twenty paces from big gator."
Doc patted Jak on the shoulder. "Well, thank you for that splendid piece of information, my dear Ganymede."
"Dear what?"
"Classical allusion, Jak."
"Like a trick?"
Doc frowned. "What do?" His face suddenly brightened. "No, not an illusion. An allusion . Means a sort of reference." He saw the teenager's bewilderment. "But let it pass, Jak. Just let it pass on by."


"IT COULD EASILY be some sort of alien virus that the boy picked up at our last jump."
"You worried, Mildred?"
"A little, John. His pulse was definitely very slow, and his skin was cold and slightly moist. He looked as white as a sheet when I first saw him this morning."
"Kid usually bounces with energy," J.B. said. "Must be something wrong if he won't get up."
Mildred looked up. "Weather's still brightening. Look at those hummingbirds, high up."
"Probably a bees' nest. Honey attracts them."
"At least it wasn't vampire bats, John."
"You sure?"
"Not a mark on his throat. It isn't likely that even a sizable flight of bats would kill a healthy person. Danger comes from them being notorious carriers of rabies. But there's none of the symptoms of that with Dean. Just one of those things, I guess."


THERE WAS VERY LITTLE sign of human life. At one point the trail became a moss-covered two-lane blacktop, carrying them along at a good rate. That ran into an elevated section, riding over the placid water on cracked and stained concrete piles.
"Good traveling," Forde called. "If only all the highways of Deathlands were so easy."
"Don't speak too soon," Krysty warned. "Back in Harmony ville Uncle Tyas McCann used to say that life was always checks and balances."
Sure enough, a half mile farther on it was obvious that there had been some serious quake activity, almost certainly during the geoturbulent months that followed skydark and the beginnings of the long winters. Volcanoes and massive earthquakes became commonplace, changing the face of the country forever, turning deep valleys into lava-puking mountains and serene islands into bottomless lakes.
The elevated highway had presumably been rocked by such a quake, bringing it down into the surrounding bayous. But someone had taken a lot of trouble to build up a causeway of packed earth that enabled the team to carefully draw the loaded wag down onto another dirt trail.
"Sign ahead," Dean said, pointing. "Past the ruins of that gas station."
The sign was tilted sideways, as though one flank of it was sinking slowly into dark ooze. A small shotgun shack of unpainted wood sat just beyond it, which also leaned to one side, as though it had become too much of an effort to remain vertical.
"Bramtown," the boy read slowly. "That the place we're looking for?"
Forde had reined in the team. "Seems like it. What's the sign say on that hut?"
Dean peered at it, shaking his head. "Writing's too clumsy and daubed. Paint's run, as well. I can't make it out. What's it say, Doc?"
The old-timer strode to the front of the wag, leaning his hand on the splintered sides, shading his watery eyes. "Totems and items for sale." He laughed. "Short and to the point. I admire that in a sign painter. Though I confess that I have precious little idea what it must mean."
"Mebbe religion," Jak suggested. "Used to be lots voodoo in bayous. Totems is what you buy keep safe against things of dark."
"Voodoo?" Mildred shuddered theatrically. "Cutting the throats of chickens, walking dead, needles stuck in dolls? Like Haiti? Zombies?"
The albino nodded, his hair clouding forward to conceal his long, narrow face. "Yeah, Mildred. All of that. All of that and much more."
Ryan glanced up at Forde. "Think it's best we go ahead and take a look."
The man put his head on one side, smiling at Ryan, though the smile never got close to his hooded blue eyes. "Now would that be a suggestion or an order, friend Cawdor?"
"You heard the words. Meaning that you put on them's up to you. Just that I've some experience of the swamps. Man can get himself some nasty surprises."
Forde pushed back the Stetson, squinting at the sky. "Fairly said. I'll stay here and pick up the pieces of your ass, Cawdor. Or back you, if you need that."
"Dean, stay here with him."
The boy opened his mouth, ready to make an automatic protest, then saw the look in his father's eye. "Sure, Dad."
The rest of them walked forward.
As they got closer to the shack, they could see that the township lay beyond it, in a swampy dip in the trail, a couple of hundred paces farther down the line. Thirty or forty small houses were scattered on both sides of the rutted track, as well as the burned-out ruins of what once might have been a church.
The place was deserted.
There were the remains of a peach orchard behind the shack. The trees looked as if they last gave fruit before the long winters. A solitary hog with only three legs hobbled around a cramped, muddy pen out back. Somewhere, they could just hear the faint barking of a dog, and there was the faint smell of cooking fish in the still air.
Ryan signaled for everyone to spread out.
"They throw a blanket and it covers us all," he growled.
Everyone had blasters drawn and cocked, ready on a red skirmish line.
The hog scented them and looked up, limping toward the far corner of its compound, giving a plaintive, almost human cry of warning.
Ryan noticed that the mud-splattered, three-legged beast also lacked an eye.
Doc also spotted it. "Is the kine kin to you, my dear friend, Ryan?"
At that moment the front door of the shack barged open on frayed rope hinges, and a stout, middle-aged woman lumbered out, smoking a corncob pipe and carrying a filthy 12-gauge under her right arm.
"Who fuck you?" she grunted. Her greasy jowls, covered in bristling clusters of thick black hair, dropped almost to her hunched shoulders.
"She kin to the kine, as well?" Doc whispered, making Mildred giggle nervously.
Ryan half turned toward them, narrowing his eye, the angry expression on his face reducing both Mildred and Doc to instant silence.
"You outlanders? Must be. Know every fucker from Bramton and miles around. What you want?"
"Name's Ryan Cawdor. These are some of my good friends. Passing through. Saw the sign saying you sold totems." He pointed to it with the four-and-a-half -inch barrel of the big SIG-Sauer.
"Fancy blaster don't mean shit. Musket ball from a self -make can chill you just as quick an' easy."
"You won't find any of us arguing with that," J.B. said, taking off the fedora, his glasses twinkling in the watery sunlight that had broken through the clouds. "Might I point something out that could be of interest?"
Ryan wondered why the Armorer was copying Doc's old-fashioned way of speaking, guessing that J.B. had figured it might impress the thuggish woman.
"What fuck you talkin' about?"
"Just felt you should know, lady, that one barrel of your scattergun's blocked with mud."
The woman stared at him with eyes that were as warm and friendly as a week-dead cod. "Lotta mistakes. I ain't no lady. Not my scattergun. My old man's. He's not here. Out catfishin' in swamps. Last thing is that it ain't fuckin' mud in the blaster. It's from where I stirred the dog stew with it last night. So, you don't know fuck. Probably have to use both hands to find your shrimp-limp dick."
"Homecoming queen from charm school," Jak muttered, standing at the back of the group.
Doc stepped forward to chance his arm against the slatternly harridan.
"We are but poor strangers who make our way toward the eternal city."
"If you mean Norleans, then you're a fuckin' long way off the trail, you stupe old goat."
It crossed Ryan's mind that the best, quickest and cleanest thing to do might be to put a bullet through the brutishly low forehead and then move on.
But some of the other houses in the scattered ville were close by, and be knew how intensely tribal the Cajuns were against all outlanders. He didn't fancy being hunted through the swamps by a gang of keen-eyed raggedy men. It had happened to him before and the memory wasn't pleasant.
"You sell totems?" Jak asked.
"What the fuck happened to your hair, sonny?" She bellowed with laughter at the albino. "Somethin' scare you to death? Come look at what I got inside. Might have some dye for your hair. Make you look like a fuckin' man again."
"You got a name?" Ryan said.
"Sure. Madame Maigris. Folks call me Mudchuck behind my back. Not to my face."
She spun and went back inside. Ryan saw she was wearing men's work boots under the trailing, torn hem of her ankle-length dress.
He shrugged his shoulders and led the way inside, Krysty at his heels, the rest of the group following them into the shadowed, musty ulterior.
The cold voice from the darkness stopped everyone. "No stupe moves. Nobody hurt."