Chapter Fifteen

Ryan felt unaccountably on the edge of tears.
Johannes Forde had arranged with Winthrop to put on a movie show in the darkened back room of the local butcher, later that afternoon.
The rest of the group, with Dean the most enthusiastic, had been eager to share this rare opportunity. Even Krysty had come bursting into their bedroom to tell Ryan the news of the film show.
"Johannes says he'll show some real old movies he found that go back almost to the days of the long winter. And he'll take some new stuff of the ville and mebbe of us. Process it tonight and we can watch it tomorrow."
"Terrific."
Krysty was so excited that she missed the bitterness first time around.
"Yeah, lover. I can hardly wait."
"I don't mind waiting."
This time the red anger coated every syllable, unmistakable and out in the open.
Krysty had closed the door softly behind her, coming across the small room to sit beside Ryan on the narrow bed, laying her hand on his stubbled cheek.
"Want me to shave you, lover?"
"No!" The silence stretched for a dozen heartbeats. "Yeah, all right."
"I'm real sorry, Ryan. It was stupe of me to go on about this film show. I'll stay here with you this afternoon."
That was the moment that Ryan felt closest to tears. Not only was he washed in his own self-pity because he wouldn't be able to see the precious movies, but now the person he loved most in the world was offering to miss them on his behalf.
"You don't have to stay away," he mumbled. "No need for us both to not see them."
She kissed him, arms around his neck, holding him tight. "Stupe of me, lover," she whispered.
"No, it wasn't. I know Mildred says that the sight could come back in a few days butbut I can't build my hopes on that. Trader said a man who wouldn't face facts was a man who wouldn't face up to living."
"What did Trader know about the problem you have?"
"Trader knew plenty about plenty, Krysty. And he was right. I'm blind. Sure, there's a long shot it might go. Like it might snow in New Mexico in July. Doesn't happen often. So, the sooner I face it, the better for all of us. I'll come to the vids and you can tell me what's going on. All right?"
"All right."


FRESHLY SHAVED, Ryan stepped out into the bright afternoon air, pausing on the porch of the Banbury Hotel.
"Is it just my imagination, or is the vile smell of damp going away a little?" he asked Krysty, who was holding his arm.
"Your imagination. When I pulled on my boots this morning I could swear there was already mildew growing in them. You could farm mushrooms in the corner under the bed."
Ryan turned his face, staring up into the sky. "Sunny?"
"Some. Patches of high cloud. Signs of thunderheads over to the west. Could rain later."
Ryan opened and shut his "good" eye, trying to distinguish some difference. But there was none. Other than the now-familiar brightly colored floaters, his vision was as black as a sealed kiva at midnight.
"Looks like most of Bramton's going along to the show. Dozens of them."
Ryan nodded. "Not surprising. Frontier ville like this, way out in the boonies, probably don't get much in the way of visiting entertainment."
"True enough. No sign of anybody who looks like they might be linked to a baron or this mysterious Family that we heard about. Just plain folks."
"How far's the butcher's?"
"Close. You could almost spit one end of the main street to the other."


FOR RYAN, IT WAS AN HOUR or more of almost total boredom. He would have given a handful of top jack to have been able to see the scenes that Krysty whispered to him, above the whirring of the 16 mm projector and the oohs and aahs of the packed crowd.
Oddly his strongest memory of that film show was of hot, fresh-spilled blood.
The butcher had been slaughtering that very morning, and the carcasses of a half dozen sheep, some calves and a couple of roe deer were hanging on steel hooks from the ceiling, eviscerated and dripping blood.
The screen was a near-white sheet that Forde had unfolded from the back of his rig, setting it up on one wall. Benches and chairs were brought from all over the ville, but Krysty told Ryan that a lot of people were still standing, packed at the back of the airless, stinking room.
The films rolled by.
Ryan could tell from the reaction of the audience that some of them were fairly amazing.
"Gaia! This one must have been made at the end of the long winters. It's in black-and-white, not color. Shows banks of snow around the edges of some real big city."
"Duluth," Johannes Forde said from the middle of the room, where he was controlling his precious projector. "Tin was labeled, else I'd never have known. Frozen sea is one of the Great Lakes. Not sure which."
"It is most likely Lake Superior," called out Doc from close by Ryan.
"People look rad sick and raggedy," Krysty breathed. "Faces all waxen and lined and dirty."
Dean sat on the other side of his father. "Never seen such poor folk," he said.
Ryan could tell from the catch in his son's voice just how bleak and affecting the films had to be.
Next came a color film of a chem storm.
"Must be real early, as well," was Krysty's comment. "You can see all sorts of space junk burning up and coming down through the lightning."
Ryan had often seen a similar spectacle, though it had definitely decreased in frequency in the past few years. The detritus was largely the residue of the ill-fated Star Wars element of the Totality Concept, bits of missile launchers, tracking devices and laser guns blown apart during the brief holocaust of skydark, circling Earth in their own eccentric orbits, dropping lower and lower, until they flared through the atmosphere and burned back again.
Again, the effect on the audience was spectacular. There was calling, yelling and cheering, with one or two of the oldsters trying to explain that their mothers and fathers had lived through these times, passing on their tales to anyone who'd listen.
It was the first time that Ryan had been aware of any reaction from the people of Bramton. The only ones he'd heard speaking had been John Winthrop, who turned out to be the ville's mayor, and the owner of the hotel, Zenobia Simpkins. There was something that they were both holding back, an oddly guarded manner of speech, as the others had noticed about the rest of the ville.
While she was shaving him, Krysty had said they reminded her of people who'd committed some dreadful crime and were fearful of being found out. They were definitely scared, glancing over their shoulders and starting at shadows.
The third of Johannes Forde's films was a herd of wild mustangs that Krysty described running through the stark landscape of Monument Valley.
"Freedom, lover," she said with a sigh. "Looks like it was filmed from the back of a pickup wag. Now they're going through a river crossing, between trees. Sun and spray and shafts of bright light. Magnificent."
Gradually Ryan lost count of the movies that Forde was showing, losing touch with the subject matter. It was as though his blindness had somehow affected his short-term memory.
After the old films, some of them going back the better part of eighty years, there was a lot more modern stuff. Some Pueblo rituals and a gunfight in a frontier township, ending with a close-up of crimson blood seeping into yellow sand. "Proud of that," Forde commented. "Nearly got to catch the last train west myself. Bullet glanced off the camera tripod."
Young women, dressed in their finest, smiled shyly as they paraded through a town that Mildred identified as being Omaha, Nebraska.
A game of baseball was played between a team of young norm children and some muties, in a frontier pesthole that J.B. said he thought was somewhere around the southern edge of the Darks. But he couldn't be sure.
"This is the kind of film that I could make here in Bramton, if everyone is agreeable," Forde said. "This is a small ville close to the headwaters of the Missouri River that I took a month ago. Start with a general shot, panning all the way around. Then the main street."
"Everyone's grinning at the camera," Krysty said. "Look like a load of apes, escaped from a zoo and dressed in their keeper's best clothes."
A burst of laughter was quickly quieted. Ryan nudged Krysty. "What happened?"
"Fat guy, in a suit two sizes too small for him, walked toward the camera."
"Full of piss and self-importance," Mildred interrupted. "Striding along, thumbs in his watch chain, like he owned the whole town."
"Looked like the fabled Akond of Swat," Doc suggested. "Living proof of pride coming before the fall."
"He fell over, did he?" Ryan asked, grinning in readiness at the joke.
"Eventually," Krysty said, giggling. "After he trod in the biggest cow flop you ever saw."
The film had been rolling on.
Forde had talked over the whispered conversation of Ryan and his companions. "Here's the whole town in a single shot. Watch that kid with buck teeth on the left. Now the camera's moving slowly to the right. And look who's on the right-hand of the line, seeming like he's a little out of breath."
"Kid with buck teeth," Ryan said quietly, the burst of laughter confirming his obvious guess.
"Happens in nearly every ville I visit," Forde stated complacently.
Ryan was almost overcome with stultifying boredom. Part of him desperately wanted to see these marvelous films, some of them showing a Deathlands that was gone forever. Life expectancy in Deathlands was around forty for men and in the midthirties for women, plagued with birthing deaths, which meant that the hideous horror of skydark, at the beginning of the new century, was lost to everyone except the extraordinarily old. And Deathlands didn't have many of them.
"Now I want to show you some movies I've made with a few special effects. Folk appearing and vanishing miraculously and stuff like that. Could be a bit midnight scary. So, if you've got a nervous disposition, hold on to your partner's hand. If you don't have a partner, hold on to someone else's partner."
The joke went down like a lead balloon.
Ryan felt the short hairs prickling at his nape at the sudden certainty that something had changed in the butcher's back room.
"Lover," Krysty breathed, her fingers tightening on his hand. "Feel that?"
"Yeah."
There was a whispering silence, a stillness in the air, as if everyone was instantly frozen into immobility.
The loudest sound was the clicking of the projector, the film slotting through the gate.
Forde was conscious that he'd mysteriously lost the attention and interest of his audience.
"What's wrong, folks? Someone died in here? Only kidding, of course."
"What?" Ryan whispered. "Tell me what the fucking film's showing now!"
Krysty hesitated a moment. "Old ship, alongside a dock. Ruined ville behind it. Loads of rats pouring off the vessel. Close-up of some of them. They've got a double layer of teeth, Ryan. Needle pointed."
"Go on."
"A man appeared. Could be Forde himself. Wearing a weird wig that makes him look bald."
Doc recognized the allusion in the last reel of film. "Nosferatu, the vampire," he muttered.
But it was a crudely edited and jumpily shot scene, the camera seeming to be operated by an oddly inexpert hand.
Forde kept turning and leering campily at the screen, though at least twice he was clearly calling out orders to whoever worked the camera.
Then the tricks startedclumsy and unsophisticated compared to the amazing special effects Doc had seen just before they gave him his time push into Deathlands from December 2000.
But the audience in the slaughterhouse in Bramton acted as if they'd never seen anything like it before. There was shrieking from women, men yelling and children bawling. To Doc's right someone stood up and then slumped down to the blood-slick floor in a dead faint.
"Only a film!" Forde called out, trying to hang on to a semblance of order.
"Too little and too late, my old chum," Doc said to himself, watching as bodies jerked across in front of the white swathe of light, turning into capering, distorted shadows for a few delirious seconds.
"Don't panic! No need for this. I'll switch off the film. There."
The flickering images vanished from the sheet, being replaced by a stark-white rectangle of dazzling light that spilled over and showed the disemboweled corpses of the animals, swinging from their hooks.
Doc actually considered for a moment the possibility of fighting his way to the front of the panicked throng and making shadow shapes of camels and crocodiles and bunny rabbits with his fingers.
But he sat again as a bizarre figure appeared in the core of the light, as sudden as a pantomime demon, holding up both hands for silence.
"Everyone sit down," said the cultured, gentle voice from the young man.
"Who the fuck's that?" Ryan hissed.
"I think we've just met a member of the Family," Krysty replied.