Chapter Fifteen

 

 

Falling.

 

The wag rolled sharply to the right, the first pair of mules already shrieking like tortured humans as the trail vanished from beneath their hooves and they began to plummet over the edge.

 

Dean's face was taut with panic, yelling for his father to help him, to free his trapped foot.

 

And all around was death and injury.

 

Lemuel lay sprawled back across the seat, blood flowing freely from the wound in his throat.

 

Joey, leader of the bandits, moaned on the trail, his face bleeding, his body crushed by the wheels of the heavy rig. One of his companions called for someone to free him from where he was trapped under his dead horse.

 

The piano squealed in protest as the wag began to twist and flex and bend, the weight of the mules pulling it over the sheer edge of the steep drop.

 

"Dad!" Dean's voice was high and thin, his eyes on his father's face.

 

Ryan was hanging on with his left hand to the top of the piano, saving himself from plunging over the wrong side of the rig. He could see the taut cord that had caught his son's ankle, trapping it between the piano and the back of the seat, where Lemuel's corpse was slumped sideways.

 

The problem was that his razor-sharp panga was sheathed on the left side of his hip, and he was holding the SIG-Sauer in his right hand. There was no way that he could holster the blaster and draw the panga without going over the edge.

 

There was screaming bedlam all around him as he made his lightning decision.

 

He steadied the automatic and fired.

 

The first round frayed the cord and tore through the wag bed, knocking out a splintered hole. The second shot hit the rope with an ace on the line, severing it with a loud twanging sound.

 

"Get out!" Ryan yelled, trying to work his way around the bulk of the upright piano, held on the ravine side of the wag, the side that was already beginning to dip sharply down, ready for the big plunge.

 

He glimpsed Dean flying out the safe side, though he didn't see him land.

 

The world was spinning.

 

With a desperate acrobatic twist and lunge, Ryan hurled himself off the tailgate, landing clumsily on his back and shoulder, the impact making him drop the SIG-Sauer. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the last of the wag as it slithered ponderously over the brink.

 

Ryan would never forget to the end of his days the noise as it fell, a noise that seemed to last forever and ever.

 

The mules, helpless, cried like children at their rushing doom, and then came the sickening crash of wood, flesh and bone, and the hideous jangle of the piano as it smashed to pieces among the sharp-edged boulders, spilling its last chords in a thunderous finale.

 

After the echoes had bounced their way into stillness, the morning was almost silent.

 

Ryan fumbled for his blaster and stood, brushing dirt off his coat and pants. He saw that Dean was also on his feet, gripping his own 9 mm Browning Hi-Power.

 

And their attackers?

 

Joey had finally stopped moving, thick clots of dark blood oozing from his open mouth, crushed to death by the iron wag wheels.

 

The bandit that Ryan had shot in the chest was also dead, lying spread-eagled in the rutted dirt, one hand clawed shut on a fistful of barren dust.

 

Which left the one survivor.

 

Trapped beneath his dead horse, the one-armed man had stopped wriggling, staring up at Ryan and Dean. His revolver had vanished, and his elegant sombrero had become trampled and bloodied and muddied.

 

"Let me go, mister. I can't do you no harm. I just went along with them."

 

"Man carries a gun and rides with coldheart killers, then he shouldn't look for any other ending," Ryan said. "You die with the company you kept." He shot the young man cleanly through the forehead.

 

 

 

JOEY'S HORSE HAD FLED back up the trail, the sound of its clattering hooves fading slowly in the immense silence. Ryan stooped to slit the throat of the fallen bay mare, once he'd seen that it had shattered its fetlock in its fall.

 

"Shame," he said. "If that horse had stayed around and the little mare hadn't crippled herself, we could've been a good spell on our way to the school well before dark."

 

"We leaving the bodies here, Dad?"

 

"I guess so. We could heave them down the ravine after Lemuel and the piano. Not much point, though. Leave it all like it is. J.B. and Jak should be able to read what's gone down here. They'll see our tracks heading southward, clear as day."

 

The boy brightened, looking around him. "Wow, that was a triple-bright light, Dad. Shooting out the rope that got my leg caught was well, it was the greatest. I thought for a bit that we was all done for. But you was so cool and in control. You knew we'd be all right."

 

"You should learn to say 'we were done for,' not 'was done for,' Dean."

 

He didn't reveal to his son his own mind-numbing fear that they had all been going remorselessly to hell with the piano.

 

 

 

IT WAS ONLY WHEN they were forced to resort to walking that they realized how fast they'd been going with the mule team.

 

"How long've we gone?" Dean asked, kneeling by a tiny stream that dashed its way across the tracks, cupping his hands to drink from the icy clearness.

 

"Since the ambush?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Hour." He checked the chron. "Well, call it about an hour twenty."

 

"That all?"

 

"Sure is. After you with the water." The boy wiped his mouth on his sleeve and straightened, allowing his father to take his place by the bubbling stream.

 

"Seems longer. If I look back down the trail, where it bends in that sharp sort of fork, I can still see the dead horses and men." He moved to the unmarked edge of the trail, staring down. "And I can still spot the broke-up wag and mules. Doesn't seem very far away from us."

 

"Mildred has an old predark saying about how times passes quickly when you're having a good time. I guess the downside of that's true, as well."

 

 

 

THEY DIDN'T SEE another living soul, but they found mute evidence that Joey and his two desperadoes had been working their business a little higher up the trail. The weather was changeable, and as they came around a snakeback turn in the trail, there was a drop in the temperature, the sky grew darker and hailstones began to patter down, bouncing off the rocks.

 

And there, lying at the side of the trail, was a dead donkey and the bodies of an old man and a girl, barely into her teens. It was only when they drew near enough to peer more closely at the naked girl that they could be certain of her sex.

 

The man, who, they presumed, was probably her grandfather, lay huddled on his side, a small black hole just in front of his ear, the silver hair scorched by a powder burn. His clothes were in disarray, all of his pockets turned inside-out.

 

Someone had slit the girl's throat, and it was obvious from the bruises and congealed blood around her mouth and between her thighs that she had been brutally used before being slaughtered.

 

Her face was turned to the sky, her eyes wide open. Dean noticed that hailstones were striking into her staring eyes and winced with horror. Looking around, he saw a kerchief that had been ripped from the old man's pockets and he unfolded it and placed it over the girl's face.

 

"We can't bury them, can we, Dad?" Dean said, answering his own question. "Course, we got no spades. Nothing to dig with." When he turned away from the bodies, Ryan noticed a new hardness to Dean's face, as though the experience had aged him.

 

 

 

ONLY A FEW MINUTES of daylight remained when Ryan spotted a small, neat sign, set in concrete, off to the left of the Leadville trail. Nicholas Brody School, Twelve Miles, was all that it said, in rectangular yellow lettering.

 

Ryan knew that road signs, even before the long winters, had always been fair game for any trigger-happy drunk motoring by. But this sign was virginal and untouched.

 

"We make it tonight?"

 

"No way, Dean. This part of the Rockies got grizzly and wolf running wild, as well as cougars. And it used to be a breeding ground for muties, back in my war wag days. No, we'll find somewhere for the night. Start fresh in the morning. That way we'll both make a better impression."

 

 

 

DEAN SLEPT BADLY. He had lain awake for two or three hours, working over in his mind the fact that this was probably the last night he'd spend with his father for at least a year.

 

There had been a gas station on the same side of the road as the sign for the school. The pumps were long gone, hacked off their squat bases for the scrap-metal content, and the cash office had all its windows smashed. But it still retained its flat concrete roof, stained by nearly a hundred years of Rocky Mountain winters, and all four walls.

 

As Dean had lain there, aware of his father's steady breathing at his side, he had caught the eerie sound of a wolf pack on the hunt, their keening rising and falling, ending in the exultant, unmistakable noise of their making a kill.

 

They sounded as if they were only a mile or so away, but distance was difficult to judge among the snowy peaks.

 

Finally, sleep had come.

 

But it was an unquiet, uneasy sleep, disturbed by gibbering phantoms.

 

The dream that finally jerked the boy awake, sweating, crying out, had him in a schoolroom. Then there were rows of desks but no other pupils, a blackboard covered in arcane squiggles that made no sense at all to him and a teacher.

 

A bunch of columbines sat on his desk, and a stuffed lark stood on a shelf behind his head.

 

The teacher was elderly, his clothes disheveled. He had white hair and had cut himself shaving, with dried blood mottling his chin.

 

He beckoned to Dean, indicating a box that lay across the desk, about four feet in length. As the boy drew nearer, he was aware of the smell of corruption and he stopped.

 

"Come on, son," the teacher said with a kindly smile. "You want to learn, don't you?"

 

"So my father'll be proud of me," the boy replied. "Yeah, I do."

 

"Then come and we'll carry on with the biology lesson." The teacher picked up a metal pointer with a needle-sharp silver end. "Come closer and you can see what I'm doing."

 

Dean dragged his feet, the sound harsh, like flints rubbing together, approaching close enough to see that the box had its lid open, but not quite close enough to make out what it contained.

 

"Come, come. Let me point out to you the main features of the human anatomy."

 

Now Dean could see what was in the boxthe naked body of a very beautiful girl, about thirteen years old, with long blond curls.

 

"Here is her nose and her mouth, for scenting and eating," the teacher said, jabbing at each part of her face with the metal pointer. "And these are for seeing."

 

He tapped hard on the open, staring eyes with the silvered end of the pointer, which clicked loudly, as though it had made contact with steel.

 

"No," Dean said in a calm, conversational tone. "Don't do that, you cruel bastard."

 

Suddenly he screamed, "Don't!"

 

The yell woke Ryan, who held his son tightly, until the shaking and the fear had passed and the boy was sleeping quietly again.