Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

Ryan had made the steep climb up toward Alma, seeing no trace of life for several hours. Then the first sign that he saw of life was death.

 

A telegraph pole on the right side of the road had been rigged into a makeshift crucifix, and the body of a naked woman hung from it.

 

The rain had finally eased, but there was still a persistent drizzle. Ryan blinked up into it, looking at the corpse, suspecting that it might well be one of the kidnapped Quaker women. Not that anyone would ever have recognized her.

 

It was impossible to tell at what point death had come to the poor wretch. The probability was that she'd still been living when they'd strung her up, using thin baling wire around wrists, elbows and ankles to hold her in place. The wire had cut into the flesh, leaving deep, white-lipped gashes.

 

The bruises around her breasts and across her thighs told their own tale of how viciously she'd been abused before death, and the circular torn patches of skin showed the rending hands of stickies had been involved.

 

The hair on her head and on her body had been burned away, which also indicated stickies. Nothing in Deathlands loved fires and explosions like stickies did.

 

After they'd used her to satisfy their own sexual lusts, the gang had crucified her, then used her for target practice. Her right hand had been blown off at the wrist, and there were other devastating wounds all over the body. What remained of her face was unrecognizable. What blood there had been had long washed away in the downpour and the corpse was as white as marble, the various wounds showing dark purple.

 

Ryan stared blank-faced at the sight.

 

If he'd had any doubts of the sort of gang they were going to deal with, then this would have removed them. It was a brutal mob with no sense of the dignity of life.

 

A few pebbles and clods of earth clattered down the hillside, making him jump and draw his blaster. But it wasn't repeated, and he guessed that it was a result of the heavy rain.

 

As Ryan started to walk on, boots splashing through the watery mud, the drizzle grew stronger, turning into full-fledged rain.

 

 

 

"SOMETHING'S LYING at the side of the trail," Krysty said, pushing back threads of soaking red hair from her forehead. "Looks like a body."

 

The light was very poor, more like evening than noon, the visibility diminished by the curtains of rain that swept across the top of the pass.

 

"Dead one," Jak said.

 

"Man or woman?" Krysty had already quickened her stride, feeling a lump like cold lead in her heart.

 

"Can't Got white hair."

 

It was an old man and he wasn't dead. But he wasn't far off, his breathing shallow and rapid, his pulse barely there. He was sodden and looked as if he'd been lying faceup at the side of the road for some hours.

 

Mildred had carefully checked him over, kneeling in the muddy pool where he lay. She looked up at the others. "No chance," she said quietly. "Hypothermia's way too advanced. If I had a hot bed and a warm room within a hundred yards, and skilled nursing staff, then maybe I could just save him." She stood. "That's only a maybe."

 

"What do we do with the poor old fellow?" Doc asked, water streaming down his stubbled cheeks, matting the silver hair to his leonine head.

 

"Nothing," Mildred replied.

 

"We cannot just leave him! By the Three Kennedys! He is our brother."

 

J.B. shook his head. "No, he isn't, Doc. He's a stranger. Help him if you can. If you can't, then you might as well move on. Sympathy won't help him. He's dying."

 

He turned to Mildred. "Is that right, Millie?"

 

"I'm afraid so, Doc. A bullet would best put him out of his misery."

 

"Butcher him?"

 

"Truth is, the old man's in no pain. He's in a deep coma and he'll never come out of it. Weather like this'll take him off in an hour or so. He's that close to the dark ferry. Believe me, Doc, there isn't a single damned thing we can do for him. Can't even ask if he's seen Ryan."

 

Doc stooped and plucked a scarf from around the dying man's throat, folding it carefully over his face. "Least it'll keep the rain from his eyes," he said.

 

 

 

RYAN HAD FOUND another body, tossed by the side of the winding blacktop like a discarded toy. He guessed that it was one of the children kidnapped from the Quaker train. She lay huddled on her back with her throat slit, both arms broken. Her body hadn't been so badly mutilated as the woman.

 

"Building up a good blood score," he said to himself. He straightened the little body and placed it gently beneath a broad sycamore tree, standing and looking down at it. "Wasn't your day, was it, kid?" he said.

 

 

 

BECAUSE THERE SEEMED little evidence of serious danger, J.B. hadn't felt it necessary to order them into a strung-out skirmish line.

 

He walked along with Mildred, while Krysty had found herself taking the point position. Behind her, Jak and Doc were deeply involved in an argument of extraordinary complexity about what happened beyond space.

 

"You say space started with big bang from nothing. What was before nothing, Doc?"

 

"Fields, dear boy. Fields of potentiality. Thirty-seven of them, according to what was the latest thinking when they pushed me forward to Deathlands."

 

"But how can something come from nothing?"

 

"You have to be able to wrap your brain about particles that have no mass and can be in two or three places at the same time. Difficult, I know."

 

Krysty had been half listening to what she could catch above the ceaseless splashing of the rain on the trail. But half of her mind was fixed on Ryan. At least they knew that he was roughly a full day ahead of them.

 

For a moment the rain stopped altogether, and shafts of silvery sunshine broke clear across the valley, showing them their destination, a thousand feet or more below, and the ribbon of highway that wound back up to their right, toward where she knew Fairplay and Harmony lay.

 

Everyone stopped to stare at the beautiful view.

 

"Worthy of the painter Turner at his mystic best," Doc said.

 

"We can almost see Ryan from here," Mildred stated. "If we knew just where to look."

 

Krysty was following the snaking trail down below them when her eyes were caught by what looked like the wreckage of a burned-out wag, and some people. Although none of them seemed to be moving.

 

 

 

"BROTHER ANGUS went for help," breathed the elderly woman who was crawling steadily, head down, knees raw and bloodied, about two hundred yards from the scene of devastation. "I just decided to go after him but can't make it."

 

They had made her as comfortable as they could. Mildred and Krysty went to check the others.

 

A snow-haired man and another old woman were still clinging by their fingernails to the ragged edge of life. Beyond the wag, on a flat stretch of the tundra before the first of the remorseless lines of blue spruce, were some graves.

 

Some were completed, some half-finished and some barely started. One was full of water and held the floating corpse of a child and the body of a man, who looked as if he'd been digging, had slipped and fallen in headfirst and drowned.

 

Mildred returned to where Doc was sitting in the dirt, cradling the head of the old woman in his lap. "She said they were attacked by a gang that included stickies," he said. "And Ryan passed by them in the night. She can't remember more than that, but it must've been him. Tall, one-eyed man, who tried to help." He sighed. "Her mind wanders, and I fear that she is also a candidate for that dark ferryman."

 

Mildred checked her over, confirming Doc's informal diagnosis. "Yeah," she said, straightening and looking around. "She say anything else?"

 

J.B. answered her. "They're Quakers. Got attacked. Lost all their food, which was little enough. They were all close to starvation. Ryan told them to go back to Leadville. They insisted on trying to bury their dead. She says that's what pushed them all over the brink."

 

Krysty sniffed. "Ryan had an ace on the line. Time's gone and it's too late. If they'd struck off for Leadville straight away, most of them could've made it. As it is" She shrugged.

 

"What we do?" Jak asked.

 

J.B. had been about to speak, but he looked instead at Krysty and Mildred, hesitating. "They're all dying. We don't have the food or the facilities to help a single one of them."

 

Mildred nodded, the beads in the wet plaits whispering softly. "Goes hard against the grain, but like John says. There isn't a thing we can do. Except stop and hold hands until they let go."

 

"How long would that be?" Doc asked. "It is grim to leave a fellow human being to a lonely passing."

 

"Afternoon now," Mildred said. "They'll all be gone by moonrise."

 

Doc rose, carefully laying the dying woman's head in the dirt. Her eyes had closed, and she seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness.

 

"If we are to go, then it were best that we go quickly," he said. "Before I allow my heart to take precedence over my head. I know that we must leave them. But" He allowed the sentence to trail away into the gray drizzle.

 

 

 

THE GANG MEMBERS HAD BEEN using their victims for their pleasure along the road, stopping, sometimes, to light a small fire to keep themselves warm and to inflict a little pain and torture. Then they moved on, higher up the trail, leaving the corpses discarded by the roadside.

 

Brother Angus had told him that the bandits had taken five women from the wag.

 

Before he reached Alma, with the sun well down, Ryan had found all of them.

 

Ryan had two kinds of anger.

 

One was the sudden flaring rage that he had always found difficult to control, which dated back from when he was a young boy. The veins would throb in his temple and the scar across his cheek would pulse like a disturbed snake. A crimson mist seemed to filter across his mind, sometimes snatching away his combat senses.

 

It was something that seemed to happen much less often than it used to, and Ryan could now, generally, bring it quickly under control.

 

And there was the other kind of anger, the kind that was slow to be triggered but gradually gathered its own murderous momentum. It was like a cold flame that burned with a terrible clean light.

 

The short-fuse anger would come and go within a minute.

 

But the kind of rage that now seeped through Ryan's mind and body would be extinguished only when he'd taken revenge on the gang of mindless, brutish murderers.

 

 

 

THERE WAS MORE of their handiwork to see when he eventually reached the site of what had once been the attractive little ville of Alma.

 

With the steady rain it was impossible to tell when the fires had been set, but the smell still lingered. The cracked and blackened timbers streamed with water, and every last spark was long extinguished.

 

At least there weren't too many bodies. It looked as if a lot of the inhabitants of Alma had gotten wind of the raiders and managed to make their escape, possibly down the trail toward the old interstate.

 

A row of four men had been crucified to a barn wall, with long steel nails that had crushed through their palms and ankles. One had been hung upside down and a fire lit beneath him, so that little remained of his charred skull and torso.

 

Once again, it was cruelty for its own mean sake, tainted with the vicious sickness of the stickies in the gang.

 

Most of the township had been fired, with every building on the main drag either destroyed or seriously damaged.

 

Night was closing in, and the endless rain showed no sign of abating. Twice in the last half mile Ryan had come across evidence of serious earth slips, where the dirt had absorbed all the water it could and had given way in a wall of streaming mud.

 

"Best get shelter," he said to himself.

 

Glancing around through the gloomy drizzle, he could see that some of the side streets of the little ville seemed to be untouched by fire.

 

Movement caught his eye, and he saw what looked like a dozen or more tiny mice scurrying across from one building to another, their little legs powering through the spray.

 

Ahead of him he could make out a row of wooden shacks, some of them already tumbled, built against a steep slope that held some stunted pines. He thought he could see the remnants of an ancient mine a little higher up the hillside, but it was getting too dark to be sure.

 

Ryan picked his way through the muddy puddles, trying to decide which of the cottages looked the most solid. Four or five of them seemed to have been inhabited, with unbroken glass in windows, curtains and decent front doors. One had a few scrubby rosebushes tangled around a white picket fence, and a hand-painted nameplate on the gate. Pong-de-rosa, it was called.

 

Ryan took a last look around the dead township, checking that he wasn't being watched, then walked up the narrow path and pushed at the front door. After a momentary resistance, it gave, and he stepped into a dark hall.

 

There wasn't the usual dead, flat smell of a long-empty building and he hesitated. Food had been cooked within the last day or so, and he could smell lamp oil.

 

The woman's voice from the shadows wasn't all that much of a shock.

 

"You got three seconds to tell me why I shouldn't blast your cock clean out your ass."