Chapter Fourteen

 

 

In a wrecked vacation cottage somewhere up near what remained of the Great Lakes, Ryan had once found a stash of children's books. Included was a beautifully illustrated copy of the adventures of Robin Hood, who had been an English outlaw in the Middle Ages who'd allegedly robbed the rich and given the proceeds to the poor. It was a way of life that had been a source of endless raucous amusement to the crew of War Wag One.

 

Robin had some friends, one or two of which had stuck in Ryan's memory, a giant called Little John and a fat priest who had been named Friar Tuck.

 

Now, as Ryan turned slowly to stare down the yawning railroad tunnels of a Winchester Model 24, 20-gauge, he gaped at the figure holding the lethal blaster.

 

He wore a long brown gown, like a woman's dress, that fell to sandaled feet, tied at the waist with a length of knotted cord. A whip, twin to the one on the altar, was stuffed into the makeshift belt.

 

Ryan's initial guess put him at close to six feet, but he was so fat it was hard to judge. Really big men often looked shorter than they were. He looked around three hundred pounds, but it was easy to see that a lot of that was hard muscle.

 

His face was round, with several wobbling chins, clean shaved. The top of his head had also been shaved in a kind of circle, exactly like the picture of the legendary Friar Tuck. The eyes were difficult to judge in the gloom of the church, but they were so dark they could have passed for black, almost buried behind layers of fat, looking like little currants that had been thrown hard into a vat of white dough.

 

And he was smiling.

 

"Welcome, dear pilgrims. Such a pleasant surprise to find a pair of worshipers waiting for my services so early on such a fine morning."

 

"Not exactly worshipers, Father," said Krysty, whose face had gone pale. Ryan also noticed that her sentient hair had responded to the alarming apparition by curling in on itself, tight on her skull.

 

He beamed at her. "What a deeply ecumenical comment, my dear child. For surely all of us are 'not exactly worshipers.' How aptly spoken."

 

Ryan allowed his right hand to drop casually toward the butt of the holstered SIG-Sauer, on the blind side to the monk. But the man spotted the movement and gestured toward him with the barrels of the Winchester.

 

"No, no, no," he tutted. "We have only just met and you are trying to force me to speed you to your own personal Gehennah. Pray make no hasty moves."

 

"Gehennah? That near Savannah?" Krysty asked. "That's where we're bound when we spotted your church and we were just so taken with it."

 

"Filthy whoring harlot," he said, the broad smile untouched by the anger in his voice. "An untruth in the mouth of a strumpet is like unto worms in the brain of a camel."

 

Ryan guessed that the man was crazier than a shit-house rat, but he was also as dangerous as a cornered rodent. The chubby finger was tight on the triggers of the scattergun, the mean little eyes not flickering from them.

 

"You live here?" Ryan asked, trying to turn the conversation into safer waters.

 

"I have a small home close by. But I am remiss. I am called Father Sandor by my poor flock."

 

"There's a ville nearby?" Krysty probed.

 

"Oh, indeed, yes. Praise the gods."

 

Ryan was vaguely bothered by the strange smell that lurked underneath the reek of incense, a smell that also clung to the body and clothes of the fat monk.

 

"You don't need the blaster, Father," Krysty said, taking a casual step across to her left, trying to cover Ryan from the man's vision.

 

But Father Sandor was alert, gesturing with the shotgun for her to move back again. "Stupidity'll get you very dead, my child. Before your time. And who knows when the hour cometh? Be prepared, foolish harlot."

 

"Interesting stained glass," Ryan said, gesturing toward the windows, but the monk's attention never wavered for a moment. "Unusual."

 

Father Sandor stopped smiling, so suddenly that it was like a scream. "Enough talk."

 

"You aiming to keep us here?" Ryan asked. "Won't your flock get suspicious?"

 

The smile came back, frosty and bleak as pack ice. "My dear one-eyed dead man, my 'flock'as you call themshit themselves if I even glance in their direction. They know that this is not as other churches, and this is what the dirt-poor triple-dumb bastards secretly need. Not to be loved. To be cursed and whipped and tortured and sometimes chilled. That is a form of religion that makes sense in their brutish lives."

 

Ryan thought about the whip with its blood-clogged barbs lying on the altar, and he knew that life for both of them was hanging here by a hair. If there was a glimmer of a quarter chance, then to miss it would be to die. He'd known plenty of cold-heart killers in his lifetime in Deathlands, and Father Sandor was right up there with the best of them.

 

Or the worst of them.

 

"We'll go down into the crypt, pilgrims on the highway to celestial suffering."

 

He gestured with the scattergun, pointing them toward the front of the church, by the altar.

 

"Behind the pulpit, outlanders."

 

As they moved slowly forward, Ryan noticed that the figure of the crucified Christ that hung at the farther end of the church was sheathed in coils of razored barbed wire.

 

Father Sandor stayed a safe six paces behind them, not giving them a ghost of a chance to jump him.

 

"Ring in the floor. Lifts easily with the aid of the gods and a good counterbalance. Find a lamp and some self-lights just inside it and some steps down. Get the lamp going and walk down the steps. Go straight to the far wall and wait there for me. Don't thee move or speak."

 

Ryan stooped and tugged on a wrought-iron ring set in the stone floor close by the altar. He heaved on it, surprised at how easily it swung open.

 

"Gaia!" Krysty gasped in horror at the noxious miasma that floated up from the black hole.

 

And Ryan knew instantly what the smell had been that he'd first noticed in the church, clinging to the person of gross Father Sandor.

 

It was death, spilled blood, fresh and old, putrefaction of human flesh, ancient and modern. The vault below the aisle was nothing more or less than a charnel house.

 

Ryan hesitated at entering the pit, and the priest grew angry.

 

"Now or later. Matters not a jot to me, outlander. But most of my parish find breath oddly attractive and cling to it. Longer than one would have thought possible."

 

"I'm going." Ryan lighted the oil lamp and adjusted the wick to give a steady, golden light that showed him a narrow flight of steps that wound down into a deep cellar.

 

"I think the time has come for thee to lay aside the weapons of unrighteousness, brother and sister. The two blasters can go down on the floor, at the top of the stairs. Perhaps that crooked stick, as well."

 

"Can't walk without it. Got a bullet in my leg. Can't even stand."

 

There was a long, menacing stillness, and Ryan knew that the monk was considering the option of blasting him in the spine. But the first option of having them both untouched in his crypt finally won out.

 

"Very well. But thy automatic and thy double-action Smith amp; Wesson, daughter of ungodliness. Very slow and very careful. Lay them down, pilgrims."

 

Ryan and Krysty obeyed the soft, oily voice, gently putting down their handblasters.

 

"Now thee may creep into my crypt."

 

 

 

THE CELLAR was unbearably hot, with two coal fires burning in iron braziers, one at each end, casting a fiery, crimson glow across the space that heightened the images of Hell.

 

Rows of torture instruments were hung on strong metal hooks probes, files, hammers and pokers; whips in all shapes and sizes; knives, razors and cleavers; a rack and thumbscrews; chains and loops of thin wire, manacles and iron collars with padlocks.

 

It was a fully equipped torture chamber, like an engraving from an ancient tome about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.

 

And it was occupied.

 

Ryan and Krysty immediately saw the body of a young person, hung from one of the hooks like a rejected side of meat, so mangled that it was impossible to tell its sex or its age.

 

The corpse had been torn and battered in a hideous manner that screamed of endless hours of unimaginable pain and suffering.

 

Father Sandor was all too obviously a man who enjoyed his own skills.

 

"Ah, that," he said, beaming again in the light of the oil lamp, the fires casting a sweating sheen over his jowls. "A local youth who helped me with a service for good crops for the ville. A successful operation, but the patient, sadly, died." He laughed at his own humor.

 

He gestured for Ryan and Krysty to stand against the far wall of the cellar while he laid several probes and pokers in the braziers to grow hot.

 

"Suffering is pleasure and pleasure is suffering," the fat monk muttered, still keeping the Winchester scattergun aimed at his two prisoners.

 

It was obvious to Ryan that the priest intended to chain them, then torture them both to death. This was as inexorable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the far west. It meant that the moment was coming like a runaway train when some sort of move would have to be made, go up against the menace of the shotgun, whatever the outcome.

 

It was the most slender of chances, but it was a whole lot better than no chance at all.

 

He knew that Krysty would be thinking exactly the same, but there was no way of communicating with each other, no plan to be hatched.

 

At the back of his mind was the desperate idea of making a suicidal attack and hope that Sandor fired both of the barrels, giving Krysty a good chance of making a break for safety, then bringing J.B., Jak and the others back with her to avenge his own death.

 

Even at that dark moment, Ryan grinned wolfishly to himself, amused by his own shadowed plan of dying.

 

If the monk had been holding a handblaster, there would have been a goodish chance that he might miss. Ryan remembered seeing a nervous bounty hunter in a clothing store in a nameless ville in Pennsylvania fire eight shots from a Ruger P-85 at a dodging killer. All of them were at a range of less than ten feet, and every single bullet missed the target.

 

That wasn't going to happen at that range with a 20-gauge scattergun.

 

Father Sandor was breathing heavily with his own bustling exertion, readying himself for hours of sheer delight. His voice had become high and thin, like a eunuch's, with his own sick arousal.

 

"Now," he said, "thee can strip thy bubonic bodies naked and then chain thyselves to the walls. And we shall commence the service."

 

The instruments of torture in the hot coals were already beginning to glow cherry red.

 

"The scum of my parish will be so happy when they hear that I have consecrated a pair of strangers in the church. They will be happy because they will know that they will be spared for a short while." Sandor giggled. "But it will be a very short while."

 

Ryan hadn't moved, leaning on his clumsy walking stick, clinging to each passing second. Mildred and the Armorer hadn't been all that far away from the little church, and there was always a remote chance that they might come along and save the day. It was a small hope.

 

"Clothes off," Sandor snapped.

 

"Please," Krysty said.

 

"The time for begging will come later," he replied. "When the blood flows and salt fills your eyes and mouth, and your flesh is scorched and you crave butter for the smarting. But there is no butter here in Hell!"

 

"Just let her go and keep me," Ryan said, going along with time-buying.

 

Sandor grinned so widely his whole face became a huge creased smile. "I have two pets for my collection. Why, outlander filth, should I give either of you up?"

 

The shotgun barrels were about eight feet away from the two prisoners.

 

Too far.

 

Krysty took a step toward the priest, her hands spread for mercy. "Please," she said again.

 

Instinctively Sandor took a similar step back from her, gesturing with the big shotgun for her to stay where she was. But his movement had made him bump into the dangling corpse. The chains rattled noisily, and the eyeless skull slumped suddenly down onto the burned chest with a strange clicking sound.

 

In the atmosphere of bizarrely heightened tension, the monk jumped with shock, head turning to stare at the bobbing body, the Winchester scattergun swinging away from Ryan and Krysty for a moment.

 

How do you measure a moment when your entire life hangs in the balance?

 

Half a second?

 

A single beat of the human heart?

 

An indrawn breath?

 

All of Ryan's combat reflexes had been stretched to the limit, since the first appearance of the malevolent priest, ready to take instant advantage of any chance that appeared.

 

Sandor had a deep and ingrained sense of primitive evil on his side, combined with a total and brutish disregard for the sanctity of human life.

 

There was flurry of movement, a yell of surprise and the boom of the shotgun being fired, the charge shattering the oil lamp, plunging the cellar into almost total darkness.