Chapter Twenty-One

 

 

The man and woman leaped to their feet with a strange, clumsy agility, both drawing their short-bladed pecking knives. The man spit out a coughing expletive, falling instinctively into a fighter's crouch while the woman remained more upright.

 

In the cold moonlight, Ryan could see them both with a new clarity.

 

The man was around five-six, squat, about one-fifty pounds. His arms seemed too long for his body, the knuckles of the left hand almost trailing in the leaf mold. A mane of the filthiest hair that Ryan had ever seen partly masked the brutish face.

 

"No danger," Ryan said, holding out his hands, but keeping the blaster focused. "Just passing by. Keep it quiet and nobody gets to be hurt."

 

He was fascinated by the state of the man's hair. It was matted and tangled, and seemed to contain a day's supply of food. There was a piece of green, rotting cheese as large as a thumb, stuck above the right ear. As Ryan stared at it, he was horrified to see an opalescent cockroach, scales glittering in the silver moon, crawl apparently from the man's ear and make its way toward the cheese.

 

The woman was shorter and skinnier, her withered, naked body visible through a twisting shroud of rags.

 

A small rodent's carcass was stuck on a spit above the fire, the outside black, charred and smoldering. Ryan pointed at it. "Meat's done."

 

"Not for us not. Only like it burned," the man muttered, not letting go of the knife. "Scared us, jumpin' like a bandersnatch out the dark."

 

"Sorry. Didn't mean to. You live these parts?"

 

"Yeah," the woman replied, sheathing her blade and squatting by the fire, thighs apart, seeming to deliberately expose her sex to him. Ryan swallowed hard and looked away, wishing he'd kept on moving. Apart from his disgust, there was something else that was keeping the short hairs prickling at his nape.

 

"Lived here forever. Was more us." The man reached down and squeezed something in his crotch that made a popping sound. He examined it and slipped it into his mouth. Ryan managed to avoid throwing up.

 

"A ville?"

 

The woman shook her head, and bits of bark and dried dirt flew from it. "Not ville. Small. But him and me's all left. And we don't walk good."

 

The couple looked in the last stages of some gross degenerative disease, hollow eyed, with dried and weeping scabs around their crusted mouths.

 

Ryan simply wanted to make his excuses and leave the clearing. He was unconsciously trying to breathe fast and shallow through his mouth to minimize the risk of breathing in some foul taint of corruption.

 

"Got jack, mister?" the woman asked, holding out a clawed right hand, showing that most of the nails were missing. "Help us out, it would."

 

Ryan shook his head. "Jack I got's the jack I keep," he replied. He was aware of the canteens, swinging heavy on his shoulder. It would be easy enough to fill them up again on the way back. "You got a container, I'll give you good water." He unslung them and opened one so that the fresh gurgling sound filled the clearing.

 

The reaction was startling and scary, similar to his first demon-king appearance in the firelight.

 

The woman threw back her head and screamed, the sinews in her scrawny throat as taut as bowstrings, eyes rolled back in the sockets so that only the bloodshot whites showed.

 

The man dropped to his haunches, suddenly bringing to mind Ryan's fancy of shape-changing, wolflike muties. His head settled in his shoulders, and for a moment he resembled a crouching predator, eyes gleaming yellow under the mane of hair. He was snarling deep in his throat, and flecks of reddened foam dripped from his peeled-back lips.

 

"Fireblast!" Ryan backed off a couple of paces, index finger on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer.

 

"Water chills!" The man's voice cracked, sliding up the scale until it became a lupine howl of mindless rage and fear. "You chill us!"

 

Then the round slipped into the chamber, and Ryan guessed what he'd encountered.

 

"Rabies," he said. "You both got rabies. Wiped out your whole community. Now you're the last."

 

"Blood saves," the woman whispered, eyeing him hungrily, sliding toward him. The knife was back in her hand.

 

Ryan fired two shots, the 9 mm rounds booming out, the sounds muffled by the surrounding trees.

 

The first one took the female through the upper part of the right cheek as she turned her head away from the threat of the blaster. It bowled her over on her back, legs kicking, fingers scrabbling while blood poured from the massive exit wound at the back of her angular skull.

 

The second round caught the man in midleap. He had powered himself up in a vaunting spring toward Ryan's throat, knife in his outstretched hand, open jaws showing the foam-smeared fangs, curved and yellow.

 

Ryan shot him in the chest, going for the safe option, despite the close range and good light.

 

By one of the freaks of combat, the full-metal-jacket round went clean through and out the back without striking anything vital, missing heart, lungs, ribs, spine and scapula, barely slowing the leap.

 

Ryan was taken by surprise, unable to get off a third shot before the howling creature was on top of him. There was just time to use the snub barrel of the SIG-Sauer to deflect the knife from his throat, then he was down in the dirt, rolling and wrestling with the rabid man.

 

He was incredibly strong, fueled by the ravening sickness that was sliding fire through his veins. Ryan got a grip on the right wrist, which held the knife, dropping the now useless blaster, managing to keep his thighs pressed together to stop the intruding knee. He jabbed a couple of short, chopping, savage punches into the man's lower abdomen, but they hardly checked the ferocious attack.

 

The man tried to bite his face, and Ryan barely pulled away in time, knowing that if blood was drawn by the infected creature, then the odds were that he, too, would be contaminated and confront the same brutish passing.

 

There was a vital pressure point beneath the breastbone that Jak had taught Ryan, and the one-eyed man went for it, feeling his fingers beginning to slip in the sweat on his enemy's wrist. It was only a matter of moments before the knife hand was free again. The stink of death from the gaping jaws was overwhelming, and Ryan kept his own face turned away, fingers groping, feeling for the point, hard under the upper ribs, aware of the jerk of shock and pain from the man on top of him as he finally located it and pressed with all his strength.

 

The howling shifted gear, downward, into a roar of agony. The man kicked clear, rolling in the dirt, right across the fire, scattering ashes, flame and burned meat everywhere. The knife dropped from the pain-racked fingers, and the man came up in a crouch.

 

Ryan didn't hesitate. Following up the advantage, he was already back on his feet. For a moment his hand went to the taped hilt of the eighteen-inch steel panga. But he winced from the thought of the rabid blood smearing the clean blade, and he left it sheathed on his hip.

 

Stepping in, perfectly balanced, he kicked out with the steel-tipped combat boot, the point of the toe catching the kneeling man at the angle of the jaw on the left side. There was a snap like a dry branch under the heel, and the head slumped loose on the broken neck. After a moment's pause the dying man went down and rolled on his side, lying still.

 

"Son of a bitch," Ryan said, backing away, picking up the fallen blaster, automatically reloading before checking himself to make sure he hadn't taken any unnoticed scratches or wounds in the tussle.

 

But he was clean. Shaken and bruised, but unharmed. It had been a lucky break.

 

The canteens had tangled themselves around his upper arm and one had emptied itself in the dry dirt, leaving a black patch in the moonlight.

 

Some of the embers from the fire were smoldering in the fringes of stubbly grass under the trees, setting them smoking. Ryan trod them out carefully before leaving the scene of death, his nostrils filled with the stink of the blackened meat and the two corpses.

 

 

 

HE WAS KNEELING by the pool, the background noises of the woods returning again after the mortal fight, when he caught a sound just behind him.

 

"It's me, Ryan," he whispered.

 

"J.B., Jak and Krysty," came the reply. "Heard the shots. All right?"

 

"Sure. Met those neighbors we talked about, and they turned out hostile."

 

"They still hostile?" the Armorer asked.

 

"No," said Ryan. "Not anymore."

 

The others filled their canteens at the sweet pool and when they were all back at their own campsite, he gave them a brief account of the encounter with the rabid couple.

 

"Sure you didn't get even a scratch, Ryan?" Mildred asked worriedly. "Not really a good enough light now to check you over. Best do it first thing in the morning."

 

"I'm fine."

 

Krysty squeezed his hand. "In any case, Mildred, nothing you could do for him if they'd wounded him. Just a matter of waiting and seeing."

 

"Guess so. Least we can clean it thoroughly. Cuts down on the odds."

 

"Think we should post a watch?"

 

Ryan shook his head at J.B. "No."

 

"Sure? There might easy be other sicko freaks around in the woods."

 

"Before they died, they said that they were the last survivors of a small community of dirt-poor folk. Something brought in rabies. Bats, mebbe? There were some in the trees. All of the others had died."

 

The Armorer nodded. "Sure. Night's passing. Best try and catch up on some more sleep."

 

"We go on to Memphis?" Jak asked.

 

"Tomorrow. Don't know how far." Ryan looked again at his oldest friend. "Couple hundred?"

 

J.B. thought about it, pushing back the fedora from his high forehead. "Easy. Long way. Sure we want to take the trouble to go there?"

 

Mildred slapped him on the arm. "You know I want to see if Graceland is still standing, John. You promised. We can find a highway and pick a lift."

 

"All right, all right. I don't recall ever hitting old Memphis, Ryan."

 

They'd been so many places over the riding years with the Trader, that names and villes all blurred, like the faces of the dead, mostly forgotten.

 

"Can't recall it, J.B., must admit. Anyway, let's all go get us some sleep and start fresh in the morning."

 

Doc put on a saccharine-sweet Southern voice. "Why not? Then tomorrow can be another day, and I shall still be relyin' on the kindness of strangers." He looked at the blank faces around him, only Mildred grinning knowingly. "But let it pass, my trusty companions. Let it pass."