Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

 

The rest of that day passed amiably enough. Straub had offered himself as guide, but Ryan suggested that they would prefer to explore on their own. He was told that only the personal quarters of the countess were out-of-bounds to them.

 

"There's an armory?" J.B. asked. "Spent a lot of ammo getting you away from those shit-eating little muties."

 

Straub enthusiastically encouraged the six companions to visit the ville's store of weapons and ammunition and to help themselves to anything they found there.

 

 

 

THERE WAS A YOUNG GUARD on the door, crew cut, his hand resting casually on the butt of the Ruger Red-hawk. "Welcome," he said. "Straub passed on the word from the countess that you could come and help yourself." He looked at their array of armaments and grinned in a friendly fashion. "Guess you know what you want without me having to come in. It's all labeled clear."

 

"Dark night," the Armorer breathed. "Here's a lady knows what she wants and has what she wants. Good an armory as I ever saw, even in a big frontier ville."

 

Jak had spotted a pedal-powered honing wheel and went straight to it, setting himself down to sharpen the edges on his beloved throwing knives.

 

Ryan handed over the eighteen-inch steel panga. "Can you hone that for me while you're at it, Jak?"

 

"Sure." Sparks flew as he pedaled furiously, making the large wheel hum.

 

"Doc, they even got some lead for your cannon," J.B. called. "Fill up your pockets while you can. Don't see many of those 18-gauge grapeshot rounds. And there's plenty of rounds for the revolver chamber." He pushed back the brim of his fedora and looked around the stone-walled room with its rows of chained rifles and scatterguns and the neatly labeled boxes of ammo of every caliber known to man. "This stuff's worth a baron's ransom," he said. "A serious fortune."

 

"Haven't got any flechettes for the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000, have they?" Ryan asked.

 

J.B.'s unusual pistol-grip shotgun held eight rounds of Remington flechettes, each round packed with twenty of the tiny, razored, inch-long darts.

 

"Yeah. Up here in this cabinet. Got plenty of those equaloy rounds and some caseless that would have done for your old Heckler amp; Koch, Ryan."

 

Ryan himself was scavenging for the 7.62 mm rounds he needed for the Steyr SSG-70 hunting rifle. To his delight he even found a brand-new baffle silencer, still in its factory-greased packing, that fitted the SIG-Sauer P-26 automatic. The original one had given up the ghost many months earlier. There were also three olive-green cases of 9 mm ammunition that fitted J.B.'s Uzi, as well as the SIG-Sauer.

 

"There are .38s over here, Mildred," Krysty called, stocking up for her double-action Smith amp; Wesson 640. Mildred's supremely accurate Czech target revolver also fired the Smith amp; Wesson .38 round.

 

Jak needed some .357s for his Colt Python, though he tended to use the blaster as little as possible, relying on his other weapons and his own skills.

 

"Those grens, John?" Mildred asked, looking into a row of open boxes.

 

"Yeah. Any you want? Always come in handy when you least expect it."

 

"Which are the ones that start fires?"

 

"Burners? Those. Next to the blue-and-scarlet implodes. What are you planning to burn, Millie?"

 

She smiled. "You never know what's going to come along just begging for someone to set it on fire."

 

The guard had been wandering around, occasionally checking out of one of the sec-steel barred windows, whistling an old predark song that Ryan recognized as "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You."

 

"Woody Guthrie," Doc said. "During the bleak time that I was held a hapless prisoner by the fiendish whitecoat scientists, before they fired me forward into Deathlands, I became very fond of folk music. Woody was one of my special favorites with his dust-bowl ballads."

 

"You got what you want?" the guard asked.

 

Ryan nodded. "Think so. You finished with that wheel, Jak? Yeah, then we're ready to go."

 

"What you goin' to do next, for the rest of the day? Check out the ville?" the guard asked, leaning against the frame of the sec door.

 

Ryan hadn't thought about it. "You got any ideas? Any good walks around in the grounds?"

 

The guard nodded vigorously. "Why, heck, do we? Countess is real keen on making things beautiful. Most important to her, apart from" He looked around nervously. "Apart from you-know-what about having a son and all."

 

"Which way should we go?" Krysty asked.

 

"Out the rear entrance, past the stables and down over the terraces. Around the pin mill that stands at the end of the long fish pond. Follow a winding path across the flank of the steep valley, and that brings you to the viewing spot at the top of the gorge. Sight worth seeing."

 

"Thanks." Ryan looked around the armory again, thinking that the countess couldn't have seriously malign intentions toward them if she was allowing them this much freedom. There hadn't been even a hint that they might leave their blasters somewhere safe and collect them when they left.

 

"Have a nice day," the guard said.

 

 

 

THEY FOLLOWED his instructions, heading out into the sweet-scented gardens, where many of the plants had small metal labels attached to their stems to identify them. Near the house was a terrace of roses in all colors, sizes and shapes.

 

"This lemony one's beautiful," Krysty said, kneeling to catch the scent.

 

"I like the apricot-colored one." Mildred stooped to rub her fingers through a bush of flowering lavender, cupping her hands and breathing in deeply. "Lovely."

 

The still water of the large, rectangular pond was covered with waxen lilies, pink and ivory, and they could see gigantic carp moving slowly through the mysterious deeps, with smaller goldfish darting between the stems of the plants.

 

"There's path," said Jak, who had taken the lead, showing no interest in the array of shrubs, trees and flowers, eager to get on to the viewing spot so that he could see the river.

 

They passed along the side of a hill, richly planted, that dropped away into a steep valley, with gigantic pines at its bottom, and a narrow stream winding through under an ornamental wooden bridge.

 

"I believe that I can hear the river," Doc said, pausing to gather breath and sitting on a bench that overlooked the lovely valley.

 

There was a whispering sound, like surf on a distant beach, from somewhere ahead of them.

 

Jak was a long way in front, his flaring snow white hair leading them like a beacon along the twisting path. The ground leveled out, and the rich vegetation faded away until they were walking over bare rock.

 

"Noise is louder," Mildred said. "I thought that Old Miss was the only river running through Memphis."

 

"Probably was." Ryan paused and looked back, seeing the fortified mansion, standing on a promontory, perfectly placed for defense against any attackers. "But Tennessee was one of the states hardest hit by the earth shifts after the nuking. We've seen that already. Volcanoes and swamps. So a new river isn't much of a surprise."

 

"There's the viewing point that the guard mentioned," J.B. said.

 

It was a reinforced platform of concrete tied in with steel girders to the bedrock at the top of the cliffs. Ryan noticed that much of the stone all around the ville seemed oddly raw, as if it had been buried for eons of time and had only been pushed out into daylight a hundred or so years earlier. The sides of the gorge down to the foaming ribbon of the river, several hundred feet below, were also fresh looking, with streaks of light stone among the darker gray.

 

Jak was hanging on to a wire fence that had been built around the edge of the platform, staring down into the deeps. "Can't dive straight into the river. Slopes away steep, then drops sheer for last hundred feet or so."

 

They all joined him, and Doc whistled softly between his excellent teeth. "Upon my soul, but that is a fine spectacle. To view it gives an odd tightening of the scrotum, if you will pardon my language, ladies."

 

Mildred tutted. "Keep your tight scrotum to yourself, will you, Doc?"

 

"But you know that feeling of part thrill and part primitive, atavistic terror of heights, madam. To go over there is to die, without a doubt."

 

Jak was swinging back and forth on the flimsy fence, oblivious to the fact that some of its base fastenings had come loose and it was only hanging in place by a few rusting pins. "If dived clean down be all right. Straight into river. Long as no shallows or rocks."

 

The Armorer was fanning himself with his hat, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. "Quite wrong, Jak."

 

"How?"

 

J.B. sniffed. "I saw a mag article once about high divers. Seems there's an optimum height, no matter how skillful you are, where your momentum gathers and you accelerate until hitting water's like hitting a sheet of marble."

 

"Thirty-two feet per second, per second," Mildred said. "One of the few facts I recall from high school physics. Rate of acceleration. Means in the first second you fall thirty-two feet. Sixty-four feet the next second. Ninety-six in the third second. And so on and on, faster and faster, until you reach maximum speed, whatever that is."

 

Krysty threw back her head, letting the strong breeze blow through her flaming hair. "I read that high divers also got punchy after a bit, because of the repeated damage to their brain. So keep away from the edge, Jak."

 

The teenager looked at the others, as if he wondered if he were being teased. He decided he wasn't and moved back a couple of paces from the brink.

 

"You all right, Doc?" Mildred asked, seeing that the old man was looking a little pale and had moved back out of the sun to sit on a shelf of shaded rock.

 

He was holding his stomach, biting his lip. "I believe it is just a passing attack of dyspepsia, thank you, Doctor. But rather sharp, I must confess."

 

"Maybe we should get back to the house, so you can have a rest. Put your feet up. Ryan?"

 

"Yeah, sure."

 

But the sight of the misty river, raging through the deep gorge, was hypnotic. The sensation drawing him toward it was strangely powerful and brought back to him the mesmeric powers of Straub.

 

He tore himself away from the platform, and they made their way back to the ville, Doc occasionally rubbing at his stomach while assuring them that he was feeling fine.

 

Ryan walked with J.B. and Krysty. "What do you make of Straub?" he asked.

 

"Mad and bad all the way through, lover. He glories in what that bitch's done to him. Like it was some sort of sick honor. Still wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit."

 

"J.B.?"

 

"Man's got a brain like a cunning, rabid rat. My guess is that he's got himself caught by someone as devious and power crazed as him. Now he's settling himself inside her nest. Become a councilor to her so she'll need him and trust him." The Armorer was polishing his glasses as they walked by the pool. A dragonfly, better than a foot in length, floated by them, a poem in iridescent turquoise and aquamarine. "And one day the Countess Katya Beausoleil gets to wake up dead."

 

Ryan paused to look at a gigantic carp, rainbow scaled, as it broke the surface of the pond to snap at a skimming water boatman. "Yeah," he said. "Like we think along the same lines. Wish he'd tell us the truth about Trader. Probably the only way we'll ever know how that final curtain came down."

 

 

 

THE HOUSE HAD A wonderful library, and it was a pleasure for the companions to spend some time there during the afternoon. The weather had closed in, and a gray drizzle blew across the gardens from the gorge, beating on the shuttered windows. There was no sign of either the countess or of Straub himself.

 

They ate a perfectly cooked but exceedingly dull supper alone in the dining room.

 

A guard warned them as they prepared to go to their rooms for the night that the expedition for Graceland would be leaving around nine in the morning, so would they make sure they were down for breakfast by eight.