Chapter Fourteen

 

The wooden sign that ran along the length of the storefront was painted in bright hues of orange, green and blue, with cutout sound-effect icons such as Pow and Biff and Zonk decorating the corners in a three-dimensional effect.

 

"Kollector's Kloset," Dean read.

 

"Yet another example of the wretched spelling to be found across Deathlands." Doc sighed from his vantage point next to the boy. "Eventually I fear the human race will ultimately regress to painting pictographs in dyes made of blood and dung on dank cave walls."

 

"And fighting with clubs and stones, eh, Doc?" Krysty said.

 

"Why not?" Ryan said thoughtfully, allowing himself to see the philosophical side of life after his pit battle. "The world's got to run out of ammo sooner or later. Then we're all reduced to fighting in bearskins."

 

" Indeed," Doc agreed.

 

"I don't think the guy who runs this place is that stupid, Doc. I think the owner is trying to make some kind of statement," Krysty said.

 

None of the group could see inside the store very well, since the front display windows and door were covered in layers and layers of old faded paper posters, featuring drawings of colorfully attired characters with names like Wolverine and Batman. It was hard to fully read any of the advertisement in the collagelike display. It seemed that once one poster had served out its time in the shop's display, the owner merely pasted up another on top instead of taking down the earlier one, giving the windows a curious checkerboard pattern of overlapping designs.

 

" The X-Men ," Dean read off one poster. "Mutant Hope In A World Gone Mad. Twenty Monthly Titles For Your Reading Excitement, Only From The House Of Ideas. What a load of crap. Those guys in the funny suits are norms. They sure aren't like any muties I ever saw."

 

"Nor are any of those women," Krysty added.

 

"Mutant tits," Jak said.

 

"Wait, I have heard of this Batman," Doc said. "He was what they once called a superhero. His costume was worn to strike terror in the hearts of evil men."

 

"No kidding?" Ryan said. "Was he a fancy sec man or what?"

 

"No, no, Ryan, you misunderstand. Batman was a fictional creation who appeared in comic books for the delight of the under-eighteen set."

 

"Meaning?"

 

"Children's entertainment," Doc said succinctly.

 

"We've got time," Ryan mused, glancing at his wrist chron. "You want to go in for a look, Dean? Better than standing out here in the mall with our thumbs up our asses waiting on J.B."

 

"Yeah! All right," Dean eagerly agreed, "That would be a hot pipe, Dad!"

 

Before the boy could open the door to the store, Ryan held out a hand. "Hold up. The window's so crowded, we can't see in. Let me take a quick look first."

 

He pulled open the glass entrance and stuck his head through. He felt half-silly doing a recce inside a place obviously designed to be a spot for what Doc had told him was the entertainment of half-wits and children, but he knew from hard experience that nothing was ever as it seemed in the Deathlands.

 

Still, his eye wasn't ready for a sight such as this.

 

From floor to ceiling were off-white cardboard boxes filled with magazines, wall pegs adorned with packaged miniature toys and games, racks of compact discs and black vinyl LPs, and an array of other colorful debris that Ryan didn't even pretend to recognize. Even the surface of the drop ceiling was adorned with more of the posters as seen on the front of the establishment. As Ryan stepped through the glass door into the morass, a tinkly bell jingled overhead to announce his arrival.

 

"Wasn't kidding about the closet part in the name of this place, lover," Krysty said, walking in close behind him. "Going to be crowded in here."

 

"Feel anything?" Ryan asked, hoping Krysty's latent psi abilities might pick out any dangers hidden behind the crowded piles of boxes.

 

"Just claustrophobic. Only danger here as far as I can tell is mebbe having something fall on you."

 

Ryan glanced back and grinned. "You break it, you bought it, darlin'."

 

"Wow," Dean breathed, his eyes open wide. "Look at all this stuff!"

 

Ryan pressed forward, allowing the others to come inside the small pathway that wound its way along the store's contents to the back counter.

 

"That smell," Doc whispered. "Wait, let me place it in the proper context!"

 

Jak wrinkled his nose. "Stinks. Smell sweat."

 

"Yeah, somebody needs to wash their ass," Dean agreed.

 

"No, I speak not of the stench of unwashed flesh, young Cawdor. I'm talking about the heavenly aroma of old paper. Rotting pulp."

 

"Dust, you mean," Krysty said, running a finger along a box top and bringing it up coated with fine dirt.

 

The smell was unfamiliar. In the Deathlands it was quite unusual to find much in the way of printed material, new or old. The larger villes might have their own little news sheets run off on antique printing pressesDoc had spied a version of this in Freedom and had happily grabbed one up in search of any printed information, only to find it was a series of advertisements for the endless array of mall stores but in the poorer sections, more often than not paper was viewed as nothing more than useful kindling or toilet tissue.

 

As for older, predark vintage books and magazines, most of the paper goods had long since crumbled into dust due to the abnormal weather conditions around the globe or vanished into nothingness in the long nuclear winter immediately following skydark. There were rare exceptions, the odd baron and a hoard of books.

 

A fair estimate of the general populace of Deathlands would probably put most men and women in the category of the functionally illiterate. There was no time for reading for the enjoyment of books, nor was there a viable system of delivering written letters or messages. Written contracts with signatures were a thing of the past, except for barons who delighted in thrusting papers down for hired help to make their signature mark without even knowing what agreements such contracts contained.

 

Kollector's Kloset contained the most pulp paper any of the group had ever seen. One wall was devoted to bagged examples of horror magazines. Ryan's eye traveled over the lurid covers before one caught his complete and undivided attention.

 

As he sighted the predark magazine, everyone heard a sound that was familiar yet disturbing all the same.

 

Ryan was laughing, a deep-from-the-gut laugh followed by a few guffaws and chuckles.

 

"You okay?" Jak asked carefully. The albino hadn't cared much for this shop from the beginning, and now Ryan's mirth was starting to set him more on edge. Ryan rarely laughed, unless it was in irony or bitterness.

 

This laughter was genuine, the kind that came without conscious thought or warning, the kind of natural laughter few people were able to give of themselves.

 

Ryan nodded toward the wall of monster magazines. "Check out the one on the bottom left there," he said, still amused. "Does the ghoul on the front in the fancy knee britches look familiar to anybody besides me?"

 

Dean's young voice was the next to ring out in laughter, followed in turn by Krysty's chuckling, then Jak's bark of surprise and amusement. Unable to contain his curiosity, Doc bent over and peered intently at the indicated magazine cover. The colors were lurid green on mustard yellow. The center of the cover was dominated by a tall, spindly man dressed in a long greenish coat with a lean face, hawk nose and thinning white hair. The man was waving a hand in a gesture of entry into the magazine's interior.

 

" Creepy ," Doc read off the top of the cover. " Creepy Magazine ."

 

"You forget the rest, Doc," Ryan added, reading the blurb next to the figure. "Says here that Uncle Creepy Welcomes You Inside."

 

"Yes, yes, I see that. What I am missing is the implied humor."

 

"That Uncle Creepyhe looks just like you, Doc!" Dean piped up, in a gale of giggling.

 

Doc frowned. "Nonsense! This fellow looks nothing like the proud countenance of"

 

"Quiet!" Ryan whispered. "Somebody's in the back. I guess the guy who owns the place finally decided to make an appearance."

 

Ryan's words were proven true when a fat, bearded man-child waddled out from a back room and took up a stance behind the long row of glass showcases.

 

He looked to be carrying about three-hundred-plus pounds on his five-foot-four-inch frame. His hair was long and greasy, and appeared to have been dyed a phony jet black that never existed in nature. His beard was also the same unnatural color of night. He wore a T-shirt two sizes too small. On the shirt was a picture of a tall man with pointed ears spouting the command Live Long And Prosper.

 

Some dark brown gravy stains also adorned the shop owner's attire above the moon white expanse of flesh visible between his shirttail and waistband.

 

Ryan kept expecting him to knock over one of the many precariously stacked piles of books, toys and junk with either his wide ass or wider stomach, but he was nimble and seemed to possess an uncanny sense of grace when it came to navigating the store's many possessions.

 

"Greetings and salutations. My name is Chet. I am the proprietor of this, my humble establishment," the bearded man said. "Welcome to the finest array of predark comics and collectibles on the East Coast. If we don't have what you're looking for, we can find it for you with our search service for a small fee."

 

"More fees," Jak sniffed.

 

"Pardon me," Doc said, moving to the counter. "I cannot help but notice you deal in paper goods."

 

"Whoa, you are quite the elder," Chet said, staggering back and holding a hand over his heart as he got his first clear look at Doc. "Hey! Anybody ever tell you that you look just like Uncle Cree"

 

"No! No, they have not."

 

"Oh, okay. Man, a guy your age, I bet you've got a bitching collection."

 

"Only of memories, my rotund friend, and those are getting harder and harder to find as time goes on," Doc said wistfully. "Alas, I now have no place to call home to keep my possessions. All I have is what I carry."

 

"Say, that's a real flashback of a mack daddy jacket you're wearing," Chet said, pointing at the lapels of Doc's frock coat. "Very retro. Need to get you an ascot or neck kerchief and you'd be humming."

 

"Before you ask, no, my coat is not for sale, especially to one such as yourself."

 

Chet didn't get the implied insult. "Suit yourself. I wouldn't give it up, either. My problem is finding apparel that will fit my ample girth," the fat clerk said.

 

"That's what tailors are for, my good man," Doc noted.

 

"Tailors cost jack. Any jack I get I spend on collecting," Chet replied, nodding his three chins as he spoke. "All the good stuff is going up in value. Used to be, I put the word out for baseball cards or comic books and within a month I'd have more than I could handle from outlanders and wanderers going back and forth across Deathlands. Now, my best pickers can't find dick anymore. Everybody thinks this stuff is worth a fortune, and I can't afford to pay top jack to have to then turn around and resell it and make a profit anymore."

 

"Supply and demand," Krysty said.

 

"Exactly!" Chet replied. "All the stores in the mall are occupied. I cannot demand a break in my rent. Instead, I must weather the annual rent increases! Do you know what rent goes for in Freedom?"

 

"I've seen enough," Ryan said, already bored with the sales pitch. "Let's go."

 

"In a minute, Dad," Dean replied, his attention drawn to a rack covered with old-style wire coat hangers. An array of T-shirts was hanging from the rack.

 

"They got any black ones?" Jak asked, stepping over next to Dean as carefully as possible.

 

"They're all black," Dean replied, looking at some of the small white size tags in the collars. "All XXL, too."

 

"That's good," Krysty said. "Allows you to grow into them."

 

"I don't know," Ryan said, holding up one of the huge shirts. "I think a boy Dean's age could pitch a tent with one of these things."

 

"So what's your reading fancy, mister?" Chet said to Doc.

 

"So many choices," Doc said, searching his mind for a book he desired.

 

"I know. And you want to know why?" Chet asked.

 

"Why?"

 

And then the portly salesman launched into a dissertation the likes of which Doc had never heard before. Unlike most common reading material such as paperbacks or hardcover books, the mass-published glossy magazines or hundreds of daily newspapers on newsprint, comics had the quantum edge in survival. Starting in the mid-1950s, comics were no longer being seen as just childish diversions to be read and disposed of, but also as pop-culture collectibles to be hoarded.

 

As the years passed, more and more comics were kept stored away until finally, by the late seventies, practically every comic book sold off the stands was read onceor not at allhermetically sealed in a plastic bag, kept flat by a specially cut piece of coated card stock and stored upright in a specially designed box to avoid any damage.

 

Millions of comics were kept safe in this fashion, with the more valuable examples receiving extraspecial care. Those were put in stiff Mylar snugs, which were then placed in acid-free archival boxes. Larger collectors even built their very own comics vaults, some aboveground, some below. All were airtight.

 

Compared to all their paper brethren, comic books lasted because of the extra care taken in the decades before skydark to keep them from deteriorating due to natural causes.

 

"Yes, well, that's all very nice," Doc said, taking the time to speak while Chet gasped for air after his verbal history of the comics. "But I was actually hoping to find a volume of Chaucer."

 

"What issues did he draw?" Chet asked. "Did he work for Marvel? D.C.? Dark Horse? Image?"

 

Doc gave up. He'd had enough. "He's not an artist, he's a writer, you overstuffed cretin."

 

"Sorry, I get those guys mixed up sometimes. Artists, writers, inkers, lettererstoo many names. Got a title for this book?"

 

" The Canterbury Tales ," Doc said respectfully. Chet looked blank for a few seconds, then reached behind him and plucked a chipped brown clipboard from a stack of papers and consulted a list.

 

"Got Marvel Tales, Weird Tales, Tales from the Darkside, Sonic's Pal Tails, Tale Spin, Shirt Tales and Tales Guaranteed to Drive You Bats , but nope, no Canterbury Tales . Sorry. Hold up, I missed one. A Tale of Two Cites ."

 

"Dickens!" Doc cried. "Let me view it, please!" Chet consulted the list a second time. "Box 63-A, Row F," he read before wading out and pulling down a box from a wooden rack. He removed the lid, and inside were bagged and boarded comics. He pulled one out and handed it over with a flourish to Doc.

 

He stared down at the cover. " Classics Illustrated ?" he snorted.

 

"Don't get a call for those, anymore. You are a man of taste."

 

"Wait, wait a moment," Doc said, struggling to communicate. His entire skinny frame nearly shook with frustration. "I don't believe we're on the same page, to coin a phrase. I see all of the men's magazines and juvenile antics of the comics, and I appreciate your discovery of this crudely drawn mockery of the good Charles Dickens, but I wonderdare I askif you have any books at all?"

 

 

Chet looked insulted. "Of course!"

 

"Splendid," Doc said with relief in his educator's voice. "What kind?"

 

Chet started counting down on his fingers again before launching into a litany of selections in a merry singsong voice. "What kind? We got Big Little Books, Golden Books, Tell-Me-a-Story books, black-and-white and color Graphic Novelsboth original and reprints, Whitman Tell-a-Tale, Wonder Books, talking story books, but I'm afraid they no longer talk when you pull the string, and a near complete line of every TV-paperback tie-in known to the historians."

 

"Really."

 

"You bet! What kind you wanting?"

 

"I believe I'm in need of that rare animal book book."

 

"A book book? Never heard of it."

 

"I'm not surprised," Doc sniffed, and turned on his heel to exit.