by James Axler
“So you just wandered in from the desert, like us?” J.B. said.
“Started at the very bottom of the shit pile,” Plavik said with pride. “Came here with nothing, and half-dead from the sun. But I got better before they could bury me, and I learned the ways of the ville. There’s no place to run once you get here. You know how close the desert came to taking you out. Before you’d go through that again, you’ll make do with almost anything so long as there’s some shade, some water, and something to eat.
“Because I had some size to me, and I like to mix it up, I worked myself from field slave to overseer in less than a year. The men who objected to my taking their jobs got themselves drowned in the lake and turned into fertilizer.
“I’d been an overseer for mebbe six months when I chilled Pilgrim Boone and took everything he owned. Boone, he was a real big son of a bitch, even for a pilgrim. Three hundred pounds stripped naked, and all of it mean. One night I caught him on the staircase in this building, four flights up. Surprised him from the shadows with a stout rope. Had the noose around his neck and cinched tight before he knew what was happening. Then I practically ruptured myself pitching his fat ass over the stair rail. The bitter end was tied off real good, but Boone was so heavy his falling weight broke the rope in the middle. Snapped his spine at the same time.”
Plavik gleefully smacked his palms together as a sound effect.
“Pilgrim Boone didn’t need any more chilling after that,” he went on. “When I found him laying at the bottom of the stairs, the bastard’s neck was stretched two feet long.” He turned to Ryan and added, “You were dumb not to chill old Wicklaw when you had the chance. You could be having his women, one after another, right now. You could be living in his rooms down on the third floor.”
From the kitchen came loud sizzling sounds and the clatter of crockery. The smell of the food wafting through the doorway made Ryan’s mouth water and started his stomach rumbling. “We didn’t see any gaudies when we came into town,” he said.
“No gaudies here. This is a dry ville. Jolt and juice don’t grow food. They eat a man’s strength.”
“No trained sluts, either?”
“Oh, there’s sluts, but none for rent, only for trade,” Plavik said. “We pilgrims prize our wives above everything else. That’s what Bob and Enid taught us.”
Prize. Not respect. Not honor. Not cherish.
Women as livestock.
“We’ve never heard of Bob and Enid,” Krysty said, fighting to keep the anger out of her voice. “Just who might they be?”
Plavik smiled at her. It was a question he relished answering. “Bob and Enid were the ones who came first,” he said. “Right after the waters fell away. They brought with them the greatest wisdom of the world before skydark. They used it to give shape and balance to this Paradise. We praise their memories every single day.”
“This great wisdom you mention,” Doc said, “might I inquire as to its substance?”
It took a second or two for Plavik to sift the meaning from the old man’s somewhat tortured Victorian construction. “Bob and Enid, may they abide in Glory, carried knowledge of all things on the earth,” he said. “And of the inner workings of all things, down to the tiniest spec of dust.”
“They were whitecoats, then?” J.B. said.
From the expression in Plavik’s dark, protruding eyes, J.B.’s suggestion bordered on blasphemy. “They were seekers after truth,” he said, with heavy emphasis on the last word. “They were pilgrims in a ruined land. As are we.”
“Okay, Bob and Enid weren’t whitecoats,” J.B. conceded, “but there were whitecoats in Little Pueblo before nukeday.”
Plavik gave him a blank look.
“That’s one of their complexes in the middle of the square. We walked right past it. Nothing like that’s been built since Armageddon.”
“You’re mistaken,” Plavik told him. “That’s the tomb of Bob and Enid. A monument to their sacred memory.”
His absurd answer hung in the air for a moment before Ryan pressed the issue. “A tomb and not a temple?” he asked. “You never go down there to make your praise?”
“That would be sacrilege. The tomb is sealed for all time. It cannot be defiled.”
Their interest in the redoubt was clearly starting to aggravate Plavik, so Mildred changed the subject. “We followed a man here,” she said. “Picked up his trail in the canyon, tracked him almost to the outskirts of the ville. We figured he was two or three days ahead of us. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
Plavik shook his head, then smiled. “You’re the first newcomers to show up in more than a month,” he said. “Perhaps the man never made it? Maybe he died before he got here?”
Even if the pilgrim hadn’t looked down and to the left as he spoke, the classic “tell” of a man who was lying, Ryan wouldn’t have believed him. The thief had to have arrived in Little Pueblo. Why he would bother to lie about it was the mystery.
Plavik’s quartet of wives swept into the room, carrying the food in a hodgepodge of serving containers. Chipped ceramic bowls, handleless mugs, and metal sauce pots brimmed with a thick, steaming soup. One of the women offered them rounds of golden fry bread from a heaping, wicker basket.
The soup was corn-based, sweetish tasting, with bits of chicken meat and flavored with chili spice. Ryan had to force himself to eat slowly to avoid scalding his mouth. As he dipped the fry bread into his pot, he looked more closely at the women and kids. Plavik’s oldest wife was in her midtwenties. None of the children were older than six or seven. They all resembled their pa. Same dark thick hair, same intense dark eyes. Plavik’s women didn’t look at their husband straight on while they served the meal, but they weren’t scared to death like Jubilee.
Maybe because they were sitting on top of the shit pile.
As more fry bread was passed around Plavik turned to Ryan and said, “Now it’s you folks’ turn to talk. Tell me all about yourselves. I want to hear everything. Where did you come from? Where were you headed?”
Taking a page from his host’s book, Ryan smiled and lied through his teeth.
Chapter Nine
Mildred Wyeth used the razor point of her knife to cut a slit in the sheet plastic that blocked the second story, city hall window. Outside, night had fallen on Little Pueblo. There were firelights here and there around the town square, dancing in the doorways of the occupied one-story buildings. Stars glittered overhead. No one moved in the faint moonlight. It was very hot, and the air was dead still. The smell of woodsmoke hung like a pall.
Looking out at the surround of blackness, the valley floor and the canyon walls, Mildred got a powerful, disturbing sense of Little Pueblo’s precarious grip on existence. It was like a ship far out on a storm-tossed sea, floating, rudderless, at the whim of fate.
Jubilee stood at her side, mute, expressionless. Mildred had tried her best, using the gentlest possible approach, but she hadn’t been able to break through to the child, or to get her to respond in any way. It wasn’t catatonia, Mildred was sure of that. Jubilee knew what was going on around her. Mildred would have felt better if there’d been tears, screaming, even violence. Anything but this blankness.
When Ryan called out from the middle of the room, Mildred looked over her shoulder at him.
He waved for her to join him and the others in a circle on the floor.
She started to lead Jubilee over, too, but Ryan said, “No, not her. She can stay right there.”
Mildred understood his reasoning. They didn’t know if they could trust the girl yet. There was a slim chance that she wasn’t as incapacitated as she looked, that she was biding her time, looking for an opportunity to get herself back in the good graces of some other pilgrim, and perhaps return to the ville’s fold. If she overheard their plans, she could betray them.
“Everyone sit close,” Ryan said, “and keep your voices low. We don’t know who’s listening.”
“What do you make of all this?” J.B. aske
d Ryan.
“Bug-eyes was feeding us a load of bullshit,” he said “The water thief got here, all right. We were following his tracks. If he’d dropped dead in them, we would’ve found the body. There was no reason for Plavik to lie about our chiller-friend unless something bad happened to him. Something that wasn’t an accident. Something Plavik thought we wouldn’t take kindly to.”
“And he was lying about Minotaur, too,” J.B. said. “A tomb, my ass.”
“But it was sealed up like one,” Krysty said. “Remember how that door was blocked?”
“Well, we’ll unblock it in a little while,” Ryan said. “As soon as we’re sure everyone’s sound asleep.”
“Our host’s protests notwithstanding,” Doc said, “the much-revered Bob and Enid were most definitely of the whitecoat persuasion.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, “they had to be. They were here first because they walked out of that redoubt when the water level dropped.”
“Atlantis becomes Eden,” Doc remarked. “A veritable dog’s dinner, mythologically speaking.”
“Worthy of the Disney Channel,” Mildred added.
No one got the joke, of course.
Of the companions, only Mildred had subscribed to cable TV, and found nothing to watch on 150 stations.
Pursuing Doc’s line of thought, she said, “So, how did Eden pop up here? Sure, there’s water, but look at what else these people have. Grain crops. Vegetables. Bees. Chickens.”
“The seeds could have been carried across the desert,” J.B. said, “but not the bees or the chickens. No way would they have survived the heat. There’s only one place they could have come from, and that’s Minotaur.”
“The redoubt’s emergency processed food supplies would have run out a long time ago,” Ryan said. “Whoever designed Minotaur was looking at the big picture, at building some kind of permanent settlement here.”
“But they didn’t know when skydark might happen,” Krysty said. “Even small livestock takes up room, requires food, makes a mess and tends to multiply. How do you store bees and chickens indefinitely?”
“Cryogenically, using liquid nitrogen,” Mildred said. “Compared to defrosting and reanimating a human being, a chicken is a piece of cake. Believe me, I’ve done both.”
J.B. had another suggestion. “Or the bees and chickens could’ve been mat-trans-ed in from some other location, after the nukecaust.”
“I like the sound of that better,” Krysty said. “Means the damn thing works.”
“Or at least it worked once,” Ryan said.
“It would appear that Eden is the product of much careful consideration,” Doc said. “Right down to the bees necessary for proper pollination of their crops.”
“They planned out the community structure here, too,” Mildred said. “They knew that Little Pueblo, post-nukecaust, wasn’t going to be a closed system, with a static population. Every once in a while newcomers would show up out of the desert and have to be assimiliated. There had to be a procedure for that in place. Also a procedure for removing excess people. Overpopulation would destroy everything.”
“So what keeps everyone in line?” Krysty said. “There’s only six pilgrims. They’ve got no blasters that we’ve seen. There aren’t teams of enforcers to make the people obey. As big and mean as the pilgrims are, they couldn’t turn back a mob with their bare hands.”
“I think it has to do with this place,” Ryan said. “About what it is, where it is, and what’s all around it.”
“Death all around,” Jak said.
“That’s right,” Ryan said. “Water is life. Water is limited. Probably some years there’s a lot less of it to go around. It’s in everyone’s interest to follow the rules. A pilgrim might get chilled and replaced, but that doesn’t change anything. The system is still in place. Lots of single males at the bottom and a few pilgrims at the top.”
“And there’s hope built-in, even for the field slaves,” J.B. said. “Plavik’s an example of that.”
“I agree about the stability of the pecking order,” Mildred said, “but I think you’re missing something important.”
“What’s that?” Ryan said.
“There isn’t just one efficient way to organize this place. Sure, simple works best when it comes to social order, but I can think of a dozen other plans that make as much sense, given the elements we’ve seen here.”
“Why don’t the single men get together, and rearrange things so they all have wives, or at least access to them?” Krysty said.
“That’s what I mean. They’ve got everything to gain from kicking ass. And they’ve got the means to do it. But they’re docile as sheep. We’re missing something….”
“What I want to know,” Krysty said, “is what happened to Pilgrim Boone’s children?”
“You’re right,” Ryan said. “Those kids were definitely Plavik’s. They looked just like him. If this place is all about certain people making babies, what happened to Boone’s?”
“It’s basic Darwinism, I’m afraid,” Mildred said. “In a system like this, with a handful of alpha males in charge of all the females, it isn’t unusual for the new male harem-master to kill all the offspring who aren’t his. This improves the chances of his kids, his genes to survive.”
“And the women who mothered those kids would stand still for that?” Krysty said.
“They wouldn’t have had any choice,” Mildred said. “They might have even helped. In a situation like this, you can’t discount the women as just being downtrodden and helpless victims. They can be as determined and deadly as the dominant males. Together, the females form a kind of subclan that functions—and survives—in support of whatever male who happens to be in charge at the moment. Their real allegiance is to the subclan. To one another.”
“There seems to be a dearth of graybeards on the premises,” Doc said.
“Maybe they’re chilling the oldies, too,” J.B. suggested.
“What you mean is they’re killing their own fathers and mothers,” Ryan said.
“Like chilling one’s offspring, that’s a very difficult proposition for a human being,” Mildred said. “Historically speaking, it’s only been done in extreme circumstances, in times of starvation, disaster. Which obviously isn’t what’s going on here. There’s plenty of everything.”
“Why haven’t they tried to chill us?” Krysty asked. “Because we’ve got blasters and grens?”
“Or mebbe because we have you and Mildred,” Ryan suggested. “Women are status here. They’re treating us like we’re not-quite pilgrims.”
He looked over at Jubilee. She stood by the window, staring out at the night.
“That one could tell us a lot,” Ryan said.
“If she was talking,” Mildred said.
Chapter Ten
Because her back was to the newcomers, Jubilee couldn’t make out their words. She wasn’t really trying to hear what they were saying, anyway. It was all wasted effort. There was nothing they could do, or plan to do that would change anything. And there was nothing she could do to go back to the way things were.
She breathed in the familiar smells of the night. Woodsmoke. Chili spice. Wet earth from the lake. And as she did the aching pain in her throat became almost unbearable. No tears came, though. She had no more tears left. She had every reason to believe that this was her last night on Earth. That she would die without ever seeing her baby’s face.
Like the one-eyed man and his male friends, she was the walking dead.
Their two women companions still had a few good years left, by Little Pueblo standards. Unless they proved difficult.
Jubilee knew all about the consequences of being difficult. That’s what got her put on the trading block. She wasn’t submissive enough to suit Wicklaw. She asked him questions. It was automatic, in her nature. And when she didn’t like the answers he gave her, she asked him more questions. It was a recipe for disaster.
Her sister Wicklaw-wives had taken her aside numero
us times and tried to explain to her that despite the way things looked on the surface, the women of the ville really controlled everything. They said they all just pretended to be weak in order to rule behind the scenes. The idea rang false to her, as it had when her own mother had first told her the same thing, years ago—her mother, who had been culled at age twenty-nine, after birthing fifteen children for four pilgrims. The power over life and death wasn’t in the hands of the womenfolk. The way Jubilee saw it, no one in Little Pueblo was in control. They were all prisoners. All condemned, all awaiting execution.
Before the afternoon’s assembly, the word on her prickly attitude had gotten around to the other pilgrims, through the wives’ grapevine. She knew in advance that no one was going to trade for her.
Not today, not ever.
In Little Pueblo, not fit to trade meant not fit to live.
For a moment in the movie house, when the strangers had their grens out, and were threatening the entire ville with destruction, she wanted to scream out “Do it! Chill them all before they chill you!” The words had died in her throat. She was thirteen years old, she was pregnant and she had no faith in grens. Or the threats of strangers. Calling out for blood would have only sped up her own end. Keeping quiet meant few more minutes of agony-free life for her and her unborn baby.
Jubliee Wicklaw felt the one-eyed man approach her from behind. She couldn’t escape him any more than she could escape her own fate, so she didn’t try.
He came close, but he didn’t touch her. He spoke in a low, soothing voice. He promised that he wouldn’t harm her or her baby. He had questions for her, he said. He wanted to know what was in store for him and his friends. He wanted to understand the way Little Pueblo worked.
Jubilee had seen strangers wander in from the desert many times before, but never any quite like these. Dangerous people. Skilled fighters. Arriving in a squad, not in ones or twos. And the women were as hard as the men, and in the same way. All of them had been kind to her.
