by James Axler
He nodded, grinning. "Seems like I do."
"Then let's get to scratching it."
Chapter Fifteen
The luminous numerals on Ryan's wrist chron showed it was seventeen minutes past one in the morning. Outside he could hear rain beating steadily on the roof of the bedroom.
Ryan stretched, wincing a little at the cool stickiness that he could still feel around his groin. At his side Krysty was sleeping on her back, mouth partly open, snoring slightly. He was aware of pressure on his bladder, and he considered paying a visit to the bathroom that he knew was just along the passage, past the door of the room where J.B. and Mildred would be sleeping.
Perhaps if he lay very still and closed his eye, the feeling would go away.
Ryan tried it for several minutes.
"Fireblast!"
It was no good. He was going to have to get up, unlock the door and walk along the passage to take a leak. It was cold and damp and the middle of the night.
"Fireblast!" he whispered again, swinging his legs from underneath the blankets. After they finished making love, he had gotten partly dressed. Now he had on his underclothes and the blue denim shirt, socks but no boots, and no weapons.
He thought about going just as he was. It would take him only a couple of minutes. Then again, there was Krysty's unease. If you traveled with someone who had a mutie skill at "seeing" and chose to ignore them, then the blood was likely to be in your own face. Trader used to say that a man who took any chances when he didn't have to was a likely candidate for a six-foot plot of good earth and no marker.
Slowly he pulled on the dark blue pants and laced up the steel-toed boots. He buckled on his belt and slid the SIG-Sauer from under the pillow into the holster, making sure that the eighteen-inch steel blade of the panga was secure in its sheath on the opposite hip.
"Time to get up, lover?"
The voice was heavy and muffled with sleep.
"No. Goin' for a piss."
"That's good. Is it raining?"
"Yeah. It is."
"Hear it on roof. Pittering and pattering and…" Krysty's voice faded into silence as she slithered back once more into a deep sleep.
Ryan eased back the bolt and cautiously peered out into the corridor, which was almost completely dark. A flash of bright pink chem lightning made him jump, the clap of thunder following hard on its heels.
It showed him the empty passage, making him blink at the transition from blackness to brightness to dark again. He could have turned and taken the oil lamp off the rickety table by the head of the bed, using one of the box of self-lights provided by Mrs. Fairchild. But he figured there was no need and stepped out of the bedroom into the stygian gloom.
The air was cool and moist. As he went past the door of the other bedroom, fingers brushing the wooden walls to keep himself orientated, Ryan heard the sound of someone coughing, deep enough to be J.B., he guessed.
It crossed his mind to wonder whether the cold that Doc was suffering from was going to turn out to be contagious. In Deathlands, if you were healthy then you were also lucky. Many illnesses could rage through a ville with virulent effect, ailments that he knew from reading about predark days hadn't used to be mass killers. Things like measles and mumps and pink pox.
The next door was the bathroom.
Ryan pushed it open, expecting to find it creaking, but to his surprise it gave with the stillness of recently oiled hinges. There was a narrow window of frosted glass. Another flash of lightning revealed a nest of thick metal bars across it.
"Go to a lot of trouble to keep out hostiles," he muttered to himself, preparing to piss. The thought crossed his mind that the bars might equally easily be designed to keep people in.
The storm was very close, the lightning coming every few seconds, the rolling thunder making the building quiver. After he'd finished, Ryan hauled himself effortlessly up onto the bars, peering out into the California night.
Rain was sheeting from left to right, driven on a strong northerly wind. He could see that even some of the larger branches on the tall pines were moving violently in the storm. He winced at a great jagged fork of lightning that sliced to earth less than a quarter mile from where he watched. Static electricity made his curling hair stand on end, filling the air with the crackling stench of ozone. "Fireblast!" It was a storm and a half. Just as he began to lower himself back to the floor, Ryan's eye was caught by a dark blur of movement at the fringe of the trees, beyond a narrow path that ran along toward the cabin where Dean, Doc and Jak were sleeping. It was impossibly difficult to make out what it was.
Until the next flash of lightning from the chem storm threw the scene into brilliant, stark pink relief, halting the movement so that Ryan could make out what it was. "Bastard rat!"
It was one of the massive mutie creatures, identical to the ones that they'd run into earlier in the previous day. If anything, it looked even bigger.
The body was bloated, the fur clinging, sodden, to the five-foot-long body. The leprous tail twitched uneasily behind the mutie creature, and the blank golden eyes turned slowly toward the watching man. Common sense told Ryan that the rodent couldn't possibly see him at that distance in that light, but his grip relaxed and he dropped clumsily to the floor of the bathroom.
He waited, crouched, steadying his breathing, aware that his heart was beating faster than usual.
There was something hideously malevolent about the soaking predator, waiting out in the storm.
Where was it going?
On an impulse Ryan moved fast out of the bathroom, heading to the main entrance. He hesitated a moment, then retreated to their bedroom. He leaned over Krysty and shook her gently awake, his hand pressed over her mouth to stop her from crying out.
"Quiet," he whispered. "Just saw one of those mutie rats, heading toward where Dean, Doc and Jak are. I caught the bad feeling from you." He took his hand away.
"Storm," she said, starting to sit upright.
"Yeah. Bad one." Lightning cracked through a narrow gap at the top of the solid sec shutters, like the slash of a razor-edged knife. "Going outside to recce. Soon as I'm gone out the front, slide the bolts across again. Keep safe. Get dressed. Wait for me comin' back."
"How about the others?"
"Who?"
"J.B. and Mildred."
"Oh, sure. No point in waking them. No need. Just that feeling. Be back in five minutes or so."
"If you're still out there after ten minutes, I'll be waking them and coming out after you."
He nodded his agreement and bent down, kissing Krysty lightly on the cheek, feeling the cool softness of her skin against his lips. "Sure."
THE WIND nearly whipped the heavy door from his fingers, tugging wildly at it. Ryan held on tight, easing it shut behind him. He stood still and waited to try to accustom his eye to the darkness and the turbulent weather, blinking as yet another dazzling flash of purple-pink chem lightning crackled across the forest, followed by rippling thunder. The noise was so deep and so close that it felt like his spine was vibrating in time with it.
The mutie rat had vanished, which was both good news and bad news: good if he never saw it again, bad because he now had no idea where the creature might have gone.
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer slowly from its holster, thumbing back on the hammer, holding it steady in his right hand, alongside his thigh. He started to move cautiously toward the cabin.
He kept in close to the protection of the main building of the eatery, past the kitchens, catching the lingering scent of the marvelous jerky.
He paused at the end of the block, gathering a breath as he readied himself for the dash into the open, checking once more that none of the mutie rats was anywhere around. But the rain-swept clearing was empty of life.
There was a great temptation to turn on his heel and go straight back to the warmth and comfort of the dry bed. It was almost certain that everything was fine. Dean, Doc and Jak were snug…snug as… "Bugs in a rug," he said to himself
. Yeah, almost certain.
Almost.
He took a deep breath and moved into the torrential downpour, soaked through to the skin in moments. Ryan didn't make the mistake of trying to run, head down. That way you could easily bump into something profoundly unpleasant and not ever know what it was that had laid you out in the dirt, hot blood gushing from your severed arteries.
Also, the footing was desperately treacherous, with slimy streams of dark mud, mingling with the leaf mold at the edge of the trees.
Ryan brushed rain from his good eye, flicking back his wet hair, keeping a good watch all around as he closed in on the dark cabin.
The iron handle was cold to his fingers and resisted any movement. Ryan waited a moment, then tried again, using greater force.
But nothing happened; it was rock solid. He looked around as another great flash of sheet lightning illuminated the rain-slick slope.
The thought of calling out crossed his mind, but he doubted that they'd hear him anyway. The storm's heart seemed locked in place, directly over that part of the Sierras.
Ryan looked around one more time, shaking his head to clear his vision. He wondered whether he'd actually just seen fresh movement, along a narrow path that he hadn't noticed before, which led past the cabin down toward the stream, flanking what had probably once been a car-parking area.
On an impulse he followed the movement.
The wind was deafening, combining with the constant rumbling of thunder to seal him off into a buffeting world of noise. A gang of stickies could have come up behind him, letting off triple-power cherry bombs as they came, and Ryan wouldn't have heard a single sound.
Branches lashed out at him, making him duck and weave, fending them off with both hands while trying to maintain a tight grip on the blaster.
There it was again!
It was definitely one of the rats, scuttling along about thirty yards in front of him, belly down, scaled tail scooping through the mud. The compensation from the storm was that the gigantic rodent was way too busy to worry about whether it was being the hunter or the hunted.
The trail wound steeply downhill. Ryan could make out faint ruts, despite the streaming dirt, as though some sort of barrow or handcart had been frequently used on the path.
There had been no lightning for several long beats of the heart, and Ryan reluctantly stopped, waiting to gather his bearings again in the swooping blackness. If the rat had stopped, as well, there was the real menace of walking right into it. With predictably unpleasant consequences.
To his surprise the ragged veil of clouds was suddenly torn apart for a moment and watery moonlight broke through, showing that he was on the edge of a wide clearing.
Ryan's mind registered two separate and bizarre images, almost simultaneously.
One was the rat, silhouetted by the stark light, towering on its hind legs, clambering and gnawing away at a mound that stood up against a roof-high deadfall. The other, seen in that frozen fragment of time, like a fly trapped in amber, was what the rodent was eating.
There were bones, glistening, stripped of meat, with just a few shreds of gristle and sinew dangling from them. A small mountain of death was piled high, the smell penetrating to Ryan despite the wind and the rain.
That first hideous glance revealed the presence of dozens of flayed carcasses, all too obviously the source for Mrs. Fairchild's wonderful jerky.
It was the next flash of chem lightning, a triple heartbeat later, that showed Ryan precisely what kind of meat he and the others had devoured so enthusiastically.
There were femurs and clusters of carpal bones, entire rib cages and pelvises. But most of all there were dozens of grinning skulls.
Human skulls.
Chapter Sixteen
Aware of the watcher, the mutie rat turned from its feast and dropped to all four legs.
The few seconds of moonlight were over, the wind blowing the banks of cloud back, plunging the area into total darkness again, with only the scattered bolts of pinkish silver lightning to bring any illumination.
Ryan moved a few steps to his right, feeling with his hand to encounter the rough, streaming bark of the nearest of the immense pines. He sensed the importance of having some kind of solid cover to make a stand against the mutie rodent and pressed his back against the trunk, the SIG-Sauer probing at the blackness like an extension of his right arm.
Part of his fighting brain was locked into the problem of the rats, but another part was wrestling with concern over the grotesque hill of human corpses and what the implications were for himself and the six friends.
And another part of him desperately wanted to throw up and rid himself of the half-digested jerky that seemed to have swollen to near bursting.
It took an enormous effort of will for Ryan to shutter off the thought of what he'd eaten with such delight. It wasn't a good moment to give in to the nausea and double over, vomiting. Not with the rat on the move.
Lightning flashed, a massive display, longer and brighter than any that had gone before, thunder making the centuries-old conifer at his back tremble to its ringed core.
The mutie rat was coming slowly toward him, head moving from side to side, the silver light reflected from the cold gold eyes. Its mouth was half-open, drooling a thick yellowish grue. Ryan noticed that the thing still held a severed limb in its strong jaws, a fleshless arm, bony fingers clacking as the head moved. And it was making an obscene high-pitched squealing sound as it advanced on the man.
Ryan steadied his right wrist with his left hand, aiming the blaster at where he thought the rodent was.
There was a strong wish to cut and run, to get away from the horror that he knew was creeping stealthily toward him.
It would be a doubly bad move to expose his vulnerable back to the monster and risk running pell-mell into some of its brothers or sisters.
He stood his ground, ignoring the clubbing wind and the driving rain, ignoring his own utter discomfort and the worries about his friends.
A staccato burst of short, stabbing lightning strikes burst over the clearing, accompanied by deafening thunder.
The light showed the rat was in midcharge, its movements twitching in the strobing flashes barely a dozen paces from him.
The blaster coughed three times, the explosions muffled by the baffle silencer, the glow of the triple discharges barely visible. Ryan felt the kick of the pistol run up his arm, clear to the shoulder, and saw the bullets strike home, blood flaring black in the lightning.
The first one ripped into the side of the rat's questing muzzle, shredding wet fur and flesh, exiting immediately below the right eye, bursting it from its socket where it dangled in the dirt like a discarded ornament.
The second drilled into the throat as the rat lifted its head in agony from the impact of the first 9 mm round. The bullet dug deep, nicking the spinal column, before coming out at the base of the skull in a welter of blood and bone.
The third round was superfluous. The grossly mutated, rad-cancerous animal was already dying, its legs folding under it, the tail flailing like a demented buggy whip. It lurched as the final round hit it through the right shoulder, toppling it onto its side, dropping its interrupted meal. Sable blood oozed from the parted jaws, the scream of shock and agony muffled by its own arterial flow, which flooded its throat and lungs, choking it.
"Bastard," Ryan said quietly, looking around to see if there were any other giant rats anywhere close by. But the clearing was completely deserted—just the wind, the rain, the lightning and the mortally wounded creature, barely twitching.
Ryan closed his eye for a moment, pressing the blaster to his cold forehead, taking several slow, deep breaths to try to control the sickness that washed over him.
But he kept seeing a vision of the jerky, sitting there on the plate, nestled in its bed of potatoes and vegetables, soaked in that rich, luscious gravy, and Mom's smiling, sweating face, hovering over the plate.
The sickness was shockingly violent, b
ringing Ryan to his knees in the mud, a thread of bile hanging from his mouth, all the way into the sodden dirt. His stomach rebelled, bringing up every last, bitter morsel of the supper, the watery chunks frothing all around his combat boots.
"Oh, fireblast," he groaned. "Never ever eat at any place called Mom's again."
He remembered now that it had been a part of one of the Trader's sayings. "Never play cards with a man called Doc," was another part of it. And there had been a third part, but it had slipped from his memory.
He knew that—
"Doc," he said, suddenly remembering his original worry about the old man, his son and Jak. He spun on his heel, still holding the SIG-Sauer, and set off back toward their cabin.
IT SEEMED that the storm was beginning to move away, toward the Cific coast, across the next range of mountains. There was a noticeable gap between the flashes of chem lightning and the roiling sound of the thunder, and the rain was easing, as the cold blue norther veered easterly.
Everything was still quiet as Ryan reached the shelter of the overhanging cabin roof, pausing and sniffing, wishing he carried a kerchief. He reached out and checked the big sec lock on the door with his left hand, finding, to his relief, that it was still securely fastened.
If he couldn't get in, then Ryan was comforted by the thought that nobody else would. Even if they had a key, he could tell from the pressure that there were heavy bolts inside, at the top and the bottom of the door.
It had to be well past the ten minutes since he left the main building. By now Krysty would have roused J.B. and Mildred, and they would all be dressed and coming out to look for him.
Ryan started to turn away when there was a dazzling flash of lightning that brought the door and the area on both sides of it into stark relief.
He noticed something very peculiar. The one side was a narrow strip of timbering, the rough ends of the logs overlapping each other. On the other side the strip was wider, almost the width of the door. And the timbers ended in a straight, clean edge. If it hadn't been for the incredibly bright lightning, he would never have noticed it.
