by James Axler
"Do it," Krysty urged. "Doc's right. Leave a shred of poison hi the wound, and it'll kill him."
Mildred sighed. "Yeah. Come on, Dean. Just one last time, then we can clean it up and bandage it."
"And pray," Michael added.
IT WAS OVER. J.B. had managed to disconnect most of the lights in the ward so that Ryan could rest in a pool of darkness, lying on his back, a length of clean sheet wrapped around the wound. He was naked, with just a single sheet covering him.
As soon as the suppurating wound had been purged of its filth, his temperature had begun to drop. He was
still hot, but Mildred had chosen not to wrap him hi wet sheets to bring it down any more quickly.
"Figure his system's had enough of a pounding for any one day," she said.
The rest of them had moved to an adjacent room in the hospital section of the redoubt, sitting quietly. Dean had fallen asleep, drained by witnessing the operation on his father. Michael also dozed on another of the beds.
Krysty sat next to Ryan, watching over him, occasionally laying cool fingers on his forehead and muttering a blessing from the Earth Mother.
Farther down the ward J.B. sat next to Mildred, holding her hand. Doc was facing them.
They talked together quietly, not wanting to disturb any of the others.
"How long before we can move on, Mildred?"
"Don't know, John. Most patients been through what Ryan's gone through today, and they'd be in rest and recuperation for a month. But he's got the finest constitution of any man I ever saw. Could be up and moving, slow and easy, within a couple of days. Have to wait and see."
"What about delayed shock?" Doc asked. "Is that not a possibility?"
"Course. After that... But his pulse is near normal. Little slow. Respiration a little fast. But you have to bear in mind that Ryan's been through an operation that would normally only have been done under a full general anesthetic. It's amazing he's pulled through this far."
"You did brilliantly, love," J.B. said, kissing her on the cheek. "Think mebbe you should lie down and rest awhile? I could sort of-"
"Come and rest with me, John," Mildred said, smiling. "Well, I could be up for that. Let's go into the end ward and get some privacy from prying eyes."
She grinned at Doc, who actually blushed.
"Upon my soul, Dr. Wyeth! Have you no shame?"
"Enough to go into the end ward, Doc."
They stood up. J.B. looted at Dean and Michael, both soundly asleep."Food's going to get to be a real problem in the next half day or so," he said.
"Seeing that white steel burning away Ryan's neck was the finest suppressor of an appetite I ever saw." Doc shuddered.
RYAN CAME AROUND from the soul-deep blackness in the middle of the night.
Krysty had dozed off on the adjacent bed, lying on her back, her fiery sentient hair curled protectively about her nape.
But as Ryan's eye opened, she stirred, as if someone had whispered her name in the center of a dream, calling her back from a land far away.
She smiled at him. "Hi, there, lover."
"Feel like a war wag drove over me." His arm came out from under the thin cotton sheet, lifting toward his neck.
"Don't touch it, Ryan."
"Seems like something's sucking my brain out through the side of my throat. What happened?"
"Remember the ghost town?"
"Lonesome Gulch? Sure."
"Those mutie bird things?"
"Blew their asses sideways. Yeah. One of them... How come it hurts so bad?"
"Got infected."
He struggled to sit up. Krysty swung her long legs off the bed and helped him with an arm behind the shoulders, easing him to a more upright position.
"Fireblast!" In the gloom of the ward, she could see how deathly pale he was and what the injury had taken out of him. "I got no clothes on."
"You had a temperature to put Death Valley in the shade. Mildred saved your life, lover."
"Whafdshedo?"
"I took your skinning blade and-"
"Where's my blasters?" A note of something close to panic was in his voice.
She sat on the bed, taking care not to jar him. "Easy, lover. SIG-Sauer's under the bed. Rifle's in the other ward along with J.B. and the others."
"Ward?"
"We jumped to an abandoned redoubt that's stripped about as clean as a mutie's conscience. Think it's probably in New England someplace."
"Anyone been outside?"
"Not yet. Listen, don't keep interrupting me, Ryan. Bad jump. Michael went full psycho and tried to chill Doc."
"Who..."
"Me. Pistol-whipped him. J.B. tied him up and he finally got quiet. He helped in your operation. We all did."
"Any food in here?"
Krysty shook her head. "No. Doesn't look like it. Have to do something tomorrow."
He nodded, cautiously raising a hand and touching the wad of white material around his throat. There was a dark patch of blood at its center, and he felt it. "Still leaking some, huh?"
"Some."
"I was out of it, then?"
"We carried you. Took turns."
"Close call?"
She kissed him on the cheek, still feeling the blazing remnants of the high fever. "Close."
"Mildred used my knife, you were saying. Heated it, I guess. Burned it out. Must've been a mess of laughs."
"It was."
He closed his eye again. "Can't really remember anything about it. Not the actual business. Sort of smell myself burning, but that's about it."
"You ought to try and sleep."
"Thought that was what I'd been doing."
"Lie down again. And try and keep flat on your back. Save from hurting your neck."
"You'd make a good nurse, Krysty. Thanks, love. Tell the rest of them... tell them thanks."
Chapter Fifteen
Ryan woke several times during the long night, jerked abruptly out of sleep by the stabbing pains from his neck. The makeshift bandage kept sticking to the congealing blood, making any rest difficult.
Krysty slept lightly and stirred every time Ryan moved suddenly.
Mildred had explained that the first twelve hours would be crucial in Ryan's recovery. If his temperature started to rise again, it would probably indicate that the infection hadn't been scoured from his system.
"Then what?" Krysty had whispered to the doctor, as they'd stood together in the deserted pharmacy, sharing a cup of water.
"Then I think Ryan'll probably die. There isn't anything else to be done."
MILDRED HAD ALWAYS HAD the ability, common to many doctors, of being able to control her waking and sleeping. She rose roughly every hour during the night, slipping from J.B.'s side, and padded on bare feet through the silent vault of the redoubt, stopping at Ryan's bedside.
She laid her hand on his forehead, smiling down at him as his right eye fluttered open. "So far, so good," she whispered, finding each time that his temperature was no more than a degree or so up on normal.
"Will I make it?" he asked, late in the small hours of the morning.
"Doing good, Ryan. Bleeding looks like it's stopped."
"Will I play the violin again, Doctor?"
"What?"
"Saw some old vid once and a double-sick person said that. I never really understood it. Some kind of predark joke, I guess, Mildred."
"Yeah. Guess it was."
MICHAEL WOKE UP DEAN. "Hey, you asleep?"
"I was. What d'you want?"
The teenager rolled on his side, facing the boy. "You feel hungry?"
"Some."
"You got any of that candy left?"
Dean fumbled in the pocket of his black denim jacket. "Couple of sticks."
"Give me one."
"No."
"Why not? I'm famished and could eat a horse, if there was one lying around."
Dean shook his head. "Can't. Don't reckon there's any other food around this deserted crap hole. These are sw
eet, so they could keep us going. Give us energy. My mother told me that once."
"They're too small. Can't share them, Dean."
"Watch me."
Michael rolled onto his back again, lying and staring at the high ceiling. "Dean?"
"What?" he asked irritably.
"Was I... was I out of it?"
Dean sat up, making the bed creak. "You kept saying that you were trapped up your own ass."
"Yeah. I can kind of remember that. Sort of blurred. Was I yelling a lot?"
"Until Krysty said she'd break your neck if you didn't calm down."
Michael laughed quietly. "I remember that. Must've been on the way to being normal again. My throat's real sore from her boot. I think I was struggling so I'd know I was still alive. If I'd stopped back then, I might have gone far away into that distant land. And never returned again."
"If you hadn't managed to shake off being triple stupe..." Dean hesitated.
"What?"
"Well, I don't think Dad would have made it. He was too strong, and the others couldn't like hold him still."
"The smell from that hole in his neck when Mildred stuck the knife in it-"
"Worse than a stickie's fart."
"Worse than Doc's socks."
Dean giggled. "Worse than a dead dog's guts."
"Worse than..." Michael paused, trying to think of something sufficiently gross. "Worse than a stickie's fart after eating a rotting fish from out of a dead dog's guts."
Dean clapped his hands. "Hot pipe, brother!"
"While it was wearing Doc's socks."
Both of them exploded into uncontrollable sniggering, which covered the sound of approaching feet along the ward.
"My apologies, gentlemen." The laughter stopped like turning off a faucet. "I had thought to find a pair of puking, giggling infants, waiting to be filled up with their mother's milk. Now I find that it is Dean, who I believe is already into his twelfth year of life. And the former oblate from the monastery of Nil-Vanity hi the hills above Visalia, a young man who must now be close to his twentieth birthday, both creating such a damned noise and making such childishly stupe jests."
Neither of them spoke, lying on then beds, looking at the towering figure of the angry old man.
Doc rapped the floor with the iron ferrule of his stick. "Go back to sleep, both of you, before you get the good spanking you so richly deserve."
"Sorry, Doc," Dean muttered.
"Yeah, sorry," Michael agreed.
"Very well." He strode off, heels clicking, vanishing into the darkness at the far end of the long ward.
"Good spanking..." Dean whispered.
Michael was struggling not to break out laughing again. "Mother's milk!"
"Silly old fuckhead."
"Right on, Dean."
"If I ruled Deathlands, I think I'd have a law that meant all wrinklies get chilled after their fortieth birthday." Dean stifled another giggle. "That'd teach Doc."
THEY ALL SHARED the two slender sticks of candy, using one of Michael's twin daggers to cut them into small segments.
"Any idea what flavor they are, Dean?" J.B. asked, as he looked at the striped sugary fingers.
"One was mango and mint, I think. Something like that. Can't remember the other."
Doc held out a hand. "See if my ancient scent buds still function in identifying sweetmeats." Dean gave him the unwrapped stick. "Let me see..." The old man sniffed at it.
"Don't breathe it all away, Doc," Mildred said. "Leave some for the rest of us/' She shook her head, tiny beads rattling softly together. "I can't believe that seven grown men and women are sitting around sharing out two tiny bits of highly colored, flavored and preserved candy."
"Sassafras and moonlight," Doc said, handing the candy back to Michael, ready to be sliced thin.
"What's that?" Ryan asked, leaning on one elbow on his bed.
Mildred had been amazed at the speed of his recovery. His temperature, respiration and pulse were all back to normal, and he seemed to be gathering and renewing strength with every hour that passed.
"Guess that's what living in Deathlands does for you," she'd explained to Krysty. "So much disease that everyone's a lot more resistant to it. I seriously believe that ninety-nine men out of a hundred from my time would have been long dead with that degree of infection."
"Sassafras and moonlight?" Doc replied. "Just a rather fancy way of conveying the fact that I have no idea at all what flavor it's supposed to be."
There was still the argument of how best to slice up two candy sticks of slightly differing lengths and divide them evenly between seven people.
"It's a total length of about fifteen and a quarter inches," Mildred said.
"That's about 2.17 inches each." Doc looked down at his fingers. "Or should that be 2.18?"
"Crush them all up with the hilt of the knife," J.B. suggested. "Be a lot easier to split up a pile of bits into seven roughly equal heaps."
It was the best idea that anyone could come up with, so that's what they did.
"Delicious. Best half ounce of candy I ever ate," Mildred said, licking her lips.
"Not quite as satisfying as a plate of eggs and bacon and hash browns." Doc wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Jesting apart, what are we to do about obtaining some rather more adequate sustenance for ourselves?"
"Go out and hunt." Ryan was sitting up in his bed, his face pale beneath the stubble.
"Not you."
"Why not, Mildred?"
"As your doctor, I forbid it. You would fall down, stone-dead, and then your relatives could bring a medical malpractice suit against me."
Ryan grinned. "I can't believe I feel so much better."
"Amazing what a little mango-and-mint candy can do for a man." Krysty leaned over the bed and kissed him.
"You shouldn't try to move today." Mildred saw the look in Ryan's eye. "I'm serious, now. Fever like that puts a real strain on your heart."
"Stay here and starve?"
"You stay here. Couple of us remain with you. John can go out with Dean and Michael and bring back food."
Doc drew himself up to his full six feet three inches. "Am I not to be considered for this hunting expedition, madam? Must I stay with the sickly and the female, which some say are one and the same thing?"
"You dumbshit..." Mildred began angrily.
Ryan clapped his hands together. "Hold it, hold it! This doesn't matter."
"Why?"
"Because, Mildred. Grateful as I am to you for pulling me through, I still don't figure on lying on my back. Without food I'll likely get weaker, so I might as well do it now."
"Hot pipe, Dad!" Dean shouted, his voice cracking to a reedy squeak in his excitement.
Michael punched the air. "Thanks to all the gods. We can have some fresh air, food, water and stuff."
"Like we did around Lonesome Gulch," Mildred warned. "Remember how good that was."
"Won't be like that," Dean said confidently.
IT WASN'T LIKE THAT.
After all taking a long drink of the cold water, they set out toward the main entrance of the redoubt. Despite his claims of fitness, Ryan was glad to accept Doc's offer of the loan of the sword stick to help himself along the echoing corridors.
"Main sec doors just ahead," J.B. reported, taking up the point position. "No sign of life. No sign of trouble."
The panel had the same coding as in all of the other redoubts that they'd encountered. Three-five-two to open the massive doors and two-five-three to close them.
"Want to rest a spell, Ryan?" the Armorer asked.
"You're enjoying this, J.B., aren't you? You never forgave me for laughing at you that time you had the little problem over sitting down with your-"
"That's enough. You swore an oath on Trader's life never to mention that."
Ryan grinned. "It was Trader who used to say that he never knew of a promise that couldn't be broken."
Watched by the others, Dean pressed in the number code and th
e doors began to slide back.
Chapter Sixteen
