by James Axler
"No." Michael stepped slowly out of the shadows, and everyone could see the dark stains on his face and mouth from the juice of loganberries. But nobody said anything. "Oh, yeah, I found a sort of building."
"Where?"
"And some bullets and stuff."
"Any sign of life? Recent life?" The young man sniffed. "No, afraid not, J.B., not even a smell of anyone."
"Show us," Ryan said. "Now." "Sure, sure."
THE MEAL AND MORE good water had restored Ryan to something close to his original health. He still allowed the Armorer to take point, walking with Michael, while he brought up the rear with Krysty. Doc, Mildred and Dean occupied the center of their group. Everyone had a blaster drawn and ready.
The teenager led them along the river, up a gentle slope, past some moss-green boulders and still pools. They moved through a grove of whispering aspens, then cut away from a narrow trail to the right of a feathery waterfall.
"Far?" J.B. asked.
"Closer than the sun and farther than the end of my dick," Michael replied, smiling hugely at his own humor.
The Armorer didn't respond to the attempted joke. "I asked you how far it was, Michael. Stop treating all this like some fucking game."
The unusual flicker of temper from J.B. quieted the boy. "Another five minutes or so. Suppose it might be a quarter hour."
Krysty pointed out that the trail had been used recently. "Feet."
"Wonder when it rained last," the Armorer said, stopping and kneeling by the side of the track.
"Looks like someone without shoes." Ryan steadied himself on the silver lion's-head hilt of the sword stick and peered down at the ground.
"Not clear enough." J.B. straightened. "Don't think they're that recent, but keep on red alert."
THE CACHE OF BONES was heaped off the trail, near the mouth of a shallow cave. Most had been broken and the marrow drawn from them. A few shreds of dried flesh and gristle hung from the ends of some of the longer bones.
Nobody needed to ask what species of animal the remains came from.
Three grinning skulls, with broken teeth, had been piled on top of the grisly cairn.
Grinning human skulls.
Ryan had begun to feel tired climbing the slope of the hill, and they'd stopped a little way past the discovery of the bones.
Dean and Michael had gone to throw dry sticks into the stream that flowed close by, falling fast over a series of small cascades. The other five sat together.
Ryan broke the silence. "I'll say it, if nobody else is going to. We need to watch Michael carefully."
"He seems better right now," Mildred stated, listening to shouts of laughter from the two boys.
"He says we're nearly at this building he saw. I guess he's bringing us the same way he came."
"Couldn't come any other way by the look of it," J.B. interrupted.
"Right. But he never mentioned those bodies. Had to have seen them. Known what they were. Why not tell us about that?"
Krysty touched Ryan on the arm. "The bones had been there for some days, hadn't they?"
"So what. Three skeletons, looking like a herd of buffalo stampeded over them. Never saw bones so splintered. What do you think, Mildred?"
"About Michael, or the bodies?"
"Both."
"I think there were more than three. I know there was only the trio of skulls. But that looked like at least eight or nine femurs for a start. And the same number of scapulas. Could've thrown the rest in the river."
Ryan nodded. "What about Michael?"
"I agree we need to be a bit careful. I don't think there's much chance of him trying to harm any of us."
"You don't just sit there and say.. .tell us about being 'much chance,' Mildred. That's about as bastard useless and stupe as..." Ryan bit his lip and breathed slowly. "Sorry. Nearly got real angry again. But you reckon he could hurt us?"
Mildred stared at him. "I don't think either you or Michael are on top of life at the moment, Ryan. Try speaking to me like that another day and you'll be shitting bits of broken teeth. You hear me."
"I'm sorry. Really. But we have to know."
"Should we consider some sort of restraint for the poor lad?" Doc asked.
"Tie him up?" Ryan shook his head. "No. Short of chilling him, all we can do is watch and listen." He stood up again. "And be careful."
A PAIR OF FOXES DARTED across the trail a hundred yards farther along, where it was beginning to level out again and move away from the water.
"What's the name for them, Doc?" Michael called, grinning cheerfully back over his shoulder.
"A skulk of foxes, my dear boy. Though I wouldn't have said that Br'er Reynard was all that much at skulking."
"Is it far, Michael?" Ryan leaned a hand against the smooth trunk of a tall, elegant silver birch. The day was getting much wanner.
"Just over the top. Looked like some kind of shelter. An overlook."
"I can see it," J.B. said. "Hold it here and I'll go on ahead. Rest of you cover me,"
The trees had thinned out, and the trail had suddenly turned into a stone-lined path. There was a line of beeches to the right, and to the left the ground dropped off steeply toward the distant water. They could all see the outline of a gray stone building, standing alone in a clearing.
"Feel anything, Krysty?"
She paused a moment before answering. "Not close." Seeing him about to speak, she added, "Before you jump on me, I mean not for several miles. But I feel a kind of contact, recently. In the last day or so, I'd guess."
"Good or bad." "That's easy, lover. Bad."
J.B. HAD VANISHED, crabbing to the right, moving at a fast crouch, with the Uzi in his hand.
The others waited. Ryan had the Steyr, scanning the land all around through the powerful Starlite night scope with the laser image enhancer, his index finger on the trigger.
The other five were fanned out, watching silently in a combat perimeter, Dean with his heavy Browning and Mildred with her Czech ZKR 551. Krysty looked toward the stream, holding the 5-shot Smith & Wesson double-action revolver. Doc sat with his knees drawn up, back against a live oak, the massive J. E. B. Stuart limited edition Le Mat cradled in his lap. He held a fallen leaf, preoccupied in following the delicate tracery with his fingernail.
Michael lay flat on his stomach, following the progress of J.B., his own Texas Longhorn Border Special resting on an abandoned anthill.
"See him?" Ryan whispered.
The teenager replied without even looking toward Ryan. "No. Saw a blue jay fly out of the trees close to that building. Must be him."
Ryan turned and crawled to lie alongside Michael. "You go right up to that place?"
"Yeah. I thought..." The boy's face changed, almost as though someone had pulled a skintight mask down over it. "No, Ryan," he said. "Got close, then figured I should come back and report what I'd found."
"And you had the berries on the way back?"
"Right."
Ryan spotted J.B. at that moment. The Armorer was kneeling behind a stout sycamore, less than twenty yards from the building. He stood up very slowly, then waved with the automatic pistol for the others to join him.
THEY STOOD TOGETHER a few feet from the southern wall of the single-story shelter. Mildred said that it looked to her like it had originally been a kind of very basic overlook for campers or tourists.
"You said you saw bullets," Ryan said to Michael. "Where was that?"
"Other side. By where there's been the big fire and stuff." He pointed.
It crossed Ryan's mind that only a couple of minutes ago the teenager had specifically denied that he'd gone right up to the place.
"Fire?"
"Go look."
As they walked around the front, it was clear that it was a totally basic shelter, with no windows and only an open doorway. To the left there was a fringe of aspens, hiding the view over the valley and the tumbling falls of the river. Back before skydark, Ryan guessed, the trees were probably not th
ere and the building would have given the hiker an uninterrupted vista of staggering beauty.
The ashes of a big fire were heaped up against the wall, the concrete and stone scorched and cracked. And, as Michael had reported, there were dozens of empty shells, the brass discolored by the heat.
"Thirty-eights," the Armorer said, without even having to pick one of them up. "Someone threw them into the fire so's they'd explode."
"And there's the smell of gasoline." Mildred sniffed. "Why set such a big fire way out here?"
"It seems a veritable midsummer madness," Doc commented. "Who on earth would do such a foolish thing?"
Ryan and J.B. looked at each other, the same thought running through their minds, both of them knowing just who might do such a stupe thing.
But before either of them could put that thought into words, they were interrupted by a shout from the back of the damaged building.
"Dad! Come quick!"
Chapter Eighteen
The first body could have been either male or female.
It had been so badly mutilated, then set on fire, that it was almost impossible to tell. If Mildred had been allowed the time and resources she could undoubtedly have deduced the sex of the corpse from a variety of forensic evidence, beginning, of course, with the pelvis.
It had been bound with strands of baling wire, then strung up onto a large iron hook driven into the wall. It was impossible to be sure, but it looked like the feet had been severed before the burning.
All of the skin had been blackened and crisped, though it had split in several places, showing the veined redness of raw flesh beneath.
The skull was roasted, eyes and soft tissues quite destroyed, leaving only the startling whiteness of the teeth, frozen in an eternal rictus.
The air was heavy with the sour scent of gasoline.
"Last night, I'd guess," J.B. said, his voice seeming loud in the stillness.
The second corpse was male. It lay huddled around the corner, knees drawn up to its chest, arms clasped around itself . A dark hole in the side of its head, with dried blood matting the stringy hair, showed how it had finally died. A massive dark patch over the front of its torn cotton shirt spoke of a mortal wound that had left the man dying in agony.
He looked to be about thirty, with a skinny body, and bare feet. His lips had flared back off his teeth, showing that they were filed to needle points.
But it was the soles of his feet, and the palms and the fingers of the hands that everyone looked at, confirming the unvoiced suspicions of both J.B. and Ryan.
They saw a number of small, powerful suckers, mostly closed in death, but plenty strong enough in life to rip skin away from an enemy.
"Stickles," Dean said.
"Yeah," his father agreed.
It explained the empty shells and the surfeit of gas-powered explosions. The one thing that a stickle loved above all else was causing mayhem and murder with fires and detonations, the louder and grander the better.
It also explained the blackened log that had once been a human being.
Ryan reconstructed what had happened.
"Person on his own. Hunting. Passing by. Trapped by some stickies. Two or five or fifty. Doesn't much matter how many there were."
"Could matter to us, Ryan/' J.B. said. "Tracks only show about five or six."
Ryan nodded. "Agreed. The norm probably only had time for a few rounds. Gut-shot that chilled the stickle down there. One of the other mutics put the bullet through his head. Unusual to show mercy like that."
"And then they had a stickle party, Dad." Dean shuffled his foot through the ashes of then- fire.
"Right."
"Had we not best assume extra vigilance if those subhumans are in the region?" Doc had his Le Mat drawn, the hammer set over the single scattergun round. "I knew that this Garden of Eden would have its share of reptiles."
"Nothing to do here," Ryan said. "We got us a choice. Know there's food and good water here. Probably a lot more game in the woods."
"How are you feeling?" Mildred asked.
"I wouldn't want to go five miles with a rabid grizzly, but it's getting better all the time. The wound on my neck still pains me."
She nodded. "Course it does, Ryan. Could easily take three or four days to begin proper healing. I thought about stitching it for you."
Ryan winced. "Glad you didn't. Had a wound stitched once. Never again."
"Where was that?" asked Krysty. "Iknow all your scars pretty well, lover. Never seen one that looked it had been sewed back together again."
"It was a long time ago, in another place."
"And the wench is dead," Doc said.
"Yeah." Ryan sounded surprised. "How did you know that? I never told anyone about it."
The old man shuffled his feet, embarrassed. "It was a sort of quote from an old play, Ryan. I hadn't intended to touch upon a sore point."
"It was a bastard sore point, Doc. Slut in a gaudy, when I was fifteen. Tried to cut me for a handful of jack. Did it when we was doing-"
"Were doing, not was doing," Krysty corrected, smiling at Ryan's obvious discomfort.
"Sure. We finished doing it and she tried to cut me with a small boot razor."
"Where did she cut you, Dad?" Dean asked eagerly. Michael was standing alongside him and whispered in the younger boy's ear. "Oh, I get it. There. Wow, Dad! Double-empty scene!"
"Well, she only did part of the job. And after it was over the old bitch who ran the gaudy sewed me up. I said I'd put out her eyes if she didn't help me. It was a real deep cut. I was bleeding to death."
"What happened to the whore?" Mildred asked.
"Chilled her. Slit her throat with her own blade." He was suddenly defensive. "Look, I had no choice."
"Sure," Mildred said.
THEY LEFT THE BODIES unburied.
The discovery of stickles in the area had cast a dampener over the pleasant day. There was very little conversation as they all picked their way down the path toward where they'd caught and cooked the trout.
"Better if we have a council, now," Ryan said, as they finally reached their temporary campsite. He was
out of breath, unhappy that attacks of dizziness had made him stumble a couple of times up on the hillside.
"Not much to talk about, is there?" Michael had picked up one of the discarded fish heads and was nibbling at the shreds of meat left on it.
"No. Just do we go or do we stay?"
Krysty flopped down beside him. "There aren't any stickie tracks down here. I've seen worse places to spend a few days. You need a rest, lover."
"Mebbe."
"I don't think that any of us would refuse the possibility of a little gentle relaxation. I cast my vote for remaining here. But, what of the rest of you?"
Krysty lifted a hand. "I'm with you, Doc."
"Me, too," Dean said.
"That's already a majority," Ryan stated. "Anyone going to disagree?"
J.B. looked uncertain. "If we'd only made a single jump, then I'd say leave. You remember what the Trader used to say about stickles, Ryan?"
"Yeah. He used to-"
"Company," Krysty said.
Above the sound of the racing stream came the noise of six blasters being drawn and cocked. Only Michael, still nibbling on the trout head, didn't react.
"Ho, the camp!"
Ryan shouted back. "Come in slow and easy."
"No shooting, friend."
"Just come in slow and easy."
Five strangers walked toward them from the general direction of the big lake. None of them appeared to be over twenty, and they all had a squeaky-clean, laundered look to them. All wore matching stone-washed jeans and pale denim shirts and had hunting rifles slung over their shoulders. Every one had blue eyes and long blond hair. There were four men and a woman.
"Hold it. Don't get too close," Ryan warned.
The two groups eyed each other. For some reason, Ryan noticed, they all seemed particularly struck with the appea
rance of Doc.
The young woman spoke for the arrivals. "Good day to you, outlanders."
Ryan nodded.
They all kept looking at Doc, as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing. Finally, after an uncomfortable pause, the woman spoke again. "How old is the old one?"
