by James Axler
Mildred frowned. “I thought I heard tell that Dark Lady encouraged everybody to learn some kind of a trade. Mebbe I heard wrong.”
“Oh, no,” Ruby said. “You heard right. She wants to make sure all of us entertainers find some way of making a living other than... You know, on our backs and knees.”
“Well, that’s big of her,” Mildred said a bit stiffly. “What do you want to learn?”
“Haven’t decided yet,” Ruby said, her eyes back on her pages of dense archaic text. “Been doing some carpentry kinda stuff. Mr. Coffin’s offered to teach me how to make caskets.”
“I’ll just bet he has.”
“It’s real kind of him, huh? But lately I’ve been getting more and more interested in trying to work with metal. You know, make things.”
“That’d make Mr. Dix a most happy man to hear,” Mildred said, thinking, And if he tries to take her on as a student I’ll break both his thumbs.
Ruby nodded abstractedly. She was clearly back into the Decline, or Fall.
“So, tell me...” she said. “What’s it like, uh, working for Dark Lady.”
“Fine,” Ruby said. “I like it.”
“Really?”
Ruby looked up at her with a hint of a frown. “It’s better than being forcibly turned out for muleskinners by the side of the road, for a bottle of whiskey the bunch, Ms. Wyeth.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
She took a minute to gather her thoughts. That bit of backstory had broken her stride. But she wasn’t about to walk away from her principles.
“Don’t you feel exploited?” she asked.
“‘Exploited’?”
“You know...taken advantage of.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ruby said. “I know what the words mean. I just don’t know what you mean by them.”
That put Mildred back in her chair. “Well, I mean—being compelled to have sex for money. To, uh, make money for somebody else.”
Ruby closed her book, looked at Mildred and frowned. “Are you gonna give me some other job?” she asked.
“Well...”
“I told you where I came from. You know what’d happen to me if I started peddling my round little ass just out on the street.”
“Well—yes.”
“So what else am I gonna do? What would you do in my place? Dark Lady gives me safety and comfort,” she said. “People treat us with respect. Or—well, you saw what happens to them.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “Mikey-Bob thumps them and throws them in the gutter.”
“See, she cares about us. She cares about everybody. Everybody in the ville. Mebbe in the whole world.”
She shook her head. “Crazy, right? But it’s a craziness that’s giving me a shot at a better life than anything else I was gonna get. Same for everybody here. What do you think would happen to Mikey-Bob, if not for Dark Lady? He’d have been hunted down and butchered as a monster long ago. Or at best had to go off with Madame Zaroza and play a freak in her traveling show. Which, you know, works for some people.”
Mildred felt her face tighten into a ball of confusion.
“Talk to anybody you like,” Ruby said heatedly. “Here or in Amity Springs. Not everybody likes Dark Lady, sure. Lotta people in the ville butt heads with her regular. But you won’t hear anybody say she doesn’t care, and doesn’t do her best to look out for us all, unless they’re a nuking liar!”
Mildred held up her hands. “Okay, okay. You can back off the trigger of the blaster now, hon—”
“You know what? You can even go ask that Baron Sand out to Joker Creek! She’d tell you the same. And she and Dark Lady hate each other like poison. Or love each other like sisters. Or mebbe ex-lovers. Nobody knows for sure. Least of all them, mebbe—”
The kitchen doors opened vigorously to what turned out to be a kick from Ryan. He walked into the room carrying two heavy steaming crockery plates. The others trooped in after him, ignoring Mikey’s expostulation about not mishandling the physical plant.
“If you’re done browbeating the help, Mildred,” he said, plunking down heaping helpings of scrambled eggs, thick bacon slices and stewed pinto beans on the table in front of her, “breakfast is served. And you’re rad-blasted welcome.”
* * *
“HOW DO DARK LADY’S employees like her?” asked the woman behind the counter. She was solidly built, with a pretty face, bobbed red hair and a cheerfully matter-of-fact manner. “Why don’t you ask them?”
Chagrined by Ruby’s words—and her vehemence—but still unwilling to let go of her righteous indignation against Dark Lady and her sex-trafficking ways, Mildred followed her advice. Despite her friends’ admonitions to rest up, she’d decided to spend the rest of the day talking to the young woman’s coworkers in the gaudy, and then talking to random people in the ville.
Only a couple of the entertainers, another young woman named LaSalle and a young man named Duke, had gotten up and proved willing to talk before Mildred got bored and restless and ventured out into the warm day. They had fairly well corroborated Ruby’s account. So Mildred determined to talk to people whose livelihood, not to mention possible safety, did not hinge quite so directly on staying on the gaudy owner’s good side.
“Well, I did,” Mildred said. “But I admit I’m just a bit uncomfortable with the whole brothel-owner thing.”
The woman, Kris, looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t really see why. Sure, some people kind of look askance at the whole thing. But it seems to me like people want the service and she helps her people provide it in a safe, clean way. What’s the problem? Anyway, aren’t you-all hired blasters?”
“Well, that’s not all we do.”
The woman laughed. The store was lit only by backscatter sun through fly-specked windows. It had shelves of various nonperishable items, from bins of nails to bolts of cloth to hand-turned meat grinders to sturdy mechanisms that Mildred had no idea did what.
“Well, we all get along best we can. Reckon it’s the same for Dark Lady and her people.”
“So how do people in the ville feel about her?”
“What’s this about feeling Dark Lady?” asked Wilson, Kris’s husband. He was wearing his apron and lugging a basket of folded hemp cloths out of a back room.
Without even looking around Kris smacked him on top of his bald head. “Behave,” she said. “I’m not sure you can say everybody likes her. She comes off as kind of standoffish, and can be stubborn as a jug-head mule. But she does a power of good for the ville, not much disagreement about that.”
“What sort of good?” Mildred asked.
“You mean other than providing invaluable public services like whores and beer?” Wilson asked jauntily, hoisting the cloths onto the sturdy wooden counter. “Well, the place serves as a lending library. Not many intact books are around Deathlands these days, and people come from far and wide for a chance to borrow one. The name’s not just for show. And she gives free reading lessons to anyone who needs it.”
“Mebbe half the people in Amity Springs can read,” Kris said with pride. “Wilson and I knew how before she got here, but she taught a bunch of folks. He’s the avid reader in the family. I don’t find much time, myself.”
“She does handle a lot of our salvage operations,” Wilson said. “You know about those, right?”
Mildred nodded.
“She came here mebbe five, six years ago, nobody knows where from,” Kris said. “Little frail-looking wisp of a thing, with those big black eyes. But smart, and without an ounce of back-down in her.”
“Her and pretty much that huge steamer trunk of old books she used to start her library with,” Wilson said.
Mildred wondered just how a “frail little wisp” managed to drag a whole steamer trunk full of books along with her into the Basin—Nukem Flats. Given
that she had to bring them across the mountains to the east, bluffs north and south, or up the cliffs the Río Piojo apparently hurled itself off of in an endless suicide dive beside the ville of the same name. But Mildred let the question go. She had more pressing concerns, and limited time to indulge raw curiosity.
“We were just starting to realize what we were sitting on top of back then,” Kris said. “She had the idea of making a focused effort to scavvy the primest stuff out of the trash beds, and use the proceeds to build up the ville, which you can see has worked out double-well.”
“But she’s not the baron?” Mildred asked.
Husband and wife looked at each other. “Never felt much call for one of those,” Wilson said, “lording it over us and all.”
“Dark Lady is what you might call a leading light of the community,” Kris said. “People just naturally go to her for advice on help on all manner of things. She gives it if she can. And she’s right at least a bit more often than she’s not, which isn’t a bad record.”
“She sounds too good to be true,” Mildred said. “Things like that have a bad way of turning out not to be true. Or good.”
Kris shrugged. “We’re not much given to borrowing trouble here. All we can go by is what we see. And now if you’ll excuse the two of us, I have to get to pestering this lazy man of mine into making something useful of himself.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Dark Lady’s a witch,” the kid said in a confiding yet confident tone.
“Oh, she is, is she,” Mildred said.
“Uh-huh.”
“So you’re scared of her?”
He was a slat-skinny boy of about ten, with a mop of muddy blond hair, freckles, a red shirt and blue canvas pants. He squatted, peering intently into one end of a stack of weathered wood poles, four inches thick and ten feet long. Firewood evidently.
His right hand darted the long-hafted implement he held into a gap near the bottom of the pile. She heard a squeak, then frantic chittering.
He pulled out a large brown rat, impaled, writhing on the barbed tines of what she’d thought was a frogging gig.
“Sorry, little guy,” the boy—he’d said his name was Billy—told the rat. He laid the gaffe on the ground and crushed the animal’s skull with a decisive stomp of a boot heel. Then he pinned it and yanked out his two-pronged spear.
“Nope,” he said. “Why should I be scared of Dark Lady? She likes kids. Now, if you try to hurt one of us kids, then she gets stone scary.”
“Um,” Mildred said. “Yeah. I’ve seen her do scary.”
A tiny triangular face sleekly furred in white and silver poked out of the pile of poles where Billy had gigged the rat. Beady black eyes stared at him from a black bandit mask.
“Good girl,” he told the ferret approvingly. “Go get me some more, Angelina. I hear ’em in there.”
The face vanished.
Picking the now-still rat carcass up by its tail, he tossed it onto a heap of a dozen or so others lying eight feet away from his stakeout. A brief shift in the slow noontime breeze told Mildred why: they were starting to get ripe in the warm sun.
“I get paid for bringing in so many tails,” he explained.
“I see. So why do you apologize to the rats when you chill them?”
He hunkered down again, leaning forward, then left and right and frowning as he tried to see into the spaces between the poles.
“Rats are actually intelligent and sociable,” he said. “Did you know they cry when they’re alone?”
“I don’t believe it.” Mildred didn’t want to believe it.
“True as glowing nuke death, ma’am, cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “See, Dark Lady had us kids raise us some rat pups. We kept ’em as pets until they died—they don’t live long. We found out when they were kept alone, without other rats or us for company, they’d whimper.”
“So, how can you bring yourself to chill them now?”
He shrugged. “Well, we got to, I guess. The ones we kept were our friends. These ones are our enemies. Same as human coldhearts. They take what we need, because they need it, too.”
He glanced up at her.
“They’re not really to blame, though. Not like coldhearts are. Rats got no choice. They want to live and raise their kids same as we do. If they got to do it by stealing our food, that’s what they do. But when they do that, they threaten our lives. So we get to fight back, and that’s just too bad for them.”
He speared another rat and finished it off with the same cold-blooded yet merciful efficiency.
“I wanna hurry and grow up and start chillin’ coldhearts,” he said. He looked at Mildred again. “Just like you and your friends do. Because when they hurt and rob and kill, they do mean it. They’re double worse than rats that way.”
His words chilled her. More than they should have. In her own time she’d known of children growing up in such close-to-the-bone situations—and not just with regard to rats. Or not just the four-legged kind. She’d worked with some of them, as an intern.
She realized he’d given her a clear snapshot of two seemingly contradictory sides of Dark Lady’s nature: compassionate and cold-blooded. Just like the way the boy finished off his prey.
“You say she’s a witch?” she said. “But you seem to like her.”
“She’s not a scary witch,” he said. “Not if you’re her friend. But how else can she know the things she knows, or do the things she does?”
Mildred had no ready answer.
“You know, she’s got a soft spot for muties,” he said, deftly spearing and dispatching yet another rat. “You know how she’s got a soft spot for that big two-head mutie who always talks to himself?”
“Yes,” Mildred said. “But he’s not a mutie. He’s—never mind. Go on.”
“Some folks say the reason why is, he’s her brother. My older sister Maggie says it’s because he’s her lover. But when she talks like that Mama always threatens to wash her mouth out with soap.”
“I should say so.”
“Anyway, she used to roll with that traveling freak show that just left town. Some people say mebbe she’s even a mutie herself. She sure comes down hard on anybody picking on ’em.”
“You know this for yourself? That she was with Madame Zaroza, I mean?”
He shrugged. “Well, that’s what people say. Some people whisper she’s got a dark secret, too.”
“What is it?”
He looked at her as if she were the triple stupe to trump all triple stupes.
“Well, if they knew that, it would hardly be a secret, now, would it?” he asked with abundant pre-adolescent scorn.
“Oh. I guess not.”
He turned back to his task.
“Some people do say it has to do with Baron Sand.”
“Baron Sand?”
“Yup.” He nodded, though his eyes never left the logs. Or the spaces in between. “They got history together of some kind, and that’s a fact. As to what—some folks say they’re sisters. Had a falling out over a lover picked one over the other. Some say the Dark Lady, some say Sand. Dunno how anybody’d pick the baron over Dark Lady though. She’s funny-looking.”
“That’s not nice,” Mildred said. “She has a very pretty face.”
“Well, she is funny. I mean, make-people-laugh funny. The kind of funny a body wants to be. I gotta give her that.”
He didn’t sound convinced anyone would pick the baron over the gaudy owner, though.
“Some other people even claim Dark Lady and Sand was lovers themselves.”
“Goodness gracious!” Mildred exclaimed, scandalized. “Was that your sister Maggie, again?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. But my aunt Blanche has been known to say it once, or more than once, when
she’d had a little too much summer beer or Towse Lightning to drink of an evening. Mama always tells her to hush her mouth. I guess she can’t wash her mouth out with soap, being as they’re both adults and all.”
“I suppose not.”
“There’s even some as say Dark Lady and Sand are in cahoots,” he said.
“Cahoots?” Mildred asked. “To do what?”
“Never heard that part, rightly. Usually when they start talking that way they get quiet, then chase me off. Don’t put no stock in that, myself.”
“Who says that about her?”
He shot her a narrow-eyed suspicious look. “Why do you wanna know?”
“Forget I asked,” Mildred said. “I take it there are people in this ville who don’t care much for Dark Lady?”
“Some,” he admitted.
“I really don’t believe it, though,” she said. “I think you’re making that up.”
“Am not! Are too! There’s Sarah Walker. And the Mormons—they don’t live here rightly. And there’s Mr. Sinclair. He runs the wag yard and he’s almost as important as she is.”
“Is he indeed?” Mildred said.
“Billy!” a woman’s voice cried from around the corner of the building. “Billy Cohen, you come right now!”
“But, Ma!” he called back. “My tails!”
“You leave those nasty things for now. I need you right this moment.”
He made a clucking sound. Angelina poked her pointy, piquant face out, higher up than she had before. He scrabbled a couple fingers on the ground. She jumped down. He gathered her up and, standing, poured her inside his shirt.
“You won’t take my rats, will you, ma’am?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“They’re pretty tasty when they don’t get too high in the sun,” he said. “Hope the cats don’t—”
“Billy!”
“Yes, Ma!” Clutching his ferret against his belly, he raced away out of sight.
* * *
“SO YOU WANT to know about Dark Lady?” asked the man who sat in a small office with his boots on the desk.
