by James Axler
“I know no such thing,” Conn stated crisply. “But I do know you. And you know I don’t put up with trouble inside my place. So I reckon it’s time for you to leave.”
The huge man looked around. The gaudy was filled with faces lit yellow by smoky oil lamps. None of them looked sympathetic. Potar turned and strode out, head high, as if leaving was his idea.
“He’s the town bully over to Sinkhole,” Conn told the companions.
“We figured,” Mildred replied.
“I think he just wants acceptance.”
“The kind of big lunk who has no real harm in him, huh?” Mildred said acerbically.
Ryan cocked a disapproving brow at her. The gaudy owner was their main and best customer for their scavvy. He saw no point in letting Mildred sour a perfectly profitable business relationship.
Conn laughed without much real humor. “Oh, there’s plenty harm in him,” he said. “It just happens to stem from him not being able to find a place in the world, is all.”
Ryan looked around at his friends. With his head turned so no one else in the gaudy could see but them, he inflated his cheeks and blew out an exaggerated sigh between pursed lips.
Krysty winked at him.
Stenson’s Creek’s gaudy was much like any other, if cleaner than most. That made it different from the nearby ville of Sinkhole, which was something of a dump. It seemed to be run-down more from a sense of comfortable complacency than from the pervasive despair that defined much of the world outside the Pennyrile district. The gaudy was a sprawling roadhouse in the woods, east of Sinkhole along the creek that provided its name. It was mostly solid postnuke construction, fieldstone and timber. The bar was polished local hardwood. The tables and chairs had a crude look to them, as if they’d been made with little concern for appearance. But they were sturdy. The place didn’t offer much by way of decor, but that wasn’t what Conn was in the business of selling, and his customers didn’t seem to mind.
“Hey, big boy,” a dispirited-looking gaudy slut asked a man at the table nearest Ryan and company, “looking for a good time?”
She wore a ragged skirt, a blouse whose neckline hung almost as low as her breasts did and a sort of scarf around her neck made of interwoven rags. It was apparently meant to suggest a feather boa. What it did suggest was a mutie hybrid of an actual boa constrictor and a weasel with the mange.
The man she was talking to looked cast from a similar mold to the departed Potar, but of a shorter, wider, flabbier model. He had a neck bulged out thicker than his head, into which a succession of chins blended seamlessly as he slurped at the foam on his own beer mug with an intensity single-minded enough to suggest to Ryan that it just about maxed out his capabilities in the mind department. He didn’t so much as flick his vacant brown eyes the slut’s way.
She ran her fingers down the burly shoulder left bare by his grime-, sweat- and man-grease-mottled singlet, and leaned down so far Ryan could see the full pendulousness of her breasts from ten feet away without trying to, much less wanting so. Putting her painted lips close enough to his ear to risk leaving red marks, she purred, “Mebbe you didn’t hear me the first ti—”
He shoved her away, and she went down on her not-so-well-upholstered fanny so hard her tailbone cracked against the floorboards like a knuckle rapping on a table.
Scowling, Conn put down the bottle of shine he held and started around the bar, reaching under the counter as he did so.
The woman jumped to her feet. “What the nuke, you fat slob?”
“Back up off the triggers of them blasters, everybody,” a deep voice boomed from another corner of the room.
It was naturally arresting. Everyone stopped—even Conn himself, whom Ryan had observed in their previous visits was the unquestioned master in his own house.
The speaker wasn’t tall, but he was wide. A black man, the gray in his short, tightly curled hair showed him to be in middle age. And while he had a bit of a gut bulging out onto his thighs as he sat nursing his brew, Ryan suspected there was more muscle than flab. He was surrounded by four men and two women, most of whom showed a family resemblance, though it was far less pronounced than in the three largely chinless, large-foreheaded types who accompanied the meatbag.
“Don’t take it to heart,” he said calmly. “You’re new in these parts and don’t know. Them Sumzes don’t ball nobody more distantly related than first cousin. And Buffort, there, ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
“It’s a family turdition, Tarley,” said a skinny redheaded Sumz with ears like open wag doors. “Dates back to the dark times. That’s how us Sumzes pulled through.”
Buffort guffawed and pounded a beefy fist on the table. It happened to be the one clenching the handle of his mug. Frothy brown beer slopped forth.
Ryan could smell him and his brothers from twenty feet away. The Sumzes were turpentiners, he knew—they made the stuff from the resin of loblolly pines growing around the valley where they made their home. Its astringent, piney smell overwhelmed even the body reek wafting from the group, and the fresh-sawdust-and-old-vomit stink that even the best-kept-up gaudy sported. It was even noticeable over the odor of the lanterns, which like most of the lamps hereabouts burned a blend of the pine oil with wood alcohol.
“You tell ’em, Yoostas!” the huge fat man crowed in a surprisingly shrill voice. “Family that sleeps together keeps together!”
Everybody laughed. Even the gaudy slut, though she looked as if she wasn’t clear as to the why.
A couple of husky young men, one dark-skinned, one light, had appeared near the scene. They were local youths Conn employed for odd jobs, including bouncing the occasional rowdy patron. They looked now to their boss.
He sighed, but he was already withdrawing his hand from underneath the bar. He used it to smooth back his thinning seal-colored hair instead.
“Right,” he said. “Keep a tighter leash on your boy, there, Yoostas.”
“Aw, c’mon, Conn. There ain’t no harm to him.”
“I know,” Conn said, moving back to his accustomed spot and picking up his bottle again, as if he meant to use it for its original purpose instead of cracking heads. “That’s why y’all are still here.”
He looked at the girl, who was trying to untangle her arms and upper torso from her ratty makeshift boa.
“Go take a break, Annie,” he said. “Catch a breath, pull yourself together.”
“But my take for the evening—”
“I said, take a break. I won’t jam you on the take. Don’t bleed when you’re not cut.”
She bobbed her head and vanished toward the back, where the few cribs were. Like a lot of the more respectable gaudy-house owners, Conn allowed a few women, usually down-on-their-luck locals, to rent time and space to ply their sexual wares rather than keeping them in greater or lesser degrees of slavery, as most did. Ryan had also noted he treated his workers the way he did trading partners: politely, calmly and driving a hard bargain but a fair one.
He didn’t cheat too much, which made him a Deathlands paragon.
Ryan turned his attention back to his friends. He saw them all easing their hands back from their own blasters. Handblasters only; Conn insisted longblasters be checked at the door. That chafed J.B.’s butt a tad, but Ryan went along with it, meaning the Armorer and the others did, too.
Ryan was willing to rely on Conn’s unwavering insistence on keeping an orderly house.
And if that failed, it wasn’t as if Ryan and his friends weren’t packing enough heat to burn a way to the little cabinet by the door where their longblasters were.
“There are worse places,” Mildred said with a shrug.
J.B. showed her a hint of sly grin. “You still got your mind on settling down?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve been in way worse locations, is all I’m saying.”
“Indeed,” Doc said. He was leaning forward, staring down at an angle at the tabletop with an unfocused look in his blue ey
es. Ryan couldn’t tell for sure if he was agreeing with Mildred, or with some randomly remembered person from his past, like his long-lost wife, Emily, or even their children, Rachel and Jolyon. The predark whitecoats and their malicious time-trawling had done more than age him prematurely. Sometimes Doc lost touch with the present and wandered off through the fog of his own reminiscences.
The others couldn’t help but fear that sometime he might just wander off inside his own skull and never come back. But he always had, and lately things seemed to be getting consistently better. In any event he always snapped right to when the hammer came down.
Jak was frowning.
“What’s the matter, Jak?” Krysty asked gently.
The albino’s scowl deepened. But he didn’t snap back at her, as he sometimes could with his male companions. He just pressed his scarcely visible white lips together so hard they vanished altogether, and shook his head briskly.
“Don’t gnaw your own guts over not being able to track those stick-throwing white things,” J.B. said. As was his custom, he didn’t raise his voice. If he had something to say, he said it calmly. If he had something to do, he did it without hesitation or qualm. “They know the lay of the land better than even you can, most likely. And they probably have some kind of lairs nearby they can duck into.”
Though the gaudy chatter had resumed its normal volume, Ryan could hear Jak growl low in his throat. It wasn’t a gesture of hostility but a sign of his own dissatisfaction with himself.
“Listen, Jak,” Mildred said helpfully. “There’s always someone better than you.”
That got her a red-eyed glare.
“Mildred,” Ryan said dryly, “stop helping.”
The door burst open.
For a moment all that poured inside was darkness and the sound of crickets, audible because the dramatic opening had quieted the small talk again. It wasn’t necessarily in anticipation of an equally dramatic entry; people hereabouts, like most places, were just that starved for something a little different from the day-in, day-out routine.
But they got the drama anyway. A young woman came through the door, half striding, half staggering under a burden of deadweight and fatigue. She carried a body in her arms. It was apparently a child, a girl by the long hair that hung down from the intruder’s right arm, and she was dead, from the lifeless swing and dangle of her small, bare arms.
But the young woman’s head was high, black hair falling in waves around broad shoulders, one bared by her half-torn-open flannel shirt. Her deep blue eyes blazed with rage.
“My baby sister’s dead!” she cried in a vibrant voice. “Blinda’s been murdered, and I saw who done it!”
A number of patrons had jumped to their feet. “Who did it, Wymie?” one asked.
She fixed Ryan with a laser glare. “Those stoneheart outlanders there!”
That silenced the rising murmur as though cutting it off with an ax. Immediately whispers started up again: “Oh, holy shit, her face.”
Ryan saw that it was missing. Something had taken much of the bone from brow to lower jaw along with flesh and skin.
Ryan heard Krysty gasp. Doc made a strangled noise.
“You can’t be talking to us,” Ryan said, as evenly as he could.
“I saw you! You bastards!”
“You didn’t see us,” Mildred said. “We were working at the claim until late. Then we came right here.”
“Tell us exactly what you did see, Wymie,” Conn told her.
The black-haired young woman stooped and eased her burden onto the floorboards. Blood began to trickle outward. Behind her Ryan could see a number of others with anxious, angry faces. Plenty held weapons, from hoes and axes to a muzzle-loader shotgun or two. Slowly, Wymie straightened.
“I looked out the window, soon as—as it happened,” she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair. Bloodred eyes!”
All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.
“Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.
“Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”
“We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”
“You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”
“We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.
He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.
He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.
“It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”
“I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.
“Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we do such a thing?”
“You’re outlanders! From out there!”
Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.
“You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it Deathlands. Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”
“But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And he looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”
“Mebbe used an ax.”
“Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”
“Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”
“‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.
“Mebbe he’s a—a werewolf or somethin’! We all know there’s monsters out there!”
Tarley shook his head. “Wymie, Wymie. Listen to yourself. We can’t go lynchin’ strangers because they might be werewolves. Not without some kinda evidence they are. Or that werewolves exist, even.”
“People say there’s all kind of weird muties, out in the Deathlands,” one of the men standing on the stoop behind Wymie said. “Like little rubber-skinned bastards with suckers for fingertips, can rip the hide clean off you!”
“That part’s real,” Ricky said. “Those are stickies. They’re bad news.”
“I’ve seen stickies,” Tarley stated. “They’re pretty much what you say. But stickies didn’t do this, and I see no reason to believe these folks did, either.”
“You takin’ their part, Tarley Gaines?” Wymie shrieked. “Of outlanders who murder our own?”
“Nobody’s takin’ anybody’s part,” Conn said, his voice level and as unyielding as an anvil. “Not tonight. Not in here. Except the truth’s, mebbe.”
“I know the truth!” the young woman yelled.
“You got precious little to show for it, Wymie.”
“I know what I saw!”
“And mebbe what you saw wasn’t what your mind’s made of it. Fact is, these folks have been right here a good past hour, half an hour spent hagglin’, half an hour eatin’ my venison, stewed greens and beans, and drinkin’ my brew. They came in without a dot of blood on them, wearin’ clothes they’d double clearly worked in all day. And their hair isn’t wet enough to be from anythin’ but sweat, so they didn’t clean themselves up after doing murder. The alb
ino in particular—blood’d show up pretty clear on him.”
Wymie was looking around, but from the slump of her strong shoulders Ryan could see that, while the anger and even hate were still there, still smoldering, sheer exhaustion and emotional reaction had damped her fires. She had nothing left.
Not now, anyway.
“You out there,” Conn called past the suddenly befuddled-looking woman. “Burny Stoops. Walter John. Get in here, pick this poor girl up off my floor and take her to Coffin-Maker Sam, over to the Hole. He’ll see she gets a decent burial.”
“I can’t afford to hire a hole dug for her,” Wymie said, sounding more sullen now than raging. “Much less a box to bury her in.”
“Tell Sam I’ll cover the expenses,” Conn said. “But you got to leave now, Wymie. Find a place to stay. Don’t make any more fuss, now. It won’t do poor Blinda a speck of good.”
“But—”
“We’ll get it sorted out. When the sun comes up, we’ll go take a look at your old place. We need information, and that’s a thing we haven’t got.”
“I know all I need to,” she said, the spark of anger flaring again.
“The rest of us don’t,” the gaudy owner said, with just a bit of edge to his voice. “Mrs. Haymuss!”
After a moment a stout brown-skinned woman emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a much-stained apron and wiping her hands on a rag. She was evidently the cook.
“Take this poor girl and see to her. Get her settled with Widow Oakey. She’s close and likes to take in strays.”
“But, Mr. Conn, the kitchen—”
“Kitchen’s closed,” the gaudy owner said. “Nobody’s got an appetite left now. And if they do, I’m not minded to feed them, right now.”
The woman walked forward, encircled Wymie’s shoulders with a brawny arm and began alternately clucking and cooing at her. Ryan couldn’t make out what she was saying. Or even if it was words.
The black-haired woman made as if to push her off. Then she turned, buried her face at the juncture of Mrs. Haymuss’s neck and beefy shoulders, and began to cry uncontrollably.
The two men Conn had called on came in past the two to gingerly pick up Blinda’s body. Mrs. Haymuss steered Wymie back out into the night. They followed, struggling to carry what a single woman had brought here on her own.
