by James Axler
“The rest of you out there,” Conn called, “move along. It isn’t polite to stare.”
Whatever passions Wymie’s trek had excited in the locals who had collected to follow her to the gaudy house, they had vanished, as well. Shuffling their feet, not meeting one another’s gazes directly, they broke up began to go their separate ways.
Conn watched them for a moment. Slowly, those inside the gaudy who had jumped up at the spectacle sat themselves back down.
“I’d wait to make sure they all get headed in the right direction, just in case,” Conn said to Ryan. “Then you might want to clear out of here.”
“Much obliged,” Ryan said.
“Thank you for your help,” Krysty said. “Do you think we did it after all?”
Conn shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. Somebody did this, and that somebody needs to pay. But if I thought it was you, I never would’ve said what I did. Fact is, I don’t see how you could have done it.”
“But that big-titty girl still thinks you done it,” Yoostas Sumz said. “Sure as shit stinks double bad.”
* * *
Chapter Three
“What do we do now?” Mildred asked.
The faces gathered around the little campfire mirrored the concern and uncertainty she felt. Except for Ryan’s. He sat off a little apart, knees drawn up, facing off to the side. His chin was down and he was clearly brooding.
Jak was nowhere to be seen. Ryan would have had to physically restrain him to keep him from prowling the perimeter of their camp to scout for signs of watchers or intruders—and look for signs the elusive white shadows had been there. Crickets and tree frogs trilled in the night. A few late fireflies danced.
“Can we stay here?” Ricky asked.
“Don’t see as how we rightly can,” J.B. said. He sat across the fire from Mildred, face turned toward the flames. The yellow underlighting brought out the strong bone structure of his face, and turned his eyeglass lenses into disks of flame.
“The place has gotten too hot for comfort, I reckon. It’s time to shake the dust of it off our heels.”
Mildred pressed her lips into a line. She hated to contradict J.B. She loved him. More, she respected him.
“Let’s not overreact.”
Mildred’s eyes widened in surprise.
She glanced at Krysty. The tall, statuesque redhead sat beside her brooding man. It was she who had spoken out as Mildred opened her mouth. Looking back at J.B., she saw a quick furrow of his brows as he glanced at Krysty.
On him, that was the equivalent of a full-on scowl. He was usually as expressive as a stone statue.
But Krysty said what she wanted, and not just because Ryan was her partner. Everyone could speak his or her mind.
“‘Overreact’?” Mildred repeated.
“We have a good place here,” Krysty said. “A comfortable camp, the cave is good shelter, and we have running water. The dig has a lot more scavvy to be unearthed. You yourself said it looks as if we’re just getting down to the good stuff, J.B.”
“Jack’s worth squat,” J.B. replied, “if you don’t live to spend it. So Trader used to say.”
Mildred frowned. J.B. did not tend toward the dogmatic, but when the quotations from his and Ryan’s old mentor were trotted out, that meant he was settling into his groove of thinking.
“He also used to point out you tend to make jack in direct proportion to the risk you run,” Ryan added without looking around.
“Why, Ryan,” Doc said. “I thought you of all people would urge caution.”
Ryan shrugged. “Looking to look at the whole situation before I make up my mind,” Ryan replied.
“Looks straightforward to me,” J.B. said. “We’ve got two packs of enemies on our tails. That’s beyond bad odds.”
“But, J.B.,” Ricky said, almost desperately. “Think of the stuff that might be down there! The tech—the weapons!”
The Armorer shook his head. He took a half-smoked black cheroot from a pocket of the brown leather jacket he wore, struck a spark from a butane lighter he had found in the last redoubt they’d jumped to and puffed the smoke to life. He cast a swift glance at Mildred.
The woman repressed a grin. His apprentice knew his soft spots, for sure.
His occasional smoking didn’t please her as a twentieth-century physician, even one who preferred research to hands-on doctoring—before she got wakened from her cryosleep into a brutal, desolate world where “healing” was her number one marketable skill, that is. But she’d long since lost the heart to chide him for it, other than a slight frown.
Realistically, she didn’t count on any of them living long enough for cancer to take them. In Deathlands, sudden death wasn’t just a constant possibility. It was an immediate reality.
“Right now,” Ryan said softly, “we’ve got no evidence I can see that anybody’s on our tails. Here, anyway.”
“But those pale shadows know where our dig site is, certainly,” Doc stated.
“Yeah. But they haven’t shown up around here, yet.”
“Yet,” J.B. echoed.
It was Ryan’s turn to shrug.
“We’re not on the last train west yet, either. Even if the locals are after us, too, they don’t know where either place is.”
Ryan had chosen a campsite a mile or so from the sinkhole that had swallowed the predark trove. It was a fine site, as comfortable as it got sleeping rough—and better than a lot of buildings they’d bunked in, Mildred knew all too well. The cave provided shelter from the frequent rains as well as from casual observation. A little stream ran along the base of the sandstone outcrop that formed their current home. And even though it was a pain humping back and forth each day to the excavation, the separation ensured that even if one location was compromised, the other wouldn’t be.
As the fact that the pale shadows had found the dig but not this place—as far as they could tell—attested to. Though with Jak on the job, she wasn’t concerned they might be under covert observation. Just because even he couldn’t track them here on their home range—whatever the hell-on-earth they were—didn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to spot them if they came creeping around here.
But now something was eating at her, too, in spite of the fact that she, like Krysty, badly wanted to stay here as long as possible. Even if this wasn’t going to be a final, permanent safe haven—unless of course they left their bones here in the Pennyrile—they were all riding the ragged edge of exhaustion. Not so much the physical sort, but the kind brought on by constant stress.
The stability they’d enjoyed for the week or so that they’d worked the sinkhole had visibly restored them all, despite the hot and arduous labor every day brought.
“If the locals think we’re murderers,” she pointed out, “how can we stay here? I mean, we need somebody to trade with.”
“We can conceivably work the excavation for a few more days,” Doc said, “until, as Ricky observes, we get to the most valuable relics. At that point we can pick the most portable and valuable items, and then head out of the area. It’s not as if we have not done that a score of times already.”
“But Conn,” Ryan said, “the man we’ve been mostly trading with, seemed triple far from convinced we had anything to do with that girl’s murder.”
“But the girl’s sister was certain we did it,” Krysty added. “And she did manage to convince some of the locals that we were guilty.”
That was another thing about Krysty. She had her druthers, same as everybody—in particular, the longing for stability—but she was wise to the bone, as well. She saw both sides to every coin, and she spoke the truth as she saw it, always.
At least to her friends. She could lie with the best of them to an enemy, as all of them could. And did.
“And Conn poured cold water on that.”
“Not Wymie,” Krysty said.
“No. She’s got her heart set against us. But Conn managed to get some doubts in other people’s minds. I don’t t
hink we got the whole county roused against us.”
“Yet,” J.B. said. It was becoming a theme for the evening. “But she’ll get around to coming and hunting for us, and that’s a triple lock for sure.”
“She in all probability will not come alone,” Doc said. “She showed herself to be quite persuasive, in her vengeful wrath.”
For a moment they sat in silence. A bat fluttered just outside the mouth of their cave, chasing the insects drawn by the firelight. A distant screech-owl trilled mournfully. The night smelled of moist earth and cooling, sun-warmed rock, along with the more acrid smoke of their fire.
“Then we should find evidence to clear ourselves!”
Everybody turned and looked at Ricky. His brown eyes were wide. His round cheeks showed a decidedly red flush on top of their usual olive color.
“S-sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean—”
“Kid,” J.B. said, “haven’t you learned by now, that if we let you run with us, we let you speak your mind?”
“When there’s mind involved,” Mildred said, “and it’s not just a matter of words popping into your head and rolling right out your mouth.” She liked the youth, well enough. He was a solid companion, a surprisingly good fighter and painfully smart. But he was still working on developing any damn sense, in her view.
“Ease off,” Ryan said without heat. “Clearly you got something in mind, Ricky. So let’s hear it.”
“We know we’re not guilty, and it’s a fair bet these albino creatures are what killed Blinda,” Ricky said. “After all, what she described seeing, that made her think of Jak—that looks just like what we saw.”
“What little of them we saw,” J.B. added. “But true enough.”
“So we need to find evidence it was them who did it, and not us! And then this Wymie will shift her hate off us and onto them.”
“People don’t always let go of that kind of anger easy,” Ryan said. “Even when there is evidence. Anyway, what evidence did you have in mind?”
“Well, we chill one, and take in the corpse. That’ll show them. And I bet even Wymie will admit these things are more likely to have murdered her little sister than we are.”
“Right you are, lad!” Doc exclaimed.
“But there’s a problem,” J.B. said. “We know we hit one of the things back at the dig. Chilled one, mebbe. Mebbe even more, but we found nothing but the blood trails.”
Ricky shrugged. “Maybe there’s other evidence we could find.”
“Or mebbe we could do a better job chilling one and keeping hold of it,” Ryan said. “Rather do that than cut stick and run, on balance.”
Krysty smiled. After a beat, Mildred joined her. Her friend knew her man well. You could tell Ryan had just made up his mind—if you knew the signs to look for.
The others knew them, too. “So we do us some hunting, too,” J.B. said. He tipped his fedora back on his head a few degrees. His thin lips quirked slightly at the corners.
That was his equivalent of Ryan’s wolf grin. He loved the prospect of a hunt as much as any of them. As long as there was action to take he was well satisfied, so long as it was meaningful, with a proper chance of payoff.
“The only question is, how?” Doc asked. “If they manage to elude even our master tracker, Jak.”
“Try again.” They heard the albino’s soft voice from right over their heads, perched on a ledge above the cave. “Catch next time.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said, but he was nodding, acknowledging the possibility. “They’re good. They know the country. But they make mistakes, double sure.”
“And they don’t know Jak,” Mildred said.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Krysty asked. “I mean—what are those things?”
“That one local yokel thought werewolves,” Mildred replied.
“We have seen werewolves,” Doc said. “It is just as well young Ricky didn’t choose to share that fact with that distraught young woman. It might quite have swayed the case against us.”
“He wasn’t with us when we were down in Haven, Doc,” J.B. said gently.
“Ah. So he was not. My apologies. Time…my time is all out of joint, it appears…”
“Still good,” Ryan said. “But I’m not willing to jump that far quite yet. The baron and his lady down there were special cases.”
“Muties?” Ricky suggested.
“Albinos not—” Jak began, with quiet heat.
“We know, Jak,” Ryan said. “Albinos aren’t muties. But we also know some muties are albino.”
“We lack sufficient facts to speculate,” Doc said.
“Speculation doesn’t load many magazines,” Ryan agreed. “What interests me is, you shoot these things, they holler and bleed. Meaning also, you shoot them enough, they die.”
“So you want to stay here, in the Pennyrile,” Krysty said carefully, making sure her wishful thinking wasn’t making her read more into Ryan’s words than he meant to put in them, “and look for evidence even Wymie will have to accept.”
“Go hunting,” J.B. stated.
“Bull’s-eye,” Ryan said. “Fact is, it’s not like there’s anywhere really safe in Deathlands. Shy of the grave.”
“That crazy chick in the gaudy was right about one thing,” Mildred said. “They don’t call these Deathlands for nothing.”
“Got a plan, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“Go scout around. Keep our eyes skinned. We know they hang out around the dig site, so we can inspect the area around it triple close. Better than we did this afternoon. See if we can cut sign on a second pass.”
“And if we don’t?”
Ryan shrugged again. “Widen the search, I reckon. There doesn’t seem much point in continuing with the scavvy operation until we figure out who these hoodoos are and how to keep them off our necks anyway, the way I see it. We can head off the local folks from doing anything rash, so we won’t have to ventilate a power of them.”
“Now?” Mildred asked. She yawned. It wasn’t an attempt to back up her question—not consciously. She was that beat.
It had been a long, hard day before they’d had to face down wild murder accusations and a potential lynch mob.
“Mildred, the way our asses are dragging, we’d be in double-deep shit if we ran into any of the shadowy bastards. If Jak couldn’t follow their tracks in the daylight, we bastard sure aren’t turning up anything now.”
He straightened and stretched.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
* * *
Chapter Four
“What a mess,” Mathus Conn said, shaking his head.
The ruins of the Berdone house still smoldered, drooling dirty brown smoke into a mostly cloudless blue morning sky. The sweetish smell of overcooked meat spoiled the freshness of a new day’s air. It even overpowered the stink of still-burning wood.
“You didn’t expect it to be pretty, did you?” his cousin and chief lieutenant, Nancy, said.
He grunted and rubbed his chin. “Just funny how it always turns out worse than you expect.”
“I always hear tell of how your imagination makes things worse than they really are,” Tarley Gaines said. “But then the reality usually sucks harder.”
The three, along with a few of Tarley’s kinfolk and half a dozen or so well-disposed or just curious ville folk from Sinkhole, had trekked out to the Berdone location to see for themselves what could be learned from the site. It was clear that Wymie had been telling the truth.
At least so far as she knew it.
“So who set the house afire, I wonder,” Conn said.
“Don’t see as we’ll ever know for sure,” Nancy replied. “Mebbe the outlanders did it. Mebbe Wymie did it in hopes of trappin’ some of whoever chilled her family inside.”
“Speaking of which,” Tarley said. “Yo, Zedd. Find any chills in there?”
“Two,” came back the voice of one of his nephews from inside the gutted house. Like many established homes in the Pennyrile, the ou
ter walls were stoutly built of fieldstone, not scraped-together scavvy and newly sawn lumber the way villes like Sinkhole tended to be. Wymie’s great-grandfather, a man remembered only as “Ax,” had built the house with the help of his sons, after setting up a successful wood-cutting claim in the area.
And now it’s gone to ruin overnight, Conn thought, shaking his head.
“Reckon we’d best go see for ourselves,” he said.
* * *
“NUKE THAT MATHUS CONN!” Wymie exclaimed, slamming her fist on the breakfast table in the boarding house Widow Oakey ran. The assorted crockery clattered and tinkled. “I can’t believe he stuck up for those outlanders like that!”
“Now, Wymie,” the widow said, tottering in from the kitchen holding a steaming pot of spearmint tea on a battered tray. “You got no call to be pounding around raising a fuss like that.”
Wymie judged the old lady had to have seen her. She was deaf as a rock, unless you hollered in her face. At that there was no telling how much was lip-reading rather than any kind of hearing.
Widow Oakey was a tiny woman, who seemed to consist entirely of a collection of dried hardwood sticks bundled up in what had most likely started its existence as a gingham dress, but now seemed mostly made up of roughly equal amounts of soaked-in seasoned sweat and patches, all topped off by a bun of yellowish white hair. She seemed frail and so bound by arthritis and rheumatism that her joints barely functioned at all. Yet Wymie knew she chipped her own kindling like a pro, and her cooking was better than passable good.
It was her housekeeping that fell by the wayside.
“Why are you wishin’ death and devastation on Conn?” asked Garl, one of her fellow lodgers, from across the table. A few fragments of scrambled egg dribbled from the side of his mouth and cascaded down his several chins toward his belly, which kept him so far back from the table his comically short-seeming arms had trouble reaching his plate. He looked as if he went straight from being a baby to being a vast, gnarled, weathered, grizzly baby, without passing through the intervening stages of childhood and adulthood.
