Starfall

by neetha Napew

  "What's your name?" Ryan asked.

  "Morse," the man answered. "My boys are named Bud and Sandy."

  Seated ahead of the wheel, the boys both nodded at Ryan, but they didn't seem overly friendly about it. Their skin had been browned by the sun, and they were whipcord lean from the hard life they led. They'd stripped down to cutoff denims and carried broad-bladed knives at their waists in plastic sheaths. Their hair trailed well past their shoulders, done up in braids that kept it out of their faces.

  "River still come from the north?" Ryan asked.

  "There's a fork about forty miles north and east of here. Comes from north on into what used to be Montana there, and the other fork comes out of Wyoming."

  "Those areas populated?" J.B. asked.

  "Some," Morse said. "Mainly people who don't like being around other people. Get back in the woods, live by themselves, taking what they need from the land."

  "That, old salt," Doc said, walking up, "does not sound like such a bad dream to hang on to whilst in this nightmare of apocalyptic life." The old man took a deep breath. "Why, friend Ryan and John Barrymore," Doc added, "I do believe the wind carries with it a freshness of the earth rather than the stench of the ville we so recently debarked."

  Ryan took a breath and silently agreed. "What kind of supplies do you have on board?" he asked Morse.

  Moving the wheel slightly to alter the sailboat's heading, Morse gave the one-eyed man a harsh stare. "Take my boat and steal from me, too? Fuck, we're going to have to talk about my wages at some point."

  Ryan's anger gave way to the humor of the situation. The red mist cleared from his vision as he smiled. "You must have a set of brass balls big as your head."

  J.B. gave a short grin, then doffed his hat long enough to wipe the sweat from his forehead. "Man's got a price in mind, usually first sign of a professional."

  "You ain't going to find no son of a bitch knows this river any bastard better than I do," Morse crowed. "And that's a damn fact."

  Ryan glanced in the bow of the boat and spotted Elmore sitting with his back to the railing, gazing out at the trees and the lazy water passing him by. His eyes looked hungry but wary as he considered his options.

  Dean sat across from him, his dark hair ruffling in the wind. The boy kept his Browning Hi-Power bared in his lap, his fist resting casually around it.

  "You took my boat and the safety I had at Idaho Falls," Morse went on. "Can't just take a man's home and expect him to be happy about it. Your problems weren't none of my own. Right?" He looked at Doc, obviously expecting support.

  "My dear fellow," Doc replied, "you do a disservice to yourself by assuming that I have any sway with the gen­tleman who champions our little group. Though friend Ryan and I admittedly do not share the same perception of time, events or orchestration, it is through his savvy and strength that we have lived so long and adventured so much."

  "What about it?" Morse pressed Ryan. "Know you're a bad man from the way you carry yourself, the way you handle those blasters of yours, but are you an evil man?"

  And in that moment, Ryan had to admire the man. Morse had grit. The Trader always cut a little slack for men who stood up for themselves, took a little off the bottom line when he sat down at a table to cut a deal.

  "No," Ryan answered, "I'm not an evil man by nature. Leastways, I'm not an evil man today. What kind of jack are you looking for?"

  Morse grinned. "Got a bottle of smooth-drinking whis­key down in the hold. If we're going to dicker, we ain't gonna do it dry. Let one of my boys go get it?"

  "Sure," Ryan said. "Doc?"

  "I shall accompany the lad, my dear Ryan."

  "And take a look around at what's to be had for eating."

  Ryan advised. "Bastard self-heats right now don't sound good at all."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The whiskey burned the back of Ryan's throat as it went down, igniting a small fireball in his stomach. They drank from small ceramic cups molded by hand and fired in a postnukecaust kiln.

  "Now, that's the stuff to set men's souls ablaze," Morse stated.

  Ryan silently agreed. The whiskey possessed a rawness to it, but had been aged for a time somewhere in good barrels. He knew the difference from his time in his father's barony, and from the years spent on the road with War Wag One. And good whiskey barrels meant some kind of sta­bility in a ville or small group of homes.

  "Where's the boys' mother?" Ryan asked after drinks had been poured around again.

  "You're thinking mebbe we left her in Idaho Falls?" Morse shook his head. "You'd have had to chill me to keep me from leaving any woman at the mercy of them Slaggers. Oh, those coldhearts gouge us for protection jack, as they term it, saying they keep most outlanders away from the ville. But they learned early on not to fuck around with any of Docktown. They came down a couple times, took some women and savaged them. Chilled one of them and fed her to those fucking dogs. Mebbe ate her themselves, way I hear it."

  The sailboat glided across the water, hardly noticing any of the chop that settled across the river's surface. The shadows from the trees lengthened behind them as they headed east, stabbing shadowy branches into the water. Ryan had noticed a lot of game around the banks, winding between the trees and brush. It told him the water was good and the food plentiful. The companions definately wouldn't go hungry.

  "No," Morse went on, "I lost Sandy's ma to a tinker man. Came to the ville with knives and such. Predark non­sense an honest body wouldn't have a need for. But he was a good-looking man, and he had dresses the like of which that woman had never seen before. When he left after a few days, she left with him."

  "Love never quite goes along the paths one wishes for it to," Doc lamented.

  "Don't know about that," Morse replied. "Sandy's ma, she was quite a lay when she wanted to be. Got all wide-eyed and squealing when I let her ride me. But that woman could wear a strong man down to the bastard bone. Luckily most times she just put up with what I had to give her and wasn't trying to get her own. By the time she left, I was done playing slap-and-tickle with Bud's ma, and him al­ready in the oven."

  "Oh," Doc said.

  Ryan could tell from the old man's face that Doc didn't know how to properly respond to the information, and smiled at his friend's discomfort. Doc's Victorian ways still showed through from time to time.

  "Bud's ma, she ran as skipper on Dawson's boat. She was his daughter, but old Dawson, he liked to have his way with her. Didn't know it when I started sneaking around with her. Thought we was just hiding it from my first wife, but we was actually hiding out from her da. She turned out knocked up, Dawson knew it wasn't his because he went barren from a fever when he was just a young man. His wife got burned up in a fire down in Docktown. He figured why go looking for another woman when you already got one at home."

  Ryan listened to the story. It was like a lot of others a man could hear out in the Deathlands. Incest, though, re­mained a taboo in most societies, but not all. Even the baronies recognized the need for fresh blood in the gene pool. The story was too familiar to offer any strong reac­tion, but it still brought distaste.

  "When Dawson found out his daughter was knocked up, he come at her with a knife. Cut her up some." Morse clucked his tongue. "She got away from the fucker and come running to me. Dawson, he was stupe enough to fig­ure he could take me. When I saw what he done, I broke his neck. Didn't chill him outright, though, just paralyzed him."

  "You let her chill the reprobate herself?" Doc asked.

  Morse shook his head. "No. Junie, she was a good daughter. She wouldn't have chilled her old man no matter what. Probably might have even gone back to him if I hadn't chilled him. But I did. Took him out in the middle of the river down from Docktown, and propped him up in a cork-filled life preserver. Went fishing, using him as bait."

  "Paralyzed man good bait," Jak said knowingly. Ryan wasn't sure when the albino had joined them at the wheel. Jak sat on the railing, his body moving easily with the river curr
ent. "Got tribe in bayous break necks of outlanders, use 'em troll for gators. Works bastard good."

  Morse nodded. "Down where I took Dawson, they ain't got any gators. Only heard stories about them, but that place has got mutie catfish near to three hundred pounds. Fuckers don't come off the river bottom for much. But I cut the heels of Dawson's feet just enough that they'd bleed good without bleeding to death. And him squalling like a woman the way he was, he attracted a lot of attention from the local catfish population. Too big to fish for them with a line, but I got four of them with a bow before they took Dawson to pieces and gobbled him down." He grinned at the memory.

  "So what happened to Junie?" Doc asked.

  Morse shrugged. "We had some good years together. But she got kind of sick in the head. Mebbe it was all that shit her pa done to her, and mebbe it was the fact that she never did get over me taking him out and chilling him. But three years ago, she come up on me mad, waving a skinning knife in my face and telling me how she's gonna cut my balls off. I slapped her back off me before she could do any serious cutting, but she come at me again. Broke her arm that time." The sailor waved at his sons.

  In response, the boys climbed the masts again and ad­justed the rigging so that it better caught the breeze.

  "Wind's changing," Morse said. "Good in a way, though. Don't want to have to worry about the boat getting caught in a damn cross wind when we drop anchor tonight."

  "Nobody said anything about dropping anchor," Ryan told him.

  "Be triple stupe to think about going on in these waters after dark," Morse stated. "You haven't hardly seen any of the shit I've steered us clear of. And even with a good moon hanging overhead, we'd rip the body out of Junie for sure."

  "Junie?" Doc inquired.

  "Yeah. Named her after my second wife." Morse shrugged. "Course I named her after my first wife and a few girlfriends before and after and in between, too. But today's she's Junie."

  "Pray tell me," Doc said, "what became of your second wife. You never mentioned. Unless I misremember."

  "Chilled her," Morse replied. "Got to where she was creeping around at night. Caught her with a knife once, coming at me while I was asleep. I slept lighter than she knew."

  "So you chilled her?" Doc repeated.

  "Yeah. Fishing's hard work. Suck the life right out of a man, he ain't careful. Even with these boys, I bust my ass every day to bring a catch in. I don't need to be losing no sleep while I'm at it. A man gets tired, that's a man who makes mistakes. I'd sooner be without a wife than be with­out this boat."

  "A man's got to have his principles, Doc," Ryan said.

  "So you chilled your own son's mother." Doc shud­dered at the thought.

  "Did it right, though," Morse objected. "Slipped that boning knife between her third and fourth ribs right into her heart. She was gone before she knew she was going. Afterward, me and the boys took her out to the river and had a ceremony."

  "Then used her for bait?" Doc asked dryly.

  "Naw. Just dumped her in and went upstream to fish."

  "And your boy Bud," Doc said, "he never came to you about any of this?"

  Morse smiled. "Them boys, they like fishing more than anything else in the world. Reminds me of myself. I crewed aboard this ship when I was a boy for my da. And him for his before that. Ship's got a long history. Luck willing, I'll still have it to leave for my own sons."

  "It and such an interesting history besides," Doc agreed somewhat sarcastically.

  "Oh, and if it's stories you want, there's plenty of them about Junie, as well."

  Before the storytelling could get any further, Ryan said, "You were asking about jack for the use of your boat."

  Morse gave him a look filled with greedy interest. "I'm a working man. Going out of Docktown like this, I'm gonna miss a few customers on my regular rounds. Mebbe even lose some of them altogether. This taking my boat and taking me and my boys hostage, that's going to impact my business."

  "Ah, the nomenclature of the would-be Wall Street ty­coon," Doc said. "The me generation. And people thought all that had been left behind in the eighties. The 1980s."

  "Noticed you and your boys didn't have any blasters when we came on board," Ryan said.

  "No."

  The man's answer was too short and too clipped to be the truth, and Ryan knew it. He was certain that somewhere aboard Junie was a hidden cache of one or more blasters. J.B.'s earlier investigation of the boat had turned up the bows and arrows kept in the small hold.

  "You do a lot of salvage, though," Ryan went on.

  "What I can," Morse agreed. "Not so much trade in it as there used to be. Most stuff me and the boys scull up from the bottom these days ain't worth having."

  "J.B. doesn't see it that way. Says he spotted some blast­ers in the lockers belowdecks that he can fix."

  "He thinks so?"

  Ryan nodded. "Comes to weapons, J.B.'s an artist."

  "He fixes those, you want to call it square on the jack you owe me for the boat?"

  "Yeah. Only you're not getting all of the blasters."

  Morse didn't look happy. "How many?"

  "Half," Ryan answered. It was more than fair. Without being repaired, the blasters were useless. And fixed and ready to fire, they'd be worth more than anything Morse had ever laid his hands on. The others could be used by the companions to barter with.

  "How far are we going?"

  "Let you know when we get there." Ryan turned, leav­ing Morse in Jak's hands, and went back to join Krysty. She was asleep when he got there, her face turned in toward her arm. He settled in beside her and let the motion of the river lull him. His hand, though, never stayed far from the SIG-Sauer.

  "YOU BELIEVE you can fix these, John?"

  J.B. looked up at Mildred, his lap covered by the hand-blasters he'd found in the hold. There were eight of them in all, four Colt 1911 model .45s and four 9 mm Beretta Model 92-Ss. Two of the .45s had satin stainless-steel fin­ishes, and the rest were all matte black.

  "Can you fix a broken arm?" the Armorer asked.

  "I don't fix a broken arm," Mildred replied. "I just set it and it fixes itself."

  J.B. took one of the .45s from the military footlocker they'd been held in. "Don't fix these, either. But in my hands, they fix themselves." He knew his words, spoken in jest, were nonetheless almost the truth. There wasn't much he hadn't been able to fix back in Cripple Creek where he'd been born and raised, and the rest he'd learned even before he'd hooked up with the Trader.

  "Best eat while you got the chance," Mildred said. "Keep your strength up."

  "I'll get to it."

  The light in Junie's hold was dim. There were no port­holes—mainly, J.B. figured, because much of the hold could be below water if she carried a heavy load.

  The lantern he'd lit hung on a long hook attached to the wall, sticking out far enough that even though the lantern swung, it never connected. The pale yellow light ghosted the room, giving it a surreal quality. It was nowhere near natural light. But that was okay with J.B. because, if he'd had to, he could have fieldstripped and inspected the hand-blasters, and probably even fixed them in the blackest night.

  The room held a small gas stove and kitchen. A warped table with benches screwed into the floor occupied the cen­ter of the room. And there was a mass of mattresses, sheets and pillows that served as a bed. Personally J.B. figured the bedding needed airing out in the worst way.

  Mildred continued sitting, watching him. "Damn, but you smile like a little boy when you got your hands on a new weapon."

  J.B. felt his smile get a little bigger. He couldn't help himself. Weapons had always been his top interest. Back when he'd been traveling with War Wag One and the Trader had given them permission to roam through a ville, most of the men had made for the closest gaudies to get laid as often and as soon as possible.

  But J.B. hurried to visit the weapon smith in each ville they traded with. Sometimes they had shops, and some­times they dealt out of saloons. An
d more times than not, the local weapon smith was just a guy or gal working out of his or her own home.

  J.B. had learned to be a hell of a trader himself. It had been his job as armorer for War Wag One to keep the weapons up and dependable, and keeping extra parts on hand for some of the heavy machine guns had almost been a full-time effort.

  When he hadn't been trading for parts the wags needed or might need, he'd traded blasters. He'd kept a fair selec­tion aboard War Wag One, and always managed to have something to trade. He'd found that other weapon smiths were just as eager as he was to get their hands on something new and different, just to see if they could figure it out. J.B. would trade, sometimes coming out on the short end of the trade if it was a particular piece he hadn't had the chance to work with before, just for the privilege of work­ing on it.

  He'd taken a lot of busted blasters, pieces other weapon smiths had given up on. Nearly always he'd managed to find ways to fix them.

  The blasters in the footlocker were going to be no chal­lenge at all compared to some of the projects he'd taken on. Whoever had stored the blasters in the footlocker had removed the firing pins. It had been too much to hope that they would be in the footlocker, but if he had access to a machinist's shop for a day or two, he could get them all replaced. There'd be some repair work on the slides and other inner mechanisms, because there'd been some water damage. From the looks of the rust, he figured that the water damage had happened in the past couple of months, maybe when the footlocker had been dredged up by Morse and his sons.

  Finding a machinist's shop, though, was going to be a problem.

  And ammo. The footlocker was curiously bare of am­munition. J.B. guessed that Morse had cadged the ammu­nition and sold it, or stored it. Neither he nor Ryan believed that the boat was as defenseless as her captain would have them believe.

  He looked up, pieces of the blasters strung across his knees and the surrounding floor. Mildred still sat there. He knew long minutes had passed as he disassembled the weapons, and though he didn't feel guilty about not talking to her, he knew she needed to talk.