by James Axler
“Me neither, now that she mentions it,” Ryan said. “All right. Truce. We might as well go along with these people, even laying aside they got the drop on us. We already know this ain’t a healthy vicinity to wander at random.”
“No kidding,” McCoy said. “You’re triple-lucky you didn’t stir up a pocket of serious rad-death emitters. That’s worse than getting eaten by cannies, any day! The baron, he—”
“McCoy,” Tully said sharply, but nowhere near as sharply as he’d spoken to the beefy Lonny. The black kid shut his mouth and swallowed hard. Tully looked back to Ryan.
“Let’s just say you seem a bit too dangerous to allow to wander around freely kicking over hornets’ nests. We have to live here.”
“What if we tell you we don’t mean you any harm or trouble?”
“I’d say evidence suggests otherwise. Least so far as trouble’s concerned. And I can tell you plain, you’ll have every chance to state your case once we get back safe to our ville. Which is far from certain yet, so less talking, please. None of us wants to draw more hassles.”
“People want avoid trouble bad,” Jak grumbled, indicating their captors with a nod of his head.
“If we tried a little harder to skip trouble,” Krysty said, “we might be a whole lot happier.”
“Only a droolie looks for more trouble than looks for him,” Ryan replied.
“What does that make us?” Mildred asked.
“People a triple load of trouble looks for. Now shut it.”
Mildred looked miffed, but she pressed her lips tight.
Tully slapped his hands on his lean thighs and stood. “That’s clean rain falling now,” he said. “We can move.”
Ryan’s nose had already told him that the lethal acid downpour had halted. The sound of drops falling on the asphalt-covered overpass and the cracked pavement beyond its shelter didn’t change.
“Are you quite certain about that, young man?” Doc asked. “A return of the acid precipitation could quite spoil one’s day, were one caught in the open.”
Tully frowned at him a moment as if sorting out his words. Ryan got the impression the lanky man was no stupe. He just wasn’t used to hearing that sort of talk.
Well, in the Deathlands, nobody was. It had taken Ryan some time to get used to Doc, too. And that was just in his lucid moments.
“That’s how it goes here,” Tully said. “Fresh rain always follows the acid. Dilutes it and washes it away. That’s one reason the settled villes survive.”
Ryan looked at Krysty. She had her limited doomie moments, but more important, she was better attuned to the natural elements than anybody Ryan had met. Whether it was her link to the Earth Mother, Gaia, or just a natural ability, he couldn’t say.
She nodded. “I feel he’s right.” Then she flashed him that smile of hers that always made him realize how lucky he was. Even in situations as tight as this one.
“Best pick up your pal,” Tully said. “We don’t have to run anymore. But it’s not healthy to hang around out here.”
“Mildred?” Ryan said.
The physician was already kneeling over J.B. He was unconscious. Sweat sheened his forehead, more than what was due to the humidity.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like we’ve got much choice, do we?”
“No,” Ryan said. “We don’t. C’mon, people, let’s get him up. We got places to go and people to meet.”
Chapter Six
They continued south onto what looked like a largely intact highway that Mildred, who had spent some time in predark St. Louis, identified as Interstate 55, to make their way through a complicated tangle of broken concrete and twisted rail iron, fanged by nasty bent spikes of rust-red rebar. Evidently it was a collapsed bridge. A railroad-highway combo, by the looks.
No sooner were they past the collapsed ruins than Tully led the party down the brushy bank to the surface street that ran alongside the old highway. They jumped a little stream in the ditch at the bottom. Because there was just no way four people could cross it carrying the unconscious Armorer, and because the locals seemed uninclined to wade this soon after an acid downpour, Ryan draped J.B.’s limp form over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
Everybody else hopped easily across. Burdened as he was Ryan didn’t quite make it cleanly. The dirt gave way under his left foot. It slipped and went into the water to the ankle. Though he jumped clear as if J.B. suddenly weighed no more than dandelion fluff, Ryan felt a sting from the diluted acid in the little stream.
Krysty and Doc relieved Ryan of his burden. Tully tossed him a water bottle. “Best rinse that off before we go on,” he said. “Just in case.”
Ryan cocked a brow over his good eye. “Don’t sweat it,” Tully said. “We’re not far from the ville. If we’re not inside the perimeter inside half an hour, I likely won’t be needing the water anyhow.”
Ryan splashed water over his ankle and boot. It probably didn’t do much good. It made him feel better, though. He tossed the bottle back to the patrol leader, who caught it with a grin.
“Why not use highway?” Jak asked as they started moving west between a stand of woods along the partially elevated, partially fallen-in right of way.
“Too exposed,” Tully said. “Sometimes we get snipers in the rubble.”
“And there’s stickies, in those drowned warehouses and factories other side of the Interstate,” another man said.
“Highway does get used by people passing through, Randall,” Tully said. “Long-range traders and such.”
“Things travel that road no human should meet or get to know anything about,” a black-haired man with drawn gray-stubbled cheeks said.
“That’s only by night,” Tully said. “Anyway it’s all superstition. Probably.”
“I hear the screams, Tully. Can’t hardly sleep none, sometimes.”
“That’s just stickies roasting rivermen or scavvies they caught,” Randall said.
The companions found themselves toting the unconscious J.B. along a wide street. The rain, having seemingly washed away the remnants of the toxic rain, had stopped quickly. The air smelled fresh. Overhead the clouds had taken on the colors of an old bruise, gray and green and brown, an improvement over the tortured, boiling orange of not so many minutes before.
They passed beneath standing bridges where a railroad line swung in from the northwest to join a highway that crossed their route. A little farther south the highway they paralleled swung off west. Walking under an intact under-pass, their captors went on triple alert. The guy who didn’t sleep so well jumped when a pigeon boomed out from high up the embankment near the overhead and flapped out into the milky sunlight. His buddies laughed at him.
When the group emerged, the clouds were breaking up. Ryan blinked his good eye at the sight. As hot as it was, without clouds to filter the sun the day would only get hotter. And J.B. wasn’t getting any lighter.
“How are you holding up?” he asked the others.
“Don’t worry about us,” Krysty said. “We’ll do what we have to do.”
He ginned at her. “Like always.”
“Not much farther to go, anyway,” Tully said. “We’ll see about getting you some wheels for your friend when we reach the gates. We got people who can tend to him. Ace healer name of Strode.”
Lonny muttered something about mollycoddling no-account outlanders. His leader ignored him. Though Tully acted like a good guy—and Ryan knew too well it could all be an act—and seemed to have his shit pretty much in one sock as a leader, he also seemed to allow the bulky brown-haired man an unusual amount of slack. There had to be some link here Ryan didn’t see.
No way to scope it now, nor to know if the fact, if fact it was, had any use to him and his friends in their current predicament. Ryan filed it away and let it go.
Ryan saw Mildred’s shoulders and upper back tense. She was a physician, a fully qualified preskydark doctor who tended to think not too much of what passed for
doctors these days. Truth be told, she had met several healers whom she had to admit were truly gifted.
But whether it was more prudence than the freezie woman usually showed, or simple fatigue, she didn’t make a point of the fact she could tend to J.B. as well as any and better than most. Besides which, if Soulard were the relatively large and prosperous ville a twelve-man patrol wearing reasonably clean outfits suggested, they probably had medical facilities better than the Deathlands standard.
Tully led them down the center of the wide street. His troops stayed crisply alert. Here, anyway, they seemed to be more worried about jump-out-from-cover attacks than coming under long-range aimed fire. More and more of the structures they passed were intact, which shortened potential fields of fire and favored blitz-style ambush.
“Wonder why these littler buildings held up so much better than the skyscrapers,” Mildred said. Ryan was mildly surprised she had breath to talk.
It was more of a surprise when Doc answered; even after all their association Ryan had a tendency to underestimate his physical hardiness.
“Smaller surface areas,” he said. “Being more compact, they proved more resistant to the blasts. The bigger buildings provided greater surfaces for the shock waves to push against.”
As they marched through the ruins between increasingly intact-appearing structures, in the growing sunlight Ryan realized the black kid, McCoy, was no longer with them. None of the others looked concerned—about the youth’s absence, anyway. Even here in what they evidently considered potentially hostile ground nobody seemed to assume he’d been snatched by someone. Or even wandered away into danger.
So Tully sent him ahead to spread the word they were coming, Ryan thought. He’d probably use some secret bolthole. Mebbe even one only a kid knew about, or could even get through. The patrol leader had to have spoken quietly to the kid when Ryan wasn’t looking, or even flashed him an arranged signal. Or, hell, for all he knew it was standard operating procedure.
They were working in a dangerous information vacuum here. The bitch was, even though their escorts were proving neither hostile nor closemouthed—except mebbe the lout, Lonny—they didn’t seem inclined to small talk right now. Ryan wasn’t about to distract them, if they thought there was something here to look out for.
And anyway, he wasn’t sure himself where Mildred and Doc found the energy for chitchat. He sure didn’t have much to spare, right now.
“Biggest danger here is stickies,” Randall said. “They infest the flooded warehouses and like to hunt up here from time to time. Plus sometimes scavvies think they can snag an easy score this close to a ville.”
“There’s also people from Breweryville,” said Dowd, the haunted-looking dude who couldn’t sleep. “They might attack us if they come upon us.”
“Oh, crap,” Randall said. “They can be dicks. But they’re not coldhearts.”
“Brother Joseph says they lack a true sense of community.”
“Look alive, guys,” Tully said hastily. “We don’t want to get too caught up talking and wind up crawling with stickies.”
That drove a shudder through everybody, companions and captors alike. There were numerous varieties of the needle-toothed mutants with the sucker pads on their hands and feet that could strip skin from meat and meat from bone. Most of them shared a love for human flesh, cruelty and fire, not necessarily in that order. Despite their pyrophilia they often colonized near bodies of water, and seemed to take to the water well.
Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the patrol leader had once again steered talk clear of the subject of Brother Joseph. Whomever he may be.
They came to a corner where a wire fence stretched down the street ahead of them and down the street west, backed by dense thorny hedges and topped with coils of razor wire that gleamed in the sun despite being pitted and stained by the acid rains.
“Soulardville,” Tully said with evident pride.
“Didn’t that used to be the farmers’ market?” Mildred asked. “Those long shedlike roofs inside the perimeter?”
“Uh-huh,” the patrol leader said, nodding his ginger head. “It’s a farming-and-gardening center now. Our market’s more centrally located.”
“What’d you say your ville’s name was again?” Ryan asked.
“Soulard,” Tully said.
Doc perked up. “‘Soulard,’” he said. “Why, bless my soul, but unless I misremember, that means ‘drunkard’ in French.”
Tully shrugged. “Mebbe so, some time past. Sure not now.”
“Bro Joe don’t allow drunkenness,” Dowd said gloomily. Perhaps he felt he’d sleep better for a good load on.
“Bro Joe?” Ryan asked.
“It’s still the baron who rules in Soulardville!” Lonny bellowed. Ryan thought he was going way too red for Dowd’s remark. Lonny turned an angry glare on Doc.
“What d’you mean by that, anyway, oldie?” he yelled.
“Back off the trigger there, fella,” Ryan said.
“Why, nothing, my boy,” Doc said. Though his forehead shone with sweat, he didn’t seem to be flagging under his burden. “Nothing at all. Just passing the time of this lovely day.”
Lonny gave him a narrow, suspicious glare. “You okay there, old-timer?” Tully asked. “You want mebbe to get the white-haired kid to swap with you?”
“Not at all, young man, thank you kindly. I have resources unlooked-for.”
They continued south along the fence. Ryan watched his people closely. There was nothing they could do for J.B. right now but shade his face with his hat, which they had. He was concerned about how the other three were holding up. Krysty’s sentient hair hung limp over her shoulders, a sure sign fatigue was getting the better of her. Mildred would, from time to time, start to slump, then straighten. Usually at such times she glanced back at the unconscious Armorer suspended among them. It was as if she renewed her strength, or at least resolve, by reminding herself J.B.’s health and very survival lay very much in question, and depended on her ability to keep on keeping on.
Ryan also monitored Jak. The teen was volatile and obviously smoldering at the fact they’d been taken captive. He wasn’t tracking too closely that their captors could’ve treated them far worse. In fact, under the circumstances, they could hardly have treated them better. Of course that could change at any instant; Ryan knew that as well as Jak did.
He just didn’t want Jak flying off and making the locals treat them more harshly.
Visibility through the hedge-covered fence wasn’t good. Ryan suspected that was part of the shrubs’ purpose. Glimpses through gaps suggested that south of the garden sheds lay a cultivated field, a block north to south and at least three blocks east-west. Then the perimeter turned mostly to the fronts of what seemed to have been houses and small businesses, their doors and ground-floor windows bricked up. Razor-wire coils spiraled along roof-lines. The streets between were blocked off by piles of big rubble chunks as well as the fence.
“That’s a pretty fine defensive perimeter,” Ryan said. Talking was hard, but it took his mind off the ache in his shoulders and lower back from lugging J.B.’s deadweight.
Tully chuckled. “Have to be triple-stupe not to be able to fortify out of the bones and guts of a dead city.”
“That’s true.”
They passed a still-intact church whose white spire showed flaking remains of paint bubbling from the nuke strike’s thermal flash on its north side. East of the street lay a wide expanse of grass, green but yellow-spotted from the acid rains. Farther along stood more ruins.
From just ahead came a shout. Square three-story-tall towers made of different colored bricks flanked a wide street leading into the ville. The black snouts of longblasters poked out from underneath peaked roofs. A couple were trained right on Ryan and his little party.
“Almost over, people,” Tully told Ryan and his friends.
“We’re at the gates.”
Chapter Seven
The Soulardville gate
was a stout, barred construction, topped with the ubiquitous razor-wire coils. It ran on a metal-lined track cut into the asphalt of the street.
The gate opened with a squeal of bearings as runners ran down the track. Inside waited a quartet of men in armless black jerseys holding longblasters. Long wooden truncheons hung from their belts. Sec men, Ryan thought.
The patrol headed inside. Big trees shaded the gate area, and Ryan was grateful for that.
As their escorts spread out around them, calling greetings to bystanders, the one-eyed man took stock of their surroundings. The church to the right of the gate seemed to have been taken over as a sec-man headquarters, or at least station. To the left lay an open area, with tables under canopies: a market or trading station, mildly busy today, with men unloading goods to a table from a light wooden land wag while others admired heaps of produce.
McCoy approached them, leading a stocky woman wearing overalls, with a gray braid wound around her head. Right behind came a wooden cart with steel-tired wood wheels. As the sec men covered the captives with their blasters, the woman bustled up.
“I’m Strode, the ville healer,” she said. “We’ll take over from here.”
The bevy of assistants who had pushed the cart trotted around to ease J.B.’s limp form away from Ryan and his friends. Predictably, Mildred bridled.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice rasped from dryness in her throat; she hadn’t been following her own advice about keeping hydrated while carrying her wounded lover.
The Armorer had already been laid on a pad on the bed of the cart. Strode leaned over him. “Hmm,” she said. “Competent job of field dressing.”
“‘Competent’!”
Strode looked up directly at the twentieth-century physician. “You did well by your friend, given the circumstances,” she said firmly. “We have him now. We’ve got a clean infirmary and scavenged meds as well as herbs.”
“Herbs!” Mildred sounded as outraged as if the gray-haired, red-faced woman had suggested using vodoun.
