by James Axler
“Is he?” Ryan asked as she led them toward the stairs.
“Is he what?” the healer asked a bit impatiently.
“Dead.”
“No. Just exhausted.” She seemed minded to say more. Instead she flicked her eyes toward the sec boss, who stood gazing down at his baron with a thoughtful frown rumpling his face.
They started down heavy stairs of dark-stained wood. “Rad sickness?” Mildred asked quietly. The ville healer had assured her J.B. was resting well and she and the others would get to see him once the bosses were finished with them. Mildred seemed to have accepted the healer’s competence. She still was obviously none too pleased with their situation. But then, who was?
Lips pressed together, Strode nodded briskly. “Apparently he broke open a hidden rad pit while leading an expedition into ruins to the northwest of here. He took a substantial dose. Probably ingested some.”
“Lethal dose?” Mildred asked.
“Only time will tell. At this point some random disease could swoop in and carry him off opportunistically. Pneumonia’s a real threat. Even with scavenged antibiotics, there’s a limited amount we can do.”
“Rad death,” Jak said softly, and shivered. Not much scared Jak. But death by radiation exposure would frighten the balls off a brass statue.
“Hard way to go,” Ryan said.
“Know any good ones?” Garrison asked.
Ryan shrugged. “Easier ones and quicker ones, sure.”
“Wait,” Mildred said, stopping dead halfway down the steps. “I know the man in that tapestry. That’s Savij!”
“The first Baron Savij, yes,” Strode said. “He founded Soulardville in the days just after the bombs quit falling. He and his posse showed up one day armed to the teeth and took over.”
“I knew him,” Mildred said. “Knew of him, anyway. He was a famous gangster rapper. Unlike a lot of them he was the real deal. Authentic street thug, been shot half a dozen times, suspected in a dozen murders but somehow never convicted. Supposedly kept his posse supplied with cocaine, hookers, illegal automatic weapons, explosives and rocket launchers.”
“Sounds like our founder,” Strode said.
Frowning, Mildred shook her head. “I remember reading once that Soulard was a totally white-bread little suburb. How would a bad-ass black man like Savij take over a place like that?”
Garrison chuckled like gravel shaken in a gallon can. “Who was gonna stop him?”
They came out onto the ground floor. A young woman was lighting kerosene lanterns against evening’s impending arrival.
Two men stood on a dark brick floor near the landing. One was tall, erect in bearing, lean with just a hint of pot belly pushing out the front of a T-shirt tie-dyed in a red and orange and yellow sunburst, over which he wore an open sky-blue shirt. Sun-faded jeans and sandals completed the ensemble. He wore a three-lobed golden pendant, each lobe of which was engraved with a spiral.
Late-sun glow from the street gilded a round cheek and a head of neat dreadlocks just long enough to tie into a queue at the back of his neck. He was a middle-aged, relatively light-skinned black man with laughing eyes and a trim salt-and-pepper beard.
The shorter man was a little skinny white guy dressed in a red, green, black and gold T-shirt bearing an image of the original Savij. It had to be relatively recent scavenge by simple virtue of the fact it was intact. It was, however, filthy; Ryan, accustomed to the smells of himself and his friends after days of wandering in wilderness and ruin, felt a bit of a twinge at the sheer intensity of his body funk. He had a ratlike face, much of which was concealed, probably for the better, by big dark glasses. His hair hung over the shoulders of his shirt in tangled dreadlocks, so greasy they not only made it impossible to tell what color they might originally have been, but also actually left obvious stains when they brushed the already grimy fabric.
“I’m Brother Joseph,” the tall man said in a rich baritone voice that flowed like honey. “This is my associate, Booker.
“I am the spiritual guide of this community of seekers,” Joseph said. “I’m pleased to meet you all at last. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“What would that be, Brother?” Krysty asked, putting some sugar in her voice. Men tended not to get suspicious when a question came out in that kind of tone from that kind of face and body. Krysty had a great many assets—mental, spiritual and physical—and she wasn’t shy about using any of them to help her friends survive.
In this case, Ryan knew, it could be important to know whether their reputations had preceded them. It happened. If they had, it might give them leverage they wouldn’t otherwise have. Conversely, if the saga of One-Eye Chills and his merry band wasn’t known here in the rotted-out corpse of St. Lou, it might just mean potential enemies could underestimate them. And whatever the sentiment of the ville as a whole, they had enemies here: burly Lonny’s bizarre behavior with their food demonstrated that.
“Why, your running battle and heroic last stand in the ruins of downtown,” Joseph said. “You would be Krysty, would you not? Our patrol’s reports scarcely do your beauty justice. Nor your obvious intelligence. And you, Mildred—”
He turned the considerable candlepower of his smile on Mildred. “Our own healer gives high marks to your field treatment of your wounded comrade. Had you not taken the actions you did, promptly and efficiently, we would not have had the opportunity to save his life.”
“Hmm,” Mildred said. But she didn’t seem quite so full of piss and vinegar as she had a moment before.
“And you are Jak, the valiant youth,” he said, turning and nodding. “And you, sir—Doc. I’m afraid our people made rather heavy weather of your full name.”
“Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, sir, at your service.”
“An honor to meet you, Doctor. You are clearly a man of education. And last, the hero-figure, the leader-from-the-wilderness. Ryan. You must be a most remarkable man.”
For once Ryan felt at a loss for words. He felt Krysty sidle against him and take his arm. “He is,” she said.
Brother Joseph beamed more brightly. “Indeed! You are all remarkable men and women. Every man and woman is a star, the oracle tells us. But now you’ll want to pay a visit to your fallen comrade. I trust you’ll forgive me this brief delay. After an afternoon of praying and meditating over what your advent might mean to this ville, I found myself dying to meet you. You’ll join us in an hour for supper, I hope?”
“Sure,” Ryan said. That was an easy call, anyway. A free feed was a free feed. Neither the vegetable stew nor Lonny’s loogie had been enough to do more than dull the edge of hunger long-honed by privation.
“Splendid. Come, Booker. We’ve business of our own to attend to.”
“MILDRED,” the man on the bed said in a rough-edged whisper. “Sorry. I let you down. Everybody…down. I…fucked…up.”
Now wholly Mildred, and not even the least little bit the briskly professional Dr. Wyeth, the sturdily built black woman clutched his hand in both of hers. “Honey, no. Don’t talk that way. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Bullet flies where it will, J.B.,” Ryan said. “You of all people should know that.”
The Armorer’s eyes were closed. His cheeks were yellowed and sunken. He looked awful, for a fact. Though not a sensitive man, Ryan was too attuned to the realities of morale to point out the fact, even in any sort of fun. Fact was, his own heart ached to see his friend and battle brother reduced to this condition.
“Mildred’s right,” he said. “Don’t fret yourself on nonsense. Rest. Get better.”
“What he’s trying to say, in his manly, near-inarticulate way,” Krysty said, moving to the other side of the sick-bed, “is that we need you, J.B. Rest well. Come back to us soon.”
Although no breath of air blew through the open windows of the neat, almost dazzlingly clean infirmary, in a former storefront across the big plaza from the palace, her sentient hair stirred around her shoulders as if in a slight breeze. It showed the agita
tion of her own spirit.
“Heh,” the Armorer croaked in what seemed to be an attempt at laughter. “Mebbe I’m chilled already and all them stories about heaven weren’t the lies I thought they was. I’m surrounded by angels…”
He sighed and relaxed. Ryan’s hard heart skipped a beat before sense took over and he realized his friend had simply passed into sleep, not caught the last train west.
Strode made a sound in her throat. “Strange as it seems I think that last remark was probably a favorable sign,” she said. “Making a joke shows he’s keeping his spirit up. That’s important to healing.”
“I know,” Mildred said. “Back in my day—when I was studying the healing arts, I mean—some people claimed it was all a myth that your feelings could affect your physical health. But most of the people I knew who actually did healing knew better. And so do I.”
“Whitecoats,” the stocky woman with the gray braid said, shaking her head. She wore an old-fashioned stethoscope around her bull neck. “They know so much about facts and figures and so little about what matters, where people are concerned.”
“How you know whitecoats?” Jak asked suspiciously. He was always suspicious. Mention of scientists tended to make him more so.
“We have some of our own,” she said. “I have to admit, they’re helping us to make new medicines from herbs and plants. And of course Breweryville is full of whitecoats. The brewmeister fancies he’s a scientist himself.”
“Brewmeister?” Doc asked.
Strode shrugged. “Their baron.”
“You don’t sound too fond of him.”
“Well, he’s not lovable. I’m not as down on the ville itself as…some of our people here. I wouldn’t want to live there myself, that’s certain sure, even though they’re richer than we are.”
A look passed among the companions. Compared to what they were accustomed to—their whole lives, in Ryan’s and Jak’s and Krysty’s cases, not just their last few years of wandering the wastelands—Soulardville was all but unimaginably prosperous and peaceful. And clean. Ryan was actually becoming aware of his own stink through the carbolic-acid smell of Strode’s domain, and the way his unwashed clothes chafed, the way every fold and crevice of his lean hard-muscled body itched. He realized he’d begun scratching his ribs unconsciously.
Mildred had stepped to Strode’s side and was discussing J.B.’s treatment. All traces of rivalry or suspicion between the two women had disappeared like a pinch of dust thrown to the wind. Each recognized in the other a true professional in her field. Now they talked shop.
“—antibiotic powder in the wound,” Strode was saying.
Mildred’s eyebrows rose. “Your whitecoats make you antibiotics?”
“Not yet,” Strode said. “Brewmeister claims his have cultured and refined penicillin. Mebbe so. They got all kind of fancy gear down there, from the days they really were a brewery, back before the big cull. Claim they reworked some of it to make antibiotic. Me, I don’t trust ’em that far yet. This stuff’s scavenge. Old as it is, it still retains some potency. It’s better than nothing.”
Mildred nodded.
“So, what’s the deal with this Brother Joseph?” Ryan asked the ville healer.
Her face shut down. “He served the current Baron Savij the last five, six years as a combination guru and right-hand man,” she said. “Now that the baron’s incapacitated and his daughter’s…missing, he’s stepped up to run things.”
She didn’t sound too happy about that. From her body language Ryan guessed that fact wasn’t anything she wanted noised around. Fine with him; she was taking good care of the Armorer, so he didn’t want anybody jogging her elbow.
“Is Brother Joseph a native of Soulardville?” Krysty asked.
Strode shook her head. “Turned up nine, ten years ago. Claimed to have wandered the wilderness for years seeking spiritual answers. Lotta people who listened to him seemed to think he found some.”
“And what do you believe, O dear and glorious physician?” Doc asked.
Whether she was exhausted or just had heard it all already—both occupational hazards for a busy healer—Strode didn’t even give him a “you have got to be shitting me” look.
“I’m agnostic, myself,” she said. “Some of what he says makes a lot of sense. Some of it doesn’t. He does seem to help some people. But what he brought with him…”
“What?” Jak almost yelped. “He sickie? Plaguer?”
“Not in any physical sense.”
They stared at her.
“I’ve already said too much,” she said firmly. “Obviously more of the people here agree with what he does than don’t. And mebbe he does keep us safe. That’s all I’m going to say.”
She sighed. “All right. Your friend’s a tough bird. He’s in stable condition, and I calculate he’s likely to recover soon. But he’s going to be out of it for some days yet. And now I think it’s best we all leave now and give our patient time to rest without being disturbed by our noise.”
Curiosity itched Ryan like an armful of mosquito bites. He already knew there was no point peppering the woman with more questions. Fortunately the rest of his crew did, too. They allowed themselves to be herded none-too-subtly toward the door to the outer room.
Mildred, though, hung back, hesitating. Strode frowned. Of all the people in the small band of adventurers she clearly respected Mildred the most. Yet her expression also suggested she reckoned a fellow healer, of all people, should know better than to risk troubling the rest of somebody in the kind of shape J.B. was in.
“Thank you,” Mildred said at last. “You’ve done right by J.B.”
To Ryan’s astonishment the burly white healer enfolded the stocky black one into her strong arms. They hugged each other fiercely. Krysty looked on, smiling slightly and nodding.
Ryan’s eye caught Doc’s sardonic gaze. “It is women, my dear Ryan. Some say they’re a guild unto themselves. Men of science such as myself have often speculated they’re actually a separate species. Do not bother your head trying to understand them. Men have tried that and failed for millennia before my time. No further progress I could see had been made by the time of the great killing. I doubt much has been made since then.”
“Besides,” Krysty said as Strode and Mildred broke apart, “the heads men actually use to think with are too small for really important stuff.”
Chapter Nine
“So you see,” the tanned and wiry man with long gray-brown hair was saying to Krysty and Doc, who sat across the heavy-laden table from him, “from the very outset we employed square-foot gardening techniques to maximize our yield. The founder, the original Baron Savij, was quite an enthusiastic proponent of organic gardening. He proved to be highly knowledgeable, as did various members of his posse.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “He was definitely known for his fondness for cultivating certain forms of herb. Smoking ’em, too.”
The speaker, whose name Ryan didn’t catch, turned red. Everyone else laughed.
The banquet hall was on the palace’s bottom floor. The kitchen was in the back. Heat washed into the room whenever the double doors swung open to admit servers carrying laden trays and full bowls. Although the twenty or so diners gathered around the big table—made by pulling several smaller tables together—raised the heat level plenty by themselves.
Amazingly, it didn’t stink. Not by Deathlands standards of stench. Cleanliness seemed the order of the day in the ville. It kept down disease, something every ville feared, especially since sickness spread like floodwater rising through concentrated populations.
Nor did Ryan and his friends contribute to the stink level. They and their clothes had been freshly washed. They had bathed in metal tubs and water had been brought to them by order of Brother Joseph. Their clothes had been laundered by other ville helpers. Though the clothes were still damp, that actually helped cool Ryan a bit. It wasn’t as if they weren’t going to sweat their duds sopping by the time dinner was th
rough anyway.
“I’m really interested in what you’re doing here, Mr. Bulstrop,” Krysty said to the long-haired garden guy.
The man smiled so big it seemed the top of his head would just open up backward like a hinged beer-stein lid. “Thank you so much, Ms. Wroth.”
“Ms. Wroth,” Ryan repeated aloud. “They got some bastard manners in this ville. Ow! Why did you kick me?”
“Because I’m not close enough to,” Mildred said grimly.
“But I was impressed!”
“Ryan—”
The tone in Krysty’s voice shut him right down. Since he’d finally gotten grown-up and hard-bit enough to stand up to Trader, who’d ridden him unmercifully during his early apprenticeship, Ryan would step down for no man.
Then again, only a blindie would mistake Krysty Wroth for a man.
“My friends!” Bro Joe’s voice pealed like a bell from the head of the table. Booker sat at his side, stuffing a piece of bread into his face with crumbs cascading to the scarred wood table below him. Ryan noticed he’d managed to turn the bread gray just from briefly handling it. Ryan was glad that whatever breeze the open windows and doors gave didn’t blow down from that end of the table. It would’ve taken the edge off even his appetite.
“As you know,” the preacher continued when the burble of conversation stopped, “we are privileged to have guests with us tonight—intrepid wanderers of the wasteland!”
That brought out some discreet applause. Ryan wasn’t sure how the guest list had been assembled. Most of the attendees were getting on in years, forties at least, looked well enough fed and well-scrubbed. He didn’t reckon they’d been picked for opposition to Bro Joe; he noted Strode was absent. Tully sat at the far end of the table from the preacher and looked fairly uncomfortable. Didn’t harm his appetite any Ryan could see.
Garrison was there, sitting up on the preacher’s right across from Booker. Ryan admired the strength of his stomach. Unless, like some folks, he’d been born without any sense of smell.
