by James Axler
“No,” he said. “Am I a doomie, here? Can’t read the future. Except if they give us back our blasters, and they turn us out the gates without food and water, we’ll likely be dead in a few days. And if we turn down this gig, what chance is there that they’ll keep nursing J.B. till he’s back on his pins again? Doesn’t seem like we got much of a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Krysty said gently.
Ryan sighed. “Okay. Ace. Mebbe what I should have said is, I don’t see that we’ve got any better choice. Fact is, I don’t see this is necessarily such a great one. Others I can see’re all worse, double down.”
“I’m not trying to tear you down, lover,” she said. “Never that. I know we don’t have any really appealing choices here. I agree that taking the preacher’s job is probably our best shot. It’s just that we should never forget that even when triple-huge events intervene, we always have a choice of what to make of them. Even if it’s just to die rather than submit.”
“I hear you,” Ryan said.
Jak was walking along frowning, his head tipped to the side and his white hair streaming down to the right shoulder of his jagged-edged camo shirt. An unaccustomed smile split his lean lupine face.
“Hum’s stopped,” he said cheerfully.
“What’s that, lad?” Doc asked. “What hum?”
Jak frowned and stared at him. “What mean, what hum? Same hum since we hit the perimeter. Loud. Makes teeth buzz and head hurt.”
“No offense, my hot-blooded young friend,” Doc said, “but judging by the expressions of our associates, here, I judge you are the only one who hears any hum. Heard. Are you quite certain you were not imagining it?”
Furiously Jak shook his head. “What? Think I droolie? Heard rad-blasted hum. Made me feel funny.”
“As we age,” Mildred said, “we tend to lose both the upper and lower ranges of our hearing. And Jak’s got unusually keen senses anyway. Is it possible he hears something that’s really there, but that we can’t because we’re too old?”
“Mebbe so,” Krysty said.
“But what can it mean?” Doc asked.
Ryan shook his head irritably. “We don’t know. We don’t have enough information. It’s just another nukin’ unanswered question about this ville.”
A figure stepped from the shadows as they approached their house with the wrought-iron bars on the windows. The moonlight glimmered on a curve of high forehead.
“Garrison,” Ryan said.
“Cawdor,” the sec boss said. He nodded generally at the others. “A word with you? Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Ryan…” Mildred said dubiously.
Jak had gone tense, as if prepared to leap at the sec boss’s throat and tear it out with his sharp white teeth.
“Don’t worry,” Ryan said. “Both of you. Face it—these people’ve had us dead to rights since they yanked us out from under the noses of the coldhearts in the rubble this morning. Anything they want to do to us, they don’t have to get tricky to do it.”
A smile spread slowly across Garrison’s face. “You’re a smart man, Cawdor.”
Ryan waved the others on. “Settle in. Start resting. We’ll need all we can get and then some.”
“I won’t keep your friend long,” Garrison said. “I promise.”
They walked south along the street. A yellow glow was visible above the trees that masked the horizon to the south.
“Breweryville,” Garrison said, noticing Ryan studying the glow. “They keep at it night and day. Brother Joseph calls ’em crass materialists and opportunists. All I know is, they’re pretty powerful and pretty well-heeled.”
“Why haven’t they knocked you over yet?”
“Give me a break, Cawdor. You’ve seen the defenses. And you’ve seen our people know how to fight. I know as well as you do walls and wire tangles and all that shit just keeps out the amateurs and the not-so-serious-minded. Do you think any of us’d still be here if we were content just to sit on our asses and trust a hedge and some angle iron to keep us safe?”
“Point taken.”
“Now I don’t say the brewmeister couldn’t take us, if he wanted us. But he’d have to want us awful bad. We’d make him pay triple anything he’d ever pry out of the smoking wreckage that kind of fight left of the ville. And whatever else you can say about the old b-meister, he’s one sharp stoneheart.”
Ryan nodded. That made sense to him.
Garrison stepped out to stand in the street squarely before Ryan. “Listen, Cawdor,” he said, in the same calm, deceptively casual tone that was all the one-eyed wanderer had heard come out of his head. “I live for this ville. Nothing else. To serve it. To protect it. My daddy served Soulardville, and his daddy, and his daddy before him. Whether I like it or not I will do whatever is necessary to protect this ville.”
He paused and his forehead creased in a scowl. He had good eyebrows for it.
“This ville may not be perfect, but it’s order and peace. You’ve seen what’s waiting out there in the rubble. All that and worse is hungering to get in, every hour, day or night. I’ll die if I have to, to keep that out and preserve what we got. Scabs and all.”
Garrison studied Ryan’s face by the light of a crescent moon. “I suspect you’re about the same with your bunch.”
“Mebbe.” A smile quirked Ryan’s lips. “I’d rather do what it takes to keep us all alive. Me included.”
“I hear you.”
Garrison briefly gripped Ryan’s shoulder. His hand was dry and strong, just as Ryan expected.
“That was it,” he said. “I wanted us to understand each other.”
“Got you.”
Garrison said no more as they turned and walked back at a relaxed pace. Some kind of night creatures made noise in the trees that was more like a rhythmic whining or moaning than anything else. He knew that wasn’t what Jak had complained of. They were natural night sounds; they’d never fool Jak Lauren.
Ryan found himself liking the Soulardville sec boss. It was a novel enough feeling to surprise him. He hoped it didn’t come down to them squaring off. Liking the man and being unwilling to chill him at need were two very different things to Ryan Cawdor. Garrison wasn’t one of Ryan’s crew. That meant he was one of them.
But if it came to throwing down there was no certainty how it would play out between them. That was what bothered him.
Chapter Eleven
A pounding on the frame of their front door yanked them from what Mildred, remembering her residency days, called, “The sleep of the just—the just exhausted.”
Ryan slipped right into deep sleep at every opportunity, but at any sign of threat he came full-on awake between one heartbeat and the next, ready to act or react on the instant.
Now was no exception. He was actually crouching by his pallet, ready to jump in any direction, before he was aware of even moving. From the pallet beside his Krysty was uncoiling, more like a waking cat than something spring-loaded like her mate.
Krysty flowed toward the door, wearing only a long pale green T-shirt. She tugged the shirt discreetly down before opening the inner door. Several young people stood waiting on the porch.
“Yes?” Krysty said.
The one nearest the door, a young man dressed in a T-shirt and baggy shorts, just gaped at her. A black girl of perhaps fifteen elbowed him aside.
“Pull your tongue back in your head, Henry,” she said. “You’ll step on it. We brought breakfast for you, ma’am.”
“‘Ma’am’?” Krysty repeated in a bemused tone.
Through the slot the youngsters passed covered pots containing bacon and sausage and scrambled eggs, a plate of yesterday’s bread, sliced and toasted golden. They also handed in a stack of ceramic plates.
“Well, well,” Mildred said, standing up and stretching. “This is a whole lot different from the last time we got fed in here. That actually smells good!”
“Yeah,” Ryan grunted. A muscle twitched in his che
ek as he remembered slab-faced Lonny hawking in their food. He still hadn’t figured that one out.
He knew what to do about it. The only questions were when and how.
“Smells great,” Jak said, helping take in the containers of steaming food.
“Eat fast,” the girl said. “Ceremony begins in an hour.” Despite her air of juvenile self-importance, her dark eyes seemed unnaturally wide and there was something strange in her manner. Something strained.
As the companions sat down in a circle and began to ladle the good-smelling food, obviously fresh-cooked in the baronial palace’s own capacious kitchen, Doc’s long haggard face grew thoughtful.
“Why am I so forcibly reminded,” he asked the air, “of the expression, ‘the condemned ate heartily’?”
WHEN PRESSED by Mildred, Doc passed the crack off as a joke. But Ryan was forcibly reminded of the phrase himself when the next peremptory hammering on the door frame led to Mildred opening the door on Garrison and no fewer than half a dozen of his sec men, each carrying a shotgun or carbine.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked.
“Lottery day,” he said. “You’re attending the ceremony.”
“Lottery?” Mildred asked. “That takes me right back…don’t we need to buy tickets?”
One of the sec men snickered. Turning his head fractionally, Garrison shot him a look that shut him off dead as a shot to his head. Instead sweat broke out all over his suddenly ashen face.
“As outlanders,” Garrison said, “you’re exempt. Be glad. Now, shake it up. We don’t want to keep Brother Joseph waiting.”
Although the companions had all undressed at least partially for sleep, to beat the humid heat as best they could, they had finished dressing hurriedly after they ate. Nor had they enjoyed their meal, despite the strong temptation to linger over the unaccustomed richness and deliciousness of it all. For reasons having not a rad-blasted thing to do with the convenience of Bro Joe or Soulardville they wanted to be ready to roll on a moment’s notice.
The day was clear but for a few white clouds rolling east over the big river. Down here in the ville there was only a slight breeze. The sun wasn’t yet halfway up the sky. But it stung Ryan’s cheek when they passed out of the shade of a linden tree into the street.
The plaza was thronged. Ryan guessed there had to have been nearly five hundred people packed in there elbow-to-elbow. It took a surprisingly little amount of room to hold a crowd that big when it was that dense. The mob spilled down the big main street and the shady side lanes, even half a block down toward the house where they had spent the night confined.
But despite being jammed in the plaza like Vienna sausages in a can, the good folk of Soulardville gave way pretty quickly when Garrison led his crew straight into them keeping the five companions carefully surrounded.
“Like a hot knife through butter,” Doc murmured.
A path opened clear to the center of the plaza, which Ryan observed to be devoid of spectators. In the middle of it the mysterious slab had had its cloth covering removed. What they saw was a big thick chunk of concrete with raw busted edges; it had to have been eight feet by ten and at least a foot thick. It had to weigh tons.
“It must have taken an almighty effort to bring that here,” Doc said. “What for, I wonder.”
“Got a feeling we’re about to find out,” Ryan said.
“Those rebars sticking up,” Mildred said, nodding toward rust-red lengths of metal jutting from the slab. “They’ve been bent so they’re like hooks.”
“That took some doing, too,” Krysty said.
Garrison led them to a spot roughly in front of the baronial palace. A combination of sec men and Joseph’s tie-dyed acolytes seemed to have been holding it open for them. The crowd seemed no more minded to tangle with the unarmed, fresh-faced young men in the colorful T-shirts than their grim black-clad counterparts with the blasters and hardwood nightsticks.
No sooner had the companions taken up position, right at the edge of the ten-foot-clear circle around the peculiar tilted slab so they had an unobstructed view, than a chant went up: “Jo-seph, Jo-seph, Jo-seph!”
The man himself emerged from his storefront temple. This day he wore a white shirt and over it a long smock not unlike a whitecoat’s white coat. Except it had been dyed streakily in a whole rainbow of colors—red and orange and yellow, green, blue, purple, even black and gray and brown. Or mebbe it had been woven in all those colors; Ryan didn’t know enough about the making and coloring of fabric to make a judgment. The self-proclaimed holy man wore loose pants of unbleached muslin and his usual sandals. He carried a staff with a large head on it that seemed of all things to be made up of scavenged green circuit boards. Little LED light glowed from it like red and green eyes at seeming random.
“What the heck’s that thing?” Mildred asked.
“No doubt an object of religious significance,” Doc said quietly. “Possibly talismanic. When I was confined in your time, dear lady, I chanced to read about something called a cargo cult in the islands of the South Seas, where natives sought to bring back the goods that had flowed to them so freely during your Second World War, by creating mock-ups of landing strips, and making aircraft out of crates. Perhaps we’re about to witness a ceremony of similar import, to try to recall the prosperity of predark times, or assure a goodly supply of salvage.”
One of the sec men turned around and glared. Doc favored him with a bland smile. Mildred couldn’t refrain from muttering under her breath, “It wasn’t my World War. I wasn’t even born.”
Brother Joseph reached the cleared space around the platform…altar, Ryan found he was thinking of it now. Without hesitation the guru strode forward and climbed up to the top of it, finding a strong standing position immediately, with the ease of long practice, despite the canted surface.
“My children,” he called in that voice like an old-style church bell tolling from the steeple. “People of Soulardville. Seekers after truth. You know why we are here.”
Instead of shouting a ritual reply the crowd fell dead silent. Brother Joseph tapped the base of his staff three times on the blacktop at his feet. Hard hollow raps echoed among the building faces.
“Years ago,” he cried, “the peace of Soulardville was broken by a terrible menace from the skies. A horror that haunted all the ruins of St. Lou. It haunts them to this day!”
Ryan was aware of his companions’ eyes on him. He shrugged. No idea, he mouthed.
“The circle of daily life was broken. No longer could farmers work their plots. Carters could no longer move goods. Friend could no longer visit friend, daughter no longer visit mother. No longer could the people assemble together to seek their strength in one another. In community.
“I was among you at that time. I remember when the horror of the screamwings arrived. The terrifying attacks. The hideous wreckage they left behind, which had been healthy, vibrant human beings before the winged horrors descended.”
“I don’t think I like where this is going,” Mildred muttered.
Ryan glanced around, a bit concerned at attracting attention. But everybody was staring at Brother Joseph as if he were telling the way to the magic jolt tree.
“I believe you speak for us all,” Doc said, sotto voce.
“Long and hard I prayed. Meditated and prayed. Prayed for guidance from the divine principle and all the spirits of the earth, the fire, the water, and especially the sky. And then was revealed to me—the compact!
“I went forth alone into the wilderness of broken concrete and steel. There I met the King Screamwing himself. He whose majestic and terrible form you may see wheeling even now against the blue vault of the sky!”
He thrust his staff up into the sky toward the north, above downtown. The crowd gasped.
Sure enough, a great winged shape circled lazily, high above the rubble of the great city.
“Triple-huge!” Jak breathed, eyes wide.
“What does he mean ‘King Screamwing�
��?” Doc asked. “They are animals. Mutant animals, to be sure, vicious brutes, by and large. But a king? Preposterous!”
“It could be he’s the dominant male,” Mildred observed.
“Let’s hear what the man has to say,” Ryan rasped.
Not that that posed any problem. The soft-voiced conversation had taken place while Brother Joseph stood poised, pointing at the monster in the sky. The assembled Soulardites stared at it with fear and terrible anticipation. Something didn’t taste right on Ryan’s tongue. Mebbe he was just smelling their fear. It wasn’t the right kind of fear.
“They’re not afraid of being attacked, lover,” Krysty said. “It’s something else.”
“I brought you back—the compact!” Brother Joseph cried. He lowered his staff with another ringing impact of its butt on the ground.
“Since that time the screamwings have left us in peace. Do I speak true?”
“You speak true, Bro Joe!” somebody shouted from the crowd.
Shill, Ryan thought, glancing toward the outcry and spotting a gaudy sunburst pattern. But the rest of the crowd instantly took up the cry.
Brother Joseph gestured with his staff and the crowd shut up again. “But everything in life has its price,” his said, pitching his voice low, although Ryan had no trouble hearing it. He reckoned he’d have heard it about as clearly had he been way off at the back of the crowd, instead of twenty feet away. The man was good. He had to give him that.
“And so we pay the price. Each of us a share. Each of us a chance. Each of us, all of us, entered in the lottery.”
Something ran through the crowd in an almost tangible ripple. The word had that powerful an effect. Ryan could actually see the whole mob flinch as one.
“And now—” Joseph rang the butt of his staff four times against the concrete at his feet “—bring forth this week’s lucky winner!”
“Winner! Winner!” the crowd began to chant.
To the east it parted. A group of six of Brother Joseph’s huskiest young male acolytes approached, clustered around a young woman. She had long dark brown hair that hung in curtains that hid her down-turned face. She wore a simple lightweight smock of brown with black stripes. Her hands were behind her back. Her feet were bare.
