Playfair's Axiom

by James Axler

  “Lotta people come through Eastleville, friend,” the bartender said laconically. “Don’t all come through the Platinum Club.”

  “Oh, Louie,” said the rather blowsy woman with the white-painted cheeks and the stiff bleached hair wound into an unlikely confection atop her head and whose bountiful bosom threatened to spill out of her low, tight, black bodice at any breath. She sat on a stool down the bar smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. Doc stood next to her, looking surprisingly debonair. They seemed to be paying a lot of attention to each other.

  “Don’t go fishing for bribes like that,” the woman said. “Can’t you see these people’re quality?” She twined her arm around Doc’s. “Especially Doc, here.”

  “But Madam Sally,” the tall barkeep whined, “a man’s got to eat. Not that you don’t pay a decent wage.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” the woman snapped. “It’s Madame Sallée.”

  “I’m sorry, Mad-Dam. It’s just—I don’t rightly know how to pronounce it.”

  She turned to Doc, sighing smoke through her nose. “These barbarians! Ils n’ont aucune idée de la façon parler correctement.”

  “Quel dommage.”

  She shivered and laid her head against Doc’s shoulder. “Ah, Doc! You certainly know how to melt a lady’s heart.”

  “A man of the world acquires certain modest skills—I beg your pardon, Jak? Are you quite well?”

  Jak had snorted his beer through his nose. Mildred started to pound him on the back, then thought better of it.

  “He’ll live,” Ryan said. “So. Black girl. ’Bout the height of Mildred here. Young, sharp-looking, big tits, green eyes.”

  “Hoity-toity type from one of those snooty villes across the water,” Madame Sallée said with a sneer. “Won’t have a dock themselves for fear we’ll corrupt their precious peasants with our worldly ways. Oh, well, so much more business for us.”

  Krysty winced as memories returned like unwelcome house guests. “You know, Ryan,” she said, “thinking about it, I can see why you prefer it here, too.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Now, if we could stick to the subject. Please, somebody?”

  Doc lowered his head to murmur something in Madame Sallée’s ear. She laughed and tapped him lightly on the chest with her folded fan.

  “Of course I’ll forgive your friend’s rough manners,” she said. “He’s obviously a rough-hewn adventurer type. Probably been all over these Deathlands. Could be a real heartbreaker to a woman who went in for the brutal type.”

  Mildred and Krysty turned and looked at each other, then started to laugh.

  “In answer to your question, tall, dark and dangerous,” the saloon proprietress said, “she was through here. Through Eastleville, anyway. She did not see fit to grace the Platinum Club with her custom. I chanced to encounter her one morning ten or eleven days ago, in Tank’s Rusty Nail trading post down by the waterfront. She was inquiring about reputable scavenger outfits in the area. As if that ain’t a contradiction in terms!” And she laughed through her charmingly retroussé nose.

  “Wait,” Jak said. “Why ‘Platinum Club’? What platinum? Don’t see no platinum nowhere.”

  “It is an honored name in these parts,” the madam said, “with a rich tradition.”

  “Oh.”

  She fluffed her hair with her fingers. A couple strands snapped like dry straws. “You may take it as referring to my coiffure, if you wish,” she said, then tittered.

  She put her bleached head together with Doc in conversation that pointedly excluded the others.

  “Thick as thieves, those two,” Ryan remarked.

  “Do my eyes deceive me,” Mildred said over her beer, “or has our good Doctor Tanner made himself a conquest?”

  Louie sidled down the bar. There wasn’t a lot of custom at the moment, but a rowdy card game in the corner made it hard to hear more than a couple feet away.

  “Not to contract the madam,” the barkeep muttered, “but actually, there is a scavvie outfit working the area that got itself a pretty good rep.”

  Ryan cocked an eyebrow. “Truth to tell, I thought it was a contradiction in terms myself.”

  “Not always,” Louie said, shaking his head. “This Daniel E. dude who runs the bunch seems like a pretty straight shooter. Drives a hard bargain, gives honest value. And nobody’s ever bought anything off him that the rightful owner turned up looking for afterward.”

  “Mebbe just chills ’em,” Jak said.

  “You’re young, boy,” Louie said. “Otherwise you’d know word like that tends to get around.”

  The albino teen bristled. Ryan laid a hand on his arm. “Easy, Jak.”

  He turned his eye to the bartender. “Not a good call on the kid. He’s been around the boneyard more than most men twice his age. The other thing though, about the rep—that’s ace in the line. So, any idea where we can find this Dan E.?”

  Louie’s eyes, which already seemed to be mostly just slits in the seamed mass of his face, actually managed to get narrower. “Why you want to know?”

  “We don’t mean harm to him,” Krysty said.

  “We got no beef with anybody concerned,” Ryan added. “Just want to find him.”

  “He don’t seem like the sort who’s eager to be found. Likes his privacy, know what I mean?”

  Ryan slid a hand across the bar. Five 9 mm rounds stuck out just beyond his fingertips. “Like you said,” Ryan said, “time’s tough and a man’s got to eat. This is live brass, and not reloads.”

  Louie moistened his lips with a gray tongue. “No comebacks.”

  Jak cawed laughter. Fortunately that wasn’t uncommon enough to draw eyes. Except a single-barreled blue glare from Ryan.

  “Who’d know?” Jak asked. “Ville like Eastleville full people eager sell skinny.”

  “He’s right,” Ryan said, turning back to the barkeep. “So why not take what’s on the table now? Or would you rather we start taking bids?”

  “North,” Louie said. His eyes, or so it seemed to Ryan from the way the wrinkled lids shifted, cut toward his employer, who at the moment was having her hand kissed by Doc. Ryan raised a brow.

  “His outfit bases out of a place up north. Three, mebbe four miles. Abandoned factory, I heard some of his people say. Big old brick thing not far from the river, woods all around.”

  “So he’s scavenging there?” Mildred asked. “Say, this beer isn’t bad.”

  “Comes from Breweryville,” Ryan said. “Couldn’t you tell?”

  “Right about the beer,” Louie said. “Not about the salvage. Nothing there but floors and a few walls. Legends say it was abandoned years before the megacull. Old Dan, he likes it ’cause it’s triple-easy to defend. Does his salvage work in other old industrial areas. Or just heads inland a bit. There’s tens of thousands of houses there, many of them still untouched. Same as down here.”

  “So why don’t you live and work in those houses, instead of out of a bunch of thrown-together shacks like Eastleville?” Mildred asked.

  “Lotta people think the old burbs’re haunted. Rad dust, they are—same as over the Sippi. Not all the scavvies workin’ them are near as ethical as Daniel E. Cannies like to lair there. And worse things.”

  “I hear you,” Ryan said.

  The bartender hunched up a stooped shoulder. “Anyhow, I reckon the real reason is, here’s where the docks are. Lot shorter distance to walk to work or trade. Even if a quake does shake your own roof down on your head, ain’t as if it’s very substantial.”

  “Got it.” Ryan opened his hand to the right. Louie made the stacked ammo disappear with a speedy efficiency that impressed even Ryan.

  “So,” he said to his companions, tipping up his glass mug and draining the last drops and bits of foam. “We better see if someplace can rent us a room tonight. We’ve got weapons to clean and make sure they’re full dry before we sack out.”

  He didn’t think anything of mentioning the fact, nor did Lo
uie show any sign of thinking anything of the fact that he did. That was life in the Deathlands.

  “You won’t get a better deal or cleaner bedding anywhere else in E-ville,” Louie said. “That’s straight-up. I don’t take home extra whether you den here or go sleep in some bushes. And, uh, it looks as if the management has taken to looking upon you with a kind eye.”

  “Is that what they call it here?” Krysty asked with a twinkle in her eye. Little pink spots actually appeared high up on the man’s gray and sagging cheeks as he turned away.

  Ryan looked over to where Doc and Madame Sallée were, to all appearances, joined at the hip. The proprietress was a bit generous in that department, but notwithstanding that, nor even the mileage the thick face paint couldn’t hide, she was a fairly handsome woman. Any scavvie or boatman or caravaneer who forked over his crib fee would count himself lucky to draw a gaudy slut who looked half so good. Or smelled half as clean.

  “Doc?” he said, pitching his voice to be heard over the card game, where a vociferous dispute had broken out over who was a greater donkey, the man who raised with seven-deuce off or the man who folded to such a weak-ass bluff.

  From a back room three tall, thin, middle-aged black men filed in. Like Louie they wore ruffled white shirts, black trousers and scarlet cummerbunds. An upright piano, blond wood-stained and battered and sporting a bullet hole visible from where Ryan leaned against the bar, stood against the wall. A battered but shiny saxophone and a stand-up bass in decent shape leaned in racks next to it. One man sat down at the piano. His partners picked up the other instruments and started doing musician-looking things to them.

  Madame Sallée sank long fingernails painted the color of fresh blood into the lapel of Doc’s frock coat in a highly proprietary manner.

  “You people got yourselves a cut rate on our finest room,” she said, “if you’ll just be sweethearts and not rush Doc off. The band’s good. I want him to hear them.”

  That wasn’t all she wanted from him, Ryan thought. He held back a grin.

  “He’ll be fine here,” Krysty said. “Won’t he, Ryan?”

  “Reckon he won’t get into too much trouble.”

  “Reckon he will,” Mildred stage-whispered behind his back, and snickered. As fatigued as she was, a single beer seemed to be having a disproportionate effect on her. Not that she was a big-time lush to start with.

  With a languid gesture of red-nailed finger Sallée summoned a pot boy of about eight, dressed the same as the other male employees and with his round face scrubbed and his straight brown hair parted neatly in the middle, and told the solemn-faced child to lead their guests to their accommodations.

  “What happen to ‘we aren’t splittin’ up’?” Jak asked in disgust.

  “If I got to spell it out for you,” Ryan said, “Doc got lucky. Which, you got to admit, doesn’t happen often.”

  “Come along, Jak,” Krysty said. “You’d want us to do the same for you.”

  Mildred sniggered again at the look on the teen’s paper-white face.

  “Oh. Almost forgot.” Ryan turned back to the bar and signaled the bartender. Louie finished filling a tray full of mugs for a serving girl. The bartender came over.

  Ryan pushed across a single bullet. “One more thing. We’re going to need a boat.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lying on his belly in brush damp with the dew of recent dawn, Ryan held the navy spyglass to his good eye. A young woman stood naked in an open section of wall, three stories above a gravel yard dotted with a few dandelions just opening yellow heads to the daylight. As Ryan watched, she ran her hands back through her kinky black hair. She appeared to be gazing off across the river, possibly at her lost homeland.

  He heard the slightest rustle of sound and turned to see Krysty elbowing up beside him. They hid in the dense undergrowth of a hardwood forest, not a hundred yards from the river, at the verge of a wide cleared space that, they knew, surrounded the long-dead factory on all sides.

  “Borrow?” she asked.

  Wordlessly he handed the glass over. As she focused it he carefully scanned their surroundings, looking for details they might have missed. Or possible threats.

  The friends had traveled here in the boat they purchased in Eastleville for the rather exorbitant price of the Mini-14 Krysty had recovered from McKinnick plus its banana magazine. She’d mostly exhausted the .223-caliber ammo while fighting off the stickies anyway. The craft, a simple twenty-foot-long whale boat with a little two-stroke alcohol-fueled mill, lay hidden on the riverbank among thick thorny wild blackberry bushes covered in pink and white flowers.

  The past two days they had spent skulking in the nearby woods and scoping out the gutted factory building that was Dan E.’s headquarters. They had been all around the perimeter, spending hours split into teams observing the stronghold from various angles. They even shadowed work parties as they tramped toward the woods to their current scavenging grounds amid a big development of long-empty tract homes roughly a mile to the northwest. They slept under makeshift tents, moving their campsite every night to reduce the odds of a bad-luck discovery.

  For all the seeming wildness of its woods, marsh and grassland, this particular stretch of country was either occupied or traversed enough by relatively settled humans that many of the Deathlands’ more alarming denizens had been hunted back. The unexpected appearance of whoever had fought the stickies on the east side of the bridge a mile or so south was yet another reminder nothing could be taken for granted.

  “Pretty,” Krysty said, studying the girl. “I can see why you don’t mind this part of the surveillance.”

  He grunted a brief laugh. “She does love her routine.”

  “We have enough information now to move on?”

  “Mebbe so,” he said. “Longer we stay out here, worse we’re asking for something to go south on us. And I’m itching to get back and check on J.B.”

  She made a distressed sound. Glancing at her, he saw her lips pressed together.

  “I don’t like this, lover,” she said in a low voice. “Not any part of it. From everything we’ve learned, girl’s smart, tough and resourceful. And that she has triple-good reason not to want to go back. The fact she’s so pretty doesn’t make it any easier to think of…that happening to her.”

  “The little girl who got given up to the screamwings didn’t have it coming, either.”

  “No, but we couldn’t do anything to help her. This one…” She shrugged.

  “I’m not leaving J.B.,” he said. “You don’t want to, either.”

  “No, I don’t. I won’t. But you also know if we go back, even if we bring the princess, Brother Joseph and his creepy acolytes will never let us leave alive.”

  “That’s true,” he said, wiping sweat from his face. It was a beautiful morning, with birds singing and flowers blooming and the air thick with the smell of moist green growing things, as if the big nuke and skydark never happened. But it still got nuke-red hot in a hell of a hurry here, a long spit from the great river.

  “But like a man said in a book I read as a kid, it’s also irrelevant. We made a deal. We take this girl back, and we leave with J.B., regardless of whether they want us to or not.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “You know better. Know me better.”

  “But Jak even managed to sneak inside the scavvie stronghold last night. Surely he can find us a secret way into Soulardville, so we don’t have to carry out this…this horrible bargain!”

  “But we do, like it or not,” Ryan said. “That’s the part everybody always keeps forgetting. We made the deal. We honor the deal. Like or dislike don’t come into it. Now, let’s get back with the others and calculate what comes next.”

  “THEY WOULD APPEAR to have created a formidable defensive system,” Doc said.

  He sat beneath a tree in his baggy boxers, his bony white knees drawn up, wearing a sort of hat he’d contrived out of leaves against the heat. He had spent the
past three days painstakingly creepy-crawling at the edge of the two-hundred-yard cleared zone, making detailed sketches of the former factory, its defenses and what he could observe of the structure’s interior and movements of its occupants inside. It was considerably facilitated by the fact that much of the outer walls were simply gone. There wasn’t much by way of internal partitioning left, either, although the scavvies liked to define their own personal spaces with movable screens or hanging curtains. Apparently they liked being able to catch such breezes as stirred the hot, humidity-heavy river-valley air.

  How they liked it during winter’s snow and hard-driven sleet was, to Ryan’s mind, a different question entirely. Krysty suggested either they migrated somewhere a little more airtight when the weather started getting serious cold, or they’d only set up shop here earlier this spring.

  “They have people on watch for twenty-four hours of every day,” Doc said, sounding like a teacher lecturing his pupils. “By night guards patrol the roof, in pairs, which are spelled every two hours. They enjoy a clear field of fire in all directions, with sandbagged hard-points spaced throughout the open area in the walls to protect rifle-men. They set out long strings hung with bells or cans with rocks in them, in different locations each night, both inside the structure and in the cleared zone surrounding the building, to provide warning if intruders approach. When they travel to and from their work site, they take a different route through the woods each time. They do not appear overly comfortable in the woods, and they do seem to stick to the same few trails in what appears random rotation.”

  Any well-educated man of Doc’s time, it turned out, had been trained to draw accurately and well. He’d covered many pages of one of the notebooks Mildred was forever scavenging—and scribbling in—with his diagrams and sketches and notes. These were strewn out among the companions in a little clearing in the brush a quarter mile south of the abandoned factory. If there’d been people in this spot in the past hundred years they saw no sign of it.

  “They primarily appear to expect either wholesale assault, or attempts to purloin their salvaged goods by stealth. For those reasons they occupy the ground and third floors. The second is where they keep the fruits of their labors. They have numerous locked strongboxes for the most valuable items.”