Neutron Solstice

by James Axler

  "The Two-step de Bayou Teche" was followed by a driving song with a heavy beat, called "Un Autre Soir d'Ennui." Gradually the members of Ryan's group split apart as they entered into the spirit of the dance. Doc swung Lori away, his legs kicking sideways, knees cracking audibly, whooping his pleasure, the girl smiling like a pretty doll in his arms.

  Finn was eyeing a skinny girl who looked to be around thirteen. She sashayed up to him and whispered something into his ear.

  "Can I dance, Ryan?" he asked.

  "Stick to dancing, Finn. Don't leave this room, or I'll slit your fat windpipe."

  "Sure thing." The fat man grinned and went wheeling away after the sprite in her torn dress.

  J.B. leaned against the bar, rubbing a pattern in the spilled beer with his forefinger. A huge woman, fully six and a half feet tall and weighing around 350 pounds, came over and tapped him on the shoulder.

  "Dansez, mon petit?" she asked.

  "What did…?" began the Armorer, but not even waiting for an answer, she jerked him forward, pressing his face into her rolling breasts, nearly knocking his hat off and sweeping him onto the crowded dance floor.

  "Want to dance, lover?" asked Krysty.

  "Better offer than J.B. got," he replied.

  "Want it more formal?"

  "Yeah," he said with a grin. The beer was loosening him up, and the food had been as good as any he'd eaten in…in a long time and a lot of miles.

  "Sure." She composed herself, brushing back an errant strand of the fiery hair from her cheek. "Miss Krysty Wroth of the sanctuary of Harmony requests the pleasure of the next dance with Mr. Ryan Cawdor of… of where?"

  The answer came in a crackling high-pitched giggle, from someone behind her.

  "From the ville of Front Royal in the great state of Virginia, run by Baron Cawdor."

  The blood drained from Ryan's face at the sudden voice.

  Once, years back, a whore in a gaudy house somewhere near Denver had kicked him in the groin in an attempt to rob him. He'd broken her arm to teach her a lesson, but the shocking pain remained a powerful memory. It had felt like the breath had been sucked clean out of his body.

  The feeling now was similar.

  "What'd you say?" asked Krysty, turning on her heels.

  "He's the youngest runt o' Baron Cawdor. Richest and most powerful man east of Ol’ Miss."

  The speaker looked to be around three hundred years old, but was probably somewhere between sixty and ninety, with a filthy fringe of hair around a peeling scalp. He was not much over five feet tall, with a drooping shoulder that made him look like a hunchback. He was dressed in a variety of rags, held together with mud and spittle.

  His eyes were bright as stars.

  Ryan gaped at the hideous apparition. There was something vaguely familiar about the old, old man, but he, couldn't set his mind to it.

  "You don't know me, Ryan Cawdor, do yer?"

  The noise of the music and bellowed singing was so loud that nobody apart from Krysty and Ryan had heard the dotard's chattering, or shown the least interest. Instead they concentrated on having a good time.

  Finn whirled past, hugging the young girl. On the far side of the hut J.B. was still almost suffocating in the embrace of the giantess. It might have been a trick of the flickering oil lamps, but Ryan could have sworn at that moment that the Armorer's feet were a good eighteen inches clear of the planking.

  But all of that blurred compared to this totally unexpected confrontation. The Trader had known a little about Ryan's background. About the lost eye. About the emotional scars.

  But even the Trader had only known the small glimpses of the past that Ryan allowed him.

  Now this…

  For a moment of scorching rage, Ryan was tempted to reach out and snap the scrawny neck of the diminutive old man to still his babble forever. But that would bring everyone in Moudongue down on them.

  Oddly, it never occurred to him that the stranger might be chattering lies, might just have a snippet of useless information that meant anything or nothing. Somehow Ryan knew that this was the revelation that he'd feared for many long years.

  "I think I know you. What's your name?"

  The face contorted into an expression of vulpine cunning. The old man wiped a gnarled hand over the stub-bled cheeks.

  "Like to know, wouldn't yer, Squire Cawdor?"

  Ryan eased aside the shirt, showing the butt of the SIG-Sauer pistol. "Name?" he hissed.

  "Ryan? What does—" began Krysty, recoiling as he turned to look at her, the one eye glowing with a manic light.

  "Let it lay, woman," he snarled.

  "I don't rightly recall what my true name is," muttered the old man, licking his lips and speaking so softly that Ryan had to lean close to catch the words. He winced at the stale alcohol on the breath.

  "What do they call you?"

  "Pecker."

  "Pecker?"

  "Yeah."

  A vacuous smile slithered across the wrinkled cheeks. The old man touched his stomach with his right hand, smoothing the torn shirt. He moved his hand lower, fondling himself, demonstrating how he'd earned his nickname.

  "You know Ryan?" asked Krysty.

  "Sure. Knowed him. Years, back. He knowed me then. Don't know old Pecker now, do yer?"

  The man put his head to one side like a bird sizing up a juicy morsel of food. Then Ryan remembered him—remembered his real name.

  "Bochco. Harry Bodice. You were my…the dog-handler at the ville."

  "Harry Bochco." The man tried the name out for size, running it around his mouth, repeating it and finally shaking his head in bewilderment. "Sometimes past I don't recall. You say it, then it was so. But I recall you."

  "Then tell it," said Ryan wearily.

  Against the noisy maelstrom of the Cajun dance, unheard by anyone else, the old man told it.

  Chapter Eight

  "FRONT ROYAL WAS THE biggest, strongest, richest ville in all Virginia. The nukes hit it hard, but the land's good. Fertile. Plant a bullet, and it grows a blaster. Baron Cawdor held it, in the Shens, from his father and his father 'fore him."

  The music and the dancing swirled about them, but Ryan and Krysty were locked into the old man's story; the girl heard it for the first time; Ryan tasted the bitterness of old wounds, feeling the empty eye socket beginning to throb with ancient pains.

  "Home like a fortress, deep in the hills. Oh, sweet Lord, those blue-muffled hills and the rolling forests. I swear it were near heaven. Ryan here, Lord Cawdor, was the youngest. Bravest. Proudest. Best with blade or blaster. Finest…"

  "Get on, man," snapped Ryan.

  "But only as he grew some. There were three in the litter. Morgan was oldest, and like Ryan here. Cherished him when we were little. Runt of the lot when young, Ryan was. The middle brother…"

  "Harvey," whispered Ryan, barely conscious that he'd spoken.

  "Aye, Harvey. Curse his fucking name. Twisted like a windblown rowan tree. I recall that when he were but ten years old, he took this kitten and a white-hot dagger and pushed…".

  "Fireblast!" Ryan closed his good eye, fighting for self-control. "Keep to the center of the story, or I'll fucking… Go on!"

  "You were only fourteen when Harvey struck. Your older brother, Morgan, was out with a landwag train, meeting up a trader from the Apps. Stickies mined the wag. None lived to tell."

  The rowdy songs had momentarily ceased, and a young girl, her skin afflicted by disease, stood at the center of the long hut and sang a slow, sad ballad, alternating lines in French and English. Around her, the dancers had slowed, with everyone holding their partners tighter.

  My yesterdays are always here,

  Tomorrow is another now.

  And none may say when life will end

  And no man may say how.

  Krysty had moved closer to Ryan, sensing the dreadful tension and memories roused in him by the old man's story.

  "They said it was stickies," stressed Pecker. "I was there wit
h me dogs—you said it was dogs, Lord Cawdor?"

  "Don't call me that, Bochco. The name is Ryan Cawdor now."

  "Where was I?"

  "The dogs. After the stickies mined the landwag and butchered Morgan."

  The old man giggled suddenly. "Them dogs was… Yeah, I was there with the dogs. The baron sort of figured that there was something didn't set right 'bout it. There was boot tracks in the hillside 'bove where the mine had been triggered."

  "Boot marks?"

  Pecker started to sing to himself in a warbling, fragile voice. One or two of the Cajuns looked around, but nobody took much notice.

  Well, I traveled four and forty miles

  Mebbe was only three

  But boots upon a stickie,

  I never more did see.

  "It was Harvey. I knew it then. Couldn't prove it, but I knew it.

  "Then he poisoned your father's mind. The baron believed you'd a hand in Morgan's passing. Harvey kept whispering in his ear, like tainted honey. The baron near lost his mind with grief. Then, when time was right, Harvey sprung his trap on you."

  Though he fought against it, Ryan's right hand rose jerkily in the air of its own volition, brushing his chin, seeking the patch that hid the ruined left eye. A part of his mind was vaguely aware that the Cajun girl was singing another slow ballad; the only other sound in the room was the shuffling of feet as the dancers caroused about her.

  It was a song of lost love and the pain that remains.

  I miss him in the weeping of the rains,

  And I miss him at the turnings of the tide.

  Pecker was leaning against the table that served as a bar, reaching for a mug of beer, fumbling it so that it toppled over, the frothing liquid spilling on the scuffed planks.

  "So Harvey and half a dozen of his sec men came for you. Kid of fourteen."

  "Fifteen, Bochco. The day after my fifteenth birthday. Ten at night. Corridor outside my room."

  THE FORTRESS AT FRONT ROYAL was one of the largest buildings anywhere in the East. It had been the mansion of a horse breeder, back before the long chill of '01. Ryan's father had built on it, repairing the work of his father and grandfather. Adding refinements. Fences and a moat. Blasters at every angle. You didn't get to be a baron by making everyone love you.

  They had plenty of gasoline. Electric generators. A fleet of wags. A hundred sec men.

  Harvey had tried to drug his younger brother, but a loyal servant named Kenny Morse had warned the lad not to eat or drink that evening. So when Harvey came with four of the sec men, they found Ryan awake and ready.

  With his blaster cocked and ready in his right hand. A Colt .45 pistol that he'd stripped and oiled and cleaned himself. Because of his father's suspicion of him, Ryan hadn't been allowed a blaster, and he'd been restricted to certain parts of the fortress. But that hadn't stopped Morse from stealing the gun for him and instructing him in its use.

  The blaster held seven, rounds.

  The first two rounds killed the first two sec men. Ryan had waited, just inside the doorway of his darkened room. Morse's, last favor had been to remove a couple of the light bulbs, so that the attackers would be perfect silhouettes for the lad. As soon as he heard them coming, Ryan jumped out, firing.

  Two shots to the upper chest and throat. Certain kills, sending the men in their maroon uniforms and polished knee-boots crashing back into the others.

  The third guard took two bullets. One through the right arm as he dodged sideways, the next penetrating his skull as he tried to duck away to safety.

  Harvey fired back at him with tracer bullets that hissed and flared in the darkness, bursting off the wall at Ryan's shoulder.

  The last of the sec men had thrown himself flat on the floor, behind the jerking body of one of his fellows, firing short bursts from some sort of machine-pistol, but Ryan kept moving, dodging in and out of his room. His first shot at the man missed by inches, howling into the blackness at the top of a narrow flight of stairs.

  The second bullet from the Colt drilled through the guard's open mouth: shattered his teeth, slicing his tongue to ribbons of bleeding flesh, angling upward through the palate to bury itself into the man's brain.

  "You fired six, brother," yelled Harvey. "One to go."

  "I reloaded," Ryan lied. Morse had only been able to steal a single magazine.

  At that moment, the fifteen-year-old boy knew his life was measured only in short minutes. His room offered no escape: the window opened on a sheer drop of fifty feet to the stone flags of a courtyard. If he could make it past his brother to the stairs, then he might have a slight chance.

  With Ryan Cawdor, even at just fifteen, to think was to act.

  He dived headfirst through the doorway, rolling over and coming up, his finger on the trigger, squeezing off his last shot, not even waiting to see that he'd missed the crouching figure of his brother. He drew the horn-hafted dagger from his belt and sprinted through the dim light, hurdling the dying guards.

  "Bastard!" screamed Harvey trying to shoot him, cursing as the pistol jammed.

  "Butcher!" cried Ryan as he closed in on his older brother.

  Harvey was taller and stronger than the boy, but he lacked the ruthless determination. As they grappled, he managed to draw his own knife, and Ryan felt a cold fire across his ribs from the steel. But he also drew blood, cutting Harvey Cawdor on the upper arm, making him cry out in pain and shock.

  Within seconds he could have killed him. And the rest of his life would have been utterly different. But there had been a sec man on a regular patrol in the corridor a floor beneath, and he'd come running at the sound of gunfire, arriving in time to drag Ryan away from his screaming brother.

  The boy was quick enough, wriggling like a gaffed eel, to stab the guard to the heart, feeling the life flow from the man as his grip relaxed. But the interruption had given Harvey the moment he needed.

  Ryan lived all his days with that memory. At times he felt he still had both eyes, so vivid was the image of the knife in his brother's hand, moving toward his face.

  Striking.

  He saw it. Actually saw the tip of the blade as it grated into his left eye socket. There was liquid trickling down his face that mingled aqueous humor of the eye with a little blood. Surprisingly little blood.

  Shocked beyond belief, not realizing the devastating damage the knife had done, Ryan had staggered back, dropping his own dagger, his hands grabbing at his injured eye. Harvey had slashed out once more, aiming for the right eye, missing it by the width of a finger. The steel opened up a great jagged tear from the edge of the eye to the puckered corner of his mouth. This time blood cascaded over his chin and neck, soaking into his shirt.

  In agony and desperation, Ryan punched out at the leering Harvey, feeling the man's nose break like a rotten apple. Then he turned and ran for the stairs, scarcely able to see, moaning from the pain. He never truly knew how he escaped from the fortress at Front Royal that hideous night. Perhaps a servant aided him. There was a door open. Driven snow from the Virginia winter chill on his face. Darkness, stumbling among the tall pines. A hand on his arm.

  Had there been a helping hand on his arm?

  Away, as far as possible. Running, running. Hiding and fighting. The years ground past until he had met the Trader and begun a new phase of his life, hoping that he had shut all of the past behind him forever.

  He knew now that he had not.

  BOCHCO BABBLED ON.

  "After, there was a fearful inquisition. Poor Kenny Morse was put to death by Harvey Cawdor. So were others of the servants judged to have helped you."

  "I did not know that," said Ryan quietly.

  "The cobblestones of the great yard ran with blood. Harvey was in a fearsome temper."

  "My father?" asked Ryan hesitantly.

  "He was told by your brother that not only were you responsible for Morgan's death, but that you'd bribed the sec men to murder him. The baron named you wolf's-head with a lot of jack on your head.
"

  "I heard that."

  "Guess you didn't hear 'bout the new Lady Cawdor."

  "What?"

  Again the crazed giggle from the old-timer called Pecker. "Yeah. Your father wed the whore, but it was Harvey that did the pleasuring. Only eighteen she was. Plump as a corn-fed chick. Hair like straw. I figured the old man was getting bats loose in the belfry by then, what with all that happened."

  "My father died, I heard, Bochco. Was that the hand of my brother?"

  No, no, no, no. That was his wife. Lady Rachel Cawdor. The word about Front Royal was that she bound him with cords of silk. Game of love, she called it. Then she smothered him with a pillow. He was frail by then. It was at Harvey's word."

  Ryan licked his dry lips. There was a small room, locked at the end of a corridor in the west wing of his memory. Despite everything he'd done, someone had come along and, forced the bolts.

  And in a perverse, cathartic way, he was relieved that it was over and the door flung open and the secrets dispersed.

  "Go on, Bochco," he whispered:

  "He was dead and under the earth, feeding the worms and maggots, all in a day and a night. There was a babe born an' all."

  "Boy or girl?"

  "Boy, Lord Cawdor… I'm sorry, sorry, so sorry. Mr. Cawdor. Christened Jabez Pendragon Cawdor."

  "My father's or…?"

  The look on the old man's face was the answer. Harvey had sired the child, on his father's wife. His mistress.

  "Hard to say which was most wicked, her or him. Mebbe they's twin shoots of the same dark flowering weed."

  "And now?" asked Krysty. "Does Ryan's brother rule Front Royal? With the woman and his child? Is Harvey the baron?"

  "Yes, yes, yes," babbled the old man, his eyes rolling madly. "The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Will you return, Mr. Cawdor, my lord, and claim what should be yours?"

  "Harvey has it. Let him keep it. And let him have the fucking pleasure in it that he deserves," spat Ryan, turning away from Bochco, blinking as he found Doc Tanner and Lori at his elbow. "I didn't know you were…" he began.