by James Axler
"Open."
"I'm trying. But it's…" He spit in his hand and wiped off some of the blood, seeing, then, that it had a catch on one side. Ryan levered a nail into it and pried. "Stiff," he said. "Don't want to break it when… Ah, here."
"Rona said to find you. Died long back. Find you. Quest. Look after." Her breathing was becoming faster and more shallow.
Slowly Ryan opened the locket and found that it contained two things—a tiny ringlet of blond hair and a picture. A faded, pale brown portrait.
"Who is it?" he asked, even though he knew what the answer was going to be.
"Your son, Ryan Cawdor. It's your son."
Chapter Twenty-Four
THE WOMAN COUGHED again, spitting a tiny thread of fresh blood from the corner of her mouth. Krysty, still kneeling at her side, wiped it away.
"My son."
"Rona."
Ryan nodded, her face flooding his memory. "Sharona," he said almost to himself. "Sharona Carson from Towse ville."
"Yes. Dead. Boy lives."
The only sound was that of labored breathing. Everybody was looking down at the dying woman, each locked in his or her own thoughts.
Ryan stared again at the tiny picture, at a solemn-faced boy with short, dark curling hair, dark eyes, stubborn jaw and pronounced cheekbones.
Krysty reached and took the locket from him, glanced down at it and nodded. "Certainly looks a lot like you, lover."
"How old is he? How old is the boy?"
His mind was frantically calculating backward. When had the Trader been in Towse? When had he slept with that feral bitch, Sharona Carson? Rutted with her, until they were both spent with the venom of their coupling. Whatever else it might have been, it certainly hadn't come within a country mile of being lovemaking.
"He's ten years old, Ryan Cawdor."
That sounded about right. He glanced at J.B. and saw that the Armorer had been occupied with the same arithmetic. There was the slightest nod of the head.
Ryan couldn't think of what to do or say, his mind completely blanked by this astounding revelation. Part of him wanted to question it, to shake the woman until her remaining teeth rattled in her skull, to make her admit it was a pointless lie. A macabre joke. Simply a mistake.
But he knew it wasn't, not with those solemn eyes staring back at him from the little square of paper.
He knew.
"Name's… Name's…" But it wouldn't come. The woman's eyes closed as though she were gathering her strength for a final assault on an unclimbable peak. "His name is Dean."
"Dean." Ryan tried the sound in his mouth, letting it slide into his mind. "Dean." Ten years old. What in fireblast was a ten-year-old boy like? He couldn't properly remember himself at ten, and if the boy had been out on the road in Deathlands for those ten years, then what might he be?
The breathing was suddenly slowing, becoming more erratic.
"She's going," Mildred said, taking her pulse again.
J.B. took off his fedora, turning it in his hands. "Woman spends a chunk of her life trying to find you, Ryan. Finds you, then she hasn't got any life left anymore."
"Least she handed the quest on," Krysty whispered.
"Yeah." Ryan nodded, his mind still in a blurred turmoil.
Doc coughed. "I have no wish to intrude a note of reality into this solemn and sad moment, but I have a question. One which I feel might be somewhat relevant here."
"What's that, Doc?" Mildred looked up at the old man with a slightly irritated expression on her face. "Can't it just wait a few moments? It's very near, now, for her."
"That's the point. It will shortly be too late. Forever."
Ryan looked at Doc. "Then spit it out."
"Where is the boy?"
It was like slicing into a beautiful cake and finding a ticking implo-gren inside.
"Fireblast!"
Mildred half raised her left hand, as though to protect the dying woman. "I think it's too late, Ryan. Sorry, but—"
"Get out of the fucking way," he grated, kneeling at her side. "Move, Mildred!"
Reluctantly she did as he ordered, shuffling to her left.
He took the woman's hand in both his, squeezing, his face inches from hers. "Where is he? Where is Dean? Tell me."
Her eyelids fluttered and her lips moved, but there wasn't a sound.
Ryan lifted his right and brought it down in a vicious round-arm swing, catching the woman across the left cheek, and bringing a flush of pink to her skin.
"Ryan!" Krysty shouted.
He ignored her. "Where is the boy now? Quick, or your quest's fucked forever. Where is Dean?"
This time there were words, just audible. "Not here…"
"Where?" No answer. No response. He shook her, a small part of his mind aware of the slippery sound of her intestines sliding in her lap. Ryan shouted again, spittle spraying in her face. "Where is he?"
"Ninth Avenue
."
"More."
"Twenty-eighth, old park. One block."
"Go on!" he shouted, shaking her again.
"Cellar. Friends there. I'm real cold. Where's Rona gone?"
"A park near Twenty-eighth and Ninth. What else? Come on," he demanded, his voice cracking.
"Ryan, she doesn't…" J.B., urged by Mildred, a hand on his shoulder.
The one-eyed man didn't turn, but his body stiffened. "Leave me be," he warned.
"Old cellar under the ground. Get in back of tumbled… Dean! Here, son. Going to get cold."
Now the voice was fading. The woman's breathing was slowing and becoming painfully irregular. Seconds would pass between each shuddering intake. All of them knew time was being measured in those breaths.
"You left him there?"
"I really don't think she can hear you now, Ryan," Mildred said gently.
Ryan wasn't done yet. He lifted his hand again, this time clenching it into a fist. But he hesitated, sighing, feeling the crimson mist of anger beginning to drift away from him. "No point."
The breathing stopped.
Long seconds passed and he began to stand up, his mind racing with myriad thoughts.
But there was a hoarse, grating moan, and the woman half sat up, eyes staring, pupils dilated. One hand grabbed at Ryan, catching his sleeve, holding him frozen. "You're like him. Like Rona said you was. He's going to…to be special, Ryan Cawdor. Now I done what I said, and there isn't…"
Mildred stooped, putting a finger to the artery beneath the woman's left ear. "Gone this time."
Ryan gently disengaged the clawed fingers from his arm and folded it across the woman's chest. "You did it right. Now I'll carry it on."
Chapter Twenty-Five
"I HAD TO do that."
"I know that."
"If I hadn't-"
"Then she'd probably have died, and you wouldn't have known where the boy was. Just that he was somewhere in the Newyork ville."
"But I… Slapping a dying woman who's maybe saved the life of…"
"Your son," Krysty said. "Come on, lover. It's not that difficult to say, is it?"
"Yeah." He stopped and glared at her. "Yeah, Krysty, it's actually very fucking difficult to say. My son. Up to fifteen minutes ago I didn't even know I had a son. Or a daughter. Or any children. It's going to take me a while to get used to that. My son, my son, my son. Right?"
She smiled at his anger and his uncertainty, then stepped in close and kissed him on the cheek. "Course. Glad you've gotten that off your chest, lover. Easier all around. Be easier for Dean, as well."
"Krysty…" He hesitated. "Look, I think we should talk some about this. It doesn't make any difference to you and me, you know. It was ten years ago."
Doc, with J.B. and Mildred, had been waiting, listening. The old man repeated a runic remark he'd made once before. "And it was in another country, and besides, the bitch is dead."
THE SKIES OVER NEW YORK had cleared and it was a bright, fresh morning. The shadows were shar
p-edged as they walked south.
Once again they slipped naturally into a skirmish line, keeping to the center of what remained of the streets, Ryan leading, holding his G-12 caseless. Then came Krysty, Doc, Mildred and J.B.
As he walked on, Ryan's mind kept sliding back ten years to the blazing heat and murderous winds of the baked Southwest. And Sharona Carson. "Rona." He'd never heard anyone call her that. As the wife of Baron Alias Carson, she'd been entitled to respect. Sharona—dazzling blond hair, beautifully styled; expensive jewels; fabulous clothes that fitted her like a second skin; skin, with its sharp, exciting taste; teeth that had nipped at him, leaving him marked and bleeding; and deep violet eyes that had suckered him.
"Something ahead left," Krysty called from just behind him, jerking Ryan out of the reverie about the past and back into the dangers of the present.
He realized he'd lost concentration by brooding on Towse and the woman. And his son.
He stopped and raised his G-12, looking where Krysty had pointed. Something was watching them from around the corner of a pile of rubbish, but it was in shadow and he couldn't make it out. As soon as they paused and looked, the creature darted away out of sight again.
"Scalie?" J.B. called.
"Don't think so. The head looked normal shape. Just a scavenger, one of the triple-dirties who lives here."
THE FARTHER THEY TRAVELED, the worse the desolation grew. Hardly a building stood above ground-floor level, and virtually all had been stripped of wood. To their left, where there had once been great buildings that scraped at the lower edges of the sky, there was a permanent haze.
Ryan noticed that the tiny lapel rad counters he, J.B. and Krysty wore were showing a potential hazard. The color had shifted from the faded green of safety through the middle band of orange toward the crimson of danger.
J.B. was also aware of it. "Some serious hot spots over east."
Ryan looked around. "Can't be that far. How many blocks should it be?" he asked, addressing the question to either Doc or Mildred.
It was the old man who answered. "The bus terminal was around Fortieth Street. It backed on to Ninth Avenue
. Woman said down to Twenty-eighth. Twelve or thirteen blocks."
Mildred looked around. "Not all that far from Greenwich Village, but it's impossible to work out. Some roads have totally vanished. No landmarks. Just head south and look for that park she mentioned."
"Chelsea Park," Ryan said.
They did what they could to quarter the area, looking for anything that might resemble a park. As far as they could tell, they were in roughly the right part of the ville, but they drew a blank.
"Noon," J.R announced, glancing up at the bright sun from under the brim of his fedora.
"Not that much food left." Krysty turned to face Ryan. "What do you reckon, lover?"
"Keep moving. Woman was dying. She wouldn't tell us lies. Got to be around here."
In some of the shadowed parts in the lee of the piles of debris, there were small patches of unmelted snow. J.B. stepped aside to take a leak behind a heap of dark red bricks near one of the white drifts. "Hey! Look here. Some scalies been here."
They made out the marks of studded boots and a few scuffed smears of heelless footwear as well as the clear imprint of a set of small bare toes.
"Still sending out their hunting parties," Ryan commented. "Never known muties so well organized. Really are like fireblasted sec men."
Doc gazed vaguely at the fallen walls and ice-coated rubble. "That's most interesting," he observed.
"How's that, Doc?"
"Well, my dear Ryan, unless I am much mistaken, someone has painted the number over there as an indication of the street. Twenty-seven. Of course, it may be the merest coincidence."
The numbers were in faded white paint, poorly executed, the dribbles running from both the two and the eight.
Ryan looked toward the west and took a deep breath. "River's close. Can taste it. Let's go two or three blocks to the east and then cut south. If we move west along what's left of that highway, we should hit this Chelsea Park."
"MUST BE."
"Some park."
The only thing that made them think this had once been a park was the fact that there were no piles of rubble on the ground, merely a narrow rectangular space of brownish mud. It was totally featureless except for small ice-slick puddles.
"Said there was a cellar around the back of a tumbled building or something like that."
"More scalies been here." J.B. pointed to the clear line of boots, etched across a long, narrow bank of snow.
Ryan knelt and peered closely at the tracks. "Recent. Look at the edges. Kind of blurred and rounded. Been this morning. Not last night."
Both men straightened and looked around uneasily, both conscious of the prickling possibility of sudden, bloody ambush.
"Better find this cellar real quick," the Armorer suggested.
The companions looked around the wasteland.
"There," Krysty said.
"Behind that broken archway?"
She nodded. "I can feel it, Ryan. Someone's been there."
"Still?"
She shook her head slowly. "No. No, I don't think so."
"Best look."
They climbed over heaps of brick, tangled about with iron girders, some rusted to orange ribbons. The sun was bright enough to see clear tracks that said others had been there before them. There was a path between the twin pillars of the arch. Ryan hesitated, looking at the carved figures that had once supported the keystones. More than life-size, they were female, their heads wrapped in stylized shrouds, as though they were frozen in weeping.
"Here," he said, seeing immediately that Krysty had been correct. They were too late, probably only by an hour or so.
After ten years, he'd missed the son he'd never seen by a matter of minutes. It was one of the most bitter moments of Ryan Cawdor's life.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE THREE BODIES were so hacked and raggled that it was almost impossible to tell either sex or age. Ryan steeled himself to look more carefully, but J.B. took him by the arm.
"Let me."
Even from where he stood Ryan could see that none of the bodies was that of a ten-year-old boy.
The Armorer straightened, wiping his glasses. "Misted up from somewhere. Can feel heat from… maybe down in the cellar there."
"What about…?"
"No. Two men. Both look late teens. One got a double-stupe face. The other hasn't got much face left. The scalies used cleavers on them all. Pure hacked them to shreds. Third one's an old woman. Bodies are stiffening, but it's cold. Hour or two. That's my guess. Look in the cellar?"
"Sure."
Mildred offered to stand watch outside, her target pistol drawn and ready. The other four climbed down the makeshift steps into the sweltering, noisome darkness.
"Dark night! Like an oven," J.B. said. "And that stink!"
The remains of a great fire still smoldered against the back wall, where there seemed to be a kind of a chimney. The embers glowed with a shimmering scarlet, casting a ferocious heat around the vaulted room. Ryan guessed it was roughly thirty feet long and twenty across, with a flagged floor and a low, arched ceiling.
The worst of the smell came from a shapeless pile in one corner. At first Ryan took it for a heap of butchered corpses, and his heart sank again. Then he moved a little closer and saw that it was bodies all right, but the carcasses were of slaughtered, skinned dogs. Some of them, by the smell, were several days old.
A mound of ragged blankets and coats was thrown against one of the walls, presumably too far gone to interest even the scalies.
"Some dried fish over here," Krysty said. "Rotting meat masks the smell. Seems edible to me."
"Keg of water here," Doc announced, kicking it with one of his boots. "Feels about two-thirds full. Or perhaps it's nearer three-quarters." He kicked it again in a thoughtful way. "Possibly four-fifths, or-"
"We get the picture, Doc," Ryan interrupted, aware of the swell of relief that the boy wasn't lying there with his throat gashed open, cold in a pool of his own blood. That would have been a hard road to walk.
The far end of the underground room held a pile of wood, mostly broken joists and rafters, presumably looted from some of the tens of thousands of buildings that had fallen a century ago.
Ryan walked past the fire, opening his coat and wiping beaded sweat from his forehead. He looked around the cellar, swiping crossly at a slow-flying, buzzing insect.
His sharp eye was caught by something gleaming among the wood, as though it had been tucked there as a hurried hiding place when the scalies came bursting in.
He stooped and picked up the object, angling it to the firelight to see what it was. Aware that the others had all turned to look at him, he waved it. "Knife. Little knife, but the blade's real sharp. Pretty. Hilt carved from what looks like turquoise."
"Small," J.B. said. "And the Navaho use a lot of that green stone, don't they? Remember it from around Towse ville."
"Yeah. Could be."
It was a powerful and disturbing feeling for Ryan, holding something in his hand that might have belonged to his son. It might be Dean Cawdor's knife. He found a sheath of soft deerskin, and he slid the blade into it and tucked it into one of his pockets.
Mildred called from outside. "Weather's getting real bad, folks."
"Just what we need." Ryan turned. "Want to get off and try and track them down while the trail's fresh." He punched his right fist into his left palm. "Flreblast! We'll never find him."
Krysty was moving to join Mildred when she paused. "Way Dred talked about them, the scalies control most of this southwest part of the ville. Big base around the docks. They must have taken the boy there. Nowhere else."
"Hey," Mildred said, "there's the biggest mother of a storm I ever saw, and it looks as if it's heading our way!"
Then they all moved to the steps, pushing past a heavy section of wood paneling that had obviously served the hideout as a door.
"Dark night," J.B. breathed. "You're right, Mildred. Seen some big ones down by the Gulf. Acid storms that take the skin off you in a couple of minutes. But this is going to be hard."
