Seedling

by James Axler

  Stanton scratched his chin. "Good question. Have to ask my accountants, but I figure there must still be around half left."

  Anywhere in Deathlands, strong, large plastic bags were like a handful of good jolt. You could wear them, shelter in them or under them and carry your life around in them.

  "And from that…" He gestured around the room they were eating in, with its strip lighting and thick carpet; the good-quality furniture and the row of video machines and music players; the paintings and the piano in the corner, its perfection marred only by a long gouge across the polished top.

  Harry stood, spilling crumbs from his lap. A small dog, looking like a rat in a hairy body wig, scam­pered from the corner and started licking them up. The man ignored the animal. "Let's go look," he suggested.

  And it was the fragments of this tour that Ryan kept struggling to remember.

  One thing that struck him early on was that there were no women at all anywhere within the under­ground empire. The men all seemed to be between eighteen and thirty, with a few of the group leaders closer to forty.

  "Women?" the jovial figure replied when Ryan fi­nally asked him. "Get in the way. Cherchez la fenane when trouble beckons. Look for the woman, Ryan. No. Not necessary here."

  The complex was maintained at a steady sixty-two degrees with air-conditioning ready for the scorching heat of summer. Ryan noticed a large dome of ar­mored glass above one of the linking corridors.

  "What's that for?"

  "Opens up for some real sunlight. See the flowers all around us?" There were banks of waxen lilies, filling the air with their heavy, funereal scent. "Sun brings out the lilies."

  "Sun also brings out the snakes," Ryan replied.

  "Best collection of old vids in all Deathlands," the Santalike figure boasted as they strode through a large, high-ceiling room. The walls were lined with shelves, jammed with the cases of thousands of vids.

  "How many?"

  "Around twenty thou."

  "Watched them all?"

  Harry Stanton turned to look at Ryan. "Never met anyone with more questions." He paused. "Sure I have. Most are movies, but there's a lot of eighties and nineties teevee. You name it and I got it."

  "I once saw part of a vid about a little guy looking for his wife and his brother taking care of him. Never knew what it was called."

  Harry looked around the walls. "Could find Vid-man and ask him. Got a memory like a triple-comp. Only he's got some sort of flu."

  Ryan glanced at his wrist chron. "Look, I ought to be collecting these drugs and getting on back to the others."

  "Sure, but just let me show you a little more."

  "J.B. needs those drugs."

  Harry turned to face him, and the merry little eyes turned into chips of frozen obsidian. "I might not be in the giving vein, Ryan. Just humor me some."

  They entered a room that held nothing but dolls, one shelfful with soft, pudgy faces, all of them dif­ferent, looking to Ryan like the victims of some ter­rible disease. Another row, at the back, under a failed light, appeared to hold dark green turtle dolls. That idea was so ridiculous that Ryan never even bothered to ask Harry about it.

  A long, vaulted chamber held wags, but these were real old, all gleaming chrome and huge, brightly painted bodies. Harry ran his finger along each one, swelling with the pride of ownership. "This is the SS Jaguar and this is a Bugatti. Ferrari and a Corvette. Chevy and a green label Bentley. Pretty, aren't they?"

  "You ever drive them?"

  "The questions, Ryan. Beginning to get on my nerves some."

  There were rooms of clocks and books, jukeboxes and pinball machines; walls with swords and bayo­nets in serried ranks; pewter mugs and cut-glass vases; trays of gold and silver rings. "Human eye one comes from London originally. Great Frog jewelers. Lovely, isn't it?"

  A bookcase ran for fifty feet along a wall and scraped at the ceiling, filled with carefully catego­rized comics. "Best run of Conan the Barbarian in Deathlands," Harry crowed. And there were neck­laces, model ships, embroidered samplers, some with dates back in the 1700s.

  One room had its walls covered in black velvet and decorated with whips and handcuffs, and boots with wicked spurs and six-inch spike heels. Mags and some special vids that Harry flicked his hand at. "Porn. Not to my taste. But it's there to be collected."

  "Blasters?" Ryan asked.

  "Not here. Sec section. Sorry, Ryan. Not even for you."

  "Drugs?"

  The smile was back. "Sure. In the giving vein again. Should be ready by now. And then you can have a free ride home in the wag."

  IT WAS FULL DARK. Krysty was standing at the top of the flight of cold steps. The weather had changed yet again, becoming far colder. The clouds had lifted and been whirled off to the south by a freshening wind, leaving the black dome covered in a myriad spar­kling stars.

  She held Ryan's G-12 caseless. Her heart told her it wasn't possible that J.B. should be in serious danger of leaving them. Someone like the Armorer had been around so long that the idea of his falling under the scythe seemed to be ridiculous. But her mind and her highly developed mutie sensitivity told her differ­ently.

  The stillness that enveloped J.B. in its muffling darkness brought its own story.

  She had knelt by his side, reaching for his hand, finding no response at all to her touch. It was like holding warm, dead meat. The vibrant electricity that normally surged through the Armorer was com­pletely lacking.

  The ville was quiet. Cooking fires brought smoke ghosting from the north and east of where they were hiding. She felt a few drifting flakes of snow feath­ering against the skin of her face, holding the prom­ise of more bad weather to come.

  Footfalls on the steps made her turn, and she saw the silver-haired figure of Doc climbing wearily to­ward her. "Good evening, my dear Krysty. Dis­tinctly more chilly, is it not?"

  "Hi, Doc. Yeah, getting cold."

  "No sign of Ryan?" He shook his head. "Not one of my more intelligent questions. If he'd been back, I suspect you might have informed us. He said he hoped to be back by dusk."

  "The key word there is hoped, Doc. He's after his boy and also something to save J.B.'s life. Sort of busy day."

  "How do you feel about this sudden appearance of his son? What we used to call 'a bit of a turnup for the book,' back in my day."

  Krysty rested her forearms on the pile of rubble, staring out across the vast wilderness of Newyork. "I don't know. That's the truth, Doc. I don't know what I feel. I suppose that if a woman had turned up with an armful of children and said she was his wife…might be different. A kid of ten, Doc. You saw the pic of him. Got to be Ryan's son. No, I just don't know. Have to wait and see."

  "Ryan would never do anything that might hurt you, Krysty."

  "I know that, Doc."

  While they'd been talking she'd been idly pricking with her nail at something lodged in the brickwork. It finally came loose, and she peered at it, realizing she was holding a part of a woman's earring. Krysty wondered what had happened to the owner of the slender piece of metal that had been driven into raw stone by the awesome power of the nukings.

  "What's that?"

  "What, Doc?"

  "Thought for a moment that my tired old ears had caught the faintest susurration of mechanized trans­port far off."

  "A wag?"

  "Yes. Can you not…?"

  Now she heard the sound, a low rumbling, like a fairly large wag moving in low gear, moving toward them.

  "Yes. Could be."

  "Shall I tell Mildred?"

  "No. Get J.B's blaster and come up here, Doc. Might be Ryan. Might not be."

  It was Ryan.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  THERE WERE SO many questions after the wag had rumbled away into the freezing night.

  The underground monarch hadn't just given Ryan drugs. There was a parcel, neatly wrapped and itemized, of ammunition, including both the rare caseless rounds and the antique .36s for Doc's Le Mat.
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  A whole rucksack was filled with food, mostly canned meat and vegetables, as well as some dried fish, and a supply of Eau-clenz tablets, which claimed to make any kind of water safely drinkable. A small shrink-wrapped box of self-lights promised to get even the dampest of wood burning brightly. But it was the drugs that brought Mildred running from the side of the unconscious man. She took the package, which was wrapped tightly in the neatly cut remnants of a black plastic garbage bag, and tore it open, looking down into her cupped hands as though she'd just encountered the Holy Grail.

  "Fucking-A!" she whispered.

  It was a bubblepack, stamped and coded, of twelve miniature syringes, each containing a measured dose of the antibiotic. Mildred read quickly though the instructions, lips moving, totally ignoring the wait­ing trio of friends.

  Krysty broke the silence. "Well?"

  Mildred nodded slowly, her face breaking into a smile. "Pardon the aptness of the expression, but this is just what the doctor ordered."

  THE NIGHT PASSED. Ryan took turns on watch with Doc and Krysty, allowing Mildred to spend all her time by the side of her patient. A cold front had come south over the state, slicing down from Canada, dropping the temperature to something like forty be­low.

  The only good thing about the lethal chill was that it kept everything out of sight and under cover. It was only necessary to slide the door open and peer out every once in a while, waving away the frosty plume of your own breath to see what was happening. The streets were utterly deserted. Once the wind blew an old can past, and it rattled and echoed with a strange, sharp intensity.

  During the time, Ryan told his companions some­thing about Harry Stanton and the rambling palace of the underworld king.

  Mildred was only listening with half her attention. The instructions had said to give the injections every six to eight hours. She'd given J.B. two at once and then a third two hours later. His breathing seemed slower and easier, and his temperature had fallen a little.

  But, as she said, there was still a bitterly long row to hoe.

  Doc was the most interested in the story of the endless rooms of prenuke memorabilia. But all of his questions passed Ryan by. He wanted to know about certain books or movies or songs.

  "Sorry, Doc," Ryan replied, shaking his head. "If you want to go there after this is all down and done and see for yourself, I guess Harry is the sort of guy who'd be delighted to see you."

  "You trust him, lover?" Krysty asked.

  "You know about me and trust."

  "Sure, but as far as it goes? Will he give us up to the scalies?"

  Ryan rubbed his hands together, trying to massage some warmth into his fingers. "Don't know, Krysty. I asked him about how he survived, living quite close to the edge of the muties' turf."

  "And?"

  "Said he believed in living and letting live. Long as they didn't step on his toes, he tried not to step on theirs. But I think the fact that he knew Trader and even knew me years ago gives me an extra card in the game."

  "The wag," Krysty said.

  "What about it."

  "Think he might sort of lend it to us to go after the boy?"

  "Stanton's got the biggest collection of wags I ever seen."

  "Saw," Kiysty corrected.

  "I ever saw. But I can't imagine him being so filled with kindness that he'd lend us something like the recce wag I came in."

  "Be good against the scalies."

  Ryan nodded again. "Yeah. But he did give us a map, showing as much as he knows about the layout of their headquarters. It's right up against the river on the west side. He reckons there could be as many as five hundred of the bastards there."

  "Take some doing."

  "I know that, lover."

  "When do we make our move to rescue Childe Harold from that dark tower?"

  "Dean. Not Harold, Doc. The kid's name is Dean."

  The old man half smiled. "It was a literary allu­sion, my dear friend. But let is pass."

  "Sure. Depends on J.B.'s health. If he stays the same, I'll go day after tomorrow. If he starts recov­ering, we could maybe even try tomorrow night. If he… doesn't make it, we'll go as soon as feels right. Can't wait too long. Not with the boy in the hands of the scalies."

  "TIME IS IT?" Ryan asked.

  "About an hour off dawn," Krysty replied.

  "Doc on watch?"

  "Yeah. If it gets any colder, he reckons his breath'll freeze right in his mouth."

  Ryan laughed quietly. "Might be the only way known in the universe to teach Dr. Theophilus Tan­ner to keep his mouth shut."

  Krysty wriggled under the pile of stinking covers, alongside him. "Mildred says J.B. is holding his own against the infection. She's given him another injec­tion, and she'll try another at first light."

  "What a shitting stupid way to go and buy the farm. Bitten by an insect! I reckon J.B. must have had better than a dozen serious blaster and blade wounds. An insect!"

  "Not quite as cold under here," she whispered. "You got all your clothes on?"

  "Sure."

  "Want to try getting out of some of them, lover?"

  "Won't be my breath that gets frozen if I do, Krysty."

  "Maybe find somewhere hot to put it."

  "You gaudy slut."

  Krysty giggled, fumbling at the buttons at the front of his trousers. "That's me. Any act, no matter how disgusting, for a handful of jack or a fistful of creds. You name it and I'll do it."

  Ryan was kissing her, and he whispered something in her ear, making her laugh out loud. "You filthy bastard perve, Ryan Cawdor."

  "You said anything."

  "I didn't mean that anything. Anyway, we don't have either the honey or the blindfold."

  "Or the deaf-mutie with the hand bells."

  Krysty was kissing him in tiny, fragile little pecks, all across the side of his face and neck while her fin­gers reached their destination. He was uncomforta­ble on his side, trying to find a way into her tighter pants.

  "No hand bells?" she said. "Gaia! What a shame. Have to just do it in the boring, old-fashioned way. Nevermind."

  "Don't mind at all."

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  THE FOOD HARRY Stanton had given them made a wonderful change from the strips of dried dog meat and the dubious fish. The four companions sat to­gether around the warm ashes of the fire, huddled against the cold, finishing the meal.

  "Any chance of more like this to eat?" Mildred asked.

  "Harry told me he'd send his recce wag over to us sometime tomorrow evening. More of the drugs and some more food."

  "Why did he not give you a little more of each yesterday and forgo the necessity for a further trip this way?"

  "I wondered. Think it's partly the link with Trader. Harry's older than us, and I guess he feels a kind of responsibility toward me."

  "Mebbe you're the son he never had," Krysty murmured just loud enough for Ryan to hear. To hear and to understand.

  RYAN CONSIDERED GOING on a solo patrol again to try to check out some of the details on the map Harry Stanton had given to him. But he knew now that the network of streets for several blocks around the scalies' base was heavily guarded. From the sketch plan, it looked as if the only way in was from the direction of the river.

  The issue that should have been occupying most of his mind was the health of his oldest and closest friend. Yet somehow that wasn't the way it was. It was the faded picture of the solemn-faced little boy with the tight black curls that kept swimming unbid­den into the front of his mind.

  But the Armorer was already showing encourag­ing signs of fighting back against the lethal infec­tion. The hectic flush had faded, restoring his complexion to its normal sallow pallor. He seemed to be sleeping quietly, and the gaping wound at the side of his face looked to be healing. Mildred was delighted. "It's one of the weirdest things about Deathlands," she said.

  "What is that, ma'am?" Doc asked.

  "Everyone is surprisingly healthy, considering the deadly
quality of life. But when someone like John gets an out-of-the-ordinary sickness, there's no resis­tance to it."

  "Forgive me, Mildred, but I think you have al­ready made us fully aware of that."

  Slowly, and with an infinite delicacy, Mildred gave him the finger. "I haven't finished, you doddering old cretin."

  He bowed to her. "Then I yield the floor to you for your further elaboration of this most puzzling enigma."

  "It works both ways. Two-edged sword. Just as John went under fast to the bite, so he's responding far faster than usual to the healing power of the an­tibiotics."

  Ryan stood and stretched. "So you think he's go­ing to make it through?"

  Mildred rubbed at her lips, removing a particle of stewed meat. "If I was into gambling, which I'm not, I'd say he was facing a seventy percent chance of re­covery. This time yesterday I wouldn't have put it any higher than ten percent."

  By midday she was ready to go up to ninety per­cent.

  The door was pulled three-quarters of the way open, filling the dismal basement with fresh, cold sunshine. Ryan and Doc had gone out an hour ear­lier on a brief expedition to try to scavenge some more wood for the fire. Twice in only a couple of blocks they heard distant whistles, indicating that the scalies were ranging in their direction. And once Ryan spotted a ragged figure spying on them from an empty second-floor window.

  MILDRED CELEBRATED J.B.'s easing back toward health by insisting on cleaning up the cellar. Every­thing that wasn't nailed down got moved. The piles of rags and blankets were all swept up and kicked to one side, eventually placed in a tumbled mound in the farthest corner of the basement.

  "Can't stand housecleaning."

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to face the speaker. J.B. was still lying on the floor, but he was propped on one elbow, looking at the subsiding pillar of dust that contained Mildred Wyeth.

  "John!" she exclaimed.

  "Hi. Been sleeping. My cheek hurts." He raised a hand to touch the cicatrix on his face.

  "Don't, John!"

  Her shout made everyone jump.

  His fingers stopped inches short of the wound. "I remember being bitten and feeling like a scalie had pulled most of my brain out of my skull. What hap­pened next?"