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“I saw you! You bastards!”
“You didn’t see us,” Mildred said. “We were working at the claim until late. Then we came right here.”
“Tell us exactly what you did see, Wymie,” Conn told her.
The black-haired young woman stooped and eased her burden onto the floorboards. Blood began to trickle outward. Behind her Ryan could see a number of others with anxious, angry faces. Plenty held weapons, from hoes and axes to a muzzle-loader shotgun or two. Slowly, Wymie straightened.
“I looked out the window, soon as—as it happened,” she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair. Bloodred eyes!”
All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.
“Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.
“Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”
“We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”
“You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”
“We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.
He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.
He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.
“It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”
“I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.
“Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we do such a thing?”
“You’re outlanders! From out there!”
Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.
“You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it Deathlands. Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”
“But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And he looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”
“Mebbe used an ax.”
“Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”
“Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”
“‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.
“Mebbe he’s a—a werewolf or somethin’! We all know there’s monsters out there!”
Tarley shook his head. “Wymie, Wymie. Listen to yourself. We can’t go lynchin’ strangers because they might be werewolves. Not without some kinda evidence they are. Or that werewolves exist, even.”
“People say there’s all kind of weird muties, out in the Deathlands,” one of the men standing on the stoop behind Wymie said. “Like little rubber-skinned bastards with suckers for fingertips, can rip the hide clean off you!”
“That part’s real,” Ricky said. “Those are stickies. They’re bad news.”
“I’ve seen stickies,” Tarley stated. “They’re pretty much what you say. But stickies didn’t do this, and I see no reason to believe these folks did, either.”
“You takin’ their part, Tarley Gaines?” Wymie shrieked. “Of outlanders who murder our own?”
“Nobody’s takin’ anybody’s part,” Conn said, his voice level and as unyielding as an anvil. “Not tonight. Not in here. Except the truth’s, mebbe.”
“I know the truth!” the young woman yelled.
“You got precious little to show for it, Wymie.”
“I know what I saw!”
“And mebbe what you saw wasn’t what your mind’s made of it. Fact is, these folks have been right here a good past hour, half an hour spent hagglin’, half an hour eatin’ my venison, stewed greens and beans, and drinkin’ my brew. They came in without a dot of blood on them, wearin’ clothes they’d double clearly worked in all day. And their hair isn’t wet enough to be from anythin’ but sweat, so they didn’t clean themselves up after doing murder. The albino in particular—blood’d show up pretty clear on him.”
Wymie was looking around, but from the slump of her strong shoulders Ryan could see that, while the anger and even hate were still there, still smoldering, sheer exhaustion and emotional reaction had damped her fires. She had nothing left.
Not now, anyway.
“You out there,” Conn called past the suddenly befuddled-looking woman. “Burny Stoops. Walter John. Get in here, pick this poor girl up off my floor and take her to Coffin-Maker Sam, over to the Hole. He’ll see she gets a decent burial.”
“I can’t afford to hire a hole dug for her,” Wymie said, sounding more sullen now than raging. “Much less a box to bury her in.”
“Tell Sam I’ll cover the expenses,” Conn said. “But you got to leave now, Wymie. Find a place to stay. Don’t make any more fuss, now. It won’t do poor Blinda a speck of good.”
“But—”
“We’ll get it sorted out. When the sun comes up, we’ll go take a look at your old place. We need information, and that’s a thing we haven’t got.”
“I know all I need to,” she said, the spark of anger flaring again.
“The rest of us don’t,” the gaudy owner said, with just a bit of edge to his voice. “Mrs. Haymuss!”
After a moment a stout brown-skinned woman emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a much-stained apron and wiping her hands on a rag. She was evidently the cook.
“Take this poor girl and see to her. Get her settled with Widow Oakey. She’s close and likes to take in strays.”
“But, Mr. Conn, the kitchen—”
“Kitchen’s closed,” the gaudy owner said. “Nobody’s got an appetite left now. And if they do, I’m not minded to feed them, right now.”
The woman walked forward, encircled Wymie’s shoulders with a brawny arm and began alternately clucking and cooing at her. Ryan couldn’t make out what she was saying. Or even if it was words.
The black-haired woman made as if to push her off. Then she turned, buried her face at the juncture of Mrs. Haymuss’s neck and beefy shoulders, and began to cry uncontrollably.
The two men Conn had called on came in past the two to gingerly pick up Blinda’s body. Mrs. Haymuss steered Wymie back out into the night. They followed, struggling to carry what a single woman had brought here on her own.
“The rest of you out there,” Conn called, “move along. It isn’t polite to stare.”
Whatever passions Wymie’s trek had excited in the locals who had collected to follow her to the gaudy house, they had vanished, as well. Shuffling their feet, not meeting one another’s gazes directly, they broke up began to go their separate ways.
Conn watched them for a moment. Slowly, those inside the gaudy who had jumped up at the spectacle sat themselves back down.
“I’d wait to make sure they all get headed in the right direction, just in case,” Conn said to Ryan. “Then you might want to clear out of here.”
“Much obliged,” Ryan said.
“Thank you for your help,” Krysty said. “Do you think we did it after all?”
Conn shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. Somebody did this, and that somebody needs to pay. But if I thought it was you, I never would’ve said what I did. Fact is, I don’t see how you could have done it.”
“But that big-titty girl still thinks you done it,” Yoostas Sumz said. “Sure as shit stinks double bad.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_ae18f3fe-86b7-5f58-b173-064994107477)
“What do we do now?” Mildred asked.
The faces gathered around the little campfire mirrored the concern and uncertainty she felt. Except for Ryan’s. He sat off a little apart, knees drawn up, facing off to the side. His chin was down and he was clearly brooding.
Jak was nowhere to be seen. Ryan would have had to physically restrain him to keep him from prowling the perimeter of their camp to scout for signs of watchers or intruders—and look for signs the elusive white shadows had been there. Crickets and tree frogs trilled in the night. A few late fireflies danced.
“Can we stay here?” Ricky asked.
“Don’t see as how we rightly can,” J.B. said. He sat across the fire from Mildred, face turned toward the flames. The yellow underlighting brought out the strong bone structure of his face, and turned his eyeglass lenses into disks of flame.
“The place has gotten too hot for comfort, I reckon. It’s time to shake the dust of it off our heels.”
Mildred pressed her lips into a line. She hated to contradict J.B. She loved him. More, she respected him.
“Let’s not overreact.”
Mildred’s eyes widened in surprise.
She glanced at Krysty. The tall, statuesque redhead sat beside her brooding man. It was she who had spoken out as Mildred opened her mouth. Looking back at J.B., she saw a quick furrow of his brows as he glanced at Krysty.
On him, that was the equivalent of a full-on scowl. He was usually as expressive as a stone statue.
But Krysty said what she wanted, and not just because Ryan was her partner. Everyone could speak his or her mind.
“‘Overreact’?” Mildred repeated.
“We have a good place here,” Krysty said. “A comfortable camp, the cave is good shelter, and we have running water. The dig has a lot more scavvy to be unearthed. You yourself said it looks as if we’re just getting down to the good stuff, J.B.”
“Jack’s worth squat,” J.B. replied, “if you don’t live to spend it. So Trader used to say.”
Mildred frowned. J.B. did not tend toward the dogmatic, but when the quotations from his and Ryan’s old mentor were trotted out, that meant he was settling into his groove of thinking.
“He also used to point out you tend to make jack in direct proportion to the risk you run,” Ryan added without looking around.
“Why, Ryan,” Doc said. “I thought you of all people would urge caution.”
Ryan shrugged. “Looking to look at the whole situation before I make up my mind,” Ryan replied.
“Looks straightforward to me,” J.B. said. “We’ve got two packs of enemies on our tails. That’s beyond bad odds.”
“But, J.B.,” Ricky said, almost desperately. “Think of the stuff that might be down there! The tech—the weapons!”
The Armorer shook his head. He took a half-smoked black cheroot from a pocket of the brown leather jacket he wore, struck a spark from a butane lighter he had found in the last redoubt they’d jumped to and puffed the smoke to life. He cast a swift glance at Mildred.
The woman repressed a grin. His apprentice knew his soft spots, for sure.
His occasional smoking didn’t please her as a twentieth-century physician, even one who preferred research to hands-on doctoring—before she got wakened from her cryosleep into a brutal, desolate world where “healing” was her number one marketable skill, that is. But she’d long since lost the heart to chide him for it, other than a slight frown.
Realistically, she didn’t count on any of them living long enough for cancer to take them. In Deathlands, sudden death wasn’t just a constant possibility. It was an immediate reality.
“Right now,” Ryan said softly, “we’ve got no evidence I can see that anybody’s on our tails. Here, anyway.”
“But those pale shadows know where our dig site is, certainly,” Doc stated.
“Yeah. But they haven’t shown up around here, yet.”
“Yet,” J.B. echoed.
It was Ryan’s turn to shrug.
“We’re not on the last train west yet, either. Even if the locals are after us, too, they don’t know where either place is.”
Ryan had chosen a campsite a mile or so from the sinkhole that had swallowed the predark trove. It was a fine site, as comfortable as it got sleeping rough—and better than a lot of buildings they’d bunked in, Mildred knew all too well. The cave provided shelter from the frequent rains as well as from casual observation. A little stream ran along the base of the sandstone outcrop that formed their current home. And even though it was a pain humping back and forth each day to the excavation, the separation ensured that even if one location was compromised, the other wouldn’t be.
As the fact that the pale shadows had found the dig but not this place—as far as they could tell—attested to. Though with Jak on the job, she wasn’t concerned they might be under covert observation. Just because even he couldn’t track them here on their home range—whatever the hell-on-earth they were—didn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to spot them if they came creeping around here.
But now something was eating at her, too, in spite of the fact that she, like Krysty, badly wanted to stay here as long as possible. Even if this wasn’t going to be a final, permanent safe haven—unless of course they left their bones here in the Pennyrile—they were all riding the ragged edge of exhaustion. Not so much the physical sort, but the kind brought on by constant stress.
The stability they’d enjoyed for the week or so that they’d worked the sinkhole had visibly restored them all, despite the hot and arduous labor every day brought.
“If the locals think we’re murderers,” she pointed out, “how can we stay here? I mean, we need somebody to trade with.”
“We can conceivably work the excavation for a few more days,” Doc said, “until, as Ricky observes, we get to the most valuable relics. At that point we can pick the most portable and valuable items, and then head out of the area. It’s not as if we have not done that a score of times already.”
“But Conn,” Ryan said, “the man we’ve been mostly trading with, seemed triple far from convinced we had anything to do with that girl’s murder.”
“But the girl’s sister was certain we did it,” Krysty added. “And she did manage to convince some of the locals that we were guilty.”
That was another thing about Krysty. She had her druthers, same as everybody—in particular, the longing for stability—but she was wise to the bone, as well. She saw both sides to every coin, and she spoke the truth as she saw it, always.
