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“We noticed,” Mildred said.
“Now would you mind telling us who you are?” Ryan said.
“Shouldn’t we make ’em stop talking, Tully?” a black kid with a single-shot black-powder longblaster asked. He looked to be no more than twelve and his eyes were saucer-large with excitement.
“Why’d we want to do a thing like that, McCoy?” the leader asked laconically.
“Well. Um.” Evidently McCoy hadn’t thought that far ahead. But he was game, and resourceful. “Mebbe they’ll plot their escape.”
“Why, then, you’ll just shoot them dead with that big scary blaster of yours, won’t you, McCoy?” Tully said. “Speaking of which, you did remember to reload that smokepole, right?”
The youngster puffed himself up. “O’ course! What do you think I am?”
“A greenie on your first patrol outside the wire,” Tully said. “You put a fresh cap on, too?”
“Well, don’t be a—Oh. Um, wait.” He fumbled at a pouch at his waist. “Wait one.”
Turning his head so the kid wouldn’t see him smile, the patrol leader turned back to Ryan. “To answer your question, we come from a ville called Soulard. A mile or so south of here, along the old highway. Peaceful place.”
“Why did you kidnap us, then?” Krysty asked.
He smiled. “Looks to me like we rescued you.”
“Looks to me like you captured us,” Ryan said. “Saving us for the stewpot?”
“What, you think we’re fuckin’ cannies?” shouted the man who’d mishandled Ryan’s longblaster earlier. He wore a T-shirt with even the brief arms torn off to reveal bulky biceps and triceps. Though he looked barely in his twenties, he was a big old slab of beef, with a blunt face fronted by a mashed tuber of a nose and a couple of brown eyes narrowed with angry suspicion. The sides and back of his head were shaved up to a clump of brown hair that stirred in the acid-tangy breeze.
“Ease off, Lonny,” the ginger-haired man said coolly. “They got a right to be a bit testy. I would be, in their circumstances.”
“But they run with a mutie!” He waved a hamhock of a hand toward Jak. “Look at him, white as clean snow and rat-red eyes!”
“I’m no mutie!” Jak shouted, spittle flying from his pale lips.
“He’s an albino,” Ryan said. “It’s a natural condition, if a rare one. He’s no mutie.”
“Bullshit,” Lonny said. Jak’s red eyes flamed. He looked likely to spring for Lonny’s throat, despite the huge disparity in size.
“Lonny!” The patrol leader didn’t stir, but his voice cracked like a whip. “Back off. We need to talk to these people. Brother Joseph will figure out what to do with them.”
Lonny spit in the pale grass that grew in the shade of the overpass. “Brother Joseph.”
“Enough, Lonny. We don’t need to be airing our dirty laundry in front of strangers, either.”
But Jak’s hot blood was up. “How we know they not cannies?”
“Lord, lad,” Doc murmured. “Let it go.”
“Look at them,” Mildred said. “Ever see cannies look that healthy?”
Jak frowned. His white teeth made paler dimples in his lower lip. “No,” he admitted after a moment.
“Me neither, now that she mentions it,” Ryan said. “All right. Truce. We might as well go along with these people, even laying aside they got the drop on us. We already know this ain’t a healthy vicinity to wander at random.”
“No kidding,” McCoy said. “You’re triple-lucky you didn’t stir up a pocket of serious rad-death emitters. That’s worse than getting eaten by cannies, any day! The baron, he—”
“McCoy,” Tully said sharply, but nowhere near as sharply as he’d spoken to the beefy Lonny. The black kid shut his mouth and swallowed hard. Tully looked back to Ryan.
“Let’s just say you seem a bit too dangerous to allow to wander around freely kicking over hornets’ nests. We have to live here.”
“What if we tell you we don’t mean you any harm or trouble?”
“I’d say evidence suggests otherwise. Least so far as trouble’s concerned. And I can tell you plain, you’ll have every chance to state your case once we get back safe to our ville. Which is far from certain yet, so less talking, please. None of us wants to draw more hassles.”
“People want avoid trouble bad,” Jak grumbled, indicating their captors with a nod of his head.
“If we tried a little harder to skip trouble,” Krysty said, “we might be a whole lot happier.”
“Only a droolie looks for more trouble than looks for him,” Ryan replied.
“What does that make us?” Mildred asked.
“People a triple load of trouble looks for. Now shut it.”
Mildred looked miffed, but she pressed her lips tight.
Tully slapped his hands on his lean thighs and stood. “That’s clean rain falling now,” he said. “We can move.”
Ryan’s nose had already told him that the lethal acid downpour had halted. The sound of drops falling on the asphalt-covered overpass and the cracked pavement beyond its shelter didn’t change.
“Are you quite certain about that, young man?” Doc asked. “A return of the acid precipitation could quite spoil one’s day, were one caught in the open.”
Tully frowned at him a moment as if sorting out his words. Ryan got the impression the lanky man was no stupe. He just wasn’t used to hearing that sort of talk.
Well, in the Deathlands, nobody was. It had taken Ryan some time to get used to Doc, too. And that was just in his lucid moments.
“That’s how it goes here,” Tully said. “Fresh rain always follows the acid. Dilutes it and washes it away. That’s one reason the settled villes survive.”
Ryan looked at Krysty. She had her limited doomie moments, but more important, she was better attuned to the natural elements than anybody Ryan had met. Whether it was her link to the Earth Mother, Gaia, or just a natural ability, he couldn’t say.
She nodded. “I feel he’s right.” Then she flashed him that smile of hers that always made him realize how lucky he was. Even in situations as tight as this one.
“Best pick up your pal,” Tully said. “We don’t have to run anymore. But it’s not healthy to hang around out here.”
“Mildred?” Ryan said.
The physician was already kneeling over J.B. He was unconscious. Sweat sheened his forehead, more than what was due to the humidity.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like we’ve got much choice, do we?”
“No,” Ryan said. “We don’t. C’mon, people, let’s get him up. We got places to go and people to meet.”
Chapter Six
They continued south onto what looked like a largely intact highway that Mildred, who had spent some time in predark St. Louis, identified as Interstate 55, to make their way through a complicated tangle of broken concrete and twisted rail iron, fanged by nasty bent spikes of rust-red rebar. Evidently it was a collapsed bridge. A railroad-highway combo, by the looks.
No sooner were they past the collapsed ruins than Tully led the party down the brushy bank to the surface street that ran alongside the old highway. They jumped a little stream in the ditch at the bottom. Because there was just no way four people could cross it carrying the unconscious Armorer, and because the locals seemed uninclined to wade this soon after an acid downpour, Ryan draped J.B.’s limp form over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
Everybody else hopped easily across. Burdened as he was Ryan didn’t quite make it cleanly. The dirt gave way under his left foot. It slipped and went into the water to the ankle. Though he jumped clear as if J.B. suddenly weighed no more than dandelion fluff, Ryan felt a sting from the diluted acid in the little stream.
Krysty and Doc relieved Ryan of his burden. Tully tossed him a water bottle. “Best rinse that off before we go on,” he said. “Just in case.”
Ryan cocked a brow over his good eye. “Don’t sweat it,” Tully said. “We’re not far from the ville. If we’re not inside the perimeter inside half an hour, I likely won’t be needing the water anyhow.”
Ryan splashed water over his ankle and boot. It probably didn’t do much good. It made him feel better, though. He tossed the bottle back to the patrol leader, who caught it with a grin.
“Why not use highway?” Jak asked as they started moving west between a stand of woods along the partially elevated, partially fallen-in right of way.
“Too exposed,” Tully said. “Sometimes we get snipers in the rubble.”
“And there’s stickies, in those drowned warehouses and factories other side of the Interstate,” another man said.
“Highway does get used by people passing through, Randall,” Tully said. “Long-range traders and such.”
“Things travel that road no human should meet or get to know anything about,” a black-haired man with drawn gray-stubbled cheeks said.
“That’s only by night,” Tully said. “Anyway it’s all superstition. Probably.”
“I hear the screams, Tully. Can’t hardly sleep none, sometimes.”
“That’s just stickies roasting rivermen or scavvies they caught,” Randall said.
The companions found themselves toting the unconscious J.B. along a wide street. The rain, having seemingly washed away the remnants of the toxic rain, had stopped quickly. The air smelled fresh. Overhead the clouds had taken on the colors of an old bruise, gray and green and brown, an improvement over the tortured, boiling orange of not so many minutes before.
They passed beneath standing bridges where a railroad line swung in from the northwest to join a highway that crossed their route. A little farther south the highway they paralleled swung off west. Walking under an intact under-pass, their captors went on triple alert. The guy who didn’t sleep so well jumped when a pigeon boomed out from high up the embankment near the overhead and flapped out into the milky sunlight. His buddies laughed at him.
When the group emerged, the clouds were breaking up. Ryan blinked his good eye at the sight. As hot as it was, without clouds to filter the sun the day would only get hotter. And J.B. wasn’t getting any lighter.
“How are you holding up?” he asked the others.
“Don’t worry about us,” Krysty said. “We’ll do what we have to do.”
He ginned at her. “Like always.”
“Not much farther to go, anyway,” Tully said. “We’ll see about getting you some wheels for your friend when we reach the gates. We got people who can tend to him. Ace healer name of Strode.”
Lonny muttered something about mollycoddling no-account outlanders. His leader ignored him. Though Tully acted like a good guy—and Ryan knew too well it could all be an act—and seemed to have his shit pretty much in one sock as a leader, he also seemed to allow the bulky brown-haired man an unusual amount of slack. There had to be some link here Ryan didn’t see.
No way to scope it now, nor to know if the fact, if fact it was, had any use to him and his friends in their current predicament. Ryan filed it away and let it go.
Ryan saw Mildred’s shoulders and upper back tense. She was a physician, a fully qualified preskydark doctor who tended to think not too much of what passed for doctors these days. Truth be told, she had met several healers whom she had to admit were truly gifted.
But whether it was more prudence than the freezie woman usually showed, or simple fatigue, she didn’t make a point of the fact she could tend to J.B. as well as any and better than most. Besides which, if Soulard were the relatively large and prosperous ville a twelve-man patrol wearing reasonably clean outfits suggested, they probably had medical facilities better than the Deathlands standard.
Tully led them down the center of the wide street. His troops stayed crisply alert. Here, anyway, they seemed to be more worried about jump-out-from-cover attacks than coming under long-range aimed fire. More and more of the structures they passed were intact, which shortened potential fields of fire and favored blitz-style ambush.
“Wonder why these littler buildings held up so much better than the skyscrapers,” Mildred said. Ryan was mildly surprised she had breath to talk.
It was more of a surprise when Doc answered; even after all their association Ryan had a tendency to underestimate his physical hardiness.
“Smaller surface areas,” he said. “Being more compact, they proved more resistant to the blasts. The bigger buildings provided greater surfaces for the shock waves to push against.”
As they marched through the ruins between increasingly intact-appearing structures, in the growing sunlight Ryan realized the black kid, McCoy, was no longer with them. None of the others looked concerned—about the youth’s absence, anyway. Even here in what they evidently considered potentially hostile ground nobody seemed to assume he’d been snatched by someone. Or even wandered away into danger.
So Tully sent him ahead to spread the word they were coming, Ryan thought. He’d probably use some secret bolthole. Mebbe even one only a kid knew about, or could even get through. The patrol leader had to have spoken quietly to the kid when Ryan wasn’t looking, or even flashed him an arranged signal. Or, hell, for all he knew it was standard operating procedure.
They were working in a dangerous information vacuum here. The bitch was, even though their escorts were proving neither hostile nor closemouthed—except mebbe the lout, Lonny—they didn’t seem inclined to small talk right now. Ryan wasn’t about to distract them, if they thought there was something here to look out for.
And anyway, he wasn’t sure himself where Mildred and Doc found the energy for chitchat. He sure didn’t have much to spare, right now.
“Biggest danger here is stickies,” Randall said. “They infest the flooded warehouses and like to hunt up here from time to time. Plus sometimes scavvies think they can snag an easy score this close to a ville.”
“There’s also people from Breweryville,” said Dowd, the haunted-looking dude who couldn’t sleep. “They might attack us if they come upon us.”
“Oh, crap,” Randall said. “They can be dicks. But they’re not coldhearts.”
“Brother Joseph says they lack a true sense of community.”
“Look alive, guys,” Tully said hastily. “We don’t want to get too caught up talking and wind up crawling with stickies.”
That drove a shudder through everybody, companions and captors alike. There were numerous varieties of the needle-toothed mutants with the sucker pads on their hands and feet that could strip skin from meat and meat from bone. Most of them shared a love for human flesh, cruelty and fire, not necessarily in that order. Despite their pyrophilia they often colonized near bodies of water, and seemed to take to the water well.
Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the patrol leader had once again steered talk clear of the subject of Brother Joseph. Whomever he may be.
They came to a corner where a wire fence stretched down the street ahead of them and down the street west, backed by dense thorny hedges and topped with coils of razor wire that gleamed in the sun despite being pitted and stained by the acid rains.
“Soulardville,” Tully said with evident pride.
“Didn’t that used to be the farmers’ market?” Mildred asked. “Those long shedlike roofs inside the perimeter?”
“Uh-huh,” the patrol leader said, nodding his ginger head. “It’s a farming-and-gardening center now. Our market’s more centrally located.”
“What’d you say your ville’s name was again?” Ryan asked.
“Soulard,” Tully said.
Doc perked up. “‘Soulard,’” he said. “Why, bless my soul, but unless I misremember, that means ‘drunkard’ in French.”
Tully shrugged. “Mebbe so, some time past. Sure not now.”
