скачать книгу бесплатно
“I’ll have a pear,” J.B. said. “How about you, Krysty, Ryan, Jak?”
“Apple,” Jak said.
“Pear for me,” Ryan said.
Krysty smiled. “Me too.”
“These look good,” J.B. said, handing a reddish-green pear to Ryan, and then to Krysty. “Mebbe I’ll have one, too.”
J.B. fished a pear out of the bag for himself.
“These are truly wonderful peaches,” Doc said, admiring the fruit in his hand. “Did I ever tell the story about the man I met who rode with Kit Carson when the red-eyed son of a bitch burned out the peach orchard in Canyon de Chelly?”
“Yes,” Ryan answered.
“Heard it,” Jak said.
“Many times,” Mildred chided.
“Well, it is quite the story….” Doc said, his words trailing off until he bit into his peach again.
And for the next five minutes, the companions walked the roadway in relative silence except for the sounds of crunching fruit and the scrape of their boots on the asphalt.
THE SUN WAS JUST beginning to fall behind the western horizon as they entered the outskirts of Falls ville.
Most of the buildings they’d passed until now were in ruins. One of the buildings had been called Ripley’s, with the outside covered with pictures of two-headed goats, men joined at the hip and other common Deathlands mutations. The friends were somewhat confused by the renderings, wondering if the structure was predark or skydark.
“Ripley was a man who collected predark oddities and put them in museums for people to gawk at,” Mildred explained.
“People pay jack see this?” Jak asked.
Mildred smiled. “As one of Mr. Ripley’s colleagues once said, there’s a triple-stupe bastard born every minute.”
There were other similar establishments, all of them advertising wonders that were all too common in the Deathlands, many of them having to do with wax.
When the road ended at the water’s edge, they turned left and followed the weed-infested trail that ran parallel to the river as it flowed toward the falls. As they came to the falls themselves, the air became filled with a moist chill as the water crested over the falls and crashed onto the rocky gorge below. It was an impressive sight, but the amount of water running over the falls was nothing like what Mildred had said flowed there in predark times.
On their left was the strangely shaped tower that stood some two hundred feet above them and likely gave an excellent view of the falls and the surrounding area. Ryan made a note to check out the tower in the morning light. If the sky was clear, he’d be able to do an easy recce of the area for miles around. Directly in front of them were two buildings that looked to be fairly stable. The first was a large structure fronted by a steel framework that had obviously been covered in glass during predark times, but was now nothing more than a white steel skeleton. On one of the metal ribs a faded green sign read Casino Niagara, which was a special kind of place, Mildred explained, where people gambled away all their jack.
“Why would they do that?” Dean asked.
“For fun,” Mildred answered.
Next to the bones of the white skeleton was a much older building. It was also white, but only because that was the color of its stonework. Although most of the building’s windows had been blasted out, a few panes were still intact. Some of the pale red letters on the roof had toppled over, leaving the rest of the letters to read her ton-Fall View. It was obviously a hotel, and just as the sec men at the farm had said, there looked to be plenty of places to spend the night.
“That one looks like a fine establishment,” Doc said. “Why do we not sleep there tonight?”
“I could use some rest,” Krysty said, her hair falling straight down from her head and hanging limply over her shoulders. “Those last few miles really tired me out.”
“I’m beat, too,” J.B. added. “I’d like to sit down for a while, mebbe have some more fruit and call it a night.”
Ryan didn’t like the idea of sleeping in a strange building without a recce, but the ville seemed deserted enough and it wouldn’t be too hard to find a room on the first or second floor that they could make secure for the night. Besides, he was feeling exhausted himself, and a night in a hotel room, even the rad-blasted remnants of one, sounded good.
“All right,” he said. “That’s where we’ll go. Jak and Mildred, scout the grounds around it and meet us in the lobby.”
Jak handed his bag of fruit to Dean, and then the albino and the physician quickened their pace with blasters drawn and ready.
“Are you looking forward to a night in bed, lover?” Krysty asked.
“You have to ask?” Ryan answered.
GRUNWOLD CLIMBED the last few steps to the top of the Skylon Tower slowly. The sec chief had double-timed it to the lookout station from Fox Farm, and his lungs were complaining against the strain. He took a few moments to rest at the entrance to the observation deck, not wanting to show his men any weakness, then entered when his breathing and heart rate had come back down to something closer to normal.
“Where are they?” he asked the sec man on watch.
“They’re heading toward the Fall view,” the sec man answered, not taking his eyes from the binoculars that were trained on the heart of the ville. “My guess is that they’re going to stay there tonight.”
“Good,” Grundwold said. “Where’s the team on the ground?”
“They’re a few hundred yards behind.”
“Have they been spotted?”
“No. I even lost sight of them myself a few times.”
“Have the outlanders been eating any fruit?” Grundwold asked.
“Yes,” said the sec man. “They were all eating as they entered the ville. Looked pretty hungry, too.”
“Excellent!” Grundwold said with a smile. “That should make them ripe for the picking.”
Chapter Seven
“Jak’s still scouting the inside. The area outside the hotel is clear,” Mildred reported. “And there’s no sign that anyone’s been through the area in a while.”
Ryan nodded. He was glad for the news, but wasn’t sure how a ville with so many buildings didn’t have more people living in it. Where had all the people gone? It was another question whose answer would probably be forthcoming in time. But despite any misgivings Ryan had about staying in the old hotel, it was getting dark out and the friends needed to find a place to bed down for the night. “All right, let’s take a look inside and find a place to sleep.”
The friends stepped through the broken glass that had once been the hotel’s front door and entered the lobby with blasters in hand. While there didn’t seem to be anyone living in the ville, a few of the hungry muties could still be crawling around looking for a meal. But even that seemed unlikely, since there was even less food in the ville than there was in all the surrounding rad-chilled farmland.
As they moved through the lobby, Doc walked behind the front desk to have a look around. “Well, I’m honored to be one of the first guests here since 2001,” he said, wetting the tip of a pencil on his tongue and signing the guest book on behalf of the friends.
The hotel was laid out in a pair of long corridors that stretched out in opposite directions from the lobby. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but they could probably establish a defensible position somewhere in the hotel, allowing them all the good night’s sleep they so desperately needed.
Just then a door opened at the end of the ground-floor hallway. The friends immediately had their blasters raised and ready to fire, but it turned out to be Jak returning from his recce of the hotel’s upper floors.
“Long halls, many rooms,” the albino teenager reported. “Second floor best. One way up, many ways out.”
Ryan nodded. Since the elevators wouldn’t be working, the only way up would be by the stairs. But a building like this had to have at least two stairways, maybe even more in case of fire. “Only one stairway?” Ryan asked.
“Locked others. Now let out, not in.”
“Are the stairs the only way out?”
Jak shook his head. “Windows. Twenty-four each side, not far to ground.”
A ten-foot jump out a second-story window wasn’t Ryan’s favorite way of escaping a firefight, but with forty-eight windows and a few stairways to choose from, not to mention the possibility of going up, the one-eyed man was satisfied they’d be able to escape in the event of a mutie attack, or worse. Besides that, he was too tired to go any farther. If they didn’t stop here for the night, Ryan wasn’t sure he’d be able to go on. “Second floor it is, then.” He looked at the friends to see who was freshest and could take the first watch. “Jak, you take first watch, hour-and-a-half shifts.”
The teenager nodded.
The friends went to the end of the hallway and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
RYAN AND KRYSTY TOOK a room on the east side of the building at the far end of the hallway near one of the locked doors that led to the stairs. The windows on that side of the hotel were mostly whole, looking out over a back alley, which was just as deserted as the rest of the ville.
There were two large beds in the room, both covered with dusty sheets. Krysty took them off the bed and shook them out in a room across the hall, then replaced them on the bed. It had been a while since Ryan had slept in a bed with sheets, and he was looking forward to it.
But before he did, there was something else he’d been looking forward to even more. As he lay back on the bed, Ryan set his SIG-Sauer and panga on the nightstand next to him, then hid his Steyr SSG-70 under the bed. Then, in total comfort, he bit into another of the delicious pears they’d traded for, and watched Krysty slowly getting undressed. Seeing her shed her clothing like this always gave him a little thrill that stirred a desire deep within him. The first hint of her beauty was her gorgeous mane of fiery red hair and her strikingly brilliant emerald-green eyes. Even though she looked tired herself and her hair was hanging almost straight down from her head, she was still breathtakingly beautiful. That beauty was further evidenced as she stood at the end of the bed, slipping off her boots and then her jumpsuit and bra and panties, revealing her full breasts, long, muscular legs and firm buttocks.
Ryan took the opportunity to get out of his own clothes, taking off his jacket and shirt in one smooth motion, and then kicking off his boots and sliding out of his pants.
He was ready for her.
Krysty acknowledged that fact with a smile. “If you’re done with that pear,” she said, “you might want to try some cherry-tipped golden apples.”
Ryan stopped himself from taking another bite and put the pear down on the nightstand.
“I thought you might,” Krysty said. She crawled onto the bed and moved toward Ryan on all fours. As she straddled his legs, she bent down and kissed his hardness once, then flicked her head and dragged her long red hair across his body.
Passion flowed through Ryan, and Krysty seemed to have discovered some newfound energy as her hair was now curling slightly around her shoulders. He reached out for her, pulled her forward and, when she was in position, entered her.
They were lost in the throes of passion for a long, long time.
“DID YOU GO on a honeymoon, Doc?” Dean asked as he prepared his bed in the room he was going to share with the old man.
“Oh, I did indeed,” Doc answered, smiling.
“What was it like?”
“It was gloriously wonderful,” Doc said, looking out the window at the falls. “My dear sweet Emily and I went on a riverboat ride down the mighty Mississippi. While I knew that she was a lovely woman, I had no idea regarding the depths of her charms. She was warm, vibrant and loving, and even though the word hadn’t been in common usage, if people knew about my Emily, the word sexy might have been in common parlance long before the turn of century.”
“You mean 1900?”
“That’s the year.”
“So men and women spend a lot of time having sex on their honeymoon?”
“Well, now, yes they do.” Doc had turned away from the window and was a little unsure if it was his place to talk about such things with Dean.
“Why is that?”
“It is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years.” Doc pulled up a chair next to the bed Dean was stretched out on and sat. He stared out the window again and continued talking. “Honeymoon comes from the term ‘honey month.’ You see, even though people had always gotten married, they weren’t always faithful to each other. So, when a man and a woman married, they went off for their honey month, in which they drank an alcoholic beverage called mead, a sort of beerlike drink that was made partly from honey. The alcohol helped them…well, have sex, and it lasted a month because it allowed the woman to complete an entire reproductive cycle. This insured that the woman’s first child was undoubtedly the offspring of her husband, since no other man could have had an opportunity to mate with his wife during the honey month.
“Over time the ritual became unnecessary as there was less and less likelihood of a woman’s infidelity. However, the honeymoon still served as an opportunity for a newly wed man and woman to become intimate with each other, so it was maintained as a symbolic bonding period between two soul mates.”
Doc looked over at Dean and saw that the boy was already sound asleep. He pulled a sheet over him, then went to the other bed to lie down.
“Honey month, honeymoon,” he muttered under his breath as he prepared his bed and made himself comfortable on it. “Honey month, honeymoon.”
Minutes later Doc was asleep, dreaming of Emily and the Mississippi nights in which he’d thought he’d found a little piece of heaven on earth.
MILDRED WAS in the bathroom of the room she would be sharing with J.B. She’d taken a clean washcloth from the pile of clean towels she’d found in the bathroom and with a few splashes of water from her canteen, she was now giving herself a quick freshening up before bed.
“How long has it been, John?” she asked, looking at herself in the mirror.
“Too long,” the Armorer said between bites of a pear. He’d eaten several of them since they’d arrived in the room and was just starting to feel full.
Mildred drew her hands up over her stomach, marveling at how tight and toned the muscles had become since she’d arrived in the Deathlands. Although she was stockily built, her body had become hard and shapely. She cupped her full breasts in her hands, pleased that they had become firmer, and if she said so herself, more attractive, than they’d ever been in predark times.
“Too long is right,” she said over her shoulder. “I can’t even remember the last time.” Mildred waited for an answer, but there was none. “John?”
“Yes.”
“I said, it’s been so long, I can’t remember when we did it last.”
“I don’t remember, either,” J.B. commented, “but I do know that it was great.”
Mildred smiled. “Such a romantic.”
She finished up in the bathroom and gave herself one last look in the mirror, putting her hands on her hips and twisting her body from side to side. “You’re definitely in for a treat, John Barrymore Dix,” she whispered.
She left the bathroom and found J.B. stretched out on the bed closest to the window. His eyes were closed and a half-eaten pear was in his right hand, hanging over the edge of the bed and poised to fall to the floor at any moment.
Mildred hurried to J.B.’s side. “Are you asleep, John?” she asked.
No answer.
“John?” She shook his arm, and the pear fell from his fingers. “Are you all right?”
“Huh? What?”
Mildred stood, hands on hips again and doing her best to look indignant. “I can’t believe you’d fall asleep when you knew you had this to look forward to.”
J.B. smiled and shook his head. “I can’t believe it either.” He pulled himself into a sitting position and took one of Mildred’s chocolate-brown nipples between his lips. At the same time he let his left hand slide down between her legs, gently feeling the invitingly warm and moist folds of flesh that beckoned for more than the touch of his fingers.
“Are you going to get out of your clothes, John?” Mildred asked. “Or am I going to have to strip you down like a blaster?”
“That would be, uh, interesting,” J.B. said as Mildred began to work on his belt.
“More than just interesting, Mr. Dix.” She leaned in close, whispering in J.B.’s ear. “I’m going to oil your blaster and pull your trigger. Only in this dream, it’s going to fire…round after round, until you’re all but out of ammo.”
