“It’s leprosy, I say!” the red-haired hag contended, but the men were settling down again, returning to their table. A few of them left the tavern, and the others continued to stare at Sister with a sickened fascination.
“It itches like hell, and sometimes my head aches like it’s about to split open,” Sister admitted. “How do I get rid of it?”
“That, unfortunately, I can’t say. I’ve never seen Job’s Mask regress—but then, I only saw most of the cases in passing.”
“Job’s Mask? Is that what it’s called?”
“Well, that’s what I call it. Seems appropriate, doesn’t it?”
Sister grunted. She and Paul had seen dozens of people with “Job’s Mask” scattered across the nine states they’d traveled through. In Kansas, they’d come upon a colony of forty afflicted people who’d been forced out of a nearby settlement by their own families; in Iowa, Sister had seen a man whose head was so encrusted he was unable to hold it upright. Job’s Mask afflicted men and women with equal savagery, and Sister had even seen a few teenagers with it, but children younger than seven or eight seemed to be immune—or at least, Sister had never seen any babies or young children with it, though both parents might be horribly deformed. “Will I have this for the rest of my life?”
Hugh shrugged again, unable to help any further. His eyes locked with hungry need on Sister’s glass of moonshine, still atop the bar. She said, “Be my guest,” and he drank it down as if it were iced tea on a hot August afternoon.
“Thank you very much.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and glanced at the dead man lying in the bloody sawdust. The chunky black-haired girl was eagerly going through the pockets. “There is no right and wrong in this world anymore,” he said. “There’s only a faster gun and a higher level of violence.” He nodded toward the table he’d been occupying, over by the fireplace. “If you please?” he asked Sister, with a note of pleading. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk to someone of obvious breeding and intellect.”
Sister and Paul were in no hurry. She picked up her satchel, sliding her shotgun into the leather sheath that hung along her hip beneath the parka. Paul returned his Magnum to its holster, and they followed Hugh Ryan.
Derwin finally steeled himself to emerge from behind the bar, and the man in the dogskin coat helped him carry Earl’s body out the back door.
As Hugh got his remaining leg propped up on a chair Sister couldn’t help but notice the stuffed trophies that adorned the wall around the Bucket of Blood’s fireplace: an albino squirrel, a deer’s head with three eyes, a boar with a single eye at the center of its forehead, and a two-headed woodchuck. “Derwin’s a hunter,” Hugh explained. “You can find all sorts of things in the woods around here. Amazing what the radiation’s done, isn’t it?” He admired the trophies for a moment. “You don’t want to sleep too far from the light,” he said, turning his attention back to Paul and Sister. “You really don’t.” He reached for the half glass of moonshine he’d been drinking before they’d come in. Two green flies buzzed around his head, and Paul watched them circling.
Hugh motioned toward the satchel. “I couldn’t help but notice that glass trinket. May I ask what it is?”
“Just something I picked up.”
“Where? A museum?”
“No, I found it in a pile of rubble.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “I’d be careful with it, if I were you. I’ve met people who’d behead you for a piece of bread.”
Sister nodded. “That’s why I carry the shotgun—and that’s why I learned to use it, too.”
“Indeed.” He swilled down the rest of the moonshine and smacked his lips. “Ah! Nectar of the gods!”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” Paul’s throat still felt as if it had been scraped with razors.
“Well, taste is relative, isn’t it?” Hugh spent a moment licking the inside of the glass to get the last drops before he put it aside. “I used to be a connoisseur of French brandies. I used to have a wife, three children, and a Spanish villa with a hot tub and a swimming pool.” He touched his stump. “I used to have another leg, too. But that’s the past, isn’t it? And beware of dwelling on the past if you want to keep your sanity.” He stared into the fire, then looked across the table at Sister. “So. Where have you been, and where are you going?”
“Everywhere,” she replied. “And nowhere in particular.”
For the past seven years, Sister and Paul Thorson had been following a dreamwalk path—a blindman’s buff of pictures Sister had seen in the depths of the glass circle. They’d traveled from Pennsylvania to Kansas, had found the town of Matheson—but Matheson had been burned to the ground, the ruins covered with snow. They’d searched Matheson, found only skeletons and destruction, and then they’d reached the parking lot of a burned-out building that might have been a department store or supermarket.
And on that snow-swept parking lot, in the midst of desolation, Sister had heard the whisper of God.
It was a small thing, at first: The toe of Paul’s boot had uncovered a card.
“Hey!” Paul had called out. “Look at this!” He’d wiped the dirt and snow from it and handed it to her. The colors were bleached out, but it showed a beautiful woman in violet robes, the sun shining overhead and a lion and lamb at her feet; she held a silver shield with what might have been a flaming phoenix at its center, and she wore a blazing crown. The woman’s hair was afire, and she stared courageously into the distance. At the top of the card were the faded letters THE EMPRESS.
“It’s a tarot card,” Paul had said, and Sister’s knees had almost buckled.
More cards, bits of glass, clothes and other debris had been buried under the snow. Sister saw a spot of color, picked it up—and found she was holding an image she recognized: a card with a figure shrouded in black, its face white and masklike. Its eyes were silver and hateful, and in the center of its forehead was a third, scarlet eye. She’d torn that card to pieces rather than add it to her bag along with The Empress.
And then Sister had stepped on something soft, and as she bent down to brush the snow away and saw what it was, tears had filled her eyes.
It was a scorched, blue-furred doll. As she lifted it in her arms she saw the little plastic ring hanging down, and she pulled it. In the cold and snowy silence, a labored voice moaned “Coookieees,” and the sound drifted over the lot where skeletons lay dreaming.
The Cookie Monster doll had gone into Sister’s bag—and then it had been time to leave Matheson, because there was no child’s skeleton in that parking lot, and Sister knew now more than ever that she was searching for a child.
They’d roamed Kansas for more than two years, living in various struggling settlements; they had turned north into Nebraska, east into Iowa, and now south to Missouri. A land of suffering and brutality had unfolded itself to them like a continuing, unescapable hallucination. On many occasions, Sister had peered into the glass circle and caught sight of a hazy human face looking back, as if through a badly discolored mirror. That particular image had remained constant over seven years, and though Sister couldn’t tell very much about the face, she thought that it had begun as a young face—that of a child, though whether male or female she couldn’t tell—and over the years the face had changed. The last time she’d seen it was four months ago, and Sister had had the impression that the facial features were all but wiped clean. Since then the hazy image had not reappeared.
Sometimes Sister felt sure the next day would bring an answer—but the days had passed, becoming weeks, months and years, and still she continued searching. The roads kept carrying her and Paul across devastated countryside, through deserted towns and around the perimeter of jagged ruins where cities had stood. Many times she’d been discouraged, had thought of giving it up and staying in one of the settlements they’d passed through, but that was before her Job’s Mask had gotten so bad. Now she was beginning to think the only place she might be welcome was in a colon
y of Job’s Mask sufferers.
But the truth was that she feared staying in one place too long. She kept looking over her shoulder, afraid that a dark figure with a shifting face had finally found her and was coming up from behind. In her nightmares of Doyle Halland, or Dal Hallmark, or whatever he called himself now, he had a single scarlet eye in his forehead like the grim figure on the tarot card, and it was relentlessly probing for her.
Often, in the years past, Sister had felt her skin prickle as if he was somewhere very near, about to close in on her. At those times, she and Paul had hit the road again, and Sister dreaded crossroads because she knew the wrong turn could lead them to his waiting hands.
She pushed the memories out of her mind. “How about you? Have you been here long?”
“Eight months. After the seventeenth of July, I went north from Amarillo with my family. We lived in a settlement on the Purgatoire River, south of Las Animas, Colorado, for three years. A lot of Indians live around there; some of them were Vietnam vets, and they taught us stupid city folks how to build mud huts and stay alive.” He smiled painfully. “It’s a shock to be living in a million-dollar mansion one month and the next find yourself under a roof of mud and cow dung. Anyway, two of our children died the first year—radiation poisoning—but we were warm when the snow started falling, and we felt damned lucky.”
“Why didn’t you stay there?” Paul asked.
Hugh stared into the fire. It was a long time before he answered. “We ... had a community of about two hundred people. We had a supply of corn, some flour and salted beef, and a lot of canned food. The river water wasn’t exactly clean, but it was keeping us alive.” He rubbed the stump of his leg. “Then they came.”
“They? Who?”
“First it was three men and two women. They came in a Jeep and a Buick with an armored windshield. They stopped in Purgatoire Flats—that’s what we called our town—and they wanted to buy half our food. Of course, we couldn’t sell it, not for any price. We’d starve if we did. Then they threatened us. They said we’d regret not giving them what they wanted. I remember that Curtis Redfeather—he was our mayor, a big Pawnee who’d served in Vietnam—went to his hut and came back with an automatic rifle. He told them to go, and they left.” Hugh paused; he slowly clenched his fists atop the table.
“They came back,” he said softly. “That night. Oh, yes, they came back—with three hundred armed soldiers and trucks that they’d made into tanks. They started smashing Purgatoire Flats to the ground ... and killing everybody. Everybody.” His voice cracked, and he couldn’t go on for a minute. “People were running, trying to get away,” he said. “But the soldiers had machine guns. I ran, with my wife and daughter. I saw Curtis Redfeather shot down and run over by a Jeep. He didn’t ... he didn’t even look like a human being anymore.”
Hugh closed his eyes, but there was such torment etched into his face that Sister could not look at him. She watched the fire. “My wife was shot in the back,” he continued. “I stopped to help her, and I told my daughter to run for the river. I never saw her again. But ... I was picking up my wife when the bullets hit me. Two or three, I think. In the leg. Somebody hit me in the head, and I fell. I remember ... I woke up, and the barrel of a rifle was pointed in my face. And someone—a man’s voice—said, ‘Tell them the Army of Excellence passed this way.’ The Army of Excellence,” he repeated bitterly, and he opened his eyes. They were shocked and bloodshot. “Four or five people were left, and they made a stretcher for me. They carried me more than thirty miles to the north, to another settlement—but that one was ashes, too, by the time we got there. My leg was shattered. It had to come off. I told them how to do it. And I hung on, and we kept going, and that was four years ago.” He looked at Sister and leaned slightly forward in his chair. “For God’s sake,” he said urgently, “don’t go west. That’s where the Battlelands are.”
“The Battlelands?” Paul asked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re having war out there—in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska—the Dakotas, too. Oh, I’ve met plenty of refugees from the west. They call it the Battlelands because so many armies are fighting out there: the American Allegiance, Nolan’s Raiders, the Army of Excellence, Troop Hydra and maybe five or six others.”
“The war’s done.” Sister frowned. “What the hell are they fighting over?”
“Land. Settlements. Food, guns, gasoline—whatever’s left. They’re out of their minds; they want to kill somebody, and if it can’t be the Russians, they’ve got to invent enemies. I’ve heard the Army of Excellence is on a rampage against survivors with keloids.” He touched the scarlet, upraised scar that covered half his face. “Supposed to be the mark of Satan.”
Paul shifted uneasily in his chair. In their travels, he and Sister had heard about settlements being attacked and burned by bands of marauders, but this was the first they’d heard of organized forces. “How big are these armies? Who’s leading them?”
“Maniacs, so-called patriots, military men, you name it,” Hugh said. “Last week a man and woman who’d seen the American Allegiance passed through here. They said it numbered about four or five thousand, and a crazy preacher from California is leading it. He calls himself the Savior and wants to kill everybody who won’t follow him. I’ve heard Troop Hydra’s executing blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Jews and everybody else they consider foreign. The Army of Excellence is supposedly led by an ex–military man—a Vietnam war hero. They’re the bastards with the tanks. God help us if those maniacs start moving east.”
“All we want is enough gasoline to get to the next town,” Paul said. “We’re heading south to the Gulf of Mexico.” He swatted at a fly that landed on his hand; again, there was a feeling of being pricked by a freezing nail.
Hugh smiled wistfully. “The Gulf of Mexico. My God, I haven’t seen the Gulf for a long, long time.”
“What’s the nearest town from here?” Sister asked.
“I suppose that would be Mary’s Rest, south of what used to be Jefferson City. The road’s not too good, though. They used to have a big pond at Mary’s Rest. Anyway, it’s not far—about fifty miles.”
“How do we get there on an empty tank?”
Hugh glanced over at the bloody sawdust. “Well, Earl Hocutt’s truck is parked out front. I doubt he’ll need the gasoline anymore, don’t you?”
Paul nodded. They had a length of garden hose in the Jeep, and Paul had become very proficient at stealing gas.
A fly landed on the table in front of Hugh. He suddenly upended his moonshine glass over it and trapped the insect. It buzzed angrily around and around, and Hugh watched it circling. “You don’t see flies too often,” he said. “A few of them stay in here because of the warmth, I guess. And the blood. That one’s mad as the Devil, isn’t he?”
Sister heard the low hum of another fly as it passed her head. It made a slow circle above the table and shot toward a chink in the wall. “Is there a place we could spend the night here?” she asked Hugh.
“I can find one for you. It won’t be much more than a hole in the ground with a lid over it, but you won’t freeze to death and you won’t get your throats slit.” He tapped the glass, and the large green fly tried to attack his finger. “But if I find you a safe place to sleep,” he said, “I’d like something in return.”
“What’s that?”
Hugh smiled. “I’d like to see the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Forget it!” Paul told him. “We don’t have the room.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised what a one-legged old man can squeeze himself into.”
“More weight means using more gasoline, not to mention food and water. No. Sorry.”
“I weigh about as much as a wet feather,” Hugh persisted. “And I can carry along my own food and water. If you want payment for taking me with you, perhaps I can interest you in two jugs of moonshine I’ve kept hidden for an emergency.”
Paul was about to say no again, but his lips locked. The moonshine
was about the nastiest stuff he’d ever tasted, but it sure had quickened his pulse and kicked on his furnace.
“How about it?” Hugh asked Sister. “Some of the bridges are broken down between here and Mary’s Rest. I can do a lot better for you than that antique map you’re carrying.”
Her first impulse was to agree with Paul, but she saw the suffering in Hugh Ryan’s gray eyes; he wore the expression of a once-loyal dog that had been beaten and abandoned by a trusted master.
“Please?” he said. “There’s nothing for me here. I’d like to see if the waves still roll in like they used to.”
Sister thought about it. No doubt the man could scrunch himself up in the back of the Jeep, and they might well need a guide to get to the next town. He was waiting for an answer. “You find us a safe place to spend the night,” she said, “and we’ll talk about it in the morning. That’s the best I can do for now. Deal?”
Hugh hesitated, searching Sister’s face. Hers was a strong face, he decided, and her eyes weren’t dead like those of so many others he’d seen. It was unfortunate that most likely the Job’s Mask would eventually seal them shut. “Deal,” he said, and they shook on it.
They left the Bucket of Blood to get the gas from the dead man’s truck. Behind them, the red-haired hag scuttled over to the table they’d left and watched the fly buzzing around in the upturned glass. She suddenly picked it up and snatched the fly as it tried to escape, and before it could get loose from her hand she shoved the fly into her mouth and crunched her teeth down on it.
Her face contorted. She opened her mouth and spat a small glob of grayish-green into the fire, where it sizzled like acid.
“Nasty!” she said, and she wiped her tongue with sawdust.
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