by James Axler
For a few moments there was silence between them, broken only by the hurtling water as it rushed over the lip of the falls. Krysty leaned back on an elbow, glancing behind them, noticing, at the edge of the trees beyond the clearing, a small cluster of jack-in-the-pulpits, the white spikes bravely erect in the green cup.
Harvey had made his play the day after Ryan's fifteenth birthday. Using bribed and terrified servants he arranged for Ryan's evening meal to be drugged. Then he and half a dozen of the ville's sec men planned to take the sleeping boy. The body would then be weighted and dropped into the moat that circled the main house of Front Royal.
"Not all the servants were in Harvey's pay, and not all loved him. An old armorer called Kenny Morse caught wind of the plan from a kitchen maid. I didn't take the food, and I was ready for them."
Even before Morgan's murder Ryan Cawdor had begun to try to safeguard himself. Kenny Morse had stolen an old .45 Colt from the castle armory for him. Ryan cleaned and oiled it, and spent hours practicing until he could use it with expertise. He was instructed by the diminutive Morse, who risked at best a beating from the baron for breaking his orders that his youngest son was not to have a blaster.
That night Ryan was ready.
"I waited just inside the door of my room. A narrow crack showed me the corridor. It was gloomy. On his way out Morse had removed two of the light bulbs from their sockets. The ville had vast supplies of gas and generators for power. It was midnight when Harvey and his butchers came for me."
The first two shots, booming out of the darkness, killed two of the sec men, warning Harvey and the others that their plan had failed and that Ryan was no lamb, waiting patiently for the slaughterer. The men went crashing back, blood springing from chest and throat, soaking through their trim uniforms.
Knowing that he must now take the offensive, Ryan jumped out, gun braced in both hands, firing twice at the nearest guard. The first round from the old blaster ripped through the upper arm as the man dived sideways, the second hitting him through the side of the face, taking away half of the back of his skull with the force of the impact.
Harvey snapped off two shots with his laser pistol, tracer bullets scything through the blackness and exploding off the wall by Ryan's left shoulder.
"I called him the bastard killer he was. Screamed it, my voice breaking. I was so fucking angry that I'd have torn his face off his skull if'n I could have reached him. Another sec man was flat on the floor, blocking off the exit to the stairs. He was hiding behind the corpse of the second man I'd chilled." Ryan's voice dropped in remembrance of the charnel house scene of death and blood. "His arms and legs were still twitching and jerking."
There was a burst of shooting from a battered Czech machine pistol, but Ryan was moving again, dodging back toward the open door of his turret bedroom. He snapped off another round, the shot flying high, screaming into the black pool of shadow at the top of the narrow staircase. The second round from the Colt caught the guard through the open mouth as he raised his head, peering to see where the boy had gone. It splintered his teeth and angled upward, burying itself in the brain, through the roof of the mouth.
"Harvey shouted to me, then. He'd seen the blaster and knew it held seven rounds. He yelped out that he knew I only had one left."
"What'd you say?"
"Told him I had a spare mag. Didn't, though. Morse only stole one mag for me. I'd fired six and had one left. The fucker was right."
Krysty looked across at the blank, emotionless face of the man she loved. "No other way out? No other door? No window?"
"Fifty feet on stone. Courtyard under the window. You gotta realize, Krysty, that this ville was built way back 'fore the long winter. Based on some kind of old castle.
Harvey would have some more sec men there, faster than goose shit off a shovel. There was only one way out — past my big brother."
Ryan Cawdor was never a person, even at fifteen years of age, to hesitate when what was needed was instant action.
"I dived out and rolled. Lot of lead came my way, blowing chunks of rock off of the walls. I squeezed my last shot at Harvey, but he was hunkered down and it went high. Had me a real good knife. Fireblast! But I lost it in a firefight close by what used to be Kansas City.''
The dagger was made with the hoof of a stag for a hilt, and it fitted the palm of the hand like it had been made for it.
"I jumped the dead and the dying. They all figured I must have more ammo, or I was fucking crazy. My brother called me a bastard, and I called him a butcher. They were the last words we spoke."
Harvey was taller and stronger than his younger brother, and he clawed out at him. He drew Ryan close, fingers digging into his flesh. The fifteen-year-old suddenly felt a streak of icy fire across his ribs, and Harvey laughed, breath rank in his face. The knife cut was long and painful, but not deep. The laughter ceased as Ryan managed to bring his own blade into play, slicing into Harvey's upper arm, making him squeal in shock and pain.
"Another moment and I'd have butchered the gimp where he stood," Ryan spit, fingers clenching as he relived the moments in that long corridor. "But there was another sec man there, and he came from behind and pulled me away."
Krysty could catch the faint scent of fish roasting on the beach far below them. But she ignored it, wanting Ryan to finish the bleak tale — to finish it and to exorcise it from his mind.
"I chilled the guard with one thrust to the heart. I felt... a moment of being sorry. His name was George Cross. A good man but... He fell all in a piece, dead before his body hit the stone flags of the passage. But he delayed me for the second that cost me this," Ryan said, touching the patch over his left eye. "And fucking nearly killed me."
As he half turned, Ryan had seen Harvey lunging toward his face, his own eyes exultant with a feral grin of triumph. The younger boy had tried to parry the knife thrust, but was too slow.
"I saw it, Krysty! Saw the knife. I can see it to this day if I close my eye, see the point of his dagger, like a needle tipped with fire. It came direct into my eye." He stopped and turned away from her, looking across the valley toward the sinking ball of the orange sun.
The knife had been well aimed. It slashed into the left eye so that the young Ryan Cawdor could hear the steel grating against the bone of the socket.
"No pain. Not a single bit of pain. It felt like hot water on my cheek, where the eye had burst open. No blood. Only a spot or two of blood. I nearly dropped my knife. Or it fell and I snatched it up... I don't remember which. Harvey slashed at me again, went for my other eye. He missed by... you can see for yourself. Opened up half my face like a butcher with a lamb's carcass. Then I bled. Fireblast! But I surely bled then, lover."
Half-blind, terrified and in dreadful pain from the gash across his face, Ryan Cawdor lashed out at the smirking, triumphant face of his crippled brother. He dealt him a lucky punch in the middle of his hooked nose and felt it crumple under the blow like a crushed egg.
"I ran. Down and up and along passages. I was near death from the loss of blood, blinded. Someone helped me. Kenny Morse? I don't know. Suddenly I was out of the house and across the moat. There was snow on my face, melting and running with the seeping crimson all over my neck and shirt. A howling wind blew through the pines on the far side of the valley away from the ville. And I was gone. Fifteen years old and I never went back. Never thought about going back. Not until now." He sat up and pulled on his shirt and coat. The evening chill was rising from the Hudson, and the sun had nearly gone down. "I can smell fish cooking."
"Want to go back? Go 'fore dark?"
"Yeah."
"Help me up, lover. Thanks. What happened back at Front Royal after you'd fled the place? That double-crazy Bochco said your father married again. And what about Harvey?"
"Not much to tell. Haven't heard much fresh until down in the swamps there."
There had been a purge. Harvey had convinced the ailing Baron Cawdor that his youngest son was a murderous renegade and
he was named wolfshead so that every man's hand was against him. Several servants believed loyal to Ryan and to Morgan's memory were executed on the old gibbets. Kenny Morse was the first to go, shrieking defiance as his feet were kicked off the stool and he danced in the air.
Pecker Bochco had told them about the cobbles of the courtyard flowing inches deep in sticky blood that clotted and blocked the drains of the entire ville. He had also told Ryan and Krysty about the new Lady Cawdor.
She was a sluttish whore who had been used by Harvey, but whose strength of will and capacity for evil out-stripped the halting young man. She seduced Baron Cawdor, persuading the old man of her love for him. Ryan's father, by now, was slipping fast into dementia, finding it hard to tell fact from dream.
Lady Rachel Cawdor was plump and beautiful and just eighteen years old. She fed opiates to the old man so that he slept, then ran light-footed along the winding corridors to the bedroom of Harvey Cawdor.
They found that Ryan's father was more tenacious than they'd expected. He didn't die, despite being poorly fed and treated harshly by the girl-bride. Harvey drew back from butchering the frail old man, but his mistress did not.
One night, under the guise of playing a game of love, she cajoled the baron into letting her tie his hands and feet to the corners of their great four-poster, using cords of silk. She whispered, as she pulled the knots tighter, of the pleasures she would give him once he was her helpless slave. The silk was as thin as cotton, yet as strong as wire, and had been tied so tight that it bit into his wrinkled skin and drew blood from beneath his blackened nails.
Baron Cawdor tried to call out, realizing at that last awful moment that her intention was murder. But Rachel laughed at him, mocking him, even as she knotted a gag around his mouth, muffling his cries for aid.
She told him of her contempt for him as she climbed, naked, astride his chest, gripping him with her heels as though he were a horse. She told him of her lust for his son and of their vile and perverse pleasures together. As she leaned over him her breasts brushed his cheeks, her nipples swollen with her ruthless enjoyment of what she was doing to him. Rachel picked up a large satin pillow, holding it as she wriggled up his body.
Rachel placed the pillow tenderly over his face, leaning all her weight on top of it, whispering as she did so of how Harvey had murdered Morgan and how he had planned to kill Ryan, but the brat had escaped.
She felt the struggles against the suffocating pressure becoming weaker until, with a final jerking convulsion, Baron Titus Cawdor went to join his ancestors.
* * *
Ryan and Krysty picked their way down the twisting path through the woods, taking care as the light was fading fast.
"And they have a son?"
Ryan nodded. "That's what I heard. Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Must be around the same sort of age as Whitey down there."
Krysty sniffed the air. "Gaia, but that fish makes my mouth water! You feeling hungry now, lover? After all your exercise?"
Ryan checked in midstride, turning to look at her, his face a pale blur in the half-light. The patch over his ruined eye seemed blacker than it usually did. He reached out and took Krysty by the hand.
"I'm sure."
"What? That you're hungry?"
Ryan didn't smile. "No."
"What, then?"
"That crazy old bastard Bochco. I've been thinking on the last thing he said."
"What was that?"
Ryan's voice was so quiet that the pounding waterfall nearly drowned it out. Even with her mutie hearing, Krysty could barely hear him.
"The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Return and claim what should be yours."
"I remember."
"It was a scar that had been healed, I thought, for twenty years. Now I know that I was wrong. Now I know where I'm going."
"Where?" But she knew.
"I'm going home, lover. Home."
They walked back to the beach and rejoined the others.
Chapter Eight
Dot Tanner was straining at his memory. "Front Royal's in Virginia. There used to be a saying."
"What?" Lori asked.
"Something about the state. They said it in the nineties. Nineteens, not eighteens."
Jak Lauren was leaning against the short trunk of the mast, listening to the old man. "What did they say, Doc?"
"Ah, yes." Confidently he said, "Virginia is for..." Then he lost the thread. "Virginia is for... for... I don't rightly recall."
Jak grinned. "Guess must have been Virginia is for killers."
Doc nodded. "Quite possibly, my white-haired young companion. Quite possibly."
Ryan had told them over the supper of fresh trout that he was determined to go on to Virginia.
"Chill brother?" Jak asked.
"Just might," Ryan replied.
"See your home. I liked that," Lori said, recovered now from the blow to her head.
Doc Tanner smiled at the news. "Sibling rivalry was always an overwhelming motivation, was it not, my dear Ryan?"
Ryan nodded, even though he had no idea what the old man was talking about.
Only J.B. didn't say anything, busying himself with picking bits of fish from between his back teeth with a long, narrow bone. His eyes behind the round lenses of his spectacles gave nothing away.
"You don't seem surprised," Ryan said. "I know I sort of said I would before. But this is for real. I'll go. Even if I go on my own, I'm going back to see my brother."
"Hell, I knew that all along," J.B. said.
* * *
During the next day, the Hudson River flowed ever more slowly and became wider, the banks shelving away a good quarter mile. As they rolled gently toward the sea, they saw more and more evidence of the devastation wrought by the century-old nuking of the northeast.
They passed the weed-softened remains of what Doc swore must have been a town he called Poughkeepsie. Jak Lauren, for some reason, found that name hilariously amusing, and he rolled around on the damp timbers, holding his sides, laughing uncontrollably. His merriment was contagious, and everyone on the raft began to laugh with him. Even J.B. cracked his cheeks at the sound of the name.
Doc cackled like a rusty hinge. "Guess it always was a funny name."
About four hours later they found themselves drifting toward the wreck of what had once been a gigantic bridge. Ryan spotted it first.
He was standing on the right side of the unwieldy craft, urinating to leeward, shielding himself from the others as best he could. On the raft there was no time or space for any of the niceties of hygiene. As he pissed, it was carried away in a great amber arc, splashing into the flat surface of the river.
"Look at that!" he shouted.
Krysty glanced at him. "Terrific, lover. But what'll you do for an encore?"
"You're envious. But that's..."
"Envious! Ryan Cawdor, you've got..." She broke off, seeing he was pointing around the long bend of the Hudson, far ahead of them.
The river narrowed a little, breaking over the massive piles of the bridge. Rusting girders dangled high above, with a network of thick metal rods holding crumbling chunks of stone.
A bent piece of metal, which looked as if it might once have been painted green, had the remains of some white lettering on it. Whi e PI ins was all that could be read.
It took all their strength, using the crudely cut branches, to steer the raft around the obstacles. They pushed at the stone piers and shoved away from the maze of fallen metal where the water pitched and foamed, creating strong eddies and currents.
Once they were past the toppled bridge, they were able to relax once more, allowing the slow-moving river to carry them along. Krysty stood at the front of the raft, balancing herself easily against the rhythmic pitching and rolling.
"Doc?"
"What is it?"
The wind tugged at her long hair so that it wrapped itself around her face. She paused, freeing herself, before she spoke again.
"I heard tha
t these parts were filled with people before the big chilling."
"That's so, my dear. Thicker than bugs on a bumper was a current expression. Why do you ask now?" Almost immediately the old man answered his own question. "Ah. Because there is so little sign of human habitation on either bank of the Hudson. Is that not what prompted your question?"
"Yeah. That bridge... and a few ruins on the cliffs. That's 'bout all we've seen for hours. No people. Not since the stickies."
Doc clambered to his feet, helped by a steadying hand from Lori. His knee joints cracked like miniature blasters. He rested an arm across Krysty's shoulders, gazing rheumily at both sides of the river.
"You cannot possibly imagine the devastation wrought here. Nor, fortunately, can I. If one could have seen the megadeath scenario, then one would have gone stark mad upon the instant."
For the last mile or so, perched high on the cliffs to the east, they had been able to see a few ruined buildings. They were eyeless wrecks, almost covered by the encroaching vegetation. Most were roofless, walls bleached to an unhealthy white by a hundred years of chem storms. One or two still showed traces of blackening and scorch marks along the upper edges of many of the empty windows.
Ryan joined Doc and Krysty and they glanced behind them, over the high ground to the west of the Hudson. The sun was already out of sight, and dark purple clouds were boiling up, showing the menace of ugly thunder-heads at their crests.
"Time to put in for the night. How far from Newyork, Doc?"
"From that sky, there is menace from the west. Perchance we should find shelter. I cannot recall the lie of the land hereabouts, Ryan, but I think we must be closing in on the metropolis. Yonkers is a name that seeps into my mind, though what it was I cannot recall."
"What 'bout Newyork?" called Jak, who had been dozing near the stern.
Doc hesitated before replying. "The wreckage from that toll bridge back yonder could have overturned our frail barque. The farther south we go along the Hudson, the more problems we shall encounter of that type. Before we reach New York we may need to desert the water for the land."