Haven's Blight

by James Axler

  “At least till Krysty’s up and around. After that we’ll have to see.”

  “It would be immensely beneficial were you to remain with us long term. Our baron could use a strong hand at his side.”

  “Baron Blackwood seems to have a plenty strong hand of his own.”

  St. Vincent’s smile was as thin as a razor cut. “A ville can’t have too much strength at its head, Master Cawdor. Don’t you agree?”

  “Strength is good,” he said, and moved on.

  “RYAN,” MILDRED shouted, “what the hell do you think you’re doing barging in here like that?”

  The workroom was dim after the hot light of morning. It smelled of chemicals.

  Ryan made a fist of his forehead and jutted his jaw, which was shadowed blue despite the fact he’d shaved it himself with a straight razor and soap lather that morning. It was the only graceful way to escape from one of St. Vincent’s staffers doing the job him or herself. They were persistent as stickies, those Blackwood House servants. Except covered in nice instead of mucus.

  “I want to see what’s being done for Krysty,” he said stubbornly. “You two have been thick as thieves in here since I woke up.”

  “We’re doing the same thing we were doing last time,” Mildred said furiously. “And the time before that, and all the other times—trying to work out how to cure Krysty and wake her up, which we aren’t doing right this minute because you’re back here pestering us again!”

  Amélie Mercier stood to one side, her expression cool and detached. She made no effort either to rein Mildred in or to support her. She seemed more to be observing the interaction as though under a microscope. As when he’d first seen her, once again was forcibly reminded that she was a very handsome woman despite her almost deliberate plainness.

  Ryan, feeling a tad traitorous because of his attraction to the woman, cast his gaze around the room. It was an actual bunker with concrete walls inside and out. J.B. had told him with some admiration how it had been built during Mercier’s father’s—and Dornan’s—time first with stout hardwood logs, which were then covered and reinforced with concrete and rendered as waterproof as anything could be in this climate where the difference between the blackish bayou water, the ground, and even the air was largely a matter of degree. If not opinion.

  The room was lit with some kind of panels that gave off a steady white light. Since the house had artificial electric power, it was small surprise Mercier’s facility should. Nonetheless Ryan was impressed with both the size and completeness of the workroom. To his eye, of course, it was all gleaming polished steel and glass, with some ceramics thrown in and no purpose his brain could calculate. Mildred assured him it was wonderful.

  Mostly what it did was put Ryan on edge. It reminded him too much of predark laboratories they’d encountered. The very things from which the awful devastation of the Big Nuke emerged. And the people, some devolved into near-mindless cultists, some still working at a high level despite being crazed like terminal-stage jolt-walkers, they’d too often found occupying such surviving facilities.

  But Mildred had assured him, about half a hundred times so far, that was nonsense. Amélie Mercier, like her father before, did wonderful work here—lifesaving work. Ryan reckoned Mildred would know. He’d learned to respect her opinion when it came to the group’s health. If she said Mercier could bring the goods, Mercier could.

  “I just wish you’d hurry up,” he said.

  Mildred started to puff up—like a stepped-on toad frog, J.B. put it—which for some reason always made her deflate in helpless laughter.

  But it was Mercier who spoke. “I appreciate your concern,” she said, her voice cool. “I am making progress. Dr. Wyeth is a great help. But, please, we must be allowed to concentrate in order to help Krysty.”

  There was an air of recitation, here, that fascinated Ryan. He wondered if she’d learned to fake some kind of what Mildred called “bedside manner” by dealing with so many sick or wounded Havenites. Mebbe her old man taught her. From what little Ryan had heard the dead whitecoat had been almost as mean an old polecat as Dornan.

  For some reason Mercier’s quiet speech, however stilted, let the air out of Mildred.

  “Ryan,” she said, “we know you love Krysty. All of us love her. It’s like part of each and every one of us is lying there on that bed up in the house. And I know it’s got to be so much worse for you. But you just can’t keep jogging our elbows.”

  He held up his hands, as if holding them at bay. “Fireblast,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides. “I just feel helpless. Useless as tits on a boar hog. Sorry about the language.”

  Mildred sighed again. “You need to find something better to do,” she said, “instead of pacing the ville like a panther in a cage, brooding.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Any suggestions?”

  Mildred shook her head. “No clue. Go find J.B. and ask him.”

  “If you will excuse us, Mr. Cawdor,” Mercier said. That was the tone he guessed she had been taught to use on barons.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said again and turned to search for his old friend.

  “I GOTTA SAY I’m just as glad to shake that place from my bootheels,” Ryan muttered as he paused at the almost physical impact of the heat and sunlight outside. That was another thing the lab had: some kind of climate control that kept it fairly cool and dry. He wondered why Blackwood hadn’t arranged something similar for the house. Probably because of cost, and in this case the workroom—lab, he supposed—had priority.

  He had to admire a baron who’d sacrifice his own comfort for some greater end.

  Ryan wandered at random. The ville proper got its name from the fact it was built on a flat mound that rose almost thirty feet above the wide Blackwood Bayou that ran alongside it, providing haven from all but the mightiest storm surges or tsunamis. Some residents he’d talked to claimed the ville’s center was built on the buried ruin of a predark town. He had no idea if that was true or not.

  Following Mildred’s advice, he kept asking passersby and idlers if they’d seen the Armorer. Some had, but J.B. seemed to have always moved on once he got there.

  Haven consisted of maybe a hundred buildings of various sizes. The biggest were a handful of large houses on the outskirts that, like Blackwood House, predated the Megacull and skydark. In some cases by a century or more. The rest were mostly made from planks, with shake roofs. They got progressively smaller and more rickety the farther toward the outskirts you worked. Out in the woods it was mostly shotgun shacks and shanties like the one where they’d found the remains of old Bluie’s family and friends strewed like flesh confetti.

  There were some pretty impressive postdark structures down by the Blackwood Bayou waterfront, big and permanent. Following his latest lead from a girl in a modest food shop Ryan made his way down the corduroyed ramp road. Warehouses and sizable workshops fronted on the weather warped-plank docks. The bayou here was actually a respectable river, navigable to Haven by shallow-draft seagoing craft such as the Tech-nomads’ yachts, and farther upstream for fifty or a hundred miles by flat-bottomed riverboats.

  One such, a steam-powered stern-wheeler about the size and length of a predark bus, if much broader abeam, was tied up to the dock now. She had a single soot-blackened stack and the name Delta Queen painted on her chipped and peeling prow.

  J.B. stood on deck talking about her engines with a red-haired, red-faced woman a little taller than the Armorer and about twice as wide, who smoked a corncob pipe, cussed like a coldheart and turned out to be the owner-captain.

  “Catch you later, Nat,” J.B. told her as he walked down the gangplank to boom his heels on the wharf. “Safe running upriver.”

  “Keep yer tail outta traps, you sawed-off smooth talker!” the beefy woman said, waving with one hand and mopping sweat from her big brick-colored face with a greasy handkerchief with the other.

  “You really know the way to a woman’s heart, J.B.,” Ryan commented as they walke
d back up the crushed-shell footpath to the center of town.

  “Yeah,” J.B. said with a big grin. “Talk about her engines! You know, they built them a generation back, somewhere upstream. Big parts like the boiler are scavvie, or put together from it. But they’re casting up there. Plus making smaller parts out of brass, like they do here. Some good work.”

  “So it isn’t true the whole world’s just waiting to run out of salvage and die?”

  “Well…” J.B. shrugged. Despite the awful wet heat, he was wearing his leather jacket along with his fedora. “It’s just a matter of people doing what they just natural do—make stuff and sell it to each other.”

  “Why aren’t more people doing that, then, instead of scraping by on what they can root out of ville ruins and scratch out of the ground?”

  J.B.’s shrug had more amplitude this time. “Reckon mebbe the Tech-nomads got it right—too many people on the bottom are too scared of oldie tech, and change. Too many people up top got them vested interests in what Trader liked to call your status quo. That and just plain inertia.”

  “Mebbe,” Ryan said.

  They bought mangos from a stand by the central square and sat on a broken-down buckboard parked in the shade of a big sycamore. J.B. sat up on the box. Ryan leaned against the bed. Nobody seemed to care or even take notice.

  “I just feel at loose ends, J.B.,” Ryan said. “Like a hex nut rattling around in an old tin can.”

  J.B. bit into his fruit. Juices spurted down his chin.

  “So Mildred told you to look me up and see if I could distract you.”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  J.B. laughed. “Well, let’s talk about the other night.”

  “That was bad trouble. The worst. And folks are on edge, between waiting for the Beast to hit again, or the pirates to come to town, or mebbe word of the latest swampie outrage up in the back country to drift in. Still, Haven isn’t a bad place to light. Not bad at all.”

  J.B. cocked an eyebrow at his friend. “I’d call it more than somewhat likely it’d do you no harm to relax for a day or two. Put your feet up. Let your ribs finish healing.”

  “They’re better,” Ryan said. “Mostly. But how can I relax when Krysty’s… I don’t know. Nobody knows. She looks fine. Except for acting dead.”

  “And worrying yourself to death is going to fix that how?”

  Ryan shook his head. He realized the worry had become a sort of addiction, like booze or jolt. He hated nothing worse than the sense of being out of control of himself. And here it was the core thing in his life, mebbe the one good thing, the redeeming thing—his intense love for his redheaded beauty—that was eating away at his self-control like rot at roof beams.

  “So what I can’t figure out,” he said, trying to distract himself, “is why Mildred gets along so well with that skinny ice queen of a healer. They seem, pardon the expression, different as black and white.”

  He knew Mildred might take offense at that phrase. She came from a day when humans hated each other on the basis of the color of the skin. These days, with the world crawling with swampies and stickies and scalies and scabbies and one-off muties, plus the fears and hatred of the haves and have-nots, skin color was just another thing in most villes, like blond hair or a boil on your nose or whether you wore rope sandals or went barefoot. A descriptor. A way of telling one broke-tailed, drag-assed shabby survivor in Hell from another.

  But J.B. just laughed again.

  “Ryan,” he said, “that girl gets homesick for her own time. In a lot of ways that count, we’re as different and strange to her as so many stickies. She’s with somebody now who speaks her own language. Mebbe not the same as she does, but a dialect.”

  “Reckon so,” Ryan said, nodding. “But she’s got Doc to talk to.”

  “Yeah. And you know what happens when those two rub up against each other. Get along like steel and flint. Make sparks.”

  Ryan admitted that was true.

  “So what’s your take on this place, J.B.?” he asked. “Seems like it’s not a bad place to roost, but I don’t know. When a thing looks to be too good to be true, it is.”

  “You got that right. But mebbe this place’s different.”

  “How you reckon?”

  “Talk, mostly. The way people act. They fear plenty of things—there’s plenty to fear. Walking down the street in broad daylight—or who overhears what they say—does seem to be one of them.”

  “Meaning the baron’s yoke lies gently on their shoulders. And he talks a good line. What do the people say about him?”

  “They seem to love him. And his sister. They’re what you call a package deal. He puts his lily-white ass on the line fighting for them, and he doesn’t torture and kill them for fun like his old man and his piece-of-shit sec boss did. Elizabeth works to help the sick even when she’s so weak it seems a puff of breath’d blow her over. Fact is, everybody loves the baron and his sister,”

  “Begging your pardon, John Barrymore,” a familiar voice said, “but I fear that simply is not so!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  They both turned. Doc ambled toward them. He was in his shirtsleeves, though he carried his ebony swordstick with its concealed blade in one knob-knuckled hand, and wore his inevitable giant LeMat revolver in a covered leather holster at his hip. His eyes were wild and unfocused and his hair stuck out to one side, like a broken bird’s wing.

  “What are you talking about, Doc?” J.B. said. “You been wandering around the last couple days like a sick dog looking for a place to lie down and die.”

  Doc joined the two men and hunkered down on his long pipestem legs in the shade of the plane tree. “Sometimes I do become lost in the mists inside my own mind, yes,” he said. “But have you known me to be openly delusional, my friends?”

  “Yes,” they both said.

  “Well, all that aside. I have heard many things these past several days. And some I believe that you, as I did, will find most unsettling.”

  “I’m listening,” Ryan said.

  “You are correct that our host—host and hostess, actually—are beloved. Widely and deeply. Yet a narrow and surprisingly virulent channel of dissent runs beneath the surface.”

  “Would you try to speak English” the Armorer asked.

  “Believe me, John Barrymore, I am. Indeed, I often feel impelled to say the same of you and your contemporaries—no matter. There are those in Haven who fear and resent Tobias and Elizabeth Blackwood. Even hate them with fierce passion!”

  Ryan shrugged. “How’s that news? Nobody alive today stays that way without stepping on somebody’s fingers as they grab for the last crumb of food. Goes triple for a baron being a baron.”

  “But these are not generalized animosities, Ryan. Some people actually blame Baron Blackwood for the Beast’s attacks! Or at the very least, believe he knows more about them than he lets on, and therefore allows its depredations to continue through inaction, for some dark reason of his own.”

  “Forgive me if I’m skeptical,” Ryan said.

  “How do we know this isn’t more random crazy thoughts? You’ve been acting like you had your skull soup stirred up some these last few days.”

  Doc smiled thinly. “In this case, my friend, the key word is acting. When I act insane, people talk freely when I’m around—as if I am not there. Even before I became a companion of yours I learned the value of pretending to be an even madder hatter than I was during my torture at the hands of the unspeakable Cort Strasser.” Doc shuddered. “The sows,” he said in a hollow voice. “I still remember the sows…”

  “Those sows’re all chills, now, along with that bastard Strasser,” Ryan said. “Focus now, Doc. Why does anybody blame the baron for the Beast?”

  “It seems there was a Beast in the old days, too. The late Dornan ended it, after he killed his own father to supplant him. Some people who blame Tobias now yearn for an iron hand like Dornan’s to take control of the ville. They even yearn for his sec boss,
Dupree.”

  “So mebbe the old baron wasn’t so bad as Tobias made him out to be to Ryan?” J.B. said.

  “I’ve also heard tell of that,” Doc said. “Horrific stories. Dupree would often troll in people apparently at random for torture, to see what was going on. Or more likely, given the long-understood inefficacy of torture for forensic means—”

  “Talk plain, Doc!”

  Ryan waved a hand at the Armorer. “Let him go. He’s on a roll.”

  “—given that, most likely the torture was meant to elicit names of parties to imaginary conspiracies, spoken in order to make the pain stop. Dupree could then show what a splendid job he was doing, and at the same time emphasize baronial power, by handing those named over to Baron Dornan for the baron’s pet method of execution.”

  “Which was?” Ryan asked.

  “He would stake them spread-eagled in this very square, and have a heavily laden wagon driven over their limbs again and again, breaking them multiple times. Perhaps this very wagon, according to some.”

  J.B. jumped down from the box. Ryan stood away from the wagon’s side.

  “He would then have the broken limbs threaded through the spokes of a wheel, and leave the victim to expire in unendurable agony before the public’s eye. A method comparing very favorably to a Renaissance execution technique called, appropriately enough, ‘breaking on the wheel.’”

  “Dark night!” J.B. said. “That makes my skin just creep. And you say some people actually want that back?”

  “They believe such measures enhanced the safety and fortunes of the citizenry.”

  “There’s always that kind of nonsense goin’ on,” Ryan said. “Nobody loves everything. There’s always dissidents running down the current boss and pining for the old one.”

  Doc shook his head. “Alas, I fear there is more substance to this talk. Because of who it is doing the talking.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Again Doc shook his head. “While I might be able to identify some on sight, I can put no names to any faces. What troubles me is that those who suspect Tobias of complicity in the Beast attacks run the gamut from the lowest social rank to the highest. Historically, that is an explosive mixture.”