by James Axler
"LOOKOUT DOC!"
Her voice was shrill, like a razor over glass, loud enough to make the old man stagger back so that the knife thrust missed opening up his belly, loud enough to bring J.B. and Mildred off the porch and loud enough to tear Jak and Christina apart in their bed with the antique Amish quilt.
"Red-haired bitch!"
The leader of the wag train raged at Krysty, hand going to the blaster in its holster.
Despite his shock, Doc had reacted with unusual speed, for once drawing the mighty Le Mat from his hip without even a fumble, cocking and firing in a single, fluid movement.
The .63-caliber shotgun round was useless at anything much over thirty feet. The Armorer used to tease Doc that he'd do better to throw the heavy blaster at any potential enemy.
But this time the range was less than six feet and Doc's aim was true.
The shot didn't have time to spread, and it ripped out the center of the man's throat, slashing through his windpipe and tearing the cervical vertebrae of the upper spine into shards of splintered bone. The impact was so devastating that it almost removed the man's head from his body.
Blood fountained into the night sky, pattering in the dry sand. For a macabre moment the corpse stayed upright, even taking a half step away from the smoking cannon in Doc's fist.
Krysty, not fearing any threat, had stupidly left her Smith & Wesson .38 on the small table at the side of her bed.
Seeing that she was unarmed, a second of the travelers rushed toward her with a slender skinning-knife, held low to gut her.
Instead of retreating, Krysty stepped in, propelling herself into a ferociously high leap, kicking out with her right foot and aiming for the man's face.
The stubby heel of her dark blue leather Western boot smashed home, hitting on the upper lip and then into the base of the attacker's hooked nose.
Teeth cracked and snapped off at gum level, and Krysty felt cartilage pulping under her boot. She landed with an acrobat's easy grace, seeing the man falling back, hands to his wrecked face, blood pouring between his fingers.
She heard a burst of fire from the Uzi, and someone screamed.
The sneak attack by the wag train of travelers was doomed to failure, even before it got properly started.
One of the women stopped a bullet from Jak Lauren's satin-finish Magnum, which kicked her backward over the low stone wall around the well. Legs flailing, she toppled out of sight.
A musket boomed, a great cloud of black powder smoke giving away the position of the shootist. J.B. immediately blasted half a clip at him, seeing him go spinning away from the rear of the wag.
The strangers had scattered all over the spread, some of them trying to hide in the barn, a couple of older women making for the smokehouse.
Within less than five minutes the homesteaders had the situation back under their control, though it took another quarter of an hour to round up all the survivors.
We sat them all down in a huddled group. Oh, lover, they did look a sorry bunch. Two men were chilled. One by J.B. and one by Doc. And we still hadn't got the woman out of the well. Christina had shone a lantern down and said she was a floater. We figured she could wait. Odd thing was none of them seemed to care a grain of sand about what had happened. One of the kids was lying down, breathing fast and odd, crying that the lumps was killing him. So Mildred said she'd have a look.
THE BLACK WOMAN took one of the older children into the house, picking her way between the splashes of clotting blood.
J.B. stayed on guard with Doc and Jak, though the strangers were so apathetic that it hardly seemed worth the effort.
Krysty and Christina stood in the parlor and watched the examination.
The boy looked to be about twelve, shivering uncontrollably.
"Take off the shirt," Mildred said.
"Fuck you, bitch."
Without the slightest change of expression she slapped him across the face. The slap rang out in the quiet house, her fingers leaving a bright pattern on the pale skin.
"Take off the shirt," she repeated, "and take the pants off, too."
Sniveling, the boy obeyed her, tugging off the ragged cotton shirt, dropping it by his bare feet. More slowly, reluctantly, he unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the scrubbed pine boards. His ribs showed through like a picket fence, and he cupped his hands over his genitals.
"I want you to lift up your arms and stand with your legs apart," Mildred ordered, stooping to stare closely at him. She turned to Krysty and Christina. "You two better go outside."
"What?" Krysty said. "Think I haven't seen…"
Mildred turned, her brown eyes narrowed. "Just do it. Please."
There was a snap of anger in the voice and something else that Krysty couldn't quite identify. But she obeyed, walking into the cooling night with Christina.
"Don't you fucking touch me, bitch."
"Stand still and keep quiet. Just answer my questions."
He was deathly white, heart visibly pounding, respiration rapid. His skin was glittering with a ghost of sweat.
"How long you been like this?"
"We all got it."
She repeated the question. "How long, son? When did it start?"
"Dawn day before today."
She lifted an oil lamp off the table and stooped to look at the shadowed place beneath the boy's lifted arms.
There were great lumps there, like full-grown tomatoes, but black and shining, with a mirrored malevolence. Mildred drew in a slow breath.
"Any idea how you all got ill?" Her voice was soft and gentle.
"Came on a camp. Lot of dead. Rotted right to… kind of like thick brown water. There was food. That smelled bad and tasted… Look, I got to go shit."
In the lad's groin Mildred saw the same signs of the virulent disease. But if the boy was telling the truth and it had reached this terminal stage in less than forty-eight hours…
"You all have it?"
"Yeah. All. Lost five dead last night. Look, I got to go."
"Outside! Far from the house as you can get, before you—oh, Jesus Christ, kid!"
It was too late. The boy shit everywhere. Like watery gruel, with kind of grains of rice in it and thick specks of black. And some blood. Then he threw up.
Got to go on now. J.B. says he thinks there might be muties around. Anyway, lover, you probably guessed what was wrong and what we had to do.
"What?" Dean asked.
"Plague," his father replied.
Chapter Six
DOC TANNER TURNED to face the woman, his rheumy eyes protruding like boiled gooseberries.
"Plague?"
"Right." It was an effort for her to keep her voice from cracking.
"Black death?"
"If that's what you want to call it."
"Bubonic plague, Mildred. Are you positive in your diagnosis?"
"Doc, why don't you go and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? The boy's got big black lumps under his arms. More in his groin. Glands like patent leather baseballs. Sweating. Raging dysentery. Rapid pulse and respiration. What the fuck more do you want, you gibbering old cretin?"
Jak was still watching over their cowed prisoners, but the others were all standing around Mildred, all staggered by the venom of her outburst.
Doc was quickest off the mark. "I can only apologize, my dear Dr. Wyeth. I was foolish to speak in the way that I did, and you were quite right to reproach me for it."
Mildred sighed, patting him on the wrist. "No, I'm the one who should be saying sorry, Doc. Just that it tore my heart to see that child like that. He's only a couple of hours from the last train to the coast. I mean from death."
Krysty sighed. "It's that bad?"
Mildred looked at her. "No, Krysty. It's not that bad. It's much, much worse. Boy says he got the way he is since last morning. Even the most virulent bubonic plague would never run its full course in that short a time. No way."
"Think it's a rogue virus?"
the Armorer asked, keeping one eye toward the huddled group from the wag train.
Mildred took a deep breath, as though she were readying herself for a plunge into freezing water. "It's worse. Not my speciality this kind of disease. But it must be massively contagious, mainly through food and water. But also carried in the air. Like spores that settle on everything."
Christina ran a hand through her shoulder-length hair. "I'm beginning to hear spaces between the words, Mildred. And I don't like what I'm hearing in those gaps."
"It's simple. There's blood, shit and spit all over the farm. In the house. The well. The smokehouse. I think there's a small but real… fatally real risk of contamination."
"What do we do?" J.B. asked.
"We move. Now. Within the hour. Take no food or water. All tainted."
"But what about our home? What are we going to do with the homestead?" Christina looked stricken.
Mildred was nearly in tears. "I might be bloody wrong, Christina. Might be, but I don't think I am. Only one way. Fire."
"Burn the house?"
"Everything. The barn and the outbuildings. Let the stock all go and hope to round them up again later. Can't take them with us. Too slow."
"Where are we going?" Doc asked.
"Into the hills. North. Should be the fire'll destroy the disease and we can come back in a week or so. No quicker."
J.B. cleared his throat. "One thing," he said quietly.
"What?" Mildred looked at him.
"Those people. What are we going to do with all of them?"
EVERYONE WAS BUSY. The dead woman was hauled from the deep well and placed in the bed of a wag, along with the bodies of the two shot men.
Krysty scribbled a note and fixed it to the rope, just above the well's iron bucket.
The animals and fowl were all released into the surrounding desert.
Jak and Christina insisted on pouring the gasoline around their home, the woman weeping as she limped around with the cans. Jak was totally silent, as though he were in shock.
Mildred made everyone wear heavy work gloves and masks of linen, soaked in lye.
The oxen were harnessed to lead the wags away, some distance from the homestead where the rigs and the bodies would be burned to ashes. Doc took charge of that part of the mission, telling the others he'd wait for them where the land started to rise toward the steep rocks of the gorge.
One reason for his early departure was linked to the question of what was to be done with the handful of survivors from the diseased wag train.
The discussion had been, of necessity, brief and heated.
Doc had been simply for leaving them where they were, though Mildred had insisted that they all faced nothing more than a miserable and agonizing passing within a few hours.
Christina had been for sending them away at gunpoint.
Jak had spit on the ground. "They chilled home. Chill them."
J.B. had agreed with the view of the albino teenager. "Trader used to say that a choice between a dead enemy and a live enemy wasn't any sort of choice at all."
Krysty had looked at the circle of faces. "Two say let them live, even if it's only for a while, then a dreadful passing. Two say take them all out now. Quick and clean." She looked at Mildred. "You're a doctor. What do you say?"
"Six men, five women and four little children," Mildred said quietly, sorrowfully. "Suffering little children."
"What are you saying?" J.B. asked.
Mildred shook her head. "I go with taking away the suffering."
The Armorer squeezed her hand. "Fine. I'll do it."
"No," Jak argued. "Me."
"You gotta light the fires with me."
He looked at his wife. "Some things can't ride around," he said.
In the end the argument was resolved.
J.B. HAD STOOD GUARD with the Uzi, gesturing for the travelers, one by one, to go around the corner of the broken wall toward the main barn. Though it was obvious what was happening to them, out of sight of the group, nobody made an effort to run or to fight.
Or even to protest.
Mildred held her ZKR 551, the Czech target pistol made at the Zbrojovka Works in Brno. The 6-shot revolver was now chambered to take a standard Smith & Wesson .38-caliber full-metal-jacket round.
At her own request, she shot the children first, all of them frail and fretful from the bubonic plague, moaning in pain. Her hand was steady as if she were back home in Lincoln, Nebraska, carrying out delicate microsurgery, following her old speciality of cryogenics.
"Don't be frightened," she said, turning her head away in order to avoid getting splashed by blood and brains.
After the children came the women, most kneeling as dutifully as children at their first communion. Their eyes were blanked out by the sickness, and Mildred shot them one by one.
After three of the men, she stopped to reload the blaster for a second time, biting her lip as she fought back the tears.
Next came the oldest of the party, a tall man in a plaid shirt, a length of homespun rope holding up his pants. One of the grotesque boils had burst beneath his right arm, and a mixture of pus and blood soaked the material down to his waist.
He nodded at her, managing a cocky grin at the blaster, like it was an old friend.
"Best this way."
Mildred hesitated. "You reckon?"
"Sure. We done things and been places that the Lord Almighty never meant. I figure you just stock up treasure in heaven." He knelt in front of her, bringing his hands up in prayer. "Yeah, gold in heaven and shit in hades. Pull the trigger, lady."
So, there it is, lover. Took us awhile to dig the grave. But now it's done. Now we're moving north again, into the higher country. Catch up with us, lover, as quick as you can. Want to see the boy again. And I want to feel your…
Ryan stopped reading, finding that he was closer to blushing than he'd been since the age of five.
"That's all she says, Dean."
He looked down and found that his son, stone exhausted, had fallen asleep.
Ryan smiled. "Sure, boy. Guess I'll take a little of the same. Then, when we both feel like it, we'll be pretty up and walking good to get together with the others again. 'Specially Krysty."
Chapter Seven
RYAN SHOT A startled buck rabbit a little after dawn the next morning, knocking it over with a single round from his blaster. He ran after it as it kicked and flailed in the dry grass, and finished it off with a sharp blow to its nape.
"We could take it with us and cook and eat it later," he said, grinning at the expression on his son's face. "Or we could mebbe do it now. Seems like this is a real good place. What do you think?"
"Yeah."
"Carried by a majority of two."
IT WAS AN idyllic setting. They had moved along the trail that wound upward from the spray-filled ravine. It headed roughly northward and was the only track that the others could feasibly have taken. It was lined with a variety of pines, some with needles that were light gray green, some deep blue purple, which stood on either side of the narrow, rutted pathway, their scent filling the morning.
Their campsite—a clearing about eighty feet across, with a fringe of ripening thimbleberries at its borders—was just a little higher, alongside a place where the river opened up into a deep, mirrored pool. There was a fallen live oak at the edge, its roots rotted and dry.
While Ryan took out his flensing knife to skin and gut the rabbit, Dean went scavenging in the surrounding woods for some small sticks and larger branches for the fire.
"Lay it with some of the tinder from under the pines," Ryan instructed. "Get a handful of the dried needles and first lay them on some—"
"Dad."
"What?"
"My mother didn't raise no kids who couldn't lay a fire."
"Sorry."
"Never apologize. It's a sign of weakness, Dad. That one of the Trader's sayings?"
"Yeah. Trader had hundreds of sayings. One for every o
ccasion. Longer you knew the old bastard, the more you realized that some of his sayings would directly contradict others."
"Sometime, I'd really like to hear lots more about the Trader."
"Get the fire going. Rabbit's near ready. And set up the framework to carry a skewer."
"Sure. You reckon the Trader's really gone right back to the spring?"
"Dead?"
"Yeah. You reckon?"
"Year or so ago I'd have laid any odds you wanted he was sleeping the big sleep. Now, there's whispers and rumors. Takes a mighty sharp arrow to pierce through the dust of those rumors, Dean. Here." He tossed him flint and steel.
"You saw him last?"
"No, that was… Fireblast! What was his name? It was—"
"Not J.B.?"
"No. Abe. That was him. Abe was last guy to see Trader. He's dead now, I guess. Skinny guy with a mustache and long hair. Used to get kidded about his hair. He saw Trader take a last walk into the forest. No, he's dead all right."
A curling tendril of light smoke rose from the carefully constructed little fire that the boy had started.
He handed Dean the rabbit, ready for cooking. The water in the pool was surprisingly deep, and Ryan watched dragonflies darting just over the placid surface.
The morning was quiet, with only the wind sighing through the branches of the trees. The crackling of the fire began to override it, and the smell of roasting meat drifted to the one-eyed warrior's nostrils. It was good to relax in safety, though in Deathlands, you could never just lie down and close your eyes. Krysty's mention that there might be muties in the mountains made Ryan extra cautious.
But nothing could spoil the moment.
Dean lay down by the cooking rabbit, occasionally turning the makeshift spit.
Ryan rested against the fallen live oak, hands clasped behind the back of his head, staring up through the moving branches at the clear blue sky. Occasionally birds flew by, darting so fast that there was no time to recognize them, though their shrill piping washed around the forest.