by James Axler
"Got them from a traveling gaudy wagon we took a month ago," Charlie told them proudly. "Twenty sets of cuffs. Portable gallows. Leg stretchers. Plenty of high boots with spurs. Whips of all shapes and sizes. Stuff I never seen the like of. Couldn't figure what it was for. By then the gaudy sluts were all chilled, so I couldn't ask them."
Older women stickies brought them food in wooden dishes. The suckered fingers released their hold on the platters with a strange, moist sound, like a roomful of little children all kissing their hands at once.
The meal was a thick stew of what tasted a lot like rabbit. But the meat had been ripped and crushed apart so that flesh, gristle and bones were all a mangled gruel.
There were sweet potatoes with it and refried beans, livened with some ferocious silver-green jalapeños. Thick pottery mugs of water washed down the spiced, mediocre food.
"Finished?" Charlie asked, breaking the silence that had lasted through most of the meal. "Good. Then I think it's time that you met your fellow guests. Come on."
"What about his arm?"
The swollen eyes turned slowly to her. "What's that, Firehead?"
"The name's Krysty Wroth. All right?"
He faked a yawn, tongue protruding, showing that it also had a tiny ring of suckers on its upper surface. "Not all right. What do you want?"
"His arm. Needs washing and someone to look at it for him."
"I'll look at it." He grabbed Ryan's left arm, making the one-eyed man wince in pain. "I'm looking at it. Got a bandage. So what?"
Krysty's green eyes drilled into him. "So you get someone to take off the cloth and check the wound underneath."
"Too much trouble. Time he gets gangrene he'll be dead meat."
For a single, scary moment, Ryan thought that Krysty was going to lose all her self-control and use the power of the Earth Mother to break the thick steel links of the cuffs. Then he knew that she would have ripped the stickie's chest open and torn out his beating, pulsing heart.
And no force on earth could have stopped her from doing it, though it would have meant both of their deaths.
"No," he said, as quiet as the whisper of the midnight wind through the ivy on a fallen tomb.
She turned to him, ignoring Charlie with his machine pistol and the ring of stickie guards. "No," she agreed.
The lean figure, with his grotesque mop of yellow hair, advanced to stand right by her, face lowered to glare into her eyes.
But Krysty didn't even flinch, even when his anger showered her with sticky beads of spittle.
"You fuck little bitch! You were threatening me with your…" He stammered as words failed him completely.
"What did I threaten you with? I got cuffs on my wrists. You got twenty or thirty armed men close by. How come you're scared of me?"
"Me scared of you!" The laugh was hollow and unconvincing. "I'm more scared of something I find stuck to the bottom of my feet after I've been walking in the woods."
Krysty grinned delightedly, sensing his weakness and his fear of her. "All talk's cheap. But triple-stupe stickie talk's cheapest of all."
His left hand flashed out like a cornered rattler, gripping the woman by the jaw, fingers clamping onto both cheeks.
Ryan took a half step forward, ready to try to kick the stickie in the balls. But the barrel of a musket was rammed into his stomach, taking his breath.
Krysty was moaning in a frail, frightened voice. Charlie's hand was squeezing harder, puckering her face, making the bones of her jaw creak under the dreadful pressure.
Ryan watched helplessly as a thin trickle of blood began to seep between the spread fingers. He was tempted to threaten the stickies' leader, but he knew how empty and helpless it would sound. Better to stay quiet.
"Don't…don't…don't…don't…" Charlie was almost chanting the word, more blood oozing over Krysty's neck, down onto her shirt. The tendons in his wrist were as tight as rods of ivory, quivering with the effort of hurting the woman.
"You chill her right now, and you best chill me too," Ryan said, winning the fight to keep his voice steady.
"Norms like you—" the tension in his arm eased as he began to relax his grip "—make me fucking want to puke. But this time… you go the long walk when I want you to, not before."
The suckers peeled away, each removing a thin sliver of skin from Krysty's cheeks, leaving them dappled with tiny circles of scarlet. Her long fiery hair curled forward over her face as though trying to conceal the bitter wounds.
She sniffed and spit in the dirt, missing the curling nails of Charlie's bare feet by a couple of inches.
"Want to take the cuffs off me and try it again?" she asked loudly.
IT WAS FULL DARK and the night was growing colder. Far above them Ryan heard the swishing sound of wings and stared upward into the blackness.
"Bats," Charlie said, recovered a little from his eyeballing with Krysty.
Around them, the camp was readying itself to settle down. A small boy scampered by, casting a frightened glance toward Ryan, who noticed that the child had a hideously deformed face, with his nose missing and the mouth twisted through ninety degrees.
"Keep our guests in what the Navaho, round these parts, call kivas," Charlie said.
There were a number of the circular pits, mostly ten feet across, topped with heavy iron bars. A solitary stickie squatted by each one, cradling a musket.
"Put them together in this one," Charlie ordered. Another of his men was holding a flaming torch, so that the prisoners in the pit could see the faces on the two newcomers.
"Holy shit on a sugar shaker! It's Ryan!"
Chapter Nineteen
THERE WAS NO time to even catch a glimpse of the speaker. A hand was laid between Ryan's shoulder blades and he was shoved down into the kiva. Someone tried to break his fall, then Krysty was pushed on top of him. He opened his mouth and found it filled with the toe of her boot.
There was a metallic slamming sound as the heavy grille was dropped in on top of them, then the sound of feet moving away.
The light disappeared.
"Fireblast!" Ryan pushed Krysty's foot away from his face and felt hands helping him to get upright, lowering him gently to the slightly uneven floor of the deep pit.
"Stand still till you get used to the size of it," someone advised him.
"Them stickie pricks goin' to choke us to death with more fuckers," a third voice whined.
"Everyone keep still." The first, hoarse voice spoke again, with a snap to it.
A tiny, distant bell rang in one of the back rooms of Ryan's memory.
"I know you," he said.
"Yeah."
"Way back when."
A laugh. "You could say that."
"Trader?"
"Gettin' warm, old friend. You and me knew stickies, Ryan." The voice was so diminished that it barely rose above a strained whisper.
"Abe," he said. Not a question anymore. This time it was a simple statement.
"Yeah. Abe."
"We been talking about you a lot of times over the months."
The whining voice came riding in over the top, like a malfunctioning saw cutting across a sheet of plate glass.
"You guys shut the fuck up and let's all sit down again. Not that it's easy with even more jammed into the hole."
A woman spoke. "Why don't you shut your mouth and give your ass a rest, Harold."
There was a muttered chorus of approval.
"He's got a point, Helga," Abe said. "Everyone sit down slow and careful. Ryan, you and your woman— sorry, don't recollect her name—come this side of the kiva so's we can talk quiet."
"Name's Krysty Wroth, Abe. Real good to see you again."
"You was nearly last thing I ever seen. It was you holding me in the Darks."
RYAN HAD MOVED to stand where Krysty cradled Abe in her arms. The arrow, with its barbed tip, still stuck through his throat at a grotesque angle, blood trickling from both sides. The shaft was made of some sort of
aluminum compound. It was streaked crimson. The feathers were the same kind that they'd seen on the warning totems.
Henn had looked up. "Bad, Ryan. Bad."
Abe had fought for breath, fingers moving convulsively on Krysty's sleeve, her bright red hair framing his pale face. His eyes had flickered, seeking Ryan, finding him.
"Doesn't hurt…" His voice was muffled with the blood that was now seeping through his lips. "But a blasted arrow, for nuke's sake. Be funny if…" He'd coughed, a great gout of arterial scarlet.
And they'd left him.
That was the way. If Abe had been an inch or so nearer death, or if the attacking Indians had been a little closer, then Ryan would have put a bullet through the wounded man's skull.
But there was always a chance.
Even for someone who had the Grim Reaper's scythe laid across his neck.
And Abe had pulled through.
THERE WAS shuffling and scuffling until everyone was sitting again. "How many in here, Abe?" Ryan asked.
"You make numbers nine and ten," Harold replied.
"You ever say anything without sounding like you're about to burst into tears?" Ryan asked.
"Yeah. Fuck you!"
"Better." There was a ripple of nervous laughter before the dark pit settled into stillness.
"Abe?"
"Ryan, you're going to try to shoot off at the mouth about leaving me to die up in the Darks. Please don't."
"You know how it was."
The chuckle turned itself into a deep-throated coughing fit. '"Course. Do the same for you, someday. Live by the Trader's rules and you damned often finished up getting chilled by the same rules. You did what you had to. I hid up. Managed to push the arrow clear through my neck. Never pull it through with a barbed hunting tip to it. Bled some. Slept some. Here I am. You can hear it hasn't done much for my throat, though."
"You never were one of the Lord's chosen singers, Abe," Ryan said, grinning in the darkness. Despite the intense danger of their position in the heart of the stickies' camp, his heart was lifted by meeting again with the tall mustached man.
"Where did Charlie catch you?"
Ryan dropped his voice. "You didn't recognize him, Abe?"
"No. Why? Kind of odd for a stickie, but I never seen him before."
"You have."
"Truly?"
"He knew me. Lucky that he didn't recognize you as well."
"Don't recall. Stickie that walks and talks like a norm is something special. Thought I'd have remembered him."
"Little kid with straw hair. Party we rescued from Gert Wolfram's gang not far from Fishmouth's bar in the Darks."
There was something in the darkness that might have been a chuckle. "That was little Charlie, was it? If I'd known I'd have slit the bastard's neck from ear to ear."
"Guard coming," the woman hissed.
The circular kiva fell silent.
There were feet slapping bare on the stones above them and the sensation of someone standing there, listening closely.
Abe's face was near to Ryan's, his mustache tickling his ear. "Hope the sucker-fingered bastard doesn't piss on us again. Did it last night."
But the feet went away again.
Harold whispered into the velvet blackness. "Can we all get some rest now?"
Nobody argued.
IT WAS COLD in the underground cell, which was hewn from the bare sandstone, but the press of bodies checked the temperature from dropping too low.
As the others slipped into sleep, Ryan stayed awake, trying to marshal his thoughts, trying to make plans to cover any contingency. The way it looked was that Charlie would keep his word and use their execution as an example of his own power over norms. And with the force he seemed to have at his disposal, it would be difficult to do too much about it.
If things came down to the wire, then Ryan would at least try to take the leader of the stickies with him. Even if it meant tearing his carotid artery open with his teeth.
He'd been in many tight spots in his life and he was still alive.
But he recalled something the Trader had said to him as they'd lain under a towering sycamore not long before the sick old man had done his disappearing act. The familiar black stogie had been sending coils of smoke wreathing up into the evening air.
The Trader had used it to gesture to the sylvan calm around them. "Been a good day," he'd said. "Odd when you think that we're all bound to die sometime."
Ryan finally closed his eye and entered the darkness with the pessimistic thought that this might, at last, be the time for him and Krysty.
Chapter Twenty
RYAN'S WOUNDED LEFT arm was still tender. Krysty peeled off the makeshift bandage, trying to see how it looked in the gloom of the kiva.
"Seems to be healing."
He flexed his fingers, tightening the muscles of the forearm. "Stiff."
She lowered her head, sniffing to try to catch any taint of infection. "I think it's clean, lover." She wrapped the bandage around it again.
The small, circular scabs on Krysty's face from Charlie's attention were already almost vanished. She healed faster than anyone Ryan had ever come across.
Now there was enough light to see their fellow captives.
Abe was the oldest there, looking much as he had when they last saw him. There was a scar the size of a nickel on one side of his neck, and a larger cicatrix on the other side of where the Indian arrow had been pushed all the way through. He still had a droopy mustache and wore his graying hair tied back in a long ponytail.
He seemed a little skinnier than Ryan remembered him.
"Introduce you to the others," he said, coughing hoarsely.
There was Harold. He was chubby, in his late twenties and had a pair of battered spectacles hanging from a cord around his neck. He'd been a traveling seller of candies and had been caught by a patrol of the stickies a week earlier.
"Should be some sort of baron's sec men around here to rescue us," he complained.
Ryan sighed at the man's stupidity. "No baron," he said. "No sec patrols. No rescue."
"Been telling him that for days, but the stupe clings to his fancies," Helga said.
"Stupe yourself!"
Helga was around forty, with salt-and-pepper hair that was scraped back off her face and tied in a tight knot. She had the freckled, hard complexion of someone who spent most of her life outdoors.
She'd run a spread about eighty miles to the west and had actually met Christina and Jak Lauren a couple of times.
There were five other prisoners.
Danny, who had worked as ramrod on Helga's sheep farm, was in his early thirties, tall and lean. He'd broken his left ankle trying to escape from the stickies' attack, and was suffering constant pain from it.
Bob Leonard was a prematurely bald man of twenty-five, who'd been trapping beaver in the high country to the northwest. He'd been attacked by a grizzly when he was fifteen and bore dreadful facial scars, including damage to his mouth that made his speech difficult to understand.
His wife, Dorina, looked no more than twelve years old, yet she claimed she'd lost three children to a cholera outbreak up in Silver City. The stickies had already raped her.
"Sixty-seven times," she said in her little voice. "I keep score so's I don't forget."
Her brother, Red Folsom, was sometimes called Bitter Creek Folsom. He'd been a part of the team of trappers and hunters that had stumbled into a ranging patrol of stickies. He was a bluff, strongly built man with chestnut hair and had a finger missing from his left hand.
"Lost it in one of my own beaver traps," he explained with a quiet laugh.
The rest of their group had been butchered in the initial attack by the muties.
The last of the stickies' prisoners was a traveling preacher, the Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman. He was six feet three inches tall, with white hair that touched his shoulders, and wore a heavy suit of black material.
"All a part of the ric
h and mysterious pattern of the Lord Jesus," he'd said as Abe introduced him to Ryan and Krysty.
"How do you figure that?" Ryan asked.
"I am a flask being tested in the white heat of the furnace of wickedness. These stickies are my own personal temptation. Find if my faith comes up to the mark."
"And does it?"
"Of course, Brother Cawdor." Ryan knew from previous experience that one of the sure signs of the religious crazies that festered in parts of Deathlands was that they always called you "Brother."
"And I shall meet their every challenge," he added.
"They're going to kill you, Reverend," Krysty said. "Chill us all."
A patronizing smile touched the tall man's face. "You will fall, Sister Krysty, but on the third day I shall rise again and I will sit upon the right hand of the Lord of Hosts."
"Wish I could be there to see it, Reverend," Ryan replied.
AROUND THEM they could hear the familiar sounds of a large camp waking up.
Ryan sat close to Krysty, his feet sticking out toward the center of the cramped kiva. If Charlie collected any more prisoners it would be unbearably crowded.
He looked around at their eight fellow captives, trying to weigh them up, ready for the moment when concerted action might save some of their lives. He had no idea of how, when or where that moment might come. Or whether it would come at all.
But he had to be ready.
In case.
Abe would do real well. Couldn't look for anyone much better to stand at your shoulder when the full-metal jackets started flying.
There were two or three other good possibilities for when the shit hit the fan.
Bitter Creek Folsom was a man who seemed like he could look after himself in any tight corner. Same with his younger colleague, Bob Leonard, though the man's problems with speech could prove difficult.
If it wasn't for his broken ankle, Danny would also have taken right and center in any combat line. But he could barely stand.
The preacher didn't figure in Ryan's plan. He'd never met one worth a flying fart when steel flashed and blood spurted.