by James Axler
Little Dorina Leonard looked like a spitball could put her on her back, but Ryan reserved judgment on her. He had vivid memories of small-boned women with killer's eyes.
Helga had the up-and-walking-good look of a woman used to handling trouble in any size or shape, a useful person if you wanted a horse gelded or a baby birthed or a renegade gut shot.
Then there was Harold Lord from Castle Rock, way out east, a soft boy who looked like he'd mess himself if anyone raised a blaster anywhere near him.
J.B. used to say that you could pick out the fighters, give them marks from twenty and add them up. Then you had an idea of how you might line up against the opposition.
On that basis Ryan would give himself nineteen and Krysty eighteen. Abe was at least a sixteen. Red Folsom and his partner would rate about thirteens each. Give Helga the same. Joe-Bob Jarman didn't get to first base to score. Danny might have been a twelve, but his ankle dropped him to a fat zero. Dorina could score anywhere between a one and a ten. Call her a five. No way of guesstimating that. Ryan generously gave Harold a two.
"What are you doing, lover?"
"Trying to work out what our combat total would be."
"J.B.'s magic formula?"
"Yeah."
"What do we add up to?"
"I'm trying to work that out."
"Didn't J.B. say that if you divided the total by the number of people in your group, it had to average at least ten?"
"Yeah. At least! To have any chance."
"Ten of us. Got to reach a total of one hundred, then."
Ryan was never that great at mental arithmetic, and his lips moved silently as he battled with the simple addition.
"You say we needed a hundred?" he asked quietly.
"Right."
"Fireblast! We got ninety-nine."
One thing he hadn't bothered to take into account was that none of them had a weapon of any sort.
Charlie's forces numbered several times theirs, and they were all armed.
They could hear the patter of bare feet above them. Ryan grinned at Krysty, his teeth white in the gloomy half-light.
"Never cared about numbers, myself," he said.
The voice of the stickie guard was loud and harsh. "Get out, norm scum!"
Krysty squeezed Ryan's hand. "Nor me, lover. Nor me."
Chapter Twenty-One
THEY CLAMBERED OUT, blinking in the bright morning sunlight. Abe and Bob helped Danny, who cursed between gritted teeth as his broken ankle jarred against the stone top of the pit.
Helga looked beyond the ring of guards to where Charlie was standing, hands on hips, watching his prisoners.
"Why don't you let us splint it for him, you triple-mutie son of a whoreson bastard?"
She hardly raised her voice, but the cut of her words lashed across the camp.
Ryan felt his stomach muscles knot up in tension, waiting for the single word from the leader of the large mutie gang that would inevitably trigger the bloody massacre.
But Charlie stood still and calm for a moment, half-smiling, head on one side. The light breeze tugged at the mop of bright ochre hair, ruffling it like Kansas wheat.
His voice was controlled, quieting the murmur of anger that was coming up from the watching, listening stickies.
"You hear her, my friends? Hear the words of the norm? Proud and arrogant in her certainty and her divine rightness. You have all seen the way we are treated by norms. Your fathers and their fathers, back unto many generations."
"Amen," said the Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman, at Ryan's elbow, confirming his belief that the man was an utter fool.
Charlie ignored the interruption. "Since we have all been together, have we had to put up with this norm shit?"
"No!" was loudly shouted from dozens of voices all around the camp.
Charlie nodded, repeating the word. "No. And this woman—" his suckered finger pointed at Helga "—will learn that. I promise you we shall all see her crawling and weeping. Before the sun has set and risen three times, every one of those norms will have died to amuse us." Charlie raised his voice high above the shouts and cheers. "We shall then have the brightest fires and the loudest explosions to celebrate their deaths. This I promise you!"
Now every stickie, young and old, was yelping and ululating, banging sticks and spoons on pots and pans. One of them fired off a musket, the puff of black powder smoke rising serenely into the air, drifting up the face of the overhanging cliff.
So, it looked like three days was to be their projected life span. At least it gave Ryan something to work on.
THEY WERE FED in a circle around a spluttering fire of pine branches that sparked and crackled. They were manacled in pairs. Ryan's left hand to Danny's right. Krysty's right to the preacher's left. And so on.
Ryan admired Charlie's cunning. The stickies' leader also had their ankles chained, but in different pairs. So Ryan's right ankle was joined to Helga's left. That way the entire group was linked, one to another and any attempt to escape would have been utter, helpless chaos.
The food was based on old Apache dishes, with beans and peppers mixed with spiced meats. Ryan felt hungry and asked for a second helping. The stickie woman serving him looked across at Charlie, who nodded agreement to the request.
She ladled out a great dollop of the thick, rich stew. Her back was to Charlie, her muscular body hiding what she was doing from anyone else. The woman clumsily spilled a little of the mixture down the front of Ryan's trousers, offering him a thick-lipped half smile of almost apology.
She reached with her fingers and brushed at the dark smear, rubbing harder, the delicate suckers tugging at his pants. To his horror, Ryan found that the movement and the pressure was beginning to rouse him, despite his will.
"Thanks," he said. "Leave it."
"Might do it proper for you, later, norm," she whispered, her breath foul and bitter in his face. The lank hair brushing against his cheek as she straightened to serve the rest of the prisoners. Her handwoven dress hung open, revealing her heavy breasts, the dark nipples ringed with porcine bristles.
His erection diminished as quickly as it had grown, leaving him feeling slightly sick.
The only scant consolation was that nobody else had seen what had taken place.
CHARLIE WAS CONTENT that his captives should be seen all day, setting them in the open in a long row, still chained together. He made no effort to try to force them to do any sort of work, nor were they ill-treated, which was yet another difference from any stickies that Ryan had ever known.
Normally extreme cruelty was all that awaited anyone or anything unlucky enough to fall into their ripping hands.
Deathlands was sprinkled with all kinds of muties, some of them kind and friendly. Some, like stickies, were irredeemably brutal and vicious, always taking their greatest pleasure in the pain and anguish of others.
But there was little evidence of that in the camp at the old mesa settlement.
Around the midpart of the morning, one of the younger muties threw a stone, sly and underhand, at Danny's broken ankle, narrowly missing and striking Harold Lord on the shin. The blow made him whoop with pain, and he tried to hop on one leg, nearly bringing everyone down on top of him.
But Charlie had seen what the teenager had done and beckoned him over.
The toothless mouth stretched into a smile, which never even came close to the swollen eyes.
"Saw you," Charlie said.
The young stickie's lips were so gross that they flapped together as he tried to speak. It was impossible to tell what he was trying to say, but his whole cringing body language made it obvious the youth was terrified of his leader's anger.
"Hold out your right hand." There was a moment of hesitation. Charlie's tongue darted out, the myriad tiny suckers opening and closing with a weird rippling motion. "Do it."
Everyone around had stopped whatever they were doing, watching the menacing little tableau. Charlie, the Uzi slung casually a
cross his shoulder, towered over the hunched figure of the boy.
"Hope he chills the shit-eating little prick," Harold hissed. "That stone really hurt my leg. Take him out, Charlie."
"You keep your mouth shut, or I'll break your neck," Ryan warned in a whisper.
"Why do—"
"If he doesn't break it, I will," Helga threatened.
Harold shut up.
"Put out your hand, Shem." Charlie's thin tenor voice was still calm and gentle.
"No."
"Yes."
Very slowly, as though it were being drawn out by some distant but immeasurably powerful magnet, the young stickie pushed out his arm, hand clenched.
"Good. Now put your hand over the muzzle of the blaster."
The Uzi was down at his hip, the stubby barrel pointing toward the darkening sky. Charlie's finger was on the trigger.
"No." The word was breathed out through a stream of tears.
"Yes, Shem. Yes. Just to teach a small lesson to you and everyone."
There was a soft rumble of thunder, sounding as though it came from the distant south. But the high walls of the valley that surrounded the campsites made it difficult to tell, as any noise echoed and bounced off the red cliffs.
The bright start to the morning had disappeared, and the sky was a dark, leaden gray streaked with high pinkish-purple clouds.
The stickie closed his palm over the muzzle of the machine pistol, his eyes squeezed tight shut. His mouth hung open, and spittle dribbled down onto his chest.
"Do what I say. No less than that and no more than that!"
Charlie's voice cracked as the warning was shouted to all his followers.
There was a silence, broken only by the high piping sound of a lone bird, circling far above the isolated canyon.
The triple burst from the Uzi was peculiarly muffled.
One of the women, watching from a few paces away, lifted her hand and slowly wiped a smear of blood from her face.
Charlie reached and ripped a length off the boy's shirt, using it to clean the crimson spray and ragged shreds of flesh off the blaster.
The stickie teenager passed out, dropping like a sack of discarded clothes at his leader's bare feet. The right hand all but disappeared, a stream of blood flowing steadily from it into the orange dirt around him.
Helga clapped her hands, the chains tinkling as she moved. "Well done, Charlie! Must make you real proud to be a prince among woodcutters."
He made her a half bow and stalked away.
AS NOON APPROACHED, the sky turned from a lead color to that of spilled ink. The lighter clouds had been swallowed into the oppressive blackness. The cooking fires seemed to blaze with a tenfold brightness in the deep gloom.
At first the rain fell in a gentle drizzle, laying the dust, beginning to trickle across the overhang above the prisoners.
In less than ten minutes it had turned to a steady, teeming downpour.
"Going to last awhile," Krysty commented, raising her voice above the sound of the rain.
"Making tracking us real difficult," Ryan replied. "Real difficult."
Chapter Twenty-Two
"MAKE THE TRACKING real difficult."
J.B. was huddled inside a dark green slicker, the collar turned up in a futile effort to stop the ceaseless rain from trickling down into the small of his back.
Jak hunched his shoulders. His long hair, glowing like a magnesium flare in the gloom, was plastered to his long, narrow skull. His eyes glowed like coals of fire, and his delicate fingers toyed with the hilt of one of the throwing knives that hadn't been turned over to the stickies.
"Can't be far from them."
"Distance, my dear young man, is a totally relative concept." Doc Tanner sneezed and scuffed at the mud around his cracked knee boots with the ferrule of his silver-headed cane. "One can be a scant yard away and yet miss by an entire universe. Or a full thousand miles off and yet still be able to reach out and grasp your target."
Christina gave the old man a look that would have frozen boiling soup on the stove. "I never met anyone, Doc, that talked more damned horsefeathers than you do."
"My dear madam, I must…"
He turned and met her eyes, and his voice faded away like rainwater down a storm drain.
"Doc, we're here in this endless rain. Cold and wet. Two men, two women, a boy and an old, old fool, going after we don't even properly know what. But it took away Ryan Cawdor, who is about the scariest person I ever met. Him and Krysty sliced from the air. We've lost their trail."
J.B. interrupted her. "We agreed we had to go after them."
She pointed a finger at him, as though it were a lightning rod. "Fuck that, John Dix. Fuck you, too. Fuck all of you to hell and back."
Jak had fallen silent, sheathing his knife. "Couldn't not go," he muttered.
"Sure. Couldn't not go! Couldn't leave an old friend. Drag your pregnant wife up mountains in the rain, facing a shitty death in the dirt. You can do that, Jak Lauren, can't you?"
THE RAIN PERSISTED all through the afternoon, turning hollows into puddles, puddles into pools, the beds of dry creeks into streams, streams into frothing torrents of muddy water that tore at the roots of trees and filled with plants and the corpses of small, helpless creatures.
Jak managed to calm his wife, hugging her close as they all cowered in a makeshift shelter of broken branches. Mildred dozed off, head against Dean's shoulder. The boy had hardly spoken since hearing the news of his father's disappearance, and seemed to be slipping away into a dark world of his own. His face remained blank, eyes like stone.
J.B. had gone out before evening completely closed off the day's light and scouted along the trail they'd been trying to follow, which was leading them deep into a maze of arroyos and ravines.
But the weather had defeated him.
The rain battered down in a solid wall. J.B. remembered one of the Trader's stories. He'd never really believed it, but now it suddenly seemed to be entirely possible.
Jimmy McCluskey had been a top gunner on War Wag Two. Everyone suspected him of having a mainline jolt habit, but he was always too clever to get caught at it. Then he started showing the symptoms of one of the horrific diseases that still clung to a malevolent life in dark corners of Deathlands. This one was known as "trips."
According to the Trader's version of McCluskey's ending, the man had realized that all that remained of his life would be short, brutish and painful.
It had been raining like it was now.
The way it was told, McCluskey had gone out alone at night and stood in the open, head back, face turned to the dark heavens, mouth gaping wide, hands down at his sides.
And drowned.
As J.B. picked his way through the dripping, dank wilderness, he thought about the story. At times it almost seemed like the air around him was too supersaturated with water for a man to be able to breathe.
When he got back, he woke Mildred.
"Anything?" she asked, rubbing her eyes on her wet sleeve.
"No. Any tracks there might have been are long gone now."
"So?"
"Sleep. Wake up and it'll have stopped raining. And we go on deeper. Until we find them."
Mildred smiled at him. "Then we rescue them and go home safe and live happily ever after."
"Yeah. Something like that."
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE ATMOSPHERE IN the stickies' camp was thoroughly miserable. Although nobody actually came and told the prisoners, they saw the corpse of the young man that Charlie had maimed being carried away in a crude litter, uncovered rain pattering down into his staring eyes.
"Guess he must have bled to death," Red Folsom said.
"Got what you wanted," Helga taunted, nudging Harold.
But the fat young man ignored her.
The day dragged on in a strange, desultory sort of way. There was a ceaseless rain, skirling around the canyon, making it hard to see more than fifty yards in any dire
ction. It was coming off the cliff above the ancient dwellings in a solid sheet of dull silver, pouring down into the river that was widening among the trees.
Charlie kept away from them. Food was brought in what was probably the middle of the day. It was the same sort of hot, spiced stew.
"Get used to it, Ryan," Abe said with a cackling laugh.
"This all there is? Well, I guess I've eaten a lot less and a whole lot worse."
Red grinned mirthlessly. "Sure. The finest stew in the finest stickie camp in all Deathlands."
Helga wiped her metal dish clean with a hunk of corn bread. "This place serves beans well done, beans medium rare, beans over-easy, beans on the side, bean salad, chicken-fried beans and refried beans. I leave anything out?"
"Yeah," Danny said, lying awkwardly on his right side to take any pressure off his broken ankle. "You forgot something, Helga."
"What?"
"Just plain beans."
RYAN TRIED TO TALK to the other captives, weighing them up, trying to figure how they might react when the firing pin came down.
Danny, despite his pain, was more than ready to do what he could.
"Trouble is, Ryan, it's little I can do."
There was no doubt about Helga. Just put a sawed-off in her hands and a box of 12-gauge shells, and she'd take out an army of stickies.
"Heard trouble was around," she said, "but I didn't figure it for stickies. Neighbor to the west, away from Jak and Christina's spread, lost cattle and a couple of his men to a sickness. Wondered if there was lepers traveling through."
"Lepers! Fireblast, I haven't heard of them since I was in my teens. Thought they'd died off."
Helga shook her head, brushing away an importunate blowfly. "Nope. We get all sorts of crazies." She poked the Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman with her toe. "That right, isn't it, preacher man? Some real crazies."
He turned away from her, presenting his back in its tight broadcloth suit.
Helga grinned at Ryan, making a jerk-off movement with her right hand.