by James Axler
The cheering from the expectant crowd dwarfed anything that had gone before, drowning out the sound of the explosive as it ripped the man's head off the top of his body, sending it a hundred feet into the night sky.
So it ended.
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE NEXT DAY was warmer, with a blue sky and a fine, drying wind blowing in from the north.
The corpse had vanished, leaving only dark smudges on the sheer face of the sandstone cliff where it had been chained.
Charlie was in a high good humor after the monstrous demonstration of his power.
"Loved it, didn't they?" he said to his prisoners, once they were outside and manacled again in the bright morning sunlight.
Ryan answered him. "Light a fire and you can be bastard certain to have every stickie in creation rolling on their backs, waving their legs in the air with pleasure."
The bitter verbal attack didn't faze Charlie. "You don't worry me, Ryan Cawdor. Talk's cheap. Only death counts. Sun's above. The stupe's body's probably around a hundred miles downstream by now. Let the little ones play some with it. Good for them to practice using their hands on norm flesh." He laughed delightedly. "Not that the poor son of a bitch had too much of that left."
THE DISTANCE JUDGEMENT of the stickies' leader was badly flawed.
The mangled, bloodless remains of Red Folsom had finished up a lot closer to the Anasazi village than a hundred miles.
Dean had gone to relieve himself after breakfast that morning, picking his way along the narrow path, deep in congealed mud after the interminable rains of the previous twenty-four hours. The boy had found his father's disappearance extremely difficult to handle, and the knowledge that they'd now lost the trail, on account of the turbulent weather, had plunged him into the depths of misery.
He felt a strong disapproval from the limping Christina Lauren, almost as if she blamed him personally for what had happened. Jak had always been real friendly, but now the albino, only a few years older than Dean, seemed embarrassed to be seen with him, constantly glancing over his shoulder to see if his wife was watching him.
Doc and Mildred had been just as nice to him as ever.
But there was something seriously wrong about J.B. The Armorer was usually calm and taciturn, seeming like his mind kept focusing inward. But since Ryan had been taken, J.B. had been on edge, unable to sit still, looking around at the sound of a raindrop dripping from a high branch, hand fumbling for the butt of his Uzi. Every time they stopped he'd be taking off his glasses, polishing them on a piece of clean rag, just like he was trying to wear the lenses away.
J.B. had been at his worst when they realized that they'd totally lost the track.
He'd clenched his fist, knuckles as white as Jak's hair, his eyes staring blankly through the soaked trees, across the valley. His lips had been moving as though he were cursing under his breath. Dean had wondered whether he'd been praying, but that didn't seem too Likely.
But now the sun was shining, and they were near a raging torrent.
It had only been a thin stream the day before, gurgling and chuckling its way over little green boulders.
Now it would be almost impossible to cross in safety, as it hurled a great arc of rainbow spray high into the early-morning air.
Dean reached a bank of loganberries and wormed his way in among them, feeding himself as he lowered his pants, wiping himself with a handful of grass then making his way down onto the flattened turf at the river's edge. He kneeled and dipped his hands into the freezing water, washing them clean.
Then he stooped farther forward to wash his face and drink a cupped mouthful from a deep pool beneath him.
"Shit a brick!"
He jumped back so fast that he was fifteen feet away before he even realized that he'd moved. The turquoise hilt of his knife was gripped in his right fist, and his lips were peeled back in a feral snarl of terrified menace.
Then his brain started to reassure him about what it was that he'd seen floating in the bright water, shimmering like the forgotten ghost of some old yesterday.
Drowned man, he thought. Go tell the others.
THE DEAD BODY WAS LAID OUT on wet grass, the remains of its face turned toward the cloudless sky and the dazzling sun that filtered through the branches of pines.
They stood around it in a silent circle, looking at the horrors that had been performed upon what had once been a man.
Doc spoke first. "Hard time he had of it," he muttered.
Christina turned away, looking over the ceaseless river, her shoulders slumped. Jak put an arm around her, but she shrugged him off and walked slowly away, back toward the smoldering embers of their overnight camp fire.
Mildred had already given the corpse a cursory checkup. "No gunshot wounds. Don't think. Course, coming some ways down the river hasn't done a lot for the condition. Massive bruising. Some breaks that might have been premortem. Done by rocks. Damage from fishes here and there. But the rest…" She spread her hands to encompass the appalling injuries that disfigured the man's body.
Doc sighed. "What can possess a human being to commit such inhuman outrages upon another?" he asked. "I fear that we are dealing with dark forces here, are we not?"
J.B. took off his spectacles and polished them, not looking at anyone else, ignoring the slab of mottled torn flesh.
"Tortured with a knife and some kind of explosive detonated or ignited in the flesh. By the pockmarks and the scorches around the wounds, I'd guess they used plain old black powder. Typical stickies' game."
Jak rejoined them, his face tense and worried. "Saw first, thought was Ryan. Not much head left."
"Explosive in the mouth. Mebbe eyes as well." J.B. stooped. "Yeah. Looks like the eyes went before he was chilled."
Mildred bent and touched the cold flesh on the inside of the upper arm. "This what stickies do?" She pointed to where strips of skin had been ripped away, bringing sections of muscle with it. Near the gaping, white-lipped wounds she could see the clear marks of tiny circular scars.
"Yeah," J.B. replied. "That's the suckers on a stickie's hands. Bastards."
"We going to bury him?" Dean asked.
The Armorer shook his head. "Came out of the river, we'll put him back in there. Don't have the time nor the inclination to open up the ground for a stranger. Best get moving."
"Think they're the same lot that have Ryan and Krysty?" Mildred straightened, rubbing absently at damp patches on the knees of her reinforced military fatigues.
"Must be." J.B. looked around. "River's in full spate. Might have carried the body a long way. But there's one thing for sure."
"What?" Dean asked eagerly.
"We follow it back upstream into the high country there, and we might just find your father."
They stood around in silence, hearing a jay noisily defending its territory, somewhere close by in the forest.
None of them referred again to the hideous state of the dead stranger.
Not in front of Ryan's son.
SCANT MILES AWAY, up the steep and tortuous mountainside, the camp of the stickies had been enjoying a quiet day in the beautiful weather. Wet clothes were laid on warm rocks to dry, parties went out to seek kindling for the fires, and the hunters left in the middle of the morning.
For Ryan, Krysty and the other prisoners, the hours drifted by slowly.
None of them spoke much. There didn't seem anything worth saying.
Ryan was preoccupied with trying to come up with some sort of plan to save his life and Krysty's. And possibly some of the others as well.
If you could once break free and reach the far side of the little bridge, then you had a fair chance of outrunning the stickies. But Charlie was more careful since Folsom's attempt to escape. Now there were patrols farther out, and guards posted on the high part of the ravine.
And the captives were never released as a group, except under the heaviest of armed guards.
Every route that
Ryan examined in his mind seemed to end in the blank wall of recapture or death. But since being chilled was going to be the final scene in about thirty-six hours, there wasn't too much for any of them to lose.
"Come up with anything, lover?" Krysty asked quietly. "Can almost hear the gears grinding in your brain."
"Nothing. Well, almost nothing."
"Prefer almost to nothing at all."
He leaned toward her, his eye raking the camp to make sure none of the stickies was paying them any particular attention. "It's a last chance. Tomorrow morning, when they get us out. Only time we're not chained together. Just grab for blasters and then run."
Krysty half smiled. "That's it?"
"Yeah. I said it wasn't—"
"Grab their blasters and run. Now I know we're in deep shit, lover."
"You got a better plan?"
"Course not. But we have to do it all together, or it's down to a big nothing."
"Sure."
"We trust everyone?"
"I don't, but I don't know who we can rely on and who we can't. And we have to tell everyone. No other way."
"Guess not."
THE LONGER RYAN WAITED to mention his threadbare plan to the rest of the prisoners, the less chance of their being betrayed. His original intention had been to speak to Helga about it first, but the craggy, freckled woman was still distraught after witnessing the horrific butchering of Red Folsom.
As it happened, his scheme was altered during the middle of the afternoon.
One of the stickies who'd been out on a hunting patrol came running down the path and across the bridge, his bare feet flapping noisily on the planks. He was sweating hard, his shirt soaked and darkened under the arms and across his belly. The creature's stringy hair was flattened against his angular skull, and the eyes goggled even more than usual.
Charlie was close by the prisoners when his subordinate appeared, and he beckoned to him. "Come on, Josh! You look like you got a mutie grizzly on your heels."
The stickie glanced fearfully behind him at that thought.
"Not, is there?"
"No, no, no. There isn't. But what brought you back here?"
"Norms coming." A doubtful pause. "Sort of norms. Men and women. We seen them."
Ryan glanced at Krysty, his heart sinking.
Charlie smiled broadly, aiming his good cheer at the captives. "Company," he said. "We must get ready to give these visitors a hearty welcome."
Chapter Twenty-Six
J.B. CALLED A HALT.
"Not a breath of wind," he said, using his fedora to fan away some of the midges that had gathered hungrily about his head.
The river still thundered at their side, but its flow had been audibly slackening during the period after noon. The heavy rain that had fallen on the higher peaks above them had now mostly found its way down to lower levels. In another twenty-four hours or so, if the fine weather held, the river would have shrunk back to being a stream again.
"Think we're on the right trail, John?" Mildred asked, slumping down, panting, on a large fallen branch.
"Who knows? Corpse had been chilled by stickies. Stickies got Ryan and Krysty. River comes from this way. Been no other side watercourses coming in on either side."
Christina was suffering most of all on the arduous trek. The rain had turned what would normally have been a difficult climb into one that constantly verged on the impossible.
Again and again they had to negotiate fallen trees, their roots washed away in the downpour. These had sometimes formed themselves into a malign tangle, twenty feet high or more, and completely blocked their access to higher ground. Each one took up to an hour to negotiate.
With her heavy surgical boot, the woman normally found that even a long hike on a broad flat trail tired her out.
Jak repeatedly urged her to go back to their base camp and wait for them.
"I'm not pretending I like this," she scolded her young husband, "but I'll go where you go. And that's that."
"I only…"
She pointed at him, with a hand that trembled with fatigue. "I will not give up all my hopes for our future and see them turned to ashes, Jak Lauren. I tell you I will not."
And she turned away to hide her tears.
Doc cleared his throat and coughed. "If I may so, Christina, I find you the most admirable and courageous woman that I have ever had the honor of meeting. Were I wearing a hat I would most certainly doff it to you."
"I'd second that," Mildred said. "We all got us a tough row to hoe. We stick together and we reach the end safe and unharmed."
"Hope you're right, Mildred. And thanks for the kind words, Doc. You're not so damned bad, yourself."
J.B. was prowling around like a caged puma, head back, scenting the air. Dean watched him, putting his own face to the wind, sniffing to try to see what was bothering the Armorer. But all he could smell was the familiar flavor of the sun on the pine trees. A rich, resinous scent.
"Don't like it," J.B. suddenly said.
"What?" Mildred asked.
"Just got that itching feeling, clear up my spine. I don't know what it is. Someone's watching us from hiding."
"Are you sure?" Doc queried.
"No. Never sure until the bullet hits you and you're down in the long grass, flat on your back, staring up at a china-blue sky. That's when you get to be certain about it."
"But you think—"
Jak interrupted. "Got same feeling. Could be stickies close."
"Could be," J.B. agreed. "Just have to be triple-red careful."
"Thought we already were," Christina said.
"YOU THINK IT MIGHT BE your friends coming?" Helga spoke quietly, not wanting to draw the attention of the cautious Charlie.
Ryan shook his head. "Could be. Normally in this sort of situation, they'd be on a triple-red careful patrol. But they reckon they're after ordinary stickies. Might not worry so much."
Krysty was next along the manacled line and she leaned in closer. "That storm would hold them up on tracking us."
"Yeah. Mebbe wash the trail out altogether."
So, how will they find us? How will anyone find us?
Ryan strained to look over the far side of the ravine where the ambush was already laid. "It's not going to make much difference, anyways. Those fireblasted stickies are ready and waiting for them. Whoever they are."
THEY HEARD THEM before they saw them.
Charlie was leaning against a tumbled wall, suckered tongue darting out to moisten his fleshless lips. His almond-shaped brown eyes were alight with private enjoyment.
He kept turning toward Ryan, who did everything he could to avoid meeting the malevolent grin.
Krysty had uncommonly keen hearing and she was first to hear the sound. "Listen," she said. "Listen."
Charlie straightened, the smile vanishing. "Yeah, Firetop. I can hear it, too. But what the blood smoke is it?"
Then Ryan caught the faint noise. "Yeah. I got it. But I don't—"
He shut his mouth abruptly, afraid that he might inadvertently let slip his own relief that the strangers weren't J.B. and the rescue party.
It was a kind of singing, chanting, arrhythmic, like a song sung by a staggering man.
And there was another odd sound that was riding along in the background, like someone clapping their hands together at irregular intervals.
Ryan looked at Krysty, who shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. "No idea, lover. Except I know for sure it's not—" she caught his warning glance, picked up on it and didn't miss a beat "—the local baron and his sec men riding in to rescue us."
Charlie had been listening. "You can stake your fiery scalp on that one," he said. The stickie was so delighted with the imminent success of his plan that he was actually hugging himself with his long, thin arms.
The singing was louder, nearer.
And the slapping noise was more clear. Ryan thought of Mex women turning dough on a large flat, sun-warmed stone.
&nb
sp; Krysty remembered Harmony ville, and the sound of a large fresh salmon being thrown down onto a kitchen table by her uncle, Tyas McCann, come back flushed with success from a day's fishing.
It was the Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman who recognized it first.
"Fladgies," he said, his face contorting with contempt and disgust.
And then it all made sense.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"FLADGIES" WAS THE common name for the small groups of religious extremists who traveled through Deathlands. Their particular milieu was in the areas of the desert Southwest, concentrating their activities in the wilder regions of what were once the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, West Texas and Southern California.
The name was a diminutive of the word flagellant. Old predark dictionaries said that was someone who was preoccupied with the act of whipping, either as part of an extreme religious experience or as a way of heightening sexual and erotic pleasure.
The fladgies would go about punishing one another—and themselves—with a variety of whips, often tipped with glass or metal. The more the blood flowed, the more the fladgies felt they were worshiping their particular god.
In the past few years these grossly aberrant practices had virtually died out, often as a direct or indirect result of overenthusiasm on the part of the fladgies.
Ryan had, oddly, never actually seen a living fladgie. Once during a trip with the Trader they'd encountered a group of bounty hunters, who'd seen a trio of the religious extremists a week earlier up on the Brazos, and had come across their butchered corpses a few days later.
The Trader had spoken about them. He had been revolted by their self-mutilating excesses and had said that he'd be happy to put a full-metal-jacket round through the skull of any he saw. "Speed them on the way to meet their Maker," he'd said, laughing.
And here they were, appearing on the brink of the cliff across the valley, like a quintet of ragged scarecrows.