by James Axler
"No. Not that I remember."
They waited for the moment to cross an open space, by the hissing remains of the biggest of the stickies' camp fires.
The doorway to Charlie's house was pitch-black, with no sign of life within.
A woman ran past Ryan and Krysty, holding her severed left hand in her right hand, blood jetting in spurts from the raw wound.
A musket cracked to the left of the valley and someone cried out with shock and anger.
Ryan glanced at Krysty. "Now," he said.
Just as they reached the entrance, a tall stickie came out, holding the butt of a musket. The barrel was missing.
He looked up, recognizing Ryan in the gloom. "You the One-eye went with good old Marcie." A puzzled look clouded the mutie's eyes. "Hey, how come you…"
Ryan and Krysty stabbed him at precisely the same moment, almost as though they'd been rehearsing the move for weeks.
The man went down like a sack of coal, dropping stone dead without a sound at their feet.
They slipped out of sight into Charlie's home, finding a small brass oil lamp still burning.
All their weapons were there, lying on the top of an old oak chest at the foot of a double bed.
Less than a half minute later they rejoined the others.
Chapter Thirty-Four
"WHICH WAY WE going to get out?"
The Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman was the biggest block of shadow in the building, and his voice was the loudest.
"Next time you shout like that, I'll cut your damned throat, preacher," Ryan snarled, peeking around the corner of one of the windows to watch what was happening out in the teeming night.
It seemed as though the stickies still had the edge. The downpour made it hard to see, the rain mingling with the smoke from the fires and the muskets.
But there seemed to be a lot less shooting and screaming.
Ryan gave his rifle to Abe, keeping the SIG-Sauer for his own use. Krysty held on to her 5-shot Smith & Wesson. After some thought Ryan gave Jak's big .357 Magnum to Harold, keeping the teenager's precious throwing knives for himself.
The captured blades went to Dorina and to Joe-Bob Jarman, who complained in an endless monotone. "Leaving a man of God without a weapon against them that threaten me. I need more than a fucking rod and staff to comfort me with lepers and stickies and Christ knows what else is running around in this valley of the fucking shadow of death. You give the blasters to women and to a fat kid."
"Don't call me 'kid,' Reverend," Harold warned, a new note of confidence in his voice.
"Cut it out."
"Which way we going to go?" Dorina was trembling with excitement at the thought that they might actually escape from the stickies.
"Shortest route isn't always the best one to take. This rain'll swell the stream in an hour or so. Charlie'll expect us to go back down the valley. Quickest way out. So, we go up."
"Up?"
Ryan tightened his knuckles on the butt of the blaster. "Yeah, Harold. Try listening so I don't have to keep saying the same thing. We go across the bridge and then move up the farther side of the valley. All right?"
"Sure, Ryan, sure."
THE SUDDEN ERUPTION of gunfire out of the black night had awakened Mildred, Dean, Jak and Christina. As usual, Doc was locked into a long-ago dream of an endless summer yesterday and proved harder to wake.
"Upon my soul, are we under attack from some nameless entity?"
"No. Guns up the mountain."
"Might it be Dad breaking out from the stickies' camp?" Dean asked.
Jak shook his head. "Shooting isn't moving around like they chasing anyone."
Mildred looked at J.B. "You make out what it is, John?"
The Armorer stood still, eyes closed, head on one side. "There's some muskets and some carbines. An M-16 and I think I heard an Uzi. No. Figure that somebody's attacking the stickies." And he thought of the group he'd heard moving quietly north earlier in the night.
"Who?" Christina asked. "Apache? Navaho? Mexes? Or just the usual renegade bastards?"
"Can't tell. Seems like…dark night! Now it's starting to rain again."
"We going up there?"
J.B. looked at the boy. "Sure we are, Dean. Fast as we can."
FOR A FEW MINUTES the storm seemed to have passed by.
Someone threw gasoline on one of the dying fires, bringing it back to a brilliant, roaring life. The sight obviously cheered the stickies and took more of the heart out of the attacking lepers.
It also made it more risky for Ryan and the others to leave their hiding place and break across the camp for the relative safety of the higher ground farther up the valley.
They watched as scenes from the tableaux of life and death—mainly death—were played out around them.
They saw Charlie twice, and Abe leveled the Steyr at the stalking, hunting figure, his finger moving to settle on the trigger.
But Ryan laid a hand across the sights. "No. Not when we're so close to making it clean away from here."
Abe nodded, but he still followed the stickies' chief, keeping the blaster trained on the shock of yellow hair.
It looked like Charlie was searching for someone, and they all knew who that was.
After he'd gone, they saw a skirmish line of a dozen or so lepers picking their way haltingly along the line of buildings, opening fire at anything that moved. Or looked like it had moved.
"Boy! It's as though they've opened the gates on every crip's home in Deathlands," Harold commented. "Had one up in Castle Rock and you'd see them all slobbering and hobbling and being triple odd. Mostly double wrinklies, of course."
"Like to be around and see you when you get old, Harold," Krysty said coldly.
"Hope I die before that," he replied, grinning amiably.
Ryan couldn't help thinking that Harold's comment wasn't entirely unjustified. Apart from demonstrating that they shared with the stickies a virulent hatred of anyone normal, the lepers were just amazingly stupid, which made Charlie such a double freak. But lepers had the major problem that they were all rotting away—maybe only the end of a finger here and there, or the tip of a nose. Or just one ear.
But the lepers in Deathlands didn't ever get any better.
Once they'd had that telltale numbness in the extremities and began to lose a sense of what was hot and cold, it was downhill.
The group that stumbled by were typical. The classic, almost leonine heads, and the obvious lack of toes and fingers.
Most had blasters, with the traditional M-16 carbines predominating. But some had small hideaway handblasters, while others had only spears and long knives. A couple had bows and arrows, though Ryan suspected that these weren't likely to be great weapons if you didn't have a full set of fingers on each hand.
One went down right in front of the hidden watchers, a musket ball striking it through the side of the neck. The others ignored its death throes, moving toward the end of the camp where the overhang was steepest. And where most of the stickies lived.
The fire seemed to be burning even more brightly, illuminating the room where they were hiding. Joe-Bob Jarman glanced behind him and gagged in revulsion, drawing the attention of the others to what he'd just seen.
Two stickie children lay on a truckle bed. They had been stripped naked. The little girl showed the visible stigmata of having been the victim of rape. The boy had been castrated. Both had been strangled.
"Gaia!" Krysty looked at Ryan. "These sick bastards sure deserve each other."
Dorina spit on the floor. "Mebbe they'll wipe each other out, right down the line. Make for a cleaner world!"
"Rain's come back heavier still." Abe was leaning on the crumbling wood of the windowsill.
"Might still be stickies out in the woods," Ryan warned. "Anyone we see's an enemy. So shoot first and we can worry about corpses afterward"
J.B. GATHERED them around, hunching his shoulders against the downpour. "When we get
close to the camp, there could be sentries. Stickie guards. Don't hesitate. Pull down on them before they do it to you. All right? Then let's go get Ryan."
Chapter Thirty-Five
THE EXPLOSION IN the small building that held the stickies' supplies of cooking and lighting oil was devastating. It turned the wet and windy night into the brightest day.
The falling rain resembled a great wall of red and orange flames, spitting into the lake of mud. The liquid from the ruptured containers streamed everywhere, pouring into the kivas, where it also ignited, making the circular ceremonial pits look more like blazing oil wells.
The deep, echoing boom bounced around the camp, seeming to become amplified beneath the cliff. It was welcomed with wild cheers and whoops from the triumphant stickies, giving them extra courage to surge across and finally begin to drive out the surviving lepers,
"We have to go now," Ryan told his companions. "If we don't, then we could get stranded in here. Won't take Charlie long to get himself reorganized and sweep the place to find us. Think he might even bring our execution time forward for us. Just try and keep close."
"But the fire makes it easy for anyone to spot us. Perhaps we should be better advised to try and remain hidden."
Ryan closed his eye for a moment, drawing a slow breath to control his anger. "Fine, Reverend. You stay here and wait to be crucified by the stickies. Mebbe you could really enjoy that. Give you a deep and meaningless experience."
"But the rest of us is going." Abe grinned. "Here and now."
A DEAD LEPER LAY SPRAWLED half off the wooden bridge, one abbreviated hand trailing in the foaming water. It worried Ryan, as it looked like the man had been chilled while trying to escape the camp, rather than gunned down during the attack. It could mean that some of the lepers were already out ahead of them, hiding somewhere in the dank woods.
The center of the firelight was clearly away at the far end of the encampment, where the remainder of the lepers were trapped under the overhang, forced into a bloody and savage last stand. The gunfire was slowing, as victims were picked off one by one.
Ryan glanced behind them once more, making sure his little group was still together after the dash down the slope.
"Get on," Jarman shouted, "before the mutie curs see us."
The rain was sheeting down in swirling banks of water, pitting the mud and turning the puddles into frothing orange lace. Ryan picked his way up the slippery steps on the other side of the ravine, marveling at their good fortune in managing to get away without any of the stickies spotting them.
"Lose some, win some," he said over his shoulder to Abe, who was next in line.
But the skinny man was on his knees, the hunting rifle lying in the dirt. His face was contorted with pain and his hands were pressed to his stomach, low on the right side.
"Lose some," he said, making a brief try for a brave grin and failing by a distance.
"Bad?"
"Like being kicked in the kidneys by a fucking mule. Oh, jeez…"
The scream of rage from behind them was chillingly recognizable as Charlie, being told that his choice captives were off and running.
Jarman pushed by Krysty, knocking the wounded man to one side of the path. "Stand away!" he bellowed at Ryan.
If he hadn't been concentrating on how best to play Abe's injury, Ryan would have killed the preacher without hesitation.
The tall white-haired figure bounced away from them, quickly vanishing into the wet darkness near the old Visitor Center.
"Get going, Ryan," Abe said, his voice surprisingly calm and gentle.
"Shut it."
"Bad hit. Had 'em before. Tell you it's a bad one. Leave me."
"We can carry him between us," Harold offered, lifting himself up a couple more notches in Ryan's estimation.
"Won't make it very far," Krysty said.
"Yeah," Abe agreed.
A couple of bullets hissed through the night and kicked up plumes of spray behind the small group.
"Give me the rifle," Dorina suggested. "I'll keep the bastards' heads down."
"Do it," Ryan ordered.
"Leave me here, Ryan. You four can make it."
"No."
"Rain covers tracks. Go and—ohhh, hurts. Put one between my eyes, Ryan. Old times' sake. Be a friend, won't you?"
Abe was doubled right over, one foot tapping uncontrollably in the slime. He was moaning now on every indrawn breath.
Dorina leveled the Steyr and fired off three spaced rounds.
"Get any?" Harold asked.
"Difficult to see. Think one went down. Light's near impossible."
"Don't waste ammo," Ryan warned.
"Come on, man. Do it for me. I'm going to get you all chilled. Time's ticking fast."
"Cover us, Dorina. Harold, give me the Magnum. Get Abe on your back. Just as far as the top. Then I'll come and help. Can you?"
"Sure." He handed over the borrowed blaster. "Upsadaisy, Abe."
"I said—"
"Shut the fuck up, Abe," Ryan said. "Krysty, go with him. Watch for lepers up top. Or any stickies. Just watch for anyone."
Dorina fired again, this time slapping her hand delightedly on the muddied stock of the rifle. "Got one, clean through the head. Only way to take out a stickie for sure."
Harold was gone, feet splashing in the pools of water. Krysty was at his heels, her Smith & Wesson 640 ready in her right hand.
They could still hear Abe moaning, some way above them.
But now Ryan was able to focus all of his attention across the bridge, where he figured Charlie would already be trying to rally his people.
"You okay?" he asked Dorina.
"Never better. Pay back the rapists. Only way they know. Dead man rapes nobody."
They were both as wet as you can get, staring toward the Anasazi houses. The camp fire was extinguished by the storm, but the oil still blazed in a haze of yellow light and black smoke.
"Them lepers gone?"
The voice came from a stickie, who'd emerged from the thick brush at the side of the path where he must have been hiding, terrified, oblivious to the group of norms making their escapes right by him.
"Nearly squirted my shorts when I saw them. Ugly bastards!"
He was short and chubby, his sunken eyes and dark skin marking him for a breed, the product of a stickie mother and a norm father. It wasn't very often the other way around.
"Hey, I asked if—"
The penny still hadn't dropped when Ryan shot him through the bridge of the nose with the SIG-Sauer P-226. The 9 mm round exited the back of the head, taking with it a piece of bone the size of a small dinner plate. The contents of the skull were sucked out by the misshapen bullet in a great gout of brains and pale blood.
Quite literally mindless, the stickie staggered a few steps on automatic pilot, then vanished off the path, crashing back into the undergrowth where he'd been hiding.
The baffle silencer on the blaster still functioned fairly efficiently, and Dorina blinked at the muted cough, seeing the devastating effect of the single shot.
"Way to go, Ryan," she giggled.
IT WAS A CONTAINED, organized withdrawal. Under fire from the rifle, Charlie had enough combat sense to realize that he wouldn't chance a frontal attack. As the rain continued to pour down, the river was once more a raging, impossible torrent, meaning that the narrow, exposed bridge had become the stickies' only option.
Ryan waited until he felt that Krysty, Harold and Abe had been given enough time to reach the top of the steep incline, then he tapped Dorina on her shoulder and jerked a thumb upward. She put one last round in among the shadows below them and joined him, scampering agilely up the streaming steps.
There was no return fire.
Abe was laid on his back on a carpet of pine needles, under the spread branches of an enormous tree. Rain dripped around him, but he was relatively dry. The first fumbling fingers of dawn were appearing in the eastern sky. In
their pallid light, the wounded man's face seemed a sickly gray.
He looked up as Ryan and Dorina came jogging into view.
"Chill me some, lady?" he asked.
"One or two," she replied. Dorina was streaked with great gobbets of crimson mud, making her look as though she'd been on the losing end of a brawl in a slaughterhouse.
"Good on you."
Harold was leaning against the trunk of another big pinon, fighting for breath and trying to look casual about it.
Krysty grinned at Ryan. "We made it, lover. If we take turns with Abe we can still do some reasonable time. Find some place to hole up. Rain takes out the tracks."
"Any sign of the Reverend Jarman?"
She shook her head. "No. Long gone." She sucked in a great breath of the cool morning air. "Being free beats all, lover."
"We want to stay that way we'd better get moving again. Charlie won't wait forever before he sets his hounds after us."
Dorina looked around them in the widening light. "There's some tough peaks upstream. Why not go down and have the easy running?"
It was Harold who answered her question. "Ryan's right, sweet thing. Stickies goin' to figure we took the soft road. Me and Ryan can manage old Abe here for a good few hours yet."
Ryan managed to conceal his grin at the soft boy's new confidence. Wouldn't be right to tease him about it, but he knew in his heart they were setting themselves a triple-tough row to hoe by climbing north.
"What about J.B. and the others?" Krysty asked as she helped Abe painfully to his feet.
"Could be anywhere from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon," he replied, using one of Doc's favorite sayings.
IN FACT, J.B. and the others were less than a mile away, on a converging trail. All of them had blasters ready, fingers on triggers.
Minutes later it was Mildred who fired a single shot.
With a fatal result.
Chapter Thirty-Six
BEFORE MILDRED WYETH had gone into hospital for minor abdominal surgery, just after Christmas in the year 2000, she'd been one of the United States' leading authorities in cryo surgery, which was ironic when precisely those medical skills were used to freeze her after the operation went tragically awry. Mildred was to stay clinically frozen for close to one hundred years.