Moon Fate

by James Axler

  "Sure. I'm real pleased." Ryan stopped, halting the others. "I know Christina is pissed at me, Jak. And I understand. Really."

  "Had bad times, Ryan. Now good times come. Doesn't want to lose that."

  "Yeah. She sees me as some kind of snaggle-toothed ghost come beckoning to you from the grave. Once this is over, we'll be gone."

  "How about rebuilding the spread?" J.B. said. "Lot of work."

  Ryan looked at the teenager. Jak sighed and ran his hand through the unruly mop of pure white hair. "Use help. Think Christina would be okay. Once danger's gone. Talk to her. I will."

  J.B. was sniffing the air. "Smell something," he said, bringing up the Uzi.

  "What? Smoke?"

  "No. Just like…something sort of rotting. Like bodies, but not quite the same."

  "Now that could be something that Krysty was seeing." Ryan hesitated a moment. "Jak left, and J.B. right. Skirmish line and I'll take the middle. Triple-red alert."

  THE HIGHWAY DIPPED and swept left in a gentle curve, revealing a huddled cluster of buildings in the dis­tance. Close by was the ruins of a gas station, the Exxon sign broken off in a jagged stump eight feet from the ground.

  There was a small group of people sitting close to­gether by the stained concrete base of the derelict heap of rubble.

  "Lepers," J.B. said.

  They all stopped, looking at them. Ryan counted six. At a distance of a hundred feet or so it wasn't possible to make out any details of sex or age.

  "Take them out from here?" the Armorer sug­gested. "Burst from the blaster'll chill most of them. Pick off the rest with the Steyr."

  A couple of the lepers stood, the ragged hoods drawn over their stooped heads. One was holding what looked like an M-16, but it was at the trail. There didn't seem any sense of threat or defiance. Just a slumped, hopeless defeat.

  The Trader's rule had been steel hard. "Take them out. Dead man hurts nobody."

  Ryan had survived in Deathlands long enough to recognize the validity of that inflexible commandment. Common sense said chill the little gang of lep­ers. He assumed that they were the miserable bunch of survivors from their failed attack on the stickies who'd picked their way up the steep trail and had now col­lapsed from exhaustion or hunger.

  "Hold fire," he said. "Cover me."

  "No," J.B. argued. "You know Trader's way. Safe way."

  "They look a threat to you? Fireblast, J.B., we can't chill everyone we meet!"

  "They're lepers, Ryan. Bad news." Jak had re­trieved his Magnum and held it drawn and cocked.

  "Wait here." Ryan stepped forward, the heels of his combat boots ringing out bravely on the surface of the blacktop.

  One of the other lepers held up his right hand in what might have been a gesture of friendliness. Or of warning. Only half of the middle finger remained on the hand.

  "You got food?" came the croaking voice.

  "Enough for us. Nothing to give."

  "We're starving."

  "We give you our food and we starve. That's the way it is."

  "Help us."

  "Can't."

  Now he was a scant thirty feet from them. Close enough to make out the details.

  One of the lepers lying down had the slack, dis­carded, unmistakable appearance of a corpse. An­other seemed to be unconscious, with a massive stain on the front of his coat that was obviously a mixture of old and fresh blood. A third was squatting, back to Ryan, trying to knot some rags around a gaping knife wound to the face.

  The three standing and looking at him were all male. The other leper, who had remained sitting, seemed to be female, but she was ignoring him, hands wrapped about herself as though she was trying to combat a deep and bitter cold.

  "We got no place to go."

  The voice was thick and difficult to understand.

  Ryan looked hard at the speaker. "Then stay right here."

  "We got stickies after us."

  "Why?" Ryan asked, pretending he didn't know about their attack on the encampment.

  "They figure we harmed them. Some shitting load of stickie lies."

  Ryan nodded sympathetically. "Know how it is."

  "Just the three of you?"

  "No. Another half dozen back in the trees, waiting for me to call them on."

  "They got food?"

  Ryan moved a few steps closer. "I told you. We got no food."

  "But we—"

  "Tell you a second thing. We know how you sneaked up on the stickies' place and tried to massa­cre them all. Not our business. But we know."

  The leper threw back his hood, revealing a face that had been hideously ravaged by the disease. His nose and ears were gone, as was most of his upper lip and part of his cheeks.

  "You see what God's done to us, mister. Can you blame us for trying—"

  "Keep getting told the ways of God are strange," Ryan replied. "And I don't blame you for anything you did."

  "Then why…"

  He held up a hand. "One other thing you should know. Those same stickies are coming after us like goose shit off a shovel. Be here in a couple of hours or so. If I was you, I'd move my ass before they get here. Stickies aren't known for their forgiving nature."

  The woman seemed to explode from the ground in a bundle of tattered rags and flying dust.

  Ryan glimpsed a hairless, misshapen skull, and a face with a weeping raw hole at its center.

  He also saw the sunlight glinting off the broad-bladed knife she gripped clumsily in her right hand.

  Though he'd been ready for an attack as he'd walked down the narrow highway toward the old gas station, Ryan had been lulled into a false sense of se­curity by the apathetic and defeated air of the little group of survivors.

  But the leper woman stumbled, catching her foot in the cloak of the man with the slashed face. The quar­ter-second delay was enough for Ryan.

  The SIG-Sauer coughed once, and his attacker flew backward, feet flying in the air, hitting the dirt with her shoulders. Most of the rear part of her skull had been blown away by the 9 mm round.

  The knife was hurled into the air, whirling with a strange slowness, before it came tinkling back to earth again.

  "Stupid," Ryan said through gritted teeth. "That was stupid."

  "Gabrielle was always real stupid," said one of the other lepers, looking sorrowfully down at the twitch­ing corpse.

  "Ryan?" The shout came from J.B., farther up the blacktop.

  A wave of the hand to reassure him and Jak that everything was under control. Though Ryan knew in his heart that he'd been a lot luckier than he'd truly deserved.

  "You going to chill us all?"

  "No."

  "Do us a favor."

  "I'm not in the business of doing fucking favors!" Ryan knew as he shouted that his anger was mainly directed at himself.

  "We got two dead. One gut-shot and floating into the big dark. What kind of stinking chance the four of us got?"

  "Chance to take some long steps out of here. Move now and you'll mebbe find a place to hole up for dark. Could be the stickies might miss you."

  "How about him?" one of the hooded figures asked, pointing to the leper with the caked blood across his coat.

  "Dying."

  "Give him a bullet, mister. Least you can do for us."

  "You got a carbine. You do it. Your friend, not mine."

  "Empty."

  Ryan was tired of wasting time. He stepped in and kneeled, his eye watching for another piece of treach­ery, placed the four-and-a-half-inch barrel of the handgun behind the dying man's ear and squeezed the trigger. The head bounced and a splatter of blood and brains appeared on the dirt.

  "There. Now get out of here."

  Still trying to wind the crimson strips of rag around his face, the other wounded leper rose to his feet. And all four of them began to move wearily off along the road, toward the cluster of buildings.

  "Don't even think about stopping in that town­ship," Ryan warned. "We'll be there, and we'll chill
anyone in the way. Just walk on."

  The spokesman turned. "You said stickies was coming. That a lie?"

  "No. Truth. But we're goin' to be ready for them. So long."

  "But you—"

  Ryan pointed the gun at the man's chest. "So long," he repeated.

  Slowly, looking to be in the last stages of exhaus­tion, the four lepers trudged away, following the blacktop, leaving the corpse of their colleagues where they lay.

  Ryan watched them until he was sure they weren't going to dodge into the buildings and try to hide. Then he lifted the SIG-Sauer and waved J.B. and Jak toward him.

  "Bring the others!" he shouted. "Let's get ready for the stickies."

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  "DO LIKE I WANT."

  "No."

  "Want me to beg?"

  "No."

  "So, I'll beg you, Ryan."

  "Still no."

  "Please. Just leave me here with some water and a handful of jerky. Blaster and enough ammo so I can spare one for myself at the ending. You know that's what makes sense for everyone."

  Abe was hovering on the edge of delirium, drifting in and out of madness. When he was sane he would argue logically that Ryan and the others should go on while they had a chance and leave him behind. When his fever soared he would shout at them to get out and abandon him. Like he'd do to them if he only could get a lucky break.

  Mildred had finally had to control him physically by binding his wrists and ankles to keep him still on the stretcher.

  Ryan left her with Dean, Christina, Jak, Harold and Dorina while he went with Doc, Krysty and J.B. to explore what remained of the tiny township of Bear Claw Ridge.

  SEVERAL OF THE constituent parts of the township had already collapsed. The offices and restaurant of the Overlook Resort Motel had tumbled into ruins, showing the scorched signs of an ancient fire. The nearby vacation cottages had also long gone, ab­sorbed into the wilderness. Some of them had been ranged along a cliff to the northwest, doubtless with wonderful views of the setting sun. But the earth tremors during the long winters had felled tens of thousands of tons of rock into the abyss below, tak­ing many of the cottages with it.

  All that remained was a squat, single-story shack of rotting wood, its sign still proclaiming that it had been called Verne's Place. Doors and windows were gone, and the shingle roof had fallen in. A rattler glided away from under the old porch as they approached.

  Part of the SkyHi Mall still stood. It had been two floors, divided into a number of small boutiques, but it looked as though one of the quakes had rocked it off its foundations. It leaned like an elderly dowager, complaining that it was old, ill, terrified and drunk.

  And there was the Beacon Multiplex Cinema.

  Rectangular and sturdy, its wind-washed concrete shell was the only place in the tiny settlement that had kept itself together.

  The outer glass doors were long gone, shattered into a million shards of bright crystal. But the inner doors had been armored, layered with protective wire. They'd been cracked and splintered, and they showed the signs of some serious attacks, but they still stood against the elements.

  The Beacon was where Ryan had helped to carry the wounded Abe.

  "We could separate and scatter through the shop­ping mall," J.B. said thoughtfully. "Wait and pick them off."

  Ryan shook his head. "Building's double danger­ous. You move a hand, and you got the roof girders in on top of you."

  Doc was shaking his head in amazement. "This takes me back, my dear friends. Oh, so far back, to such happy times with my dearest Emily."

  "You came up here?" J.B. asked.

  "Not here, John Barrymote, but to places like it. In far Montana and in the snowy fastness of Colorado. The hotels then were not gimcrack little tinplate boxes. They were grand. Giant trees ranged around the lobby and balconies in serried rows. Magnificent. Did I tell you of the barge wherein she sat, with…" His voice trailed away as he was swallowed up by his own be­wilderment.

  Ryan took the silence. "Abe's worse. Mildred reck­ons he has to rest."

  "It's down to numbers." J.B. looked around. "They come at us in the dark, then they can do us some serious damage."

  "You mean that they might kill some of us," Doc said. "I have always been fascinated at the euphe­misms employed by dealers in death. High body count. Necessary removal. Large-item discounting. Successful site clearance. When all that is meant is the deliberate destruction of other human beings. Now you calmly stand there and say that there could be 'serious damage' to us."

  The Armorer listened to the old man's outburst. "Comes down to the same thing, Doc. Flat on your back and rain in your open eyes. We all know about that, don't we?"

  Doc sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Yes, yes, of course, my dear fellow. But we all know that talk is cheap, while the price of action is utterly colos­sal."

  Ryan looked around once more, trying to visualize the appearance of the stickies, and worked out in his mind how dark it might be before they reached the crest of the trail and looked down the blacktop into Bear Claw Ridge.

  "Time's running through our fingers," he said fi­nally. "Let's go talk to the others."

  ABE WAS UNCONCIOUS.

  Mildred had reported that this wasn't necessarily terminally bad news.

  "Partly delayed clinical shock. The bullet went in, through and out, and I still don't think it did Abe any life-threatening injury. But there could be some internal hemorrhage. No bowel motions, so I can't be that certain. So, Abe could come out of the shock syn­drome in around twenty-four hours."

  "Or?" The monosyllabic question came from Ryan.

  "Or he'll be dead sometime tomorrow morning. Before noon is the likely prognosis."

  "And if Abe's moved?" This came from Chris­tina.

  Mildred looked at her in the gloom of the old cin­ema. "I believe it would mean his death. The shaking would do it."

  Ryan coughed. "In any case, all of us moving with Abe isn't really a viable combat option. Slow us down too much. Did a recce the far side of the ville. Trail goes back down someplace. Very steep and narrow. Stickies would take us easily by first light. If not be­fore."

  Christina spoke again. "That's a path that comes eventually to Brightwater Canyon. Get back toward the desert floor that way. Comes out between our spread and Helga's place."

  "You know the way?"

  "Sure, Ryan. Born and raised."

  Her answer decided him on what he knew they should do for the greatest good for the greatest num­ber of them.

  "All right, everyone. This is the way it'll be. Don't waste time arguing about it. I'm staying here with Abe."

  There was a moment of silence in the vault of the multiplex, which was broken by J.B. "Tough on your own. I'll stay with you."

  Harold broke in, the familiar worried, whining tone back in his voice. "You mean we go on and hope the stickies follow us?"

  Dorina slapped him on the wrist. "Don't be a stupe, Harold."

  "Why?"

  "Carrying Abe, they'll be on us anytime now. We can move real fast without him."

  "And Christina knows the country. If we play it right, then the stickies won't bother looking around the ville here. You get clear. They give up. We come out safe." Ryan looked at Krysty, knowing what he'd see in her eyes.

  "I'll stay with you," she said.

  "I'll remain with you," Doc offered.

  "You and me, Ryan." J.B. glanced at the others. "Got to be me."

  Ryan stood and stamped his feet, the steel tips on his boots striking sparks off the stone floor. "Charlie isn't your usual stickie. Too many drop out, and he might read it on the trail. Take the stretcher and drag it with you. Could help fool him. J.B., you have to go. Need a top gun with the group."

  "Why can't I stay?" Krysty asked.

  Ryan sighed and closed his eye, fighting anger. "Because I don't want to risk you getting chilled. This is some seriously dangerous shit."

  "That's why I offered
, lover."

  "Dean'll need you, if anything happens to me in here."

  "I need you, you triple-stupe bastard!"

  She spun on her heel and ran out.

  Christina broke the uncomfortable stillness. "Only really one person who can stay with you here, isn't there, Ryan?" Her voice rose. "Isn't there, Ryan?"

  Chapter Forty

  PARTINGS WERE SWIFT and painful.

  Jak had already slipped away, returning with the report that Charlie and the stickies were still a fair distance down the trail. But they seemed to be mov­ing faster as the sun dipped behind the snow-tipped western peaks.

  "How long?" Ryan asked.

  The red-orange sky had tinted the teenager's white hair a fiery crimson, almost the same color as Krysty's. His eyes glittered like rubies in a furnace.

  "Hour. To trail head. Mebbe longer to here. Mebbe not."

  "You look to see if the lepers have gone?" J.B asked.

  "Yeah. No sign. But track's twisting and lots trees. Double red."

  "Better go," Krysty said. "We stay too long, and all this is for nothing."

  There was a depth of cold in her voice that Ryan had hardly ever heard before. It crossed his mind that she could see some sort of disaster striking them and wasn't telling him. But he dismissed that. If there had been some unknown threat, Krysty would have told him.

  She kissed him on the cheek, once, like the brush of a moth's wing.

  "You better come through this safe, lover," she said with something that might almost have been a half smile.

  Almost.

  Christina was bright and brittle, seeming like she was holding on to the last shreds of self-control by a single ragged fingernail. She smiled a lot and kept hugging Jak, patted Ryan on the shoulder and urged him to look after her man. She mentioned her preg­nancy several times, looking around the dank build­ing with eyes that brimmed with unshed tears.

  Dean offered his hand for Ryan to shake, keeping his lips from trembling as he said goodbye.

  "All goes well, son, and I'll be back with you in a day. Two at the outside."

  Mildred embraced Ryan and Jak, kneeling to check the pulse of the unconscious Abe.

  "He could let go the hold anytime," she warned. "Best keep a good watch."