by James Axler
“Just what you see, sir,” Professor Finesse said from behind the counter in the kitchen area. He was a courtly middle-aged man with exaggerated mustachios and a fawn suit coat over a white shirt with a frilled front and a string tie. His top hat, which matched his coat, rested crown-down by the sink. “A troupe of performers, making our way across the Deathlands.”
Ryan grunted.
With a bit of a trill a rangy orange tabby jumped up on Krysty’s leg.
“Belphegor,” Madame Zaroza said sharply from her chair. “You be good, now.”
Krysty smiled at her. “He’s not bothering me.”
His claws bit slightly through the faded blue denim of her jeans. She didn’t mind; she could tell they were not all the way retracted. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, or even clinging on. It was obviously just the way he was.
“Thank you, Draco,” Madame Zaroza said to the enormous lizard mutie, who had just poured her a cup of steaming tea from a big white-painted, cast-iron teapot.
“Might as well call me Gordon,” Draco said, moving on to pour for Mildred.
“Tut, tut, Draco,” Madame Zaroza said, wagging a finger. “We’ve got marks here. We don’t use real names.”
He frowned. His face had fewer mimetic muscles than a normal man’s, but he managed to get a lot of mileage out of them. His eyes were amber-colored and actually had lashes. They were oddly pretty, Krysty thought. Especially by contrast to the dull green-and gold-scaled rest of him.
“I thought that, under the circumstances—”
She gave him a look. He shut his big saw-toothed jaw with a clack.
With surprising delicacy for his bulk and build Draco pivoted to pour for Krysty, who stood with her back to a bookshelf between J.B. and Ryan. Though spacious for a recreational vehicle, the room was crowded. Jak, naturally, insisted on restlessly prowling around outside, searching for threats. Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Doc and Ricky were all inside. As was most of the traveling show troupe they’d encountered in their scrum outside. The show folk had not obeyed their boss’s instruction to go to bed, and she hadn’t pressed the issue.
Krysty had no idea how Madame Zaroza managed to find fuel for the giant Winnebago, much less her other motor wags. No doubt it was converted to burn alcohol, and probably other fuels, as well, like a lot of wags were these days.
“Are these people marks?” asked the double-long limbed boy. He and his obvious twin sister stood together behind Madame Zaroza. Their dark eyes were wide in dark-olive faces.
“Everybody’s a mark, properly considered,” Madame Zaroza said. “Even these folks. Though not now.”
She dragged in smoke, then pensively let it out. “Right now, looks like we’re the marks for them.”
“Are you coldhearts?” asked the spider-limbed girl twin. She seemed more thoughtful than her brother.
“Mebbe,” Madame Zaroza replied, “but I wonder. Tall, dark and dangerous there is too good-looking for a coldheart. Come to think of it, so’s the redhead. Women who look like that don’t stay looking like that long running with coldhearts. Unless they get kept more or less intact to sell on to slavers.”
“I assure you, Madame Zaroza,” Doc said in his most formal tones, “we are no coldhearts.”
“At least not your usual run of coldhearts,” Mildred said.
“So what is your gig?” Madame Zaroza asked. “I’m guessing this isn’t a straight jack-up? Because we’d have gotten to the point by now.”
“Not exactly,” Ryan said. “You got something that doesn’t belong with you. We’re here to take it back.”
She nodded. “Well, Sleeping Beauty warned us you were coming for that, yes.”
“‘Sleeping Beauty,’” repeated Ricky, who stood behind Ryan. “That’s the lady in the painting? On the side of the wag?”
“Yes.”
“And you said she said we didn’t mean you any harm, too. Is she a doomie?”
“Well, you’re sure full of questions, aren’t you? Yes, she is.”
“Indeed, Madame Zaroza,” Doc said. “I cannot help noting that a high proportion of your performers appear to be muties.”
“I’m not,” said the fur-covered man, who answered to Squatsch. In the light, the pointed tufts sticking up from either side of his skull proved to be hair. His ears were normal in size, shape and placement, though covered with the same dark fur as the rest of him except the pink palms of his hands. “I’ve got a condition called hypertrichosis.”
“I’m not,” said the slight man in tights. “I’m Stretch—what they used to call an India Rubber Man in the carny trade. I was born flexible and trained myself to the rest.”
“Masked Max—yeah, he takes his mask off sometimes—is a skilled knife thrower and nothing otherwise out of the ordinary,” Madame Zaroza said, nodding toward the man with the vest sewn with many pockets or flaps with flat hiltless knives stuck inside. “Although he can also juggle, and he throws a mean bowling pin, as well—as I believe your older friend discovered.”
With great gravity Doc mock bowed in his chair. He never spilled a drop from his teacup.
“Professor Finesse, who dosed your other friend with his patented sneezing powder and then stunned you all with one of his Patented Double-Wide Flash-Bangs, is a whitecoat, exiled from the lab community he grew up in back East.”
The man in the fawn coat bowed. “In many ways,” he said, “my life, should my background become known, would be in more perilous straits than those of our mutant brothers and sisters.”
He straightened and smiled at their clump of visitors. “No hard feelings, I trust.”
Mildred glared and sniffled. Ryan shrugged.
“Ace trick,” he said. “Worked. That time.”
“I also perform stage magic and conjuring. And of course my patent medicine will display remarkably curative properties to a diversity of ailm—”
“Can the sales pitch, Prof,” Madame Zaroza said, lighting a cheroot. “ Our twins there are Spider and Monkey. They’d been with us a year before we found out their given names were Moss and Hilary.”
“Are you muties?”
“Ricky!” Krysty said sharply.
“Sorry.”
Moss—Krysty thought he was Monkey, but wasn’t sure—alternately glared defiantly and dropped his gaze. His sister seemed more comfortable with the strangers.
“We don’t know,” she said in a clear voice. “All we know is we’re different. We’ve been on our own since we could walk and not welcomed anywhere, until we fetched up here.”
“I don’t suppose I could convince you this is all makeup,” Draco said. He had laid aside his tray and rested his finely scaled forearms on the breakfast bar.
“He’s a mutie. Sleeping Beauty, I told you about. And Catseye, of course. She’s our lookout.”
The last was a tiny young woman, who looked to be little more than a child, who crouched in a corner staring at the intruders half curiously, half fearfully from beneath brown bangs with a pair of golden eyes that were easily twice as large as a norm’s. And their pupils were indeed vertical black oval slits, like a cat’s.
“What about you?” Mildred asked.
Madame Zaroza shrugged. “I’m just the head freak-wrangler,” she said. “I ride herd on this crazy outfit, run the shows, do some sleight of hand, run a few scams on the side, do what I can to keep everybody fed and safe and the wags running. Otherwise my job is Woman of Mystery.” She said the last pointedly.
“As to why we could handle you so fast,” Masked Max said, “it’s the same reason I can throw knives and Stretch can put his heel behind his head when he’s standing up—practice.”
“It’s hard enough on my people being muties and freaks,” Madame Zaroza said. “My traveling show just barely gives them a pretext to be accepted
among norms, and that’s limited in degree and duration. Even here in Amity Springs, and that’s an accepting place.”
She sighed. “Or was. So we don’t dare hurt any of the locals. Nothing permanent, anyway. You see?”
“Yeah, well...” Ryan said. “What I saw was that you people were ready enough to put the boot in when you had us down.”
Chapter Seven
Madame Zaroza sighed theatrically. Krysty felt some of the sudden tension bleed out of the crowded room.
“We can’t afford to let the rubes feel like they can pick on us with impunity, either,” said Squatsch. His voice was surprisingly high, given his size. While he was shorter than Ryan, he was thicker and his fur made him look bulkier still. “So we got plenty experience in beating them down and teaching them a good lesson, without leaving more than bruises.”
“You see our dilemma,” Madame Zaroza said. “Anyway, though Sleeping Beauty warned us, and Catseye watched you the whole way, kept me informed of your kids creeping around my mobile home and everything, you didn’t give us time for a better plan.”
“That wasn’t rightly our intent,” J.B. said with a slight smile.
A woman came into the already-overstuffed room from the passage to the rear that no doubt led to the bedroom. She was a small but curvaceous woman with long blond hair framing a pretty face. Also she was entirely naked.
Ricky uttered a squeak like a stepped-on mouse.
“S.B.,” Madame Zaroza said, “you’re naked.”
Sleeping Beauty, who this evidently was, yawned and stretched.
“You make me wear clothes all the time, Z,” she said. “It’s not comfortable.”
“Yes,” Madame Zaroza said. “When marks are around. As they are now.”
“No,” the blonde said sleepily. “These are Dark Lady’s friends. Tol’ you.”
“Employees.”
“Whatever. I’m hungry.”
Masked Max, sans mask, reached to a kettle of washed but unpeeled and uncooked potatoes on the stove. He picked one up and without looking lofted it over his head toward the naked woman.
Without even opening her blue eyes fully, Sleeping Beauty reached up and caught it one-handed. The movement made her full breasts dance in a way that made Ricky’s eyes stand straight out of his head. Her pink nipples played hide-and-seek with her long gold ringlets.
Without a further word she turned and padded back the way she’d come. Krysty looked over to see Ryan frankly admiring the play of her well-rounded naked buttocks as she walked. Good thing I’m not the jealous type, she thought.
As if sensing her attention—or unusually self-conscious—Ryan’s lone blue eye flicked toward her. They traded smiles.
Madame Zaroza shook her head. “She’s a sweet girl, and an ace draw,” she said. “But she got no more sense than a week-old blue-tick hound pup. She sleeps a good twenty, twenty-two hours a day, like lazy old Belphegor there.”
She nodded at the orange tabby, who had settled, purring, on Krysty’s lap.
“So,” Ryan said, “where’s what you took from Dark Lady?”
The woman cocked her head at him. “Did she tell you what it is?”
“No,” Ryan said.
She laughed. “I have no earthly idea, either,” she said. “And I looked at it. Baron told me not to, of course, and of course I did. Just like I told those fool kids not to look, and of course they did.”
Moss dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet. “We did not!” his sister exclaimed in outraged tones.
“Don’t lie to me, little missy,” Madame Zaroza said. “It’s not like I won’t know.”
“Well—” It was the girl’s turn to sidle her big long-lashed eyes and scuff her foot. “I might’ve peeked. A little.”
“She picked the lock,” Madame Zaroza said matter-of-factly. “Same as I did, the moment I got alone with it once they brought it back here.”
“So, what is it?” J.B. asked. Krysty knew he was not much given to abstract curiosity—not like Ryan was, much as her man tried to pretend he wasn’t. But the Armorer was clearly hoping it would be some kind of wizard gadget.
Madame Zaroza snorted a laugh. “No clue,” she said. “Couldn’t describe it to you if I cared to try. Only thing that really matters to me or you, for that matter, or so I reckon—is that somebody’s willing to pay for it.” She yawned and rolled her shoulders.
“But your quest for the Great Whatsit is in vain here. I already passed it on to the person who hired the job done.”
Ryan’s eye narrowed to a slit of blue fire. “Are you trying to put something over on us?”
The room got tense. Before taking his blaster off Madame Zaroza, J.B. had insisted his friends’ weapons be returned to them. Though their longblasters were in a trunk outside, where Jak could keep an eye on them, everybody had his or her handblasters and knives.
“Pull back off the trigger, there, sport,” Madame Zaroza said. “I know better than that. Mebbe my children here think we could get the better of you a second time tonight. I don’t. We got paid for delivery. Even ten times that wouldn’t be worth getting even one of us chilled. Least of all me.”
“Don’t tell them, Z,” Draco said. “Mebbe they ain’t such bad sorts for locals. Mebbe they ain’t coldhearts. But they’re still rubes.”
“I already agreed to,” she said. “And, scammer or not, I’m as good as my word. Especially to a bunch of chillers like this. Anyway, I don’t owe my principal anything more than delivery of the goods.”
She tipped her head briefly to one side. “Rad-blast it, I doubt the principal would mind if I told. But I’m going to. It was Baron Sand, up to Arroyo de Bromista.”
Ryan looked at Krysty. She nodded. As far as she could tell, the woman was telling the truth. She didn’t have any kind of power that’d let her tell—not mutie stuff. But both of them trusted her intuition and her judgment.
“All right.” Ryan stood. “Reckon you might want to shift away from Amity Springs, and keep clear for a while.”
“Reckon we will,” Madame Zaroza said with a rueful smile. “We’re already ready to roll. It’s why we break down the show every night and pack it in. Never can tell when we may need a sudden change of location for our health.”
Ryan rounded up his own troop with his eye. “It’s time we shook the dust of this place off our heels,” he said. “Our employer won’t like the taste of what we’ve got to tell her any better, the staler we let it get.”
“Tell D.L. I’m so sorry,” Madame Zaroza said in a dull voice.
“D.L.?” Ryan asked.
“Dark Lady. Tell her sometimes there’s such a thing as conflicting loyalties. You know? Uh—she will.”
“Why not?” he asked.
She relaxed visibly.
“But won’t this Baron Sand get hot, you ratting him off like this?” Ryan asked.
“Baron Sand won’t care,” she said with a secretive and, Krysty thought, somewhat sad smile. “I think I can assure you of that.”
“Doesn’t sound much like most barons we’ve encountered, ma’am,” J.B. said. “The harder cases they are, the tenderer their sensibilities tend to be about that kind of thing.”
She laughed.
“You’ve just pretty much defined Baron Sand, my boy. Not a scrap like any other baron you’ve known. Expect surprises.”
* * *
“BACK SO SOON?”
It was Mikey, the more ingénue, snarkier head of Dark Lady’s titanic mutie right-hand man, calling out as Ryan and the companions walked through the swing doors. He—and of necessity his brother—stood behind the bar, where they appeared to have taken over the role of bartender for the evening. Right now he was mainly occupied washing glasses.
“Looks dead in here,” Ryan said, looking a
round the mostly empty barroom.
The scattering of customers went back to their muttered conversations or lonely beers. The three or four gaudies, which had looked up alertly if not necessarily eagerly when the door opened, visibly lost interest when they recognized the new hires.
The giant shrugged.
“Amity Springs is known for nothing if not its solid bourgeois values,” balding Bob said. “Everybody works, and goes to bed at night.”
“And if they’ve left here, definitely to sleep,” said his brother with a dirty snicker. That earned him a dirtier look from his twin. “Unless a bunch a outlanders are in town, the place drains out early.”
“Where’s your boss?” Ryan asked.
“Asleep,” Bob said.
“She said to report in when we got back,” Ryan said. “Go get her.”
Mikey sneered. “You’re not my boss.”
“We could just go up ourselves,” Ryan said. “Or stay down here and make enough noise it’d be triple sure to wake her.”
“My brother’s just being obstreperous,” Bob said wearily.
“Isn’t that a fancy word for a two-headed freak,” Mikey said.
“You know it, too. You’re not as big an ignoramus as you like to pretend.”
Before his twin could respond the balding head looked toward a pretty woman with café-au-lait skin, a brown ringlet hanging in her face from a pile of hair pinned atop her head, and a frilly dress with a blouse cut low enough to display everything short of nipples. She was playing solitaire on a table to one side of the bar.
“Ruby,” Bob called. “Run up and tell D.L. her, uh, independent contractors are here.”
She looked at him with sleepy eyes and pouted briefly with bright-red painted lips. Then she stood and trotted up the stairs.
* * *
THE GAUDY PROPRIETOR slouched in her chair with her chin sunk to her clavicle and listened as Ryan rendered his report by the light of a low-turned lamp. She made no comment or even showed sign of reaction until he mentioned the person who paid for the theft—and now had possession of the object she’d sent them to bring back.