by James Axler
“Right,” Ryan said. “Let’s move on.”
“And just leave her?” Krysty demanded.
Ryan looked at her and shrugged. He was a hard man, because he usually needed to be.
Krysty usually did not try to temper that hardness, but when the time came, she reckoned it was part of her job.
But it was J.B. who spoke up first. “I’d like an account of what happened here,” he said. “Best way I know to have a shot at keeping it from happening to us.”
Ryan bared strong white teeth, but he nodded. The little man in the scuffed leather bomber jacket, fedora and round wire-rimmed specs was the ultimate technician of survival. He was even more purely practical than Ryan himself, and when he spoke, he spoke to the point.
Taking that as all the assent she needed, Krysty holstered her Glock 18C and picked her way quickly but carefully through the disarrayed tools. She hunkered down by the girl, who wore a simple black shift with long sleeves.
“What’s your name?” she asked gently. She mostly wanted to try to pierce the other’s veil of uncontrolled emotion before doing anything like touching her. Gentle tones and innocuous words seemed the quickest way.
The girl didn’t look at her. Her eyes were screwed so tightly shut in her snow-pale face that it almost seemed as if she was resisting attempts to pry them open. But her shivering began to slow. The rhythm of her heartbroken sobbing began to break up, like the steps of a runner slowing down.
“It’s all right,” Krysty said. “My name is Krysty and I want to help you.”
“Here, now,” Ryan protested from behind her. “Let’s not go overboard with this.”
“Out of the way, Captain Sensitivity,” Mildred said brusquely. “A healer needed here.”
“But—”
“Healer working here.”
Although Jak had butted heads with Ryan a few months back, that was all in the past now. The two had discovered the hard way how much they needed each other. Same as everybody in their little crew needed everybody else. Before, during and since that time, the other member of the group to challenge Ryan’s authority was Mildred. Krysty reckoned he endured it as much to help keep himself from getting too full of himself and thinking he was infallible—which was a sure recipe to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes, triple quick. But like every one of the companions, she had a specialty. And when she or anyone of them was engaged in his or her work, Ryan knew to back off.
The way, of course, they did with him. Mostly. Krysty had to grin to herself.
“My friend Mildred is coming to help you, too,” Krysty said—fortuitously a moment before she heard the clatter of a tool inadvertently kicked by one of Mildred’s combat boot, and a suppressed curse. “You’re safe now. Why don’t you talk to me? Tell me your name.”
An eye opened. It was brown. It looked startlingly dark in that bloodless face. Krysty had to hope that trauma and terror had drained color from her skin. Otherwise she could hardly be healthy.
The eye rolled, then fixed on Krysty. The sobbing dwindled to a sniffling.
“I—I’m Mariah,” she said.
“Are you hurt, Mariah?” Mildred asked briskly, kneeling next to Krysty. She subtly shouldered the redhead a bit to the side to make room. The two were best friends. As such, Krysty knew that when she was in full-on healer mode, Mildred was as bullheaded businesslike as her man, J. B. Dix, tinkering up a busted blaster—or using one to chill a room full of stonehearts.
“Any blood? Any broken bones? Any bad pains?”
“No,” Mariah said. She moistened her lips with a pale pink tongue. “Can I have some water?”
Mildred promptly pulled a canteen from her belt. With plenty of snow on the ground here near the Black Hills, fresh water wasn’t hard to come by. Fresh chow was another thing entirely.
“Come on,” she said. “Sit up to drink it.”
She let Krysty urge the girl to uncurl her arms from their death grip on her shins. Then Mildred firmly grasped her shoulders and pulled her up to a seated position. Krysty suspected that her friend’s bedside manner, as they would have called it in predark times, would have raised some eyebrows, but no matter how abrupt the dark, stocky woman with the beaded hair plaits might be, she treated her patients far more gently than a girl like this was likely used to. It was how the world was.
Mariah took the canteen and drank thirstily, her eyes squeezed shut. Krysty noticed that she didn’t spill a drop.
After a moment Mildred eased the canteen back from the girl’s lips. “Not too much at a time, or you’ll just throw it back up again. Breathe.”
For a moment Mariah clutched at the bottle like a nursing baby at the breast. Then she dropped her hand to her lap. Her eyes focused, first on Mildred, then Krysty again. Then they swept over Ryan, J.B., Ricky and Doc, looking in from the doorway.
Jak’s friends had put themselves in position to counter whatever threats may have lurked in the toolshed. He, of course, had moved on. His business now was to secure the rest of the small farm settlement and report back to the rest.
Mariah appeared to become more in control of herself. Some color was coming back to her cheeks. Krysty still reckoned she likely was as naturally pale as the redhead was herself.
“I’m Mariah,” she said again. “What do you want from me?”
“That’s a good question,” J.B. said, scratching his neck. Evidently deciding the scared child—she looked now to Krysty to be in her early teens—offered little immediate threat, he had tipped the barrel of his combat shotgun toward the slanted roof. “I can’t really think of a thing.”
“Information,” Ryan rasped. “What happened here? And who did it to whom?”
“What do you mean?” the girl asked.
“That’s Ryan,” Krysty said. “He’s the leader of this crew. Tact isn’t his strong suit.” She and Mildred hastily introduced the others. Mariah seemed to listen attentively, nodding shyly at each in turn.
“What our fearless leader was asking was two questions at once,” Mildred explained.
Krysty saw Ryan frown a bit at that, and she flashed him a grin.
“Why don’t you tell us what happened first?” Mildred asked.
Mariah moistened her lips, then she looked down at her hands, lying in her lap like crippled white birds.
“Stickies attacked us before dawn,” she said. “The, uh, Baylah family lived here. Actually, a few families did. They were all related to one another somehow, I reckon. I never did get it straight, and no one bothered explaining it to me. Paw and Maw Baylah owned the ’stead, though, and ran the show.
“Just all at once I woke up and there was screaming everywhere. Screams of people and animals in pain. And that awful screeching the muties make.”
“Ones with mouths anyway,” J.B. said, nodding.
“You were sleeping in your dress?” Mildred asked.
“I do a lot,” the girl explained. “In case somebody decides to rouse me out in the middle of the night to do chores.”
Krysty watched her closely. If those chores included the sort of sexual favors that were sometimes demanded as the price of boarding—even of children—she wasn’t giving the fact away in her face and manner any more than in her words.
If that sort of abuse had happened, the guilty had more than likely paid by now. For what that might be worth.
“You got away?” Ryan asked.
“I was sleeping in the pantry,” she said. “They didn’t find me. At first. But when I looked out the door to see what was happening, they spotted me. They were...feasting already and across the kitchen. I ran out the door and hid in the first place I hit.”
“This shed,” Krysty said.
She nodded. “I shut the door. They started hammering on it. Dust flew all off it—I could just see by dawn light s
eeping in through the little window. I hoped they would get tired and go away. But they knew I was there and didn’t give up. Then the door sprang open, and I curled up in a ball like the way that you found me, closed my eyes tight and started to scream.”
From the doorway, Ricky made a strangled sound.
“Relax, kid,” Mildred told him without looking around. “We know the stickies didn’t eat her.”
“Why not?” Ryan asked.
“Ryan,” Krysty said.
He raised his eyebrows at her. “What? It’s a fair question.”
Mariah just shook her head. She still didn’t look up.
“What happened to the stickies?” Ryan asked carefully, his lone blue eye on Krysty.
Mariah shook his head.
“I don’t know. The door burst open. The wind was howling. A big bunch of snow and dust blew in. And the stink—the stickie stink, and fresh blood. And worse—”
Worse likely meaning the reek of torn-open guts, Krysty knew. She was double glad the cold wind tended to carry off the charnel smell and deadened such scent as remained.
“But the stickies didn’t come in. I waited and waited to feel their...those awful sucker fingers on me. And those teeth. But it never happened. I still didn’t open my eyes because I didn’t want to see the world anymore.”
“Hard to blame you there,” Mildred said.
“Any idea what happened to the muties?” J.B. asked.
“Why?” Mariah sounded confused. “What did? I wondered if something scared them off.”
“Something chilled them,” Ryan said. “More than that—it was like they all got blown up or chopped to pieces.”
“Never seen anything like it,” J.B. added.
“And from this outlandish collection of humankind,” Doc remarked, “that is a remarkable statement indeed.”
Mariah continued to shake her head in what Krysty took for incomprehension.
“We found a man with an ax outside,” Mildred said. “We, uh, chilled him. We had to. He thought we were stickies and came rushing at us. We found stickie blood on his ax and stickie wounds on his body after we took him down.”
“That’d be Elias,” Mariah said. “He always did have a temper on him.”
“Enough to chill an entire pack of stickies?” Mildred asked. “Enough to wipe out the whole rest of the farm?”
Mariah just shook her head. “He was big and strong. And you know how men can get when the anger comes upon them.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
Jak called softly from the doorway, “All chills inside. Wind dying.” No one had heard him approach. His friend Ricky started at his sudden speech, banging his head on the top of the door frame.
Ryan had been hunkered down beside Mariah, his weapons sheathed or slung, hands on the thighs of his sun-faded jeans. Now he nodded decisively and stood.
“Right,” he said. “Well, thank you kindly. That’s all we needed to know. We’ll be leaving you to it, now.”
“Ryan, we can’t just leave her,” Krysty protested.
He looked at Krysty in what seemed genuine consternation.
“It’s time to go,” he aid. “Shake the dust of this place off our boot heels.”
“But what’ll happen to her?”
“She’ll find her way. Or she won’t. She made it this far, anyhow, and that’s a thing. It’s not our problem what happens to her now, though. One way or another.”
As Krysty scowled at him, the girl abruptly launched herself at her. Blasters whipped up, but instead of attacking her, Mariah was suddenly clinging to her and sobbing. Krysty judged herself lucky she’d been on her knees; otherwise the girl, slight as she was, might’ve bowled her over backward.
“Krysty’s right,” Mildred announced as the redhead began to stroke Mariah’s head and murmur soothingly to her. “We can’t just leave her out in the middle of this god-awful wasteland.”
“But she’s been living here just fine all along,” J.B. said.
“When she had a family and a working farm around her,” Mildred shot back. “What is wrong with you, John? Where’s your compassion?”
He blinked at her through the round lenses of his specs. “Compassion?” He sounded as if the word was unfamiliar to him.
“There’s food,” the girl said, still sobbing and her face pressed sideways to Krysty’s neck. “Supplies. Powder and shot.”
“Jak,” Ryan called out. “You still out there?”
“Yeah?”
“How trashed is the place?”
“Chills everywhere,” the albino said in his customary clipped and often cryptic speech. “Chill parts, too.”
“They get around to pissing down the well?” J.B. asked. “Or tossing any chills down it for poison?”
“No,” Jak said.
“So the mutant blackguards got no chance to indulge in an orgy of wanton stickies vandalism,” Doc said.
“Before Elias put the chop on ’em,” J.B. added.
“Sounds like,” Ryan said. “Thanks. We’ll make sure to leave plenty for you. And now—”
Krysty put her arms around the girl’s thin, shaking shoulders. She was actively shivering now, not just to the timing of her sobs.
“Ryan, no,” she said.
“You know as well as I do we can’t go picking up every stray we stumble across,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
With a final sniffle, Mariah stopped weeping, or at least stopped weeping as vigorously. The trembling subsided, too, but did not stop.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Ryan looked blank. “You mean stumbling around in the storm?” Mildred supplied helpfully.
Mariah nodded.
“Let’s say we’re new in the district,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said—grudgingly, because information was a trade good itself. But clearly he saw nothing to be lost by imparting a few morsels to the foundling.
“You looking for work?” Mariah asked.
“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. We could use a gig.”
Their supplies had gotten low. The stocks of food and such the girl had mentioned—and fresh water from the well—would tide them over for a spell. But they were always looking for ways to sustain themselves, and mebbe get ahead, even, for the lean times that inevitably followed.
“I know a place,” Mariah said. “A ville nearby. The baron’s always looking for help, and he ain’t triple bad, as barons go.”
“We don’t hire on as mercies,” Ryan said.
“No. Not that.” Mariah paused. “I—I can take you there.”
Ryan sighed. “We’re outvoted, J.B.,” he said. “Even if it’s just Mildred and Krysty against the rest of us.”
“I don’t mind her coming along,” Ricky said.
“Put a sock in it,” Ryan replied without heat.
“I have no objection to it,” Doc put in. “Perhaps performing the occasional humane gesture might remind us of our own humanity.”
“I don’t see how that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. “But you can come with us as far as this ville.”
Mariah let go of Krysty to spring for Ryan. She caught him around the waist in a powerful hug and pressed her cheek against his breastbone.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. “You can come as long as you don’t hug me anymore, understand?”
Chapter Four
“Please,” the painfully gaunt blonde woman said, falling to her knees on the short, winter-scorched Badlands grass before two glowing avatars. “I did what you told me. Now let me have my daughter back. I beg you!”
“What wretches these people are,” Dr. Oates said to Dr. Sandler over the suppressed channel. “Hardly wort
h the trouble to rule.”
He might have reminded his colleague that they could just as well speak aloud in this vile, cowering being’s presence for all the difference it would make. But he did not. Habit was key to discipline, in communications as in every area of life. Discipline was a goal in itself.
Especially when one’s collective goal was full-spectrum dominance over this entire timeline.
By the same mode he told her, “They can be shaped into useful vessels, into which to pour our leadership and enlightened thinking.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
Aloud he said to his supplicant, “What have you done? Report, that we may judge your performance.”
“I told him to go up Harney Peak to seek a vision. I told him to eat the magic mushrooms to put himself in the proper receptive state. I betrayed my people, because you told me that’s what I needed to do. Isn’t that enough for you?” the blonde woman asked.
“How did you betray your people?” Dr. Oates asked. “Inasmuch as your people are Absaroka, and Hammerhand a Blackfoot—and a coldheart outcast at that?”
The woman wrung her hands. “Because their trust in me encompasses the sanctity of my visions! If it were known I gave...false advice to Hammerhand, we would suffer disgrace, loss of standing in councils and even mebbe war!”
“The advice we told you to give was not false,” Dr. Sandler said. “The subject climbed the peak as you instructed him to. And there he received the vision he desired. What falsehood was there?”
“But the vision wasn’t real. It was an illusion you created. Wasn’t it?”
“What a pathetic beast,” Dr. Oates said inaudibly to the wretch. “To imagine there can be any such thing as a ‘real’ vision.”
“The credulity of our two-legged cattle has long been a mainstay of our power, Dr. Oates. Do not forget the fact.”
“I apologize, Doctor.”
“Who are you to say our powers are not those of the gods or spirits?” Dr. Sandler asked the woman. “Have we not amply displayed them to you? Did not Hammerhand experience them, for that matter?”