by James Axler
But in the end it seemed Tarley Gaines’s quiet yet deadly-confident defiance had shaken her out of the mood for more threats.
“Could be you’ll live to regret your choice, Mathus Conn,” she said, her voice lethal-low as a copperhead sliding through autumn leaves.
“Could be,” he agreed. “It wouldn’t be the first time, and it likely won’t be the last.”
Wymie spun and walked toward the door. She didn’t even seem to acknowledge the ragtag mob of a dozen or so followers who had trailed her inside. Wordlessly, they made way for her. Then, shuffling their feet without a backward glance at Conn or his people, they went out into the early night as well.
Nancy blew out a long breath.
“You may have stepped in it this time, Math.”
“Mebbe so. But this time my gut agrees with my brain.”
“These’re your neighbors,” Nancy said. “Our neighbors. Your customers. And people hereabouts are scared. Somethin’ was spookin’ them even before what happened to Wymie’s poor sister. Somethin’ needs to be done.”
He allowed a hint of his irritation to show on his face.
“I’d expect you of all people to know, Nance,” he said, “that somethin’ done for the primary reason that ‘somethin’’ has to be, is only going to help by accident, and is more likely to do harm than good.”
“Is doin’ nothin’ helpin’?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “At least, helping more than joining a random lynch mob.
“That’s like an old-time nuke. Once you let the mushroom cloud loose, it’s triple hard to stuff it back in its shiny metal shell. And you never really know in advance which way the fallout will blow.”
* * *
Chapter Eight
“Found somethin’,” Lou said. Wymie thought he looked a bit green.
“What?” she said, starting forward.
He held up a hand. “Wait, Wymie. Uh, mebbe not you?”
She scowled at him, as much out of puzzlement as annoyance.
Dorden pushed past her in the grassy clearing, in a hollow that led down to karst flats. “Let me check it out,” he said. “You just bide here a moment.”
She didn’t care for taking orders, least of all at the head of her own search party. But Vin Bertolli followed the stocky gunpowder-maker, looking unaccustomedly grim. Mance laid a hand on her shoulder, briefly, and followed.
She stood waiting. There was no overhead cover between her and the afternoon sun. She wished she had a hat. Flies buzzed lazily around. A sluggish breeze stirred the grass around the ankles of her jeans.
Her posse murmured uneasily to themselves, fondling their weapons and eyeing the trees around them. They didn’t seem to include her—seemed at pains not to, which was fine by her. Even Wymie’s helpers, it seemed, had a tendency to dilute her purpose.
She would not permit that. Could not. Vengeance for Blinda wasn’t just her mission. It was now her life, and she had consecrated herself to that vengeance in blood.
She realized a pair of turkey vultures were circling in a cloudless sky. Not quite overhead, but orbiting a point that looked mebbe fifty yards farther down the gentle slope, possibly out on the flats themselves.
Wish I had a wep, she thought. For the first time since her crusade began. Once she’d left her daddy’s ax behind in the burning inferno of the home she’d been born into and grown up in, that had seemed superfluous. Her fury and hatred seemed weps themselves, and the group she had gathered around her—currently swollen to nineteen or twenty, seemingly by news of her group’s latest encounter and her subsequent confrontation with Conn and Gaines—sufficient to make her passions real.
But now she felt helpless.
And even with so many followers, she didn’t feel secure, waiting on the unknown but indubitably horrible like this and all. Mebbe I should get me a shotgun, she thought.
A few of her party drifted down the trail to disappear into head-high grass, spring green already starting to yellow as the heat turned into summer, where Dorden, Mance and the others had gone before. She made a growling sound deep in her throat and wiped sweat from her eyes. She was getting impatient.
Mance and Dorden came tramping back. Mance’s face was as green as Lou’s had been. The older man had a thunderous expression.
“I reckon you best come with us after all,” Dorden said gruffly. “It’s against my better judgment, frankly. But Mance here and the others insist you need to see.”
She nodded and followed as they turned about and walked back.
Sure enough, the track led into tall grass sprouting on the flat land itself. She was warned by a sudden thickening in the buzz around her, and what she first thought were bees buzzing before her eyes. Then she realized they were bluebottle flies, fat and gleaming with carapaces like blue metal.
Then the smell hit her. She knew the smell of death; you didn’t come up a country girl as she had, even in the peaceful backwater of the Pennyrile hill district, without getting to know that on an intimate basis. So she also knew too well how fast meat turned to reeking carrion in the humid heat of late spring. It was a constant problem in staying fed, how fast game spoiled.
But this death stink had an added edge of sweetness. She hadn’t smelled it before, and somehow it made her guts turn over the way no half-rotted deer or rabbit carcass ever had.
Between that odd, never-known but familiar smell and the way the men in her party were acting, she knew roughly what she’d see before she stepped out into a wide spot in what had turned into a game trail through the grass and found herself confronting horror.
She almost stumbled on the first chill. It lay on its belly as if crawling toward the trail, right arm outstretched as if to plead for help. The bearded face, untouched except for smeared-on mud apparently from a brief midnight shower, was upturned. The gaping mouth and eyes showed unspeakable horror, agony and what Wymie had a crawling sensation was disbelief.
The back of the man’s plain linen shirt had been torn open. So had his back, so that blood soaked the fabric so completely its original color was impossible to guess at. Ribs had apparently been wrenched from his torso from behind, and half-chewed chunks of organ were scattered around the body, masked by writhing skins of flies.
The body ended at about the waist. A tail of two or three vertebrae, blood-dyed crimson, stuck out. A single purple-gray strand of intestine trailed over the ground for eight feet, to connect to the hips and what remained of the legs. The severed legs were, horrifically, front-upward. The canvas trousers had been clawed open, and the muscles torn to shreds and ripped out in chunks, presumably mouthfuls, exposing still red bone.
“Got another one over here,” called Burny, who along with most of the rest of the search party had followed Wymie forward. “It was a woman. I…think.”
“The two of them had a campfire here,” Dorden called. Various items—torn-up bedrolls, a cast-iron cooking pot—lay strewed about. Whether by the brutal slaughter or from vandalism Wymie couldn’t tell. “If there were just two of them.”
He looked meaningfully at Lou. The scout-tracker shrugged.
“It’s hard to say,” he admitted. “There’s mostly grass underfoot, springy enough not to take good tracks. And the bare dirt’s been scuffed over by a power of feet. Some of ’em bare, that’s as much as I can tell.”
“It happened last night, to judge by the…state of decay,” Dorden said.
Wymie nodded. Had the chills been there longer, the rotting process would have progressed further than it had.
So, last night, she thought. While I was urging Conn to act, and while he and that fat ass Tarley Gaines were refusing to face the truth that was as plain as the noses on their triple-stupe faces! A fuse lit inside her, and it was a fast one.
Mance gently took her arm. “You sure you’re up to this, Wymie?”
She shook him off. “They’re not my people,” she said.
And then the fuse burned down. Rage blazed out of her, as hot
as a fired kiln.
“Nuke take them!” she screamed.
Everybody jumped, weapons raised.
“The cannies?” Mance asked. “The—the outlanders, I mean?”
“Conn and his nuke-sucking wafflers! While they shilly-shallied around, those outland coldhearts were doing this. Eatin’ people!”
“Any idea who the chills were?” Angus asked.
Lou shook his head. “Man don’t look familiar. The woman—well, her own kin’d likely not recognize her.”
“So were they outlanders, too?”
“They were innocent victims!” Wymie shouted. Why couldn’t anybody see the plain truth? It made her want to explode.
“Sure, Wymie, sure,” Mance said. “So, what do you want us to do?”
“Best bury these poor devils,” Dorden said. “Don’t want other animals buildin’ up a taste for human flesh.”
“We need to do whatever it takes to track these coldhearts down,” she said icily. It wasn’t that the fury was gone, exactly. It was more like it was suddenly channeled. “We need the manpower to do it with.”
She looked around her search party. Her eye lit on Lem Sharkey, one of the new recruits to her searchers. He was skinny, restless, shorter than she was, with a stand-up shock of sandy hair and a bony face that was always clenched like a fist ready to hit. He had a reputation as a hothead, and was always ready for action. Especially when he had his younger brother, Ike, or one of his bigger cronies to back his play. Just the sort Wymie needed to rouse more of the local folk off their complacent fannies.
“Lem, take Ike and Gator with you and back to Sinkhole,” she said, naming one of those cronies, Gator Malloan, who had come along with him on the search party. “Round us up some more warm bodies to hunt down these nuke-suckers. We can’t let this happen again!”
“What about Conn?” Burny asked. “He won’t like it one bit.”
She felt her lips peel back from her teeth.
“Remind him what I said—that if he ain’t with us, he’s against us,” she said. “Let him know double hard!”
* * *
“THIS ISN’T WORKING,” J.B. said. “It’s not getting us anything but blisters on our feet, and worn to a nub.”
Though the pale green sky still held light, the sun had set. The gloom already filled the spaces between the trees, so thick even J.B., not given to poetical flights, would swear he could almost touch it. But it should have been prime time for the task at hand.
Which was hunting cannie. They hadn’t had a scrap of success since Jak had turned up the bolt-hole the day before.
Around them early crickets sawed away at the thick, dark air. They were in a patch of forest where the canopy of leaves was evidently thick enough to discourage much undergrowth from filling in the gaps between tree boles. Now it was only letting in the odd spike or sprinkle of the light from the full moon overhead.
“You’re right,” Ryan said.
He stood thirty feet ahead of J.B., holding his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster angled muzzle-down in front of his hips. By habit on entering the relatively open area, they had spread into a loose V formation, with Ryan taking point, Krysty and Mildred on either side behind him, Doc and Ricky after them, and J.B. pulling drag. Ryan whistled softly.
After a moment Jak seemed to materialize out of the leaf and acorn duff almost at Ryan’s right shoulder. Not even Ricky, whose eyes if not double strong were definitely skilled at watching, spotted him approach.
“Been following,” Jak said. “Not now.”
“Thought not,” Ryan replied. “Crickets don’t chirp when they’re around.”
“Why have they not attacked us?” Doc asked. “Abe Tomoyama told us that they launch serious attacks only after sundown.”
“Why did they only make a serious play on us when we were at the dig site, anyway?” Ricky asked. He swatted at the back of his neck where a mosquito had likely targeted him for dinner. “That’s what I want to know.”
“What’s the point of even talking about it?” Mildred asked.
“They’re cannibals. If they’re the people who killed that angry girl’s sister. I know it wasn’t us who bit her freaking face off, so the weird baboon-snouted white humanoid things seem like the best suspects.”
“Which means they’re bat-shit crazy. So why even try to figure out what makes them do what they do? Or don’t do? What is even the point?”
“Wait,” Krysty said, her brow furrowed in thought. “I think he’s got something.”
“I hope it’s not catching,” Mildred said. Jak laughed, once, briefly. J.B. knew he was best friends with the Armorer’s young apprentice—they were by far the closest in age to each other. But that never seemed to stop the albino from enjoying the occasional joke at his buddy’s expense.
“You’re right, Krysty,” Ryan said. “The one time they came after us with what seemed like serious intent was a couple days back, at the dig.”
“So?” Mildred asked. She was hot, she was tired and she was grumpy.
“So mebbe,” Krysty said patiently, “we need to be looking for them there.”
“I admit to perplexity, dear lady,” Doc said. “If we cannot find our quarry by hunting for them accurately, how might we find them by waiting passively at one point?”
“We’d get more digging done, anyway,” Mildred said. “We’re just getting down to where the good scavvy likely waits. We might as well go for that, instead of wearing ourselves out tramping up and down these bastard hills all day and night while the cannies laugh at us.”
“Not just waiting,” Ryan said. “Baiting.”
Everybody looked at him, except Krysty, who was nodding with a slight smile. Even Ricky was coming up blank.
After a moment J.B. chuckled. “Dark night!” he said. “That might be our best trick, at that.”
“So enlighten the slow section of the class,” Mildred said.
“Out here roaming the woods—‘tramping up and down the bastard hills,’ and I quote—they either ignore us or shadow us for a spell and then go off to wherever it is they go,” Ryan said.
J.B. knew that Jak was frustrated at not having been able to turn up a hint as to where that was, although underground seemed the most likely bet. Unless they took to the trees.
“The once place we know they came after us hard was the dig. So let’s spend a day or two there and see if we can lure one close enough to grab us a chill after we blast them.”
“While that might well work,” Mildred admitted, “I’m not really keen on us just putting ourselves dead in the X-ring as targets for these white-haired freaks. Uh, no offense, Jak.”
“Not mutie,” Jak said. “Not cannie, neither.”
“Point taken,” Mildred said.
“I’m not in love with that part, either,” Ryan said. “You got a better idea, Mildred? The night is young, so there’s a lot of darkness left if you love walking up and down hills so nuking much.”
“You know what?” Mildred asked. “I love this plan. Let’s go back and sit in the dig pit and paint big red targets on our foreheads.”
“Don’t reckon we need to go that far, Mildred,” J.B. said.
She looked at him intently.
“What?” he asked.
* * *
MATHUS CONN HAD just awakened from a sound sleep when he heard shouting from the taproom.
His room lay to the east of the bar, on the right as a person came in the door. That wing was the shorter, with the slut cribs and guest rooms to the west, and the kitchens and storage rooms on the north side. The only other occupants of the short hallway were his chief aide and cousin, Nancy, and his bouncers, currently Tony and Chad.
It was male voices doing the hollering. He didn’t recognize them right away. From the light seeping in through drawn scavvied venetian blinds, it had to be late afternoon.
Time I was getting up and getting to work anyway, he thought. Normally he’d leave the matter to Nancy and the bouncers. It was their
job; and loudly irate customers weren’t exactly rare in Stenson’s Creek. He rose, pulled on his clothes and shoes, and padded out the door.
He was yawning as he turned into the short corridor, shutting the door behind him and locking it with his key.
The shouting continued and got louder as he approached the open entryway to the central room. He recognized the main shouter, and scowled.
“Lem Sharkey,” he said, striding through the entry, “I thought I told you you weren’t welcome here anymore.”
Then he stopped.
The tableau in his barroom burned itself indelibly into his mind, and flooded his gut like acid. On his right, Nancy and his two bouncers stood in front of the bar with their hands held up by their shoulders, palms forward. Arranged facing them from ten feet away in a rough semicircle were Lem, his younger, stockier brother, Ike, and his rad-scum pals Tupa and Gator. Ike carried an ax handle. Gator held an actual ax. Tupa stood, turning a big beer stein he’d picked up off a table over and over in hands that made it seem teacup-sized as if he’d never seen one before.
Lem was holding a double-barrel black-powder shotgun by his hip, the hammers pulled pack and the muzzles pointing toward Conn’s people.
* * *
Chapter Nine
“Yeah,” Lem said, sneering. “Don’t sound so nukin’ high and mighty now, do you, Mr. Conn? Don’t try no shit with me, or I let ’em have it!”
“What do you actually want?” Conn asked. Despite the circumstances, he made no effort to keep his annoyance out of his voice. He knew the wiry, wound-tight youngster could be volatile—that was why he’d been banned in the first place. But Conn suspected submission would have the same effect on him as a jolt on a jolt-walker.
“Wymie sent us to take care of you,” Gator said, showing some of his too-many, too-jagged teeth in a smirk.
“‘Take care’ of us?” Conn demanded. “What in the name of glowin’ nuke shit is that supposed to mean?”
“You been shelterin’ them murderin’ coldheart outlanders,” Lem said. “We’re here to stop that. One way or another.”