by James Axler
“But Brother Joseph’s feeding the people to those muties one at a time. Wouldn’t they be eager to help us if we saved them from that?”
“Seems to me you got it exactly backward, Mildred.”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw those people,” Krysty said. “When they sacrificed that poor child, they seemed…eager, ecstatic. They think Brother Joseph is saving them from that. Allowing the few to pay the blood-price for the many.”
“Anyway,” Ryan said sharply, “we’re letting our barrels wander way off-target, here. The point is, we took the job. We sealed the deal. So we deliver. Simple as that.”
“But the deal was tainted!” Mildred exclaimed.
Ryan shrugged. “I tried that argument and lost. In the end we took the jack and we took the bargain, even if it turned out to be the devil in disguise on the other side of the counter. It’s still our word given. That’s our bond.”
“What now?” Jak asked. “Into cannie-land?”
“Just wandering around their turf seems like a poor proposition,” Ryan said.
“Succinctly put,” Doc said.
“Out there!” Mildred called.
Everybody looked toward her. A faint silvery glow was streaming in the open spaces where wall-size windows had been, molding her round cheeks and forehead in mercury. The crescent moon was rising over the bluffs across the big river.
She pointed. “Lights. Down there toward the river.”
Ryan duck-walked up to hunker at her side. “Bonfires,” he said. It seemed figures were moving across the brightest fire, about a quarter mile off in an area of buildings that seemed, at least in the thickening darkness, mostly intact. After a moment he turned back to his circle of friends.
“We need information,” he said. “So we don’t just skip in blind.”
“What?” Jak said. “Just find cannie and ask?”
Ryan felt a slow smile cross his face.
“Shit, yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”
Chapter Seventeen
Scratch scratched.
Names among cannies tended to be like life: nasty, brutish and short. Also intensely literal-minded.
It was hot and humid here in the late afternoon. The air was thick and smelled of the river, and also the shit and piss and decomposing body parts in the vast stickie nest a little bit to the north. The buildings right down by where the brown water lapped up against the top of the old river wall had most of their walls standing, mostly in brick the color of a human liver. A color Scratch knew well.
The pack had enjoyed a big feed a few days back, when they chased some outlanders. They hadn’t caught any of them. But several of the pack had been chilled. And so had four scavvies, at least whose bodies the Landing pack had managed to recover. So everybody had feasted until their bellies were round.
But that food would be gone soon. What didn’t get eaten would go all liquid and slough off into the dust in another day or so of this wet heat. So Scratch had to come out here and forage.
He was by himself, considered too junior to be accorded a role running with the bulk of the pack, which was hunting richer grounds, on the heights of Highway 70, or south along the waterfront. The cannies were hoping to catch unwary wayfarers or even exiles from the big villes down that way, as they had half a moon ago. But that hadn’t turned out too well.
He heard a scurrying and leaped after it into the dark interior of a brick building. There were rats down here. Catching even one of them would mean he didn’t have to come back to the den empty-handed and face the unpleasant consequences.
In the gloom of what had been a corner room he saw a naked tail just disappearing into a hole. With a cry of anguish he threw himself on the floor, which was crusted with dried mud and crud deposited last time the Sippi had overflowed its banks and flooded the Landing. He stuck his hand in the hole and groped.
His fingers brushed the whipping tail tantalizingly. Then pain! Pain shot up his arm.
He squalled and yanked his hand out. Jumping up, he danced the dance of agony, waving his wounded hand in the air. Blood drops flew in the heavy air.
Then he calmed down. If he made too much noise, some other hunter would hear him. Early-rising stickies, his own pack—it almost didn’t matter which. Either would be triple-bad.
He stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked. The taste of human blood, salt and copper, heavy and hot, soothed him like mother’s milk.
He looked around. He had to find something. If he went back empty-handed again, he’d go hungry and maybe get beat and bit for his trouble. And if the pack had had an especially bad day—or an especially good one—the senior males would use him.
Or they might just decide Scratch was more trouble than he was worth. Then the only question would be: raw or cooked?
He headed toward what had been a big window. A large green tree grew outside, so big its roots had buckled up the sidewalk. Lots of trees down here near the river, anyway. That meant squirrels. Lots of squirrels. They tasted good. Much better than rat.
They were hard to catch, though, he admitted. Double-hard. He moved soundlessly across the dried muck of the floor.
And froze. He smelled something.
He had to stand there and take several deep sniffs to be sure. No mistake: human sweat, on relatively clean skin.
Clean human flesh was rare in the LaClede’s Landing rubble and environs, a prized delicacy. If he could score a whole adult who’d bathed more recently than last cold-moon time he’d win full pack standing and go up over all sorts of rivals. That evil bastard Deadeye for sure. And Club-Dick—Scratch’s sphincter tightened in remembered agony at the very thought.
He crept toward the window, hunkering down so as not to be seen if the prey was close by. Reaching the window, he lay down on his belly. The dried stuff on the floor itched his pecker. He ignored it.
His prey was a block to his left, down toward the river itself. His heart jumped. It was a woman, an oldie, but not wrinkled-old yet. She was plump with juice and muscle and the right amount of fat. Especially on her ass and bubbies.
He felt his dick get hard beneath him and didn’t even mind the way the hard crust of crud sanded it.
She was middle-dark skinned. Her hair seemed to be done in short braids with beads. She carried a handblaster in a holster at her belt. She looked scared.
Lost. Had to be. Come off a boat put in to trade with the scavvies or the villes and wandered in the wrong direction.
Wrong for her, right for Scratch.
She disappeared down an alley. Scared as she was, she didn’t think to look around much. Triple-stupe.
Scratch could barley believe his luck. It was good to be Scratch. He flowed like floodwater over the sill of the window, whose glass had been busted out so long ago not even glittering powder remained. Then he took off at a run down the cobblestone street.
He knew how to run pretty fast without his feet making flapping sounds. You had to be stealthy when tracking prey.
He reached the mouth of the alley, knelt, peered quickly around. The woman had almost reached the other end. She looked cautiously left and right as if there were anything to see but blank brick walls, with mud marks on them and a lot of old faded marks painted on. Never seemed to occur to her to look back.
Drawing his knife, which had a short, wide, almost wedge-shaped single-edged blade, he stole down the alley. His prey was headed toward the water, and that was a bad thing this time of day. It meant stickies might just be abroad. To have them grab her… The notion filled him with a burning, bubbling brew of fear and rage and frustration, to go with the hunger and blood-lust and adolescent horniness already boiling in there.
She paused at the alley’s far end, hunkered down and looked with exaggerated care: first left; draw back; right. But still: not back. Never so much as a sign in the muscles of her upper back and shoulder, the brown sweat-sheened skin left bare by her green halter top on which Scratch’s eyes wer
e pinned, of turning to see the silent death running up on her.
He couldn’t run balls-out, not if he wanted to stay quiet. He feared she’d hear the pulse that thundered in his ears as it was. So he didn’t catch her before she’d straightened and walked into the middle of the next narrow street.
Scratch shot out of the alley mouth in pursuit. He’d time his leap to drag her right down on her face and those ripe big bubbies on the cobbles. Then his knife at her neck, and—
And nothing, it turned out. Because no sooner had he left the alley himself than something the size of a building hit him right in the back of his head. He felt pain, wide and broad, and lightning flashed through his brain along with an oddly musical note.
Then he was banging his own chin on the cobbles, biting through his tongue, rolling, flopping, as helpless as a beached fish with a world of pain, his head pushing hard to be let out.
He’d been took, he knew. Enemies! Enemies! But his vision was all blurs, and his limbs wouldn’t work.…
“NOT A VERY prepossessing catch,” Ryan said. He stood over the stunned cannie, tapping the aluminum bat on the scuffed toe of one boot.
“Is he still breathing?” Doc asked. He stood on the other side of the mouth of the alley where they’d waited for Mildred to lure the cannie kid they’d been shadowing the past half hour. He still had his sword stick clutched near the tip with both hands to use as backup in case Ryan missed his stroke. But the one-eyed man had come through again.
Mildred bent over and pressed fingers to his neck. “Got a pulse,” she said.
“Carry my bat, Krysty?” Ryan asked.
“Anytime, lover.”
He looked at her, then blinked. He laughed and handed over the bat. They’d found it up in an apartment west of where they had chilled McKinnick the day before. Jak had said that they likely faced more close-in work and suggested they find some bashing weapons. Blades could get stuck in an enemy, and sometimes the most important thing to do to an attacker was just physically push him off you, so that you could bolt for it. Or so you and your buddies could chill him; whichever.
Given Jak’s extreme fondness for knives, of which he carried at least a dozen, mostly concealed about his person at any given time, they took his advice to heart. So Ryan had the ball bat, Krysty a side-handle baton, Jak an ax-handle. Doc carried his sword stick, which he could wield with great skill. Mildred preferred to rely on the steel-shod butt of J.B.’s shotgun, which was designed for such work, unlike the precision tool that was Ryan’s Steyr longblaster.
Ryan knelt by the semiconscious youth’s shoulders and slid his hands under. “Whew,” he said. “He smells awful.”
Mildred hunkered down to grab his calves. She recoiled at once.
“Ew! He’s all shit down the backs of his legs!”
“Want me take?” Jak asked. It wasn’t that he was suddenly all-come-over solicitous for the freezie doctor. It was just that he, like the rest of them, was nervous about being caught on the streets by the cannie kid’s pals. Or worse. He urgently wanted to move.
“Hell no!” she said firmly. “Thanks just the same, Jak. I hate these bastards, but I’ll do what I have to. And I’ll be damned if I give in to squeamishness about simple body wastes.”
This time she helped Ryan pick up the limp form with perfect coordination. Ryan was surprised by the sheer deadweight of the slight youth. Still, deadweight or not, there wasn’t that much to him: he was all sharp bone, barely covered by parchment-looking skin. Plus Mildred was strong for a woman, if not to the degree Krysty Wroth was.
“Sometimes,” Mildred said as they hustled the nowmoaning youth toward the hidey-hole they’d picked out earlier, “living in these Deathlands just gets the better of me.”
“It does all of us, sometimes, girlfriend,” Krysty said with a sympathetic smile.
“ALL RIGHT,” Mildred said, pinching the cannie’s thin cheek to rouse him. “You need to talk to us, boy. And talk fast.”
He lolled his head. His blue eyes rolled in his pinched, foxlike face.
“Perhaps the boy’s concussed?” Doc asked.
“I don’t think so,” Mildred said. “Pupils’re the same sizes. Might take a while to manifest, though.”
“Who gives a glowing night shit?” Ryan said. “So long’s he doesn’t die before he tells us what we need to know.”
Mildred shot him a glare. Her patient-concern reflexes kicked in. He stared her down and she backed off, shaking her head ruefully, making the short beaded plaits swing.
“Nev-never talk,” the boy said. A trail of drool ran out the side of his face. “Die first.”
“That’s a real possibility,” Ryan said. He smacked the bat suggestively into the palm of his hand. He liked the little extra ringing sound it made. It sort of added something.
“Torture all you want,” the boy said, a bit more clearly this time. Ryan guessed he’d never talked more than about halfway human at the best of times. “Landing pack don’t break.”
They had carried him into a back room of another of the long-vacant cafés or taverns in the old LaClede’s Landing district, out of sight or easy earshot of the street outside the vacant doors and windows. There had been a venerable chair, heavy dark-stained wood, lying in a corner of the outer room. They’d tied him to that with rope from Ryan’s pack.
Outside, dusk was gathering in almost tangible blue-gray particles in the narrow streets between the buildings. These had suffered less gross damage than the buildings to the west in the downtown’s crumpled core. The companions were all so wired on adrenaline they might as well have been jolt-walkers, for fear of getting caught down here after dark by the cannie’s friends. Or worse.
“We aren’t gonna torture you, boy,” Ryan said. “You don’t tell us what we wanna know, and make it triple-fast, we’ll just clear out and leave you for the stickies.”
“No!”
“Pipe down,” Jak warned. “Or we choke some.”
The youth’s eyes were wide and standing out of his head now. Talk of stickies plainly terrified him.
“Your pack caught a ville girl two weeks ago,” Ryan said.
“Yeah! Yeah! All water-fat and juicy. Dark meat! Like bitch there.”
“Such a charmer,” Mildred murmured.
“What happened to her?” Ryan asked.
“She fought. Too hard for ville bitch. Chilled two of us, then hurt Lumpy Balls so much he died two days later with his ball-sack all blue and swole up bigger’n his head! Balls really lumpy then, ha! But we downed her. We won. Chief Sharp-tooth said, tie her and take her. We make party with her at night by happy-fire!”
“Something tells me something went wrong with that little plan,” Ryan said dryly.
“We built fire high. Then while we dance for to make happy, and for to make hungry, she gots loose! Cut ropes with hidie-knife. Sneaky ville bitch!”
“We seem to see a pattern developing here,” Mildred said.
“I like this girl more and more the more we learn about her,” Krysty said.
“Shut it,” Ryan snapped. “What then? You chased her, right?”
Scratch’s head nodded furiously, whipping the thatch of matted straw-colored hair. “We chase. She ran fast and we tired from dancing happy. But she triple-stupe! She ran up on old bridge. Right by big dry oldie ship stickies live in.”
“Oh, shit,” Mildred said.
“We so red, we nuke-red mad, we chase anyhow. Out on bridge. It all slippy, fally, and black black night! Black as stickie heart! And here come stickies all buggly eyes! Stickies in front! Stickies behind!
“We fight big fight with stickies then. Long-Dugs had her face and dug ripped off and fell in river. Stinky got tore open and guts stirred with torch. Did he howl! We had to make run then. Ran back home!”
“And the girl?” Doc asked. “What befell her?”
The boy blinked at him. “Huh? You stupe? Talk English!”
“What happened to the girl?” Ryan said.
&nb
sp; “What else?” he said with a brown-toothed smile. “Stickies ate her.”
“You saw that happen?” Krysty asked. “Saw her die?”
“No. Busy make fight so not make stickie food. What else? Bridge triple-dangerous all time. Stickies everywhere. She die! She had to die! Serve bitch right for what she done to pack!”
“Yeah, my ass just bleeds for your pals,” Ryan said.
The youth blinked at him. “Others bitch you? Thought you chief, bitch them!”
“I think you’re lucky I didn’t really understand that.”
“You were talking about a pattern?” Krysty said.
“Yeah,” Mildred said.
“Surely you ladies do not entertain the possibility that Princess Emerald might have survived?” Doc said.
“Why not?” Krysty said.
“She survived the last impossible situation just peachy, seems to me,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t bet anything against this rad-blasted girl that I don’t care to lose!”
From somewhere in the dusk came a long, nerve-
freezing howl.
Chapter Eighteen
Scratch put back his head and howled back.
Ryan backhanded him across the face. “Shut that shit off!”
In a sinister fluid motion Jak drew and leveled his big Colt Python at the cannie’s head. Krysty knocked his hand up. His red eyes flashed, but his reflexes—and for once his self-control—were so good he never triggered a shot.
“Why do that?” the albino teen asked with vibrating outrage.
“No time,” Krysty said. “Just run!”
Ryan drew his panga. The cannie flinched. Ryan stepped behind the chair and brought the big knife down fast.
The rope that held the prisoner’s hands parted and fell to the floor. The big knife never made a mark on Scratch’s filthy hide. Then Ryan backhanded him with the fist that held the knife and knocked boy and chair sprawling and clattering into a corner.
“Why cut loose?” Jak asked.
“We had a deal,” Ryan said. “Now run or get eaten!”