Ice and Fire

by James Axler

  For a moment Ryan considered icing the store owner. Questions about Rick would lead to questions about the rest of them. Where have you come from? Where exactly did you leave your wag? How did you get here?

  Not the kind of questions that outlanders welcomed in a small ville, however friendly some of its inhabitants might be.

  He looked at Brennan for a dozen heartbeats. "Yeah. I understand. Guess we might both take some real good care."

  Krysty tugged at the sleeve of his jacket. "Ryan! Look!"

  Rick Ginsberg, the dusty, leatherbound book open in his hands, had sat down on the floor. His eyes were wide and staring, and gobbets of tears coursed down his cheeks. Ryan could see he had been looking at an illustration of a large black bird. Rick's lips were moving and he kept repeating the same word.

  "Nevermore," he said. "Nevermore. Nevermore."

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT WAS A COLD EVENING in Snakefish.

  Only Doc and Lori had eaten in the dining room of their boarding house. The others had taken their suppers upstairs on trays, all sharing the room where Rick lay in a frightening, almost catatonic trance. He still held the Edgar Allan Poe book. Ryan had tried once to remove it from his hands, but the freezie had wailed like a lost soul and tried to bite him on the wrist.

  There had been little time for Ryan to debrief J.B. and Jak. Rufus Brennan had been the soul of kindness and discretion, helping Krysty and Ryan to carry the weeping man across to the Rentaroom, bustling him up the stairs before too many prying eyes could see him.

  There was a log fire laid in the grate, and the Armorer had used a pyrotab to get it blazing, filling the curtained room with bright, crackling heat.

  Despite that, Rick didn't seem able to stop himself from shivering. His fingers opened and closed and his teeth chattered together. They'd decided to leave on his newly purchased clothes, piling on a couple of blankets for good measure. Doc had asked Ruby Rainer to send up an enamel pot of hot, sweetened tea, explaining that their friend had suffered something of a shock and needed to be kept warm.

  The woman had been eager to help, offering her prayers and wondering whether the accident might prevent poor Mr. Ginsberg from joining everyone at the service the next day.

  After she'd been ushered from the room, Ryan turned to J.B. "Find anything out?"

  "Sure. Friendly folk. Talk to you about everything. Just as long as it's the weather or are we comfortable with Ma Rainer here. Soon as you ask them anything about how the ville's run and how the gas is produced and processed and traded…"

  "And mouths clam like snap trap," Jak concluded, locking his fingers to demonstrate what he meant.

  "See the plant?"

  "Sure, Ryan. No guards. Drillings are all to the east and north. Brought in tank wags. Pumped and then purified. Stored in all kinds of barrels and tanks. Kind of careless. So much gas there that a single burner gren would set half the country on fire."

  "Saw bikers again. Zombie and others," Jak said. "Said could ride with 'em. Mebbe after snake service tomorrow. Seem okay."

  Ryan glanced at the Armorer, seeking confirmation of the young boy's judgment of the Last Heroes. But J.B. pursed his lips and said nothing—which was as good as saying everything.

  At that moment their attention was taken by Rick.

  The freezie had begun to talk in a quiet, confidential sort of way, but in a voice quite unlike his natural tones. It was a thin, piping little voice, like a young child's. And there was even the hint of a childish lisp to it.

  "I'm eleven years old in three weeks. My full name is Richard Neal Ginsberg and I was born March 22, 1970. I live in New York City, which is in New York State, which is the best of all the United States of America, the land of the free."

  There was a peculiarly monotonous quality to the speech, as though Rick had learned it by heart and was pattering through it.

  "I have a pet turtle who's real old and lives all the time with his head buried in the mud of his tank, and his name's Tricky Dicky. I guess he's real boring. My Dad's name is Jack Ginsberg, and he worked as an accountant in a big office on Sixth Avenue

  . Mom's name is Naomi and she doesn't do any work. She's like a housewife."

  "Little prick," Krysty whispered. "I read about that sort of male attitude. Doesn't do any work!"

  "I play softball and I watch football and I like the New York Giants best of all. When I grow up I'm going to be a quarterback and pitch for the Yankees and maybe also work as an accountant. I haven't decided yet but I'm real good at math."

  Doc and Lori came into the room, closing the door behind them. They stood at the foot of the bed, listening to the ramblings of the freezie.

  "Looks fucking stupe," Lori said. "Look at his eyes all staring."

  "I fear our newly thawed comrade has regressed to his childhood," Doc observed sadly. "It was always something of a gamble. I had been delighted with how well he had coped with his blind leap into our future. But now I see how fragile his hold on our reality is."

  "Reality sandwiches," Rick said, a tremulous sickly smile clutching at the corners of his bloodless lips. The fingers of his left hand played with the frayed edge of the gray blankets while his right hand kept its deathly grip on the leather-bound volume of Poe.

  "What if I deck him, Doc?" J.B. asked. "Short right cross to the point of the jaw. Could snap him out of it?"

  "Could snap him further into it," Ryan said dryly. "How about if we get some sleepers from the woman? Feed him some of those and mebbe he'll be fine when he comes around?"

  Rick seemed able to hear what was being said and somehow translate it into fragments from his past. "Round and round the little wheel goes and where it stops nobody knows. Not me and not my mom or my dad. Nor my beloved grandmother, Agnes Laczinczca. She's a wise woman. Witch of the west. She lives somewhere over a rainbow in Kansas, bloody Kansas." A cunning smile flitted across his face. "Shouldn't say that. Bloody. Get my mouth washed with soap and water. Bloody bastard. Fuck and prick." He giggled.

  "Got do something, Ryan," Jak said. "Crazy as sun-blind gator."

  "Yeah," Ryan agreed. "Sure. Do something. Anyone got any ideas?"

  "Rambo. Bimbo." Rick sniggered. "Dumbo Crambo. Wilco. Dildo."

  "I could… I've never really tried to do it for anything like this, but Mother Sonja taught me ways of using the force of the Earth Mother for healing. Setting a mind to peace. I could try."

  "Try it, lover," Ryan said, kissing Krysty on the cheek.

  "Rest of you go out. Got to have privacy and quiet for this."

  Doc nodded. "It could work. In my day I was known as something of an apostle of alternative medicine."

  "Out, Doc," J.B. said, leading the way. "I'll give you a game of Kiowa if we can get a deck of cards."

  The others followed, with Ryan bringing up the rear. Rick was still chattering away to himself on the bed.

  "The premature burial. That was always my fear. My terror. To slip into a coma and yet not be dead. Folks not realizing that I still lived. Breathing slow, but living." The voice had changed, had lost the infantile flatness. Now it held more of Richard Ginsberg's normal tones. But it was oddly without inflection, as if the words were strung together by a computer, with no sense of emotion at all.

  "I'll go, lover," Ryan whispered. "Next door. You want any help, just bang once on the wall and I'll be in here."

  "Sure. Could take some time."

  The freezie's words danced over and around them, plaited with an old, sad madness.

  "The box closing. Eyes shut but still seeing. The softness of the silken shroud embracing the cold skin. The lid lowering. A loose thread of cotton trailing against the corner of your mouth. Tickling you, for all eternity. A spider, buried with you, seeking somewhere to spin its web and lay its eggs." A shudder racked the man's body. "In your ear, burrowing inward. Gestation. Birth. A thousand tiny spiders, eating inward. Into your living brain. Living and feeling but paralyzed and helpless."

  The door sh
ut behind Ryan, and Krysty sat on the bed, reaching to hold Rick's palsied left hand in both of hers. "Be all right," she said. "Quiet and easy, brother. You got so much pain inside you, Rick. Gotta let it out of you."

  "Locked in the box. One time around then they put the lid down on you. John said that. John Stewart. Said that. He didn't know what it was like. My body trapped me. Locking and tensing and falling and the tiredness. Bells of hell, the tiredness. I wanted to rest and get away. That's why I agreed to let them do it to me. Knew it wouldn't work. Didn't care. The gateways being used for war. Instant soldiers here and there. Oh, fuck! I hated that. Lock the lid down on the box. Goodbye to pain forever. Then they woke me up. Woke me healed and new. Not now. Not ever. Nevermore. Nevermore."

  Krysty systematically began to clear her mind, using the techniques that her mother had taught her, long ago in the ville of Harmony.

  When Krysty was under great stress she was able to harness the Earth power, giving herself a cataclysmic strength for a few moments. But using it drained her for hours after. This was different—the healing way had nothing to do with dissolution.

  She focused on a sky of untouched blue, a river foaming over silver rocks, imagining the water washing away all pain and anguish. She gripped Rick's hand more tightly.

  "I hear the slamming of the lid. My heart beating, louder. How can they not hear it? My nails break against the implacable dark wood. Blood warm down over my palms, my wrists. Muscles straining, helplessly and utterly without hope. Oh, the tigers that come in the dead of night! Help me, help me. The sibyl said she wished only to die."

  Ginsberg was talking more and more slowly. Krysty was weeping, not aware of her own grief, tuning in to his bone-cold sorrow, trying to tap it and divert it. She looked for sparks of light within the bleak world that might illuminate and carry hope.

  "Come out of it, Richard," she said, lips barely moving.

  "Trapped in my crippled body in a twisted, demented time," he moaned, fingers tightening on her hand.

  "No." She drew on some lines that her mother had made her learn. "There is a wind on the heath, my brother. Life is very sweet. Who would wish to die?"

  "Everyone I loved is dust," he said quietly, the words hardly disturbing the warm air in the small room.

  "We all will be, Rick. One day. You and me and Ryan and everyone. Today's baby is tomorrow's dust. Live while you can, Rick. Live and live and live."

  His eyes had been staring at the roughly plastered ceiling. As Krysty looked at the freezie, his face grew calmer. His gaze dropped, settling on her face. His breathing steadied, and there was something like the frail ghost of a normal, sane smile.

  "Krysty Wroth, I believe?"

  "Richard Neal Ginsberg, isn't it?"

  "Guess it is."

  "Good to have you back," she said, feeling the strain of drawing the demons from the helpless man's soul.

  "Didn't much care for the places I've been. Too damned dark."

  "It's dark out, Rick."

  "Light in here. Light and warm, Krysty. I feel real tired."

  "Yeah. Me too."

  RYAN HAD BEEN SITTING with the others, relaxing, half-asleep.

  After an hour had slipped by he sighed and stood, stretching, feeling the muscles around his ribs tightening as he moved. "Just going to take a look," he said.

  As he stepped into the corridor he nearly jumped out of his skin. His fist clenched and he began a lethal, crushing blow to the bridge of the nose, checking his punch in time, inches short of the sharp, quill-like nose of Ruby Rainer.

  "Shedskin!" she exclaimed, stumbling back, hands waving at the air. "You were going to hit me, Mr. Cawdor!"

  "No, ma'am," he replied. "If I'd been going to hit you, then I'd have done it. Not a good idea to creep up on a person like that, Mrs. Rainer. Could lead to a nasty accident."

  She recovered a little, brushing at her print apron, running a finger along the top of the bannister rail, checking it for dust. "That girl, Rosemary! She never cleans up… But that wasn't what I came up to see about."

  "And what was that?"

  "Is Mr. Ginsberg recovered? I hope he'll be at the seven o'clock service on the morrow. It would be such a disappointment if he missed it."

  "Just going to check. I hope we'll all be there."

  He watched her go slowly down the stairs before he eased open the door and peeked in. Rick Ginsberg lay fast asleep on his bed, breathing peacefully. Krysty slept at his side, holding his hand.

  Ryan smiled and very quietly closed the bedroom door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "BLESSED IS THE WORM!"

  "And blessed are the scales thereof!"

  "Blessed be the fang!"

  "And the hollow needle!"

  "Blessed is the crushing and the coil!"

  "And blessed are the rattle and the skin of the great worms!"

  "The Lord loves the worms of the earth and all that crawl and sting."

  "As we do also love them!"

  "The poison shall harm only the ungodly and the righteous sacrifice!"

  "And the innocent shall walk untouched through all the lands of Canaan."

  "As it was in the beginning, before sky-dark and long winter, is now and ever shall be. Our world, never ending. Amen!"

  "Amen," came the echoing chorus from the huge congregation that brimmed along every bench and pew in the Temple of Snakefish, formerly the Rex Cinema and Video Palace.

  One of the twin guardians, Norman Mote, had just finished the introductory call-and-response part of the a.m. service. Marianne sat at his side, with their son Joshua, the apostolic apprentice, next to his mother.

  At a rough count, Ryan reckoned that virtually all the adult population of the trim little ville was there, crammed together, cheek by jowl.

  It was swelteringly, sweatingly hot inside the building.

  Ruby Rainer had shouted up the stairs, a few minutes after six, asking if they wanted some fresh-baked cornbread with eggs and grits before coming along to the service. They had all accepted, though Rick made heavy weather of the meal.

  The freezie was looking better, like someone who had been through the fire and come out the other side purged and cleansed by the experience.

  He'd walked with the others along the bustling main street to the church, helped by an old bamboo cane with a curved handle, which had been a gift from their landlady. "It was my late husband's," she'd said. "He got it from his uncle, who found it in a ruined shack up beyond the north-forty well. You're welcome to take it, Mr. Ginsberg."

  Ryan had rarely seen so many people gathered together in one place.

  Baron Edgar Brennan sat in the front pew, on the right with his brother Rufus. An enormously fat young man sat next along. Ryan figured he must be the nephew, Layton, pilot of the air wag. He was dressed in a suit of dark blue leather and was so large that it looked as though the bench seat might tip up if anyone else stood. The last of the worshipers in that privileged pew was Carla Petersen, who had changed her riding breeches for a pleated skirt, but was otherwise wearing the same clothes as when they'd met her in the town hall. She had turned around as Ryan led his group in, favoring them with a smile. A smile that seemed, to Ryan, to be directed rather more at J.B. than at the rest of them.

  There were no children in the congregation. No one showed undue interest in the outlanders as they were shown to a bench on the left, about halfway from the front.

  Zombie and his biker brothers acted as stewards, marshaling everyone into their seats, making sure that there was no smoking. They eventually lined up near the altar, looking like sec bouncers at a particularly unsalubrious gaudy house.

  Ryan had been particularly interested in seeing what the Mote family looked like. Before the festivities had begun, during the period of waiting for their arrival, he had studied the inside of their strange church.

  There was a large balcony toward the rear, which had been extended more recently to run around both sides of the old theater. The altar
was on a dais, between old and faded curtains decorated with huge, golden tassels. The chairs for the members of the Mote family were more like thrones, covered in gilt and crudely carved in ornate, writhing snake shapes. The rear wall, behind the platform, was obscured by a bright mural.

  "Delicate, isn't it, lover?" Krysty whispered, seeing where Ryan's eye was focused.

  "Sure. Like having a war wag run over your face is delicate."

  The painting centered on an absolutely massive mutie rattler. Bigger by far than the one that they'd butchered out in the desert, it had a silver collar with the name Mote blazoned across it in scarlet. In its jaws was a diminutive figure that was kicking its legs. There was a 3-D holo effect built into it that made the head swing hypnotically from side to side and the tiny feet wave helplessly.

  Around the edge of the picture were a number of oil-drilling rigs, vanishing away into a distance that was blurred by a poor perspective. At the very edge there was a crude version of the Sierras, snowcapped, tumbling out of the mural.

  The colors were extremely basic—glaring greens and crimsons, with sickly yellows and a sky of an eye-blinking and unreal blue.

  Ryan's ruminations stopped suddenly when he realized that the prayers were over and Norman Mote was about to speak.

  He stood a little above average height and weighed about two-forty. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, the mane of sculpted hair a uniform silver gray. His suit was also in light gray, skillfully cut to conceal his spreading waist and stubby legs. He had the puffy eyes of a regular and long-time drinker. The hands that gestured from behind the reading stand were soft and white, with manicured nails.

  Norman Mote's voice was calm and friendly, warm and welcoming. Ryan immediately disliked and mistrusted the man.

  "Mah dear, dear friends," he began, smiling broadly around the packed building. "Welcome to our little morning get-together. Blessed is the worm!"

  "And blessed are the scales thereof," responded the congregation.