Moon Fate Page 14

  "What if I don't want to agree to your plan?"

  "You haven't heard it."

  "Bet it's no good."

  "Being burned alive or being fed your own cock with chili sauce isn't that good, Harold," Helga said, not even bothering to conceal her contempt.

  "Guess not. But what if I don't like it?"

  Ryan leaned forward in the darkness. "You're with us, Harold."

  "Or?"

  "Or you're against us. This isn't some kind of civ­ilized debate on morality. This is all of us getting slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours, going down with a whimper. I prefer a bang, Harold."

  The anger brimmed to the front of his voice giving it a hard, lethally frightening edge. Ryan wasn't even aware of that.

  Harold was. "All right, all right. Sure, I'm in."

  HAROLD'S VOICE WAS a squeak of anguish. "Is that it?"

  "Shut the fuck up," Bob snapped. "You heard what Ryan said."

  "Sure, and what he said wasn't worth a spoonful of sugar in a vat of molasses. Not worth an ant's fart."

  Ryan was suddenly angry, partly because he knew that the young man's reaction was justified.

  His voice hissed across the circular pit, striking like the lash of a fladgie's whip. "You gutless little fuck! I'm going to grab you around your stinking neck un­til the eyes squeeze out of your skull, just like pips from an orange. You do the same as the rest of us, or I swear to God I'll chill you right here and now."

  "But they all got blasters."

  "Old muskets. Self-mades and patch-ups." Abe laughed. "Do better with a good bow and arrow. Be­lieve me, Harold, I know."

  "Yeah, but, but… They take us out, and we jump than and grab blasters and run for it." He couldn't hide his terror and disbelief. "Danny's a crip. Three women. Me and the preacher aren't combat sec men, Ryan. You gotta see sense. There's only truly three of you who can fight."

  He was nearly crying.

  Krysty shuffled to be near him. "Harold, listen to me."

  "I'm listening. I am really."

  Ryan had seen every aspect of his beloved's char­acter. So he thought.

  But now she was the older, wiser sister, comforting and encouraging, teasing a little, wiping away the sudden flood of tears that rolled over the unseen, plump cheeks, praising Harold for his courage in the face of ghastly adversity, cheering him along.

  "If we're to die, Harold, isn't it better to go out fighting? On your feet, not cringing on your belly? Isn't it?"

  In the end, Krysty was so successful that Harold had to be dissuaded from a new plan, which had them all breaking out in the middle of the night.

  THREE MILES AWAY, down the meandering valley, J.B. was on solitary watch. He had chosen to take the pa­trol from midnight until four in the morning, the longest four hours known to man.

  The others were all sleeping quietly, wrapped in blankets, blasters ready to hand. Doc was on his back, snoring in a regular, muffled beat.

  J.B. sat with his back against a Sitka spruce. The wind had veered northerly, and he could taste the threat of rain on his tongue. The Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge rested across his lap, its eight flechette rounds ready for use.

  The night was quiet, with the occasional howl of a distant coyote, way down on the desert.

  The Armorer thought of Ryan, trying to guess what might be happening. He'd already thought through the strong possibility that his oldest, closest friend was two days dead. Stickies weren't known for keeping their norm prisoners alive for very long.

  If Ryan and Krysty had been snuffed out, then what was left was revenge.

  Total, absolute revenge.

  Just as dark came down, he'd spotted a narrow trail, high up on the far side of the ravine, looking like it had been established by goats, clinging to the edge of the sharp cliff. It had occurred to J.B. that it might be worth trying to cross the river and reach the trail. The path they had been laboring along had been ravaged by the rains, and any farther deterioration in the weather could make it utterly impassable.

  Clouds came sailing across the moon, darkening the forest. J.B. automatically slid his finger onto the trig­ger of the M-4000, straining his eyes into the black­ness. Wind rustled the trees, and the sound of the tumbling water seemed to have become suddenly louder.

  But there was something else.

  Like smoke coiling from a fire, the slightly built Armorer stood up, melting into the blackness around him.

  Something moved.

  He corrected that as he heard the faint mutter of voices. Someone moved.

  J.B. glanced over his shoulder, his keen night vi­sion enabling him to pick out the lumpy shapes of his sleeping friends. There was a grave risk of one of them waking and calling out to him, bringing the strangers down like a pack of hunting wolves. But the alterna­tive risk of trying to ease them all silently from sleep was infinitely higher.

  J.B. stood still and waited and watched, trying to work out how many were moving north, toward the higher ground.

  And who they were.

  The clouds thwarted him in the former while the insistent river remained just loud enough to blur any speech.

  But there was enough sound to tell him that the group moving through the night was a large one. J.B. didn't much care for guessing, but when there was no choice… He figured there was fifty or more in the party.

  Once they'd all passed, he kept perfectly still and counted a thousand heartbeats, waiting in case they'd posted a rearguard. But the night remained quiet.

  Ryan woke with a start, feeling his heart jump. He opened his eye and saw only the faint glow of the big camp fire peeking through the cover of their prison.

  For a moment he couldn't work out what jerked him from sleep. Then he realized that the weighted silk scarf was missing from around his neck.

  On the far side of the kiva he caught the whisper of movement and harsh, strained breathing.

  "Krysty?"

  "Yeah?" Her voice barely audible.

  "What are…"

  "Just chilled us a traitor," she replied.

  Chapter Thirty

  WITHIN SECONDS EVERYONE in the kiva was awake, asking urgent, whispered questions.

  Krysty explained in short, shocked sentences. "Woke when I felt movement. Was trying to tap on the grille above to attract the attention of the stickie guard. Heard what he was saying. He wanted to tell Charlie about an escape. All that I heard."

  "What did you do?" Dorina asked. "You got a knife hidden, Krysty?"

  "No. Ryan's scarf is white silk. Really strong." She paused. "Strong enough."

  "Strangle him?" Bob Leonard's distorted voice reflected all of their shock.

  "Had the scarf in both hands, looped in the middle. Had it around his throat before he knew what I was doing."

  Abe coughed. "Nothing like a good garotte for a quick, quiet chilling." His admiration was obvious. "You did him without disturbing me, five feet away, Krysty. Real good."

  "Yeah, Abe. Throttling a man is real good, isn't it?"

  "Had it coming," Ryan said. "We all know you did the right thing and did it well."

  The Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman didn't share that opinion at all. "Oh, terrific. Now we got us a strangled corpse in here with us. How in the name of the Savior do we explain that one, Ryan?"

  "Won't have to. We stick to our plan and leave him down here. By the time we make the rush on them, it'll be way too late for anyone to notice one dead man more or less."

  "Never have thought it," Helga whispered. "Would have expected that someone else…" The words faded into silence.

  "You mean you thought that if we had a traitor it'd be me, didn't you? Ugly old bitch!"

  "Shut the fuck up, Harold!" Ryan reached out and grabbed a handful of sleeve. "One more word and I'll break your whining neck."

  "Yeah, then you got two chills in here," he re­torted defiantly. "And Danny shit himself when he died. We got to put up with that all night."

  Ryan let go of the fat young ma
n and laughed qui­etly. "I never met anyone who complained as much as you, Harold. You got it to a real art, boy. If Krysty hadn't choked Danny for us, then that faint glimmer of light would've been plucked right away. You never think of that, Harold?"

  "Guess I didn't. I'm real sorry, Krysty. Got a loose mouth."

  "Why'd he do it?"

  Krysty, recovering from the midnight shock of committing a hands-on murder, answered Helga her­self. "He sounded like he was desperate. Lost his mind, almost. I think it was probably the pain of his broken ankle turned his brain."

  The older woman sounded relieved at having an ex­planation that she could cling to, something that might eventually help her to come to terms with her ram­rod's betrayal.

  "Guess that'd make sense. Danny never coped too well with suffering. Remember the time he was way south in Mex country after mustangs. Picked up some of them pokies."

  There was a collective shudder through the kiva. Joe-Bob Jarman made a sound of utter disgust. "Had one once. In my right ear. Where did he get…did they get him?"

  Pokies were small beetles that were found both north and south of the big Grandee. They had black iridescent bodies, about an inch long and a third of an inch across. Their legs were tipped with barbed spikes that hooked themselves onto anything convenient.

  They also had hugely disproportionate jaws, like miniature scythes.

  Their name came from their ceaseless desire to poke into the warm, moist places of the human body. Once there they would hook on to the living flesh and start eating, dining in comfort on fresh meat. There was no orifice known to man or woman that a pokie wouldn't try for.

  Sleeping on the ground often meant tying lengths of whipcord around the bottoms of your pant legs to try to keep them out. But then there were ears, noses and mouths. Ryan had even heard ghastly tales of pokies insinuating themselves into the tear ducts at the cor­ner of a sleeping man's eyes, working their way deeper and deeper.

  But the folklore on pokies concentrated far more on their affinity for the lower regions of the human body.

  Ryan recalled a scrawled warning he'd once seen on the tarred wall of an outhouse: No Good Standing on the Seat. The Pokies Here Can Jump Six Feet.

  He'd never personally witnessed anyone who'd been tacked by the burrowing insects, but Deathlands lore as full of tales: a man who'd been squatting to relieve himself had been penetrated; a woman who'd been bathing in a shallow lake on the Keys. Best known, and probably apocryphal, was the wretched man taking his pleasure in a gaudy, with a breed whore. He didn't know she was infested with pokies. The carnivorous little creatures traveled from her to him during intercourse.

  Rumor was he'd finally gone insane and poured gasoline over his cock.

  And lighted it.

  Jarman's question had made Helga hesitate. "Where did they…"

  "Doesn't matter. But how did Danny…"

  She regained the thread of her thoughts. "He had them up his nose. Three of them, I got 'em out with salt, but he sure made a fuss. Pain was—hell, there's no use. Boy's dead and that's the end of it."

  "Someone coming," Krysty warned.

  "Changing sentries," Harold guessed.

  Wrong.

  "One-eye?"

  It was a woman's voice. Ryan ignored it. But it was repeated.

  "One-eye? Know you're in there."

  "Might as well answer, lover. Or she'll call the sen­tries and they'll be on the alert. Find Danny's corpse."

  "And goodbye'll be all she wrote," Abe whis­pered. "Better see what she wants."

  "Yeah?" Ryan called.

  "Knew you was in there."

  "What do you want?"

  "You out here."

  "Why?"

  "Me to know and you to fucking find out. Just get out here, One-eye."

  Ryan stood, hands fumbling to keep his balance as he picked his way between the others. He looked up, able to see only a dim shape through the bars of the grille.

  "I'm here."

  "Rest of you stay real still. Got plenty of blasters up top. Just One-eye comes out."

  One of the stickie guards said something, and there was a burst of soft, obscene giggling.

  Bolts grated and the grille was hauled off to one side, sliding across the bare rock. Ryan smelled the familiar scent of burning torch oil, and the orange flames danced around him. Coming from the black­ness of the kiva, it was difficult to make out how many of the stickies were around him, but his eye caught light off musket barrels.

  "Get his hands tied good behind him," said the unseen woman. "Want to do what I want to the norm with no trouble."

  "How about his feet, Marcie?" asked one of the guards, sniggering.

  "Best tie his feet to the bottom her bed. Or he'll get sucked out of sight," called another of the stickies. "Charlie'll never see him again, and he wouldn't like that."

  Ryan stood still. Behind him, he caught an urgent whisper from Krysty. "Control, lover. Think con­trol."

  It was good advice.

  But it didn't do Ryan much good.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  RYAN HAD TRIED the old trick of flexing his muscles when they began to bind his wrists behind him, so that he might win a little play in the narrow length of whipcord.

  The stickies might have been stupe in a lot of ways, but they knew about tying norms up so that they stayed tied.

  As soon as they spotted what Ryan was trying to do, one of them punched him in the stomach, winding him, making him relax so that the cords could be pulled brutally, efficiently tight.

  "Don't hurt the norm or I'll cut your balls off, Jack," the woman warned.

  "I'll leave the hurtin' to you, Marcie" was the re­sponse, bringing yet more laughter from the ring of sentries.

  Ryan heard the grille slid back and bolted into place again.

  A loop of coarse hemp rope was slipped over his head and pulled until it closed around his throat. The mutie woman held the other end in her right hand and she jerked hard at it, making Ryan go stumbling after her.

  "Make sure you got him back before dawn, Marcie," a sentry called. "Yeah. What's left of him."

  THE WOMAN'S TUMBLED HOUSE was at the far end of the camp, nearest to the ravine and the muttering stream. It was back under the lee of the massive cliffs overhang, the smoke-crusted stone soaring into the darkness above it.

  She pulled him through the doorway, which was hung with a length of dusty sacking. A single torch was jammed into a hole in the ancient brickwork, showing a three-legged table propped in a corner. A stout-framed bed with a yellow blanket crumpled on top of it occupied a large area of the room.

  Ryan had time to notice a faded picture pinned above the head of the bed. It seemed to show two na­ked men, one kneeling in front of the other. The shadows concealed what they were doing, but it didn't take a giant leap of the imagination to guess.

  The stickie turned to face him, confirming Ryan's suspicion that it was the same woman who'd "acci­dentally" spilled the stew on him. And used it as an excuse to feel him up.

  "Well, ain't this fucking cozy, One-eye? They call you Ryan, don't they?" When he didn't answer im­mediately she reached out and laid her suckered left hand against his cheek, the tip of the index finger just touching his good right eye. "Want to lose this baby-blue glim as well?" she said, grinning at him with a soft, insistent menace.

  "No."

  Her breath was like the firefight stench of punc­tured guts, the protruding eyes as cold and dead as a basking shark.

  "So? Ryan?"

  "Yeah."

  "And I'm Marcie. Now we know each other's name we can get to it."

  The hand moved from his face.

  Lower.

  IT WAS THE WORST of times. Ryan lost track of how long the woman had kept him in her stinking hovel. He consciously tried to use techniques that Krysty had attempted to teach him: ways of controlling the mind, and through the mind the body; ways of moving out of the horrors of the immediate present; ways that failed him u
tterly under the manipulations of the stickie woman.

  MARCIE WOULDN'T take any chances, so Ryan's hands stayed tied behind his back. But that didn't stop her from stripping him naked below the waist, pulling his pants off over the combat boots. Ryan considered trying to kick her unconscious, but she was too care­ful.

  She was also extremely strong, her naked body rip­pling with ridges of muscle. He figured her at close to six feet, with a fighting weight of about one-eighty pounds.

  Apart from the rings of bristles around her thick nipples, Marcie had a nest of pubic hair that curled up to her navel and seeped onto the tops of her powerful thighs.

  She took the rope around his neck and knotted the loose end to the top of the bed. "Move and you strangle yourself, Ryan." She grinned. "I'll do all the moving for both of us."

  Despite all his efforts, he rose to her. The fingers, with their hundreds of tiny lips, were surprisingly del­icate, touching and fondling him, pressing with insis­tent lust between his legs. Ryan made the serious mistake of trying to close his thighs against her. Mar­cie simply sat up and dealt him three contemptuous, open-handed slaps across the face, which made his ears ring.

  "Do that again and I use my hands on your chest. Peel little round circles of skin off of you like acid, One-eye. Best be nice and give me your best shot. Do that, and you might get back alive to the firehead norm bitch."

  The mutie's orgasms were like wrestling with a puma in a typhoon.

  But she kept her mouth snapped shut, saliva seep­ing between her own lips from the intensity that surged through her. Marcie rode him like a vaquero spurring an unbroken stallion, her heels digging into his thighs, rising and falling faster and faster. Her head was thrown back, eyes closed, breath rasping like a tur­bine in overdrive.

  After the second one she lay flat against him, her sweat running down both sides of his chest, her face against his stubbled chin, fingers groping across his stomach, to keep him ready.

  With an enormous effort, Ryan had managed to tread the tightrope between losing his erection through a sickly disgust, and risking Marcie's violent displea­sure by coming himself.