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  "Better stay together," Ryan replied. "Don't forget there's supposed to be scabbies around here."

  "I don't see no sign," Ben said.

  "Then you better use your eyes better," Ryan snapped. "That looks fresh painted to me."

  He pointed ahead of them and to the right, to a single-story house with a long cream-colored wall. On it, in dripping letters of dark green, someone had scrawled a message. And, as Ryan said, it looked to be fresh.

  Waer Skabis, it read.

  "I seen better spelling," Ray said, "but I guess the message is triple clear."

  "We stay together?" Hun asked, grinning ruefully at Ryan.

  "We stay together."

  There were two corpses inside the cream-walled house. It was difficult to tell from their condition what they'd once been. One had been a woman, but the mutilations were so severe that it was hard to tell for sure. The smaller body lacked a head, hands or legs.

  "Probably a child," Hun said quietly. "Like to get one of those mutie bastards in front of my blaster."

  "Been dead around a week," Ryan guessed. "Drying out in this heat."

  The skin was stretched taut and was such a dark brown it edged into black. There were no eyes in the gaping sockets, and the soft tissues at the mouth, nose and groin had already been largely eaten away by a variety of predators.

  "Think he'd have buried them," Ben said. "Guy left that message. Must have been his kin."

  "Mebbe not." Ryan looked around. "No sign of a firefight here. Looks like scabbies crept up out of the hills and chilled them. Sign could have been done by someone passing through. Or someone lived nearby here."

  The sudden voice behind made all of them jump.

  "Right there, stranger. Live nearby. Old Walt lives nearby and that's a fact."

  The man who stood in the doorway of the ravaged house was around five feet nine inches tall and looked like he might weigh around ninety pounds soaking wet. He was dressed in a variety of animal skins and was barefoot. His face was whiskered, revealing just a pair of faded blue eyes. The man carried what looked like a crossbreed blaster, half shotgun and half self-made bell-muzzle blunderbuss.

  "You put that warning up?" Ryan asked, easing the hammer back down on the big Ruger.

  "Sure did, sonny. Never got the way of letters, but I got close as I could." He peered owlishly at Ryan. "Hey, was you ever bit by a dead snake?"

  "No."

  "Me neither. Heard tell of it. Preacher near Leadville was with a whore. Husband came back, Preacher jumps out the back window. Lands on a dead rattler. Barefoot. Poisoned. Died. Heard tell of it, years ago it was."

  "What happened here?" Lox asked, gesturing to the two corpses.

  "The Widow Bishop and her little lad. Scabbies came a week back. I was out hunting. Seen tracks of a big mutie grizzly." Hun and Ben exchanged meaningful glances.

  "Why didn't you bury them?" Ryan asked, suddenly angry with this crazy, garrulous old man.

  "Why'd I do that, sonny?"

  "Because of fucking decency, you terminal fool!" Hunaker spit, obviously sharing Ryan's instinctive dislike for Walt.

  "Not my kin."

  Ryan shook his head. "Sure. Just keep on walking by the other side, old man. Do the same for you, one fine day."

  "Seen the scabbies since?" Ray asked.

  It was the right question, and Ryan felt a momentary flush of anger at himself for not having asked it already.

  "Nope. Hide nor hair. But I know they're still around here."

  "How?"

  The dull eyes flicked around to Ryan. "I ain't deaf, sonny. I hear 'em. Most nights. Yelping and singing. And I smell 'em cooking."

  "Where d'you live?" Ben asked.

  "Top o' the hill, sonny. Y'all come see me when you've poked around here. Going up now." He paused. "Did I ask if you was ever bit…"

  "Yeah," Ryan said.

  After Walt had vanished, leaving behind a maniacal cackle and the lingering stink of a long-unwashed body, Ryan led the others into the next building up the canyon. They left the corpses where they were, since the recce time was limited.

  The next house was larger. All the glass was gone, and the interior looked as if it had weathered a hurricane. Not a stick of furniture remained undamaged. Ryan went in first, turning to the others. "Ben, you and Lox stay here. One each side and keep your eyes open. Ray, climb up on the roof there. Don't shout if you see anything. Just get down and report."

  "While you and Hun go have fun inside, huh?" Lox sneered.

  "You do it, or you stay here and keep Walt company after we're gone." Ryan didn't raise his voice to her.

  "You threatening me, Ryan?" she asked, her voice flat and cold.

  "Don't be a stupe. You've ridden long enough with the war wags to know there's a country mile of difference between a threat and a promise. What I said was a promise, Lox."

  Ryan turned his back on her and stepped inside, boots crunching over broken splinters of glass. It took a few moments for his vision to adjust to the darkness within the open-plan building.

  "Nukes or muties?" Hun asked, her hair like a beacon in the gloom.

  "Both," Ryan replied.

  "What're we looking for? Food? Blasters? Not likely to find anything in this shit heap."

  "Never know. Been places and found things."

  Unexpectedly the woman, stepping in close, grabbed at his groin and squeezed gently. "I been things and found places, Ryan," she giggled.

  Their coupling took less than five minutes and wasn't all that terrific for either of them. Hunaker was bent backwards over a torn Naugahyde sofa, her pants around her ankles. Ryan simply unbuttoned and thrust into her, feeling her pelvis grinding against his, her arms strong around his neck, her mouth sucking at his lips hungrily.

  "That wasn't bad, sweets," she said as she clicked her belt buckle shut. "But we gotta do it properly with more time."

  "It'd be good."

  "That little cutie, July, might come in on a three-way fuck," Hun whispered, licking her lips in a way that made Ryan regret they'd been so hurried.

  "Could be good."

  A pile of debris stood ten feet high in the farthest room. Ryan guessed it might have been some sort of workroom. The shell of a word processor rested on top of shelves, along with files and folders. He reached out and tugged, bringing half the mountain sliding down around his feet. Something small and scaly rustled across the room and picked its way out through the broken wall.

  Ryan probed the shelves and recognized a machine that was some kind of message transceiver. He'd seen them before, but never one that was in good working order. Some of the old prenuke machines had double lithium batteries that were supposed to last nearly forever.

  It had a number of keys: Mess Record, Mess Rcvd, Announce Only, Rewind and Play.

  Ryan pressed Play, expecting to hear nothing but silence. There was a delay, then a faint hissing sound, the gritty noise of dusty wheels meshing. Ryan turned the Volume knob around.

  "Hi, this is Dave Platt. Sorry I'm out right now, and the way things are I'm not real sure what time I might get back. But leave a message for me."

  Ryan let it wind on, listening intently to this voice from long ago. Another voice broke into his concentration.

  "Hi, Dave. Corinne here. Denver's gone crazy. Don't know when I can get away. Catch you later. Love you." The words were followed by a noisy, sloppy kiss.

  Hunaker appeared in the doorway, saying nothing, her face solemn.

  "Hi, Dave. Calling at… at one-thirty on the… I can't remember the fucking date, man. Can we come stay at your place? Here there's nothing but—"

  The call ended in silence. The tape hissed on for another few seconds, then cut off with a loud, finite click.

  "Not with a bang but a whimper," Ryan said.

  "How's that?"

  "Something I read someplace, sometime. About how the world would end."

  "What I know, Ryan, is that it ended up with the biggest fucking bang the world'
s ever known. Or ever will know."

  "Yeah. Find anything around?"

  "No. Lot more shit like this, all around the place. Been cleaned up and reamed out."

  "Go tell the others we're leaving. Better look in on that old crazy up on the top of the hill before we get back to the wags."

  She went out, and he heard her calling to the other three. Something brushed against his boots as he moved, crackling dryly. He bent and picked up a crumpled paperback book. It was larger than usual and filled with black-and-white drawings, like a comic book.

  Through a crack in the wall his eye caught a flicker of movement, but whatever it had been was gone.

  The book was called House of Raging Women and was drawn and written by someone called Los Bros Hernandez. Inside the back were some striking pictures of some other comic called Love and Rockets. Ryan had seen a lot of comics in his time. Oddly, despite their seeming frailty, they were something that survived around Deathlands better than a lot of other, tougher things.

  "Here, Ryan!" The call came from outside.

  Reluctantly he dropped the book back on the pile and went blinking into the bright sunlight.

  The other four were grouped together, looking up the hillside.

  "What is it, Hun?"

  "The old crazy, Walt. He's waving his arms around to get us to go up there."

  Now Ryan saw him, a tatterdemalion figure that was capering on the porch of a shack above them. Strangely Walt wasn't shouting out to them. He just waved his arms and beckoned for them to join them.

  "Let's go."

  But Ryan was conscious of the feeling, a faint, uncomfortable prickling at his nape. It was an itch that didn't need scratching, like someone was walking behind you, dodging every time you turned around so that you never quite got to see who it was.

  "Red alert," he said quietly.

  Lox looked at him as the others drew and cocked their blasters. "Red? What for?"

  "Do it." The coldness in his voice wiped the sullen expression off her face almost as if he'd slapped her.

  It took only a half minute for them to join Walt. Ryan stepped in close.

  "What is it?"

  "I seen 'em. In the draw. Scabbies. They was—"

  Ryan didn't hear the crack of the blaster. All he saw was the old man's head explode, covering his own face with hot blood and sticky threads of brain.

  Chapter Eight

  EVEN AS HE DIVED sideways, Ryan's fighting brain was working overtime. His left hand wiped the warm gore from his good eye while the right drew the Ruger and thumbed back the hammer. And his mind was racing.

  Walt was dead. His legs might be kicking like they were tangled in bed sheets, and his fingernails might be cracking and scrabbling at the rock, but the lines of communication were down.

  Immediately after the explosion of the old man's skull, Ryan's acute hearing caught the flat bark of the blaster. It had the unmistakable sound of a smoothbore handmade musket and probably fired a huge round; maybe even .50 caliber. And to blow Walt's head apart, the range had to be short—less than fifty yards was Ryan's guess.

  As he hit the dirt, Ryan heard the sound of four or five other explosions, overlapping, the noise echoing around the steep valley.

  They faced half a dozen muties, assuming that's what they were. In any part of the Deathlands, at any time, there would be gangs of roving outlanders, thieves and murderers, combining in wolf packs to harry and raid the weak and isolated. Twice in the past three years, the war wags had encountered such gangs and decimated them in savage firefights, as the discipline of the Trader brought victories.

  "Cross the other side!"

  That came from Ben, crouching behind a low wall to Ryan's left. Since the five members of the recce party were virtually at the top of the hill, the attackers must be below them. Poor tactics, Ryan thought as he scanned the opposite slope. He spotted a puff of powder smoke from a clump of mesquite, near a pair of identical ruined houses. He heard the thin whine as the bullet hit stone a couple of yards to his left and went singing into the clear sky.

  But the bullet that downed the old man had come from somewhere closer, probably a little lower on the same side of the valley.

  "Get inside the building!" Ryan yelled. "Me and Hun'll cover you. Go!"

  He snapped off three spaced shots, concentrating on the area where he'd seen the smoke. Hun blasted a couple from the sawed-off pump-action 10-gauge, even though it was way beyond practical range for the close-action blaster.

  Ray led Lox and Ben at a scurrying run into the relative safety of the semiderelict building behind Walt's corpse. A figure stood, long gun at its shoulder, aiming at the running trio. Ryan steadied his right wrist with his left hand and fired a single, careful shot, wishing as he did so that he'd taken J.B.'s advice and gotten himself a good rifle.

  But the Ruger did its stuff. There was a muffled scream as the figure threw up its arms, dropped its blaster and crashed forward. It rolled down the slope in a cascade of stones and dust and lay still near the bottom. Ryan could make out a splash of red, spreading below the chin.

  The shooting provoked yells of anger and a flurry of shots in reply. Hastily aimed, none of them came anywhere close.

  "Now, Hun!" Ryan shouted, picking the pause while their attackers would be reloading their primitive weapons.

  Despite the danger, he was immediately conscious of the stink of the old man's home, strong enough to make him gag. Sweat and urine were the less unpleasant ingredients of the smell.

  But he was pleased to see that Lox, Ray and Ben had obeyed their training, each taking a side window to cover against a sneak attack.

  Ryan nearly tripped over Walt's blunderbuss lying propped against a chair that looked to be built from rusting iron and knotted twine.

  "Hun, take the front."

  "Yeah."

  "Keep watch. I'll support anyone under threat. All okay?"

  There was a chorus of acknowledgment.

  Ben hissed, "Got a bullet clean through my shirt sleeve. Never touched me."

  "Think they'll have heard the shooting from the wags?" Hun asked.

  Ryan considered the question and took the wind and the contours of the land into account.

  "Can't tell. We're way off, and there's ground between us. Wind's against it, as well. If there's a scout in this quadrant then they might have heard something. Can't bet jack on it."

  "So, we wait?"

  "Yeah. We wait. We got the high ground and a good defensive fire point. If they want us, let them come after us."

  Two hours and forty-five minutes had been the Trader's orders to Ryan. That meant a search party would start after them if they weren't back within the three-hour limit. And they could walk straight into the ambush.

  The one-eyed man looked at his wrist-chron. So far they'd been away from camp for about ninety minutes. No need to hurry events along. Not yet. He'd ordered the others to hold fire unless they actually got a clear chill shot. None of them had blasters that would do the business at much over thirty yards, and there was no point in wasting ammo.

  "More of them coming," Ben called. His position overlooked the top of the opposite slope, where there were prenuke mining ruins.

  "How many?" Ryan picked his way through the junk to squint through the tattered cloth that covered the window. "Eight, ten."

  "Fireblast!"

  The game was changing. Their position was strong enough to hold easily against the half dozen muties they calculated were out there. But if the number was doubled or tripled, then the lack of any long guns might prove terminal.

  He could see one of them, crawling on hands and knees, the top of his head occasionally peeking out over a weathered slat fence. It was a temptation to try to put a bullet through the skull, but Ryan possessed only twenty spare rounds in his jacket, and the odds against a hit were too great.

  "What do we do, Ryan?" Hun asked.

  The idea of sitting patiently and waiting for the Trader to send a rescue force di
dn't appeal to Ryan Cawdor, but if they left the shack and made their way down the steep and precarious hillside, they'd be totally exposed to the cross fire from the scabbies gathering around them.

  "I got a plan," Ryan said.

  "Got any more ammo?"

  "No. Ben? You got any bullets?"

  "One round left, and I'm saving that for myself if they come at us!"

  Ryan turned and pointed to Hun, who opened her mouth and screamed. "No! Oh, no! I got no bullets left for my blaster!"

  The muties had opened up from all sides in a fusillade of shots, the defenders firing off about half the ammo they had left. Then they deliberately dry-fired their blasters, so that the muties' acute hearing would catch the metallic clicks of hammers falling on spent rounds or on empty chambers.

  There had been spasmodic shooting from the slopes around them, but none of the muties had shown themselves, remaining safely behind cover.

  Ryan found a ragged length of dirty sheet, and tied it to a broken broom handle, waving it outside the front door in the universal gesture of surrender.

  "We give in! Don't shoot. We give in!"

  There was silence outside. From just inside the doorway Ryan could see out across the reddish rocks down the valley. Above him he glimpsed a large bird floating effortlessly on a thermal, silhouetted against the pink sky.

  "Hey out there! Can't you hear me? We're giving up! We run out of lead!"

  A voice replied, thick and guttural, with an accent so thick you could've cut it with a blunt chisel.

  "Throw yore blasters out!"

  This was the tricky moment of the whole plan. From below, Ryan guessed that the muties wouldn't be able to see all that clearly onto the cluttered patio outside the door. Everybody had concealed their blasters, fully loaded, down the backs of their shirts, tucked into belts. They all now held a variety of chunks of the scrap metal that seemed to fill the old man's shack.

  "Here we go," Ryan said quietly. "They open fire on us, then we get back under cover and wait for Trader. They fall for this, and you don't open fire until I say. Anyone starts blasting too soon, and I'll gut-shoot 'em myself."