Moon Fate Page 8

  Ryan stood very still, knowing that the anger of the stickies' leader might easily mean instant, summary execution for Krysty and himself.

  Four of the patrol lumbered into the shadowed darkness, one firing his musket with a dull, flat sound.

  "They won't get him, will they?" Charlie reached into his pocket and calmly reloaded the Uzi.

  "I doubt it."

  The stickie sniffed. "Well, now he'll go and hunt up some friends and come back here to try to rescue you. We'll be long gone. Shame he did that. Won't make it easier for you two."

  "That's the way it goes," Krysty said, sitting in the dirt, not making any effort to cover herself.

  "Tell you the truth, it makes it harder for me. These others—" he gestured to the watching circle of stickies, and the shamefaced quartet that was picking its way back through the trees "—depend on me beating norms. Proving I'm better. The snowhead fucked that up for me."

  "I'm real sorry," Ryan said, wondering how far the noise of the shooting would have carried.

  "Strip off now. Let's have that over. Then we get moving."

  A moment later Ryan didn't make any resistance to the search for hidden weapons, closing off his surging anger.

  Krysty also shut down a part of her mind, so that the probing, clawed fingers and the suckered hands were only a dull sensation. The sniggering and the intrusion into the secret places of her body passed.

  As all things did.

  Chapter Sixteen

  FIRE ANY BLASTER within a mile of a sleeping John Barrymore Dix, and he'll not only wake up, but he'll be jerked from the land of warm sand with the certain identification of the make and type of the weapon, with a close guess at its caliber.

  Which was why he had come to instantly alert con­sciousness, but in a state of some considerable con­fusion.

  "Nine-millimeter Uzi," his infallible mind told him, a message that was passed on to his lips. But his hand had already picked up his own blaster and was hold­ing it ready.

  A nine-millimeter Uzi.

  "Who?"

  On his feet, crouched, his memory analyzed the sounds he'd heard—a burst of rapid fire, ripping through the stillness, but a little muffled. At least a quarter mile away.

  "Farther?"

  Behind him, Mildred was by the ancient ruins where they were camped. She'd heard the noise of the shooting and had spun around.

  Across the high-walled canyon the cattle and other stock had stopped eating and lifted their heads with a mild curiosity.

  Mildred was about to call out to J.B. when she re­alized that might not be the best thing to do.

  Now the Armorer was on the move, holding the blaster at the hip, stooped over as if he were afraid of catching his hat on low branches. When he saw her he waved an urgent hand, motioning for the woman to get inside, under cover.

  In the distance they both heard the flat sound of another gun being fired.

  Even Mildred was experienced enough to recognize the distinctive noise of a black powder musket being discharged. She drew her revolver.

  J.B. was closing fast. He glanced behind as he ran, but the ridge that closed the box canyon from the rest of the forest was still deserted. And there was no other way that anyone could come at them.

  "Got you covered, John!" Mildred shouted, the target pistol already cocked.

  J.B. was out of breath when he dived in through the narrow doorway, into the coolness of the building. He sat breathing hard, took off his spectacles and wiped them slowly.

  "Still nobody?" he asked.

  "Not a sight and not a sound," she replied. "Think it could be Jak or Christina?"

  "No. That was an Uzi. Certain-sure. Whatever it is, won't be real good news. I can promise you that, Mildred."

  "We stay here?"

  J.B. managed a smile for her. "No place else I'd rather be."

  Time passed.

  The stock had resumed its grazing, and birds had come back to the canyon.

  Mildred and J.B. had eaten a snatched meal of po­tato salad and jerked beef, with water from the spring at the side of the ruins.

  It was about two hours after the burst of automatic fire that J.B. spotted someone moving, a slight fig­ure, darting elusively among the trees.

  "It's Jak," he said.

  It took less than five minutes to hear the whole story, another two minutes to decide that Mildred should go back at her best speed to warn the others while J.B. and Jak started to try to pick up the trail of the stickies and their prisoners.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ONE OF THE things that life in Deathlands had taught Ryan Cawdor was to always try to look for the positive factors in any situation.

  He and Krysty had been allowed to get dressed again, but their hands had been tied behind their backs with a brutal efficiency.

  The best thing to weigh in the balance was the fact that they were both still alive and relatively unin­jured.

  The blood from the torn skin on Ryan's left arm had been seeping to such an extent that Charlie had even­tually had to order a stop and have it bandaged with a strip of material torn from a shirt.

  The pair wasn't entirely without a weapon. Ryan had casually draped his white silk scarf around his neck as he finished dressing, and none of the stickies had made a move to take it away from him.

  No one had noticed that both ends were weighted, making it into a lethally effective garotte.

  As Ryan and Krysty stumbled on, the barrels of the muskets jabbing them in the small of the back, Ryan tried hard to tick off some more positive factors about their position.

  Jak was alive, and he'd quickly get news of their predicament to J.B. and Mildred. The Armorer would send Mildred down the trail to Christina, Doc and Dean and bring them back at double time.

  And J.B. and Jak would be coming after them.

  After that Ryan ran out of good things to think about.

  STICKIES WERE NOTORIOUS for having great physical stamina, and this group was no exception. They pushed westward, up a snaking trail that crossed over a bare crest of sunbaked rock, pausing briefly by a stream that dashed itself down a wall of undercut stone, falling in a rainbow spray.

  Ryan and Krysty stood below it, faces upturned, drinking the icy water. Both took care not to take in too much.

  During the late afternoon they stopped again, by a rotting wooden bridge with rusted supports.

  "Sit over there," Charlie ordered. "You get some jerky."

  "Much farther?" Ryan asked.

  The mutie's toothless mouth stretched into a smile. "That's for us to know and you to find out, Caw­dor."

  He wandered off and sat with his men, joining them in a detailed investigation of the weapons that they'd captured. Ryan's pistol caused most interest to the group.

  Charlie turned with the blaster in his hand. "What can you tell us about my new blaster, Cawdor?"

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Everything."

  Ryan shook his head to disturb the horde of tiny flies that were buzzing around his face.

  "Model P-226, 9 mm SIG-Sauer."

  "Fifteen rounds?"

  "Push button mag release. Baffle silencer's built-in, but it's getting past its best now. It weighs a touch over twenty-five and a half ounces. Overall length's a little under eight inches. Barrel close on four and a half inches long. Anything else you want to know about it?"

  The stickie laughed. "You know your blaster, Cawdor. Heard word of you over the years. You kept rising to the surface like a dead fish. All over Deathlands. I knew our paths would cross one day. Knew it. And I was right."

  Ryan didn't reply, and Charlie turned back to his men.

  Krysty leaned close to him. "If I used the power I could easily break the cords."

  "Then what?"

  "Free you."

  He looked at her. "Both be dead. Have to wait, lover. If they leave us tonight… or at their camp. Mebbe risk it then. But you know that using the power leaves you drained for hours."

>   "You might make it."

  "Forget it."

  There was a long silence between them. One of the stickies brought a handful of the dried meat and dropped it in the dirt, giggling as they had to roll on their stomachs to gnaw at it.

  After he'd rejoined the others, Krysty spoke qui­etly, mumbling through a mouthful of beef.

  "Jak and J.B. must be after us."

  "Difficult."

  "What?"

  "Difficult to track us. This skinny bastard is good. Taken us a quarter mile or more over bare rock. Won't leave much of a trail. Crossed the same stream three or four times. Walked along through the water for a ways. I figure that they'll have a triple-hard time try­ing to follow us. And they'll be real slow, having to keep backtracking and checking all the time. No way they'll move as fast as us."

  "But they'll find us in the end."

  "Course they will."

  The pause was so minimal that an outsider wouldn't have noticed it. But Krysty did.

  "Try again, lover. Fails to convince."

  "Fireblast! Odds are they'll find us, but it could be way too late."

  Charlie and the stickies were standing, ready to move on again.

  MILDRED POURED a pitcher of water over her head, dropping to hands and knees, exhausted by the run back to the main camp.

  Dean was already pacing nervously around, eager to start off in pursuit of the stickies that had taken his father.

  Christina had merely nodded as the black woman panted out her story, sitting and waiting patiently un­til she'd finished.

  "Knew this would happen," she said. Her voice was flat, bitterness coming dry and hard from every word. "Soon as Ryan Cawdor came back here. Things were good until then."

  Doc had been leaning silently against the trunk of a sun-warmed spruce, shaking his head at the gravity of the news. But at Christina's anger he stood, stamping the ferrule of his lion-headed cane in the dirt.

  "Forgive me, my dear, but I fear that your concern has made you less than fair."

  "What?"

  "I concede that your life with the young man has been one that has paralleled Shangri-la itself. But you can hardly blame Ryan for the misfortunes that have struck in the past couple of weeks."

  "Oh, yeah? Wrong, Doc. I can blame him. Just watch me."

  "These stickies did not come to New Mexico to hunt down Ryan, did they?"

  She looked down at the ground, moving the surgi­cal boot she wore against a tiny yellow-and-white flower. "Things were good with Jak and me until he came again."

  "And they'll be good again," Mildred said. "Course they will."

  "Ryan Cawdor," Christina grated. "Jak thinks he's like something between an angel of death and a sub­stitute father. The best thing the Good Lord made since he invented the chambered revolver."

  Dean was shuffling his feet anxiously. "Dad does good," he said.

  "Sure. Count the men he's chilled good. Women he's widowed good. Little ones that he's orphaned real good. Houses burned good."

  Doc pointed the sword stick at Christina. "Allow me to remind you of the somewhat selective nature of your little speech, Miss Ballinger. Or, Mrs. Lauren. Cast your mind back to your life with your sweet-natured father and your fine brothers."

  "All right, Doc, all right." Her face showed her re­membered pain.

  "Ryan chilled them good. Liberated you good. Risked his life good. And in the time I've had the honor of knowing him, he has done a very great deal that is undeniably good."

  Christina hauled herself to her feet and nodded, lifting her eyes to meet Doc's. "You're right and I'm not. But I'm pregnant and you're not. And my hus­band might come back dead."

  "We'll all go together, my dear," Doc said, his voice now gentle.

  "Sure. Yeah, sure."

  EVEN AFTER THE BETTER PART of a day with them, Ryan still found it hard to reconcile himself to the idea of there being intelligent, capable, organized stickies.

  The sun was setting, and they'd covered about fif­teen miles over tough terrain. And Charlie had con­stantly been taking precautions to ensure that any pursuit would be slow and laborious. Again and again they would detour to walk over exposed granite, avoiding the softer paths.

  Each time they came to water they would deliber­ately try to pick their way along the center, sometimes altering the direction they were moving in to ensure that anyone trailing them would waste a lot of time.

  Once Ryan pretended to stumble, hoping to leave some clue for Jak and J.B.

  Charlie took him by the arm, gripping him by the elbow, suckered fingers digging in with frightening power.

  "Try that again, Cawdor, and I'll use my hands on the woman's breasts. Think she'd look as good with­out any nipples?"

  Ryan didn't try it again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THEY PASSED A large open space, with light gravel partly covered with thimbleberry bushes and sagebrush. Be­yond it the trail meandered past a row of burned-out buildings so totally destroyed that it was impossible to even guess at what they might have been.

  Beyond that was another, much more substantial ruin, the windows missing, dark marks of smeared carbon showing that it had also been ravaged long ago by a ferocious fire.

  "It was a place called a Visitor Center," Charlie explained.

  "Seen them in the old wilderness parks," Ryan re­plied.

  The last dying daggers of crimson sunlight bounced across from the high sandstone cliffs opposite, re­flecting from the dangling golden medallions on the hairless chest of the leader of the stickies.

  Krysty had moved a few steps away from Ryan, shepherded by the guards, leaving him alone with the skeletally tall mutie.

  "What's going down?" Ryan asked quietly.

  "How's that?"

  "What happens now?"

  "We go to the houses."

  "Then?"

  "Meet the rest of the community."

  "Come on."

  "What?"

  "Fireblast! You know what I'm talking about, Charlie."

  "There'll be eats for all."

  Ryan felt the pulse of anger beating at his temples, and the long scar that seamed his face began to throb.

  "When do we get chilled?"

  "Ah. Get your drift now, Cawdor. Good question. Real good."

  The toothless mouth was stretched in a beaming, God-bless-you smile, the protruding eyes half-closed in delight. The stickie's whole body was tense, like someone straining toward a distant orgasm.

  Only at that moment did Ryan realize the total ha­tred the mutie felt for him.

  "Krysty doesn't have anything to do with the cards lying between you and me, Charlie." He knew how barren and futile the words were, even before they left his mouth, and knew what the response would be.

  "She's your woman, Cawdor. Walks in your shadow. Sleeps in your bed. Fucks you. Eats with you. Her life is your life, Cawdor, and her death will be your cold death."

  Ryan took in a slow, deep breath, fighting down the blood rage. "Yeah. I understand."

  Charlie patted him on the shoulder. "But first you get to eat and meet some other…visitors, I guess they are."

  "Why not chill us right off?"

  "Like I said, they—" he gestured toward the armed men that ringed Krysty "—back me, long as I chill norms. More norms I chill, more they think I'm close to a god. If I come up with good way of doing the chilling, then they like it even more. You'll go out with a big bang, Cawdor. That I promise you. Real big bang."

  DURING HIS ODYSSEY through Deathlands, Ryan had visited any number of villes and camps, from the richest to the poorest. He'd also seen stickie settle­ments.

  They were filthy and squalid, with oily fires and open middens. Huts leaked raw sewage, with rotting food in stinking heaps. Lousy mongrels fought over scraps, and naked children tormented those weaker than themselves.

  Charlie's small empire wasn't anything like that.

  There was a winding trail down from the ruined buildings, the lush veget
ation on either side cropped back. In the steepest parts it became a sequence of crumbling steps.

  Ahead of them they could see a towering cliff, looming over the ravine. The farther they descended, the darker it became.

  Charlie pointed toward the wall of orange rock, smeared with chemical stains of black and gray. "You know that this remained hidden for hundreds and hundreds of years. Local Indians were fearful of it. Bad place. Wasn't found until the middle part of the 1900s. Cowboys were chasing lost cattle. One fell over the edge and broke his neck. Others came down and found this."

  He waved the Uzi as they reached a wider curve in the track, gesturing toward the amazing sight below them.

  It was like a town, almost buried under a gigantic overhang, a hundred feet or so from the base of the cliff.

  At first glance, there seemed to be a limitless num­ber of little dwellings. But a second, slower look showed that there were about forty of them. Many were linked together, some in ruins.

  There were plenty of cooking fires burning as well as dozens of oil lamps, hanging in the gloom like golden eyes.

  "How many you got in this place?" Krysty asked, hardly able to believe the organization of what she was seeing.

  "Last count there were ninety able men and forty-four women. Eighteen little ones." There was a note of bitterness in his voice. "Stickies aren't great at breeding, Firehead. Chromosome chains are faulty. Some young doctor told us that. Just before we filled his ass with black powder and blew his cock over the mountain."

  Now the commune had seen them.

  Ryan had checked on security, spotting silhouettes on the cliff top, against the pale yellow sky. And he was certain there'd been other sentries in among the trees.

  There was whooping and cheers. Someone stirred up the largest of the fires so that a great fountain of bright sparks went whirling into the evening sky. The sight produced even louder yells from the crowd of stickies.

  "Still like flames," Ryan said.

  "Bred into us in the bone," Charlie replied. "Ex­plosions, lights and flames. Not even I can stop that."

  RYAN AND KRYSTY had their ropes cut, but they were replaced with old steel handcuffs that clicked shut, keeping their wrists bound in front of them.