Chapter Thirteen
The journey through the rest of the woodland was ominously quiet. To get so close to the settlement, and to know that the hidden inhabitants knew they were close, yet to have no obstructions thrust in their path kept both the Gate tribe and Ryan’s people in a state of constant tension. Not that that was necessarily bad. It helped them to stay triple red and frosty even when all around was quiet. But somehow the suspense was fraying their nerves and attention, making it sure that sooner or later they would snap.
So it was a relief to reach the end of the woods. As with the plain, the division wasn’t natural. The woods ended abruptly, with a division that suggested a carefully maintained watch on nature encroaching too far onto what, on the surface at least, seemed a deserted and long since abandoned ville. This was belied by that careful maintenance.
Gloria dropped to her haunches as they emerged from the woods, holding up a hand to signal a halt. She pawed at the earth, taking a handful and sniffing it. Ryan crouched beside her.
“Tell you anything much?” he asked.
“Tells me enough, sweets. Tells me that it’s been turned recently, and that it wasn’t the first time. Woodland like this should spread easily. At the very least there should be saplings for the next hundred yards where the trees reclaim the land. And there’s nothing wrong with the soil. This is good, rich earth, and the texture and moistness suggested that it’s been turned regularly. If this was recent, then it would still have dry crust in it. This is loose.” She crumbled the remnants of the soil in her hand through her fingers, sieving it gently and letting it fall until her hand was empty. “See?” she added. “Nothing left here.” She held out her empty hand.
“So they keep the area clean but otherwise don’t use it, and want anyone coming too close to think that it’s deserted,” the one-eyed warrior mused. He cast his eye to where the old wire fencing forming an enclosure around the ville had long since vanished. A row of evenly spaced concrete posts, reinforced with steel rods, now corroded and covered with the grime of decades, stood for as far as he could see in either direction, like an endless row of rotten teeth in the mouth of a seemingly harmless mutie…one that could still take your head off if you didn’t pay heed. The electrified wire that had ran between the posts was little more than a memory.
But Ryan was aware that this was a facade. They had already encountered the forces that had to surely live beneath the seemingly dead surface. Furthermore, they had seen and fought the results of the experiments these people had perpetrated on stickies.
His hard, steely blue left orb caught sight of a lone concrete pillar, seemingly undamaged. Set deep into the concrete was an opaque lens: a sec camera. The pillar was too high, at this angle, to get a good look at the deep-set camera, but the impassive blue-black lens stared unblinkingly ahead, refusing to tell him whether it was dead or unobtrusively recording their arrival at the edge of the settlement.
Gloria followed his gaze. “Soon find out,” she said simply, realizing what was passing through the one-eyed warrior’s mind. “Just have to prepare for a reception committee.”
“Whatever form it takes,” Ryan murmured.
Both leaders rose, and Gloria turned back to her people. She whistled a series of low-pitched commands barely audible in the quiet of the ville but still carrying back to the rear of the caravan, where Doc gave Jon and Petor an amused stare. He waited until the last of the whistles had died away on the quiet morning.
“I can see the use of such a system—after all, who but you would be able to define its meaning—but by the Three Kennedys, it must be a devil of a job to learn.”
Petor shrugged. “It’s always been there, since we were little. Just like learning to talk.”
“That’s all it is,” Jon added, “just different talk.”
Doc shrugged. “And to think that when I was young they tried to wipe out races with such a complex system of communication, calling them primitive. Yet who thrives now?”