“We’ll find water,” Krysty said, pulling out a canteen from her backpack. “That pipe under the temple had to come from somewhere. And the Grandee River isn’t that far.”
Then she paused for a moment until the throbbing in her temples subsided. Her hair had been cut by an arrow in the fight at the ville, and the pain still lingered. As she stroked the filaments, they coiled tighter, almost protectively about her hand, and as the dull agony eased somewhat the animated hair relaxed once more into a crimson cascade about her shoulders.
Taking a very small sip from the canteen, Krysty carefully washed out her mouth before taking a long drink. Born and raised in Colorado, she had learned early in life to always cut the dust from your mouth before drinking, or else you remained thirsty and wasted precious water taking a second, unnecessary drink.
Finally lowering the canteen, Krysty wiping her mouth dry on the sleeve of her bearskin coat, and tightly screwed the cap back onto the container. Waste not, die not, as her mother always used to say. Tucking the battered tin canteen safely away, Krysty then fingered her S&W Model 640 revolver to make sure it was still with her after the wild ride. Then kneeling, the redhead checked the knife tucked into one of her cowboy boots.
“Best not ride for a while,” Jak Lauren stated. “Horses rest or die.”
“That’s why I stopped here,” Ryan said, brushing back his wild crop of hair with stiff fingers. Sleep tugged at his eyes like dead weights, and he jerked his head to try to stay awake. This wasn’t the time or place to catch some sleep. Soon, though, they’d find someplace to make camp, and he’d get some rest then.
Grunting in acknowledgment, Jak awkwardly easing himself off the roan mare with his good arm, the other tucked inside his shirt stained dark with blood. He had caught some flying lead in the fight to get out of Rockpoint, but there had been no spurting of blood to show a major artery had been hit. It was only a flesh wound, the small caliber round having gone clean through his arm without even hitting the bone. Soon it would be just another scar on the albino teen’s body, lost amid the dozens of others.
“My dear Ryan, are you quite all right?” a silver haired man asked, sitting easily in his saddle as if born there.
Dressed in a frock coat and frilly white shirt with an ebony walking stick thrust through his belt like a sword, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner seemed to be a refugee from the nineteenth century. A WWI web belt encircled his waist, the closed pouches bulging with ammo for the colossal handcannon resting on his hip. The large blaster was a Civil War-era LeMat revolver, a 9-shot .44 that used black powder. Though Doc looked deceptively old, he could wield the LeMat with authority.
Fighting back a yawn, Ryan scowled at the other man, then shrugged. “I could use some coffee,” he admitted in frank honesty. “Got an MRE?”
Doc nodded in understanding. MRE stood for Meal Ready to Eat, and the pack included a main course, snack, gum, cigarettes, candy bar, dessert, coffee, sugar, moist towelette and even toilet tissue for afterward. The companions found the MRE packs regularly in the redoubts, often with the protective Mylar wrapper ripped open, the food inside dried and useless. But they had a few of the precious rations saved away for when they couldn’t hunt for meat or trade for food at a ville.
Against his will, Doc had been an experimental test subject for Operation Chronos, the use of the mat-trans units for time travel. He had been abducted from his quiet university home in Vermont in the late 1880s and thrown rudely into the nuclear wastelands of the Deathlands. For a very long time his mind had been shattered by the event, memories lost and reason gone. But the episodes of madness were less and less frequent these days, which the scholar took to mean that he was slowly becoming adjusted to the present. He found this oddly disturbing. Doc was still grimly determined to find a way to go back in time to his beloved wife, Emily, and his children. They were long dead and buried, in the present, but still alive and well in the past. Someday, somehow, Doc would return to them, and God help anybody who got in his way.