RYAN WOKE UP, trembling, soaked in sweat. He lay still for a few moments, his right hand fumbling automatically for the butt of the SIG-Sauer. It took only a second for him to locate it, though the cool slick metal felt oddly unfamiliar to the touch.
Once he had the blaster secure and cocked in his fingers, he lay still, trying to relax, fighting to slow his breath and steady his heartbeat. He realized in a few seconds that Krysty was no longer lying at his side. With her sensitivity to mood changes she would immediately have been aware of his distress.
He wondered where she’d gone, what the time was.
Cautiously Ryan lifted his right hand over his good eye, cupping it as he made sure that the eye was open, feeling the lashes brush against the skin of his palm, confirming movement. Then he slowly moved his hand away again.
“Anything, lover?”
“Fireblast!”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to make you jump. I know what you said, but I came in and saw you experimenting. Guess there’s still no glimmer of light.”
It was a simple flat statement with no hint of a question to it.
“Nothing,” Ryan said, the single word as abrupt and harsh as a handful of dirt thrown on a coffin lid.
JAK AND J.B. HAD BEEN OUT together on an early-morning recce. It was obvious that Ryan couldn’t have gone out with them on a potentially dangerous mission, but it still hurt him that the Armorer hadn’t, at least, gone through the motions of consulting him.
But he said nothing and listened intently as the pair reported back to the others over a breakfast of cold chicken and ham, with bread and cheese and a variety of the preserves that had been stolen the previous evening.
Johannes Forde was knocking back the whiskey, moaning constantly at the taste. “Worst I ever knew. Got to have me another chugalug just to make sure it’s as hideous as I thought on the first drink.” He had another swig, then sighed as he wiped his mouth and beard with his sleeve. “God damn Judas and all the little devils! I reckon it’s worse than I remembered it. Guess I should have me another sip.” After a pause he added, “Worse every time I try it. Anyone want to join me in getting rid of this catamount’s piss?”
Ryan heard Doc’s voice, the only one in the group to answer. “I will force down a drop or two. I have always said that there is nothing like good drinking whiskey.” Doc choked, then let loose a spluttering cough. “By the Three Kennedys! This is nothing like good drinking whiskey!”
“Ryan, care for some?” Forde asked.
“No. Thanks.”
J.B. spoke. “I was starting to tell you about Bramton. Sign called it Bramtown, but the store calls it Bramton. And the ruined church was the First Tabernacle of the Fishers of Men of Bramton, Louisiana.”
“See anything of this Family we heard about?”
“Nothing, Ryan,” Jak answered. “There’s trout farm other side of the ville. Seems main source work. Also logging. River runs through place. Goes off east through high bluffs. Could be big house there.”
“Seemed normal,” the Armorer added. “Reckon there’s about two hundred or so men, women and children in the ville.” He hesitated a moment.
“Go on,” Ryan prompted.
“Something kind of off kilter the way they walked. Not the usual kind of chatter of women doing washing in the stream by the mill. Children seemed listless. Kind of halfhearted in their playing.”
“Dogs ran quiet,” Jak said.
“Watched from the screen of trees.” J.B. sniffed. Ryan knew from long experience that the diminutive figure of his oldest companion had taken off his spectacles and was wiping the lenses clean, using the action to try to get his thoughts collected before he spoke again.
“Leave the glasses and get on with it,” Ryan growled.
“Sorry” J.B. sounded thrown by the interruption. “We hung around a half hour or so. Well, twenty-eight minutes by the wrist chron. Nobody came near us. Seemed like everyone knew precisely what they had to do and when they had to do it. Almost like robots in a predark vid.”
“What kind of weapons they have?” Dean asked. “Messed-up scatterguns like the fat bitch in the voodoo store or the old flintlock that blew away ?”
“Blew away my eye,” Ryan said, aware of how loud his voice sounded in the echoing old house. “Don’t have to worry about saying it, son. Always tell it how it is.”
“Still early days, Ryan,” Mildred remonstrated, her fingers playing nervously with the small golden crucifix. “Early days.”
“Yeah, sure.” Ryan hated himself for the bitterness, overlaid with self-pity, that he heard in his own voice.
J.B. coughed. “Pass me another slice of that smoked ham, will you, Krysty? Thanks. You asked me about what kind of weapons they had, Dean?”
“Right.”
“Didn’t see much weaponry. Couple of Kentucky muskets, bound up with baling wire, looking like they were last fired in anger in the revolutionary wars.”
Ryan was surprised at how honed and heightened his other senses had become since the blinding. He could actually hear J.B. turn toward Jak for confirmation.
“Most had long knives or axes. Workers. Saw one revolver. Holstered. Mebbe .38.”
“Surprisingly little blaster power for a couple of hundred souls,” J.B. observed.
“Bows?” Ryan asked.
“Didn’t see any Jak?”
“No. Some animal skins drying on stretchers outside one house. Probably hunted with arrows.”
“Not samurai arrows,” Krysty said.
J.B. gave a short, barking laugh. “No. Not a sign of those bastards around here.”
“Some strips gator meat drying.” Jak cut another slice of the bread. “Funny no guards. Must’ve missed food.”
“Yeah, right, Jak.” Ryan sat cross-legged on the floor, a piece of bread spread thick with gooseberry preserve in his left hand. “Reckoned they’d have been on double red after losing the chicken and stuff last night.”
His eye was sore and he rubbed at it, vaguely admiring the bright patterns that whirled and drifted across the retina.
Forde stretched and belched loudly. “Sorry for that, ladies and friends,” he said. “Still, better out than in, as my dear old silver-haired mother used to say. I was wondering whether the fair ville of Bramton might appreciate a showing of some of the finest 16 mm films in the whole florid history of Deathlands?”
“They might,” Ryan said. “Only one way to find out. Let’s go ask them.”
Chapter Fourteen
“You’re going to offer to take films of the people of the ville?” Dean asked. “And then you sort of process them and show them the next day?”
“More or less, son,” Forde replied, half turning in the seat of the wag. “You sat comfortable back there, Brother Cawdor?”
“Could do with something solid to hang on to. Never realized that having to travel with eyes closed brought on a swimming sickness!”
“There’s some boxes of film stock there. Can you sort of wedge yourself in?”
Ryan wriggled around, hands held out to try to fashion himself a kind of nest in the bed of the wag. “Think this is a bit better.”
“Just don’t lean too hard on the big case marked Acme Film Processor. There’s a good man.”
“How am I supposed to see any writing, you triple stupe!”
“Sorry.” But Forde didn’t sound all that sorry to Ryan, who sat with knuckles clenched bone white, hearing the man click his tongue to set the team walking forward again.
THE USUAL QUICK planning meeting had been odd and strained. Ryan still perceived himself as the leader of the group of friends, but it became immediately obvious that not everybody shared that opinion.
He had suggested that Jak and Mildred should ride along with him and Dean in the wag, while Johannes Forde drove the rig into Bramton.
The Armorer had immediately argued against that idea, pointing out that they’d seen no shred of evidence that the people of the ville were at all warlike, and they seemed sadly lacking in any serious armament.
“No point in coming in like an armed posse. You and the boy ride safe in the wag, and the rest of us’ll walk along with it. Keep our hands close to our blasters, obviously. Stay on orange.”
“Come to a strange ville and you go in on red! Didn’t Trader teach you a bastard thing?”
He heard the faint chittering of the tiny beads in Mildred’s plaits, he guessed that she was making some sort of conciliatory gesture toward J.B.
The Armorer had taken an audible long breath before replying. “Trader taught me to take care, like he taught you, Ryan. But he also used to say that you didn’t fire off both barrels of a 12-gauge to chill a mouse.”
That was the end of the argument.
Now they were moving toward the ville at an easy walk, and blinded Ryan Cawdor rode helplessly in the back of the two-horse wag.