“Rain in the air,” J.B. announced, beating his battered fedora into shape.
“Shame no fish left.” Jak sat up, honing one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives on a round stone. “Shoot us another, Mildred, huh?”
“Yeah, Mildred. I’m about starved!” Dean added.
She laughed. “Maybe. I still feel kind of stuffed from yesterday.”
Ryan stood and stretched, easing the kinks out of his muscles. “Might be best to move on some. Tracks showed plenty of deer around here.”
Doc smiled at the thought. “Haunch of venison. With some apple and cabbage and some creamed potatoes. Goblet of a decent zinfandel to wash it down. Followed up with a gut-sticking portion of homemade treacle pudding. And a brimming balloon glass of Napoleon brandy.”
None of them, not even Krysty with her “seeing” ability, could have guessed how far off the mark was the old man’s sybaritic vision.
THE TRAIL WAS NARROW, winding steeply across the face of a wooded ridge, the ground dropping away to the west toward the river. The water level had fallen during the night, but the river was still a snarling, menacing sight, impossible to cross safely.
There was the threat of rain, though the bank of low clouds had passed over and lifted. Mildred hunched her shoulders and shivered. “Still cold,” she complained.
“Spoiled by having such a good fire for two nights running,” J.B. said with a grin, wiping away the fine mist of condensation from his glasses.
“Warm up once we get moving properly.” Ryan led the way, swinging along at a good four miles per hour, which was a fair pace over difficult terrain.
They hadn’t seen any sign of human life for some time, then Ryan spotted a short wooden sign, almost hidden among a clump of flowering thimbleberries: Beaver Lake Trail, 1.6 Miles. An arrow pointed back and downward. Crest Pine Trail, 8.6 Miles. An arrow pointed straight ahead. The lettering was deeply incised, covered with a thin coating of phosphorescent moss.
“Lots of national parks around here and stuff like that,” Mildred commented.
They crossed the remains of a wider, edged path, its surface rippled by some postnuke earth movements. Its tarmac surface was furrowed and cracked, and bright weeds sprouted through in hundreds of places.
“Look at that.” Dean pointed into the lower branches of a fire-scarred ridgepole, a little way ahead of them and to the left.
“More of the Children of the Rock,” Krysty said as they gathered round the macabre totem.
It was the wind-dried corpse of baby pig, with trotters and head removed, its flanks shrunken and leathery. Two unmatched dolls’ heads, plastic and eyeless, had been nailed to the shoulders, staring into each other’s face. Threads of blond hair, looking human, were pasted to one of the artificially pink skulls.
Chicken feet had been sewn onto where the forelegs of the pig would have been, the claws painted a faded crimson. And what looked like the legs of a very large rat were fixed to the rear stumps of the hideous thing.
A delicately embroidered waistcoat in rainbow silks had been fitted around the wasted midriff, fastened in place with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons.
“I vow that someone has taken a great deal of time and trouble, bubble, bubble, double trouble, in the caldron… My apologies, my good and trusted companions, but I fear that my brain took a brief vacation there.”
A small white card, about nine inches square, shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, was nailed to the trunk of the tree below the symbol:
The righteous are right and the rest are wrong. We choose life. For you, unless you come to us in abject humility, we choose death and damnation.
It was neatly lettered, signed in scarlet with the stark initials: “CoR.”
“Friendly sons of bitches,” Ryan muttered. “Religious crazies can be serious trouble.”
“Think we should just go back, lover?”
He shook his head hesitantly. “Mebbe not yet.”
EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON they reached another cross trail. This one was wider than any of the others and showed distinct ruts from wheeled vehicles and the deep patterns of many horses. Jak squatted on his haunches and peered at them. “Not fresh. Not very. Days not hours.”