Perhaps if he lay very still and closed his eye, the feeling would go away.
Ryan tried it for several minutes.
“Fireblast!”
It was no good. He was going to have to get up, unlock the door and walk along the passage to take a leak. It was cold and damp and the middle of the night.
“Fireblast!” he whispered again, swinging his legs from underneath the blankets. After they finished making love, he had gotten partly dressed. Now he had on his underclothes and the blue denim shirt, socks but no boots, and no weapons.
He thought about going just as he was. It would take him only a couple of minutes. Then again, there was Krysty’s unease. If you traveled with someone who had a mutie skill at “seeing” and chose to ignore them, then the blood was likely to be in your own face. Trader used to say that a man who took any chances when he didn’t have to was a likely candidate for a six-foot plot of good earth and no marker.
Slowly he pulled on the dark blue pants and laced up the steel-toed boots. He buckled on his belt and slid the SIG-Sauer from under the pillow into the holster, making sure that the eighteen-inch steel blade of the panga was secure in its sheath on the opposite hip.
“Time to get up, lover?”
The voice was heavy and muffled with sleep.
“No. Goin’ for a piss.”
“That’s good. Is it raining?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Hear it on roof. Pittering and pattering and…” Krysty’s voice faded into silence as she slithered back once more into a deep sleep.
Ryan eased back the bolt and cautiously peered out into the corridor, which was almost completely dark. A flash of bright pink chem lightning made him jump, the clap of thunder following hard on its heels.
It showed him the empty passage, making him blink at the transition from blackness to brightness to dark again. He could have turned and taken the oil lamp off the rickety table by the head of the bed, using one of the box of self-lights provided by Mrs. Fairchild. But he figured there was no need and stepped out of the bedroom into the stygian gloom.
The air was cool and moist. As he went past the door of the other bedroom, fingers brushing the wooden walls to keep himself orientated, Ryan heard the sound of someone coughing, deep enough to be J.B., he guessed.
It crossed his mind to wonder whether the cold that Doc was suffering from was going to turn out to be contagious. In Deathlands, if you were healthy then you were also lucky. Many illnesses could rage through a ville with virulent effect, ailments that he knew from reading about predark days hadn’t used to be mass killers. Things like measles and mumps and pink pox.
The next door was the bathroom.
Ryan pushed it open, expecting to find it creaking, but to his surprise it gave with the stillness of recently oiled hinges. There was a narrow window of frosted glass. Another flash of lightning revealed a nest of thick metal bars across it.
“Go to a lot of trouble to keep out hostiles,” he muttered to himself, preparing to piss. The thought crossed his mind that the bars might equally easily be designed to keep people in.
The storm was very close, the lightning coming every few seconds, the rolling thunder making the building quiver. After he’d finished, Ryan hauled himself effortlessly up onto the bars, peering out into the California night.
Rain was sheeting from left to right, driven on a strong northerly wind. He could see that even some of the larger branches on the tall pines were moving violently in the storm. He winced at a great jagged fork of lightning that sliced to earth less than a quarter mile from where he watched. Static electricity made his curling hair stand on end, filling the air with the crackling stench of ozone. “Fireblast!” It was a storm and a half. Just as he began to lower himself back to the floor, Ryan’s eye was caught by a dark blur of movement at the fringe of the trees, beyond a narrow path that ran along toward the cabin where Dean, Doc and Jak were sleeping. It was impossibly difficult to make out what it was.