“What’s with him?” Mildred said in dismay. “Where’s he off to now?”
Ryan shrugged as he smoothed out his bedroll and carefully set down the Steyr SSG-70. “Got some private business to attend to, I guess.”
“Are we going to have trouble with Jak?” Mildred asked him point-blank, hands braced on her sturdy hips. “Is he going to lose it on us? Has he already lost it? That’s the last thing we need.”
“Mildred, keep in mind that Jak has saved your life more than once,” Krysty cautioned her.
“And vice versa,” the black woman replied. “Jak and that mutie mountain lion have a connection that’s downright spooky. It’s been so long since we parted ways with that horn-necked monster, I’d almost forgotten just how spooky. It reminds me of the psychological case studies I’ve read about the psychic bonds between human twins. Only in this case it involves creatures of very different species. It isn’t natural, Krysty. It doesn’t make sense, biologically or physiologically.”
“You’re talking like a whitecoat.”
“I can’t help that,” Mildred said. “I was trained to think like a scientist. And the scientist in me says, we have no way of predicting with any sort of confidence what Jak is going to do next. Think about it. We no more than got inside the berm and he had us facing off against a dozen blasters…all over that mutie cat.”
“She’s right about the trouble,” J.B. told Ryan as he took off his glasses and polished the lenses with the hem of his shirt. “The big question is, can Jak keep to the plan we made? Or is he going to blow it for all of us by trying to get that critter out of its cage?”
“As it stands,” Mildred added, “this whole deal is balanced on a knife edge.”
J.B. nodded in agreement. He slipped his glasses back on. “Every one of those carny chillers over there has a centerfire blaster,” he said. “The odds were bastard bad even before we lost Doc. If the rest of us aren’t at one hundred percent, and on the same page, we don’t have a chance in hell here. We’re all gonna end up in a shallow hole with dirt in our faces. Mebbe the smart thing would be to slip over there once it gets dark and put a slug in the back of that big cat’s head.”
“Jak won’t let us down,” Ryan said with conviction. “He never has and he never will. He knows what we have to do, and why.” The hard edge to his voice said for the time being the discussion was over.
Inside, Ryan was as concerned as Mildred and J.B., and for the same reasons, but he couldn’t show it. His confidence had to shore up theirs; it was a simple matter of survival. He had to be the calm in the eye of the storm.
He sat cross-legged on his bedroll and with a scrap of lightly oiled rag began to brush the dust from the scope and action of his treasured predark longblaster. In silence, the others started going through the contents of their packs, sorting and gradually assembling a small pile of trade items so they could all eat and drink at the ville’s hostelries.
Ryan’s hands moved over the rifle automatically, his fingers programmed by countless repetitions of the same vital task. Trader had taught him that a fully functioning weapon was the difference between being dead and cold by the side of the road, and walking on. As he worked, Ryan thought about their long journey, about how they had followed the wheel tracks from the looted hamlet to Perdition ville. The trail ended on the outskirts of Perdition where they found a wide circle of deep holes pounded into the ground, holes made by carny tent’s massive stakes. Exactly the same circle they had found in the looted ville.
From a stooped old man poking around in the pile of worthless, half-burned trash the show had left behind, the companions had learned that the Gert Wolfram show had spent three days and nights entertaining the good folks of Perdition. The trash picker had described the strange and wonderful acts, the rousing music, the feats of strength and daring.