“There’s only the one exit,” J.B. said to Ryan. “And no window vents that I can see.”
“It’s like we thought,” the one-eyed man said. “Whatever it is that they’re doing to folks, it all happens inside the tent.”
“And nobody’s getting out,” Krysty added.
“From the looks of the fabric,” Mildred said, “the tent could be a Kevlar weave, or something like it. But with a plasticized coating on the outside. If it is made of Kevlar, even blaster slugs won’t tear it. With those double seams, it’s got to be virtually airtight.”
“A candy-striped, portable death house,” Krysty said softly.
“All the evidence we’ve seen points to an inhalant,” Mildred went on. “They’ve got to be using some kind of poison gas.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to go in there, Dad,” Dean said, his voice tight with concern.
“The boy’s right,” J.B. said. “Once we’re inside that tent, we’re trapped along with everybody else.”
Ryan grimaced. They had gotten themselves in a bind; that was for sure. But it wasn’t unexpected.
They had known that once they entered the ville, circumstances would be fluid. That whatever plan they had hatched over the long march might have to be thrown out.
A key part of it already had.
The original idea had been to take out some of the chillers in the night, using their knives to quietly reduce the odds. But once they were on-site in Bullard ville it became clear that plan wouldn’t work. For one thing, the caged sideshow muties acted like an army of watchdogs, alerting the carny folk with squeals and bellows when anyone approached their circled wags. For another, the dispatched roustabouts would have been missed on the work crews that morning. Search parties would have been sent out. Perhaps the shallow graves would have been discovered. Either way, the companions’ hands would have been tipped. Outnumbered as they were, without the element of surprise, they had no chance at all.
Having caught up with the traveling troupe at last, and having gathered a sense of the people involved, Ryan had no doubt that it was the carny doing the mass chilling. The moment he had looked into the Magnificent Crecca’s eyes, all other possibilities vanished.
To loot an entire ville down to the pots, pans and shoelaces called for manpower, which the carny had. To loot an entire ville required heavy duty transportation for all the stolen goods. The only tracks of sufficient number and size leading from the place had belonged to the carny. To chill that many people at once called for confinement, isolation, no escape.
Which the tent provided.
After they had examined the bodies in the unnamed ville, Mildred had guessed that a poison had been used, but she couldn’t tell what kind or how it had been administered. Though some of the victims had been shot in the head, most had no evidence of wounds. The bullet holes were either mercy shots or the result of a pack of chillers taking random target practice on a pile of corpses. It made sense that the lethal weapon would be a gas, although where it came from and how it was delivered was still a puzzle.
There was, of course, also still the possibility that the carny would just do its show and move on, without chilling anyone. As it had done in Perdition, and elsewhere.
Ryan thought this outcome was unlikely, as did the other companions. Bullard ville was made-to-order for another mass wipeout. It was isolated. It was unknown, except for being an established water stop along a very long, very dry road. If all the residents vanished overnight, the travelers up and down the valley would just conclude that the water supply had finally dried up, forcing folks to abandon their huts and disperse. No one would care one way or the other. No one would look any deeper.
Once more, Ryan took in the excited faces of the crowd. It wasn’t just made up of kids, but people of all ages, and the leaders of the ville, too. Dirt farmers, cooks, housewives and sluts had deserted their work in order to gawk at the wonder of Wolfram’s World Famous Carny. Their rapt expressions said this was the biggest thing to ever hit Bullard ville. Unless something was done, it was also probably going to be the last thing to ever hit Bullard ville.