The promised convoy approached the barricade.
The baron looked over at his three helpers, men whose names he had never bothered to learn. He had long since given up such formalities. Their hair, their faces and their hands were black with encrusted grime. As were his.
Their clothes hung in greasy tatters, showing peekaboo filthy knees and elbows. As did his.
All three were grinning at the line of onrushing wags, but in the backs of their eyes was a terrible, hooded fear.
Kerr didn’t ask himself if the terror he saw in their faces was real or whether he was just imagining it. He knew it was real because he felt it, too, the fluttering in the depths of his heart. It was the same paralyzing fear that kept him from taking the Baja Bug, which had more than enough gas to get him to the safety of Paradise ville, from just driving away and leaving the burning pool and all its horrors behind. The part of him that had been born James Kerr, the pre-burning pool James Kerr, wanted more than anything to make his break while he had the chance, or failing that, to simply die. But that part of him no longer had control over the body it inhabited. That James Kerr had shrunk in size and influence, until it had become like a lone passenger on a cruise ship commanded by someone else. By something else. The something else could steer the ship. Could make it run faster or slower. Could, on a whim, run it aground on some rocky shore, or scuttle it over bottomless seas. And it did all this by manipulating reality.
Or to be more precise, by manipulating the glandular secretions that determined his reality.
Kerr understood none of this, and not just because he was ignorant of the complex biological principles that were involved. His brain had been permanently rewired by its long term exposure to the spores’ mutagenic chemicals. This rewiring had dug deep circular ruts in his already limited powers of thought.
The surviving scrap of the original James Kerr saw the burning pool as a conscious, malevolent force that had swallowed him alive, a whirlpool of impossible power and perfect evil that had held him trapped, that had manipulated him like a puppet for longer than he could remember.
The larger portion of himself, the vast fleshy ship that carried him and that he observed with what seemed to be some degree of emotional detachment, had a much different view of the situation. The SS James Kerr found indescribable peace and contentment in living close to the pool and its lovely, twinkling spores. That James Kerr found serenity in tending the fungus in its moist grottoes, in following the pool’s grisly, unspoken commands, in being one with its infinite majesty.
It was this larger James Kerr who, standing on the edge of the fire road, felt the crushing fear of separation and loss. He longed to be back in the pool’s all-encompassing embrace.
Though passenger Kerr could only vaguely remember it now, there had been a time when he had been a whole, undivided being. He remembered traveling from Paradise ville to the pool and the blockhouse and the shanties. He had come on purpose, and he had brought many others with him. Like minded others. Kerr had belonged to an extended family-religious cult of nearly a hundred members who had migrated from the east in a handful of rusted-out school bus wags. They came in search of a new eden, unpolluted land and water, freedom from the moral depravity that typified Deathlands, and personified Paradise.
In their view, the thriving ville, with its rows of scabrous, twenty-four hour gaudies and its lice infested flophouse shacks, with its thieving, murderous residents, was nothing short of hell. After many weeks of enduring the indecencies and indignities of this postnukecaust Sodom, Kerr had located and purchased a crudely drawn map that, according to the traveling trader who had sold it to him, purported to show the way to exactly the sort of place the members had come looking for: isolated, protected, unsullied.
Kerr had then taken the map around the better sections of Paradise, in search of someone trustworthy who they could pay to lead them to the hidden high mountain valley.