No one trustworthy in Paradise would have anything to do with the journey. On seeing the map, most of the prospective guides just spit in the dirt and walked away. The few who would talk to Kerr repeated gruesome campfire stories about what went on in those cruel, dark mountains. About people going up there and never being seen or heard from again.
Because Kerr and his fellow cult members believed they were righteous in their faith and that their god wouldn’t lead them astray; because they were desperate to leave Paradise, they chose to ignore the ominous signs and set out to find the place marked on the map on their own.
Inside of ten minutes of their arrival at poolside, the green lightning began to crackle and the spores fell upon them in a pale yellow blizzard. It was so beautiful, so remarkable that the people cheered and rejoiced on the bank, taking it for a sign from God. Afterward, they had wandered down to the deserted shacks, to the ready-made, if shabby, little town. Within half an hour, the Clobbering Chair had been dragged out of the blockhouse and into the center of the ville’s pounded-dirt square. The first victims had laughed as they pushed and shoved one another to win a seat and be strapped down. There was more cheering and rejoicing from these morally upright folk as the lead pipe smashed down and brains began to fly.
That day Kerr himself had swung the bloody pipe and led the cheers, and had supervised the butchery that followed on the muddy banks. His curse from the very beginning had been his receptivity to the pool’s needs. It was what kept him alive. Even when he no longer wanted to be.
“Only five,” one of the men standing near him said.
The words snapped Baron Kerr out of his dismal reverie. He refocused his eyes and saw that that was true. Just five wags. One was a ways ahead of the others. It was a much smaller convoy than the scout had described, but there was no way of knowing how many people were inside each one. There was room for sixty, for sure, if they were packed in tight.
Once all five wags had taken the detour and turned up the main fire road, Kerr led the three men back to the Baja Bug. He drove them down to the valley floor, then to the barricade across the interstate. At his command they got out and started dismantling the barrier, throwing the chunks of concrete onto the shoulder. It was the work of a couple of hours to pull it apart.
The baron didn’t remember how many times he had temporarily diverted traffic in this way, but he had always diverted just enough to fill the pool’s needs. Only so many could be accommodated in the ville. Only so many could be nourished by the fungus.
How long would sixty fresh souls last in the hidden valley? Kerr no longer tried to predict such things. Survival time was different for every individual. And sometimes, for reasons beyond his understanding, the pool chose to gorge shamelessly, taking a dozen or more unto itself in a single day.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jak peered around the bend in the downhill road, squinting his ruby-red eyes to slits as he listened hard for the sound of pursuit. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breath in his throat. The oppressive and airless stillness of the deep forest pressed against the sides of his head; it felt as if his ears were plugged up with cotton. The albino shifted the Colt Python to his left hand and wiped the sweat on his right palm on his pants leg. His mission wasn’t to fight a rearguard, delaying action, but to verify that the carny chillers had abandoned their wags and come after them on foot. And to try to get a head count if he could.
Jak had been the natural choice for the job because he was the fastest runner of the companions. But he was as slow as molasses compared to the lion, who sat on his back legs on the road beside him, its huge head cocked, its round ears upright and at full attention.