For his concern, Doc received a quick, hard punch in the solar plexus that doubled him up and sent him staggering away. As he gasped for breath, Krysty tore off another greasy chunk with her teeth and poked it into her mouth with her fingertips.
Chastened and humiliated, Doc retreated to the scant shade along the front of the blockhouse, where he could observe and absorb, and perhaps form a plan of action. It appeared that his companions were suffering from some kind of sudden-onset mass mental illness. They all presented the same symptoms, which could have been caused by a shared trauma or by exposure to some infectious agent. Doc knew he had to uncover the cause before he could come up with a cure.
After the huge, if monotonous meal, everyone in the square except for Doc and Jackson fell asleep where they lay. As it turned out, the only other creature who wouldn’t eat the awful stuff was the young stickie, which was most curious. A picky stickie was something Doc had never seen nor heard tell of. The naked mutie stood resolute guard over its snoring, red-coated master.
After a few minutes, Doc heard the sound of a wag approaching from the north, apparently traveling a different route than the one he and the companions had taken.
A battleship-gray Baja Bug rumbled over a rise and roared over to the square. Like a pack of dogs, the sated diners stirred from their beds in the dirt. They rose to their feet as the Bug stopped. Its doors opened and four men piled out. Doc’s attention was drawn and held by the driver, a tall thin man in a tattered straw cowboy hat and scratched wraparound sunglasses. He wore his dark hair in a long braid and had a snaggly goatee beard. His clothes were ripped and filthy. His hands were filthy, too.
From the way the black cook prostrated himself in greeting the driver, Doc assumed that he had to be the hammered-down ville’s headman.
Doc was struck by the way the faces of the companions and chillers lit up in his presence. Everyone seemed thoroughly delighted to see the man for no reason that Doc could fathom. As far as he knew, none of them knew him from Adam.
If Ryan beamed at the driver as if he were a lifelong hero, Mildred’s response was even more surprising, and unsettling. The middle-aged black woman sidled up to the man in the cowboy hat and slipped her arm around his lanky waist. She fawned on him in an overtly sexual way that was absolutely contrary to her nature, as Doc thought he understood it. The Dr. Mildred Wyeth that he knew was a self-contained and self-sufficient human being, whose stoic and clinical reserve was the stuff of legend, and she never fawned over anything or anyone.
While Doc pondered this development, the crowd moved away from the Baja Bug, leaving it unguarded. With no one to stop him, the old man wandered over to the driver’s door and looked inside the open window. There were no keys in the ignition. Keys weren’t needed. The ignition had been pulled apart, leaving the ends of two bare wires hanging under the dash.
Doc straightened and looked over the Bug’s roof. Before anyone could stop him, he knew he could easily slip behind the wheel, start it up and drive away. And once he got rolling, he was free. Doc had the means to escape, but he made no move to do so. He couldn’t abandon his friends to whatever fate had in store. No more than they could leave him when he was out of his mind.
The situation he faced was much more difficult, however. He couldn’t simply lasso the companions and tow them away. There were too many of them. And it appeared from recent events that they would resist his intervention, and do so with all their might. His predicament was colossal, yet he was determined to succeed. From the middle of the square, the driver addressed the rapt crowd in a soothing voice. “My name is Kerr,” he said. “I am baron here. Now that you have been fed and rested, there is work to be done. Most rewarding work, as you will soon discover. Follow me.”