On the north side of the ville was the start of a narrow track that led up the mountainside in a series of winding switchbacks between the fallen blocks of limestone. From the wheel ruts, which were deep and matched the tires perfectly, the cart had been the only vehicle to traverse it in a very long time, and had traversed it often.
Crecca didn’t do any of the cart pushing. He walked a short distance behind, and he stopped to look back when the procession was halfway up the slope. What he saw wasn’t what Ryan or Mildred or Doc saw.
There were no shabby huts below, no open sewers, no mind-numbing poverty and starvation. What Crecca saw instead was a place of enormous wealth and luxury homes, a suburban development that had apparently, miraculously been left untouched by the fires of skydark and the ravages of the decades of nuclear winter that followed. And for the most part it was deserted.
All there for the taking.
And there was only one person keeping Crecca from taking it: Baron Kerr. The last of Kerr’s men lay dead in the cart.
So far the job of baron looked butt simple to Crecca. Much simpler, and much less dangerous than running a carny and mobile gas chamber.
Pick some bounty.
Slam some heads.
And the last bit was especially easy since the folks getting their heads slammed wanted it to happen.
He stared at the low concrete-block building at the foot of the slope. It was the most secure structure in the ville, and where he knew its most valuable treasures would be kept. He recognized the building as a predark pumphouse because he’d come across others like it before. From the oblique and downward angle of view, he could see the huge pipes running down the mountainside to the back of the building. No doubt they had something to do with the pool’s water level.
A tug at the tail of his ringmaster coat made Crecca turn. He looked down to see Jackson staring up at him with dead black eyes.
“Get away from me,” the carny master said.
The naked stickie started to sing and dance, to try to make up for biting the hand that fed it. Jackson did a rendition of the Tiffany music video that they had been rehearsing in the big wag, complete with head jukes and hip thrusts.
The singing sounded like screeching to Crecca, and the dancing wasn’t like dancing at all, more like a perpendicular grand mal seizure. The carny master wasn’t amused and wanted no part of it. He hauled off and booted the stickie in the backside, sending it tumbling down the road.
When Jackson didn’t go away, but rather resumed its irritating caterwauling and pelvic thrusting at a safe distance and with a pleading look on its pale face, Crecca reached down and picked up stones, with which he pelted the creature.
Struck and bleeding, Jackson slunk away over the hillside, still in its choke collar and trailing its chain leash.
With Crecca bringing up the rear, the procession crested the rise, then followed Baron Kerr downhill to the muddy bank beside the pool, where he signaled for them to stop. When the baron handed out the cutting tools, Crecca was first in line to take one of the axes.
The job was messy, but not difficult, because the tools had been honed to razor sharpness.
After the first body had been chunked, Kerr started lobbing the pieces into the pool. Almost at once the huge lungfish rose to the bait, swirling and splashing on the surface as they fought over their dinner.
Crecca enthusiastically returned to the chopping. As he did so, he noticed Kerr staring at him. The carny master smiled at the ville’s headman as he brought down the ax.
You’re next, Baron, he thought.
Chapter Thirty-One
Baron Kerr had learned not to trust rays of hope. Like everything else in his ever shifting world, they had always proved to be illusions, cast by the burning pool for its own inexplicable ends.
Yet, as he watched the man in the red coat struggle on the ground with the black scout over the right to brain the strapped-down-and-beaming sacrificial lamb, he had the first inkling of what might be possible. While it wasn’t unusual for people to fight for the right to be next to sit in the Clobbering Chair, and so to sooner exit the grasp of the pool, no one had ever before demanded the right to be executioner. To test his suspicion, he had given the pipe back to the black man, then studied Red Coat’s reaction when it was used shortly thereafter to crush the victim’s skull. Kerr saw fury in the man’s eyes. Fury at having been denied pleasure. Fury directed at him, the denier.