Ryan .
If he had been linked to the gleaming banks of sophisticated preskydark medical monitoring equipment, then there would have been a fractional change in the beeping and in the peaks and troughs of the printout of his life functions. It would have been marginal but readable.
Ryan.
Krysty concentrated with every ounce of her powers to mindlink with him. Her thoughts reached out through the dark and stormy night like the frail beam of a lighthouse, searching through the storm-racked skies.
On the other side of the hut, oblivious to anything else, the old man slept restlessly, his dreams filled with voracious creatures that scurried blood-eyed through moist, dark places and tore at living flesh.
Ryan’s fingers opened and closed again. His lips moved, his dry tongue pressing at his teeth. Beneath the closed lid, his good eye flicked from side to side as though it were scanning a document, and his pulse quickened.
Ryan.
The rain flurried against the wall, bringing a scattering of fallen leaves to brush at the door.
The old man turned over, disturbed by the sound, his dream changing from dark to light, to driving a rocking Conestoga wag across endless, sunlit prairie, heading toward the jagged silhouette of Ship Rock.
Ryan, I’m here, my dearest love. Are you there, Ryan ? Krysty bit her lip so hard with the effort of trying to send the soundless message across time and space that a worm of blood inched over her chin.
He stirred again, his mind groping toward the surface like a drowning man clawing his way upward from the great mysteries that inhabit the abyss of the deeps.
In the abandoned store Krysty was disturbed for a few moments by Doc rolling over, coughing, mumbling to himself. “A man would as lief travel from Dan to Beersheba and then find himself without horse.”
Krysty smiled to herself, then forced herself back into the trancelike state, trying to send her thoughts to Ryan, if he still lived. She hoped against hope that she might receive some sort of signal back from him.
Ryan, lover. Speak to me, lover, please.
He was breathing faster, hands both clenching, nails biting into his palms.
Krysty was rigid with tension, every muscle and sinew strained taut. The worm of blood had become a steady trickle, and her face was screwed up into a rigid mask.
Come on, Ryan, hear me. Come on, lover.
Outside the hut, driven up from the rising waters, a mutie cottonmouthfull thirty feet longcame crawling slowly along the path outside the hut. Pausing, its tongue tasted the air, sensing life close by. But the door was closed and it passed by, vanishing into the trees beyond the hut.
Ryan.
He was lying on his back, his head turning from side to side as though he was disagreeing with something someone had just said. But he could hear the words.
Feel the words.
Ryan opened his eye.
Chapter Six
“Eight days ago I figured you was ready for boneyard.”
Ryan sat on the porch of the little hut, enjoying an afternoon of watery sunshine, whittling away at a short piece of broken beechwood, trying with little skill to turn it into a whistle. He shifted sideways, the SIG-Sauer clunking in its holster against the leg of a broken chair.
“Careful there, Ryan,” Paddy Maxwell mumbled. He was sipping from a chipped jug of rot-gut hooch that he’d traded for the previous morning. He’d dealt it for a skein of fresh-gutted catfish that he and Ryan had caught the day before, with an inbred family of moonshiners who lived in squalid poverty a few miles up a side creek.
The old man had warned Ryan to sit inside the cabin and keep the SIG-Sauer drawn while the trading went on with the family of a mean-eyed father, three sons with barely a single brain between them and a pretty, vacant-eyed daughter.
“Turn your back on them scum, and you end up pickin’ steel out your fuckin’ spine,” he said.
Ryan finally tired of his clumsy attempts at carving and heaved the piece of wood toward the muddy edge of the water, now back at something close to its normal level. What had been a nameless stretch of river he now knew was known locally as the Big White.
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