The head was missing from the body, sunk in some deep pool, ripped away in ragged tendrils of sinew and gristle, the flesh a dirty white color. One arm was gone, torn off at the shoulder, and the other had disappeared. The legs had both been broken a dozen times, splintered stumps of bone showing through the wrinkled, pallid skin.
There was no way of recognizing the elegant, powerful woman who had been their hostess and had brought murder and disaster to them. What remained of the corpse lay sprawled in the mud at the edge of the river, water lapping at it, making it rock gently back and forth.
“Should get it?” Jak asked hesitantly.
As they looked across, a pair of mutie fish-falcons swooped in from the north, out of the pines. They had wingspans approaching twenty feet and huge bronze hooked beaks. Golden eyes looked incuriously at the five invaders of their territory as they sliced through the dusk, settling on the raggedy flesh of the dead woman.
“Let it lie, Jak,” Mildred said. “Bitch got something like she deserved.”
Doc nodded his agreement. “I have encountered divine vengeance many times in Deathlands. To be ripped apart and then be food for the fowls of the air in a river of vile, stinking mud is an apposite ending for that ghastly, murderous person.”
“No sign of Ryan. Not even a rag of his clothes,” J.B. commented. “Nothing.”
Krysty sighed and stretched, standing to stare around in the dying light. “Nothing more we can do tonight,” she said. “We might miss something.”
“Camp a little way inland from the river,” the Armorer suggested. “No sign of any pursuit from the ville. Must be a good ten miles away by now.”
For a few moments they watched the rapacious scavengers as they ate, peeling away a long strip of intestines, squabbling noisily as they tugged it between them.
Krysty shook her head. “Just hope that what’s left of Ryan isn’t” She let the sentence fade into the darkness.
“We’ll make an early start in the morning,” Krysty announced, heading away from the quiet river.
Behind her, Jak and J.B. exchanged a meaningful, hopeless glance, but neither of them spoke.
Chapter Two
Ryan had lived within the silent shadow of death for all of his adult life. Indeed, as a child his constant companion was the tall man in the hooded cloak, with the scythe across his shoulder.
As the river dragged him under, already barely conscious from the steepling fall, he slipped in and out of blackness, his fading mind dragging up images of some of his other close calls with mortality an ax, wielded by a man dressed as a monk, in a brown habit and shaved head, the huge blade slicing a crescent-shaped cicatrix of flesh from Ryan’s arm, hissing by to strike golden sparks from the stone-flagged floor of the chancel; a ball from a nineteenth-century dueling pistol, plucking at his sleeve, barely drawing a bead of blood; a cell in the Everglades, where tidal water swilled in and out, rising within inches of the packed mud ceiling, forcing him against it, struggling for life for the long, cold hours until the salt waves receded once more, kicking away at the deadly snakes that swam around him; pinned to a giant sequoia with a hunting arrow through the sinews of his shoulder, holding him helpless while he struggled to reload his musket, watching the black-masked warrior moving toward him through the pools of bright sun and dappled shadow, another shaft already notched and ready.
The waters carried him along at a terrifying pace, faster than a man could run, bouncing him off boulders, rattling the teeth in his head. An undertow tugged him down into icy deeps, holding him there for eternities, blacking him out again. His mind plucked memories from his past.
He lay on a truckle bed in a shotgun shack in rural Georgia, as weak as a kitten from an amoebic fever, helpless while a little girl of eight years climbed onto his chest holding a filthy pillow in both hands. She leaned over his face, smiling gap-toothed into his eye, and began to suffocate him.