“Best of luck,” Gus said. “We find your friend, and there’s a burying we’ll do it right.”
Doc cleared his throat, flushing in embarrassment. “I feel a call of nature coming on. A sudden spasm of intestinal pressure. So much rich meat after a relative dearth of sustenance. Would you all mind waiting a moment or two while I retire to to do the necessary?”
“Means he’s taking a dump,” Mildred explained, seeing bewilderment on the faces of the three hunters.
Doc pointed his swordstick at her in a mock-threatening gesture. “Duty calls and I must away,” he chanted in a nasal, folky voice. “Over the hills and far away.”
He wandered off from the camp, the wondrous odor of the roasting pork gradually fading behind him as he picked a path through the thick forest. He brushed against the moss-covered trunks of ancient pines, stumbling through deep leaf mold, which made his Victorian frock coat even more stained.
“Perdition! Confusion as I wander alone upon this winding path through a tortuous wilderness. All I have need of now is a dark tower to come to.” He smiled to himself, pausing a moment as he saw a clearing ahead of him. “Perhaps it will be a pretty rest room made of gingerbread and sugar icing. Or a grim place. Grim. How clever.”
It was silent, the sounds of voices having vanished behind him. There was just the rustle of the rising wind soughing through the topmost branches of the trees. Very little direct sunlight penetrated to the forest floor, and there was a dank, alien smell hanging in the air.
Doc sniffed. “Like the cave of a hibernating grizzly? Or the home of a family of incontinent felines. Unpleasant. Best do what I have to and be on my way.”
He dropped his pants, making sure that he had plucked a handful of broad green dock leaves to clean himself. Then he looked around with a sudden attack of nerves, fancying himself no longer alone. But he could see no one near.
The old man had propped his cane against a handy spruce, and when he had finished and readjusted his clothing, he reached for it, fumbling in space.
Doc turned and found that the swordstick was no longer where he’d placed it.
Now it was held in the suckered fingers of a tall stickie, one of a band of half a dozen, all leering at him. They’d sprung from the shadows like infernal spirits of the woods, watching him in total silence.
“By the Three Kennedys!”
Chapter Four
At times of sudden shock or tension, Doc had an unfortunate tendency to freeze. All the time-trawling experiences that had blighted his life, plucking him from his happy family in 1896 to the late 1990s, then shunting him forward to the corroded heart of Deathlands, had shifted his mind several points off center.
Now he stood and stared at the half circle of grinning stickies, looking around at their pale, glittering eyes, the drooling mouths, soft lips barely concealing the needled teeth, their eager hands, the suckers opening and closing with a malignant life of their own.
“Shitting norm,” hissed the mutie holding his beloved swordstick.
Doc casually allowed his right hand to fall to the butt of the cannon-sized Le Mat blaster on his hip, feeling the reassuring chill of the etched walnut.
“You got other shitters? Eating pig?”
The stickie’s voice was harsh and distorted, difficult to understand, sounding like bubbles of stinking gas bubbling through boiling tar.
“Limited vocabulary, my dear fellow,” Doc replied, his own voice feeling as frail as a dry leaf.
The eyes didn’t alter their blank, hating expression. In the stillness Doc could actually hear the tiny suckers opening and closing against the polished ebony of his swordstick. The obscenely threatening sound turned his stomach, as he imagined what those rending suckers could do to his own flesh.
“How many you shitters?”
“An infinite number. Alpha to epsilon. Many a memorable zeugma out yonder.”
“Stop talk shit!” The voice was raised, sibilant, angry. “You get chilled.”
Doc considered the oldest trick in the book, deciding that it was just about the only trick available to him with the muties clustered so close around him. Warning the others was the main requirement.