“Right. Take four minutes fromnow! Move in and try and keep them under control. Just tell them we only want to be fed and then we’ll leave.”
“Chilling?”
“If we have to. Now go.”
J.B., carrying the reloaded Uzi ready at high port, vanished silently away to the right, followed by Mildred. Ryan stayed where he was with Krysty, Jak and Doc, checking his wrist chron, counting off the seconds.
“One minute to go. Remember that we have to make them think we’ll blast them if they step out of line.”
Krysty looked at him, her face dappled in shadow. “Well, we will, won’t we?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we will.” He looked again at the changing digital display. “Ten seconds. Let’s get moving, people.”
THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE of six heavily armed strangers, coming in from both ends of their tiny village, produced an instant panic. But to Ryan’s great relief, the panic took the form of a passive defeatism.
The disabled man appeared to be the leader of the ragged community and he was the first to see them, spotting Ryan as the one-eyed man strode from cover toward the cooking fire. He immediately gave a great ululating cry of despair, falling awkwardly to his knees, hands clasped in front of him.
“Don’t kill us, mister.”
“Everyone keep still and nobody do nothing foolish and nobody gets hurt.” Ryan fired a single shot into the air to confirm the threat, the sound of the explosion echoing flatly around the small settlement.
“What do ye want, mister?” The whole village was on its knees, eyes rolling, mouths sagging in fear.
“Food is all. We got ourselves lost in that maze of lakes back there. Deeply hungered. Smelled your stew cooking and figured you wouldn’t let honest folks starve.”
The relief could almost be tasted. The man’s face lost its pallor, and he kept looking back and forth from Ryan to J.B.
“Why, sure. Surely, neighbors. What we have is ye welcome to. Be ready to eat right soon.”
“Ye can stay a night or more, neighbor,” mumbled a toothless woman with a gaping sore that leaked a colorless liquid over her neck and stained her torn cotton dress. “Any of ye with no bed warmers’d be welcome to take ye pick.”
Ryan nodded. “Thanks for that offer. But no thanks. A meal and on our way. What’s the river yonder?” Now that he was in the center of the village he could see it more clearly, making out a ramshackle jetty with a couple of rafts moored there.
The man grinned, showing a mouth filled with rotting teeth that jostled and leaned against each other like a cemetery after a quake. “You don’t know what the river is, neighbor. Where ye been all ye life?”
“Hither and yon,” Ryan replied, falling into the same kind of drawling patois that he remembered from being in rural Tennessee with the Trader.
“That be Tennessee.”
“The Tennessee River?”
“Surely be.”
“Where does it run?” J.B. asked, standing with his finger on the trigger of the Uzi, watching warily.
“It runs to Canada and to the Gulf of Mexico,” the disabled man replied. “So they says, as there ain’t a man nor wench from these parts ever bin far enough to see. We travel a day or so to the north and south. No more. Not safe. Gangs of muties. Ye seen muties, neighbor?”
“Not lately. Plenty over the years. Ye be troubled by stickies?”
“And scabbies and swampies and ghoulies,” cackled the toothless harridan, who seemed to be lacking several shingles from her roof. “Ye name them and we seen them.”
Ryan looked around the circle of haunted, watchful faces, seeing the ingrained dirt and mistrust, the tiny red eyes like trapped rodents that flicked along the line of outlanders. His guess at inbreeding was obviously right. Hardly one in five looked normal, with every kind of mental and physical disease showing itself.
“Food,” he said, “and we’ll be gone.”
THEY WERE GIVEN wooden bowls and spoons made from horn, taking the stew to sit on one side of the fire, blasters ready at hand while they ate. But the villagers didn’t show any sign of rebellion, though resentment at giving away their precious food was etched clear on every ruined face.