Doc had been teasing him about the injury, comparing it to something in an old song about a tattooed lady. “Looks like a still life of plums on a golden blanket,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t have the guards in line, all along your spine, or a fleet of battleships all around your hips?” He cackled with laughter at the expression on Jak’s pale face.
They had moored among the ruins of what had been a small village of riverside cottages, most of them very close to the water. It was, as Jak had noted, a strangely deserted region of Deathlands.
They had seen a total of five people all day, since leaving their overnight mooring.
There had been a pair of whiskered old men in a tiny rowboat, battling their way upriver against the current. They sat side by side, each with an oar, backs straining, hardly looking across at the clumsy raft as it rolled past them in the opposite direction, panting out a “Good day,” watching them vanish south while they labored to gain a few precious yards.
A woman and child had been sitting on a shallow bank on the eastern shore of the Tennessee. She was blind, with smooth flesh covering where her eye sockets should have been. The child that played by her feet, picking up tiny pebbles and laying them in a mazelike pattern, had a look of blank idiocy on its face, not showing the least interest in the strangers that drifted by a few yards away from them.
Krysty had called to them, but neither the woman nor the child reacted in any way.
The last of the people they saw was a young man with delicate features and a halo of thick golden hair. He had been walking along a path that ran by the river, in the same direction as they were sailing.
Jak had called out to him, making him jump, oblivious to their silent approach.
“Good afternoon to you,” he’d replied with a cheerful wave of the hand.
“We far from Shiloh?” shouted J.B. who was at the steering oar.
“Wouldn’t know, friend. I have to get to market. Carrying a flock of sheep hidden up my ass.”
The reply was so absurd and unexpected that everyone on the raft stared at him in silence.
He smiled and nodded merrily, keeping pace with the raft for about a quarter mile, with no more exchange of conversation, until the Tennessee bent away to the right and the path carried straight on.
Ryan had been lying on the deck, near the bow of the rudimentary boat, and he watched with the others as the cheerful young man vanished with a last, friendly wave of the hand.
“Few rounds short of a full mag,” he’d said.
“STRANGE SORT OF REGION we’ve come through,” J.B. said as they lay around their bright fire, with the shades of evening drawing down.
“I don’t recall being anyplace along the Tennessee with Trader.” Ryan yawned, reaching out and taking another slice of cold meat.
The Armorer nodded. “Me, neither. Rad count’s safe in the green, but we haven’t encountered anyone yet that you could call a norm. Not since leaving the redoubt.”
“Least there haven’t been any out-and-out muties. Just a few triple-strange.” Krysty folded her hands behind her head and stared up at the velvet sky, watching the myriad stars winking into life. “Good air and grass and water.”
“And tomorrow, Shiloh,” Doc added. “A cousin of my father gave his life there.” He blew his nose on his blue kerchief. “Fought in the Fifth Division of the Army of Tennessee, under William Tecumseh Sherman. Under Grant himself. You know that Sherman had a kind of breakdown in 1861, and Grant liked the bottle too well.”
“I know the story,” J.B. said. “Sherman said that Grant stood by him when he was crazy and that he stood by Grant when he was drunk.”
“That is correct,” replied Doc. “That is absolutely correct. I heard it from Cousin Wilfred himself, so it must certainly be true.”
RYAN WAS AWAKENED a couple of times during the night by the dull pain of his wound, getting up once to piss among the stunted rosebushes that ranged around some of the silent, derelict cottages.