He decided to walk a little farther, hoping the exercise would help to stretch and strengthen the muscles around the fast-healing wound in his right thigh.
The land was fairly flat, and he strolled toward the fringe of the forest, pausing yet again when the veering breeze brought the smell of smokea cooking fire, with meat on it, meat that smelled like it was burning.
“Burned?” Ryan said to himself.
At least wolves and coyotes didn’t light themselves fires in the evening, unless they were some kind of new mutie that Ryan had never heard of.
Which was always a possibility in Deathlands.
The smell grew stronger with every step, and he crouched, squinting above the tops of the dark chestnuts, spotting the coil of smoke, pale against the moonlit sky.
He drew the blaster once more, making sure that the canteens didn’t chink against each other, catfooting between the spaced trunks, seeing that the fire was in a clearing less than a hundred yards into the woods.
As Ryan moved closer, constantly stopping to check that nobody was going to coldcock him on his blind side, he could make out two ragged figures hunched over the fire. Both had long hair, and they were talking to each other in a conversation that seemed to be mainly unintelligible grunting accompanied by violent gestures.
Only when he was very near could he be certain that they were male and female.
Ryan waited a couple of minutes, checking that the couple carried no blasters, seeing the glint of metal at both waists that told of hunting knives. When he felt safe, he walked out into the circle of the fire, blaster steady.
“Come to borrow a cup of sugar,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-One
The man and woman leaped to their feet with a strange, clumsy agility, both drawing their short-bladed pecking knives. The man spit out a coughing expletive, falling instinctively into a fighter’s crouch while the woman remained more upright.
In the cold moonlight, Ryan could see them both with a new clarity.
The man was around five-six, squat, about one-fifty pounds. His arms seemed too long for his body, the knuckles of the left hand almost trailing in the leaf mold. A mane of the filthiest hair that Ryan had ever seen partly masked the brutish face.
“No danger,” Ryan said, holding out his hands, but keeping the blaster focused. “Just passing by. Keep it quiet and nobody gets to be hurt.”
He was fascinated by the state of the man’s hair. It was matted and tangled, and seemed to contain a day’s supply of food. There was a piece of green, rotting cheese as large as a thumb, stuck above the right ear. As Ryan stared at it, he was horrified to see an opalescent cockroach, scales glittering in the silver moon, crawl apparently from the man’s ear and make its way toward the cheese.
The woman was shorter and skinnier, her withered, naked body visible through a twisting shroud of rags.
A small rodent’s carcass was stuck on a spit above the fire, the outside black, charred and smoldering. Ryan pointed at it. “Meat’s done.”
“Not for us not. Only like it burned,” the man muttered, not letting go of the knife. “Scared us, jumpin’ like a bandersnatch out the dark.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to. You live these parts?”
“Yeah,” the woman replied, sheathing her blade and squatting by the fire, thighs apart, seeming to deliberately expose her sex to him. Ryan swallowed hard and looked away, wishing he’d kept on moving. Apart from his disgust, there was something else that was keeping the short hairs prickling at his nape.
“Lived here forever. Was more us.” The man reached down and squeezed something in his crotch that made a popping sound. He examined it and slipped it into his mouth. Ryan managed to avoid throwing up.
“A ville?”
The woman shook her head, and bits of bark and dried dirt flew from it. “Not ville. Small. But him and me’s all left. And we don’t walk good.”
The couple looked in the last stages of some gross degenerative disease, hollow eyed, with dried and weeping scabs around their crusted mouths.