They had traveled a few miles in silence, when the countess started talking, asking him about everyone in the group, seeming to pay most attention to his relationship with Krysty.
How old is she? How long had they known each other? Were they married? Did they intend to get married?
“What are your thoughts about starting a family, Ryan? Settling down someplace?”
“We’ve talked about it.”
“Does Krysty want children?”
“I already have a son, Dean, schooling up in the Rockies. He’s closing in on twelve. Mother’s long dead. I reckon that if we ever find that quiet place with sweet water and good land, then we might raise our own family. Me and Krysty. Talked about it. Almost since we first met. So hard to find a breathing time to walk away from the killing.”
She nodded, shifting down as they encountered a section of highway that was particularly badly rutted.
“I can’t tell you how much I want children, Ryan. I need them. Must have them. It’s the greatest imperative, and it rules all my waking hours. My sleeping hours, too.”
“I understand that.”
She turned, and he saw tears glinting in the corners of her green eyes. “Do you? Do you, Ryan? No. Nobody does. Think I’m a stupe bitch, sliding toward an arid middle age. Then I’ll get old and lose my grip on the ville with nobody to inherit. I must have a son.”
“There must be any number of men who’d be more than happy to bed you and give you what you want.”
“This part of Deathlands was badly nuked, and there’s still a lot of residual hot spots.”
Out of habit Ryan glanced down at the tiny rad-counter button on his lapel, as he’d been doing since they made the jump, as he did every hour or so, wherever they landed. The color was a clear, steady green.
“Not too bad here,” he said cautiously.
The countess looked sideways at him, the wag swerving a little to the left. She corrected the movement automatically, wiping her sleeve across her eyes. “I say that it’s the nuking that’s affected all the men. They all have weak seed, and it won’t grow within me and give me my son.”
It was as if there was more she was going to say, but she held it back.
“NEARLY THERE, Ryan.”
They were passing through a run-down, desolate suburb, with very little human habitation. Ryan had seen the crooked sign telling him they were actually on Highway 51 South, and he looked at the tumbled ruins of buildings that lined every such length of road across Deathlands Shell, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Diego’s Donuts, Fluff ‘n’ Fold, Shoney’s Big Boy, Ma’s Place. There were realtors and accountants, banks and thrift stores, used-car lots on both sides, some with rusting predark wrecks rotting where they stood. Most of the small, rectangular units had broken windows and doors kicked in, but it looked to Ryan as if it might have been one of the places where the Russkies had used neutron nukes that tended to destroy all life and spare the buildings.
A dusty, unbroken window on a nameless, signless store on the left of the highway still bore a scrawled message in white paint from a hundred years earlier World Closing-Down Sale. Last Chance Bargains Before Eternity.
TH ARMAWAG WAS SLOWING, and Katya eased back on the gas. “Ryan?”
“Yeah?”
“Think about it for me.”
“What?” Though he knew.
“You know.”
There was no point in playing stupe. “You want me to try and father a child for you?”
“Please?”
“No. I’m sorry, but not me, Countess. Get yourself another stud bull.”
“I could make you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“We might explore that. You see what has happened to Straub, Ryan?”
He nodded slowly. “You think a threat like that could help to make me want to have sex with you, Countess? You think that, then I have to say you’re missing a few shingles.”
“Not many men speak to me like that,” she said, her voice cold as Sierra meltwater.
“Can’t help that.” He looked ahead through the shield of the Mercedes. “We’re stopping.”