“Krysty?” he whispered, reaching for his spectacles from their hiding place beneath his fedora, where they’d been protected from the night chill.
“Yeah. It’s all right.” She knelt by him, keeping her voice low to avoid waking the others.
“You see or hear something? Or feel something?”
“Not sure.” She sat, tucking her knees up under her chin and hugging herself. “Sure is cold at this height.”
“Yeah. Heard Doc get up to take a leak a couple of times. His teeth were chattering so rad-blasted loud I thought he’d wake everyone up.”
Krysty laughed softly. “Poor old Doc. He does his best to keep up.”
“And he’s good at finding some reason why we should stop for five. ‘My dear friends, I fear that I have a pebble in my boot.’ Or, ‘I think that the ladies look a touch fatigued. I would not be averse to helping them by taking a short break.’ You know the kind of stuff?”
Krysty smiled again. “You got him there. Never admits he wants to take a break because he’s an old man and he can’t cut it the same anymore. Kill him to own up to that.”
“Hope I’m in such good shape when I get to be 250 years old.” The Armorer had been polishing his glasses while they talked, and he squinted through them before he perched them on the end of his sharp nose. He looked around him. “Still some way off full dawn,” he said.
“Yeah. Sorry I disturbed you. I don’t sleep well without Ryan at my side.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“Come on now, J.B., that’s just a knee-jerk reaction. Ryan’s not a god or a superman, like something out of a pulp novel or a comic. He’s flesh and blood and bone, and he’s not indestructible. I know it and he knows it.”
“Only delivering the kid to a school for a spell. Shouldn’t meet up with the old man with the scythe on a simple errand like that.”
“When I was about fourteen, in Harmony ville, there was a girl called Penny Teller. She was walking across the street carrying a pencil. The hem of her dress was unpicked, and it snagged and she tripped. As she fell the pencil went clean into her eye and into her brain, and she was dead in ten seconds. Don’t try and cheer me up making jokes about dying, J.B., please. I’ve seen more than enough of it.”
“SOMEONE’S FIXED the highway up,” Dean said. “Been graded recently.”
“Not only that. The edge is marked with a line of round stones. Seems like someone’s taken a lot of trouble to make the road to the school look good and neat.”
“How far did the sign say?”
“Twelve miles. Only gone about a mile so far.”
It was a predark blacktop, but it showed little sign of chronic deterioration like most of the stretches of highway throughout Deathlands. This was smooth with hardly any breakup or buckling, and most of the vegetation at the sides had been trimmed back.
There was a dense forest of Colorado blue spruce on the right side of the trail, with some scrubby mixed conifers stretching out on the left. The road wound from side to side, rising and falling, then rising again, making it impossible for them to see any great distance ahead.
By Ryan’s guesstimate they’d gone about half the twelve miles when they spotted a larger notice, standing proud and foursquare on the left side of the road.
“Not very friendly,” Dean said, reading it. ” ‘Warning. Proceed at your peril. This road is private and goes only to the Nicholas Brody School. Unless you have business there, turn back now. This means you! Woods are man-trapped, and anyone invading is hostile and is likely to be attacked without warning and killed. Stay on the road until challenged. But only if you have business. If you don’t, then turn around and get out!’ ”
“No excuse for going on and getting chilled after that,” Ryan commented.
“Long as you can read.”
It was a fair point from Dean. In Ryan’s experience, only about one in eight of the population of Deathlands was functionally literate. Trader himself had been unable to read or write, though he had always tried to conceal that from people.