“They were degenerate scum, Brother Angus,” one of the women said.
“And they took what little you had left?” Ryan said. “Anything else?”
Brother Angus nodded slowly. “There were five women of a younger age. One was barely into her teens. The filth took them all and gunned down anyone who tried” He looked at the bodies. “One was my son. They took Sister Persephone, who had agreed to be his bride.”
Ryan looked around him, stone-faced. It was a total and appalling disaster for these people. Yet it was a scene that he’d come across too many times in his life, particularly in the days with Trader. The old man had talked about wolves on the fold. Not a bad description of the callous cruelty of the attackers and the helpless vulnerability of their victims.
“Thee wouldn’t have any food, would thee, mister?” the other old woman asked.
Ryan hesitated. He had one roll and one of the peaches, plus a couple of mouthfuls of milk, enough to keep him going on into the next day. It wasn’t enough to even scratch the surface for just one of the starving group.
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“What can we do?” Brother Angus asked, wringing his hands. “Where can we go?”
“Best go back to Leadville,” Ryan said. “Nearest place I can think where I know there’ll be food.”
“We’re jack-free. They took it all. We must throw ourselves on the charity of strangers.”
Ryan sniffed. The charity of strangers wasn’t that common a commodity in Deathlands.
“Still Leadville’s closest. You got to pick between a small chance and no chance.”
“The Lord will provide for us,” one of the other men said, falling to his knees, hands clasped in prayer. “He will provide for his humble servants.”
“Not done much providing so far,” Ryan replied, looking at the corpses and the wag, burning now to the flatbed. Another five minutes and that would be gone, and the survivors would be left in the dark and cold.
He hunched his shoulders, feeling the first pattering of rain on his back.
ONE OF THE TRADER’S most deeply held beliefs was that when you could help someone, you did. But if you couldn’t help at all, then you didn’t waste time on hanging around.
Ryan couldn’t take on the job of guide for the ragged survivors of the raid. The only sound advice that he could give was to strike out immediately for Leadville. Despite their frailty, there was a chance that most of them could make it back to the township and a better than even hope of living.
But Brother Angus consulted with his fellow Quakers and they all agreed that they wouldn’t move on under any circumstances without burying their dead comrades. Ryan’s guess was that they’d be lucky to finish that chore by noon the next day. And by then their strength would be hugely diminished and most, if not all, of them would then die.
Before leaving them to their own devices, Ryan found out what he could about the gang.
It seemed that there had been between twenty and thirty of them. About a third had been stickies. Proof was marked on two of the bodies, which showed where the suckers of the stickies had ripped away patches of skin and flesh.
None of the Quakers was any help when it came to the weaponry of the gang, though one of the old women had noticed that the armawag had been towing a small trailer that she thought probably held cans of gasoline.
“You don’t know where they were based?” Ryan asked. “They didn’t mention any names?”
Brother Angus shook his head, his face a pale blur in the streaming darkness of the rainstorm. “Wasn’t like we’d have heard, friend. Too much yelling and cursing and chilling. Like something from hell.”
The brighter of the old women had been standing at his side, listening. “From hell! Truly said, Brother Angus. From the deepest circle of icy, fiery hades they came, grinning and shooting and slashing. Devils from hell.”
There was nothing more that Ryan could do.
It seemed more than likely that it was the same gang that he and his friends had been hearing about since they arrived in Colorado, the gang that was reputed to have its headquarters somewhere farther up the valley to the southeast.