He turned to Mildred. “Is that right, Millie?”
“I’m afraid so, Doc. A bullet would best put him out of his misery.”
“Butcher him?”
“Truth is, the old man’s in no pain. He’s in a deep coma and he’ll never come out of it. Weather like this’ll take him off in an hour or so. He’s that close to the dark ferry. Believe me, Doc, there isn’t a single damned thing we can do for him. Can’t even ask if he’s seen Ryan.”
Doc stooped and plucked a scarf from around the dying man’s throat, folding it carefully over his face. “Least it’ll keep the rain from his eyes,” he said.
RYAN HAD FOUND another body, tossed by the side of the winding blacktop like a discarded toy. He guessed that it was one of the children kidnapped from the Quaker train. She lay huddled on her back with her throat slit, both arms broken. Her body hadn’t been so badly mutilated as the woman.
“Building up a good blood score,” he said to himself. He straightened the little body and placed it gently beneath a broad sycamore tree, standing and looking down at it. “Wasn’t your day, was it, kid?” he said.
BECAUSE THERE SEEMED little evidence of serious danger, J.B. hadn’t felt it necessary to order them into a strung-out skirmish line.
He walked along with Mildred, while Krysty had found herself taking the point position. Behind her, Jak and Doc were deeply involved in an argument of extraordinary complexity about what happened beyond space.
“You say space started with big bang from nothing. What was before nothing, Doc?”
“Fields, dear boy. Fields of potentiality. Thirty-seven of them, according to what was the latest thinking when they pushed me forward to Deathlands.”
“But how can something come from nothing?”
“You have to be able to wrap your brain about particles that have no mass and can be in two or three places at the same time. Difficult, I know.”
Krysty had been half listening to what she could catch above the ceaseless splashing of the rain on the trail. But half of her mind was fixed on Ryan. At least they knew that he was roughly a full day ahead of them.
For a moment the rain stopped altogether, and shafts of silvery sunshine broke clear across the valley, showing them their destination, a thousand feet or more below, and the ribbon of highway that wound back up to their right, toward where she knew Fairplay and Harmony lay.
Everyone stopped to stare at the beautiful view.
“Worthy of the painter Turner at his mystic best,” Doc said.
“We can almost see Ryan from here,” Mildred stated. “If we knew just where to look.”
Krysty was following the snaking trail down below them when her eyes were caught by what looked like the wreckage of a burned-out wag, and some people. Although none of them seemed to be moving.
“BROTHER ANGUS went for help,” breathed the elderly woman who was crawling steadily, head down, knees raw and bloodied, about two hundred yards from the scene of devastation. “I just decided to go after him but can’t make it.”
They had made her as comfortable as they could. Mildred and Krysty went to check the others.
A snow-haired man and another old woman were still clinging by their fingernails to the ragged edge of life. Beyond the wag, on a flat stretch of the tundra before the first of the remorseless lines of blue spruce, were some graves.
Some were completed, some half-finished and some barely started. One was full of water and held the floating corpse of a child and the body of a man, who looked as if he’d been digging, had slipped and fallen in headfirst and drowned.
Mildred returned to where Doc was sitting in the dirt, cradling the head of the old woman in his lap. “She said they were attacked by a gang that included stickies,” he said. “And Ryan passed by them in the night. She can’t remember more than that, but it must’ve been him. Tall, one-eyed man, who tried to help.” He sighed. “Her mind wanders, and I fear that she is also a candidate for that dark ferryman.”