Mildred checked her over, confirming Doc’s informal diagnosis. “Yeah,” she said, straightening and looking around. “She say anything else?”
J.B. answered her. “They’re Quakers. Got attacked. Lost all their food, which was little enough. They were all close to starvation. Ryan told them to go back to Leadville. They insisted on trying to bury their dead. She says that’s what pushed them all over the brink.”
Krysty sniffed. “Ryan had an ace on the line. Time’s gone and it’s too late. If they’d struck off for Leadville straight away, most of them could’ve made it. As it is” She shrugged.
“What we do?” Jak asked.
J.B. had been about to speak, but he looked instead at Krysty and Mildred, hesitating. “They’re all dying. We don’t have the food or the facilities to help a single one of them.”
Mildred nodded, the beads in the wet plaits whispering softly. “Goes hard against the grain, but like John says. There isn’t a thing we can do. Except stop and hold hands until they let go.”
“How long would that be?” Doc asked. “It is grim to leave a fellow human being to a lonely passing.”
“Afternoon now,” Mildred said. “They’ll all be gone by moonrise.”
Doc rose, carefully laying the dying woman’s head in the dirt. Her eyes had closed, and she seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness.
“If we are to go, then it were best that we go quickly,” he said. “Before I allow my heart to take precedence over my head. I know that we must leave them. But” He allowed the sentence to trail away into the gray drizzle.
THE GANG MEMBERS HAD BEEN using their victims for their pleasure along the road, stopping, sometimes, to light a small fire to keep themselves warm and to inflict a little pain and torture. Then they moved on, higher up the trail, leaving the corpses discarded by the roadside.
Brother Angus had told him that the bandits had taken five women from the wag.
Before he reached Alma, with the sun well down, Ryan had found all of them.
Ryan had two kinds of anger.
One was the sudden flaring rage that he had always found difficult to control, which dated back from when he was a young boy. The veins would throb in his temple and the scar across his cheek would pulse like a disturbed snake. A crimson mist seemed to filter across his mind, sometimes snatching away his combat senses.
It was something that seemed to happen much less often than it used to, and Ryan could now, generally, bring it quickly under control.
And there was the other kind of anger, the kind that was slow to be triggered but gradually gathered its own murderous momentum. It was like a cold flame that burned with a terrible clean light.
The short-fuse anger would come and go within a minute.
But the kind of rage that now seeped through Ryan’s mind and body would be extinguished only when he’d taken revenge on the gang of mindless, brutish murderers.
THERE WAS MORE of their handiwork to see when he eventually reached the site of what had once been the attractive little ville of Alma.
With the steady rain it was impossible to tell when the fires had been set, but the smell still lingered. The cracked and blackened timbers streamed with water, and every last spark was long extinguished.
At least there weren’t too many bodies. It looked as if a lot of the inhabitants of Alma had gotten wind of the raiders and managed to make their escape, possibly down the trail toward the old interstate.
A row of four men had been crucified to a barn wall, with long steel nails that had crushed through their palms and ankles. One had been hung upside down and a fire lit beneath him, so that little remained of his charred skull and torso.
Once again, it was cruelty for its own mean sake, tainted with the vicious sickness of the stickies in the gang.
Most of the township had been fired, with every building on the main drag either destroyed or seriously damaged.
Night was closing in, and the endless rain showed no sign of abating. Twice in the last half mile Ryan had come across evidence of serious earth slips, where the dirt had absorbed all the water it could and had given way in a wall of streaming mud.