He kissed her, his lips butterflying over her cheeks, until he reached her mouth. The tip of his tongue probed gently between her parted teeth, then pushed harder as she responded to him.
“I don’t believe she’s dead,” Krysty whispered, pulling away for a moment. “Like it was with Trader. Everyone figured he’d bought the farm, then he was back, almost as good as new. I think it’ll be like that with Mother Sonja. I do, lover. I honest and truly do. One day we’ll find her.”
That was the end of the talk. Then the loving began.
THEY LEFT FAIRPLAY so early in the morning that the Brown Burrow wasn’t even open for breakfast.
Carl Lanning had been difficult to rouse, rolling over irritably and pulling blankets up over his head like a fretful child who didn’t want to go to school, complaining that it wasn’t near dawn yet. J.B. had to threaten him with a bowl of meltwater before he finally struggled up and got dressed in jeans, a patched shirt and work boots.
“How about letting me have one of your blasters, Ryan? You got two, so has the skinny little guy with the glasses. You could give me one.”
Ryan shook his head. “No. We all carry the blasters we do because they give us balance. Take anything away and the balance goes. Look after your blaster, and it’ll look after you.”
He had a momentary flash of when he’d been talking to Nicholas Brody about Dean’s stay with the school. The headmaster had commented that the boy hadn’t wanted to be parted from his beloved 9 mm Browning Hi-Power automatic. “But rules are rules, Mr. Cawdor.” Brody had suggested strongly that Ryan should take the gun away with him but had finally agreed to keep it secure in the school’s safe, against the time that Dean was finally ready to leave.
Now they were finally moving away from Fairplay.
Carl told them it had once been called South Park or Bayou Salado or Salt Creek, and it had been a summer hunting and trapping ground for the Utes.
“Bigger than all of Rhode Island, this valley,” he said proudly. “Tyas McCann told me that.”
Doc grinned. “That is somewhat akin to saying that someone is a very tall dwarf,” he said.
Ryan noticed that the blacksmith’s son kept glancing at Krysty as they followed the trail toward Harmony. And he twice brushed clumsily against her at places where the track had grown narrow. It was all too obvious that Carl still carried a blazing torch for Krysty Wroth.
Ryan filed the fact away, with the knowledge that it could prove potentially dangerous.
HARMONY LAY IN A shallow bowl of fertile land, around the ten-thousand-foot mark. They came around a bend in the overgrown blacktop and saw the ville spread out ahead of them.
“Gaia! I’ve come back,” Krysty said, standing with hands on her hips, staring down into her old home.
“Someone coming,” Jak warned. “Two men on mules. Think might be stickies.”
The albino teenager’s eyesight in the cloudy half-light of the morning was impeccable.
Everyone took shelter among the large boulders that were scattered on both sides of the highway, watching as the two unsuspecting figures drew closer, both riding spavined burrows, their long legs angled out, heels almost brushing the muddy trail. They were stickies.
Their clothes were ragged and torn, showing the sickly gray pallor of their skins beneath. They were both male, with stringy hair that seemed pasted to their bony skulls. Typically they both had weeping sores all over their faces, with clusters of yellow spots around their thin-lipped mouths. Each had a large handblaster strapped to his waist. As they drew closer, it was easy to see the circular suckers that marked their hands and fingers, giving them their Deathlands name of stickies.
One was singing a tuneless dirge as he rode along, his companion passing the time by practicing hawking up phlegm and spitting at rocks in the road.
Ryan had warned the others that it could be helpful to chill the first one silently, and take the other prisoner to try to extract information on the dispositions of the gang within Harmony ville.