“We know this, Doc,” Krysty said. “What are you trying to say?”
“They spoke English. Mine did. You said that yours did as well, Ryan?”
“True.”
Doc pressed the tips of his fingers against his forehead. “How did they learn it? And did they jump from some unknown other place? Too many questions to ponder and not enough answers. Almost no answers. And I don’t think we even know what most of the questions are.”
“Mebbe we’ll never see any of them again,” Dean said. “Gone forever.”
“Mebbe,” his father agreed. “Mebbe.”
WHAT HAD SEEMED like one huge shanty town from the outer limits of the Washington Hole was revealed as several separate gatherings of tents and makeshift huts, separated by filthy polluted streams and swampy offshoots of what was once the Potomac.
The seven companions picked their way down through the shattered remnants of the suburbs.
The frame houses with their broken windows were replaced by similar streets of homes, but with roofs gone and ancient scorch marks on their white walls.
The nearer they went to what had been the center of the city’s nukecaust, the worse the damage grew. More houses lacked their roofs, many of them showing signs of old fires. There was a small area of absolute devastation, with the melted stumps of a dozen gas pumps standing amid the ruins like the petrified corpses of nuclear soldiers. A row of stores was reduced to blackened concrete boxes.
As they made their way down a shallow hill, they went past the last of the recognizable buildings, entering a bleak region of utter obliteration. Roads had been turned into blackened strips of fused lava, at the heart of a part of the old city where there was no trace of green.
Even now, close to a century after the ending of the long winters, almost nothing grew there except the rankest of deformed weeds. There were sickly lilies, the color of drowned flesh, towering eight or ten feet above the fused soil. Bright red gardenias were mutated with poisonous spikes.
They encountered the first signs of shantytown life, a broken stump of a telegraph pole, with the body of a man wired to it. The corpse, head-down, had lost hands and feet, and a small fire still smoldered beneath it.
“Welcome to Washington Hole,” Jak said.
THE SHANTYTOWNS that ringed the bleak heart of the gigantic crater all had different names, their origins mostly lost in the mists of the long winters.
Sweet William was the largest of them, Broken Heart another, to the north.
A surprisingly neat sign announced to Ryan and the others that they were about to enter the township of Green Hill.
“I wonder if that’s the green hill far away in the old hymn?” Mildred said. “Without the city wall.”
“There certainly doesn’t seem to be either any hills or anything colored green around.” Doc sniffed the air. “Though I can smell all manner of food cooking, both fish and flesh. Perhaps even some fowl. Enough to get the under worked taste buds quivering a little.”
Stunted black chaparral dotted the dusty track that wound into the main street of the pesthole, with large red ants swarming around their roots.
“Big,” J.B. said. “Looks like a hundred shacks and tents. Big for a city pesthole.”
“We going to stay here at all, Dad?”
“Mebbe a night.”
“My mother, Rona, always said we did well to keep away from pestholes.”
“She was right,” he replied, patting the boy on the shoulder. “Not places for children or women. Not places for anyone, come to that. But if we can get some food and beds for the night we could move on tomorrow.”
“Stick together.” Jak had tied his hair back with a red bandanna. “Best rule in place like this.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Everyone hear that? Jak’s right. No wandering off on your own. Anyone.”
IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON as they trudged into the smoky shantytown.
In his life Ryan Cawdor had to have passed through hundreds of these stinking little frontier pestholes, with their filthy hovels and their poxed gaudies and brutally dangerous drinking bars. Green Hill didn’t look any different to any of the others.