“Might as well get straight to the redoubt,” Ryan stated. “No point waiting around here getting colder.”
“How about Trader and Abe?” J.B. asked. “We going back for them?”
Ryan quickly told everyone what he’d seen.
When he’d finished, J.B. nodded. “Right. Currents against us. Lucky to make it here with the raft breaking up under us. Trader’ll find his own path.”
Mildred shook her head. “Christ, I sometimes get so tired of you tough, brave, taciturn men!”
“What’s wrong?” Ryan asked. “We can’t get back there. His choice.”
“It isn’t that. God only knows, I didn’t care much for Trader, though I could see the strengths that made him what he was. And the weaknesses that prevented him ever changing. Now he and Abe are almost certainly dead back there, and you and John just button up the grief and pretend like it somehow hasn’t happened. Don’t you care?”
J.B. answered her, laying a hand gently on her shoulder. ” ‘Course we care. You add up the number of friends that Ryan and me have lost in Deathlands in the last fifteen or twenty years, and you’ll still be counting this time next month.”
Ryan nodded. “Caring for the passing of a friend is a luxury. The price is too high, Mildred.”
“Bullshit! Posturing macho bullshit!”
“No, it’s not,” Ryan pointed an accusing finger at her. “Think I don’t know about grieving? We all do here. Every one of us. We’ve all lost friends, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, loved ones.”
“Children,” Doc added quietly. Ryan went on. “All of us, Mildred. I read an old book once when we were with Trader. Holed up in a library. That the right word for a predark place where they kept a bunch of books? Right. It was called A Time To Mourn. Still remember its name. Said that if you didn’t take a couple of weeks to mourn when you’d lost someone you loved, then it sort of twisted inward. We don’t have two weeks for everyone who died. It isn’t macho bullshit to say that. We’d be grieving all our lives, Mildred.”
For a long moment the black woman glowered at the one-eyed man, the tension between them almost visible.
Finally she broke the stillness. “Every man pays his price to live with himself on the terms that he wills,” she said. “My Uncle Josh told me that.”
“Kipling, my dear madam.” Doc smiled, showing his strangely perfect set of teeth. “I believe that is from the works of the English poet, Rudyard Kipling. My father met him. I rather think that they were both members of a masonic order.”
“Dad?”
“What is it, Dean?”
“Getting double cold, Dad.”
“Right. You’re right, son. Let’s go inside.”
THE OLD BLACKTOP up to the entrance level was a tough climb, and everyone was out of breath by the time they reached the massive sec doors.
It was particularly hard going for the injured Jak, and he ended up hanging on to Krysty’s and Mildred’s shoulders, his wounded right leg off the ground.
They set him down, where he sat against a large wind-washed boulder, the streaks of quartz in it matching his complexion. Krysty joined Ryan.
“Needs a rest, lover,” she said. “Probably you and J.B. do as well, only you’re too manly to admit it.”
Ryan had been aware during the climb up the ruined highway that there was fresh blood trickling yet again over his thighs from the arrow wound.
“Could be. Dean?”
“Yeah?”
“Open her up. Remember the code?”
” ‘Course. Three and five and two.”
“Do it.”
“All the way, Dad?”
“Sure.”
Almost instantly Ryan heard the familiar high-pitched whining of the hydraulic gears, then the deep-buried grinding of the powerful motor as it struggled to lift the immense weight of the vanadium-steel doors.
“We should get some rain,” Krysty commented. “Skies darkening over to the east. Can’t even see the tops of the Sierras now.”
Ryan looked, seeing a great squat mass of black cloud, winging toward them. The faint lacing of purple-silver lightning warned of a severe chem storm.
“Be inside and safe,” he said.
Jak was on his feet, hopping toward the redoubt entrance, shrugging off an offer of help from Dean. Doc followed him, with Mildred and J.B. at his heels. The boy stood by the internal set of controls, waiting impatiently for Krysty and his father to join them.