Thunder rumbled. Ryan glanced around for a last look at this particular bleak section of Deathlands. The clouds seemed almost on top of them, and he actually felt the first heavy drops of rain, acid on his skin.
It wouldn’t have been good to get caught out in it.
“Close her up again,” he said, as he and Krysty entered the shadowy passages of the redoubt.
“Two and five and three,” the boy muttered, triggering the buttons on the control that closed the sec doors. As they dropped down, everyone could see the rain already bouncing off the blacktop.
The moment they reached floor level, with the faintest metallic whisper, all outside sounds vanished. There could have been the worst chem storm in history raging outside, but inside the redoubt it was tomb silent.
Ryan shrugged, brushing a few stray spots of the corrosive rain from his sleeve. He saw that J.B. was wiping the lenses of his spectacles clean, holding them awkwardly in the left hand of his disabled arm.
Jak was just behind the Armorer, leaning against the dusty concrete wall by the side of the sec doors, breathing heavily, his face drawn, eyes closed.
Dean squatted on the floor, with Doc at his side, tapping the ferrule of his silver-headed sword stick on the stone. The old man was struggling for a chipper manner, but Ryan knew him well enough to see that the ghastly crossing on the raft, followed by the grinding ascent to the redoubt, had really taken it out of the old man.
There wasn’t really much choice.
Apart from anything else, they were all soaking wet. If they jumped in the next few minutes, there was no knowing whether they might immediately encounter a hostile combat situation.
Ryan coughed to attract everyone’s attention. “Seems to me it makes sense that we hole up here for a couple of days. Anyone disagree?” There was the briefest pause. “Right.”
Chapter Two
As soon as they left the entrance area, J.B. went hunting with Mildred and scoured the small living quarters, coming up with a somewhat depleted first-aid kit on the top shelf in the pantry.
“Mercy be,” she said, sighing. “I can do something for all of you with this. Antiseptic cream and fresh gauze and bandages. Clean up all three of the injuries and set all of you on the road back to recovery.” She smiled at her partner. “Might take a day or so longer than Ryan’s guestimate. I’d put it closer to four days than two, to make sure all of you are really healing.”
“Four days in here, with hot showers and adequate food and clean beds,” J.B. said. “I guess I could live with that. Dark night! I know I can live with that.”
“All we need is the loaf of bread and the jug of wine,” she replied, kissing him gently on the cheek. “We’ve already got each other.”
MILDRED TOOK each of the wounded men, one at a time, even before their clothes had dried, into the bath facility and did what she could to patch them up properly. Jak, as the most incapacitated, went first.
The black woman bent over his bone-white calf, peering at it carefully, using a spatula wrapped in pink gauze to wipe away the crust of blood, wrinkling her nose at the slight odor of decay that filtered from the peppered skin.
“Couldn’t either see it or smell it properly back at Weyman’s ville,” she said. “Some of these stone splinters seem to be still in there.”
“Had worse.”
She straightened, her dark brown eyes staring into the smoldering embers of his crimson eyes. “Nobody loves a smart-ass, Jak,” she said quietly. “Fine to be brave. Not so good if you’re also stupe about it.”
He nodded. “Hurts like bastard. When move ankle.”
“Ligament damage, possibly,” she guessed. “Waggle your toes for me, Jak. Mmm, that seems all right. Rotate the foot. Now the other way.”
She had been watching him out of the corner of her eye, seeing the spasm of pain, the tightening of the bloodless lips, the whitening of the knuckles.
“Bad,” he admitted.
“No,” she said. “Not actually that bad. Now that I know what’s wrong I can do something about it. There’s a couple of scalpels and probes in this box, as well as some loc-an cream. It’ll take four or five minutes to track down the bits of stone, now that I know roughly where they are.” She smiled and patted the sixteen-year-old on the cheek. “This’ll hurt you more than it hurts me, Jak.”