As they rounded the end of the fallen overpass, they came upon a series of neat piles of concrete chunks that had been reduced to pebbles. Some pathetic soul had been chipping it away, trying to salvage the rusty steel reinforcement that interlaced the concrete.
When they returned to the pavement, they caught a glimpse of the dead ville. What they saw on the other
side of the median strip, to the right of the highway, was a red-orange glow pulsing in the depths of the swirling smoke. Ryan took them over the median, then across the three paved lanes. Before they reached the other side, they could feel the heat from the banks of live embers. Another two-rut lane led from the side of the highway to the center of the glowing mass.
“Slow and careful/1 the one-eyed warrior said as he pointed out the deep, two-foot-wide holes in the ground where the vilie’s stockade wall had once stood. Leg-breakers, for sure. The stickies had pulled out all the defensive perimeter’s sharpened logs and fed them to the blaze. Inside the broad circle of holes, the monsters had burned everything to the ground.
The roofs and walls of the huts had been torn apart, and what couldn’t be moved to the central pyre had been burned where it stood. Ash piles marked the foundations of the clustered, crude dwellings. Smoke still rose from scattered hot spots among the ashes, and ringers of fire licked up from a great pile of coals in the middle of the ring.
Mildred walked quickly ahead of the others, moving toward the center of the inferno in a straight line, kicking up puffs of ash from the heaps that drifted around her ankles. She seemed distracted and disoriented, oblivious to the blast-furnace heat
Krysty started after her.
As Ryan moved to follow, something crunched under his boot heel. He knelt and brushed the blanket of warm ash away. He saw the fire-blackened teeth of a
child, scattered like tiny seeds in the dirt. Pushing more of the ash aside, he found a little jawbone, part of the cheek crushed by stamping feet He could see the prints of bare soles in the soft ground. There were other bones pounded into the soil, as well, the bones of livestock and adult humans. All of them had the flesh burned off, all of them broken into small pieces.
Ryan hadn’t seen such systematic and total destruction in a long time.
Apparently these stickies were no longer content with the hit-and-run slaughter that until now had been their trademark. They had, with considerable expenditure of time and energy, erased not only these poor humans, but all traces of their presence. When the next round of chem storms swept past, the broken bones would dissolve in the downpour of dilute hydrochloric acid, the cinder piles would sizzle and froth and melt away. Nothing would be left but the ring of holes,
As Ryan stood, his head was flooded with a vision of the horror that had been done here only hours before: tiie screams, the pain, the blood. In the pit of his stomach, something dark and malevolent stirred.
*’Wickedness and misery, my dear Ryan,” Doc said sadly, as if reading his mind. The old man had knelt, too, and was sieving warm ash and bone chips through his fingers. He wiped the white powder on the lapels of his frock coat “Wickedness and misery. What we have spread before us is a deed of uncommon evil.”
“You’re right, Doc,” Ryan said. “This one’s triple mean.” He looked up to see Krysty returning from the
center of the ville with Mildred. She held a sheltering arm around the doctor’s shoulders. When the two women got closer, he realized that Mildred’s clothes had caught on fire; the legs of her camouflage fatigue pants were charred at the cuffs and knees and still spilling puffs of smoke. Her face bathed in sweat, Mildred seemed to be coming out of some kind of a shuddering fit Her arms and legs twitched so violently that she could barely walk without Krysty’s help.
“What happened?” he asked.
“She got too close to the coals,” Krysty said. “I think something’s wrong with her, Ryan. If I hadn’t stopped her, she would1 ve walked right into fire. This place is doing something to her mind. We’ve got to get away from here.”
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