Autry waved Doc’s words away with a dismissive gesture. “Enough of this for tonight. I’m certain you’re hungry and tired. Let me show you to your quarters, and I’ll arrange for food to be brought to you.”
They went with Autry back out onto the muddy, rutted strip that passed as Amicus’s main street. Faces filled all the doorways as they walked bymainly children’s faces and women’s faces, some of them young and pretty, most of them seamed and smoke colored.
From far off came a faint, howling call that was answered by another and then another. Ryan saw that the moon had risen higher. “The hills must be crawling with wolves,” he said.
Autry grinned at him. “They’re talking to us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wolves are highly respected by most of the tribes. They’re regarded as allies, talking to people, telling them what’s going to happen.”
Doc lifted an eyebrow. “And if you do not happen to speak wolfese, I suppose you are out of luck.”
“Not necessarily,” Autry replied. “I understand themsometimes. Right now they’re talking about you.”
Autry led them to a dilapidated building with a stone facade. “Amicus doesn’t have an inn as such, but this place serves as a visitors’ hostel.”
The interior of the building was warm and smoky, with a floor of hand-hewn planks and walls shored up with heavy, smoke-blackened beams. A cast-iron stove glowed in one corner of the common room, its pipe disappearing into the adobe ceiling.
“Three bedrooms,” Autry said. “Afraid you’ll have to double up. I’ll arrange for supper and breakfast. We’ll talk more tomorrow. Good night.”
All of the rooms were furnished identically with medium-sized beds holding mattresses that exuded a faint sour odor. Krysty and Ryan chose one room at random, dropped their gear in a corner and stretched out on the bed.
Chapter Four
Ryan was in Front Royal, riding across his father’s green meadows. He was twelve years old and mounted on Witch, his favorite pony. He had both of his eyes, and he saw that Baron Cawdor was still alive and waving to him from the top of a gently rolling hill. Ryan shouted in happiness and urged Witch toward him.
Then the pony stopped, and Ryan kicked her impatiently. Her equine shape melted beneath him, shifting and transmogrifying. And then he was riding on a giant, dark gray wolf. He was afraid and he started to cry. The wolf shushed him.
You’ve been here before, manling , the wolf said kindly. The voice had no gender, and he sensed it rather than heard it. Time to take you to a new place .
The wolf turned and loped away from the hill. Ryan looked behind him and saw his father still standing there, receding swiftly in the distance. When he turned, he was a grown man again, but he still had both of his eyes. He knew the wolf was responsible for this gift, and gratitude welled up within him.
“How can I ever thank you? You’ve restored my sight.”
You never lost it , the wolf replied. You do not need eyes to see .
The wolf leaped from the meadow and ran through a nightmare landscape. All around them were monstrous mushroom clouds, rising in roaring columns toward heaven, flashing and flickering with hellish light. They loped past ruined cities overgrown with vegetation, and bounded over fetid swamps. Overhead a boiling, glowing belt of radioactive dust scorched across the sky.
And everywhere there was death, corpses and animated cadavers with their flesh peeled and blistered, their internal organs hanging out boiled and burst, their empty eye sockets weeping gelatinous tears. They reached out with skeletal fingers and gurgled and moaned, and Ryan recognized some of them.
They screamed his name, and there was Lori and O’Mara, Hunaker and Okie and all the crew from War Wag One and Two and all the people he had chilled. And there were the billions who had died in the nukecaust, and they were all equally dead, but it was worse because they hadn’t been meant to die. Deathlands wasn’t supposed to have happened.
“They’re dead,” Ryan said. “Everything, everybody is dead. Dead.”
The dead , the wolf replied, will live forever if they die inside the circle .
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