It took a great effort for her to open her eyes again. She sensed Ryan watching her, gauging her reaction. Krysty gritted her teeth and focused her gaze on the woman tied to the front wheel. She wasn’t spread-eagledrather, she sat on the ground, her back against the hub, her wrists tied to the spokes level with her ears. She was totally naked, and her knees were drawn up to her chest and pressed tightly together. Krysty couldn’t see what her face was like, but her skin was white, though dabbed red in places. Her head was bowed, and her hair, though hayrick tangled, was cut short and dark blond in color.
A pirate strutted past her, carrying an earthenware jug. He ignored her and she did the same. Another marauder walked over to the Indian, pushed his coat aside, fumbled briefly and urinated on the man’s blood-drenched pant leg.
Hoots of laughing approval came from the man’s three companions. Krysty squinted her eyes and studied the pirates. The man with the jug was huge and ugly. His swart, flat-nosed face was embraced by a square-cut beard of an unidentifiable color. Gray threads were interspersed with tobacco-stained streaks. He looked to be about fifty years old.
The other three were undistinguished in attitude and appearance. None was tall; in fact the one who was emptying his bladder looked shorter than even Jak Lauren’s five feet five inches. One of the pirates was beefy, and a potbelly swelled over the waistband of his trousers. All of them had long, wild-looking hair.
The only firearms Krysty spied among them were a battered Winchester repeating carbine cradled carelessly in the crook of the tall man’s arm and a single-shot muzzle loader propped against the stern of the schooner. The stock and barrel of the Winchester were patched and bound in two places with shrunken and stitched deer hide. The other weapons were a variety of knives, nail-studded clubs and a short-handled ax.
The tall man handed the jug to the beefy, swag-bellied man and wiped his beard with bloodstained fingers.
Ryan tugged on her sleeve, and she eased back down beside the big, dark-haired man. She dabbed at the film of sweat on her upper lip. “What are we going to do?”
Adjusting the black patch covering his left eye, Ryan replied quietly, “We ride in and kill them.”
He and Krysty slid down the hillside on the seats of their pants. The expressions on the faces of the four people below were tense and watchful. J.B. took off his eyeglasses and stowed them in one of the many capacious pockets of his coat. The brim of his battered and bullet-holed fedora was pulled down over his forehead. With his left hand he held the reins of a roan mare, and his right hand rested lightly on the trigger guard of the Uzi hanging from a lanyard around his neck.
Though Jak’s white, scarred face was as impassive as ever, his ruby eyes glittered at the sense of danger. The young albino’s stance reminded Krysty of a vicious snow leopard, straining at its leash.
The other two people tending the horses were the only ones who hadn’t been born into the war-ravaged remnants of the United States of America. Dr. Mildred Wyeth and Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been thrust into Deathlands due to prenukecaust technology.
A stocky black woman with beaded, plaited hair,
Mildred Wyeth looked as though she were in her mid-thirties, but chronologically she was well over a century old. A medical doctor and former specialist in cryogenic sciences, Mildred had entered a hospital in late 2000 for minor surgery, but an allergic reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her body being placed in cryonic stasis until a treatment could be found.
It never was. The world was blown apart before she was revived, and she slept, like a fly trapped in amber, for nearly a hundred years. Ryan and his companions had found and freed her. They had brought her back to life, into a world she had never dreamed existed. By her perspective, she had gone to sleep as a thirty-six-year old professional woman and awakened a moment later to the devastating realization her hundredth birthday had come and was long gone. Amazingly the ill effects of the anesthetic had disappeared.
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