“Be in Newyork ‘fore us,” Ryan said.
But the old man was far more interested in getting back to the fire to see how Lori was progressing. His delight when she started to come around was touching. He knelt at her side, tears coursing down his wrinkled cheeks and through the gray stubble on his chin.
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“What happens?” the girl mumbled, eyes blinking against the brightness of the blazing fire. “I dream and then…”
She shuddered, clutching at Krysty with white-knuckled hands.
“What was the dream?” Doc asked, holding one of her pale hands in both of his. “Tell me, my dearest child.”
“I dream of Keeper. And he is fucked with me. And hand on mouth… and…” She began to cry. Krysty nodded at Doc, who took her place, holding the girl half on his lap.
“It’s all done, lily of my heart. My dear deer. Your heart, dear hart, that pounds within your breast has…” He stopped rambling. “Some mutants came calling upon us, Lori. We exchanged a few words with them, and now they’ve gone away.”
“Where, Doc?” Lori asked.
“Away down river. I think it unlikely they will return to bother us again.”
“I think that’s right, Lori,” Ryan added. “Night swimming always was dangerous.”
there was a light mist hanging on the face of the wide river, obscuring the dank forests on the farther, western shore, when they woke the next morning. A watery sun hung among citron clouds, giving a little heat in the shiv-ering dawn.
They pushed the raft off and floated southward, none of them even glancing back at the desolate scene of the previous night’s slaughter.
Chapter Six
lori quint recovered well from the horror of the at-tack by the stickies. There was some scabbing and peel-ing of skin around her mouth from the pressure of the suckered fingers, but it was already healing. She and Doc were happy to be together at the rear of the ungainly craft, handling the long steering oar that kept them moving roughly in the center of the current.
It was a beautiful day. The early morning mist had faded away like the dew on a summer meadow.
Ryan had ridden rivers before, but most of them had been fast-flowing, broken with turbulent rapids, places where a moment’s relaxation could mean an instant chill-ing. The Hudson was different. Most of the time it was several hundred yards wide, rolling steadily toward the sea between wooded banks that showed little evidence of man.
For the first time in a long while, Ryan Cawdor ac-tually felt he could lie back on the timbers and take it easy. The wood seemed to be drying out in the warm sun, and the craft was riding higher in the water.
“Those hills on the right used to be called the Cats-kills,” Doc shouted, lifting his voice against the sound of the river bubbling around the raft. “Folk took vacations there.”
“What were vacations, Doc?” Jak asked. The albino boy was sprawled on his back, shading his vulnerable eyes
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against the golden sunlight. He had peeled off both his camouflage canvas jerkin and the ragged fur vest that he wore beneath it. His skin was as white as paper, stretched tight over prominent ribs. Ryan, looking at Jak, thought at that moment that he barely looked his fourteen years, seeming more like an undernourished and skinny boy, on the threshold of his teens.
“Vacation, son?” the old man mused. “Time was folks would have laughed at you and thought you was joshing ’em.”
“It’s a time out from killing,” J.B. said quietly, wip-ing spray off his spectacles.
“It’s when you can be with the person you want, and go where you want and do what you want,” Krysty sug-gested, smiling at Ryan.
“Can’t do better’n that,” Ryan agreed, venturing a rare smile at the girl.
“I know,” Lori called. “Doc tells me. It’s good time out of bad. Like a day Keeper doesn’t fucking up rec-tum.” She looked proudly at Doc, who shuffled his feet.
“Took me all this time t’stop the chit from saying something a deal worse than rectum.”
Jak wasn’t satisfied. “Tell us what vacation was, Doc.”