“… boots. Right. The body was torn apart by the ex-plosion. Not enough left to fill the long wooden box. I
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went and peeked. They put dirt in, Krysty, to make the weight. Dirt, for my fucking brother!”
“Ryan, love, if you don’t-”
“No!” he almost shouted. “No. I’ve got to talk this out with someone. Never had anyone before I could tell. If we go back there… to Front Royal, I want you to know everything about it.”
“Goon.”
“I tried to tell Father. But he was old, shaken by what was happening. He wouldn’t listen. But Harvey heard what I’d been saying and marked me for an early grave.”
‘”So wise, so young, will ne’er live long, it’s said.’ That’s from that play. Was your brother married then?”
“Morgan? Yes. Guenema was her name. A strange mutie girl. Eyes like jet. I liked her. I… I suppose I loved her. I was fourteen. Jak’s age.”
“What happened to her?”
“She disappeared. Nobody would talk about it. A great wall of fucking silence! They said she was carrying a child and she lived out in Deathlands. But…I doubt it. Harvey would have set his dogs on her trail.”
For a few moments there was silence between them, broken only by the hurtling water as it rushed over the lip of the falls. Krysty leaned back on an elbow, glancing be-hind them, noticing, at the edge of the trees beyond the clearing, a small cluster of jack-in-the-pulpits, the white spikes bravely erect in the green cup.
Harvey had made his play the day after Ryan’s fif-teenth birthday. Using bribed and terrified servants he arranged for Ryan’s evening meal to be drugged. Then he and half a dozen of the ville’s sec men planned to take the sleeping boy. The body would then be weighted and dropped into the moat that circled the main house of Front Royal.
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“Not all the servants were in Harvey’s pay, and not all loved him. An old armorer called Kenny Morse caught wind of the plan from a kitchen maid. I didn’t take the food, and I was ready for them.”
Even before Morgan’s murder Ryan Cawdor had be-gun to try to safeguard himself. Kenny Morse had stolen an old .45 Colt from the castle armory for him. Ryan cleaned and oiled it, and spent hours practicing until he could use it with expertise. He was instructed by the di-minutive Morse, who risked at best a beating from the baron for breaking his orders that his youngest son was not to have a blaster.
That night Ryan was ready.
“I waited just inside the door of my room. A narrow crack showed me the corridor. It was gloomy. On his way out Morse had removed two of the light bulbs from their sockets. The ville had vast supplies of gas and generators for power. It was midnight when Harvey and his butch-ers came for me.”
The first two shots, booming out of the darkness, killed two of the sec men, warning Harvey and the others that their plan had failed and that Ryan was no lamb, waiting patiently for the slaughterer. The men went crashing back, blood springing from chest and throat, soaking through their trim uniforms.
Knowing that he must now take the offensive, Ryan jumped out, gun braced in both hands, firing twice at the nearest guard. The first round from the old blaster ripped through the upper arm as the man dived sideways, the second hitting him through the side of the face, taking away half of the back of his skull with the force of the impact.
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Harvey snapped off two shots with his laser pistol, tracer bullets scything through the blackness and explod-ing off the wall by Ryan’s left shoulder.
“I called him the bastard killer he was. Screamed it, my voice breaking. I was so fucking angry that I’d have torn his face off his skull if’n I could have reached him. An-other sec man was flat on the floor, blocking off the exit to the stairs. He was hiding behind the corpse of the sec-ond man I’d chilled.” Ryan’s voice dropped in remem-brance of the charnel house scene of death and blood. “His arms and legs were still twitching and jerking.”