“What d’you think, mister?” the woman said, seeing Ryan eye the man. Other than a similar wide belt, the man was visibly naked under the scorched shreds of clothing.
“What d’you want from us?” Ryan asked. “We can give you a coupla cans of self-heats. Some water. Mebbe old clothes. That do?”
“Take us with you.” The man clawed his way to his feet, helped by the woman. He stared wildly in both directions up and down the road. “The muties’ll get us if’n you leave us here.”
“We don’t have the room,” Ryan said.
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“We can make room for the poor folk, lover,” Krysty said behind him.
“It would only be the merest Christian charity, Mr. Cawdor,” Doc added.
Ryan turned in the swivel seat. “You say ‘Christian,’ Doc? That’s not a word you hear an awful lot around Deathlands these days.”
“Indubitably so, my dear Ryan. But that is a sorry comment on how we live. Oh tempora and oh mores, in-deed. If I may be forgiven the classical tag.”
Ryan ignored the ramblings. Looking back at the woman who seemed much the stronger of the pair, he said, “We can’t take you.” He didn’t apologize. Like Trader used to say, it was a sign of weakness.
“Please, mister. You can fuck me. Or fuck Jem here. Any of you can. Make you feel-”
“You want food and clothes?” Ryan said. “We don’t have the time.”
“No, mister. Just take us with you. Take us for a day, that’s all.” She was babbling, the words stumbling and jostling each other in her terror. If she was acting, she was very good.
“I told you. Drive on, Jak. So long, lady.”
The boy engaged one of the ten forward gears, and the truck began to creep ahead. The woman looked hope-lessly at Ryan. He began to wind the window up once more.
“You going t’the Susqua? We can save you.”
Ryan didn’t answer her, though Jak glanced sideways at him.
“Be a trap there. They get strangers at the toll cross-ing.”
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“Hold it,” Ryan said to Jak. “Best hear this.”
“We can save you. Me an’ Jem. Take us on and we can
save you all from the chillers.” Ryan reached back and triggered the lever that opened
the side door of the wag.
Chapter Sixteen
her name was chrissy. Jem was her man. They’d been traveling west because they’d heard from some traders that there was a good life in the clean lands toward Cali-fornia. Then the muties had come and ended the dream.
Jem rested, falling instantly asleep under a gray blan-ket in a rear bunk. She told Ryan all about the squatters who controlled the crossing of the Susquehanna, how they tricked travelers and slaughtered them.
“They’re cannies, mister,” she whispered.
“What’re cannies?” Lori asked.
“Eat meat,” J.B. replied.
“We eat meat,” she replied.
The Armorer shook his head. “Not human meat, we don’t. But cannies do.”
“By the three Kennedys!” the girl exclaimed. “Dou-ble-nasty!”
“Yeah,” J.B. agreed.
“How do they work the trap?”
Chrissy looked at Ryan warily. “I tell you an’ you put us off?”
“No. Tell me. The truth.” There it was again, like a scab that couldn’t be picked. Something about the am-bush didn’t sit right with him. But what was it?
“They got a lotta blasters. And the road’s blocked so you gotta stop. No way around. An’ they talk sweet and
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tell you to get down. Seem okay, but it ain’t. That’s how they does it.”
“When do they hit you?”
“Some kinda word they got. Like one’ll say casual that it’s bastard cold. That might be the word. You gotta watch ’em. Only way is to step down and talk a whiles. Put ’em off guard. Then you can hit ’em.”
J.B. leaned forward. “What if they hit you first?”
The woman seemed caught off-balance. “They…they won’t. Not the way they do the chilling. Always same way.”
“How far’s the river?” Ryan asked.
“Coupla miles.”
“We’ll be ready.”
“ryan,” jak warned.
“I see ’em.”
The road came winding down the side of a bluff. The original highway had vanished a couple of miles behind them, slipping away and leaving a jagged edge of con-crete and tarmac. Jak had carefully steered the big wag down to the left, where deep ruts showed how other driv-ers had taken the same course. There’d been a shower of rain, earlier, and it had laid the dust.