Ryan was aware of pressure on his bladder from drinking so much water over supper, and concluded that it could easily have been this that had eased him awake. He could have taken the SIG-Sauer and gone outside, but there was something about the shortsighted Malachi Gribble that he didn’t quite trust.
The second option was to piss out of the window.
Ryan recalled staying in a dormitory block in a ville down in the bayous, not all that long after he’d joined Trader and the pair of war wags.
The local baron had been having trouble with stickies, having burned out a nest of the ferocious muties only a week earlier. Ryan and the others in the crews had been warned about going beyond the patrolled walls, particularly at night when stickies were likely to be out hunting.
The man had been a map reader and maker on War Wag One, a tall, silent man with a hooked nose named Jerzy Wajda. He’d been one of the tiny number of people who’d fled the Old World of Europe during the long winters and survived the almost impossible crossing of the Lantic to make a fresh start in Deathlands.
Jerzy was suffering from what one of the war wags’ medics said was a prostate problem, which meant he had to get up to take a leak several times during every night. He couldn’t be bothered to go all the way to the johns in the eastern section of the ville. He just opened the window, without waking anyone, and stuck his cock out.
Where a stickie was waiting. It reached up with the lethal sucking pads on palms and fingers and ripped Jerzy’s genitals off his body. Shock and blood loss chilled him within eighty seconds of the attack.
Ryan decided not to risk taking a piss out of the window of the shack. There hadn’t been any sign of stickiesor any other mutiesin the region. And Gribble claimed that his only weapon was a ponderous black-powder musket. So there wasn’t that much danger around.
He swung his long legs out of the bed, pushing back the mound of noisome blankets. It was cold, and Ryan could see his breath feathering out in a white mist, drifting into the area of bright moonlight.
J.B. moved a little, the faint disturbance from Ryan reaching him through the layers of sleep, but not quite enough to wake him properly. He lay on his back, hands folded across his chest like a statue on a medieval tomb.
Ryan stooped toward the cupboard where he’d seen the chamber pot, opened the door and took it out. He unbuttoned himself and held the pot in his left hand, controlling the amber stream with his right hand.
When he’d finished he placed the pot on the floor and buttoned his pants again.
The floorboards creaked as they shrank in the chill of the night.
Ryan bent down and carefully put the receptacle back into the cupboard, closing the door and straightening again, ready to climb back into the warm nest of the blankets.
When he hesitated.
“What?” he whispered.
There’d been something glinting in the moonlight, underneath the small cupboard.
Ryan knelt again, reaching his right hand underneath the legs, feeling for what had caught his eye. His fingertips brushed the coldness of metal.
He withdrew it and held it up to his eye to see it clearly, realizing immediately that it was a full-metal jacket, 9 mm round of ammoa bullet for the sort of blaster that Malachi Cribble had denied owning.
At that moment, Ryan’s attention was caught by something else in the room. A section of the wall, behind the beds, was swinging silently backward on oiled bulges, revealing Gribble himself, holding an old Luger automatic in his right hand.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dean had persuaded Doc to go out with him from the safety of the house, leaving quietly an hour after supper was finished, to creep across the night coolness of the desert toward the camp fires of the Slaves of Sin.
“Are you certain that young Master Lauren and Mistress Wroth have given their permission for this shadowy enterprise, my dear boy?”