Ryan turned and shook his head. “We hurt ’em plenty bad.”
When her medic duties were completed, Mildred knelt over the nearest cannie corpses, careful not to touch them with her bare hands. Picking up a twig, she took a sample of the thick, sticky gray matter leaking from the ears of one of the dead. “Damn!” she exclaimed, then held up the twig for Ryan to see. “Did you notice this nasty discharge coming from their ears and noses? Some of these sons of bitches have got the oozies, and it looks like third stage to me.”
“Yeah, I saw. The whole pack is probably infected.”
“That would explain the suicidal frenzy of their attack,” Doc added.
“Oozies?” Uda repeated, putting a protective arm around the shoulders of her older children and drawing them close. “Is that some kind of disease? I’ve never heard of it before.”
“It’s a disease of the brain that’s transmitted through the eating of raw human flesh, and in particular, the uncooked tissues of the brain,” Mildred explained. “If I had time to do autopsies on these bodies, I’m sure I’d find holes threading all through the cerebral tissue.”
“And this disease, that’s what makes them go cannie? the young mother said.
“Actually,” Mildred told her, “we don’t know what the cause of the cannibalism is. It could be unrelated to the oozies. It could be genetic, a failure of hemoglobin metabolism” Realizing she was talking over the woman’s head, Mildred translated the predark medical terminology. A rad-mutation of the blood, passed on from parents to child,” she said. “There’s a similar illness called porphyria, which produces an obsessive compulsion to feed on fresh blood and raw meat.”
Doc cleared his throat noisily. “Is that your diagnosis, Madam?”
“No, not a diagnosis,” Mildred countered. “It was a hypothesis about the origin of their murderous behavior being secondary to infection. I didn’t say the oozies and porphyria are one and the same. If anything, the symptomology here is closer to transmittable spongiform encephalopaly, a disease that incubates silently over dozens of years. When the oozies finally start to kick in, its victims first lose control of their emotions, and then, more gradually, of all of their bodily functions. Cannibalistic behavior predates by decades the appearance of all disease symptoms, and by inference, the appearance of amyloid plaque lesions in the brain tissue. As we all know, cannies have the habit, during lean times, of eating their weaker fellows. Because of this, the oozies will eventually be passed on to every member of a band. So the behavior causes the transmission of the infection, not vice versa.”
“My apologies, my dear Dr. Wyeth,” Doc said, using his cane to sweep a low, dignified bow. “I should have let you complete your remarks. The power of your physician’s logic is, as ever, irrefutable.”
“Bunch of crazy, sick cannies,” J.B. muttered, cradling his injured arm.
“We should really burn the bodies, Ryan,” Mildred said.
“Yeah, but how can we do it without some kind of fuel?” Dean piped in.
Jak reappeared in the clearing, stepping nimbly over the string of corpses. “Cannies make run for Perdition,” the teenager announced.
“Then they’re hightailing it,” Krysty said, rising to her feet.
“Question is, are we going to let them get away?” J.B. said, flexing the fingers of his wounded left arm and grimacing. “We still owe them something.”
With a twenty-minute head start, and the companions hobbled by noncombatants, Ryan knew the prospects of catching up with the cannies before they reached the ville were slim or none.
“First thing we’ve got to do is get Uda and the girls safely to Perdition,” Krysty said.
Ryan nodded.
“And after?” J.B. queried.
“Cannies got longblaster like yours,” Jak told Ryan.
“Yeah, I know.”
Then the oldest girl struggled free of her mother’s sheltering arm and jumped to her feet. Her angelic face twisted by grief, her lower lip and chin quivering, she advanced on Ryan. In a shrill voice, she cried up at him, “Hunt them, mister! Chill them all, the ones what ate our pa!”
But Ryan had already made up his mind to do just that.
Chapter Five
A tin cup thunked on the long bar top, which was made from five hollow-core doors, lined end to end.