Uda and Benjy had been driven from their hard-scrabble farm by an outbreak of the bloody flux in nearby Brigham ville. They had abandoned everything they owned in their haste to escape the spreading contagion. Ryan and the companions had learned about the cholera epidemic from some travelers on the road and, accordingly, had given the ville an extra wide berth. On the edge of the desolate floodplain that separated Brigham from the nearest disease-free ville, they had come across the refugee family.
Despite Ryan’s warnings about the dangers of traveling through Deathlands, Uda and Benjy had refused to turn back to their homestead, which was understandable. Without antibiotics, the cholera raging through Brigham ville was a death sentence.
At an earlier point in his life, Ryan would have flat-out refused to convoy the young family to safety because of the additional risk to his own crew. In his wild years with the Trader, his first responsibility had always been to himself, to ensure his own survival, and after that, the survival of the people on whom he depended. With age and experience, with his son, Dean, traveling at his side and the steadfast love of Krysty, he had acquired a little bit more compassion for his fellow man. To abandon the young family on the edge of the plain when they had every intention of crossing with or without an armed escort, was no different from murdering them all in cold blood. Though a bullet in the back of each of their heads might have been a quicker, kinder fate, he found he had no stomach for the role of executioner. After a brief discussion in private, Ryan and his friends had agreed to take the family under their wing. None of them liked the idea any more than he did.
Before they’d gone fifty yards along the dry stream channel, they’d come across scattered bundles of fly-swarmed, stiff and bloody rags. It was all that was left of another group of recent refugees from the ville. They’d made easy pickings for the things that lurked in the willows. It had been just the first of half a dozen such unpleasant discoveries.
“How much farther?” Krysty asked Ryan as she shared her purified water with the oldest girl. Mildred moistened a cloth with her canteen and mopped the middle child’s heat-flushed face with it.
“Another two hours to the outskirts of Perdition ville, if we’re lucky,” he said.
Something moved in the brush to his right.
A shadowy form shifted behind the thick screen of branches. Ryan swung the Steyr around, aiming it from the hip. Every other blaster in the arroyo sought and located the target. A mutie deer stood there, frozen for a second before it caught their scent and was gone in a mangy blur. The companions held their fire.
It wasn’t a herd of scab-assed deer flanking their every step.
Ryan stared down the riverbed, cursing Jak Lauren for taking so long.
BENJY THUMBED BACK the hammer of his single-shot Stevens 12-gauge. It locked in full-cock position with a butter-soft clicka smoothness that came from age and wear. The weapon was more than 150 years old and had seen much use, passing through many sets of hands before it had reached his. In the shotgun’s chamber was a precious, high-brass, three-inch goose load. The red plastic hull represented one-fifth of his ammunition stockpile.
The sound came to him again, a faint moaning, high-pitched, like a woman.
It made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
Benjy quickly looked around. His backup, the other half of the rearguard, was nowhere in sight. The dirt farmer gritted his teeth; he didn’t have a clue where Jak was. The albino teenager moved noiselessly through the bush, like a wild animal. Jak was spooky in other ways, too he had that long, stringy, dead-white hair, scarred white skin and those awful, ruby-red eyes. Benjy thought about calling out to him, then thought better of it, realizing he would give away his own position.
The question he faced was whether to investigate the source of the sound or to move quietly on. He had about made up his mind to keep going when he caught sight of something small and white moving on the other side of the screen of willows. He stepped closer to the branches for a better look. Through the breaks in the foliage he could just make out the next stream channel over, and a pair of pale hands, waving at him.