“No. I’m riding into Helskel in my wag, with my people, with Zadfrak. You three’ll lead us. You try to run, you try to lead us into an ambush, I’ll put six bullets along the buttons of your spine. Acceptable?”
Phil nodded. He and Suds helped the groggy Dog to his feet.
Ryan climbed into the wag and said to J.B., “I guess we’ve been formally welcomed.”
After less than a mile the arroyo opened into a wide flat plain with cultivated fields. The crops were wheat, corn and beans. Beyond the fields was Helskel.
The overall design of the place was a confusing mishmash of architecture circus tents, geodesic domes, Quonset huts and lean-tos. The main part of the ville looked like a standing set from an old Hollywood western vid. The wag wheeled up the main thoroughfare, following Phil, Dog and Suds.
Helskel was one great open market, where nearly anything could be bought or sold. Shops and stalls were brightly painted. Vendors with wheelbarrows cried out the merits of their wares, jolt merchants were shouting “today only” special deals and wandering musicians played a discordant variety of tunes, few of them recognizable.
Men and women on motorcycles roared up and down, back and forth along the streets, throwing choking clouds of dust into the air. Ryan noted that all the cycles looked new, with fresh paint, highly polished chrome and the sounds of healthy engines.
A large number of people sporting Xs on their foreheads wandered everywhere, a curious conglomeration of all races and ages, dressed and undressed in every imaginable fashion. A few men sporting shaven pates and the X scars trooped about. They wore mirrored sunglasses, carried compact Tec-10 machine pistols and wore gray corduroy vests decorated with hanks of human hair. They might as well have carried signs labeling them sec men.
Most people on the street shuffled, stumbled or lay about, busily doing whatever occurred to them at the moment. One girl, completely naked except for looping whorls of blue paint, danced alone atop the rusting, wheelless husk of an old wag, moving in time to the soundless music of invisible instruments. The hot metal of the roof had to have been burning her bare feet, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“The bastard spawn of the predark,” Mildred muttered.
“Lilies of the field,” Doc said. “They toil not, nor do they spin.”
Zadfrak, on the floor of the Land Rover, was completely unconscious, not responding to Krysty telling him that he was home.
The dusty avenue went past hovel and tent and crude shack, until it opened in a large central square. Phil stopped in the middle of the street and pointed to a three-story wooden-frame structure, the only building in the square. “The Patriarch needs to look you over before any other business gets done.”
Climbing out of the Land Rover, Ryan said, “Your man needs medical attention.”
“That can wait. Got to make sure you fit in.”
Everyone disembarked, J.B. making a very exaggerated show of pocketing the ignition key. Even if a thief cracked the steering column in an attempt to hot-wire the wag, an electric circuit was connected to a small but frightfully destructive package of plastic explosive inside the firewall.
Phil gestured toward the bat-winged doors, and Ryan led his party inside.
If it hadn’t been for the electric light fixtures and silent, glowing jukebox in the far corner, the saloon might have been mistaken for a watering hole of two hundred years earlier. The bar top, the tables and the floor were exceptionally clean, and brass footrails and spittoons gleamed with a high polish. From the distance came the faint throb of an electric generator.
Mildred, standing beside Ryan, suddenly froze and said, “Oh my God. The Family. Helskel. I should’ve been able to put the pieces together. Zadfrak wasn’t talking about Man’s Son’s country. He meant Manson’s country.”
“What mean?” Jak asked.
“Charles M. Manson,” Mildred replied. “Look.”
Following her pointing finger, they gazed at the huge mural mounted on the wall behind the bar. It depicted in gold and brown Charlie Manson’s final ascent into heaven, amid joyous welcome from angels above and remorse from the deluded souls below. The deluded souls had human bodies, but their heads were those of swine.
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