“Nothing,” Trader said. “Get a move on, Abe. You’re too slow to catch a funeral.”
The gunner’s voice was muffled by the thick glass. “Gotta get the lid up.”
J.B. had crouched, checking the springs and suspension of the hearse. “Looks in great shape,” he said. “No worm in the wood anywhere, and the axles all greased. I reckon we could give her a try.”
Trader sniffed. “Never rode a death wag before. Still, first time for everything.”
Ryan was watching Abe’s struggles with the polished lid. He heard the crack of a catch snapping, followed almost immediately by a deep-throated scream from Abe, who shuffled backward and fell awkwardly out of the rear door, twisting his knee as he landed. His face was as pale as a sun-bleached bone, and there was a small dark patch of damp at his crotch.
“In there” he babbled. “In there someone there inside someone woman think inside”
Trader grabbed at his shoulder, shaking the ex-gunner like a terrier with a rat. “Cool down, Abe! Is it someone living?”
“Yeah. No. No. Yeah. No. No. Don’t think so.”
“Well, I’ll take a look,” Ryan said.
He thought about drawing the SIG-Sauer, but kept it bolstered. Just in case of trouble he unsheathed the eighteen-inch steel blade of his panga, then clambered inside the hearse, feeling it rock on the soft springs, aware of a strange, musty smell, like pepper and dog piss, salt and sugar.
The lid of the coffin had dropped back in place when Abe let it fall in his panic. Ryan positioned himself on hands and knees, feeling a passing frisson of something very close to fear. He held the panga tightly in his right hand and pushed back the lid of the coffin with his left.
“Fireblast.” The word breathed very gently, misting the polish on the coffin lid for a triple heartbeat. The smell was much stronger, like a spice box that had been hidden at the back of a dark larder.
It was almost certainly a woman, most likely the mother of the boys that they’d chilled down the trail. The lustrous silvery hair clinging to the grinning skull was a good clue, as was the long black organdy dress with a high collar of stained, yellowed lace, and the narrow golden ring on the shrunken bones of the left hand, folded across the flat bosom.
The eyes had long gone and the skin was leathery and brown, stretched so tight across the planes of the skull that the sharp-edged cheekbones had sliced through.
“Chilled woman,” he called out. “Stopped breathing a good while ago.”
Trader rapped the butt of his Armalite on the packed earth of the floor. “Well, don’t just stand there, men. Get the box out and the corpse with it. Dump them in the corner and we can start bringing in some food and blankets from the house. You harness up the team, J.B., and look for saddles and packs. Be good to be on the road for Seattle within the next couple of hours or so. Come on, let’s move it!”
AS THEY ROLLED THE HEARSE out of the barn, Ryan’s eye was caught by the discarded body of the woman, lying in a dusty corner, where Trader had thrown it. It lay now like a bunch of broken sticks, wrapped in rags.
The old man had never shown much respect for corpses, unless they belonged to his crew. His people. Ryan had seen a firefight against half the sec force of a powerful ville in the Shens, where Trader had insisted on recovering the corpses of a young comm nav and a cook from War Wag Two who’d accidentally triggered an ambush, just so they could be buried properly.
The two hours had already stretched to three.
All of the friends were reasonably familiar with horses, but the rigging of the ancient hearse was unusually complicated. It wasn’t like putting an ordinary pair of animals into the shafts of a wag. There was an inordinate amount of tangled, pliable harness, chrome and brass trimmings. They had several false starts, with a team of four matched black horses that were skittish and uneasy with the sweating, cursing strangers.