The shops seemed to have been stripped. Ryan walked into the crystal and tarot store, boots crunching through the shattered glass. Feeling something twist under his heel, he stooped to peer at it in the fading light.
“What is it?” Trader asked.
“Kind of toy.” It was a pewter model of a winged lizard, holding a tiny purple prism between its open jaws. “Who but a little kid would want stuff like that?”
“Some more down that side street, past the abandoned fountain. Worth a look?”
“Probably not.”
“Think I’ll get back to the wag. Feel the old hunger pains starting up, Ryan. Backbone and belly rubbing together. You coming with me?”
“Yeah. Oh, wait. One place down there’s got a sign says it was a bookstore. Might just stroll along to it and take a quick look. Coming?”
Trader shook his head. “No. Me and books never somehow quite got an understanding.” He turned on his heel and began to walk briskly back toward the parked land wag, where a thin column of blue-gray smoke from a cooking fire was already rising into the still air.
Steins’ Books, proclaimed the red lettering over the door. A poster pinned to the wall, just inside, stated proudly that the pen was mightier than the sword. Ryan had a feeling that he’d heard that before, probably from Doc.
When he saw that the store hadn’t been totally ravaged like most of the others, he wished that the old-timer had been there with him. “Guess that nobody wanted books for anything,” he said quietly. “Can’t eat them and they don’t burn that good.”
The floor was littered with the desiccated remains of hundreds of volumes. He stepped inside. The setting sun passed a bank of low purple clouds, and the light dropped by three-quarters. Ryan hesitated, feeling suddenly uneasy. Though there’d been no sign of life around Scottsdale, you could never even begin to feel totally safe in Deathlands. His fingers brushed against the butt of the SIG-Sauer, but he left it undrawn.
He knelt and started to look at the hoard of old volumes, feeling the familiar sense of wonder that these books had all been printed during the year or so before skydark, close on a hundred years ago. Ryan knew how delighted both Doc and Krysty would be if he was able to rescue anything from this pile of crumbling paper. However, the darkness of evening was easing into all the corners of the rectangular store, making it almost impossible to read any of the delicate, faded titles.
As Ryan turned around, he noticed an enormous book, bigger than a house brick. He lifted it and peered at the title, finding it was a biography of a writer called Charles Dickens, by another writer called Ackroyd.
He doubted whether Doc or Krysty would have heard of this Dickens, as he seemed to have lived a very long time ago. Also, it was far too heavy to stick in a pocket. Ryan placed it gently down on a top of a mound of illustrated books showing the adventures of someone called Judge Dredd, who looked like he was a double-tough sec man in a big ville.
Ryan picked one of the comix up, angling its muted colors toward the open door of the derelict store to try to catch the last shafts of light. But it was much darker now, almost as though someone had crept in and was moving toward him, deepening the shadows.
Preoccupied by the treasure of the books, Ryan allowed his combat reflexes to operate too little and too late.
Even as he started to turn, he heard the hiss of triumph from the attacking stickie.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ronny and Raelene Warren took to their bed and weren’t disturbed through all the hours of darkness.
Mildred slept in the next room to Doc’s, and she heard one of the strangers get up a couple of times during the night and make his or her fumbling way along the hallway to the back door, going to use the outhouse.
The black woman lay awake for an hour or more after the second occasion. On her back, the tiny beads in her plaited hair whispered as she moved on the pillow. The moon sliced through the gap at the top of the blinds, moving inexorably across the wall of the bedroom, flirting with the corner of an old steel engraving of a hunter confronting a grizzly bear on a narrow ledge, high in the snow-covered mountains.