“Must need that much land to support a hundred,” Doc said, thoughtfully rubbing the lion head on his cane. “If the acid rain ever stopped, they could feed thousands off a farm of this size. Maybe more.”
“And if the rain came constantly,” Ryan countered, shifting his patch to a more comfortable position, “as it does in parts of the Deathlands, then they couldn’t feed a rat.”
“What’s this?” Krysty asked, tracing a ring of tightly clustered squares encircling the huge farms. “A wall of some kind?”
“That’s a wall,” Ryan said, tapping a finger on a thick black line past the band of squares. “I’d bet these are rows of small huts, homes for the farmers and miners.”
“Pigsties,” Lisa snapped. “A reward for those who have worked hard enough to live in the sunshine.”
“And act as cannon fodder against invaders coming over the outer wall,” Ryan growled. “All villes have perimeters, but this is the first that uses its own people as part of it.”
“I like your ward less and less,” Mildred commented, making a face as if she had bitten into a lemon.
“We don’t like him at all,” Troy stated from the door.
“And nobody ever goes outside that last wall?” J.B. asked, fanning himself with his fedora. “Except the heirs, and mebbe raiding parties?”
“Not so,” Lisa countered. “Some of the oldsters are allowed to hunt with bows in the forest outside Detail. The mountains mostly protect us from the acid rains, and many animals such as deer and bear have returned as in the predark days, although some are not right and can’t be eaten.”
Ryan took the not right remark to mean muties.
Lost in the rad-blasted desert. he had once been so starved he ate a rattlesnake that had lain dead in the sun for days. But he’d never been hungry enough to risk eating anything mutie. The very thought made his stomach roil. “These hunters, their families stay inside as hostages.”
“Any hunter ever leave- in spite of that?”
She rubbed her face. “Once, very long ago. There’s a painting on the inner wall showing what the ward at the time did to the runaway’s family. None has tried again.”
Krysty poured the woman a drink of well water, and she gulped it.
“The outer wall, how high is it, how thick?” Ryan asked, probing for weaknesses in the ville defenses. Ancient wrongs didn’t concern him. The dead were dead. “What materials, wood, stone, concrete?”
“Stone blocks, like the walls of the Citadel. Two feet thick and twice the height of a man.” Lisa produced a goose feather, and, dipping it in a colony of oily ink, drew a rough sketch on a blank space. “There’s a walkway along the top fronted by a coil of thin metal that cuts better than a knife.”
“Razor wire,” J.B. explained. “Probably looted from the city you call Wheel. No way the prison stores could possibly have enough to cover a wall miles in length.”
“Nobody makes anything anymore,” Mildred snorted. “Humanity has been reduced to jackals feeding off a corpse.”
“O brave new world,” Doc whispered.
“And this is the only road,” Ryan noted forcibly returning to the subject. “Describe it, dirt, gravel?”
“Flat and hard. Black as coal.”
“Yellow flecks down the middle,” Troy added.
He was partially turned toward the door as if listening to a distant conversation.
“Sticky in the summer?”
“So say the hunters.”
“Asphalt,” Ryan stated. “Good. Excellent, in fact. And it ends at the prison?”
“Yes. At the front gate. That is made of wood beams an arm’s length thick, banded together with iron and covered with numerous sheets of steel.”
“Flexible and strong,” J.B. mused. “Tough to smash through. Very tough for explosives, unless we had a lot.” Then he grinned. “But Leviathan could blow it to pieces with a single volley of the 755.”
“Hear something?” Jak asked, joining Troy.
“Thought I heard sec men, but they’re gone now.”
Jak pulled out a leaf-shaped blade. “Let’s make sure.”
Troy glanced at Lisa. She nodded, and the two men slipped through the rock door, closing it tight behind them.
Shifting pages. the remaining companions studied another map, a much older one, the paper yellow and brittle from age.