shadows that flickered across those drawn features, that memories were flooding
into her mind, memories of those now dead. She seemed to him to be a strong
person, a woman of courage, a woman who could cope with disaster, yet even the
toughest individuals had their limits.
“Yeah, I was.” Her voice was low. “There’s so much I recall.” She gazed at Ryan
now, as if deciding whether to tell him one thing more.
“Later, when I was older,” she said, “I came back to the house in the afternoon,
and Uncle Tyas—I’ll never forget it—he yelled something at me as I went in the
door. He said, They’re there! I know it! I can feel it in my bones! It’s not a
joke! Bastards didn’t have a sense of humor!'”
“Which particular bastards?” queried Ryan patiently.
“Scientists is what he meant. Old-time technics. Uncle Tyas was certain they all
had no sense of humor. He claimed that was why the world blew up, because the
scientists had had no sense of humor, that they were all cold fish without a
joke among them.”
“Maybe he had a point.”
Ryan did not mind her talking on like this, although he doubted very much that
there was anything to be gained from her story. He had an idea what the punch
line was going to be. He’d heard it, in one form or another, before. Many times.
But that didn’t matter in the least. It was therapy, he knew—a torrent of words
pouring out of her, some kind of emotional release. It was all to the good if it
somehow flushed her system of the horror of the past couple of days.
Ryan said gently, “Okay, so what was he talking about?”
She took a breath, bit her lower lip and said, “A couple of months ago I got
back to the Forest. I’d been away for a year or more. I’ve been doing a great
deal of moving around myself. Things happen. Change.” She shrugged. “I got back
and Uncle Tyas opened the door to me. He didn’t know I was coming, but as soon
as he saw me he said, ‘My God, Krysty, I had it all the time and I never knew.”
He was shaken, totally shaken. And drawn, too, and ill. He said there was a
‘land of lost happiness.’ Those were his words. A land of milk and honey beyond
the Deathlands. And he’d found the gateway to it, and he knew how to open it.
Ryan thought about what she was saying. He had heard stories like this before,
although only stories. Hints, rumors, whispers. A land of lost contentment. No
one, to his knowledge, had ever tried to do something about finding the place.
Which, in any case, wasn’t to be found. It was a myth, a dream. Something to
compensate for the horrors of Deathlands existence. Sometimes the stories told
of a fabulous treasure hidden somewhere—significantly, always in the most wild
and inaccessible places: the Hot-lands in the southwest, the icy regions to the
north, those mysterious and plague-stricken swamps that glowed in the dark down
in the south. Or across the simmering seas to the west. Or even, he’d once
heard, up in the sky.
And that was it. Pie in the sky. Heaven. Somewhere— anywhere—other than this
hell on earth known as the Deathlands.
On the other hand—”more hidden underground than had ever been discovered…”Sure,
he thought, that was true enough. He and the Trader and J. B. Dix knew very well
that it was so, that there were far more Stockpiles hidden away in man-made
caverns than they had stumbled across thus far. That had to be admitted. But
strange weaponry? Bizarre secrets? Just a dream. The only bizarre shit they’d
ever uncovered was a sea of nerve gas in the hills of old Kentucky, and they’d
reburied it in very short order. For the rest—although a manufacturing industry
was alive in the Baronies, creakingly primitive as it was for the most
part—people were still living with mainly late-twentieth-century artifacts and
weapons, and if they were creating new materiel it was based on the old. There
were no new kinds of weapons in the here and now. None whatsoever.