goddamned crazy. The walls were closing in on me. Had to get out. I had to.”
Charlie snorted, began rubbing a cloth vigorously over the bar. It was clear she
was angry.
“You get back upstairs again, ya stupe. Blast it, I don’t know why the hell I
bother!”
The man called Kurt staggered toward the bar. He seemed at the end of his
tether.
“I met him, Charlie, across the street. Bastard recognized me.” His piercing
eyes were alive with terror. “Charlie, what am I gonna do?”
“This is all I need.” Charlie jabbed the cloth toward the far end of the room.
“Beat it. Get back upstairs. Don’t make a sound.” She snapped, “Move!”
The man pushed past them, ran stumblingly along the side of the bar and into the
thicker shadows at the end of the room. Ryan heard the rustle of a curtain, a
door bang.
J.B. nudged him.
“Let’s move. We got the picture.”
“Yeah, okay.” He turned to Charlie. “What was all that about?”
Charlie nodded in the direction the man had gone. She said, “My lodger.” Her
mouth opened and shut a couple of times. “I’m looking after the guy.”
Ryan knew it would be demeaning to Charlie, whom he liked, but he suddenly had
an urge to burst out laughing. He fought to keep the urge down.
“Actually, he’s in deep shit. I’m gonna have to sneak him out of town sometime.
Got in bad with one of Strasser’s gorillas and disappeared. About five, six
months back. Then he reappeared about a month ago, looking like he’d been
whipped up in a twister, spread all over the landscape then stuck back together
again the wrong way. Seems he’d walked back to Mocsin from the Darks.”
“The Darks?” Hardin frowned at her.
“Yeah. You remember a head case called McCandless?”
“Sure.”
“Ryan.” J.B. tapped him on the shoulder.
“Okay, okay. Wait.”
“McCandless took off to the Darks with a party of guys including Kurt, who’d
signed up on the spur to get out from under the gorilla. The old story. They
were looking for the treasure, har har. Only Kurt got back. And he’d stopped one
in the shoulder. Had fever, delirium, you name it. Difficult to figure out what
was real, what was nightmare. Kept on yelling about a fog with claws, fog with
feet.”
“Fog?”
“‘S what he said.”
“Ryan!” J.B.’s voice was urgent.
“Wait, blast it!”
A fog with claws? He’d never heard that one before. That was a wild one. He
tried to picture it in his mind but it came out silly. Fever did strange things
to your brain, of course…
“Too late,” muttered J.B.
The door crashed open once more. Black-leather-jacketed men boiled into the
room. Six of them. No, seven including the leader, a beefy guy with a wall eye.
Ryan recognized his face about the same time the man recognized him. Guy called
Hagic, one of Cort Strasser’s upper echelon sec men. A mean bastard, he
recalled, although one with no great brain. He hoped there wasn’t going to be
any trouble, because he was now convinced that beating a hasty retreat out of
Mocsin was the only sensible course of action to take, and the quicker the
better.
Hagic’s men were all armed with auto-rifles, M-16s mostly, which looked to be in
reasonable repair. They were shifting themselves into and around the door end of
the room, rifles ready, blank faced. Most of them were young, early twenties,
raised against a background of violence so that they had become violent
themselves, insensible to all but the lowest emotions, icy hearted. Violence was
the only way of life they knew.
Hagic stalked down the room, ignoring Ryan completely, even though Ryan knew
he’d been recognized as soon as the man had entered the bar.
J.B., next to Ryan, had shifted into his “yawning” mode, a sure sign that he was
all too aware that danger loomed. J.B. leaned back against the bar top, yawning
a second time, patted his mouth, sniffed as though to clear his nose. J.B. was
gearing himself to kill.
Hagic said, “Where is he?” His voice low.
Charlie looked up at him. She had a jug in one hand and was filling it from the