piss hole.”
For a few moments everyone was silent, trying to assess the situation. Hun broke
the stillness by getting up from her bed, starting to dance to the music. But
she suddenly saw Quint and the others in their frozen tableau.
“What the fuck does…?” She pulled off the earphones, and they could all hear the
shrill, tinny music.
“Keeper says you been wicked. Keeper says you been to see the place where death
lives.”
His voice was becoming louder and more querulous, with spittle spraying from his
lips, dangling in his beard. Ryan noticed that the knuckles of the old man’s
right hand were whitening on the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. The sequins on
his jacket shimmered in the overhead lights.
“Keeper says the law is set on them as breaks it. Keeper’s word runs like the
law of maintenance. To venture without is to die. To break…”
There was no warning.
Lori suddenly moved, pushing past Quint, sending him staggering into Rachel,
running toward Ryan, dropping her own gun. Mouth open. Talking.
Screaming!
“It’s trap! They kill! Kill ’em, Ryan!”
The room exploded with violence.
Chapter Ten
BRITVA HAD AMPUTATED three toes from his right foot, using the open cutthroat
razor that had given him his nickname. After his fall into a pool a few days
earlier it hadn’t been possible to stop and light a pyrotab to dry out his socks
and boots—not without running the risk of being abandoned as the unlamented Nul
had been. So he’d waited and hoped. But eventually the blackness had come and
the swelling. The toes had bled very little.
Uchitel had watched him closely for any sign of weakness, but the little man
with the trimmed beard had kept up well.
The invasion was going better than he’d hoped. The one disappointment was that
Alaska was just as poor as Russia.
The two communities they’d found and destroyed so far were even smaller than
those across the ice river. One had consisted of only three wretched hovels
containing seven human beings, four of them with strong mutie traits. Three of
the locals had killed themselves as soon as they saw the invaders looming out of
the driven snow.
Bet one of them had been kept alive: a lad of around eighteen in surprisingly
good health, despite being riddled with lice.
Uchitel prodded his stallion to move faster. The temperature was dropping fast
as night approached, and shelter was yet another couple of miles away, in the
lee of a low ridge. Since arriving in America, Uchitel no longer felt the need
to keep checking behind him. Those horseback soldiers, if they really did exist,
would have given up days back, not daring to leave their own terrain,
The American boy had given them hope of better days to come.
Pechal had taken the lad, helped by Urach, watched carefully by Uchitel, who had
held his phrase book open on his lap. The boy was stripped and tied to a
skinning frame outside the hut where his mother lay raped, sodomized and dead.
After his failure with the trapper, the leader of the Narodniki had spent time
studying the book, gradually learning how to choose his words with greater care.
Now, he felt ready.
“Where are big house and store?” he asked, trying to pronounce each word the way
the book said.
“What?”
Pechal laid a thumb on the boy’s right eye and pressed; the boy screamed and
tensed his skinny white body against the cords. Blood trickled from his burst
nails, and his ribs stood out like a line of picket fencing. The pain was so
severe that the boy lost control of both bladder and bowels simultaneously,
making Pechal curse and step hastily away from him.
“Don’t hurt him, Pechal. Not yet. I have read how America was a place of great
riches. Everyone owned several houses and trucks and guns. It cannot be far to
such places. I will ask him again.”
Bizabraznia, the Ugly One, came swaggering by, clutching an earthenware beaker
of zubrovka. From her walk, it was obvious she had drunk several mugs of the
spirit already. She looked at the naked boy, reaching out and grabbing him by