Doc licked his dry lips. “There’s some more that I could read, or I could proceed straightforward to the end of the service. What does anyone”
“The end,” Jak said.
“Very well. But first I would also like the opportunity to pay my own tribute to the dead.”
Jak sighed. “Every minute passes, General and cold-hearts are farther.”
“I am nearly finished. Let this be done with proper respect, dear boy.”
“Sure, sure.”
Doc closed his eyes again, hands folded in front of him. “We now bid farewell to these our friends, gone before. In the sure and certain expectation of meeting them again, around the next bend in the road. They will not grow old, as we that are left behind will grow old. Aging will not weary them, nor the passing years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them all.”
“Amen,” said Mildred, followed by the others, Jak last of all.
There was a long moment of silence while Doc stooped slowly, knee joints cracking, and picked up his own handful of dirt, scattering a little into each of the graves. He finally straightened and peered again at the flimsy pages of the mother-of-pearl prayer book.
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all now and evermore. Amen.”
“Amen,” chorused the others.
Once more Jak was the last to respond. “Amen,” he said. “Now let’s find fucking killers and chill them. Fill in the graves and let’s go.”
Chapter Thirteen
The last spadeful of earth had hardly been piled on and patted down, with a few large stones to deter the scavengers, when Jak was back at the rig, cursing at the two horses to stir them up to a faster pace on the way home. There was barely time for them, all to pile on the flatbed of the rig before they were rattling off down the deeply rutted trail. Doc nearly dropped his precious sword stick, and only a frantic grab by Dean saved it.
“Slow down, in the blessed name of Phoebus, slow down, wild charioteer!” the old man yelled, but the albino ignored him, hunched over the reins, his white hair flowing out behind like a cold banner of revenge.
THE LIVESTOCK WAS released into the wilderness.
“Most’ll die,” Jak said, watching them go.
“Some won’t.” J.B. stood by the closed gate to the corral, where they’d kept the horses. There were just enough decent saddle mounts for each of the friends to have one, along with four heavily laden pack animals, including a vile-tempered mule called Judas.
Ryan and Mildred had butchered a couple of goats and one of the pigs, while Krysty worked frantically in the kitchen, aided by a sweating Dean, to get as much meat cooked as possible, ready for them to take along on their chase.
There was already a fair supply of salted and dried beef in one of the outbuildings, untouched by the marauders. Krysty also found time to do a little baking, though the bread would become stale within a day on the trail.
Doc’s responsibility was to attend to the supply of water for everyone. He went to the well out back and carefully filled the canteens and bags to hang on the pack animals.
They all knew well enough that it was possible to survive for many days with nothing to eat. But to go without water in the arid Southwest in the months of summer meant survival being measured in hours.
After that the temperature control mechanism of the body began to flounder and fail. Common sense evaporated, and the brain began to boil.
Despite protestations from Jak, Ryan insisted that everyone have a good bath before they went, with all of the men taking time for a quick shave.
“Last chance we’ll get for who knows how long. Trader used to say a person who felt good fought good.”
While he waited for Krysty to finish drying her dazzling hair, Ryan walked around the back of the house, where all of the doors stood open, and found Jak busily filling some old green bottles with lamp oil.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“What look like, Ryan?”
“Looks like someone aiming to end their past in a mountain of fire.”
The young man nodded. “Be about right.”
“Not the way.”
“Who says?”
“Me.”
Jak half smiled. “Forgot how sure you always was that you was always right, Ryan.”
“I am this time.”
“Your house?”
“No.”
“Whose house, Ryan?”
“Yeah. Your house. But that doesn’t make it right, Jak.”
“Couldn’t care less. Don’t give fart in tornado for this place no more.”
“It’s a fine building. You and Christina made it yours, after the other troubles you had. Filled with memories, good and bad. It isn’t right to set fire to it all. Not now, Jak. And certainly not like this.”
“Think I’ll come back?”
“Sure.”
“To stay?”
Ryan hesitated. “I can’t guess at that, can I? But it’s possible. While it’s possible, then you don’t burn it all away. I tell you the truth, Jak. I reckon that’s an insult to the memory of Christina.”
Just for a heart-stopping moment, Ryan thought that the red-eyed youth was going to attack him. His right hand reached behind him, where at least one of his throwing knives was hidden, and he’d dropped into a combat crouch. Ryan had actually started to go for the SIG-Sauer on his hip, when Jak straightened and smiled, smiled properly for the first time since yesterday, when they’d found the bodies.
“Stupe,” he said.
“Me?”
“No, Ryan. Not you. Me. Got to go on. For their sakes. Fighting with you’s stupe.”
“All I’m saying is that you might want to come back here when all this is over and done. Mebbe not, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to burn the whole place down.”
“No,” Jak agreed.
“YOU AREN’T LOCKING the doors or anything, Jak?” Mildred asked, surprised.
“No point.”
“Suppose someone comes?”
Ryan laughed. “Mildred! Anyone comes by and finds the spread empty, you think a lock and a bolt would stop them getting in? Course not.”
“No, I suppose”
“Left note,” Jak said, pointing to a white rectangle that fluttered from the center of the front door, in the shelter of the porch.
“What’s it say?” Krysty asked, dismounting to adjust the length of her stirrups.
“Says I’m gone and I’ll come back.”
“That enough?”
“Sure, Krysty. Local folks and Indies who know me won’t do no harm. Others don’t matter.”
They set off heading south, with the late-afternoon sun sinking to their right, casting long shadows away to the east. There was very little wind, and the tracks of the eight-wheeled war wags and the pursuing Navaho were clearly visible.
They were less than an hour out from the ranch, with sufficient sun to keep going for a while, when they found the corpse.
It had been dumped into an overgrown drainage ditch to the right of the narrow highway. The only clue to its presence was the cloud of blowflies that rose humming into the air from their luxurious feeding.
And the smell.
If you’d asked Ryan just what death smelled like, he would probably have found it a difficult question to answer. Like asking someone from the predark United States just what a rush-hour urban freeway smelled like. Everyone would recognize it, but it was so common that it was real tough to try to put a description into words.
So it was with the scent of decayed and corrupted human flesh in Deathlands.
“Sweet and sickly and sour, all at the same time” had been an attempt by Krysty.
But the great truth about the odor of mortality was that you could never imagine that it might be anything else. Once you’d smelled a putrefying corpse, you would never again mistake it for anything else.
Ryan, Jak and J.B. all swung down from horseback and went to investigate.
The body was male. It had been stripped completely naked and was around five and a half feet tall, looking like it had once weighed in around the one-eighty mark. There was a straggling mustache, and the hair was black and had once been sleek, but was now matted with blood and dust.
“General’s man that Christina chilled,” Jak said, squatting on his heels and peering at the body.
“He look Mex?” Dean called. “Michael said a lot of them looked Mex.”
“Don’t look nothing,” Ryan replied.
“Doesn’t look anything, lover,” Krysty corrected.
“Yeah,” he said.
Assuming that it was what Jak had guessed, then the man had been dead for somewhere around thirty-six hours. He’d probably died very soon after the woman had stabbed him and had been dumped by the marauding gang of killers as soon as the wags were far enough away from the spread.
Thirty-six hours in the heat of a New Mexico summer and a lot of people would find it hard to identify their own ever-loving mothers.