And deal with their prisoner.
THE ASHES OF THEIR FIRE were still warm.
“Defeat must’ve shocked them,” Jak said. “Looks like they stayed here couple hours before going after General. Chilling him helped being beat.”
They had all experienced the skill of the Native Americans of the Southwest in making the passing of an enemy a slow and endlessly agonizing experience.
“Still smell the burned meat,” Krysty said, as she and the others came to rejoin Ryan, J.B. and Jak.
In the cold, clear light of morning, the details of what had been done to the prisoner were all too obvious.
Mildred looked at the raggled corpse with a professional interest. “Top surgeon would have been proud to have kept breath in the poor bastard’s body as long as they did.” She shook her head. “Know their human physiology, don’t they? Where the main blood vessels lie, so as not to cut them by accident and let the spirit fly free. See where they’ve cauterized some of the cuts, like those around the groin, to make sure he didn’t bleed to death too quickly and spoil the game.”
“Not game,” Jak said, already losing interest and turning toward the horses again.
“Upon my soul!” Doc had gone pale as he stared at the tortured body, noting the missing eyes, the sockets filled with the ashes of fire.
The nose had been sliced away, and more splinters of charred wood filled the gaping hole. The lips had been cut off, the teeth clubbed out of both jaws. A lump of wood had been jammed in place to hold the mouth wide open, giving the captors a number of options in sustaining their revenge.
“Broke every joint in the body,” Dean said with awe. “Every one.”
“No, that’s not true,” Mildred argued. “A lot of them, but not all.” She ticked them off, one by one. “Shoulders dislocated and then a sharp knife used to cut through the tendons and ligaments there. Elbows smashed. Wrists. All the fingers. Some toes. Ankles. Both knees pounded to a bloody pulp. Lot of ribs splintered as well. Cuts behind the knee and at the top of the thighs.”
“Why’s there blood on his ears?” the eleven-year-old asked. “They shoot him there?”
“No.” Mildred bent down. “They hammered a whittled spike of wood into each ear.”
Doc had walked a few paces away. “How can you be so damnably calm, madam, at this this desecration of the temple of the human body?”
She turned to him. “Doc, like you, I wasn’t born in Deathlands. But I saw sights nearly as bad as this when I did an internship in the casualty department of a big hospital in Doesn’t much matter where. Call it Gotham City or Metropolis, if you like. I saw druggies taught a lesson by dealers. Babies taught a lesson by parents to stop them crying. Little girlsand boys young as four, taught a lesson in satisfying male sexual aggression.” Her voice was stretched tight like wire and she was nearly crying. “Jesus, Doc, there’s always been cruelty and there always will be. Best you can do is try not to let it touch you.”
“But this was gloating and deliberate. Surely inexcusable. The men who did this sought only suffering and pain for this naked wretch.”
“Naked wretch fucked and chilled my wife, Doc,” Jak said.
THE WEATHER STARTED to deteriorate almost immediately after they left the pair of mesas behind and began to canter southward again.
The storm clouds that had been skirting them the previous day now gathered on every point of the horizon, closing in over their heads, squeezing away the last section of blue.
The temperature dropped and the wind began to rise, swirling up savage dust devils and making all of the animals skittish. Judas in particular was difficult. He was an iron-jawed stubborn brute at the best of times, trying to bite or kick anyone who came near him. Now, with a storm threatening, he was even less eager to keep up with the rest of the group.
Jak rode his gelding alongside the mule and kicked out at it with his combat boots. “Worst comes to it, I’ll blast him and we can cook and eat him.”
“Sure could do with some decent food,” Mildred said. “Those the hills ahead of us that you were talking about, Jak, for some hunting?”
“Yeah.”
Visibility was closing in fast.
Already the wind carried small spots of chilly rain, dashing into their faces.
“Knew we’d forget something,” Ryan shouted, struggling to be heard above the gathering storm.
“What?” J.B. had already taken off the well-worn fedora and stuffed it down the front of his jacket, holding his head bowed to try to keep the rain off his glasses.
“Slickers. Weather was so good, I never thought to add any waterproofs to the load.”
“Me, neither. Still, we get wet, we get wet. Nobody died from just being wet.”
“Trader say that?”
J.B. shook his head at Ryan. “No. I did.”
FOR THE FIRST TIME since they left the Lauren spread, they were starting to see some signs of civilization. Though it was predark civilization.
The rain was falling steadily as Jak led them across the ruins of a big highway. The pavement was cracked and corroded by a hundred years of unattended frosts, winds and sunshine, with all kinds of rank weeds and shrubs pushing up through the surface.
“Where did this go?” Dean asked.
Jak shrugged, pointing a finger to the east. “From there” he pointed again to the west, “all the way to there. And back again.”
Ryan had noticed that the albino teenager was beginning to show a few small signs that he was moving out from under the weight of the two murders.
There was the ruins of a gas station on their left, the blackened stumps of the old pumps standing like the corpses of burned martyrs.
The foothills were now only five miles or so ahead of the group, but they’d vanished in the sweeping bands of rain that drove into their faces.
Ryan heeled the gray alongside J.B. “Goin’ to lose the tracks,” he said.
“The wheels of the wags are digging real deep. And there’s enough of the Navaho horsemen to leave a good trail. I reckon we can keep a watch on it, unless the storm goes on and on. But they’ve been heading right on south all the time.”
It was true. The double set of wheels and the pursuing hooves had hardly deviated more than ten degrees from due south during the whole journey.
The rain was intermittent throughout the long afternoon. At times it became so heavy that the wooded hills ahead of them vanished completely, wiped away behind the banks of swirling cloud. Several times there were peals of thunder, rolling flatly across the desert, spooking some of the animals.
“HORSES ARE GETTING exhausted, Jak.”
“Plenty daylight left, Ryan.”
They’d halted a little after five o’clock. The rain had eased, but the ground was a soft quagmire, with pools in the hollows. The track was fetlock-deep in mud, slowing their progress, making it hard going.
“No point driving them into the ground.”
Jak had slipped from his saddle, reaching down to tighten the girth. His white hair was stained by the red mud, flattened to his angular skull with the rain.
“No point stopping.”
J.B. coughed, leaning forward over the pommel. “That’s crap, Jak.”
“What?”
“Total and utter crap.”
The albino teenager turned away from his horse, staring at the Armorer. In the gray light, his eyes burned like tiny chips of ruby laser.
“I say we go on.”
J.B. wasn’t a man to back down. “Tracks show they’re still around four hours ahead of us. Been riding all day, since before dawn. Like Ryan says, the horses are bushed. I’m bushed. Truth is, Jak, that you’re bushed as well.”
“Bushed fails to communicate properly the full extent of my bushedness,” Doc said, his voice creaking with fatigue. “If we do not cease this hard traveling quite soon, I shall not be answerable for the consequences to my health.”
“Then fall off and stay here,” Jak snapped.
“That’s enough.” Ryan dismounted, aware of the stiffness that yelped out from his tired muscles.
“Suppose I go on and you stay?” Jak was facing him, his body language aggressive and combative.
“Then you likely get chilled and we get there a few hours later and try to avenge you as well as Christina and Jenny.” He waved a finger at Jak. “But it means that you don’t share the vengeance, and it means you get to be dead for nothing. That what you want?”
Jak didn’t answer his question, rubbing a hand absently down the neck of the gelding. They were on the flank of a ridge, the broad valley below still invisible as the storm clouds moved away across it.
He finally said something, but so softly that none of them could catch the words.