“What?” Ryan wasn’t going to let it lie. In the days that Jak Lauren had ridden with them, there’d been times of conflict between them. Now things were different.
And the same.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Ryan.”
“Now why the fuck not?”
“Not father!”
“Course not. Way things are, we all have to live on the trust of each other. You’ve been there, and you know it’s true. No change now. I can’t stop you from going on alone without sending you to buy the last bullet, and I won’t. Because it won’t make any difference at all to the rest of us. But listen to me good, Jak. If I thought you behaving like a triple stupe might endanger all of us, then I’d chill you myself and not lose a moment’s sleep over it. You understand me?”
Jak nodded. “Brains says you’re right. Heart says you’re double wrong.”
Krysty was standing in her stirrups, watching the rain clearing away ahead of them. “Looks like the ruins of a ville down there,” she said.
“Be a good place to spend the night.” Ryan hesitated a moment, checking that he wasn’t about to get a leaf-bladed throwing knife between the fourth and fifth ribs. Then he climbed back in the saddle. “Let’s go see.”
Chapter Sixteen
The township had been called Opium Wells. The yellow metal sign leaned to the left, as though it were frozen in the act of toppling over. The main lettering was still just readable, though the altitude and population details were long faded away.
There were two skeletons wired together beneath the sign. One was the whitened bones of a sheep, shreds of wool still blowing in the light breeze. The other was clearly human, even if the leering skull had broken off the neck and lay in the dark sand a few paces away. The way that the skeleton had been joined in an ossuary tableau made it clear that the man was supposed to be copulating with the sheep.
“Welcome to Opium Wells,” Doc said, looking at the grisly spectacle. “Xenophobia capital of Deathlands. Friendliest little town in the west.”
“The General?” Jak asked.
“No.” Ryan shook his head dismissively. “Look at it. Those bones have been lying out there for a real long while. Weeks. Mebbe months.”
It was Jak’s turn to shake his head. “No! Not now. I know that. But might be got his base not far off. In the caves? Could be? They did this last time passed by.”
“Right. Sorry, kid. Only teasing you, Jak. Could be right, I guess. Someone with a sick sense of humor.”
“I think it’s funny, Dad.”
Ryan smiled at the boy. “Like I said, Dean. Someone with a sick sense of humor.”
The place was completely derelict. None of the buildings still had four walls and a roof, and most of them showed the obvious blackening of gasoline fires.
“Someone went to some trouble to take this place off the map,” J.B. commented.
They had dismounted, tethering their animals together to the sawed-off remains of what might once have been street lamps. The rain had been so heavy that there were pools of water everywhere, including several right where the horses were tied, giving them all the chance to slake their thirst. Once again, Doc led the way to top up their own shrunken supplies of sweet drinking water.
“Big storm coming up out of the north,” Mildred said, huddling her shoulders under her quilted denim jacket. “Real cold feel.”
The sky was gray all around, except where she pointed, where a bank of clouds swooped toward them, as black as the underside of a raven’s wing, laced with the silvery pink of chem lightning.
“Best find the best shelter we can,” Ryan said, looking around the desolate ruins of the township.
At its height it looked like Opium Wells had around thirty houses, a couple of stores and a church. The only building that seemed as though it might offer them any sort of cover was the church. It had been white-framed, but wind and sand had stripped it to bare wood. The windows were gone, mostly boarded over. The bell tower was missing, ending in a jagged stump at about the level of the second story.
Three of the walls still stood, but the back wall was completely gone, the timbers on either side charred and buckled. But it still looked their best bet.
Jak spit in the dirt. “That chem storm can fuck things. Best bring animals inside with us. Bad thunder, close, and all them bolt.”
Ryan glanced at J.B., who nodded his agreement. “Right. We got a half hour before it reaches us. Looks like there’s part of the roof left on the church. We’ll all try to get some wood and start a fire. Be sheltered so nobody’ll see it. Give us some warmth and protection. Finish the jerky. I’ll go check out the church, while the rest of you scavenge some wood for a night’s fire. And keep your eyes open for snakes.”
A sheet of rusting corrugated iron was flapping back and forth, torn loose from a row of jagged nails around what had once been the side entrance to the church.
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer. The ingrained habit had kept him alive as long as it had. “Man who walks in a strange building without a cocked blaster in his fist will likely come out on his back.” Trader knew things like that.
He paused in the doorway, allowing his eye to adjust to the semidarkness.
The hairs at his nape began to prickle with that certainty that someone was hiding in the shadows.
Moving very carefully, Ryan backed out of the church, looking around for J.B. He waved a hand to him, using the old signal that meant danger. The Armorer immediately readied the Uzi and walked quickly and silently across the old main street, dodging a rolling ball of tumbleweed, to join him.
“Someone in there?” he whispered.
Ryan nodded. “Can’t see anyone, but you can feel it.”
There was no need for either man to question or doubt the instincts of the other. They’d both been around far too long for that.
“How do you want to tackle it, Ryan?”
“Both go in. Me left, you right. Flat against the wall. Play it as it lays.”
“Not likely to be the General’s men,” J.B. breathed. “More likely Navaho. Wounded men.”
They paused a moment outside the ruined church. Ryan nodded, and a heartbeat later they were both inside, eyes straining to penetrate the gloom.
The interior was stripped, with a few broken benches piled in one corner, and the general air of destruction that typified abandoned buildings throughout Death-lands. There were rusting cans and plastic rubbish. A brown rat, skin dappled with a cancerous growth, moved in front of them, left to right, unhurried and unafraid.
There was a ramshackle staircase hanging from one wall that probably once led up to the vanished bell tower. Lances of gray light probed through the corners of the broken and boarded windows.
J.B. pointed with the snub nozzle of the Uzi toward the heaped pews in the corner. Unless there was someone lurking in the blackness of the ravaged second story, it was the only possible place for anyone to be hiding.
Ryan nodded, leveled the SIG-Sauer and squeezed the trigger once.
In the confined space, the powerful handblaster boomed out like the wrath of the gods, the bullet tearing through the wall a couple of feet above the benches, leaving a splintered hole through which a rod of watery light came peeking.
“Come out or get dead,” he shouted, his voice riding over the echoes of the shot.
For a few tense moments there was no reaction to the 9 mm bullet. He leveled the blaster again, this time aiming into the center of the broken furniture.
“Last chance,” J.B. called.
They heard a rustling sound, like a scorpion behind an arras. Ryan glanced sideways at J.B., both men ready to open fire at the first sign of a threat. Behind them, Ryan was aware that the rest of the friends were waiting just outside, drawn by the gunfire. Nobody moved.
“Don’t shoot us, mister. We’re fucking nearly dead anyway from no food.”
“Come out. Slow and easy and keep your hands where we can see them. One wrong move and we take you out.”
Ryan’s finger had already taken up first pressure on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. The voice had sounded genuinely frail and terrified.
He’d lost friends, though, chilled by people who were genuinely frail and terrified.
The discarded pews moved and toppled in a splintering heap, sending up a choking cloud of dust. Both Ryan and J.B. dropped into a crouch.
“Coming out, mister. Don’t shoot, please.”
The figure in the gloom was tall and skinny, hands held high, followed by a second person.
“Stand still,” Ryan shouted. “There just the two of you? Nobody else?”