“I’m Jerry Park from West Texas. This is my woman, Gemma. Should we come closer?”
“Sure. But keep those hands up.”
Ryan turned to J.B. “Check out there’s just the two of them. I’ll cover you.”
But they’d been telling the truth.
RYAN AND HIS COMPANIONS had very little spare food, banking on some successful hunting the following day. But they shared what they had with the young couple, all of them huddled together in a protected corner of the old church. The horses were hobbled in the far corner of the stuccoed building, beneath a faded fresco of the Blessed Saint Beubo among the lepers.
The threatened storm had arrived even more quickly than they’d expected, bringing endless peals of thunder and sheets of vivid chem lightning that turned the dusk to brilliant day. Rain pounded on the remnants of the roof, dripping ceaselessly from broken iron guttering.
They’d scavenged enough wood to keep a bright fire going, providing a cheerful center as the storm raged violently all around them.
Jerry Park had a hooked nose that had once been badly broken and never properly set. His eyes were brown, so dark they seemed almost black. He was around twenty and close to six feet tall, but so emaciated that Ryan doubted that he would have bothered the scales much beyond eighty pounds. There was an empty holster at his hip and an ancient sheath knife with a broken blade stuck in his frayed belt.
Gemma was also painfully thin. She wore torn cotton pants and a hand-dyed woolen shirt. Her bleached blond hair was tied back in a raggedy ponytail.
Both of them were barefoot.
Nobody questioned the couple until they’d demolished most of the remaining stock of jerky and swilled down a bellyful of good water.
Then predictably, it was Dean who began. “Where you going?”
Jerry answered. “Got a cousin with a spread this side the Grandee. Place called Agua Verde. Heard of it?”
Nobody said anything, letting him talk. “Me and Gemma come from West Texas. I told you that, didn’t I? Little ville. Three houses and a privy, my old man used to say. Called Eagle’s Fork. Damned sure you won’t have heard of it. Nothing to do there. Dirt farmers. Me and Gemma decided to head out and find my cousin, Paulie.”
“You know where this Agua Verde place is?” J.B. asked, the firelight glittering red and gold off the twin lenses of his glasses.
Gemma answered. She had a thin reedy voice, like a little girl’s, and she constantly watched Jerry as though she were scared about saying the wrong thing.
“Thought we did. Jerry’s pa gave us a sort of a map. Done good for the first few days. like familiar places, y’all know. Then it kinda went shitty on us. Showed a river that wasn’t there. Couple roads that like vanished.”
“Worst was the wells and water places,” the young man said bitterly. “He said Say, you wouldn’t have any more of that jerky, would you, folks?”
“No, sorry,” Krysty replied. “But we figure on hunting tomorrow. You’d be welcome to come that far with us. Ride bareback on the pack animals.”
Ryan nodded. “We can make some good kills and you’re welcome to some meat. Stock up on water in the foothills. And that’ll set you on your way again.”
“Thanks, mister,” Jerry said. “Noise you keep hearing’s my belly rubbin’ on my backbone. Can’t remember the last time we ate proper.”
“You see anyone passing by?” Dean asked, glancing at his father to make sure he wasn’t putting his foot in it.
“Yeah, we did,” Gemma replied. “Must’ve been about noon, wouldn’t you say, honey?”
“Yeah.”
“We hid. Like when you all come in, didn’t we?”
“Sure did. There was some noise earlier on. Couple wags. Mebbe three or four. Couldn’t be sure. Never seen them. Just heard the engines. Going south.”
“So, who were the people came by in the middle of the day?” Ryan asked, fairly certain what the answer would be.
“Indians,” Gemma replied. “Lots on horses. They stopped around a quarter hour.”
“Near a half hour,” Jerry corrected. “Ate some food. Smelled like cornbread fritters. Near died smelling it. And some refried beans.”
“They pissed in here,” Gemma said. “Heard it.”
“Smelled it, too, honey.”
“Didn’t hear what was said? Where they was going? Nothing like that?”
The couple swiveled and stared at Jak, not answering his questions.
He tried again. “You hear them talk?”
“Sure. They spoke their language. Couldn’t make a word of it.” Jerry continued to stare at Jak. “Mind if I ask you something, kid?”
“Don’t call me ‘kid.’ ”
“Sure thing, buddy. Just that I figure you gotta be some kinda mutie. That right?”
“No.” The single snapped word should have been enough of a warning.
But it wasn’t.
Jerry was insistent. “That white hair and you got triple-odd eyes. Red, ain’t they?”
“Red with blood of enemies I chilled,” Jak said. “Bit out throats and sucked all blood.”
“Holy Jesus in the desert!” Gemma exclaimed. “That surely ain’t true, is it?”
Dean giggled, giving it away.
Ryan looked past the couple, out through the dark, empty doorway. “Storm might be passing away,” he said. “Be worth us trying to get some sleep, good and early. Get moving then, before first light.”
So the party of nine wrapped themselves in blankets and settled down by the smoldering embers of the fire.
Well before dawn, two of them would be dead.
Chapter Seventeen
Trader stirred and muttered to himself, trapped deep in midnight sleep.
It had been a long time before the warm darkness had finally spun its web over his brain. Every week that crept past, it seemed that his sleep pattern was more and more disturbed. He was either sitting up at three in the morning, locked into the dark night of his soul, staring into the smoldering embers of their fire, or he was crashing out, with the evening sun hardly dipped over to the west, beyond the Cific.
Even while his eyes closed, the battle was nowhere near finished for him.
The Trader had always prided himself on being a man who never ever dreamed, or never had any dream that caused him a moment’s concern.
“Dreams are weakness,” he used to say, when he ran the two large war wags into every corner of Deathlands, when even the most powerful baron would hesitate to alienate the Trader.
Everyone knew that if you crossed any of Trader’s men or women, then you were crossing the grizzled leader as well. And he’d come looking for you, with his famous battered Armalite in his arms, like the avenging Angel of Death Incarnate.
He used to boast that he had no enemies. At least, he had no enemies still living.
At his side, deeply asleep, Abe twitched and rolled onto his back, hands cupped protectively around his groin.
Trader was sliding helplessly into the same dream that had been plaguing him for several weeks now. More or less since his ex-gunner had tracked him down in the far Northwest, bringing back memories of one-eyed Cawdor and the pale and laconic Dix, memories that he’d really believed were buried forever.
The memories had formed the backdrop for the repetitive dream that was now composing itself from the broken shards of the tranquil mirror of sleepa primitive landscape, barren and wild. Volcanic rocks had been twisted and sheared into myriad bizarre, glass-edged shapes. Walking was extremely difficult. Driving was impossible.
The two wags had been left behind. Trader couldn’t quite recall where they were.
In the darkness of their campsite, Trader’s lips moved, the words hardly disturbing the night air. “Deathlands is my land,” he said.
He was wearing steel-toed combat boots, but the razored rocks had cut them apart. His feet were hot, sore, blistered. The sky was a dome of beaten copper, with the sun like molten gold, hanging at its center.
Trader knew that Ryan and J.B. were with him, following close behind, letting him break the trail for them. They rode on his back, sucking at his power, trying to drain him of his life force, so that they could usurp his authority and leave him to die in the shimmering oven.
He paused and stared around. There was a glistening expanse of cracked salt flats a quarter mile ahead of him. The heat distorted everything, but Trader thought that he could make out some mountains, their jagged peaks tipped with snow. How far away? Ten miles? Hundred miles?
Ryan and J.B. were behind him.
Trader turned.
Salt flats. And snow-topped mountains, an eternity away from him.
No sign of Ryan and J.B.
Trader completed the circle.
It was the same every which way he looked.
“Why don’t you boys come alongside?” he said. But his throat was dry, his blackened tongue swollen like an old piece of sunbaked harness. He tried to swallow, but his spittle had become fine red dust.