Ryan could still remember the way the noise of the storm grew suddenly much louder as the vanadium-steel door swung open, hastily pulled shut by someone.
“Okie,” he remembered. The water was streaming between his boots, tinted a grayish brown by the dirt it was washing away from the top of the arroyo.
Everyone had crowded to the ob ports along the side of the war wag, and a voice had come crackling over the intercom, warning that someone was out in the rain. Nobody answered the voice.
Ryan closed his eye, recalling what he’d seen through that smeared armaglass.
Lek stood with his arms straight down at his sides, hanging limp, as if someone had simultaneously dislocated both of his shoulders. His legs were apart, as if he were braced against the enormous weight of water tumbling onto him. His shaved head was bowed, his uniform instantly soaked through.
Trader used the external mike. “Come in and stop fucking around,” he boomed.
Lek seemed to ignore the voice. Then he turned slowly toward the wag, his face splitting into a madman’s smile, very gentle and very homicidal.
Ryan remembered Trader’s immediate order to seal the wag and not allow the deranged man back inside.
The silver streak in the mat of sodden hair glistened like a mag flare, and the streaming face shone like a polished melon as Lek slowly lifted his head to stare directly upward, opening his mouth wide.
Hunaker had been pressed against Ryan, squinting through the same circular window.
“Fuckhead’s goin’ to drown himself,” she hissed. “Shit for brains!”
Hun wasn’t that often wrong.
Lek was almost invisible, the tumbling shroud of rain masking his outline, so that he looked like a vaguely humanoid statue, veiled in solid water.
Ryan rubbed at the condensation that misted the window, trying to see more clearly what was happening.
Lek seemed almost to be melting, sinking to his knees, his mouth open, filling with the solid rain, his staring eyes pits of frothing liquid.
“Want me to go out and bring him in, Trader?” Ryan called. “I could deck him first.”
“No.” The single flat syllable was unarguable.
“Down,” Hunaker whispered, her breath warm against the side of Ryan’s stubbled cheek.
The madman had slithered onto his back, chest heaving, hands now lifted toward the merciless heavens. But he had still made no attempt to save himself by turning onto his stomach, keeping his face out of the downpour.
Hunched down in the arroyo, Ryan was breathing slowly through his half-open mouth, trying to avoid sucking in water from the storm. Lightning had rocked the ground, striking less than a hundred yards away, outside the walls of the gully. The bitter stench of the chem storm flooded his nostrils and the thunder pounded at his brain.
It addled his mind, making it difficult to remember what he’d been remembering.
Lek.
Down and dying and drowning.
As the rain tumbled into Lek’s open mouth, flooding his nostrils, the man had suddenly begun to thrash around, as though he’d realized too late what was happening to him, sensing his own dreadful, choking doom.
The New Mexico rain now felt as though it were gathering momentum and power. It bounced back off the ground, filling the air with a fine spray of tiny droplets. For a moment there was a scintilla of panic, fluttering at the back of Ryan’s mind, the fear that he would no longer be able to breathe properly without inhaling the invasive liquid into his strained lungs.
And end like Lek.
“Going into spasm,” someone had said near the navigation deck of the war wag.
The man was thrashing from side to side, his fingers knotting above his head, though he was still making no obvious effort to try to keep the torrent from pouring into his nose and mouth. His chest was heaving as he coughed and retched, yellowish water bubbling from between his gaping jaws.
Suddenly Lek’s back arched and stiffened, so that the only points of contact between his body and the streaming earth were his heels and the crown of his head. A moment later everything relaxed as all the cords were cut.
“Heart failure.” The voice from the starboard machine-gun port was J.B.’s.
Ryan could still recall the way the raindrops bounced off the blind, staring eyes.
He also remembered that Trader had refused to have the body buried, regarding it as a total waste of time and energy.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when one of the Navaho glimpsed the two small wags, cresting a rise about three miles ahead of them. The pursuers were closing in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The food was gone, tipped into the abyss with the four dead animals.
Ryan had considered the suggestion of Sleeps In Day to go down after the animals and butcher some meat, but it would have taken them hours and lost vital pursuit time. So they’d snatched the chance of pressing on with no supplies and very little water, hoping to take what they needed when they finally caught up with the General and his killers.
The sight of the struggling wags, laboring to reach the top of a steep incline through deep mud, encouraged everyone in the pursuing group.
“Could take them,” Jak said.
“They are near to their home.” The leader of the Navaho brushed back an errant strand of sleek black hair from his dark eyes. “Night will come well before we catch up with them. And they will be safe.”
Ryan shook his head, moving in the saddle to face the Indian. “No. They might be in their base, but it doesn’t mean they’ll be safe. No.”
“Is there anything between here and there?” J.B. asked. “Shelter? Any sort of ville? Pesthole?”
Sleeps In Day turned to his companions, repeating the question in their own tongue. There was a shrugging of shoulders and shaking of heads.
But Ryan noticed that the oldest of the group of warriors was looking as though he were nearly going to speak.
“What about him?” he said, pointing at the longhaired, heavily built man.
“Who? You mean Thomas Firemaker?”
“Yeah. Ask him again.”
Sleeps In Day did as Ryan asked. The older man looked embarrassed at finding himself the center of attention, and he didn’t reply for several long seconds. Then he muttered something, pointing a little way to the east of the trail that they had been following south.
“What?” Ryan said.
“Thomas says he remembers coming this way, hunting with his father.” More speech from the other Navaho. “His father No, the father of his father was dying of rad sickness at the time and they looked for a place for him to die.”
At the mention of rad sickness, both Ryan and J.B. glanced instinctively down at the tiny rad counters each wore on his lapel.
Both had moved from the safe green into the slightly more dangerous yellow. But it was still a good distance from the threat of orange and the serious menace of red. They both knew that the southwestern area of Deathlands was one of the worst for hot spots of residual nuke radiation from the days of skydark, partly because of the number of secret missile installations that had been seeded throughout the region.
“And what did they find?” Krysty asked, taking a cautious sip of water from her canteen. At least the storm earlier had given them all the opportunity to top up their drinking supplies.
Thomas Firemaker spit out a short sentence and then heeled his mount away from the others.
“What’s wrong with him?” Dean pulled on the reins as his mount started to follow the other pinto pony.
Sleeps In Day answered. “The General murdered the mother of his mother and his own mother and the sister of his mother and the sister of his wife and the brother of his sister’s wife as well as the son of”
Dean held up a hand. “I get the picture. Yeah, I see.”
“What did Thomas tell you about this place where he took the dying man?” Mildred rubbed at her eyes, showing the exhaustion that all of them were feeling.
“He says it was unspoiled, behind where the land had once jumped and slipped. A place where in the ghost times the Anglos would stop to eat.”
“Diner,” Mildred said. “By God, but he means there’s an old diner.”
FROM THE OUTSIDE, Mom’s Place was still in amazingly good condition.
On the way to the diner, following the grudging leadership of Thomas Firemaker, they had passed a place where there had obviously been a massive earth slide, blocking off the highway. But some time in the past couple of years the rains had eroded the blockage away, reopening the side trail, revealing the single-story diner for the first time in a century or so.
It had originally been covered in a thick layer of stucco, painted to resemble genuine adobe. But the hundred years of extreme weather had cracked and fissured it, reducing it to an indeterminate pallid gray brown.