“Oh, Gaia!” Krysty sighed the word into the sweat-damp feather pillow. Her body arched against him, her strong stomach muscles fluttering with the power of the release, repeatedly gripping and releasing his hardness, sucking him deeper into her at the climactic moment, so that they came within a second or so of each other.
Moments later Krysty slipped easily into a dreamless sleep. Ryan slipped out of the bed, washing the stickiness from his body in a bowl of clean water, using a rough linen towel to dry himself. The night was warm and still, and he pulled on his blue denim shirt, picking his careful way, barefoot, across the ragged tufts of the oval rug. He opened the door and walked out onto the porch.
There was the click of a hammer being cocked and he spun, cursing himself under his breath for leaving the SIG-Sauer behind him in the room. Trader’s words came to him at that moment. “Man doesn’t have to be careless more than once. Once is all it takes to get to be deeply dead.”
“Can’t sleep, Ryan.” It was difficult to tell whether it was a statement or a question. The spurred hammer on the long-barreled .357 Magnum eased back down again.
“Right, Jak.” The blaze of snow-white hair like magnesium flared at the far end of the veranda.
“Figured on going for a hunt.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. No, gotta mend fences tomorrow. Day after. Get us some deer meat in hills.”
Ryan nodded as he considered the suggestion. “Sounds good.”
“Saw fire.”
“Where?” He took a few steps to bring him closer to the teenager.
Jak wore a cotton nightshirt in dark blue material. He lifted his arm and pointed out into the velvet blackness of the desert, to the northwest. “That way.”
Ryan caught the feral scent of sweat and sex, realizing that the young man had been doing the same as he and Krysty. Oddly he found that mildly embarrassing, guessing that the same rutting odor would hang about himself.
“Can’t see anything.”
“Might be lightning strike. Saw chem storm that way. Didn’t last long.”
Ryan leaned on the smooth cottonwood rail. “Air’s heavy. Could be a storm here.”
“No. Reckon not. Passed away behind hills.”
“You should know, Jak. Lived here long enough now. Still enjoying marriage and fatherhood?”
“Sure. Beats anything. You and Krysty should do it.”
Ryan smiled at Jake. “One day.”
“Wait for happiness and find old age and sadness.”
“Deep thoughts for a kid.”
“Don’t call me, ‘kid,’ Ryan.”
Now they were both smiling at the familiarity of the old, shared joke.
“Times we miss having you riding with us, Jak. But, I guess you know that.”
“Sure. Times I miss those days.”
They shared a companionable silence together, each allowing his mind to roam back through their shared memories. Times past.
Ryan straightened. “Guess I’ll turn in, Jak.”
“Me, too.” He paused. “Ryan?”
“Yeah?”
“Michael? Christina reckons he’s got sort of black boil festering inside him. Got to be cured or she thinks one day it’ll burst.”
“She’s right. He lived a strange and enclosed life before he got jerked into this world. Seemed to have coped with it well. Much better than Doc, most of the time. But lately things been setting badly wrong.”
“He get better?”
“Sure. Sure hope so.”
“Man pulls blinds down over his brain triple danger to everyone.”
“Can’t argue with that, Jak.”
There was a brilliant streak of silver light, touched with purple at the trailing edge, hundreds of miles above the heads of the two men.
“Another chunk of rad shit,” Ryan commented. “Amazes me that parts of the old Star Wars hardware’s still up there. Never did any good when they were new. Certainly not doing any good now, dropping out and burning up.”
“Jenny likes them. Thinks real pretty.”
“Me, too.” Already the smooth flare was fading away, back into the darkness, allowing the surrounding stars to break through again with diamond clarity.
“Michael needs cure.” Jak turned toward the door, a slight figure in the night. Ryan guessed he hadn’t put an inch on the five four he’d been when they first met.
Though the one-ten pounds could now be closer to one-twenty. With Christina’s cooking that wasn’t surprising.
“Mebbe hunt, day after tomorrow? Could be just the cure he needs.”
“Kill or cure, Doc used to say.” Jak’s teeth were white in the blackness of the porch.
“Yeah. Kill or cure. Sleep well, Jak.”
“You, too, Ryan. G’night.”
“Good night, Jak.”
Chapter Five
“Well, I’ll be hung, quartered and fucking dried for the crows!”
Abe woke up with a start, his hand fumbling for the stainless-steel Colt Python under his bedroll. “What is it, Trader?”
“I don’t know.” He blinked up at the moon, guessing that they were still an hour or more from the first light of morning. “Something woke you?”
Trader was sitting up, his blanket crumpled over his knees, cradling his much-traveled Armalite across his lap. The cooking fire had long died, and only a wisp of gray smoke rose between the surrounding trees.
“Yeah, something woke me, Abe. Want to know what it was, do you?”
“Sure.”
Even in the relatively few weeks since he’d tracked down the Trader, Abe had learned quickly that his former leader’s temper hadn’t improved with age. It was a whole lot better to try not to argue with him.
“I woke up because I was having a real bad dream.” He stretched and pressed his right hand against his stomach, stifling a groan of pain.
“Guts bad?”
“Yeah. Been better for a couple years or more. Used to be like having a pair of starving rats fighting in my belly. Then it got better, after I walked away from the war wags. You remember when I did that, Abe?”
“Course I do, Trader.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Went into what a Mescalero shaman called ‘remission,’ whatever that means. Think it means it got better for a while. Least, it didn’t get any worse. Last few weeks I been feeling it again.”
“Anything help it?”
Trader shifted position, farting noisily. “Help it? Heard that milk and stuff was good for it. True that liquor burns like fucking napalm. Some fruits seem to make it worse. Way I see it, I’d rather go out walking tall and piss-drunk and hurting, rather than ten years on down the line, flat on my back, with a bowl of warm milk and bread to suck on.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” There was a long pause. “Trader, you said some dream woke you.”
“Don’t remember.”
Abe sniffed. “Don’t matter.”
“No. It don’t.”
THE BEAVER TAIL was skinned and sliced thin, then cooked in a skillet over the revived fire. Trader had shot the animal as it emerged from the nearby pool, dripping after its lumbering swim from a large lodge of tangled branches.
Abe had dug up some potatoes from an ancient cottage garden, nestling off a side trail, the ruins of the holiday home barely visible through the brush. There were also some massive, mutated turnips, woody and coarse, but edible after they’d been parboiled and then fried.
“This is the life,” Trader said expansively, lying back and picking his teeth with the point of his slim-bladed dagger. “Beats working, don’t it?”
“Sure does.”
“When are we moving from here, Abe?”
“We can go farther up into the Cascades. But we gotta stay close by the ruins of Seattle. Ready for when Ryan comes up here after us.”
“He might not get the message.”
Abe nodded. “Could be.”
From where they sat, it was possible to see miles down a V-shaped valley, heavily wooded on both sides. A lake lay at the bottom, invisible beneath a white coiling bank of early-morning fog. The dark place that had been Seattle itself was invisible, about twelve miles to the west.
Over the past few weeks, Abe had been thinking a lot about the messages that had been sent. A large number of travelers and packmen had been given a scrap of paper, the words written by Abe. Trader didn’t have the way of letters or numbers.
Success. Will stay around Seattle for three months. Come quick. Abe.
There was still plenty of time left, and the men and women who carried that message were spreading all over the wastes of Deathlands. Like a drop of oil poured onto a bowl of water, they would cover the continent, visiting nearly every ville and frontier settlement. They were urgedthreateninglyto look for the one-eyed man and his red-haired woman, a small guy with the hat and glasses, a black woman, a kid, an old man and a teenager who moved faster than a speeding bullet.
One of the messages should get through.
There’d been a number of times since meeting Trader again that Abe had experienced doubts about the wisdom of what he’d done. It didn’t seem at all like he remembered it. Or how he’d expected it would be.