A Crying Shame (31 page)

All right, I'll accept your ... outrage, if that is the right word. Disgust. Whatever. Perhaps ... no, I'm sure you've seen enough to make you ... jaundiced. But now, assuming all this ... bullshit you've been spouting is true, the Links have killed. Why?”

Paul stood in the way of a woman they wanted.” The mercenary smiled.
Whatever else they may be, they certainly have good taste in women.”

I don't find that amusing, Jon. And I agree with you: you don't have much use for the human race.”

Only the adults,” Jon corrected. For a moment, the adventurer's thoughts were flung back in time: to Africa, southeast Asia, Algiers, many other ports of call. He recalled the suffering of the homeless, the starving kids, the pitiful elderly, the ruined countryside, the broken dreams and the broken bodies. Like many meres, Jon Badon had, on more than one occasion, fought for nothing of any monetary value—just for what he thought was fair and right. And he felt nothing but contempt for the petty, grasping, greedy, selfish, self-centered, and comfortable people of all races who allowed another human being to starve to death in a filthy ditch while they sought dubious self-gratification with expensive toys and country clubs, giving their snot-nosed brats everything they wanted—except discipline and a set of honorable values.

Jon looked at the sheriff. He said nothing. He didn't have to say anything. The cold look in those pale gray eyes spoke volumes.

Sheriff Mike Saucier got the accurate impression that the conversation was over for a time.

 

Deep in the darkness of the Crying Swamp, hidden by cleverly constructed living plants and shrubs, a father mourned for his dead son. He mourned silently, his tears his only sign that he felt any emotion at all. The huge adult Link wept with his face turned from the others of his kind. Even though his son had been one of those that had mysteriously turned savage, killing and raping at random, he nevertheless felt a keen sense of loss, sharp and cutting. The father was a third generation—let us call them what Badon and Paul Breaux called them—Link. He was very humanlike in many ways. It took five generations for the Links to produce—through their human mates—a Link that would pass for human. A human link to the past. A living, breathing, bleeding chain to history.

Before the white humans came, several hundred years past, the Links had been almost pure in their form. Animals, but with a definite social order. They ate only fish and berries and wild sweet potatoes—yams—and certain other palatable roots, which they knew instinctively would cure some ailments and aid their digestive systems. They knew enough to strip the bark from certain trees, including oak, soak it in water, and drink the liquid for sickness. They were as civilized then as many forms of so-called intelligent beings. They did not kill for sport; they did not kill for the sake of killing; they did not make war. They learned to live in harmony with those around them. They took mates, cared for their old, loved their young—in their own fashion—and built shelters out of bark and branches and leaves and living vines and bushes. They made loincloths out of small woven vines.

And they buried their dead in secret underground places.

But the swamp was much larger then: hundreds of thousands of acres; and the Links were never a large tribe, never numbering more than a few hundred at the maximum. Now there were less than eighty stable male Links in the Crying Swamp. More than fifty crazed young males. They all had learned to hide and sleep by day, coming out only during the late hours of the night to hunt for food—and for mates, now that they could produce only male offspring. And the leaders had to be more and more intelligent in their planning of raids, more selective in their choosing of who would breed, for a madness had crept into their strain. Of the young males, many of those who lived past twenty years would be stricken with sudden seizures and shuddering; they would foam at the mouth like mad dogs and their eyes would become crazed. They became meat-eaters only, craving hot blood and raw flesh. Human or animal. It made no difference.

And the leaders would have to kill them. If they could catch them.

But many got away. Those who did lived deep in the great swamp, breeding with stolen women, bringing more and more crazed creatures into the world, eluding their own brothers and fathers who sought to destroy them. For the leaders knew that those maddened few, and their actions of late, had the potential to kill them all.

What to do?

The older, wiser Links had much more than native intelligence. They could reason and think and plan, and they had had, for centuries, their own language. They had some of their human offspring helping them, from time to time, but now some of their human sons and daughters were turning against them, and they could not understand this act. For had they not taken the humanlike infants to the edge of the great swamp, leaving them on the steps of human homes, to be cared for and loved and raised with those who were as them?

It was baffling to the Links. Baffling.

And they did not know what to do. For it was against their nature to kill for no reason. But they had to survive. That was also part of their nature. So what choice were they left?

The leaders had to talk; they must risk an open meeting with all the clans to talk. It had to be.

 

At Despair Plantation, Jon belted on a .45-caliber pistol, then reached into the travel bag and fitted together an M-10 Ingram, complete with long padded barrel that acted as both barrel extension and silencer. Even with the silencer, the M-10 was not quiet at full automatic.

Interesting weapon,” Mike observed, more than a touch of dryness in his tone.

Forty-five-caliber. Not worth a damn past sixty yards ... that's my personal opinion. Some say less, some say more. But up to sixty yards, it'll stop most anything that's coming at you.”

Thirty-round clip?”

Yes.”