Mildred saw Doc’s tall, gangly form silhouetted against the silvery light of the clouds, standing his ground and readying his shot with a double-handed grip on his LeMat. A fraction of a second later, the mighty weapon blasted, a loud detonation and blinding explosion crashing from the barrel of its shotgun.
Mildred blinked as spots rushed over her eyes, the muzzle-flash casting a greenish splotch on her vision, momentarily blinding her in the darkness.
“A pig!” Doc’s voice came back, incredulous. “We’re being attacked by a hog.”
From farther away, close to the door of the farmhouse, Krysty’s voice drifted back, urging the others to jump over the steps there and get onto the porch. Ryan, J.B. and Jak were stood at the door, blasting shots out into the undergrowth as the animals charged.
Mildred heard the noise of something rushing at her and she blasted off a shot without spotting the target, certain she wouldn’t hit her companions but still annoyed at her lack of finesse.
There, in the bright, half second of blasterfire, she saw the boar, a heavy, waddling creature with a dark, leathery hide, its round nose punctured by two enormous nostrils. It was mostly afterimage, her brain still making sense of what she had seen, but even as her subconscious fitted it together, Mildred’s finger was working the trigger again, pumping another shot at the grass, determined to snag the monstrous creature.
Across from her, out by the gate, Doc tossed aside the oil lamp and fired another shot from his LeMat, aiming the barrel downward so as not to clip any of the people he had vowed to protect. In the sudden flash of blasterfire, they saw the mutie boar again, rushing toward Jeremiah Croxton as he urged the group forward, watching where he stepped.
The boar charged and Mildred pushed Croxton away, firing three shots—one-handed—at the creature. Suddenly, the dark shape fell, crashing to the ground with an agonized squeal. Almost as though in response, something in the far bushes, off toward the rotten farmland, squealed back—another mutie boar, Mildred assumed.
“Keep going,” Doc urged, leaping over the fence and running through the garden. His free hand grabbed Mildred by the arm, waking her from her trance as she stood listening to the eerie, squealing chorus that seemed to be building all around them. “Get into the house,” Doc instructed, deftly leaping over man traps and razor wire that had been left among the clumps of long grass.
Together, Doc and Mildred leaped over the wooden stairs, careful not to touch them with the soles of their boots. Doc shoved Mildred through the open doorway where the others had already disappeared, now lost in the darkness. Doc himself remained on the stoop, brandishing his lethal LeMat, scanning the grass as it swayed in the breeze. Something was still moving out there, he was sure of it.
Doc held his breath and tried to shut out the sounds coming from behind him as the travelers and his ever-present companions made their way into the shelter of the metal-clad building. The sliver of moon and the smattering of stars shed little light on the scene, and Doc’s eyes widened as he tried to make sense of the eerie vista before him.
Mildred was back at his side, her breath coming fast. “Did I hit it?” she asked, urgency and desperation in her tone.
Doc remained still, watching the black horizon against the deep indigo sky, waiting for movement. “I don’t think so,” he whispered back.
“Where are they?” Mildred asked. “Do you see them?”
Doc continued watching the ragged garden ahead, straining his senses to detect any movement out there. There was the sound of the wind picking up, rustling the leaves as it raced through the trees. Other noises then, too, sounds of movements, of animal grunting, running feet slamming heavily against the ground. Then Doc saw something move, over by a copse of trees whose dark branches clawed at the gloom of the sky.
“Scalies,” Doc said, the word barely a breath. He was already turning, urging Mildred back into the house.
Once they were inside, he slammed the door closed behind him, shaking it with such force that it rattled in its frame.
A second later, J.B. emerged from the darkness of the hall, shoving past the crowd waiting there for instructions. “Careful with that,” he ordered. “Had to bust the rad-blasted thing out of its socket to get in here. We need to board it up.”
As he spoke, Ryan and Jak appeared from the shadows, the younger man’s pale visage like a ghost in the darkened hallway. Doc could see that both of them carried planks of wood, roughly the width of the door. Floorboards, he realized. Julius Dougal, the old farmer, was following them carrying a claw hammer he’d either brought with him among his bundled possessions or had found in the house, Doc couldn’t tell.
“You might use this,” Julius stated, offering the handle of the hammer to the Armorer, who was examining the door.
J.B. grabbed the proffered hammer from the man, pulling a small canvas bag from an inside pocket. The tiny bag was cinched together with a drawstring, and J.B. opened it up and dropped the contents on his hand. For a moment, Doc watched, mystified, until he realized that the ever-resourceful Armorer had poured a half-dozen nails from the bag.
“You never cease to amaze me, John Barrymore,” Doc spluttered as the man got to work, hammering the boards in place where the door met the busted frame.
Maude White, the fifty-something woman who had been traveling in the final wag of the caravan, glared
at Doc and the others, shaking her finger in annoyance. “What the hell is going on?” she snarled. “What is that out there?”
Barry Adams, the driver of the second truck rig in the convoy, joined in, raising concerns his companions clearly shared. “We’ve lost one wag,” he spat, “left the others out there with who knows what. I thought you people were protecting us.”
Ryan stepped across the hall, and his trim, muscular figure seemed to tower over the older man. “You’re not chilled yet, are you?” he stated, sarcasm dripping in his challenging tone.
“Hell,” Barry growled, “we very nearly—”
“‘Very nearly’ only counts in blackjack,” Ryan interrupted, before turning away and issuing instructions to his people.
“Let’s get everyone in the main room here,” Ryan said, pointing to the open doorway to the left as J.B. and Jak boarded up the front entrance. “We checked it out while you were coming over, Croxton, and it’s clean. There’s a fireplace in there with an open chimney and plenty of firewood that the previous occupiers must have gathered. Get your people in there and get warmed up.”
“What about the rest of this fine property?” Croxton asked, his watery eyes glinting in the darkness.
“We’ll check it out,” Ryan assured him. “Make sure there are no surprises lurking in the corners. Half the house is falling down so it’s mostly just two or three rooms on the second floor and there’s a door I figure leads to the basement.”
“I’ll come with you,” Croxton announced as his people were herded into the main room.
Ryan shook his head. “Might not be safe,” he said. “Let my people work and—”
“I’m sorry,” Croxton said, “but I have to insist. If anything’s in here that we need to know about I want to be the first to find out, not the last. You signed on as our sec team, but I’m still responsible for these good folks.”
Ryan nodded, admiring the man’s courage. “Just stay behind us and try not to get shot if anything goes down.”
“I’ll try that,” Croxton assured him.
J.B. had finished his work on the door, and he and Jak walked across the hallway to discuss the plan of action with Ryan.
“I want two men to remain with the travelers,” Ryan stated, and Mildred raised her finger to volunteer, closely followed by Doc, nodding once. “Fine. Jak, I want you and J.B. to secure the back of the house. Might not need it, mind you, but be sure. Real sure. Krysty? You’re on point with me. We’ll check upstairs first.”
Krysty nodded, the Smith & Wesson blaster glinting in her hand.
As the other travelers made up beds in the main room or helped with the firewood, Daisy, the young-again girl, stepped out into the hallway and clung to Croxton’s arm for a moment, whispering something in his ear.
“The girl needs to come to,” Croxton stated. “Call of nature.”
“We’ll find a room we can set up as a latrine,” Ryan said, annoyed with the necessity to mollycoddle these travelers.
J.B.
AND
J
AK MADE
their way swiftly through the house, checking the security of the windows and the doors. The whole place seemed secure as a fortress, boards over the windows with just the slightest gaps here and there.
As the pair stood in the darkened kitchen at the rear of the house they heard scratching sounds. With his Colt Python in one hand, Jak moved silently across the wide room, his tread as light as a cat’s, until he reached the back door. Once there, the albino teen placed his free hand against the door, pushing lightly; it held, offering no give whatsoever. The scratching noises in the room continued.
As silently as he could, Jak grasped the door handle and inched it slowly counterclockwise until he heard the light click of the catch. Then he tried the door again, pushing with the turned door handle. Nothing. The door was still locked. Jak peered at the door in the darkness, trying to discern where it was bolted.
“It locked, Jak?” J.B. asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Jak replied, his voice a whisper.
J.B. pulled his flint lighter from his pocket and lit the flame, bringing a dull, flickering pool of illumination into the room. They were in a typical farmhouse kitchen, a room of large proportions with a wide iron hob crouching on stubby feet, a chimney bent to take fumes from the room through an open-grilled ventilation space. There was a family-size table close to the left-hand wall with five empty chairs arrayed around it, space for a sixth that was no longer in evidence. Like the other rooms they had examined, this one featured thick boards over the windows, and an old manhole cover had been riveted to the large windowpane that dominated the back door. The room, like the rest of the house, seemed
secure. Someone—presumably Mitch and Annie—had gone to great lengths to ensure they would be safe from attack. That made sense—they were haves in a world of have-nots.
J.B. walked across the kitchen, the flame of the up-raised lighter still burning in his hand, joining Jak at the back door. His feet scrunched on the floor, and the Armorer peered down and saw the black shells of insects on the worn, vinyl tiles.
“Something’s getting in here,” J.B. told Jak, bending to cast his flame closer to the carpet of tiny creatures. A few spots of hard-shelled black were moving here and there, tiny beetles scrambling across the room, away from the light, but most of the carpet of insects was carcasses, long since dead. “Nothing that’ll hurt us overmuch.”
Jak nodded before turning his attention back to the door. In the light he could now see that a series of bolts had been added to the door, five in all, running the full height of the door in horizontal lines like runners at their starting blocks. Every one of the bolts was locked tight. J.B. joined him, examining the door.
“Nice work,” J.B. said, admiring the locks. “Efficient anyway. Nothing ever came into this house without the owners’ knowledge, huh?”
Jak shook his head, his mane of white hair sweeping against his shoulders. “Nothing,” he agreed.
S
HOULDER-TO-SHOULDER
, Krysty and Ryan led the way up the wide staircase to the second story of the house, while Jeremiah Croxton and the teenage Daisy followed, keeping four steps below them as ordered. The staircase,
like the rest of the house, was cold, and Ryan could feel the chill radiating from the wall beside him where the side of the house had caved in.
At the top of the stairs, Ryan swung his blaster in a slow arc, covering everything to his right, while Krysty did the same to the left. With no source of illumination in the house, it was incredibly dark, and Ryan and Krysty were forced to trust their other senses—hearing, smell, combat instinct—to scope out the immediate area.
“Seems clear,” Krysty said, her voice a whisper.
Warily, Ryan rummaged in his coat pocket and lit a flame from an old tinderbox, holding a bit of candle before him to light the way. Then he stepped forward onto the landing. The floorboards creaked beneath his tread, and he hunkered down into himself, the top of his head barely higher than the level of the SIG-Sauer blaster pointing outward before him. The landing continued into a corridor that ran the full width of the farmhouse. Off to the right there were two doors, both of them closed, and the corridor ended abruptly in a pile of rubble where the roof had caved in. This was the side of the house that had collapsed, though the surviving parts stretched out over the locked area below. Ryan peered over his shoulder, checking to see that Krysty was still waiting at the top of the staircase. Behind her, along the corridor, Ryan made out the walls in the darkness. He did a slow count to ten in his head, waiting to see if anything moved there; it didn’t.
Turning back to the wrecked corridor, Ryan peered into the oppressive gloom. “Cover me,” he told Krysty as he inched forward.
Moving slowly, his movements light and silent, Ryan stepped toward the door to the left. Hand on the doorknob, he opened the door swiftly, ducking back as it swung open. The flickering light from the candle cast an ever-changing illumination into the room, like looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to sync up the parts in your head. It was a child’s bedroom, small, with a cot pushed up against the corner, bright, friendly splashes of paint across the walls. The room appeared empty, but Ryan could hear something moving.
The SIG-Sauer held ahead of him, the candle wavering in his hand, Ryan walked forward, looking this way and that until he reached the cot. The flame danced at the end of the taper, caught in a strong breeze coming from a gap in the wall through which the deep indigo of the star-speckled sky could be seen. Ryan looked within the cot and felt his stomach begin to churn, a wave of revulsion threatening to overcome him for just a moment. There was a child there, lying in the cot, tucked into an old blue blanket. The child was tiny, little bigger than one of Ryan’s hands. It lay there, its head against the pillow, thumb in its mouth as though asleep. The blanket was daubed with brown, the darkening color of spilled blood long-since dried, a darker stain where the child’s legs had been. The legs were gone; Ryan could tell that even where the blanket had been used to try to hide their loss.