The bushes surrounding the pit were thrashing. Rocks and sticks were flying from them, thrown by unseen hands at the group. Unfortunately, despite the trees shielding them from casual discovery, the excavation was approximately the worst possible tactical situation to put themselves into.
Everybody
who knew where they were and wished them harm had the high ground.
Grinning, Jak reached into his jacket. His right hand came out wrapped inside the knuckle-duster hilt of a trench knife. The left whipped one of his butterfly knives open in a blur of precision. He started to move toward the attackers. “Jak, no!” Mildred yelled. “They look too much like you! We might shoot you by mistake!”
The young man froze. Right then Krysty caught a flash of a face peering at her from a gap in the screen of underbrush. To her shock it looked like the bleached-bone white of Jak’s face, and the eyes staring at her from beneath matted white locks were the same blood color as their friend’s. But Jak, despite the prejudice he frequently
encountered—and tended to dispute loudly and forcefully—was no mutie himself, but an albino, subject to a genetic condition that predated the skydark by many generations.
The face Krysty saw, staring at her, was not right, somehow. The nose and jaw seemed pushed too far forward. It was a mostly human visage, but not entirely.
Then it was gone, and she saw other pallid bodies flitting out of clear view behind where it had been.
“What do we do?” J.B. called as a foot-long branch with green leaves still on it bounced harmlessly off his fedora.
A fist-sized stone bounced past Krysty’s right cheek. “Blast them!” Ryan shouted.
The head-splitting roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python was the first response to Ryan’s command. As a storm of blasterfire roared around her, the prone Krysty raised her Glock, but she had little to aim at. Doc’s “pallid shadows” continued to live up to their name, flitting just outside of clear sight behind the brush or among the boles of the trees around the sinkhole. Especially not knowing whether or when they might face a concerted rush by their unknown foes, she was happy to take single shots as a hint of target revealed itself.
A scream rang out from above to Krysty’s right, long, shuddering and unnervingly humanlike. It startled her, but it was no big surprise: plenty of muties were human, for all practical purposes, their “taint” notwithstanding. Some of them were indistinguishable from norms.
Like Krysty, whose mutant traits—with the exception of her sentient red hair—were hidden. As quickly as it began, the barrage of thrown debris stopped. The flitting ghosts vanished. Or at least Krysty abruptly lost
all sight of them, even the furtive glimpses she’d been getting since the attack began.
“Cease fire!” Ryan roared. “That means you, Ricky. Don’t waste ammo.”
“Sorry, Ryan.”
“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan called.
“I’m fine, lover,” Krysty said, catching his eye and throwing a wink. The others affirmed they hadn’t received so much as a bruise from the pelting.
“So what just happened?” Mildred asked.
Krysty glanced at Ryan. Her lover didn’t suffer fools gladly, or at all, and was sometimes inclined to be curt with Mildred when either her sharp tongue or her archaic sentimental notions got on his nerves. And on the surface, the question seemed pretty obtuse.
Seemed. But Krysty found herself unsure, as well. Had they staved off a more serious assault? Had they overreacted? She wasn’t too concerned over the latter possibility—if you played pranks on a heavily armed party out in the wilderness, you had no gripe coming if you suddenly acquired a few more holes in your hide.
Ryan shook his head. “No bastard clue,” he said. “Everybody try to find a position with halfway-decent cover and stay tight with eyes skinned. We don’t know if and when they might be back.”
He didn’t say “with reinforcements,” but Krysty heard the words loud and clear anyway. She knew the others did, too. They’d worked together as a team for a long time and had been in so many similar situations that the words were a given.
* * *
B
UT NO FURTHER
attack came. When half an hour had gone by according to J.B.’s wrist chron, Ryan cautiously
called for everyone to stand down. Leaving the rest to keep watch, he went out with Jak to look for signs of the flitting ghosts.
They found some broken branches, and blood spattered on leaves and the grass where the scream had come from. Reassuringly, it was red. What was less reassuring was the fact that not even Jak’s keen eyes and tracking skills were able to find any usable trails away from the sinkhole. “Right,” Ryan said, coming back to the lip of the sinkhole. The sun started to sink behind the western trees. “We still don’t know who they were, what they were, or where they went. But they seem to be gone now. So let’s pack up some medium-value scavvy and hump it into Sinkhole.”
“How do we know the creatures won’t spy on us as we do?” Doc asked.
“We don’t, Doc,” Ryan replied. “But I don’t propose to live out the rest of my days according to what I’m afraid these things we couldn’t even get a clear look at
might
do.”
* * *
L
IGHT LIKE THE
dancing orange flames of hell threw the shadow of Wymea Berdone, and the limp and lifeless figure she carried in her arms, all distorted onto the bare and beaten ground before her.
Behind her, the only home she knew burned with a bellow like a gigantic, raving beast.
Aside from a butcher knife from the kitchen, its blade reduced to little more than a finger-width by repeated honings, she was unarmed. She had been forced to leave even her father’s treasured ax behind in the blazing house, with the chills of her mother and stepfather.
If the bastard cowards who murdered my baby sister come for me, she thought, so much the worse for them!
The rickety roar gave way with a great rumbling and cracking and a redoubling of the intensity of the glare. Without a backward glance, Wymie turned onto a path scarcely wider than a deer track, and, barefoot and grieving, began the two-mile walk to Sinkhole, the nearest ville.
Where she meant to find justice. Even if it killed her.
“Potar Baggart, back off this instant!”
Ryan lifted the beer mug to his lips.
It was the bartender who spoke, sharply yet without obviously raising his voice. The other hubbub in the Stenson’s Creek gaudy, which had risen to a crescendo of happy anticipation when Potar tried to pick a fight with the grubby group of outlanders, abruptly died.
Potar was a big man, with a clenched red fist of a face beneath blond hair that would have been described as “dirty blond” had it been clean, which it wasn’t. The general smell wafting from him suggested to Ryan that neither it nor the rest of him had been clean in a long time. Ryan sipped his beer. It was good; the landlord was proud of his skills as a brewmaster, and so far as the one-eyed man was concerned, he was entitled. Ryan hadn’t risen from the chair where he’d been sitting at a table in the gaudy’s darkest corner with his friends when the lummox Potar came over and started making suggestions of a distinctly unwelcome kind to Krysty. But though the big man didn’t back off at the whip-crack command, Ryan saw the tension go out of him like the hammer of a blaster being returned gently down with a thumb.
So he let his own hand slip from the hilt of the his panga, with which he’d been preparing to gut the huge
man like a fish when he made the move he was so clearly working himself up for.
The bartender, a middle-sized, prematurely balding man whose name was Mathus Conn, and who also happened to own and run the gaudy, also seemed to notice the big man’s reaction.
“Now step right back from there, you hear?” he said, his tone softer, but barely. “Now. You don’t want me to reach under the counter.”
Though sitting in a half sprawl in the chair as if solidly at his ease, Ryan watched the man-mountain narrowly through his lone eye. He knew an aggressor usually had to get himself worked up to actually launch an attack. It was just human nature. But he also knew that in some men that could happen with frightening speed.
But apparently he didn’t want to see what the gaudy owner had under the counter. Instead his raised his ham-slab hands placatingly toward the bar as he shuffled away across the dried-grass-covered floor.
“I wonder what he
does
have under there,” Ricky said beneath his breath.
“Sawed-off double-barrel 10-gauge muzzle-loader,” J.B. said softly, “if I had to guess.”
“Sorry, Mathus,” Potar said. “Just funnin’ a little. You know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“I know no such thing,” Conn stated crisply. “But I do know
you
. And you know I don’t put up with trouble inside my place. So I reckon it’s time for you to leave.”
The huge man looked around. The gaudy was filled with faces lit yellow by smoky oil lamps. None of them looked sympathetic. Potar turned and strode out, head high, as if leaving was his idea.
“He’s the town bully over to Sinkhole,” Conn told the companions.
“We figured,” Mildred replied.
“I think he just wants acceptance.”
“The kind of big lunk who has no real harm in him, huh?” Mildred said acerbically.
Ryan cocked a disapproving brow at her. The gaudy owner was their main and best customer for their scavvy. He saw no point in letting Mildred sour a perfectly profitable business relationship.
Conn laughed without much real humor. “Oh, there’s plenty harm in him,” he said. “It just happens to stem from him not being able to find a place in the world, is all.”
Ryan looked around at his friends. With his head turned so no one else in the gaudy could see but them, he inflated his cheeks and blew out an exaggerated sigh between pursed lips.
Krysty winked at him.
Stenson’s Creek’s gaudy was much like any other, if cleaner than most. That made it different from the nearby ville of Sinkhole, which was something of a dump. It seemed to be run-down more from a sense of comfortable complacency than from the pervasive despair that defined much of the world outside the Pennyrile district. The gaudy was a sprawling roadhouse in the woods, east of Sinkhole along the creek that provided its name. It was mostly solid postnuke construction, fieldstone and timber. The bar was polished local hardwood. The tables and chairs had a crude look to them, as if they’d been made with little concern for appearance. But they were sturdy. The place didn’t offer much by way of decor, but that wasn’t what Conn was in the business of selling, and his customers didn’t seem to mind.
“Hey, big boy,” a dispirited-looking gaudy slut asked a man at the table nearest Ryan and company, “looking for a good time?”
She wore a ragged skirt, a blouse whose neckline hung almost as low as her breasts did and a sort of scarf around her neck made of interwoven rags. It was apparently meant to suggest a feather boa. What it did suggest was a mutie hybrid of an actual boa constrictor and a weasel with the mange.
The man she was talking to looked cast from a similar mold to the departed Potar, but of a shorter, wider, flabbier model. He had a neck bulged out thicker than his head, into which a succession of chins blended seamlessly as he slurped at the foam on his own beer mug with an intensity single-minded enough to suggest to Ryan that it just about maxed out his capabilities in the mind department. He didn’t so much as flick his vacant brown eyes the slut’s way.
She ran her fingers down the burly shoulder left bare by his grime-, sweat- and man-grease-mottled singlet, and leaned down so far Ryan could see the full pendulousness of her breasts from ten feet away without trying to, much less wanting so. Putting her painted lips close enough to his ear to risk leaving red marks, she purred, “Mebbe you didn’t hear me the first ti—”
He shoved her away, and she went down on her not-so-well-upholstered fanny so hard her tailbone cracked against the floorboards like a knuckle rapping on a table.
Scowling, Conn put down the bottle of shine he held and started around the bar, reaching under the counter as he did so.
The woman jumped to her feet. “What the nuke, you fat slob?”
“Back up off the triggers of them blasters, everybody,” a deep voice boomed from another corner of the room.
It was naturally arresting. Everyone stopped—even Conn himself, whom Ryan had observed in their previous visits was the unquestioned master in his own house.
The speaker wasn’t tall, but he was wide. A black man, the gray in his short, tightly curled hair showed him to be in middle age. And while he had a bit of a gut bulging out onto his thighs as he sat nursing his brew, Ryan suspected there was more muscle than flab. He was surrounded by four men and two women, most of whom showed a family resemblance, though it was far less pronounced than in the three largely chinless, large-foreheaded types who accompanied the meatbag.
“Don’t take it to heart,” he said calmly. “You’re new in these parts and don’t know. Them Sumzes don’t ball nobody more distantly related than first cousin. And Buffort, there, ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
“It’s a family turdition, Tarley,” said a skinny redheaded Sumz with ears like open wag doors. “Dates back to the dark times. That’s how us Sumzes pulled through.”
Buffort guffawed and pounded a beefy fist on the table. It happened to be the one clenching the handle of his mug. Frothy brown beer slopped forth.
Ryan could smell him and his brothers from twenty feet away. The Sumzes were turpentiners, he knew—they made the stuff from the resin of loblolly pines growing around the valley where they made their home. Its astringent, piney smell overwhelmed even the body reek wafting from the group, and the fresh-sawdust-and-old-vomit stink that even the best-kept-up gaudy sported. It was even noticeable over the odor of the lanterns, which
like most of the lamps hereabouts burned a blend of the pine oil with wood alcohol.
“You tell ’em, Yoostas!” the huge fat man crowed in a surprisingly shrill voice. “Family that sleeps together keeps together!”
Everybody laughed. Even the gaudy slut, though she looked as if she wasn’t clear as to the
why
.