“There is one thing,” she challenged.
“Make it fast.”
“What’s the
plan
here, Ryan? Don’t you think it’s time to let us in on it? Or at least, you know, give us a clue?”
“Plan?” He shook his head. “Got no plan. I’m making it up as I go along.”
“I don’t buy it,” Mildred said firmly. “You’ve
always
got an angle. There’s always some devious scheme cranking away in that head of yours. You expect me to believe that isn’t happening now?”
“Well, now,” he said with a smile, “I didn’t say
that
.”
Chapter Sixteen
Still groggy and rubbing sleep from her eyes—and remembering, both with amusement and a pang of loss, how hard her ophthalmologist coworkers would have ridden her for that, in an age that was long dead, and so were they—Mildred followed her friends down the stairs to the bar room of the Library Lounge.
It was still early by barfly standards, apparently. Hers, too, the way she felt. The sun had come up, apparently, and a gray light shone through windows bared by thick pulled-back curtains that kept the place sepulchral most hours of the day.
On the bench that ran along the back wall, same as the bar and to the right of it, Ruby, one of the entertainers, sat reading a large open book on a table. She wore a loose dark blue jersey or sweatshirt. Mildred couldn’t see what else she might be wearing. She had reading glasses perched on the tip of her pert nose, and seemed very intent.
“Mikey-Bob’s in the back, y’all,” she said with a wave of her hand as the companions paused on floorboards freshly covered with sweet-smelling sawdust. Mildred wondered where
that
came from. “I’d walk lightly around him if I was you. Both of him’s in a growly bear mood this morning.”
“You mean sometimes he’s not?” J.B. asked.
“You all go ahead,” Mildred said, for some reason separating both syllables of
you-all
more carefully than usual, as if she were afraid of being taken for as country as Ruby sounded. “Just get me whatever you manage to wangle out of Mikey-Bob, please.”
“Your leg broken, Mildred?” Ryan asked. “You look like you can go fetch for yourself.”
“That’s all right,” J.B. said. “I’ll get hers for her.”
With Ryan grumbling about J.B. being henpecked, and Krysty looking as if she were fixing to weigh in and have her say, the group went past the bar through the swing doors into the kitchen. When they opened, Mildred heard Mikey’s dulcet tones demand to know what the nuke they thought they were doing traipsing into his kitchen without so much as a by-your-leave.
Ricky kind of crab-walked, and then walked backward. He seemed fascinated by Ruby, who admittedly had a striking face, although for her shape she might as well have had two bodies to play counterpoint to Mikey-Bob’s two heads, from the bagginess of the garment she was wearing. No doubt he was having no trouble envisioning the full bosom beneath, and the way it had constantly threatened to explode out of her bustier the night before.
He wound up stalled and staring when the doors swung shut on his friends and the loud argument Bob and Mikey were having at the tops of their shared prodigious lungs. The doors opened again. A brown-leather-clad arm reached out, grabbed Ricky by the collar and hauled him bodily inside.
Shaking her head and smiling to herself as the doors swung shut again, Mildred approached the young woman. “Mind if I sit down?”
Ruby glanced up at her. “Oh, no. Not at all. Make yourself at home, Ms. Wyeth.”
Mildred sat. “What are you reading?”
“
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon,” she said. She closed the book on a finger, picked it up and turned it over to peer at the spine. “Volume, uh, Three.”
“You’re kidding,” Mildred said reflexively. But even as she did she saw the words embossed on the cracked and ancient cover in largely missing gold leaf.
“Why are you reading that?” she asked as Ruby spread the book open in front of her again. She resisted the urge to add, “Of all things?”
“It’s interesting,” Ruby said.
“Most people these days don’t seem any too interested in history. Or in learning to read, come to think about it.”
“Well, I didn’t think I was, either. But Dark Lady taught me long ago, and suggested I read this one. She says without understanding the past you can’t really understand the present. That that’s a big problem with the world today—that so many people ignore the past. Or are actively afraid of it.”
Mildred frowned. “I thought I heard tell that Dark Lady encouraged everybody to learn some kind of a trade. Mebbe I heard wrong.”
“Oh, no,” Ruby said. “You heard right. She wants to make sure all of us entertainers find some way of making a living other than... You know, on our backs and knees.”
“Well, that’s big of her,” Mildred said a bit stiffly. “What do you want to learn?”
“Haven’t decided yet,” Ruby said, her eyes back on her pages of dense archaic text. “Been doing some carpentry kinda stuff. Mr. Coffin’s offered to teach me how to make caskets.”
“I’ll just bet he has.”
“It’s real kind of him, huh? But lately I’ve been getting more and more interested in trying to work with metal. You know, make things.”
“That’d make Mr. Dix a most happy man to hear,” Mildred said, thinking, And if he tries to take her on as a student I’ll break both his thumbs.
Ruby nodded abstractedly. She was clearly back into the Decline, or Fall.
“So, tell me...” she said. “What’s it like, uh, working for Dark Lady.”
“Fine,” Ruby said. “I like it.”
“Really?”
Ruby looked up at her with a hint of a frown. “It’s better than being forcibly turned out for muleskinners by the side of the road, for a bottle of whiskey the bunch, Ms. Wyeth.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
She took a minute to gather her thoughts. That bit of backstory had broken her stride. But she wasn’t about to walk away from her principles.
“Don’t you feel exploited?” she asked.
“‘Exploited’?”
“You know...taken advantage of.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ruby said. “I know what the words mean. I just don’t know what you mean by them.”
That put Mildred back in her chair. “Well, I mean—being compelled to have sex for money. To, uh, make money for somebody else.”
Ruby closed her book, looked at Mildred and frowned. “Are you gonna give me some other job?” she asked.
“Well...”
“I told you where I came from. You know what’d happen to me if I started peddling my round little ass just out on the street.”
“Well—yes.”
“So what else am I gonna do? What would you do in my place? Dark Lady gives me safety and comfort,” she said. “People treat us with respect. Or—well, you saw what happens to them.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “Mikey-Bob thumps them and throws them in the gutter.”
“See, she cares about us. She cares about everybody. Everybody in the ville. Mebbe in the whole world.”
She shook her head. “Crazy, right? But it’s a craziness that’s giving me a shot at a better life than anything else I was gonna get. Same for everybody here. What do you think would happen to Mikey-Bob, if not for Dark Lady? He’d have been hunted down and butchered as a monster long ago. Or at best had to go off with Madame Zaroza and play a freak in her traveling show. Which, you know, works for some people.”
Mildred felt her face tighten into a ball of confusion.
“Talk to anybody you like,” Ruby said heatedly. “Here or in Amity Springs. Not everybody likes Dark Lady, sure. Lotta people in the ville butt heads with her regular. But you won’t hear anybody say she doesn’t care, and doesn’t do her best to look out for us all, unless they’re a nuking liar!”
Mildred held up her hands. “Okay, okay. You can back off the trigger of the blaster now, hon—”
“You know what? You can even go ask that Baron Sand out to Joker Creek! She’d tell you the same. And she and Dark Lady hate each other like poison. Or love each other like sisters. Or mebbe ex-lovers. Nobody knows for sure. Least of all them, mebbe—”
The kitchen doors opened vigorously to what turned out to be a kick from Ryan. He walked into the room carrying two heavy steaming crockery plates. The others trooped in after him, ignoring Mikey’s expostulation about not mishandling the physical plant.
“If you’re done browbeating the help, Mildred,” he said, plunking down heaping helpings of scrambled eggs, thick bacon slices and stewed pinto beans on the table in front of her, “breakfast is served. And you’re rad-blasted welcome.”
* * *
“H
OW
DO
D
ARK
L
ADY
’
S
employees like her?” asked the woman behind the counter. She was solidly built, with a pretty face, bobbed red hair and a cheerfully matter-of-fact manner. “Why don’t you ask them?”
Chagrined by Ruby’s words—and her vehemence—but still unwilling to let go of her righteous indignation against Dark Lady and her sex-trafficking ways, Mildred followed her advice. Despite her friends’ admonitions to rest up, she’d decided to spend the rest of the day talking to the young woman’s coworkers in the gaudy, and then talking to random people in the ville.
Only a couple of the entertainers, another young woman named LaSalle and a young man named Duke, had gotten up and proved willing to talk before Mildred got bored and restless and ventured out into the warm day. They had fairly well corroborated Ruby’s account. So Mildred determined to talk to people whose livelihood, not to mention possible safety, did not hinge quite so directly on staying on the gaudy owner’s good side.
“Well, I did,” Mildred said. “But I admit I’m just a bit uncomfortable with the whole brothel-owner thing.”
The woman, Kris, looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t really see why. Sure, some people kind of look askance at the whole thing. But it seems to me like people want the service and she helps her people provide it in a safe, clean way. What’s the problem? Anyway, aren’t you-all hired blasters?”
“Well, that’s not all we do.”
The woman laughed. The store was lit only by backscatter sun through fly-specked windows. It had shelves of various nonperishable items, from bins of nails to bolts of cloth to hand-turned meat grinders to sturdy mechanisms that Mildred had no idea did what.
“Well, we all get along best we can. Reckon it’s the same for Dark Lady and her people.”
“So how do people in the ville feel about her?”
“What’s this about feeling Dark Lady?” asked Wilson, Kris’s husband. He was wearing his apron and lugging a basket of folded hemp cloths out of a back room.
Without even looking around Kris smacked him on top of his bald head. “Behave,” she said. “I’m not sure you can say everybody likes her. She comes off as kind of standoffish, and can be stubborn as a jug-head mule. But she does a power of good for the ville, not much disagreement about that.”
“What sort of good?” Mildred asked.
“You mean other than providing invaluable public services like whores and beer?” Wilson asked jauntily, hoisting the cloths onto the sturdy wooden counter. “Well, the place serves as a lending library. Not many intact books are around Deathlands these days, and people come from far and wide for a chance to borrow one. The name’s not just for show. And she gives free reading lessons to anyone who needs it.”
“Mebbe half the people in Amity Springs can read,” Kris said with pride. “Wilson and I knew how before she got here, but she taught a bunch of folks. He’s the avid reader in the family. I don’t find much time, myself.”
“She does handle a lot of our salvage operations,” Wilson said. “You know about those, right?”
Mildred nodded.
“She came here mebbe five, six years ago, nobody knows where from,” Kris said. “Little frail-looking wisp of a thing, with those big black eyes. But smart, and without an ounce of back-down in her.”
“Her and pretty much that huge steamer trunk of old books she used to start her library with,” Wilson said.
Mildred wondered just how a “frail little wisp” managed to drag a whole steamer trunk full of books along with her into the Basin—Nukem Flats. Given that she had to bring them across the mountains to the east, bluffs north and south, or up the cliffs the Río Piojo apparently hurled itself off of in an endless suicide dive beside the ville of the same name. But Mildred let the question go. She had more pressing concerns, and limited time to indulge raw curiosity.
“We were just starting to realize what we were sitting on top of back then,” Kris said. “She had the idea of making a focused effort to scavvy the primest stuff out of the trash beds, and use the proceeds to build up the ville, which you can see has worked out double-well.”
“But she’s not the baron?” Mildred asked.
Husband and wife looked at each other. “Never felt much call for one of those,” Wilson said, “lording it over us and all.”
“Dark Lady is what you might call a leading light of the community,” Kris said. “People just naturally go to her for advice on help on all manner of things. She gives it if she can. And she’s right at least a bit more often than she’s not, which isn’t a bad record.”
“She sounds too good to be true,” Mildred said. “Things like that have a bad way of turning out not to
be
true. Or good.”
Kris shrugged. “We’re not much given to borrowing trouble here. All we can go by is what we see. And now if you’ll excuse the two of us, I have to get to pestering this lazy man of mine into making something useful of himself.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Dark Lady’s a witch,” the kid said in a confiding yet confident tone.
“Oh, she is, is she,” Mildred said.
“Uh-huh.”
“So you’re scared of her?”
He was a slat-skinny boy of about ten, with a mop of muddy blond hair, freckles, a red shirt and blue canvas pants. He squatted, peering intently into one end of a stack of weathered wood poles, four inches thick and ten feet long. Firewood evidently.
His right hand darted the long-hafted implement he held into a gap near the bottom of the pile. She heard a squeak, then frantic chittering.
He pulled out a large brown rat, impaled, writhing on the barbed tines of what she’d thought was a frogging gig.
“Sorry, little guy,” the boy—he’d said his name was Billy—told the rat. He laid the gaffe on the ground and crushed the animal’s skull with a decisive stomp of a boot heel. Then he pinned it and yanked out his two-pronged spear.
“Nope,” he said. “Why should I be scared of Dark Lady? She likes kids. Now, if you try to
hurt
one of us kids, then she gets stone scary.”
“Um,” Mildred said. “Yeah. I’ve seen her do scary.”
A tiny triangular face sleekly furred in white and silver poked out of the pile of poles where Billy had gigged the rat. Beady black eyes stared at him from a black bandit mask.
“Good girl,” he told the ferret approvingly. “Go get me some more, Angelina. I hear ’em in there.”
The face vanished.
Picking the now-still rat carcass up by its tail, he tossed it onto a heap of a dozen or so others lying eight feet away from his stakeout. A brief shift in the slow noontime breeze told Mildred why: they were starting to get ripe in the warm sun.
“I get paid for bringing in so many tails,” he explained.
“I see. So why do you apologize to the rats when you chill them?”
He hunkered down again, leaning forward, then left and right and frowning as he tried to see into the spaces between the poles.
“Rats are actually intelligent and sociable,” he said. “Did you know they cry when they’re alone?”
“I don’t believe it.” Mildred didn’t want to believe it.
“True as glowing nuke death, ma’am, cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “See, Dark Lady had us kids raise us some rat pups. We kept ’em as pets until they died—they don’t live long. We found out when they were kept alone, without other rats or us for company, they’d whimper.”
“So, how can you bring yourself to chill them now?”
He shrugged. “Well, we got to, I guess. The ones we kept were our friends. These ones are our enemies. Same as human coldhearts. They take what we need, because they need it, too.”
He glanced up at her.
“They’re not really to blame, though. Not like coldhearts are. Rats got no choice. They want to live and raise their kids same as we do. If they got to do it by stealing our food, that’s what they do. But when they do that, they threaten our lives. So we get to fight back, and that’s just too bad for them.”
He speared another rat and finished it off with the same cold-blooded yet merciful efficiency.
“I wanna hurry and grow up and start chillin’ coldhearts,” he said. He looked at Mildred again. “Just like you and your friends do. Because when they hurt and rob and kill, they
do
mean it. They’re double worse than rats that way.”
His words chilled her. More than they should have. In her own time she’d known of children growing up in such close-to-the-bone situations—and not just with regard to rats. Or not just the four-legged kind. She’d
worked
with some of them, as an intern.
She realized he’d given her a clear snapshot of two seemingly contradictory sides of Dark Lady’s nature: compassionate and cold-blooded. Just like the way the boy finished off his prey.
“You say she’s a witch?” she said. “But you seem to like her.”
“She’s not a scary witch,” he said. “Not if you’re her friend. But how else can she know the things she knows, or do the things she does?”
Mildred had no ready answer.
“You know, she’s got a soft spot for muties,” he said, deftly spearing and dispatching yet another rat. “You know how she’s got a soft spot for that big two-head mutie who always talks to himself?”
“Yes,” Mildred said. “But he’s not a mutie. He’s—never mind. Go on.”
“Some folks say the reason why is, he’s her brother. My older sister Maggie says it’s because he’s her lover. But when she talks like that Mama always threatens to wash her mouth out with soap.”
“I should say so.”
“Anyway, she used to roll with that traveling freak show that just left town. Some people say mebbe she’s even a mutie herself. She sure comes down hard on anybody picking on ’em.”
“You know this for yourself? That she was with Madame Zaroza, I mean?”
He shrugged. “Well, that’s what people say. Some people whisper she’s got a dark secret, too.”
“What is it?”
He looked at her as if she were the triple stupe to trump all triple stupes.
“Well, if they knew that, it would hardly be a
secret,
now, would it?” he asked with abundant pre-adolescent scorn.
“Oh. I guess not.”
He turned back to his task.
“Some people do say it has to do with Baron Sand.”
“Baron Sand?”
“Yup.” He nodded, though his eyes never left the logs. Or the spaces in between. “They got history together of some kind, and that’s a fact. As to what—some folks say they’re sisters. Had a falling out over a lover picked one over the other. Some say the Dark Lady, some say Sand. Dunno how anybody’d pick the baron over Dark Lady though. She’s funny-looking.”
“That’s not nice,” Mildred said. “She has a very pretty face.”
“Well, she is funny. I mean, make-people-laugh funny. The kind of funny a body wants to be. I gotta give her that.”
He didn’t sound convinced anyone would pick the baron over the gaudy owner, though.
“Some other people even claim Dark Lady and Sand was lovers themselves.”
“Goodness gracious!” Mildred exclaimed, scandalized. “Was that your sister Maggie, again?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. But my aunt Blanche has been known to say it once, or more than once, when she’d had a little too much summer beer or Towse Lightning to drink of an evening. Mama always tells her to hush her mouth. I guess she can’t wash her mouth out with soap, being as they’re both adults and all.”
“I suppose not.”
“There’s even some as say Dark Lady and Sand are in cahoots,” he said.
“Cahoots?” Mildred asked. “To do what?”
“Never heard that part, rightly. Usually when they start talking that way they get quiet, then chase me off. Don’t put no stock in that, myself.”
“Who says that about her?”
He shot her a narrow-eyed suspicious look. “Why do you wanna know?”
“Forget I asked,” Mildred said. “I take it there are people in this ville who don’t care much for Dark Lady?”
“Some,” he admitted.
“I really don’t believe it, though,” she said. “I think you’re making that up.”
“Am not! Are too! There’s Sarah Walker. And the Mormons—they don’t live here rightly. And there’s Mr. Sinclair. He runs the wag yard and he’s almost as important as she is.”
“Is he indeed?” Mildred said.
“Billy!” a woman’s voice cried from around the corner of the building. “Billy Cohen, you come right now!”
“But, Ma!” he called back. “My tails!”
“You leave those nasty things for now. I need you right this moment.”
He made a clucking sound. Angelina poked her pointy, piquant face out, higher up than she had before. He scrabbled a couple fingers on the ground. She jumped down. He gathered her up and, standing, poured her inside his shirt.
“You won’t take my rats, will you, ma’am?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“They’re pretty tasty when they don’t get too high in the sun,” he said. “Hope the cats don’t—”
“Billy!”
“Yes, Ma!” Clutching his ferret against his belly, he raced away out of sight.
* * *
“S
O
YOU
WANT
to know about Dark Lady?” asked the man who sat in a small office with his boots on the desk.
She sat across the paper-piled desk from him. Inside was dusty and dim, and smelled of sweat and tobacco smoke from his cigar. Outside, the Sinclair and Sons Wag Yard creaked and whinnied and clattered and shouted with activity.
He took a last drag on his cigar and stubbed it on a copper tray on his desk.
“Some might call it a mite strange for the hired help to be taking a poll about their boss.”
“I reckon, if we put our butts on the line for a person, it behooves us to know as much as possible about that person,” she said.
Even she had long since started to wonder why she was dragging this out like a murder investigation. It wasn’t as if she’d insisted before that everyone they took a job from had to be a Mother Teresa. She had stayed in plenty of gaudies before and had encountered many gaudy owners. For some reason Dark Lady just rubbed Mildred the wrong way.
Now she wondered why, aside from her innate bulldog perseverance, she insisted on taking things so far. She was starting to wonder if it was a reaction to the frequent sense of powerlessness that gripped her since she awakened from the cryosleep.
Sinclair was frowning at her speculatively. He was a man of early middle age, still mostly lean and lank in a tan vest, matching trousers and a white shirt. He had a red mustache, and receding red hair cut short. His eyes were green in a face lined and weathered like his boots.
He looked just like a character in a cowboy movie from Mildred’s childhood. Except for the matte-silver Beretta M-92 holstered at his left hip.
“All right,” he said. “Reckon that’s fair.”
He swung his boots down, scooted his secretary’s chair closer to the desk, and dropped his elbows on the scarred hardwood surface.
“What is it you care to know about her, Ms. Wyeth?”
“I’ve heard you don’t like her,” she said, feeling even less inclined toward tact than usual. “Pretty unusual stance, given that the rest of the ville seems to think she spends her spare time walking on water.”
By the brief lowering of his brows she wasn’t sure he got the reference.
“Dark Lady doesn’t go far out of her way to
be
likable,” he said. “She’s not the sort to suffer fools gladly. And she regards those who don’t share her vision of what’s best for Amity Springs as fools.”
He sat back. “Since I and certain of my associates most emphatically do not share the vision—well, you can draw your own conclusions.”
“So you don’t like her.”
He shook his head as if he were trying to clear water from his ears.
“Like, dislike—that’s of no consequence. The important thing is, anybody who doesn’t respect Dark Lady is a stone stupe. I honestly don’t know of a person in this ville who fails to respect her, or to acknowledge the power of good she’s done the community.”
“Okay,” Mildred said. “So, is she the baron, or what?”
“No. We have no baron.” He shook his head. “Better by far if we did. I hope the people of the ville awaken to the fact that it’s long past time for us to grow up and accept that we need proper governance.”
“So, how exactly is Dark Lady preventing you from doing what you want to, then?”
“Moral suasion. People listen to her. Enough, frankly, that if we openly defied her wishes we would face ostracism at best. Business would drop.”
“I thought you said she didn’t go out of her way to be likable.”
“Ah, but being
likable
and being
charismatic
turn out to be entirely different things.” He tipped his head briefly to one side. “That and the fact she does have a habit of being right tend to tip the balance of opinion consistently in her favor. For now.”
“What’s your beef with her, then, exactly? What’s she
not
right about?”
“I and several other substantial members of the community feel Dark Lady’s desire to keep a low profile is not serving our interests in the long run,” he said. “It’s not protecting us. It’s actively dangerous. By spurning the opportunity to grow the ville’s resources as hard and fast as we have the opportunity to, she’s putting us all at greater risk in the future.”
“Harder and faster how?”
“By selling as much scavvy as we can dig up as fast as we can dig it up,” he said as if that were the most self-evident thing there was.
Maybe he doesn’t exactly understand the risks of flooding the market,
she thought.
But I
damn
sure didn’t come here to discuss economics with this dude
.
“And in the process casting off this pretense of poverty and weakness,” he said. “It’s growing threadbare anyway. Rather we should acknowledge our wealth, and use it to build up our strength. Rather than hunkering down and hoping stonehearts won’t notice we have anything here worth stealing.”
“I take it the whole idea is to fly under the coldhearts’ radar, by making the ville look a lot poorer than it is.”
“Yeah. And that’s already breaking down. This Diego and his Crazy Dogs know well what kind of value Amity Springs has to offer. They’ve started in threatening the drivers of wags coming from the east again. I’ve been hearing about it all day as they roll in.”
That makes our services more valuable to Dark Lady in terms of taking the bastards down, then, Mildred thought. Is that rotten cynical? Well, tough, I guess. I long ago decided to do what it took to survive in this brave new world. If I want to live, I have to live with
that
.
But she said nothing.
“Even if we manage to deal with this bunch, others will come after,” the wag yard owner said. “What Diego’s figured out, others will, as well. They’ll come against us in a force greater than we can handle, all too soon. Unless we start making the proper preparations now.”
“Such as?”
He leaned forward intently. “Such as establishing proper central authority, for starters, and then letting go of all this silliness about wasting resources to make our ville look shabby. Focus on making it
strong
. And appear strong, as well.”