“Follow me,” Ryan said. He turned abruptly right, ran to the rail and jumped.
“So whom do you suppose that was coming through the woods, my friends?” Doc asked. He stood in the brush that lined the shore, wringing out his frock coat. His sodden backpack lay against a gnarled tree root beside him.
Ryan hunkered by the softly sloshing water. He had his SIG-Sauer with the mag out and the slide open, blowing down the barrel to make sure it was clear of water.
Up on the bridge itself a tremendous fracas was going on. There were shrieks and chitters and the light of torches being waved furiously back and forth. Occasionally a body toppled over the rail on one side or the other to land in the sluggish Sippi with a resounding splash.
“Got no clue,” Ryan said. He held up the handblaster so that the torchlight from the bridge shone through it. The bore was as dry as could be expected. He nodded, picked up the magazine, jammed it in the well and let the slide drive home.
“Wasn’t it a little unfriendly to let strangers blunder blithely into a pack of ravening stickies?” Mildred ask.
“Mebbe more enemies,” Jak remarked. He stood with his backpack on and arms crossed. He divided his attention between the bridge and the woods behind them.
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “And maybe they weren’t.”
“Whoever it was,” Ryan said, snagging the strap of his pack and standing up with it, “wouldn’t you rather it
was them who run into the stickies than have the mutie bastards still chasing us?”
“Since you put it that way,” Doc said, “I do believe, better them than us.”
Mildred shook her head. “Ryan, you are one cold article.”
“You just getting around to noticing?” Krysty said with a smile.
“Anything in the woods, Jak?” Ryan asked.
The albino teen shook his head.
“All right. Take point. Mildred, left flank, Krysty, right. Doc, behind Jak. I’m pulling drag again. Head us straight into the woods mebbe thirty yards. We don’t cut trail, cut right and we’ll follow the river along through the brush.”
“Where’re we going?” Krysty asked.
“Lover,” Ryan said, “we’re going to
town.
”
W
ELKOME TO
E
AST
V
ILLE
read the sign painted on a jagged-edged sheet of plywood and nailed twelve feet up an old wooden telephone pole, the words visible by the red light of a fire guttering in an ancient oil drum that was more holes than rusty steel.
Beyond it stood, or perhaps
slumped
was a better word, a good old-fashioned Deathlands pesthole. While it looked as if it were possibly built on a core of at least partially intact predark building, cinder block or prefab, it was mostly knocked together from tin sheets, planks and plywood scrap, and several tens of thousands of cans hammered out flat and tacked together.
They had come upon the remnants of a road that ran inland paralleling the shore. It lay close to an old rail causeway, whose embankment was evidently the only thing that kept the Sippi from washing out the buckled
asphalt strip, or burying it in silt. The waters now came up right to the base of the railroad.
By the light of a rising moon the travelers followed a path cleared through a mostly fallen-down highway bridge. A few hundred yards south of that the road cut inland. It then turned south again to cross the ramp leading down from the combined railway-and-highway structure Mildred identified on the far side as the MacArthur Bridge, and continued south to the lights of what proved to be the booming metropolis of Eastleville. Population several hundred at least, or so Ryan judged.
The ville occupied a dirt crossroads in the midst of deep forest interrupted by sudden tall tangles of old tanks and pipes and other artifacts of once-major industrial activity. One road led a short ways west to the docks, a makeshift affair of scavenged blocks of concrete and platforms of warped planks. A couple of decent-size watercraft were tied up there, as well as a number of others all the way down to rowboats bobbing in the lights of lanterns suspended from poles on the dock.
The smells of burning kerosene, fish oil and rancid cooking grease emanated from the ville, as well as various shades of yellow and orange light, competing strains of music played on violin, slightly out-of-tune piano, guitar, flute, saxophone and enthusiastic banging of spoons on galvanized iron pans. The friends heard the blare of loud conversation and braying laughter.
Whatever it was by day, it seemed the postnuke river-town gave itself over by night to drinking and debauchery of the most enthusiastic sort.
“I almost feel like I’m coming home,” Ryan said, stretching his arms wide and arching his back. His shoulders and upper back ached from hiking—and running—
long distances humping the heavy pack. Plus the weight of his longblaster.
“I thought you had a more genteel upbringing,” Mildred said.
He shrugged. “That was way back there. Seems like I really grew up in places just like this.”
“Depending on one’s definition of growing up,” Krysty said.
They walked into the town. They were immediately hailed by barkers shouting the virtues of the establishments they fronted. With the ease of long practice they ignored them.
Jak stopped and pointed. “Looks interesting,” he said.
It was a false-front two-story shack, not too sturdy-looking, whose front was ablaze with the lights of lanterns and candles. Painted grandly across the facade was the legend Hotest Gaudy Sluts Eest Of The Sippi!
“That’s a pretty major boast,” Mildred said, “given that we’re all of what? Maybe two hundred
feet
east of the Sippi.”
Doc whipped his cane under his armpit and straightened like an old-time gentleman out for a promenade on the town. “Come, lad,” he said to Jak. “One thing this prematurely aged cavalier can assure you of—when an establishment feels it necessary to assure you of such a thing, it is most certainly lying!”
“But mebbe true!”
Being careful of the sharp bits sewn to his shirt—some of which had their glitter diminished in the garish light by a rust-colored matte coating of dried blood—Krysty grabbed the albino youth by the sleeve and towed him down the dirt street.
“Well, we aren’t going to find out now,” she said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “We aren’t splitting up.”
“S
O,”
R
YAN SAID
, leaning an elbow on the bar, “did you see a lone young black woman out of St. Lou come through here, week or two back? Or hear tell of such?”
The bartender was a tall, cadaverous party with a sort of long hound-dog face and long sideburns. He stood behind the plank-and-barrel bar rubbing dirt around in a mug with a gray bar rag.
“Lotta people come through Eastleville, friend,” the bartender said laconically. “Don’t all come through the Platinum Club.”
“Oh, Louie,” said the rather blowsy woman with the white-painted cheeks and the stiff bleached hair wound into an unlikely confection atop her head and whose bountiful bosom threatened to spill out of her low, tight, black bodice at any breath. She sat on a stool down the bar smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. Doc stood next to her, looking surprisingly debonair. They seemed to be paying a lot of attention to each other.
“Don’t go fishing for bribes like that,” the woman said. “Can’t you see these people’re quality?” She twined her arm around Doc’s. “Especially Doc, here.”
“But Madam Sally,” the tall barkeep whined, “a man’s got to eat. Not that you don’t pay a decent wage.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” the woman snapped. “It’s Madame Sallée.”
“I’m sorry, Mad-Dam. It’s just—I don’t rightly know how to pronounce it.”
She turned to Doc, sighing smoke through her nose. “These barbarians!
Ils n’ont aucune idée de la façon parler correctement
.”
“Quel dommage.”
She shivered and laid her head against Doc’s shoul
der. “Ah, Doc! You certainly know how to melt a lady’s heart.”
“A man of the world acquires certain modest skills—I beg your pardon, Jak? Are you quite well?”
Jak had snorted his beer through his nose. Mildred started to pound him on the back, then thought better of it.
“He’ll live,” Ryan said. “So. Black girl. ’Bout the height of Mildred here. Young, sharp-looking, big tits, green eyes.”
“Hoity-toity type from one of those snooty villes across the water,” Madame Sallée said with a sneer. “Won’t have a dock themselves for fear we’ll corrupt their precious peasants with our worldly ways. Oh, well, so much more business for us.”
Krysty winced as memories returned like unwelcome house guests. “You know, Ryan,” she said, “thinking about it, I can see why you prefer it here, too.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Now, if we could stick to the subject. Please, somebody?”
Doc lowered his head to murmur something in Madame Sallée’s ear. She laughed and tapped him lightly on the chest with her folded fan.
“Of course I’ll forgive your friend’s rough manners,” she said. “He’s obviously a rough-hewn adventurer type. Probably been all over these Deathlands. Could be a real heartbreaker to a woman who went in for the brutal type.”
Mildred and Krysty turned and looked at each other, then started to laugh.
“In answer to your question, tall, dark and dangerous,” the saloon proprietress said, “she was through here. Through Eastleville, anyway. She did not see fit to grace the Platinum Club with her custom. I chanced to encounter
her one morning ten or eleven days ago, in Tank’s Rusty Nail trading post down by the waterfront. She was inquiring about reputable scavenger outfits in the area. As if that ain’t a contradiction in terms!” And she laughed through her charmingly
retroussé
nose.
“Wait,” Jak said. “Why ‘Platinum Club’? What platinum? Don’t see no platinum nowhere.”
“It is an honored name in these parts,” the madam said, “with a rich tradition.”
“Oh.”
She fluffed her hair with her fingers. A couple strands snapped like dry straws. “You may take it as referring to my coiffure, if you wish,” she said, then tittered.
She put her bleached head together with Doc in conversation that pointedly excluded the others.
“Thick as thieves, those two,” Ryan remarked.
“Do my eyes deceive me,” Mildred said over her beer, “or has our good Doctor Tanner made himself a conquest?”
Louie sidled down the bar. There wasn’t a lot of custom at the moment, but a rowdy card game in the corner made it hard to hear more than a couple feet away.
“Not to contract the madam,” the barkeep muttered, “but actually, there is a scavvie outfit working the area that got itself a pretty good rep.”
Ryan cocked an eyebrow. “Truth to tell, I thought it was a contradiction in terms myself.”
“Not always,” Louie said, shaking his head. “This Daniel E. dude who runs the bunch seems like a pretty straight shooter. Drives a hard bargain, gives honest value. And nobody’s ever bought anything off him that the rightful owner turned up looking for afterward.”
“Mebbe just chills ’em,” Jak said.
“You’re young, boy,” Louie said. “Otherwise you’d know word like that tends to get around.”
The albino teen bristled. Ryan laid a hand on his arm. “Easy, Jak.”
He turned his eye to the bartender. “Not a good call on the kid. He’s been around the boneyard more than most men twice his age. The other thing though, about the rep—that’s ace in the line. So, any idea where we can find this Dan E.?”
Louie’s eyes, which already seemed to be mostly just slits in the seamed mass of his face, actually managed to get narrower. “Why you want to know?”
“We don’t mean harm to him,” Krysty said.
“We got no beef with anybody concerned,” Ryan added. “Just want to find him.”
“He don’t seem like the sort who’s eager to be found. Likes his privacy, know what I mean?”
Ryan slid a hand across the bar. Five 9 mm rounds stuck out just beyond his fingertips. “Like you said,” Ryan said, “time’s tough and a man’s got to eat. This is live brass, and not reloads.”
Louie moistened his lips with a gray tongue. “No comebacks.”
Jak cawed laughter. Fortunately that wasn’t uncommon enough to draw eyes. Except a single-barreled blue glare from Ryan.
“Who’d know?” Jak asked. “Ville like Eastleville full people eager sell skinny.”
“He’s right,” Ryan said, turning back to the barkeep. “So why not take what’s on the table now? Or would you rather we start taking bids?”
“North,” Louie said. His eyes, or so it seemed to Ryan from the way the wrinkled lids shifted, cut toward his em
ployer, who at the moment was having her hand kissed by Doc. Ryan raised a brow.
“His outfit bases out of a place up north. Three, mebbe four miles. Abandoned factory, I heard some of his people say. Big old brick thing not far from the river, woods all around.”
“So he’s scavenging there?” Mildred asked. “Say, this beer isn’t bad.”
“Comes from Breweryville,” Ryan said. “Couldn’t you tell?”
“Right about the beer,” Louie said. “Not about the salvage. Nothing there but floors and a few walls. Legends say it was abandoned years before the megacull. Old Dan, he likes it ’cause it’s triple-easy to defend. Does his salvage work in other old industrial areas. Or just heads inland a bit. There’s tens of thousands of houses there, many of them still untouched. Same as down here.”
“So why don’t you live and work in those houses, instead of out of a bunch of thrown-together shacks like Eastleville?” Mildred asked.
“Lotta people think the old burbs’re haunted. Rad dust, they
are
—same as over the Sippi. Not all the scavvies workin’ them are near as ethical as Daniel E. Cannies like to lair there. And worse things.”
“I hear you,” Ryan said.
The bartender hunched up a stooped shoulder. “Anyhow, I reckon the real reason is, here’s where the docks are. Lot shorter distance to walk to work or trade. Even if a quake does shake your own roof down on your head, ain’t as if it’s very substantial.”
“Got it.” Ryan opened his hand to the right. Louie made the stacked ammo disappear with a speedy efficiency that impressed even Ryan.
“So,” he said to his companions, tipping up his glass
mug and draining the last drops and bits of foam. “We better see if someplace can rent us a room tonight. We’ve got weapons to clean and make sure they’re full dry before we sack out.”