He didn’t think anything of mentioning the fact, nor did Louie show any sign of thinking anything of the fact that he did. That was life in the Deathlands.
“You won’t get a better deal or cleaner bedding anywhere else in E-ville,” Louie said. “That’s straight-up. I don’t take home extra whether you den here or go sleep in some bushes. And, uh, it looks as if the management has taken to looking upon you with a kind eye.”
“Is that what they call it here?” Krysty asked with a twinkle in her eye. Little pink spots actually appeared high up on the man’s gray and sagging cheeks as he turned away.
Ryan looked over to where Doc and Madame Sallée were, to all appearances, joined at the hip. The proprietress was a bit generous in that department, but notwithstanding that, nor even the mileage the thick face paint couldn’t hide, she was a fairly handsome woman. Any scavvie or boatman or caravaneer who forked over his crib fee would count himself lucky to draw a gaudy slut who looked half so good. Or smelled half as clean.
“Doc?” he said, pitching his voice to be heard over the card game, where a vociferous dispute had broken out over who was a greater donkey, the man who raised with seven-deuce off or the man who folded to such a weak-ass bluff.
From a back room three tall, thin, middle-aged black men filed in. Like Louie they wore ruffled white shirts, black trousers and scarlet cummerbunds. An upright piano, blond wood-stained and battered and sporting a bullet hole visible from where Ryan leaned against the bar,
stood against the wall. A battered but shiny saxophone and a stand-up bass in decent shape leaned in racks next to it. One man sat down at the piano. His partners picked up the other instruments and started doing musician-looking things to them.
Madame Sallée sank long fingernails painted the color of fresh blood into the lapel of Doc’s frock coat in a highly proprietary manner.
“You people got yourselves a cut rate on our finest room,” she said, “if you’ll just be sweethearts and not rush Doc off. The band’s good. I want him to hear them.”
That wasn’t all she wanted from him, Ryan thought. He held back a grin.
“He’ll be fine here,” Krysty said. “Won’t he, Ryan?”
“Reckon he won’t get into too much trouble.”
“Reckon he will,” Mildred stage-whispered behind his back, and snickered. As fatigued as she was, a single beer seemed to be having a disproportionate effect on her. Not that she was a big-time lush to start with.
With a languid gesture of red-nailed finger Sallée summoned a pot boy of about eight, dressed the same as the other male employees and with his round face scrubbed and his straight brown hair parted neatly in the middle, and told the solemn-faced child to lead their guests to their accommodations.
“What happen to ‘we aren’t splittin’ up’?” Jak asked in disgust.
“If I got to spell it out for you,” Ryan said, “Doc got lucky. Which, you got to admit, doesn’t happen often.”
“Come along, Jak,” Krysty said. “You’d want us to do the same for you.”
Mildred sniggered again at the look on the teen’s paper-white face.
“Oh. Almost forgot.” Ryan turned back to the bar and
signaled the bartender. Louie finished filling a tray full of mugs for a serving girl. The bartender came over.
Ryan pushed across a single bullet. “One more thing. We’re going to need a boat.”
Lying on his belly in brush damp with the dew of recent dawn, Ryan held the navy spyglass to his good eye. A young woman stood naked in an open section of wall, three stories above a gravel yard dotted with a few dandelions just opening yellow heads to the daylight. As Ryan watched, she ran her hands back through her kinky black hair. She appeared to be gazing off across the river, possibly at her lost homeland.
He heard the slightest rustle of sound and turned to see Krysty elbowing up beside him. They hid in the dense undergrowth of a hardwood forest, not a hundred yards from the river, at the verge of a wide cleared space that, they knew, surrounded the long-dead factory on all sides.
“Borrow?” she asked.
Wordlessly he handed the glass over. As she focused it he carefully scanned their surroundings, looking for details they might have missed. Or possible threats.
The friends had traveled here in the boat they purchased in Eastleville for the rather exorbitant price of the Mini-14 Krysty had recovered from McKinnick plus its banana magazine. She’d mostly exhausted the .223-caliber ammo while fighting off the stickies anyway. The craft, a simple twenty-foot-long whale boat with a little two-stroke alcohol-fueled mill, lay hidden on the riverbank among thick thorny wild blackberry bushes covered in pink and white flowers.
The past two days they had spent skulking in the nearby woods and scoping out the gutted factory building that was Dan E.’s headquarters. They had been all around the perimeter, spending hours split into teams observing the stronghold from various angles. They even shadowed work parties as they tramped toward the woods to their current scavenging grounds amid a big development of long-empty tract homes roughly a mile to the northwest. They slept under makeshift tents, moving their campsite every night to reduce the odds of a bad-luck discovery.
For all the seeming wildness of its woods, marsh and grassland, this particular stretch of country was either occupied or traversed enough by relatively settled humans that many of the Deathlands’ more alarming denizens had been hunted back. The unexpected appearance of whoever had fought the stickies on the east side of the bridge a mile or so south was yet another reminder nothing could be taken for granted.
“Pretty,” Krysty said, studying the girl. “I can see why you don’t mind this part of the surveillance.”
He grunted a brief laugh. “She does love her routine.”
“We have enough information now to move on?”
“Mebbe so,” he said. “Longer we stay out here, worse we’re asking for something to go south on us. And I’m itching to get back and check on J.B.”
She made a distressed sound. Glancing at her, he saw her lips pressed together.
“I don’t like this, lover,” she said in a low voice. “Not any part of it. From everything we’ve learned, girl’s smart, tough and resourceful. And that she has triple-good reason not to want to go back. The fact she’s so pretty doesn’t make it any easier to think of…that happening to her.”
“The little girl who got given up to the screamwings didn’t have it coming, either.”
“No, but we couldn’t do anything to help her. This one…” She shrugged.
“I’m not leaving J.B.,” he said. “You don’t want to, either.”
“No, I don’t. I won’t. But you also know if we go back, even if we bring the princess, Brother Joseph and his creepy acolytes will never let us leave alive.”
“That’s true,” he said, wiping sweat from his face. It was a beautiful morning, with birds singing and flowers blooming and the air thick with the smell of moist green growing things, as if the big nuke and skydark never happened. But it still got nuke-red hot in a hell of a hurry here, a long spit from the great river.
“But like a man said in a book I read as a kid, it’s also irrelevant. We made a deal. We take this girl back, and we leave with J.B., regardless of whether they want us to or not.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“You know better. Know
me
better.”
“But Jak even managed to sneak inside the scavvie stronghold last night. Surely he can find us a secret way into Soulardville, so we don’t have to carry out this…this horrible bargain!”
“But we do, like it or not,” Ryan said. “That’s the part everybody always keeps forgetting. We made the deal. We honor the deal. Like or dislike don’t come into it. Now, let’s get back with the others and calculate what comes next.”
“T
HEY WOULD APPEAR
to have created a formidable defensive system,” Doc said.
He sat beneath a tree in his baggy boxers, his bony white knees drawn up, wearing a sort of hat he’d contrived out of leaves against the heat. He had spent the past three
days painstakingly creepy-crawling at the edge of the two-hundred-yard cleared zone, making detailed sketches of the former factory, its defenses and what he could observe of the structure’s interior and movements of its occupants inside. It was considerably facilitated by the fact that much of the outer walls were simply gone. There wasn’t much by way of internal partitioning left, either, although the scavvies liked to define their own personal spaces with movable screens or hanging curtains. Apparently they liked being able to catch such breezes as stirred the hot, humidity-heavy river-valley air.
How they liked it during winter’s snow and hard-driven sleet was, to Ryan’s mind, a different question entirely. Krysty suggested either they migrated somewhere a little more airtight when the weather started getting serious cold, or they’d only set up shop here earlier this spring.
“They have people on watch for twenty-four hours of every day,” Doc said, sounding like a teacher lecturing his pupils. “By night guards patrol the roof, in pairs, which are spelled every two hours. They enjoy a clear field of fire in all directions, with sandbagged hard-points spaced throughout the open area in the walls to protect rifle-men. They set out long strings hung with bells or cans with rocks in them, in different locations each night, both inside the structure and in the cleared zone surrounding the building, to provide warning if intruders approach. When they travel to and from their work site, they take a different route through the woods each time. They do not appear overly comfortable in the woods, and they do seem to stick to the same few trails in what appears random rotation.”
Any well-educated man of Doc’s time, it turned out, had been trained to draw accurately and well. He’d covered many pages of one of the notebooks Mildred was
forever scavenging—and scribbling in—with his diagrams and sketches and notes. These were strewn out among the companions in a little clearing in the brush a quarter mile south of the abandoned factory. If there’d been people in this spot in the past hundred years they saw no sign of it.
“They primarily appear to expect either wholesale assault, or attempts to purloin their salvaged goods by stealth. For those reasons they occupy the ground and third floors. The second is where they keep the fruits of their labors. They have numerous locked strongboxes for the most valuable items.”
“Which don’t concern us,” Ryan said.
Doc nodded. “Quite so. The fourth floor is mostly vacant, although they store less valuable items up there. The ground floor is rather heavily fortified, with sandbag emplacements, makeshift ramparts of brick and concrete and coils of the ubiquitous razor wire.”
He looked grandly around. He seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.
“In sum, my friends, they would appear to be a most difficult nut to crack.”
“But they sloppy,” Jak commented, crunching into a preserved carrot from Soulardville.
“Always happens,” Ryan said. It gave him a pang: it was just the sort of pithy and pertinent observation the few-spoken Armorer would pipe up to make. Ryan was pleased to have come up with it on his own, not that it was any earth-shattering revelation. He was good and knew it. And his other companions were triple-sharp, too.
He just wondered what his eye was missing that J.B.’s eyes wouldn’t.
“No matter how keen you are or think you are,” he said, “enough time without anybody making a serious play for
you, it all starts to get routine. You get bored, complacent. Your guard comes down.”
“Did that happen when you and J.B. were with the Trader?” Mildred asked.
Ryan chuckled. “Didn’t have enough downtime between people and muties making plays for us to ever get slack.”
“In this case I suspect this particular band’s rather formidable reputation works against them as well as for them,” Doc offered. “Coldhearts are less likely to attempt to avail themselves of the fruits of their labor by force because they know they will be competently and fiercely resisted. Because people seldom prove willing to take the risks, the scavvies are not kept as alert as your Trader’s caravan was.”
“Don’t think anybody ever accused Trader’s crew of being slack in the self-defense department,” Krysty said with a twinkle in her eye.
“Nope,” Ryan said. “Trader just had kind of a knack for pissing people off. Drew trouble like flies to shit, basically.”
“So we’ve talked out a plan, the last couple days,” Krysty said. “Do we run with it?”
“Seems complicated,” Jak said.
“Straightforward don’t seem likely to work with these people, does it?” Ryan asked. “Much less a cagey little critter like Emerald. Anyway, it’s as simple as I can see us making it.”
“Only question now is, will it work?” Mildred said.
Doc slapped his skinny thighs and laughed and laughed. Ryan feared the oldie was losing it again.
“Oh, it will work, my dear!” Doc exclaimed. “The real question is, at which point will it run off the rails?”
A
S SILENT AS THOUGHT
, Jak slid down the rope in blackness.
His long white hair was wrapped in a dark bandanna. His hands, neck, face and feet were carefully blackened with charcoal. His wolf-keen senses were stretched to their fullest.
He heard the sounds of human habitation. Far off, a hum of earnest conversation, indistinct, came from behind some kind of screen illuminated by low lantern-light, away at the far end of the factory’s third floor. Nearer, he heard snoring in several voices, echoing ever so slightly between the concrete floor and ceiling. And almost directly below came the rhythmic soft sound of a person of middle size sleeping. A young girl, by the sound.
Somewhere down on the ground floor a pair were having sex. They were trying to keep the noise down out of consideration to their fellows. Their success was indifferent. Jak suspected the others were accustomed to tuning out such sounds. Just like the snoring.
Their noise was unlikely to help him. From his own experience, and observing his companions, he guessed any out-of-place sound louder than a fart would bring scavvies instantly awake. With, it hardly needed saying, weapons in hand.
But he excelled at stealth. He’d been inside the dead factory by night before. Then, as this night, he had scaled the outer brick wall like a gecko, although that first time he hadn’t carried a coil of light, strong nylon rope about his narrow waist, as he did now. The climb itself wasn’t as triple-tough as his friends made it out to be, not much of a thing at all to the albino teen. The ancient walls still stood mostly strong and firm despite the wag-size holes yawning in them. But lots of mortar had fallen out from between bricks over decades of neglect and weather, not
to mention the odd earthquake and thermonuclear blast in the vicinity. He found plenty of grips for fingers and toes.
Double-easy. A breeze.
It was during the previous night, that first recce, when he’d found the hole in the floor of the fourth story that let down within a dozen feet of where Princess Emerald slept soundly on her pallet, hidden from the rest behind a scavenged silken screen.
The scavvies had a weakness. No surprise: every defense did. As smart and tough and resourceful as Dan E.’s crew was, there were too few of them to secure the whole structure completely. What they overlooked was what most people did: the possibility that somebody might try coming at them from above.
Well, that and one other thing. They did, after all, split their people both above and below their treasure storeroom. The thing they totally never reckoned on was that they might face intruders who didn’t give a spent brass for even their most precious salvage.
The rhythm of the girl’s breathing was interrupted. Jak froze. She produced a soft snort, a rustle and her regular breathing began again. Watching carefully in the starlight filtering in the open wall, he saw her turn over and settle back in.
He let out his own breath. Double-close, he thought, willing his heartbeat to settle down. Too close.
He slipped the rest of the way to the bottom of where a loop of rope he held on to hung and swung an inch above the bare concrete floor. The end was tied on his waist to keep it from dragging and possibly making noise. It poised a certain fouling danger, if you were clumsy. Jak was as graceful as a cat.
He set both bare feet flat on the floor simultaneously. They made no sound at all. Here, near the floor, the air
was thick with the smells of bodies, smoke, some kind of incense or herbs, as well as the dense, moist vegetation outside. Close up the strongest scent was girl sweat.
Princess Emerald slept naked. She was astonishingly beautiful lying there on her side with her head pillowed on her arm, the soft dark contours of her firm young body outlined by fugitive light from stars. Her privacy screen now masked the far lantern glow from Jak’s sight. Jak was a healthy young male; he felt himself getting hard inside his jeans.
Noiselessly he walked up behind the sleeping girl. As he did he wadded a handkerchief in the palm of his right hand. Kneeling carefully, he reached out and stuffed the balled cloth in her mouth, covering it with his hand. At the same time he slipped his left arm under her neck, then grabbed his own right wrist.
Instantly she tensed and tried to fight. Instead of her first instinct being to scream she tried to bite his hand. He admired her fighting spirit for that, but it wasn’t the best response from a survival standpoint. That would’ve been the scream, despite the makeshift gag.