“People of Soulardville!” Brother Joseph shouted in his brassiest voice. “Hear me! Traitors and blasphemers are trying to abduct your prophet! They would leave you defenseless before the wrath of King Screamwing! Defenseless, I say.”
“If you wanted to reverse that scattergun and lay the butt upside his head to shut him up,” Garrison told J.B., “nobody here’d be much upset over the fact.”
He turned a scowl on the self-proclaimed prophet. “If you cost people around here any more sleep, Brother Joseph, they’re likely to get pretty cross with you. They gotta get up and go to work in the morning. Not like you’d know anything about that.”
“But you’re supposed to serve me!”
“I serve the power in the ville.”
“But I am the power! I’m the regent, with the baron dead.”
Garrison shook his head. “The rightful baron is back,” he said. “And it appears she has the support she needs to make her claim to the ville stick. So I’m her man.”
“What about the shooting we heard?” Krysty asked. “Your men weren’t involved?”
Garrison shrugged. “Mostly Emerald’s loyalists mopping up Brother Joseph’s diehards, I reckon.”
“Shouldn’t you have been defending me, as power in the ville?” Brother Joseph demanded, outrage momentarily overpowering his common sense.
“I had no dog in this hunt. Now the power seems to have been effectively transferred, doesn’t it?”
“But this is ridiculous! I command you—”
“Looks to me like you don’t even command the direction of your own footsteps,” Garrison said. “A Savij rules
Soulardville. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Not much need to keep you around anymore, now, is there?”
“You’re just going to let us walk out of here?” Ryan asked, thunderstruck.
Garrison turned away. “Open the gate,” he ordered.
Sec men raced out to obey. The metal wheels squealed in the metal track as they forced the heavy-weighted wag attached to the gate out of the way.
“Got no orders from Baron Savij to hold you,” the sec boss said. He turned to the companions. “Gentlemen, ladies. Have yourselves a fine evening. And if you really intend to take this prick along with you, you might want to do something to quiet him down. That kinda racket draws stickies.”
“Do we have to walk right down the middle of the street?” Brother Joseph asked plaintively as they marched at a double-fast pace north along the street that led in front of Soulardville. He carried himself with immense dignity despite the fact that his wrists were still tied and he still had an outsized bandage wound around his head. The companions had cut away the rope that hobbled him.
The moon was mounting up the eastern sky. It cast eerie blocky shadows of the mostly flooded buildings to the right, and the stands of trees and dense brush that had sprung up between.
“Yep,” J.B. said. “Need to move fast if we’re going to have any chance of saving Jak. So speed’ll have to be our best defense. This gives us the clearest road. Also it means the bad things have a ways to go to get at us any way they try it from.”
The five companions were spread out in a diamond pattern: Ryan leading, J.B. winged out right, Doc on the left, Krysty bringing up the rear and Mildred in the center, guarding their captive and holding his lead. Except for Mildred, who kept her attention fixed on Brother Joseph, the companions constantly swiveled their heads, looking for signs of ambush.
The night was hot and thick and full of sounds. None of them were out of place for the gutted-out St. Lou, so far
as Ryan’s keen ears could tell. Then again, some of those were pretty alarming.
“Why do you need me, anyway?” the guru asked.
“You’re going to help set right what you did wrong,” Ryan said. “I told you—help us get Jak back.”
Brother Joseph shook his head, laughing in disbelief. “You know he’s meat, now, don’t you?”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said grimly. “Then we’ll find his remains and make sure. We don’t break a deal, and we don’t leave anybody behind.”
He nodded at J.B. “For good, anyway.”
Brother Joseph shook his head. “Admirable in a way. But folly.”
“You’re not going to talk us out of it that way,” Mildred said.
“Very well,” the preacher said. “You say you take deals seriously. Your behavior tends to back that up, I must admit. So I propose a deal to you—I help you recover your friend. I do not attempt to escape, or to hinder or harm you in any way. And at the end, when we find the young man, you let me go.”
“Why would we ever trust you?” Mildred demanded.
“That’s problematic, I admit.”
“How’s this,” Ryan said. “You try to screw us around, we shoot you in the leg and leave you bleeding for the stickies and cannies to fight over?”
“Not especially appealing.”
“We could do that now, save us the hassle and him the suspense,” Mildred pointed out.
“You’re pretty bloodthirsty for a healer,” Joseph said aggrievedly.
“You’re pretty sneaky, sociopathic and sadistic for a holy man,” she said. “It evens out.”
“You’ve definitely gotten on Mildred’s bad side,” Krysty said. It didn’t sound as if she was much fonder of him.
“Believe me,” Ryan said, “no matter how hot and heavy we get caught in it, you try something, one of us’ll see. So realize that making the deal and then breaking it is going to be your worst-case scenario.”
“Are you quite sure you want to do this, Ryan?” Doc asked.
“Yeah. I am. Bro Joe here has an eye for the main chance. He knows I mean what I say, from one end to the other. He knows we’ll carry out everything we told him we would. So he’ll go along with us because that’s the path of least resistance. Plus, he may be a survivor, but even if he could get away from us, he’s not going to be in love with his chances wandering around outside the wire at night alone. He’s way safer sticking tight to us. And way safer if we all stay alive to buffer him from all the nocturnal nasties.”
“This is true,” Brother Joseph said.
“What do we get out of it, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“Another set of eyes turned outward, where the triple-bad things are,” Ryan said. “You don’t have to hang on to the rope like you’re walking a dog in the middle of a well-run ville.”
“I think we might as well go along with this, Mildred,” Krysty said. “Also the walking’s going to start getting tough when we hit the fallen-in underpasses, and then the serious rubble downtown. We don’t want to be dragging him then.”
“Well…what do you think, Doc?”
“I think that brillig were the slithy toves,” Doc said cheerily, “to say nothing of the mome raths.”
“‘Jabberwocky’?” Mildred said. “Jesus, you barmy old fart.”
“Focus for us, Doc,” J.B. suggested.
“What? Oh, to be sure, John Barrymore. To be sure. I—I shall most certainly go along with what the majority decide.”
“Sorry I asked. J.B.?”
“Believe me,” Brother Joseph interjected, “if you’re foolish enough to chase after your friend after he was carried away by a giant carnivorous flying mutant to its nest of ravening lesser horrors several hours ago, I truly and sincerely believe you’re…of a frame of mind to honor your word to let me go should we all survive this madman’s errand. And I assure you I have no desire to test my survival skills on either cannibals or mutants with adhesive fingers and an unseemly love of fire. So you’ve nothing to lose.”
Ignoring him, the Armorer looked to Mildred and shrugged. “Might as well. He isn’t liable to slip anything by us.”
“Plus you want to be free to keep a double-close eye on J.B., don’t you, Mildred?” Krysty asked softly.
Her shoulders slumped. “All right,” she said. “You win. It’s your funeral.”
Krysty snicked open her lockback folding knife. Stretching her long legs a little longer, she caught up to the guru from behind. With a quick twist she severed the rope that had replaced the silk scarf binding his wrists. Mildred looked down at the other end of the rope, then threw it on the road.
“Damn!” She snorted a laugh. “I still feel bad for littering.”
“What’s that?” Krysty asked.
“Irrelevant. Don’t worry about it.”
“You don’t get any weapons,” Ryan said.
“I want none,” Brother Joseph said grandly, massaging one wrist. “I am a man of peace.”
T
HEY PASSED
the garden area that marked the northeast corner of the Soulardville perimeter. Instantly everyone went to an even higher alert level. Even Brother Joseph, Ryan noticed, taking a quick check over his shoulder.
He was already beginning to wonder if he’d made a stupe mistake allowing the man to be cut free. He found that whenever his back was turned on the murderous man of faith he got a tingling sensation between his shoulder blades, as if they expected to have a knife planted between them. It was distracting.
But he put it from his mind and drove on. Blood wouldn’t go back into a body.
Before they’d gone two blocks past the Soulardville boundary, bright light flashed to Ryan’s left and he heard the distinctive hollow boom of Doc’s black-powder blaster. He looked back to see a dark figure lurching at them.
Mildred had stopped and extended her right arm, Olympic target-shooting style. She fired twice. The figure, still shadowy and indistinct, spun and fell down to disappear in knee-high weeds.
“Okay, ace,” Ryan said. “Keep it moving, now.”
“Right, Ryan,” Mildred called. She turned and began to trot along. As she did, he was pleased to see, she broke open her revolver to eject the two empty casings and reload the chamber with fresh rounds.
When the street ducked beneath a still-intact section of highway, Ryan had them sprint through, blasters at the ready. Nothing jumped at them in the darkness, but he wouldn’t slack the pace for half a block.
“Have mercy,” Brother Joseph puffed when they slowed
to a rapid walk. “I’m not as used to high-speed hiking as you are.”
“Mercy?” Mildred asked. “Like you showed Jak?”
She sighed. “Still, Ryan, he’s got a point. We’re not doing ourselves any good if we push so hard our muscles knot up or we just keel over from exhaustion. Nor Jak.”
What she really meant, Ryan thought, was that she was worried about pushing J.B. this hard with his half-healed thoracic wound. She just didn’t want to shame her man’s spiky pride by singling him out in weakness. On the other hand, she did make a valid point. They
were
beat to shit, and no mistake.
He made himself slow his pace. Not much, but perceptibly.
“Thank you, Ryan,” he heard Krysty say.
After they picked their way over the debris of the collapsed bridge, Ryan had them climb up onto the highway, which Mildred said she thought she remembered was Interstate 55.
“Did not Tully tell us these thoroughfares were dangerous?” Doc asked, when they had made it to the wide and largely intact roadway.
By unspoken but unanimous assent they had paused for a breather. Ryan knew it was risky up there in an exposed position. Then again, they’d see anything that came at them far in advance. Taking a quick but close survey of his companions, Ryan noticed that their unwilling guest seemed a little tenser than he had been. He also got the impression Brother Joseph wasn’t quite as winded as he made himself out to be.
Fair enough, he thought. The phony preacher didn’t owe them the whole truth, any more than they owed it to him.
“What’s going on over there in that big triple-squat sucker of a building?” J.B. asked, pointing northwest.
“That’s Busch Stadium,” Mildred said. “It’s just a night ga—Oh.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. An orange glow wavered in the thick air above the stadium. He could see little glows through the sides, too, as well as flickering little lights that were probably torches, moving around the ramp that wound its way up the sides of the structure.
“You know, it almost sounds as if there
is
a game going on,” Mildred said.
Even though they were a good third of a mile away Ryan could hear a roar from the stadium, as though of a cheering crowd.
“Must be a couple hundred in there to raise that kind of noise,” J.B. said, coming up to stand at his friend’s side. It felt comfortable having him there again.
“Who might it be in such a multitude?” Doc asked.
“Nobody good,” Krysty said.
“Still feel so confident about risking the downtown ruins by night?” Brother Joseph asked.
“Never felt confident at all,” Ryan said. “Confidence’s got nothing to do with what’s got to be done.”
“An admirably simple philosophy,” Joseph said, “if perhaps unrealistic.”
Ryan frowned at him.
“Who’s in that stadium, Brother Joseph?” Krysty asked quickly.
“Why would I know?”
“Don’t piss down our legs and say it’s raining, Bro Joe,” J.B. said. “You were Baron Savij’s main man. You must have had access to all the info about what was going on in the area. And don’t even try to tell us a man like Garrison wouldn’t have spies out. Listening to the scavvies in the market, that kind of thing.”
“Plus we know Soulardville patrols the downtown area,” Krysty added.
Brother Joseph shrugged. “Please believe me when I tell you our best information was limited. Our patrols seldom venture past the stadium. They tend not to come back. The same for any scouts and spies dispatched by Garrison. The bulk of the information we receive about what goes on comes from gossip by scavvies come to trade, both in Soulard and Breweryville.”
“So you got spies inside B-ville?” Ryan said.
“Yes. And they have spies in Soulard. Neither side makes much effort to root them out. We’re at peace. And anyway, if we eliminated each other’s spies that we knew about, each side would just send more who’d hide better.”
“Talk on the move,” Ryan said. “Not triple-healthy here in the open. Plus we got a clock.”
“There were rumors,” Brother Joseph said as they pressed north along the broad highway. It was as if the rubblescape to either side of them was a different world, somehow. Ryan felt disconnected from it all.
He knew that was an illusion, a potentially deadly one.
“The scavvies spoke of some kind of strange cult among the cannies, certain less scrupulous scavvie gangs, other survivors eking out a living in the ruins. Because of the nuke, the earthquakes and the floods, St. Lou is still rich and largely unexploited in terms of salvage. And as you’ve seen in the villes, if you can protect crops from the occasional acid downpour, you can grow food quite readily here. So there are all manner of folk crawling through the ruins of the city and suburbs.”
“What manner of cult are you speaking of, Brother Joseph?” Doc asked.
“One so terrible our informants would do no more than
hint about it,” the preacher said. “Hints of blood rituals and human sacrifice on a terrible scale.”
“And that’s speaking as a man who ran his own human sacrifice cult?” Mildred demanded.
“As I indicated, the cult is said to go in for sacrifice on a much larger scale. And I saved more lives from the screamwings than I ever fed to them.”
“After you started calling the screamwings down on Soulard in the first place,” Krysty said.
“Well, some things are needful in the name of establishing and maintaining social order. A spirit of sacrifice strengthens community, which in turn is necessary for a ville to survive, much less prosper and grow.”
“Seems Soulardville prospered just fine for a century or so before you started helping them out by calling down screamwings to eat them,” J.B. said.
“Don’t judge me. You don’t know the whole situation.”
“Our judging you,” Ryan said, “is the last thing you have to worry about. Now shut it. If you have the wind to yap, you got the wind to go double-fast!”
Conversation died down as they picked up the pace again. The roadbed was intact as far as Ryan could clearly see by the moon and starlight. But he quickly came to wonder if perhaps canning the small talk was such a good idea, once the first protracted, blood-freezing howl of unendurable agony rose from the stadium as they approached what had been the beginning of another great bridge.
Another voice joined the chorus of pain. Then another.
They moved among the tracery of shadows cast by the remains of what had once been a complex overpass system. Roads soared to nowhere, ending in air. Railway tracks were twisted. A diesel engine with three cars behind it, long-gutted by looters, lay on its side to the west of them like the corpse of a colossal mutant worm.