They continued south onto what looked like a largely intact highway that Mildred, who had spent some time in predark St. Louis, identified as Interstate 55, to make their way through a complicated tangle of broken concrete and twisted rail iron, fanged by nasty bent spikes of rust-red rebar. Evidently it was a collapsed bridge. A railroad-highway combo, by the looks.
No sooner were they past the collapsed ruins than Tully led the party down the brushy bank to the surface street that ran alongside the old highway. They jumped a little stream in the ditch at the bottom. Because there was just no way four people could cross it carrying the unconscious Armorer, and because the locals seemed uninclined to wade this soon after an acid downpour, Ryan draped J.B.’s limp form over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
Everybody else hopped easily across. Burdened as he was Ryan didn’t quite make it cleanly. The dirt gave way under his left foot. It slipped and went into the water to the ankle. Though he jumped clear as if J.B. suddenly weighed no more than dandelion fluff, Ryan felt a sting from the diluted acid in the little stream.
Krysty and Doc relieved Ryan of his burden. Tully tossed him a water bottle. “Best rinse that off before we go on,” he said. “Just in case.”
Ryan cocked a brow over his good eye. “Don’t sweat it,” Tully said. “We’re not far from the ville. If we’re not
inside the perimeter inside half an hour, I likely won’t be needing the water anyhow.”
Ryan splashed water over his ankle and boot. It probably didn’t do much good. It made him feel better, though. He tossed the bottle back to the patrol leader, who caught it with a grin.
“Why not use highway?” Jak asked as they started moving west between a stand of woods along the partially elevated, partially fallen-in right of way.
“Too exposed,” Tully said. “Sometimes we get snipers in the rubble.”
“And there’s stickies, in those drowned warehouses and factories other side of the Interstate,” another man said.
“Highway does get used by people passing through, Randall,” Tully said. “Long-range traders and such.”
“Things travel that road no human should meet or get to know anything about,” a black-haired man with drawn gray-stubbled cheeks said.
“That’s only by night,” Tully said. “Anyway it’s all superstition. Probably.”
“I hear the screams, Tully. Can’t hardly sleep none, sometimes.”
“That’s just stickies roasting rivermen or scavvies they caught,” Randall said.
The companions found themselves toting the unconscious J.B. along a wide street. The rain, having seemingly washed away the remnants of the toxic rain, had stopped quickly. The air smelled fresh. Overhead the clouds had taken on the colors of an old bruise, gray and green and brown, an improvement over the tortured, boiling orange of not so many minutes before.
They passed beneath standing bridges where a railroad line swung in from the northwest to join a highway that crossed their route. A little farther south the highway they
paralleled swung off west. Walking under an intact under-pass, their captors went on triple alert. The guy who didn’t sleep so well jumped when a pigeon boomed out from high up the embankment near the overhead and flapped out into the milky sunlight. His buddies laughed at him.
When the group emerged, the clouds were breaking up. Ryan blinked his good eye at the sight. As hot as it was, without clouds to filter the sun the day would only get hotter. And J.B. wasn’t getting any lighter.
“How are you holding up?” he asked the others.
“Don’t worry about us,” Krysty said. “We’ll do what we have to do.”
He ginned at her. “Like always.”
“Not much farther to go, anyway,” Tully said. “We’ll see about getting you some wheels for your friend when we reach the gates. We got people who can tend to him. Ace healer name of Strode.”
Lonny muttered something about mollycoddling no-account outlanders. His leader ignored him. Though Tully acted like a good guy—and Ryan knew too well it could all
be
an act—and seemed to have his shit pretty much in one sock as a leader, he also seemed to allow the bulky brown-haired man an unusual amount of slack. There had to be some link here Ryan didn’t see.
No way to scope it now, nor to know if the fact, if fact it was, had any use to him and his friends in their current predicament. Ryan filed it away and let it go.
Ryan saw Mildred’s shoulders and upper back tense. She was a physician, a fully qualified preskydark doctor who tended to think not too much of what passed for doctors these days. Truth be told, she had met several healers whom she had to admit were truly gifted.
But whether it was more prudence than the freezie woman usually showed, or simple fatigue, she didn’t make
a point of the fact
she
could tend to J.B. as well as any and better than most. Besides which, if Soulard were the relatively large and prosperous ville a twelve-man patrol wearing reasonably clean outfits suggested, they probably had medical facilities better than the Deathlands standard.
Tully led them down the center of the wide street. His troops stayed crisply alert. Here, anyway, they seemed to be more worried about jump-out-from-cover attacks than coming under long-range aimed fire. More and more of the structures they passed were intact, which shortened potential fields of fire and favored blitz-style ambush.
“Wonder why these littler buildings held up so much better than the skyscrapers,” Mildred said. Ryan was mildly surprised she had breath to talk.
It was more of a surprise when Doc answered; even after all their association Ryan had a tendency to underestimate his physical hardiness.
“Smaller surface areas,” he said. “Being more compact, they proved more resistant to the blasts. The bigger buildings provided greater surfaces for the shock waves to push against.”
As they marched through the ruins between increasingly intact-appearing structures, in the growing sunlight Ryan realized the black kid, McCoy, was no longer with them. None of the others looked concerned—about the youth’s absence, anyway. Even here in what they evidently considered potentially hostile ground nobody seemed to assume he’d been snatched by someone. Or even wandered away into danger.
So Tully sent him ahead to spread the word they were coming, Ryan thought. He’d probably use some secret bolthole. Mebbe even one only a kid knew about, or could even get through. The patrol leader had to have spoken quietly to the kid when Ryan wasn’t looking, or even
flashed him an arranged signal. Or, hell, for all he knew it was standard operating procedure.
They were working in a dangerous information vacuum here. The bitch was, even though their escorts were proving neither hostile nor closemouthed—except mebbe the lout, Lonny—they didn’t seem inclined to small talk right now. Ryan wasn’t about to distract them, if they thought there was something here to look out for.
And anyway, he wasn’t sure himself where Mildred and Doc found the energy for chitchat. He sure didn’t have much to spare, right now.
“Biggest danger here is stickies,” Randall said. “They infest the flooded warehouses and like to hunt up here from time to time. Plus sometimes scavvies think they can snag an easy score this close to a ville.”
“There’s also people from Breweryville,” said Dowd, the haunted-looking dude who couldn’t sleep. “They might attack us if they come upon us.”
“Oh, crap,” Randall said. “They can be dicks. But they’re not coldhearts.”
“Brother Joseph says they lack a true sense of community.”
“Look alive, guys,” Tully said hastily. “We don’t want to get too caught up talking and wind up crawling with stickies.”
That drove a shudder through everybody, companions and captors alike. There were numerous varieties of the needle-toothed mutants with the sucker pads on their hands and feet that could strip skin from meat and meat from bone. Most of them shared a love for human flesh, cruelty and fire, not necessarily in that order. Despite their pyrophilia they often colonized near bodies of water, and seemed to take to the water well.
Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the patrol leader had
once again steered talk clear of the subject of Brother Joseph. Whomever he may be.
They came to a corner where a wire fence stretched down the street ahead of them and down the street west, backed by dense thorny hedges and topped with coils of razor wire that gleamed in the sun despite being pitted and stained by the acid rains.
“Soulardville,” Tully said with evident pride.
“Didn’t that used to be the farmers’ market?” Mildred asked. “Those long shedlike roofs inside the perimeter?”
“Uh-huh,” the patrol leader said, nodding his ginger head. “It’s a farming-and-gardening center now. Our market’s more centrally located.”
“What’d you say your ville’s name was again?” Ryan asked.
“Soulard,” Tully said.
Doc perked up. “‘Soulard,’” he said. “Why, bless my soul, but unless I misremember, that means ‘drunkard’ in French.”
Tully shrugged. “Mebbe so, some time past. Sure not now.”
“Bro Joe don’t allow drunkenness,” Dowd said gloomily. Perhaps he felt he’d sleep better for a good load on.
“Bro Joe?” Ryan asked.
“It’s still the baron who rules in Soulardville!” Lonny bellowed. Ryan thought he was going way too red for Dowd’s remark. Lonny turned an angry glare on Doc.
“What d’you mean by that, anyway, oldie?” he yelled.
“Back off the trigger there, fella,” Ryan said.
“Why, nothing, my boy,” Doc said. Though his forehead shone with sweat, he didn’t seem to be flagging under his burden. “Nothing at all. Just passing the time of this lovely day.”
Lonny gave him a narrow, suspicious glare. “You okay
there, old-timer?” Tully asked. “You want mebbe to get the white-haired kid to swap with you?”
“Not at all, young man, thank you kindly. I have resources unlooked-for.”
They continued south along the fence. Ryan watched his people closely. There was nothing they could do for J.B. right now but shade his face with his hat, which they had. He was concerned about how the other three were holding up. Krysty’s sentient hair hung limp over her shoulders, a sure sign fatigue was getting the better of her. Mildred would, from time to time, start to slump, then straighten. Usually at such times she glanced back at the unconscious Armorer suspended among them. It was as if she renewed her strength, or at least resolve, by reminding herself J.B.’s health and very survival lay very much in question, and depended on her ability to keep on keeping on.
Ryan also monitored Jak. The teen was volatile and obviously smoldering at the fact they’d been taken captive. He wasn’t tracking too closely that their captors could’ve treated them far worse. In fact, under the circumstances, they could hardly have treated them better. Of course that could change at any instant; Ryan knew that as well as Jak did.
He just didn’t want Jak flying off and
making
the locals treat them more harshly.
Visibility through the hedge-covered fence wasn’t good. Ryan suspected that was part of the shrubs’ purpose. Glimpses through gaps suggested that south of the garden sheds lay a cultivated field, a block north to south and at least three blocks east-west. Then the perimeter turned mostly to the fronts of what seemed to have been houses and small businesses, their doors and ground-floor windows bricked up. Razor-wire coils spiraled along roof-
lines. The streets between were blocked off by piles of big rubble chunks as well as the fence.
“That’s a pretty fine defensive perimeter,” Ryan said. Talking was hard, but it took his mind off the ache in his shoulders and lower back from lugging J.B.’s deadweight.
Tully chuckled. “Have to be triple-stupe not to be able to fortify out of the bones and guts of a dead city.”
“That’s true.”
They passed a still-intact church whose white spire showed flaking remains of paint bubbling from the nuke strike’s thermal flash on its north side. East of the street lay a wide expanse of grass, green but yellow-spotted from the acid rains. Farther along stood more ruins.
From just ahead came a shout. Square three-story-tall towers made of different colored bricks flanked a wide street leading into the ville. The black snouts of longblasters poked out from underneath peaked roofs. A couple were trained right on Ryan and his little party.
“Almost over, people,” Tully told Ryan and his friends.
“We’re at the gates.”
The Soulardville gate was a stout, barred construction, topped with the ubiquitous razor-wire coils. It ran on a metal-lined track cut into the asphalt of the street.
The gate opened with a squeal of bearings as runners ran down the track. Inside waited a quartet of men in armless black jerseys holding longblasters. Long wooden truncheons hung from their belts. Sec men, Ryan thought.
The patrol headed inside. Big trees shaded the gate area, and Ryan was grateful for that.
As their escorts spread out around them, calling greetings to bystanders, the one-eyed man took stock of their surroundings. The church to the right of the gate seemed to have been taken over as a sec-man headquarters, or at least station. To the left lay an open area, with tables under canopies: a market or trading station, mildly busy today, with men unloading goods to a table from a light wooden land wag while others admired heaps of produce.
McCoy approached them, leading a stocky woman wearing overalls, with a gray braid wound around her head. Right behind came a wooden cart with steel-tired wood wheels. As the sec men covered the captives with their blasters, the woman bustled up.
“I’m Strode, the ville healer,” she said. “We’ll take over from here.”
The bevy of assistants who had pushed the cart trotted
around to ease J.B.’s limp form away from Ryan and his friends. Predictably, Mildred bridled.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice rasped from dryness in her throat; she hadn’t been following her own advice about keeping hydrated while carrying her wounded lover.
The Armorer had already been laid on a pad on the bed of the cart. Strode leaned over him. “Hmm,” she said. “Competent job of field dressing.”
“‘Competent’!”
Strode looked up directly at the twentieth-century physician. “You did well by your friend, given the circumstances,” she said firmly. “We have him now. We’ve got a clean infirmary and scavenged meds as well as herbs.”
“Herbs!” Mildred sounded as outraged as if the gray-haired, red-faced woman had suggested using
vodoun
.
For a moment electricity seemed to crackle between the two female healers. Strode fixed Mildred with a piercing blue gaze. Mildred tensed as if about to go for the older woman’s throat.
Krysty laid a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Mildred,” she said gently, “let it go. We’re not completely ignorant savages. This woman obviously knows what she’s doing.”
Mildred set her strong jaw rebelliously. A pair of sec men stepped up to bar her way as Strode gestured. The acolytes set off both pulling and pushing the cart at a trot down the broad street that led into the fortified ville. The healer walked alongside at a brisk pace.
Tears welled in Mildred’s eyes then coursed down her cheeks.
They were still hemmed in by a combination of their original captors and sec men, who weren’t exactly wearing uniforms but all seemed to wear mostly black. Some of the
men were relieving the patrol of their weapons and toting them into the old church. The patrol members surrendered their blasters and crossbows without protest.
Interesting, Ryan thought.
Krysty met his eye over Mildred’s shoulder, gave him a quick smile and nod to show she was doing fine. He doubted that. But it was part of the reason he loved her: her fortitude and courage were the equal of any man’s he’d known. She’d keep going and do what needed to be done until her strength failed her. Her heart never would.
A pair of sec men pointed their blasters—an M-16 and a Remington pump scattergun—at Ryan as he reached to his belt. With a sardonic smile on his chapped lips, he saluted them with his canteen, then took a long drink. The water was hot and brackish but refreshed him.
Doc had plopped himself down on his butt on the blacktop in the shade of a sycamore and sat with his knees wide apart and his sword stick beside him. Jak squatted beside him and panted like a wolf. Their captors had relieved him of the throwing knives with which he festooned himself, but Ryan would’ve bet his last swig of water the albino youth had a couple holdouts hidden on him. Again, it wasn’t likely to help much, especially with J.B. trundled off to his friends had no idea where, but completely in the power of their captors. Even if they could break out, they weren’t going to do so without the Armorer.
“We don’t want to rush into anything anyway,” Krysty said to him. Ryan jerked slightly. As often the case, the full-bodied redhead seemed to be reading his mind. “We don’t know what’s here.”
“They could have treated us far worse, to be sure,” Doc said, taking a swig from his own canteen and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Patrol leader Tully, now disarmed, stood to one side talking with a man a finger shorter than his own gangly height. The man wore a black vest open over a bare chest deep-tanned as leather, beneath a thick pelt of red-brown hair, black jeans over black boots, a gunbelt with a Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum in good condition at his left hip. He had a long deeply seamed face as tan as his chest, with a well-broken nose. Close-clipped reddish-brown hair was in full retreat from a freckled forehead. Mild-seeming brown eyes looked out from beneath eyebrows like smears of black paint. He wasn’t so much wider than Tully, as he just seemed more solid.
A chiller for true, Ryan thought.
Tully walked over with the black-clad man beside him. “This is Garrison,” he told Ryan. “He’s sec chief for Soulardville.”
Neither party to the introduction offered to shake hands. “Get your people together and follow me,” Garrison said.
His voice was quiet but not soft. Neither his tone nor the sec boss’s posture threatened. Ryan sized the man up as the kind who wouldn’t bother with threats. Seen up close, he looked as unyielding and hard as a cypress knee.
Ryan nodded. No point butting heads when he’d only lose. “Let’s go,” he told the others.
“Where?” Jak asked. He showed no sign of standing.
“Where I take you,” Garrison said. His tone remained matter-of-fact. The look he gave the albino youth was another matter altogether.
One time during his road-dog days with Trader, Ryan had seen an Ozark mule skinner give a chronically balky mule that look. The next time the mule acted up the skinner had shot it dead in its harness with a big old black-powder horse blaster he worse crosswise in his belt.
“Jak,” Krysty called, “come give me a hand with Mildred, please. She’s had a hard time of it.”
Mildred had already reclaimed her composure. She was painfully aware of her relatively coddled and sheltered upbringing. Never mind her father had been murdered by the Klan when she was a child. Compared to people Deathlands born and raised she’d spent her life before her cryogenic suspension on Easy Street. She hated to show weakness to her friends. She frowned and started to say something.
Krysty held up a hand. “Save your breath,” she said. “Let Jak help you.”
The albino teen had got up and hurried to Mildred’s side. Her eyes widened as she realized what the redhead was actually doing. Jak had followed her suggestion without the thought entering his head that she had given him an out from a no-win confrontation with the Soulardville sec boss without loss of face.
The look on the sec boss’s sunburned face never wavered from…
composed,
Ryan reckoned the word was. But Ryan thought he’d caught just the slightest flicker of recognition in those dark eyes. Garrison looked to be shrewdly perceptive as well as in total command of himself and his surroundings. That made him triple-dangerous.
They set off down the street at an easy walk. A quartet of sec men flanked and followed them. Garrison let Ryan walk shoulder-to-shoulder with him without comment.
And that was the upside of dealing with a man like the sec boss. Ryan knew what he was. He knew at a glance what Ryan was. They understood each other perfectly with no need to jaw.
Houses lined the street, mostly in brown or maroon or yellow-tan brick, neat beneath pitched roofs with scrolled wooden eaves. Raised-bed gardens had replaced long-dead
lawns, and interspersed with the houses were garden plots growing a profusion of vegetables and herbs: tomatoes and beans climbing up frames, onions, carrots, lettuce just sprouting. Down one block to the south Ryan caught a glimpse of an orchard of trees just beginning to fruit out. Big trees dropped pools of shadow at irregular intervals on the asphalt.
“My word,” Doc breathed. “It looks as if war has never brushed this place with its wings.”
“Does if you’d seen it before,” Mildred said. “This is Russell Boulevard. Used to be a lot more buildings along here. Those gardens used to be houses.”
“It’s so green,” Krysty said. “It’s like a drink of water after the ruins.”
“Too neat,” Jak said. “Too crowded.”
And in fact a fair number of people went about their business. Some carried crates or big ceramic jugs, or pushed loaded handcarts. Others walked briskly as if to appointments. Children played on stoops. Chickens scratched in front yards and cultivated patches. Pigeons cooed and bubbled from the eaves.
“We been building this place up for a hundred years,” Garrison said with a note of pride in his voice.
“You’ve done well,” Krysty said.
Ryan was reserving judgment. Krysty sometimes teased him he couldn’t sniff a flower without suspecting there was a bee waiting inside to sting his nose. He reckoned that was about right.
He also saw no reason to change.
And speaking of flowers, they were there, too, purple and blue and yellow heads nodding from beds below windows and stout ceramic planters on porches. This place was easily as prosperous as Front Royal, where he’d grown up.
“Barely an hour ago the acid rain was falling fit to
bubble the skin straight off a man’s face,” he said. He gestured around with a hard hand. “How’d all this come through looking so pretty?”
“Special-treated tarps and cloths,” Garrison said. “Special frames set out. The trees’re pretty resistant. We usually get plenty of warning when a hellstorm’s brewing.”
“What happens when you don’t?”
Garrison chuckled. “Ever know a man to leave this world alive?”
For a moment Ryan looked at him as they walked. Then he barked a short laugh. “No.”
The street turned to what had been a commercial district. War’s legacy was much more visible here. While many houses had intact windows, the big commercial picture windows had been blown in and were covered with plywood sheets or planking. From neatly lettered signs above the doors Ryan gathered they were now small stores and workshops. He heard the tink-tink of a hammer on metal from one door left open to allow the sultry breeze admittance.
The street widened out. “Lot of buildings here’ve been demolished,” Mildred murmured. “If I remember right, anyway.”
For her, Ryan knew, the memory was just a few years old. But sometimes she still had trouble coping with the brutal contrast between the world she’d gone to sleep in and the nightmare she’d awakened to.
Whatever had been before there was a wide square here now. Ryan saw that the extant pavement had been eked out with paths of crushed gravel, and mosaics of jagged, salvaged concrete slabs. It was handsome work, he had to admit.
In the center of the plaza stood a low platform made of one big concrete slab laid with little regard for leveling:
no finesse. It looked quite brutal by contrast to the almost unnatural primness of what they’d seen of the rest of the ville. A weather-stained tarp covered the slanted upper surface.
Garrison said nothing about the slab. Ryan didn’t ask for an explanation. It didn’t seem to bear on their continued survival one way or another.
Beyond it stood a sprawling two-story-tall block of pink brick, with a gabled slate roof and a brick chimney. It had a gaudily painted wooden entryway stuck onto the front, obviously a postdark addition. The garish gold and purple paint clashed with the ville’s overall reserve as harshly as the strange slab dais in the middle of the town square.
“Baron’s palace,” Garrison said.
“Never would have guessed,” Ryan commented.
Garrison led them down a side street to a gray brick house just behind the “palace.” It was unremarkable except for black iron bars on the windows. Garrison unlocked an iron-and-mesh sec door and opened it. The barred door had a steel flap in the bottom section. A closed wooden door was inside.
“In here,” he said.
“How long?” Ryan asked.
“Till you’re sent for.”
Ryan turned the knob. The inner door was one of the old flimsy predark plywood-sandwich variety that kept the wind and some of the cold out but a sturdy child could put her fist through. Of course with the outer door that didn’t much matter.
Inside was gloomy, musty and hot. Dust motes floated in the light through the open door. Some lumpy-looking pallets had been tossed around the wooden floor.
“How about food and water?” he asked Garrison. “We haven’t eaten all day.”
“You’ll be provided for,” Garrison said.
Ryan went in, followed by the others. “You got the run of the place,” Garrison said, closing and locking the outer door. “You might want to open the windows. Get some air.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
“What now?” Mildred asked when the sec boss went away.
“The usual. Scope out the house. See if there’s any way out.”
“Think there will be?” Krysty asked.
“Hell no. But we take nothing for granted.”
They searched the house, quickly but cautiously. They weren’t going to take for granted there weren’t hidden dangers, either. Given the sort of things that wandered around a ruined city there might even be unpleasant surprises their hosts knew nothing about.
But the place was as empty as an old skull.
As they finished their quick but thorough recon, somebody rattled the sec door. They went down to find several locals carrying several gallon ceramic jugs as well as several large covered pots. Under the longblasters of a pair of hawk-eyed sec men they unlocked the outer door and passed in the jugs and jars.
“Water,” Jak said, uncapping a jug and sniffing.