Chapter Twenty-Three

 

 

 

The city was silent. The air tasted fresh and clean, with just a faint flavor of woodsmoke. They still had a little food left from two days earlier, but that would soon be running out.

 

Ryan stretched, bracing his shoulders. After a cold night, he invariably felt stiff, his old wounds and injuries coming back to haunt him, each one with its whispered memories of pain.

 

He brushed them to the back of his mind. "Time to be up and doing."

 

J.B.'s eyes opened immediately. From hundreds of similar moments Ryan knew precisely what his old friend would do and in what order.

 

The glasses first, unfolded from a pocket of his coat, followed by a swift check of all his weapons. Then he sat up. "Nothing?"

 

"Not a sight and not a sound."

 

Mildred awakened and stretched, her mouth gaping open in a huge yawn. "God, it's freezing. Any sign of Krysty or Doc? Stupid question. Sorry, not properly awake yet."

 

"We'll have a bite of dried meat, then go look," Ryan said.

 

 

 

DOC HAD BEEN DREAMING. The visions of the night were rarely about the present or the immediate past. Occasionally he had black nightmares about the period in the Darks when he had been a plaything for Jordan Teague, baron of Mocsin, and his skull-faced sec boss, Cort Strasser.

 

Mostly his dreams were of the late 1890s, summery dreams of picnics with Emily and the two children, Rachel, toddling in her frills and petticoats, and little Jolyon, lying on a blanket, kicking his chubby legs.

 

But the idyllic dreams were almost always shadowed by clouds across the sun, or the faint, menacing rumble of distant thunder.

 

Last night they'd been on a sloping, shingled beach. Jolyon had been close to the edge of the rippling waves, with Rachel tending him. Doc himself had been sitting up, smoking a pipe, Emily's head in his lap, her long hair streaming over his thighs. Suddenly he'd seen triangular fins cutting the water, heading toward the beach. The notches in the dorsals revealed that they were a pod of killer whales, driving toward the two little figures on the beach. He'd wanted to run to pull them to safety, but his wife's head was heavy and he didn't like to disturb her sleep.

 

He'd awakened, sweating and gasping, just as one of the creatures had lunged from the waves, surrounded by a surging swell of foaming green and silver.

 

Krysty's eyes were open, looking up at him from his lap. "Bad dream, Doc?"

 

"Not one of the very best. But how are you this fine morning?"

 

"Better. My head feels as though it's been rolled between a couple of millstones. That'll pass."

 

The place where they'd spent the night was now illuminated by the first, gentle light of dawn. Doc had dozed, waking frequently, straining his hearing for any warning of the scalies' return. But all he'd heard had been the rustling of rats, one of the most common nighttime noises in Deathlands.

 

"I think we should move if you feel strong enough. We don't want our reptilian friends of yesternight to find us here."

 

"Sure." With a visible effort Krysty stood, helped by Doc's hand. She leaned for a few moments against the chipped brick wall, taking slow breaths. "Every time I use the power I tell myself I'll never, ever do it again. Makes you feel like triple-shit."

 

 

 

"STILL SMELL THE FUMES from the acid or whatever the chemical was," Mildred said.

 

Ryan was leading the way through the maze. "I got a feeling it has to be linked with Krysty and Doc. Someway."

 

"No movement of those scalie patrols this morning." J.B. looked behind them. "I reckon that could be Doc and Krysty, as well."

 

Neither of them actually put into words the fear that their friends could very possibly be dead.

 

 

 

THOUGH STILL WEAKENED, Krysty was recovering fast.

 

As they made their way along dappled corridors, trying to track the route toward the old bus terminal, she had to stop every few minutes, squatting, hands on knees. But each time she was able to go that much farther between rests.

 

It was during the fourth or fifth such break that she suddenly looked up, head to one side as though she were listening to the tiny sound of a far-off bell.

 

Doc recognized the pose. "What can you hear, my young friend?"

 

There was a point close ahead of them where the passage forked into a T-junction.

 

"Something both ways. Not scalies. Much too quiet. To the right there's I can feel pain in that direction. The other way, left, it could be Ryan and the others."

 

It was.

 

 

 

THE EMOTION AT THEIR REUNION was intense, but quickly over. Ryan, still holding Krysty's hand, summed it up. "Tell us about it later. And we'll have later for some close times. But for now we can get the ace on the line out of here. Back north. Cross the river and down into the gateway. And gone."

 

"I'll drink to that." Doc beamed. "I fear New York is no longer the toddling town it once was. Best I leave it to my memories."

 

"You're right, Doc." Mildred gave Krysty another hug. "So great to see you again. We thought we wouldn't."

 

"Me, too. Tell you all about it on the way back to the redoubt."

 

"No scalies around, lover?" Ryan asked.

 

"Not one. Though there was something a little ways back."

 

"What?"

 

Krysty took her hand from Ryan's. "Let me just listen a moment. Quiet, everyone. Real quiet."

 

There was an infinite stillness in the concrete tomb. Ryan strained his hearing, but all he could catch was the blood pounding through the narrow thoroughfares of his skull.

 

Krysty's startlingly green eyes snapped open. "Yes. Something."

 

"Danger?" Ryan asked.

 

She shook her head. "No. Pain. Someone suffering and ill. Very sick. Close to passing over to the other side. That way." She pointed in the direction they'd come from.

 

"Near?" Ryan trusted Krysty's mutie skills implicitly. She'd never guess at anything unless she felt sure.

 

"Underground you can't be certain. But, yeah, she's not far from here."

 

"She?" J.B. said. "You sure it's a woman out there?"

 

"Course. Come on."

 

 

 

THEY FOUND HER just where Krysty had predicted, up the other corridor off the T-junction.

 

She sat with her back against the stone wall, knees drawn toward her chest. Her face was dust-white, the pattern of scars standing out even more clearly, a random design of raised weals. The metal locket around her neck glistened faintly in the dim light.

 

The five friends stood in a loose half circle around her.

 

"She gone?" Krysty asked.

 

"Breathing." J.B. stooped closer. "But only just."

 

"Let me." Mildred knelt and peered at the woman. She took her wrist between finger and thumb, looking into the distance as she counted to herself. "Very low."

 

"The cold?" Ryan offered.

 

"Maybe."

 

Doc coughed. "Forgive an elderly man's interruption, but it appears from where I'm standing that the poor woman is sitting in the middle of a pool of drying blood."

 

Mildred gently unfolded the arms from across the chest and stomach. "Oh, shit," she said quietly.

 

"What?" Krysty took a half step to the side so that she could see over Mildred's shoulders. "Oh."

 

Mildred straightened, and they were all able to see what had happened.

 

The dying woman had been knifed, presumably by one of the scalie guards, perhaps as she tried to escape. Somehow she'd managed to get away from the acid-flooded warehouse. The bloody sores on her knees told their own story of how she'd gotten as far as she had.

 

The knife had been thrust in with a ferocious anger, a little to the left, then drawn across and twisted. In among the sodden clothes, crusted with congealing, clotted blood, they could all see the thin loops and twists of intestines tumbled into her lap.

 

"Least the rats didn't find her during the night," J.B. commented.

 

"I don't think she'd have known much about it if they had," Mildred replied. "Whatever bad times she's had in her life are nearly finished."

 

"Should I end it for her?" Ryan asked, his hand slipping to the hilt of his panga.

 

At the sound of his voice the woman's eyes opened. For several long heartbeats she gazed blindly into space, not focusing on anything. Then she moved her head and her eyes locked on Ryan's face.

 

Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Her tongue tried desperately to moisten her cracked lips. Krysty had a small container of water, and she knelt quickly and splashed a little into the palm of her hand, offering it to the woman. She lapped at it, then coughed, the breath wheezing in her chest.

 

But her eyes never left Ryan.

 

"You," she finally whispered.

 

"What is it you want?" he asked, feeling an almost supernatural wonder at what was possibly keeping her alive with her guts spilled out.

 

"Rona."

 

"What?"

 

Doc looked at Mildred. "That was the name she said before." He explained to the others. "She gave us food when the scalies had us. She didn't make sense. About wanting to find you, Ryan, my dear fellow. But wouldn't say why."

 

"Look," Krysty breathed. "Her hand."

 

It was spidering up her chest, with a life of its own, to her throat. It stopped and gripped the square metal pendant. "Take," she said, her eyes burning into Ryan's good one.

 

"This?" He touched it with his fingers. A nod of the head, slow and painful, answered him. He carefully pulled it up, wincing as he realized it was stuck to her with dried blood. He peeled it loose and over the tangled gray hair.

 

"Open."

 

He turned it in his hand. The workmanship reminded him vaguely of silver he'd seen down in the Southwest. Indian crafts. For a moment he couldn't see how to get inside it.

 

"Open."

 

"I'm trying. But it's" He spit in his hand and wiped off some of the blood, seeing, then, that it had a catch on one side. Ryan levered a nail into it and pried. "Stiff," he said. "Don't want to break it when Ah, here."

 

"Rona said to find you. Died long back. Find you. Quest. Look after." Her breathing was becoming faster and more shallow.

 

Slowly Ryan opened the locket and found that it contained two thingsa tiny ringlet of blond hair and a picture. A faded, pale brown portrait.

 

"Who is it?" he asked, even though he knew what the answer was going to be.

 

"Your son, Ryan Cawdor. It's your son."