Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

 

The three bodies were so hacked and raggled that it was almost impossible to tell either sex or age. Ryan steeled himself to look more carefully, but J.B. took him by the arm.

 

"Let me."

 

Even from where he stood Ryan could see that none of the bodies was that of a ten-year-old boy.

 

The Armorer straightened, wiping his glasses. "Misted up from somewhere. Can feel heat from maybe down in the cellar there."

 

"What about?"

 

"No. Two men. Both look late teens. One got a double-stupe face. The other hasn't got much face left. The scalies used cleavers on them all. Pure hacked them to shreds. Third one's an old woman. Bodies are stiffening, but it's cold. Hour or two. That's my guess. Look in the cellar?"

 

"Sure."

 

Mildred offered to stand watch outside, her target pistol drawn and ready. The other four climbed down the makeshift steps into the sweltering, noisome darkness.

 

"Dark night! Like an oven," J.B. said. "And that stink!"

 

The remains of a great fire still smoldered against the back wall, where there seemed to be a kind of a chimney. The embers glowed with a shimmering scarlet, casting a ferocious heat around the vaulted room. Ryan guessed it was roughly thirty feet long and twenty across, with a flagged floor and a low, arched ceiling.

 

The worst of the smell came from a shapeless pile in one corner. At first Ryan took it for a heap of butchered corpses, and his heart sank again. Then he moved a little closer and saw that it was bodies all right, but the carcasses were of slaughtered, skinned dogs. Some of them, by the smell, were several days old.

 

A mound of ragged blankets and coats was thrown against one of the walls, presumably too far gone to interest even the scalies.

 

"Some dried fish over here," Krysty said. "Rotting meat masks the smell. Seems edible to me."

 

"Keg of water here," Doc announced, kicking it with one of his boots. "Feels about two-thirds full. Or perhaps it's nearer three-quarters." He kicked it again in a thoughtful way. "Possibly four-fifths, or-"

 

"We get the picture, Doc," Ryan interrupted, aware of the swell of relief that the boy wasn't lying there with his throat gashed open, cold in a pool of his own blood. That would have been a hard road to walk.

 

The far end of the underground room held a pile of wood, mostly broken joists and rafters, presumably looted from some of the tens of thousands of buildings that had fallen a century ago.

 

Ryan walked past the fire, opening his coat and wiping beaded sweat from his forehead. He looked around the cellar, swiping crossly at a slow-flying, buzzing insect.

 

His sharp eye was caught by something gleaming among the wood, as though it had been tucked there as a hurried hiding place when the scalies came bursting in.

 

He stooped and picked up the object, angling it to the firelight to see what it was. Aware that the others had all turned to look at him, he waved it. "Knife. Little knife, but the blade's real sharp. Pretty. Hilt carved from what looks like turquoise."

 

"Small," J.B. said. "And the Navaho use a lot of that green stone, don't they? Remember it from around Towse ville."

 

"Yeah. Could be."

 

It was a powerful and disturbing feeling for Ryan, holding something in his hand that might have belonged to his son. It might be Dean Cawdor's knife. He found a sheath of soft deerskin, and he slid the blade into it and tucked it into one of his pockets.

 

Mildred called from outside. "Weather's getting real bad, folks."

 

"Just what we need." Ryan turned. "Want to get off and try and track them down while the trail's fresh." He punched his right fist into his left palm. "Flreblast! We'll never find him."

 

Krysty was moving to join Mildred when she paused. "Way Dred talked about them, the scalies control most of this southwest part of the ville. Big base around the docks. They must have taken the boy there. Nowhere else."

 

"Hey," Mildred said, "there's the biggest mother of a storm I ever saw, and it looks as if it's heading our way!"

 

Then they all moved to the steps, pushing past a heavy section of wood paneling that had obviously served the hideout as a door.

 

"Dark night," J.B. breathed. "You're right, Mildred. Seen some big ones down by the Gulf. Acid storms that take the skin off you in a couple of minutes. But this is going to be hard."

 

"Temperature's up a little," Ryan observed. "Might be rain rather than snow."

 

"Either way, I think I would rather have a roof over my head. Even if if's this smelly den behind us." Doc hunched his shoulders and sniffed miserably at the prospect.

 

Ryan desperately wanted to get out after the creatures that had stolen his son. There was no way of knowing whether Dean was still living, but the attempt had to be made.

 

Would be made.

 

But not yet. Not with the deep purple and black clouds that were tearing in from the northeast, reaching toward the ville like the clenching fist of an angry giant. Silver lightning crackled and tore at the sky, leaving narrow pink strips through the clouds. The wind was rising, blowing scraps of rubbish across the street opposite.

 

"No, lover," Krysty said at his elbow.

 

"What?"

 

"You were thinking about going after the boy."

 

"So?"

 

"Going out into that storm."

 

"I wasn't."

 

Then she grabbed him, fingers biting into the flesh below the elbow. "Don't lie to me, you bastard, Ryan!"

 

"Ididn't really" he stammered, knowing she was right. He had been about to take an insane chance and go off into the rushing maelstrom.

 

"You die and what are his chances? You stupe, Ryan! Sit it out and then go. Can't be that difficult to find hundreds of scalies, even in a ville of this size." She let go of him. "And don't lie to me. Don't let this son of yours come between us and the way it's always been."

 

 

 

THERE WAS TIME to throw out the decaying bodies of the dogs, making the cellar a little less oppressive. But moving the carcasses also disturbed nests of maggots and great swollen blowflies, which hummed around them, settling on faces and hands and leaving the shuddering feeling of filth.

 

One of the insects stung J.B. when he slapped at it, leaving its mark on the side of his face. The Armorer wasn't the kind of man to make a lot of unnecessary fuss, but he stamped and cursed, pressing his hand against the sting.

 

Mildred offered to look at it for him, but he refused, insisting on helping to dispose of the rotting bodies.

 

"Should take care," she said.

 

"Don't fuss. It'll be fine."

 

 

 

THE OLD MAN APPEARED outside just as they were about to batten down against the storm. He came from nowhere, watching them, his rheumy eyes darting toward the heap of dog meat lying in the ice-slick highway. Less than five feet tall, he wore a coat that positively glistened with dirt and ancient grease. His feet were hidden inside boots of different sizes and shapes. The wind was tugging at strands of silvery hair.

 

Mildred glanced at Ryan. "Can he ?"

 

"No," he said.

 

"Why?"

 

"Because" His anger flared and he looked at the black woman. "Because he could have any kind of weapon. No point."

 

The old man had shuffled nearer. "You friends of them they took?" he asked.

 

"Why?" Ryan dropped his hand to the butt of his blaster, then changed his mind. He struggled to paste a smile on his unshaven face.

 

It wasn't very successful, as the stranger took several stumbling steps backward, hands up to stop himself from being struck. "Don't, outie. Don't. I was"

 

"I won't hurt you. Want shelter against that?" Ryan pointed at the roiling waves of leaden blackness, now almost overhead, blanking out the sunshine.

 

"In there?" He gestured with a shaking head toward the cellar.

 

"Sure."

 

"Don't like being ass-fucked."

 

Both Ryan and Mildred froze, staring at him.

 

"What?"

 

"You heard, mister."

 

"Well, you have my word I won't ass-fuck you."

 

"Goes double for me." Mildred grinned.

 

"Just s'long as it's understood. I heard about you outies and what you do t'each other."

 

"You can get inside," Ryan said. "First, you said something about the people who were staying here."

 

"Good they was. Gave me food. Jolt if they had it. I got 'em fish sometimes. Know where t'go. Old docks. Watch for them lizard bastards. Shove their cocks up your ass 'fore you can dodge."

 

"Thanks for the warning. You got a name?"

 

"Called Bluff."

 

"Best get inside, Bluff. Storm's right on top of us."

 

 

 

HIDDEN BENEATH THE PILE of firewood were a number of coils of good rope. J.B. split them up and gave everyone a length to wear wrapped around the waist. "Be useful when we try and get back to the gateway," he told them.

 

Krysty had been putting more wood on the fire, building it up again from the dull ashes. Doc took a spare hank of rope and used it to fix the makeshift door into place.

 

Before it was completely shut, Ryan went back out for a last look at the weather. The wind was so strong that he had to steady himself against the fallen wall, his hair lashing all over his face. There was a pelting mixture of rain and hail beginning to fall from the black sky. The lightning still danced, but he couldn't hear any thunder above the screaming of the gale. Visibility had fallen to a dusklike gloom so that he could barely see across the width of the street toward the featureless Chelsea Park.

 

Once they were battened down, Ryan intended to have a word with Bluff about the group that had been living in the basement. And about the young boy who'd been with them.

 

His ears sang with the pressure of the wind and he ducked, tears brimming in his good eye. He wiped it with his sleeve, readying himself to return down the steps, when he noticed a flurry of movement low to the ground, near the scattered corpses of the dogs. It looked like a man on his belly, crawling to steal some of the rotten meat. But if it was a man, then he was exceedingly tall.

 

The curtain of sleet parted momentarily, and Ryan blinked as a great sheet of glowing lightning tore the sky apart.

 

The sight took his breath away.

 

Creeping away from the stinking heap of meat were two enormous, pale-skinned alligators as big as anything Ryan had ever seen down in the bayous. In that moment of frozen magnesium whiteness he figured them to be thirty feet long, with gaping jaws and razored teeth.

 

The lightning frightened the reptiles, and they slithered away, each with its mouth jammed with mangled haunches of dog.

 

Ryan had once read an old book about people having alligators as pets before sky-dark had come. When the reptiles grew too big, their owners flushed them down the toilets. The book claimed they bred in the sewers and grew to enormous lengths.

 

But he remembered that the book said the creatures were all a fantastic myth.

 

Fantastic, yes.

 

Myth, no.

 

 

 

AT LAST THE CORE OF THE storm came swooping down with a murderous intent on the ville of Newyork.

 

Ryan clambered inside and lashed the door firmly into place. The barrier trembled under his hands, quivering with the power of the slashing rain. A little water was already leaking around the sides, and he could feel a chill draft knifing into the cellar.

 

But the fire was now blazing brightly, and he joined Krysty, who was sitting on the stone floor. Bluff squatted opposite them, hands held out toward the lapping flames.

 

"You knew these people?"

 

"Sure did. Kind they were, and I gave 'em fish."

 

Ryan leaned forward. "Tell me about the little boy."

 

The old man looked puzzled. "Little boy? There weren't no little boy living here."