Chapter Eleven

 

 

 

"Awake?"

 

"No. I'm fast asleep."

 

"Can't stand the pace?"

 

Ryan rolled on his side, seeing Krysty propped up on one elbow, her tumbling fiery hair seeming almost black in the stark moonlight. The blanket had slipped down, uncovering her breasts, shadowed and splendid. She was smiling at him.

 

"Twice is enough for starters," he responded.

 

"I call that big talk for a one-eyed old man. Been too long without you to be satisfied with a couple of quickies."

 

"Quickies!"

 

She touched her finger to his lips. "Shh. You'll wake the others. Don't want them all to know about your incessant demands on my body."

 

Ryan ran his hand through her hair, seeing the dancing sparks of pure fire burning in the still, warm air. They were lying a little distance from the others, at the center of a grove of tall sycamores whose branches stirred softly.

 

"I think I can feel another of those incessant demands creeping up on me," he said.

 

Her hand moved under the blankets, across the flat, muscular planes of his stomach, lower into the curling tendrils of wiry hair. She cupped him in the palm of her hand, squeezing, sighing as he stirred into hard life again.

 

"I can feel it as well, lover. Let's do something about it."

 

She eased him onto his back, straddling him, gripping his body with her powerful thighs, guiding him with her fingers, gasping with pleasure as he thrusted into her. Krysty lowered her head toward him, her hair falling into place like a sentient veil.

 

"So good to have you back safe with me, lover," she whispered.

 

"Good to be back."

 

"I love you, Ryan."

 

"Yeah. Love you, too."

 

 

 

KRYSTY HAD SEEN the thin column of pale smoke, following it back south for a couple of miles, eventually finding father and son relaxing after the meal of fresh-caught fish.

 

The camp was a little distance from the river, on the banks of a narrow, fast-running stream. There'd been an earth slide some months ago that had brought down twenty or thirty trees in a tangle of splintered timber, which meant a plentiful supply of firewood of all sizes.

 

There was plenty of game in the forested hills, and already they'd smoked and dried a brace of goat, as well as three small deer. And there was ample fish in a shaded pool a quarter mile upstream.

 

Some of the stock had found its way along the same trail. J.B. and Mildred had gone to stay in a box canyon about four miles east, in order to tend them.

 

When Krysty led Ryan and Dean back into the camp, Doc was shaving with the honed blade of a knife, using a second knife as a mirror. He nearly cut himself as he spun around, and he rushed to embrace both of them. Jak and Christina were playing pinochle on a red-edged horse blanket.

 

Considering the cruel blow that fate had dealt them with the arrival of the infected travelers, and the subsequent destruction of their home, both were in surprisingly good spirits.

 

Most of the first couple of hours was taken up with mutual telling of stories, filling in the gaps left in Krysty's notes and recounting what had happened in and around the sulfur mines during the rescue of Dean from the talons of Gregori Zimyanin.

 

While Ryan was telling them about the last battle, with occasional interruptions from his son, Doc kept punching his left hand into his right palm, exclaiming, "Oh, marvelous! Yes, that's where the corn is cut, my friends! Not to be gainsaid, Ryan! Oh, the rogue and peasant slave!"

 

The sun was sinking out of sight, and Ryan agreed that it would be foolish to risk getting caught by nightfall halfway to the canyon where the Armorer and Mildred were camped.

 

 

 

AFTER THEIR THIRD ROUND of lovemaking, Ryan lay with his arm resting across Krysty's shoulder.

 

"Might get up and have a drink of that spring water in a minute," he said. "Warm night."

 

"Been hotter. It's cooler up where Mildred and J.B. are settled."

 

"Things still okay between them?"

 

Krysty nodded. "Sure are. Better than okay. Seems to be a real solid relationship going on between those two."

 

"Think they want to settle down together someplace?"

 

"Doesn't everybody, lover?"

 

There was a long stillness between them. Ryan didn't move, and eventually Krysty's hand found his and clasped it firmly.

 

"Seeing Jak and Christina together" she began, allowing the sentence to trail into the quiet darkness around them.

 

"I know."

 

"Good places around here. Plenty of land for the taking."

 

"Sure. Clean water. Climate's great. No nuke hot spots."

 

Krysty sighed. "But there's always something around the next corner, Ryan. Something to keep moving on for. Dragons to be slaughtered and innocent maidens to be rescued."

 

He let go of her hand. "Don't get that."

 

"Never mind, lover. Most times I push it way back. Then it comes creeping forward again, like a sore place you can't stop yourself from picking at."

 

Ryan deliberately changed the subject, taking it to safer grounds.

 

"Any sign of stickies?"

 

"Rather talk about muties than us settling down, eh, lover? Stickies? Jak reckons they're around in these hills."

 

"What proof?"

 

"Some old miners' shacks burned out."

 

Ryan wiped sweat from his forehead and sat up. "Got to get some water." He looked around the clearing. "These shacks"

 

"Yeah?"

 

"Couldn't they have been fired a hundred years ago? Or any time in between?"

 

"Jak says not. Very recent. Even before we arrived here he'd been finding tracks of stickies. Says there could be as many as fifty up in the high country to the east and north."

 

Ryan stood, stretching. He pushed his hands onto his hips and arched his back to try to ease an old stiffness from the middle vertebrae. A pinched disk had been Mildred's diagnosis, sometimes squeezing a nerve and putting a muscle into spasm on the right side of his spine.

 

"You mean up where J.B. and Mildred are staying?"

 

He saw the blur of movement as Krysty nodded her answer. "But Jak doesn't seem to think that they'd be much of a threat to J.B., not with all of his experience."

 

"I guess not. But fifty's a shit lot of stickies to have hiding someplace around you. Sneaky bastards. Might be a better idea if we all kept in the same camp."

 

He walked and knelt by the stream, cupping his hands and drinking a copious draft from the cold stream. The more he thought about it, the less happy he was at the idea of the Armorer being alone in an isolated box canyon, even with Mildred's sharp-shooting to help him.

 

The good thing about stickies was that they generally didn't function well in groups. They were too uncontrollable and triple crazy for that. But fifty of them

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING brought another wonderfully bright and sunny day. In the early hours, just before the hesitant light of the false dawn, Ryan had woken to hear the distant rumbling of a chem storm, the southern horizon a dazzling display of pink and purple spears of lightning. But it was moving toward the far west and faded away within the hour.

 

Dean and Doc cooked breakfast, heating some venison in a small iron caldron, while eggs spit and chattered in a shallow skillet. Krysty saw Ryan looking questioningly at the eggs.

 

"Mildred said eggs were safe, long as they'd already been laid before the sickies arrived. We got quite a few sealed jars of preserve and jellies. And some bottled plums and apples."

 

Christina came limping across from the stream, carrying a bucket of water in her right hand, leaning over to balance it. Ryan was about to leap up and help her with it when he caught the warning in Jak's ruby eyes, and he sat again.

 

"Going to meet with J.B. and Mildred today?" she asked, recovering her breath, wiping her hands on her checked cotton skirt.

 

"Yeah. Dean best stay here and stock up on his strength."

 

"Oh, Dad, you"

 

"Dean!"

 

"All right, Dad."

 

"I'll come along," Krysty said.

 

Ryan nodded. "Be good."

 

Jak cleared his throat and everyone turned to look at him, but he glanced ostentatiously toward the stream and didn't speak.

 

Christina laughed. "Course you can."

 

"Sure?" His white face was bright with anticipation, then clouded. "Ryan? Mind if"

 

"Glad to have you along, Jak. You know that. Doc?"

 

"At your service, my dear fellow. What can I do for you?"

 

"You can stay here with Christina and the boy. All right?"

 

The old man shook his head. "Oh, calamity! And I was so looking forward to clambering four miles across a landscape not unlike the devil's hindquarters, in scorching heat. Now I'll just have to remain here with this whining brat and this ineffably boring housewife, here in the shade, stretched out, snoozing gently by a bubbling brook. You ask much of your friends, Ryan Cawdor."

 

"Be back before dusk. Keep a good look out for any sign of stickies."

 

Ryan had his bolt-action Steyr SSG-70 rifle, complete with laser image enhancer and Starlite night scope. His P-226 was at his hip.

 

Jak wore his Magnum on his hip and hefted an old M-16 carbine on his shoulder.

 

Krysty simply carried her snub-nosed Smith amp; Wesson 640, the double-action model that held five .38-calber rounds.

 

Jak led the way from the camp, his long hair, bleached whiter than wind-washed ivory, blowing in a freshening breeze.

 

It was a truly beautiful morning. The kind of day when every muscle in your body felt relaxed for the sheer pleasure of being alive.