Chapter Thirty-Eight

 

 

 

Ryan's guesstimate of how long it would take them to reach the crest and Bear Claw Ridge didn't take the lepers into account.

 

There were six of them.

 

Ryan had taken up point himself, with Krysty at his elbow. She had stopped him with a hand on his arm.

 

"Something ahead, lover."

 

"What?"

 

"Not good."

 

"Close?

 

"Yeah."

 

Ryan held up his hand, stopping the straggling line behind him. He heard a sigh of relief from Harold as he laid down his end of the stretcher, and a muffled moan from Abe as he was jolted back to earth.

 

"Krysty feels something up ahead," he said quietly. "Near."

 

"Bad?" J.B. asked, the Uzi machine pistol cradled under his arm.

 

She shook her head. "Odd. Can't tell. There's a kind of feeling of a threat, but it's like, far off. No. Don't know."

 

"Come on." Ryan beckoned to J. B. Dix, and, automatically, to Jak Lauren, catching the glance from Christina and cursing himself under his breath.

 

"Back soon," the albino teenager said, but his wife turned away from him.

 

 

 

THE PATH WIDENED and became less distinct at the same time, opening onto the remains of an old two-lane blacktop. A century of frost and sun had combined with weeds and bushes to break it up, but its course was still clear.

 

Off to the left, they could still hear the stream that had been their constant companion for the past few days.

 

This high it hadn't gathered the momentum from runoff water to turn it into a roaring brown torrent. Here it was just a narrow, shallow stream of ice-cold, milky water that surged over rounded boulders and tumbled across eroded ledges of granite and sandstone.

 

The blacktop was spotted with animal droppings. J.B. identified one recent pile as being almost certainly grizzly.

 

"Think that was what Krysty saw?" Jak asked, glancing around.

 

"Not usually animals," Ryan replied, "but you just never know, kid."

 

Jak turned and glared at him, then grinned. "Have own kid soon."

 

"Sure. I'm real pleased." Ryan stopped, halting the others. "I know Christina is pissed at me, Jak. And I understand. Really."

 

"Had bad times, Ryan. Now good times come. Doesn't want to lose that."

 

"Yeah. She sees me as some kind of snaggle-toothed ghost come beckoning to you from the grave. Once this is over, we'll be gone."

 

"How about rebuilding the spread?" J.B. said. "Lot of work."

 

Ryan looked at the teenager. Jak sighed and ran his hand through the unruly mop of pure white hair. "Use help. Think Christina would be okay. Once danger's gone. Talk to her. I will."

 

J.B. was sniffing the air. "Smell something," he said, bringing up the Uzi.

 

"What? Smoke?"

 

"No. Just likesomething sort of rotting. Like bodies, but not quite the same."

 

"Now that could be something that Krysty was seeing." Ryan hesitated a moment. "Jak left, and J.B. right. Skirmish line and I'll take the middle. Triple-red alert."

 

 

 

THE HIGHWAY DIPPED and swept left in a gentle curve, revealing a huddled cluster of buildings in the distance. Close by was the ruins of a gas station, the Exxon sign broken off in a jagged stump eight feet from the ground.

 

There was a small group of people sitting close together by the stained concrete base of the derelict heap of rubble.

 

"Lepers," J.B. said.

 

They all stopped, looking at them. Ryan counted six. At a distance of a hundred feet or so it wasn't possible to make out any details of sex or age.

 

"Take them out from here?" the Armorer suggested. "Burst from the blaster'll chill most of them. Pick off the rest with the Steyr."

 

A couple of the lepers stood, the ragged hoods drawn over their stooped heads. One was holding what looked like an M-16, but it was at the trail. There didn't seem any sense of threat or defiance. Just a slumped, hopeless defeat.

 

The Trader's rule had been steel hard. "Take them out. Dead man hurts nobody."

 

Ryan had survived in Deathlands long enough to recognize the validity of that inflexible commandment. Common sense said chill the little gang of lepers. He assumed that they were the miserable bunch of survivors from their failed attack on the stickies who'd picked their way up the steep trail and had now collapsed from exhaustion or hunger.

 

"Hold fire," he said. "Cover me."

 

"No," J.B. argued. "You know Trader's way. Safe way."

 

"They look a threat to you? Fireblast, J.B., we can't chill everyone we meet!"

 

"They're lepers, Ryan. Bad news." Jak had retrieved his Magnum and held it drawn and cocked.

 

"Wait here." Ryan stepped forward, the heels of his combat boots ringing out bravely on the surface of the blacktop.

 

One of the other lepers held up his right hand in what might have been a gesture of friendliness. Or of warning. Only half of the middle finger remained on the hand.

 

"You got food?" came the croaking voice.

 

"Enough for us. Nothing to give."

 

"We're starving."

 

"We give you our food and we starve. That's the way it is."

 

"Help us."

 

"Can't."

 

Now he was a scant thirty feet from them. Close enough to make out the details.

 

One of the lepers lying down had the slack, discarded, unmistakable appearance of a corpse. Another seemed to be unconscious, with a massive stain on the front of his coat that was obviously a mixture of old and fresh blood. A third was squatting, back to Ryan, trying to knot some rags around a gaping knife wound to the face.

 

The three standing and looking at him were all male. The other leper, who had remained sitting, seemed to be female, but she was ignoring him, hands wrapped about herself as though she was trying to combat a deep and bitter cold.

 

"We got no place to go."

 

The voice was thick and difficult to understand.

 

Ryan looked hard at the speaker. "Then stay right here."

 

"We got stickies after us."

 

"Why?" Ryan asked, pretending he didn't know about their attack on the encampment.

 

"They figure we harmed them. Some shitting load of stickie lies."

 

Ryan nodded sympathetically. "Know how it is."

 

"Just the three of you?"

 

"No. Another half dozen back in the trees, waiting for me to call them on."

 

"They got food?"

 

Ryan moved a few steps closer. "I told you. We got no food."

 

"But we"

 

"Tell you a second thing. We know how you sneaked up on the stickies' place and tried to massacre them all. Not our business. But we know."

 

The leper threw back his hood, revealing a face that had been hideously ravaged by the disease. His nose and ears were gone, as was most of his upper lip and part of his cheeks.

 

"You see what God's done to us, mister. Can you blame us for trying"

 

"Keep getting told the ways of God are strange," Ryan replied. "And I don't blame you for anything you did."

 

"Then why"

 

He held up a hand. "One other thing you should know. Those same stickies are coming after us like goose shit off a shovel. Be here in a couple of hours or so. If I was you, I'd move my ass before they get here. Stickies aren't known for their forgiving nature."

 

The woman seemed to explode from the ground in a bundle of tattered rags and flying dust.

 

Ryan glimpsed a hairless, misshapen skull, and a face with a weeping raw hole at its center.

 

He also saw the sunlight glinting off the broad-bladed knife she gripped clumsily in her right hand.

 

Though he'd been ready for an attack as he'd walked down the narrow highway toward the old gas station, Ryan had been lulled into a false sense of security by the apathetic and defeated air of the little group of survivors.

 

But the leper woman stumbled, catching her foot in the cloak of the man with the slashed face. The quarter-second delay was enough for Ryan.

 

The SIG-Sauer coughed once, and his attacker flew backward, feet flying in the air, hitting the dirt with her shoulders. Most of the rear part of her skull had been blown away by the 9 mm round.

 

The knife was hurled into the air, whirling with a strange slowness, before it came tinkling back to earth again.

 

"Stupid," Ryan said through gritted teeth. "That was stupid."

 

"Gabrielle was always real stupid," said one of the other lepers, looking sorrowfully down at the twitching corpse.

 

"Ryan?" The shout came from J.B., farther up the blacktop.

 

A wave of the hand to reassure him and Jak that everything was under control. Though Ryan knew in his heart that he'd been a lot luckier than he'd truly deserved.

 

"You going to chill us all?"

 

"No."

 

"Do us a favor."

 

"I'm not in the business of doing fucking favors!" Ryan knew as he shouted that his anger was mainly directed at himself.

 

"We got two dead. One gut-shot and floating into the big dark. What kind of stinking chance the four of us got?"

 

"Chance to take some long steps out of here. Move now and you'll mebbe find a place to hole up for dark. Could be the stickies might miss you."

 

"How about him?" one of the hooded figures asked, pointing to the leper with the caked blood across his coat.

 

"Dying."

 

"Give him a bullet, mister. Least you can do for us."

 

"You got a carbine. You do it. Your friend, not mine."

 

"Empty."

 

Ryan was tired of wasting time. He stepped in and kneeled, his eye watching for another piece of treachery, placed the four-and-a-half-inch barrel of the handgun behind the dying man's ear and squeezed the trigger. The head bounced and a splatter of blood and brains appeared on the dirt.

 

"There. Now get out of here."

 

Still trying to wind the crimson strips of rag around his face, the other wounded leper rose to his feet. And all four of them began to move wearily off along the road, toward the cluster of buildings.

 

"Don't even think about stopping in that township," Ryan warned. "We'll be there, and we'll chill anyone in the way. Just walk on."

 

The spokesman turned. "You said stickies was coming. That a lie?"

 

"No. Truth. But we're goin' to be ready for them. So long."

 

"But you"

 

Ryan pointed the gun at the man's chest. "So long," he repeated.

 

Slowly, looking to be in the last stages of exhaustion, the four lepers trudged away, following the blacktop, leaving the corpse of their colleagues where they lay.

 

Ryan watched them until he was sure they weren't going to dodge into the buildings and try to hide. Then he lifted the SIG-Sauer and waved J.B. and Jak toward him.

 

"Bring the others!" he shouted. "Let's get ready for the stickies."