Chapter Twenty-One

 

 

 

Ryan had always found it difficult to fall asleep in a strange bed, particularly when the bed was as vast and luxurious as this one in the west wing of the ville of Sun Crest. Krysty prodded the mattress, shaking her head. "I swear that it's goose feather, lover."

 

"Goose feather! We had one like that back home in Front Royale. Great in winter. In summer you lay on it and it kind of enveloped you, like a sucking pit. All you could do to fight your way out of its embrace."

 

"I think it's romantic. Like in that old folk song about the princess who runs off with the gypsy into the forest. You know it, Ryan?"

 

"Yeah. Think so."

 

He walked across the deep-piled carpet and pressed his forehead against the chill metal of the bars that closed off the window. "Guess we didn't have a lot of free choice coming here."

 

"I can't get a true feeling about it. There's a sort of softness in the ville, but hard underneath. Like Well, like this mattress but with barbed wire hidden at the bottom."

 

"We could have opened up and blasted them away when Dean fell."

 

"Sure we could, Ryan. And one of those sec men could easy have blown the boy's skull apart. You said yourself they were well trained."

 

"I guess. Still, let's go to bed and catch up on sleep. Then see what the baron has to show us in the morning."

 

 

 

RYAN FOUND the immensely soft mattress was just like his worst childhood memories. Wonderful for the first five minutes, then it became too hot, wrapping itself around his body, so that he seemed to be sinking slowly into a quagmire.

 

He tossed and turned, trying not to keep Krysty awake. But she had used the meditation techniques taught by her mother and was fast asleep, lying on her back, breath clicking faintly in her throat.

 

Eventually, grudgingly, he slithered into a shallow, fitful darkness.

 

 

 

THE SUN, directly overhead, had the pinkish-purple hue that threatened a serious chem storm. Only a few torn fragments of maroon clouds marred the perfection of the bowl of the sky.

 

The ground beneath Ryan's boots was bone dry, shifting as he moved his feet, composed of the finest dust. A tiny tailless lizard, its scales an iridescent turquoise, scuttled from one shadowless rock to another.

 

The landscape was featureless, stretching around Ryan, making him feel like a man sitting at the bottom of a soup bowl, the gray desert seeming to rise all about him.

 

Here and there he could make out the jagged shapes of cacti, though not like any he'd seen before. They were a leprous, sickly yellow white, with narrow spines a foot long, tapered like the sharpest needles.

 

"Christina doesn't mind the desert, you know, Ryan. But the brightness hurts my eyes."

 

It was no surprise to find that Jak Lauren was walking at his side. The vivid sun flared off the deathly white of the albino teenager's hair, deepening the ruby coals of his deep-set eyes.

 

"You should wear dark glasses, kid. Sorry, Jak. Forgot you don't like being called that. Been such a long time since we last met up."

 

"Yeah. Tomorrow is the yesterday you worried about before we met, Ryan."

 

"Or you could try blinding yourself in one eye. I did that, and it cuts the pain from the sun in half. Why don't you give that a try, Jak?"

 

"Sure. Or could pluck out both eyes and then have no pain at all."

 

Somewhere in the brazen fastness above them they heard the raw screech of a hunting falcon, but neither of them could quite make it out.

 

Jak laughed and threw his skinny arms out wide. "Happiness is being happy, Ryan," he shouted, his voice seemed to echo back from the edges of the land.

 

Far off, toward the distant horizon, there was a single vivid flash of lightning that appeared to stay frozen in place, like a jagged strip of silver. Ryan turned and stared at it, but it eventually faded away, leaving only a faint dark memory imprinted across the retina.

 

The building to his right, a quarter mile away, seemed to be falling into a dark tarn, its ivy-covered walls crumbling like stale bread. At one of the golden, lamplit windows, there was the shape of a woman, with long hair, watching them across the wilderness.

 

Jak had started to run, spinning like a dervish, his bare feet kicking up clouds of dust that threatened to envelop and overwhelm him.

 

"Careful, kid. Watch out for the big, bitching cactus behind you."

 

"Don'tcallmebecause I'll call you, Ryan." A screech of eldritch laughter erupted from the center of the dust devil.

 

"Of course you call me Ryan. That's my name, Jak. I've got my identification on my belt."

 

The white-haired boy stopped suddenly, deathly still, both hands making a strange flicking motion. Ryan felt something tug at his right shoulder and almost simultaneously at the left. A jabbing, stabbing pain.

 

When he glanced down, Ryan saw that Jak had hurled two of his leaf-bladed throwing knives, showing his usual unerring accuracy. Each of them pinned Ryan's coat to the barn wall behind him, the honed tips also nipping a fold of skin. A tiny trickle of blood ran down each arm.

 

"Good throwing, Jak. But why did you do that?"

 

"Stopping you stopping me, Ryan, old friend, old comrade, old look-after-yourself-first."

 

Jak resumed his whirling dance, nearer and nearer to one of the murderous cacti.

 

"Keep an eye out, Jak," Ryan called.

 

It was extremely difficult to understand exactly what happened next.

 

Jak stumbled over an eyeless human skull that lay half-buried in the sand and fell, facedown, into the cactus.

 

He screamed, rolling over and over, feet kicking in the air, his hands pressed to his face, pressed to his eyes, over his eyes. He squeezed tight, the slender, bloodless fingers clamped close together, but that didn't stop the blood coming through.

 

Not white, like his hair and skin.

 

Red.

 

Vivid, brilliant red.

 

A venous, arterial red.

 

It oozed into a trickle, into a sticky, steady rush of blood that dripped over Jak's hands and onto his neck and shirt and pattered into the dust, drying instantly into small clotted lumps, like dark popcorn.

 

Ryan ran to him, his feet slipping. Three paces forward and then two paces back.

 

Behind him he heard a rumble and turned for a moment to see that a huge crack had opened in the flank of the house, and it had fallen into the bottomless lake.

 

"Can't see. Once could see but now blind, Ryan. Was free but now lost."

 

The boy was sitting up now, his face still hidden behind his hands, the blood still pumping out from the unseen wound. Ryan knelt and gently pulled away the hands, surprised how soft and unresistant they were, feeling his own hands become instantly clotted with Jak's blood.

 

Seeing now the wound.

 

The spike of the cactus had penetrated clear through Jak's crimson eyeball and speared it out, leaving only a raw and empty socket.

 

But what added to the horror, and made Ryan cry out in shock and despair, was that the wound was so deep it had gone right through the teenager's head and out the other side, leaving a neat round hole the size of an old silver dollar, through which Ryan could see the desert and the bright blue of the sky.

 

Jak was smiling up at him, as though God were in his heaven and all was right with the world. "Nothing too bad, Ryan? Said, nothing too bad?"

 

Ryan said nothing, staring at the wound, from which a flood of wriggling maggots was beginning to crawl.

 

 

 

IN THE MOMENT OF WAKING, Ryan found that his entire body was streaked with sweat, rigid with the paralysis of the horrific nightmare.

 

His mouth was open, lips dry, the muscles in his jaw aching as if he'd been chewing forever and a day on a raw hunk of inedible meat.

 

Krysty stirred in her sleep, right arm thrown across her eyes. She'd pushed the cover down below her breasts, which glistened with perspiration in the cold moonlight that speared between the draperies.

 

Ryan stood, careful not to disturb her, fighting his way clear of the fetid embrace of the goose-feather mattress. He padded naked to the window and peered through the gap in the velvet curtains.

 

The steel bars were icy to the touch. He gripped them tight, consciously trying to steady his breathing after the dream, aware that his heart was still beating fast.

 

The land outside was thrown into sharply contrasting patches of light and blackness, with the river gleaming like polished glass and the trees stretching away across Kansas, farther than the eye could see.

 

He looked at it with the keen eye of a combat veteran, noting the care that had gone into the defensive placements of the powerful ville the high wall, topped with unpenetrable coils of razored antipersonnel wire; gun positions, some of them with a shadowy figure behind an LMG; the trees and bushes hacked away to clear lines of fire.

 

Ryan was suddenly conscious that he was being observed, and he looked to the right, seeing that there was someone standing in the shadows of the turret roof on the next block along, staring directly at him.

 

It was difficult to tell, because of the thickness of the glass, but he was reasonably certain that it was the mistress of Sun Crest.

 

Marie Mandeville.

 

Ryan closed the draperies and went back to bed, to sleep dreamlessly until the morning.