Chapter Seventeen

"He put on a pair of rinky-dinky little sunglasses," Krysty said.
"Yeah. Square rims, just like Vincent Price wore in What was it called? In Tomb of Ligeia , wasn't it?" Mildred said. "Saw it in a student film festival of movies by that director."
"Roger Gorman, the unchallenged maestro of the cheapie-quickie," Johannes Forde stated. "I've read a great deal of all his wonderful works."
Mildred grunted her agreement. "Think that was it. Guess his eyes must suffer in sunlight. Elric, I mean. Yours do, too, don't they, Jak, sometimes?"
"Not on day like this. His worse than mine."
The weather had become humid and overcast again. Ryan could feel a trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. Somehow, having lost his sight, everything seemed to be much more like hard work than before.
Though Bramton had a flowing river, it was still closed in by the mangrove swamps and bayous, with their oppressive warmth and insidious damp.
Ryan yawned and rubbed his eye, taking care not to press too hard as it was still tender and painful. He shook his head, trying to clear the slight feeling of sickness, closing his once-good eye tight, opening it to the momentary illusion that he could make out patches of light and dark.
He held his breath and repeated the experiment, but there was nothing.
Nobody spoke to him at that moment, so he guessed he hadn't been observed.
"How long before we need to make our move toward the house of the Family?"
J.B. answered him, having checked his chron. "About three hours."
"Want to take a walk, lover?"
Ryan turned to Krysty's voice. "Why not? Better than sitting around here getting sweaty for no reason. Anyone else fancy coming along?"
"I'd like to walk with" Dean stopped so sharply that Ryan had the distinct feeling that the boy had been given an urgent signal from someone else, possibly from Krysty herself. "Oh, sorry, just remembered. Said I'd go out with Jak to see if we could scare up a gator."
"That's all right, son."
Krysty took Ryan's arm and led him away from the others, along the main street for about fifty yards, then turned to the left, toward the bank of the river.
"Watch it here. Steep down and the mud's slippery. Overhanging branch on your right. That's it."
The faint noises of the township had faded away behind them. Now there was only the noise of their boots sucking through the wet dirt and the buzzing of insects. Within six or seven minutes Ryan found himself becoming irritated by the slow pace caused by his own clumsiness.
"Mebbe you should leave me here to sit a spell and you go on ahead for a walk, Krysty."
"That what you want?"
"Best."
"Sure?"
He heard the hesitation in his own voice and hated it even more. "Fucking said so, didn't I?"
"What you say and what you mean aren't always the same, lover, are they?"
He bit his lip, feeling the familiar throbbing in the old scar that seamed his face. "I just Fireblast!" He put his head in his hands and stood still.
Krysty didn't touch him, waiting a few seconds before she spoke. "Listen, Ryan, and listen good. I probably sound like a preacher at a river-crossing meeting, but it has to be said. If I put my arms around you now and give you a hug and tell you how I love you and it'll be all right, then I'll certainly start weeping right off."
"Guess I might, too."
"Sure thing. Anyhow, you know all that. Bad enough when you start feeling sorry for yourself. Worse all around if others start pitying you. That what you want? Pity?"
"You know it's not."
"Good," she said gently. "What's happened is rough. If it stays that way it'll be bad, but we can pull through it together and make the best we can."
"Guess so." He felt a tear brimming from the corner of his right eye. "Sure, that's right."
"And you know what Mildred said."
"Yeah."
"So so let's get on with this walk."


KRYSTY KEPT UP a running commentary as they walked side by side along the narrow, winding path, going deeper into the heart of the bayous.
"Few houses around. All rotted down. Spanish moss thick on the tumbled roofs and vines twining in through where the windows used to be."
"No people?"
"Nobody. Looks like they might have been holiday homes. There's the remnants of a blacktop tilted sideways into the swamp on our left. Old church. Steeple collapsed into itself so it stands there among the angled white walls, like the mast of a weird ruined schooner."
"Wildlife?"
"Plenty of tracks. Big birds all around here. And those long slither marks you get from alligators. Deer. Could be wild pigs, as well."
He stopped and sniffed the air. "Wet and dark," he said. "Brackish water overlaying everything." He stared blankly up at the sky. "Overcast?"
"Patches of sun, but we're mostly in shade here. So you were right."


THEY STOPPED for a few minutes, recovering their breath in the warm, soupy air. They had come to what looked like an old tourist motel on the edge of a long-abandoned and clogged marina. Three or four small fiberglass-hulled boats were visible, sunk in the shallow water like the bodies of long-dead whales, held in the limbo of dream time.
"Smell of rotting meat," Ryan said.
"Can't catch that. Time was I could pick up a scent far better than you, Ryan. Clean living and never smoking helps. Now your sense of smell is sharper than mine."
He waited, sitting on a fallen mangrove, while Krysty went to explore. They had come across a narrow causeway that had almost vanished into the murky waters. At one point Krysty had told him that they were only a few inches clear of the scummy surface of the swamp.
The afternoon was drifting by.
After three minutes, or eight minutesRyan had lost the ability to judge the passing of timehe decided to try a little cautious exploration of his own.
He had left the Steyr rifle back with the others, but he still wore the SIG-Sauer on his hip, the long panga sheathed on the opposite side.
Krysty had picked a six-foot broken branch off a willow and trimmed the side shoots off with the panga, fashioning it into a serviceable staff for him to use.
Now he began to feel his way along the path, aware of tall weeds brushing against the sides of his combat boots. Krysty had told him that among the lush, rank plants there was a smattering of the ubiquitous daisy, its gold and white making a brave show among the leprous green and gray.
Ryan could imagine it.
He knew that the motel was about thirty yards ahead of him, slightly to his left, standing at the end of a ruined jetty that had fallen into the lagoon like a jumble of old bones, nearly a century past.
Ryan stepped with an assumed confidence, but in a half dozen paces he'd lost it. The stick probed at the air in front of him, tapping on the ground to protect him from tumbling straight into the water.
He stopped and listened for any sound of Krysty, but he could hear nothing. "Turned her back on me," he whispered, aware that his mouth was dry. It brought back a snatch of an old song that one of the cooks on War Wag One used to sing, about how a man who turned his back on his family wasn't any good.
The stick rapped on something solid. Wood or stone?
"Wood," he muttered, hearing an echo, which had to mean he had reached the motel. He considered whether it was a good idea to go a little farther.
The boards beneath his feet squished with water, and Ryan hesitated, wondering if he might go clean through them and plummet into the swamp below.
"Krysty?" he said halfheartedly. "Krysty! You there, lover?"
His voice rebounded sullenly, sounding muffled and deadened. Ryan had only the vaguest idea of what the building was like. Two-storied, Krysty had said, but looking decayed and totally uninhabitable.
He fumbled forward with his staff, feeling the sponginess of the floor, trying a couple of steps, but there was something lying in front of him that he didn't pick up on. Ryan tripped and fell clumsily, banging his elbow and losing hold of the long staff.
Panic sighed in his ears, flooding his mind with fear, overwhelming the honed combat reflexes that had kept him alive in Deathlands.
He scrabbled for the branch, fighting for control over his own blind terror, finally finding it with his right hand. He sat there for a moment, hanging on to the stick like a drowning man to a lifeline.
His breathing became steady and slow. "I am strong and I have no fear. I am strong and I have no fear. I am strong and I have no fear." It was one of the mantras that Krysty had taught him many months ago, as a way of reducing stress and bringing back calmness and peace to the core of his being.
He stopped a moment, straining his hearing, imagining he'd heard a faint rustling sound. Feet. Far away in the heart of the building? Or something different?
"I am strong and I have no fear."
Closer.
Something brushed against his ankle and he jumped, spooked by the almost silent approach of whatever it was.
"Krysty?" he whispered.
Another touch, on the back of his right thigh. He had the feeling that something was scenting him.
Ryan gripped his stick more firmly, trying to judge where the creature wasor if there was more than one.
The attack was so sudden, taking him by surprise, that he yelled out. Something had jumped into his lap and bitten him on the inside of his left wrist. It felt about the size and weight of a small mongrel dog, and Ryan snatched desperately at it with his right hand.
Blindness hadn't slowed that part of his reflexes, and he caught the thing. Scrawny and hairy, struggling like crazy, squeaking at him, its long tail lashing against his body.
Long tail?
"Fireblast!" he shrieked. "Krysty! Help me, I'm being attacked by"
"Rats!" she shouted from some way off, her voice distorted by the distance, the walls and the broken doors and windows. "Stand up and swing the branch, Ryan. For your life! Now! There's dozens of the mutie bastards!"
He was up in a nanosecond, throwing the rat from him, hearing the dull thump as its body smashed into a wall. He flailed around with the long stick as the pack of vermin surged at him, feeling more helpless and hopeless than ever before.