Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ryan had drunk the liqueur. Trader often said that in a situation where you were going to have to do something, then you might as well do it willingly, with a good grace.
And watch your chance for retaliation.
The peppermint flavor almost covered up the slightly bitter aftertaste of the drink. Almost, but not quite.
Ryan contrived to spill some of the fiery liquor, but he caught a whisper of warning from one of the other people in the room with himself and Mary.
"Take care," the woman said very quietly, her fingers tightening a little on his shoulder. "Don't want it to go to waste. It's so fine, so rare. One of the last vintages from before the days of sky dark. Let me fill your glass once more. There. Now finish it."
Ryan drained it, feeling his head already beginning to swim a little from the combination of alcohol and the drug that he was certain it contained.
"Feeling dizzy, Ryan?"
"Yeah. Some. You put some kind of sleeper in the drink, didn't you?"
"Possibly."
Mary's voice was coming from a long way off, sounding as if it drifted into his mind from the back of an underground cavern filled with dark water.
"Anything happen me, others'll see"
"I'm sure they will," the voice said, echoing around and around his brain.
"Blasters good enough to"
Then the darkness rose, boiling around him, and Ryan slipped away into it.


"DELIGHTFUL THOUGH these jigsaw puzzles are, recapturing the many happy hours that I spent with my darling Emily locked away in such activity, I feel a deep unease racking my aged bones. Do none of you others feel this? Am I quite alone in my suspicions? Krysty, my dear lady, do you not?"
The redheaded woman sat by the empty grate, her booted legs stretched out in front of her, head back on the antimacassar, green eyes closed.
She answered without stirring.
"Sure, Doc. We all feel it."
"But do none of you share the midnight tenor that possesses me?"
"What talking about?" asked Jak, who had been wandering around the room like a caged snow panther.
Mildred looked up from the new jigsaw that she and J.B. had just begun, an infinitely complex design of birds and lizards in black and white.
"You got a theory about the Cornelius Family, Doc? Like to hear it. Find out if it matches one that I'm developing. What do you reckon?"
"I would prefer it if you were to tell me what your theory is first, Dr. Wyeth."
"No, Doc. I'm not going to risk looking triple stupe. You show me yours and I'll show you mine. That's fair, isn't it? What do you say, Doc?"
"I say that I am going to take a recreational stroll about the grounds. Perhaps I may even venture as far as the attractive little village of Bramton. Until I have found some facts to support my theory."
"Can I come, Doc?" Dean asked. "Going ape crazy hangin' around this old dump."
"I'll join too," Jak said, turning back from the window. "Get some good bayou air into lungs."
"Very well, my compadres . We three, we happy three, we band of brothers. One for all and all for one. My house is your house." He stopped, looking confused. "But I wander from the trail. Yes, let us go and then we can report back to Ryan. Let us hope we shall find him much recovered."


RYAN TRIED TO LIFT A HAND to check whether his right eye was open or closed, but an enormous weight seemed to have attached itself to his wrist. To both wrists.
To both ankles.
The drug still held him in its power, but he had recovered a sort of consciousness. It was a feeling a bit like making a jump, where your brain was swirling in free-fall inside the bony shelter of the skull.
"He's coming around."
Ryan partly recognized the voice, a man. Perhaps the one called Thomas.
"Keep quiet, Brother," Mary said.
Ryan tried to speak, but his tongue had turned to wet string and his voice came out as a mouselike squeak. He didn't bother to try again. Since be was helpless and tied to what he figured was a bed, there wasn't really all that much that he might want to say.
"Can you hear me, Ryan?" He didn't respond to her voice. A hand shook him by the shoulder, and he mumbled inaudibly under his breath. "I know you can hear me."
"Yeah" he drawled.
"Good. I have brought you here for one reason only. I will explain it, though I doubt you are clearheaded enough to understand me."
He could feel that his eye was opening and closing, but could see nothing.
"Blind," he managed to mumble.
"Yes, you are blind, Ryan Cawdor. And we fear that you will always stay that way. There is nothing that we can do to help you. Our makers would have had the skills, but they lie long beneath the good earth."
Makers? Ryan thought, confused. What could the woman possibly mean by using that strange word? Perhaps he hadn't actually heard her properly.
"We were safe inside our capsules when the missiles fell, scattering their seeds of death, blighting the land and anything that walked or crawled upon it. Safe inside Redoubt 47, where we were created."
Again an odd usage. Created? The drug was so powerful that Ryan couldn't hang on to a single thought for more than a few seconds. Part of him wanted to pursue this mystery, but most of him knew it was impossible.
"Don't waste time with this idle talk." The voice was a man's, insistent. "Get on with the mixing."
Ryan closed his eye and slipped back into deep unconsciousness.


IT WAS A FINE ENOUGH DAY, though the sky had clouded over and it had become humid. Doc complained as he mopped sweat from his brow with his swallow's-eye kerchief. Dean didn't seem bothered by it, and Jak positively flourished in it.
"Like old times," he said. "When was young. Summers always like this."
"When I was a young stripling, the summers were longer and sunnier than now. Blue from coast to coast from morn unto night. The air smelted sweet and birds sang. Grass grew and the corn was as high as I disremember how high. But it was not this blighted wen that is Deathlands."
Nobody stopped or questioned them as they left the mansion through the unbolted front door and began to stroll down the steep, crumbling path that led them above the river, toward the settlement. Smoke was already coming from the houses, and they could hear the hollow clunking of an ax somewhere deep among the trees. Down on the trout farm, they could make out the silvery flashing of the surging fish as a couple of Bramton women fed them from baskets.
"What you think of Family?" Jak asked, casually tossing one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives from hand to hand, occasionally launching it with a whipping, vicious underhand throw, striking the center of the trunk of one of the live oaks that lined the track.
"I think we flirt with deep and dangerous water. And I fear for our bodies and for our immortal souls. That's the truth, my dear friends."
There was a group of young children playing catch with some round pebbles, their backs to the approaching trio of companions.
They were so involved in their game that Doc, Jak and Dean were within a dozen feet of them before they noticed the crunching of boots on the highway.
Then one of them turned around, staring at Doc, his face without expression. He looked at Dean, with a similar lack of reaction. And, finally, the urchin touched on Jak.
His eyes narrowed as he took in the pale skin, the burning ruby eyes and the mane of snow-white hair.
"Family!" he screamed, rising to his feet and haring off down the main street of the ville. He was followed by all his friends, every one of them boggling at the albino teenager, ignoring Dean and Doc in their obvious terror of the youth.
"Perhaps you should be more careful of your personal freshness, dear boy," Doc joked.
"Because I look like Cornelius men," Jak said flatly. "What kind hold they got over ville?"
"That is precisely what fascinates me, Master Lauren. But I doubt that we shall find a satisfactory answer from any of these poor wretches."
"We still going into Bramton?" Dean asked.
Doc and Jak glanced at each other, the old man answering the boy. "Though I fear that it's a waste of time, we can but try. After all, we do not have anywhere better to go."


THE NEXT TIME RYAN recovered consciousness, he was surprised, to put it mildly, to realize that he was having sex with someone.
Not making love.
Certainly not that.
And it would be more accurate to say that someone was having sex with him.
He was still spread-eagled, tied to the corners of the bed, with thick cords that held him motionless. Someone was squatting astride him, gripping his thighs with heels, riding him like a stallion, rising and falling on a diamond-cutting erection, someone who had amazing control of her internal muscles and who was milking him dry, bringing him rapidly toward the brink of an astoundingly powerful orgasm.
"Yes, take him, Sister." It was the voice of one of the Cornelius men, thickened and hoarse with the sickly excitement of the voyeur. "Take him."
For a moment Ryan felt his erection begin to shrink and diminish. The woman felt it, as well, and she leaned forward over him, naked breasts brushing his chest, her powerful hands roaming over his body.
Despite her charnel-house breath, Ryan felt himself recover, despite himself, hating her with a bitter loathing for using him like a gaudy slut, detesting himself even more for becoming so painfully aroused.
He was very close to the edge.
Again she somehow sensed it, and her vagina began to tremble around him, fluttering like a butterfly. "Give me your essence, that we can all live," she whispered, her voice sounding drugged and ecstatic.
Ryan sensed the watchers drawing closer to the bed, tasting their sweat and their stinking breath, hanging over him like a foul miasma. But there was nothing he could do to hold himself back. The woman's power was awesome.
Ryan had never bothered to try to keep track of his sexual activity, but since his first experience in his early teens, there had to have been hundreds of partners.
Making love with Krysty was consistently the best that he'd ever known.
But there had never, ever been anything quite like Mary Cornelius.
It felt as though she were draining his heart, lungs and brain and soul, out through his penis, sucking the life force from him.
Ryan's back arched as if he were in the grip of a fearsome poison, lifting him off the bed, head thrown back, the straining muscles in his neck like whipcord.
A tiny part of his mind wondered whether his spinal cord were going to snap with the burning intensity of his racing orgasm. His mouth was open and he could hear his own breathing, feel his heart pounding so hard that it felt like it could leap clear out of his chest.
There was a terrible pressure behind his eye.
Ryan could feel warmth across his hands, where his own nails had drawn blood.
"Yes, yes, now" the woman said on a sigh, raising herself so that he almost slipped out from her, then dropping down onto him like a stone.
Ryan came.


KRYSTY HAD BEEN BACK to her room, using the bathroom, admiring the blue-flowered porcelain of the bowl and the dark oak seat. On her way to rejoin J.B. and Mildred she had paused to look through the stained-glass window that dominated the front landing.
It was a complex pattern, showing a frosty landscape. A hare limped trembling across it, and a band of hunters, dressed like medieval peasants, were trudging through the snow, carrying muskets and long bows. In the background was a house that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Cornelius mansion.
The main trail to the house was visible through the distorting panes of the colored, leaded glass. Krysty saw movement and realized that the three figures had to be Doc, Dean and Jak, returning from Bramton.
She hurried down the stairs, stopping in the hall as she noticed the slim figure of Norman standing still in the shadows beyond a huge seat with the word Sapientia carved above it in Gothic letters.
"Where's Ryan?" she asked.
Norman minced across to stand close to her. Krysty caught the musky scent of perfume.
"I think his treatment will soon be completed," he said in his high fluting voice. She noticed that his hair was dyed an odd mixture of ginger and lilac.
"Will he come back down here?"
"More likely they'll take him to the bedroom, Krysty," he replied, favoring her with a brilliant smile that showed a set of rotting teeth.
"I'll just see Doc and the others. Then I'll go up and wait for him."
"Of course. Whatever you wish. Liberty Hall here, my dear lady."


RYAN CAME AROUND TO FIND his wrists and ankles were free, though they felt chafed and sore. His mouth was dry, and it seemed as if his genitals had been sandblasted and then boiled in molasses. It was a bizarre sensation, burning and painful and exceedingly sweet.
"Why?" he said.
He could almost see heads turning toward him, and a muttered conversation ceased immediately.
"Why not?" Mary asked gently.
"Why me?"
"Because you are a man of unusual strength and character," a man's voice replied, not sounding quite like either Thomas or Elric.
"We are not as others," the woman stated.
"I figured that. What I don't get is just who you are and where you come from."
A hand brushed his cheeks, making him wince. The woman. "Don't worry. We don't mean to kill you. But we need you. Need you in ways you can't begin to understand."
The man spoke once more. "Within the day, you will know more. That I promise. Within the day."