Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

 

Krysty stopped walking through the evening darkness, almost doubling over, both hands snatching at her forehead, pressing at her eyes as though they were bursting from their sockets. "Oh, Gaia!" she gasped.

 

Doc was alongside and he reached for her, putting an arm around her shoulders, supporting her, saving her from dropping to her knees in the watery mud that covered the trail. "My dearest lady!" he exclaimed. "Have you turned your ankle?"

 

"No." Her voice was thin with shock. "Not that. Just got a dreadful jolt to my mind."

 

J.B., Mildred and Jak had gathered around her, barely visible in the streaming drizzle.

 

"Is it Ryan?" the Armorer asked.

 

"Yes."

 

"What?"

 

Krysty straightened, still leaning heavily on Doc for support. "I don't know. Something bad. Something real bad. Hit me like a lightning bolt in the brain."

 

"Any idea what it is?" Mildred asked. "Or where he is?"

 

Krysty swallowed hard. "Not too far away. It was so triple strong." She laughed nervously. "About the most powerful 'seeing' I ever had."

 

"Dead?" Jak probed.

 

"I don'tcan't He was falling, and the world was spinning about him. Like he was lost in space." She shook her head. "I don't know, friends. Just that it's serious, and I don't believe it's chilled him outright."

 

"We're at the bottom of the valley," J.B. said. "Should be finding somewhere for the night. Do you want to push on up the grade?"

 

Krysty hesitated. "Could easy pass by whatever's the trouble in the dark," she finally decided. "Let's try and find somewhere out of this rain, then get moving at first light. And hope we find him."

 

 

 

WATER DRIPPED remorselessly into Ryan's open mouth, making him choke and bringing him back to a sort of consciousness.

 

For several long seconds he was totally disoriented, not knowing where he was or what had happened. He struggled to bring back the memory of the last few seconds before the world fell in on him.

 

Elvira Madison. The woman living alone in the ruins of what had once been the pretty little ville of Alma. Middle-aged and spunky, sorely disabled by arthritis. Neat little house with a harmonium and lots of ornaments.

 

Ryan blinked, aware of a ringing pain behind his left ear, becoming aware that something was pinning him down below the waist, holding him immobile.

 

"House fell" he mumbled.

 

Now it came back to him the noise like a large animal leaning clumsily against the frame house; the woman hurling toward him; walls cracking; the ceiling coming down, opening up the roof to the dark sky; jangling and wheezing from the tormented harmonium and the splintering of china and glass all about him.

 

"Earth slip," he concluded.

 

Ryan tried to work out how he was, the extent of his injuries.

 

His right hand was free, but his left arm was trapped beneath him. By feeling, Ryan could work out that the floor had opened and he'd dropped into it, leaving him caught around the ankles and thighs by a tangle of jagged beams and joists.

 

Some torn carpet was bulked up and wrapped around his waist, preventing him from getting at either the SIG-Sauer or the panga.

 

It was almost full dark, but there was a faint glimmer of ragged moonlight breaking through tatters of high cloud, enough for him to see a pale blur of white only a few inches from his face. Above the sound of the ceaseless pattering rain, Ryan realized that he could hear ragged breathing.

 

Not his own.

 

"Elvira?" he croaked, coughing out a mouthful of dirty water. He tried again. "Elvira? You hear me?"

 

There was no response.

 

He made an effort to move his legs and kick himself free. Something moved down below, pinching his left ankle, making him yelp at the pain. A rumbling seemed to come from everywhere at once, and Ryan had the sensation that everything had settled a little more firmly around him. He suddenly realized that his legs, to the knees, were also immersed in watery mud, thick and clinging like ice-cold gravy.

 

He wriggled his head sideways, trying to locate the moon, but it had vanished. The woman's face was barely visible, just in front of him, and her breathing seemed to have become slower in the past few minutes.

 

"Elvira? You hear me? Hang on in there. Got friends" He succumbed to another coughing fit at the tightness of the wreckage around his waist. "Friends on the way. Could be here some time after dawn. Just hang on."

 

The wind rose for a time, finally carrying the last of the rain away with it, clearing the sky, bringing a watery moonlight.

 

Ryan was able to see his wrist chron, finding that it was only a little after midnight.

 

He could also see the way Elvira was lying. A large roof timber had her pinned to the ruined floor. She was flat on her stomach, hands out of sight, hair dark with black, congealing blood, eyes closed. A deep cut dripped more blood from the side of her mouth, exposing the broken end of a denture. There was something sticking into her throat from beneath, which Ryan finally decided was the headless statue of Elvis Presley.

 

 

 

ELVIRA STOPPED BREATHING at 115 a.m. There was no drama, as there rarely was, simply the unmistakable cessation of everything.

 

It was a short while after her passing that the first of the tiny rodents appeared, the same breed that he'd spotted scampering through the puddles when he arrived in the heart of the burned-out ville.

 

They reminded him of the notorious cuddlies, furry little golden bears that looked like every child's bedtime ideal. The unbelievably vicious creatures had left young Jak Lauren with two deep scars on his face, near his mouth, that he would carry with him to the grave.

 

He was aware of them pouring over the wreckage like a black tide, none of them any larger than his thumb, with tiny dark eyes and miniature razor teeth. For several minutes they paid him no attention at all.

 

When one of them came close and began to climb up onto Ryan's jacket he gave the loudest roar he could and the mutie mice vanished.

 

They didn't reappear until a few minutes after three in the morning. There seemed to be even more of them, as if they'd been enlisting reinforcements from the whole of the devastated little township.

 

It was about then that Ryan also became aware that the watery mud was rising around him and had reached his groin.

 

"Fireblast!" The familiar expletive was so quietly and resignedly said that the absurdity struck Ryan and produced a ghost of a grim smilea smile that vanished at a pricking pain in the back of his trapped left hand. He flexed his fingers, looking down to see that the mutie rodents were turning their attention to him. Some of them were also making good time with the dead, staring face of Elvira Madison.

 

They covered her skull like a shifting hood of dark hair, with occasional glimpses of bloody skin beneath.

 

Ryan shouted and batted his right hand at them, disturbing them for a few moments. Only this time they didn't all vanish. They just withdrew and regrouped, hundreds of microscopic eyes watching him fixedly.

 

The moon showed him all too well the danger from the furry mice. In less than a half minute they'd virtually flayed the skin from Elvira's skull, less than a yard from him, also removing eyes and lips and much of the nose. Even as Ryan stared at the horror that she had become, a blood-sodden rodent emerged from her open mouth and dropped off into the wrecked timbers.

 

He shouted again, his voice echoing around him in the stillness. As he waved his fist threateningly at the creatures, he felt some of the beams shifting, pinning him even more tightly, sucking him lower into the watery trap.

 

If they could swim below the surface, then he was instantly, irrevocably doomed. But he had noticed that their fluffed-up fur held so much air it was impossible for them to dive. Indeed, it was almost impossible for them to drown unaided.

 

The timbers around him creaked and groaned under increasing pressure.

 

And the horde of tiny rodents edged closer again.

 

 

 

DOC WAS SNORING, and she could see in the moonlight that Jak, flat on his back, was also fast asleep. J.B. and Mildred had been whispering for some time, snuggled together, but they'd finally fallen quiet.

 

Only Krysty remained awake, lying in the corner of the ruined cabin just off Highway 9.

 

She kept remembering something that Ryan had said a few days earlier, how the thing he hated most was vermin. Rats and mice. Any kind of rodent.

 

But Krysty couldn't understand why she kept on recalling that conversation, eventually deciding that it had to have something to do with Ryan's current predicament.

 

Krysty prayed to Gaia and to the forces of the Earth Mother that she was wrong.

 

Despite all her skills, she still wasn't able to embrace sleep, lying with emerald eyes open, staring out at the starry night, worrying about Ryan.

 

The only bright spot was that it had finally stopped raining, though water still thundered down the wide streambed behind their cabin.

 

 

 

RYAN COULD FAINTLY HEAR the roaring of the swollen stream that ran clear down the valley toward the north.

 

It crossed his mind that Krysty might also be listening to it.

 

He had been watching the seething army of vermin, turning his head to try to check that they weren't coming at him from behind. Two or three hundred had edged closer, until they were within his reach.

 

His hand shot out like a striking rattler, grabbing a fistful. He plunged them below the scummy surface of the water around him, holding them there while he counted to twenty, figuring that would be long enough to flood their tiny lungs.

 

Ryan held tight, ignoring the biting, until the wriggling stopped. When he opened his hand a dozen or more little corpses bobbed into sight. One or two had struggled free and were climbing out of the water onto the ruins of the house.

 

"One for me, you little shits," he said, breathing hard with the tension.

 

The icy floodwater was now over his waist, and he started to worry about snakes. But he pushed that particular thought to the back of his mind. There were three possible ways that he was going to die crushed if the beams slipped any more; drowned if the water continued to rise; eaten alive if the rodents finally massed and attacked him all at once.

 

The way things were going, his best guess was that one of the three would have happened by dawn.

 

 

 

AS SOON AS KRYSTY touched J.B.'s shoulder he started awake.

 

"What?"

 

"We should go."

 

"Now?" He sat up, whispering so as not to disturb Mildred or Doc. Jak, in the corner of the ruined building, had also awakened, his senses razor honed.

 

"What is it?" he said. "Danger?"

 

Krysty shook her head. "Not here. But I have this triple-strong feeling that Ryan is in deep trouble."

 

"Dawn in an hour or so," the Armorer said. "We could wait until then."

 

"Move faster in light," Jak agreed.

 

"Could be too late then." She gripped J.B. by the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. "Now."

 

 

 

RYAN HAD LOST COUNT of how many of the mutie vermin he'd crushed and drowned. All that he was really aware of was the undeniable fact that they kept on coming. And each time there were more of them and each time they were bolder.

 

Twice in the past half hour his own violent reaction to the rodents had caused the timbers around him to slip, tightening their embrace on his legs and left arm, squeezing and crushing his chest so that breathing became more and more difficult.

 

Though it hadn't rained again for four hours or so, the level of water around him had continued to rise steadily until it was now across the top of his chest, scant inches from his face.

 

A raft of little furry corpses bobbed around him on top of the dull surface, and he waved them away with his free hand. Breathing was becoming much harder with the compression around his chest, and he had lost all sense of feeling below the waist from the icy flood.

 

There were fifteen or twenty minor cuts and bites on his right hand and arm, but nothing serious. Ryan knew that it wouldn't be long before the diminutive rodents gathered themselves and made a concerted rush at him. Hundreds would cover his head and chest and swarm over his eye and mouth, suffocating and blinding him.

 

He watched them in the moonlight. Making a high cheeping sound like newborn chicks, they were moving restlessly all over the ruins of the house, occasionally coming down to feast on Elvira's corpse.

 

There was enough illumination for Ryan to see the progress of their ravenous devouring. The dead woman's skull gleamed white, with ragged patches of matted hair and threads of gristle dangling from it. Despite their tiny size, the rodents were voracious eaters, and he could hear the noise of an infinity of small teeth tearing at the cooling flesh.

 

Dawn was still a good half hour away.

 

Ryan sensed that the ultimate attack from the mutie rodents was about to begin, and he readied himself to go down fighting into the last darkness and take his final ride on the wall of death.