Avery and I can take it from here. You all can go.â
âYou heard the lady,â he said, passing the hose down to Krysty and clambering from the roof of the mostly gutted cabin. âLetâs shift on out of here.â
Jak looked at him with eagerness written on his face. âGo up top, watch?â
He nodded. Jak scrambled up to the roof.
âMan doesnât talk much,â he told the Queen crew members.
âNoticed,â Jake said.
* * *
âWAIT,â MILDRED MUTTERED. âHow did I wind up carrying the lower end of this freaking coffin when the dude on the other end is like eight feet tall?â
Santee was not, in fact, eight feet tall, although he was six-six, minimum, or she was the Pope, Mildred thought, and he was indisputably on the end higher up the staircase. Or âladder,â as the boat people insisted on calling it. That struck the much shorter Mildred as markedly unfair.
Of course what they were carrying could only serve as a coffin for a child or a very short adult. It was no more than five feet long and felt as if it were packed with lead ingots. Or maybe she felt burdened because it was sweltering hot there in the cargo hold, and she had to breathe through a wet handkerchief tied around her face to filter out the smoke. And then there was the stench of rotting blood from poor Edna and Maggie, although their bodies had been taken ashore.
âWhatâs in it, anyway?â she demanded as she struggled up the stairs with her unbalanced burden. âShouldnât we only be carrying, like, food and other vital supplies off the boat?â
The big man smiled down at her. âTreasure,â he said cheerfully. Nothing seemed to get to Santee.
She managed to make it up the rest of the way and onto the deck, where the two of them handed the long wooden box over the rail to a quartet of workers standing in shin-deep shallows. Then she propped her butt on the rail to catch her breath. Santee said nothing, only drank deeply from a canteen and handed it to her.
He didnât seem offended when she wiped the mouth with her hands. Even on short acquaintance, the Mississippi Queenâs crew had learned that she had her eccentricities. Fortunately, they were inclined to take folk at their own value, and not sweat that kind of thing unless it slopped over into their own personal lives. They werenât outlaws, these people who made their livings on the riverâcertainly not by the standards of the dayâbut they were pretty clearly outcasts, who had trouble fitting into the more settled societies ashore.
Which is probably why we and they get along like bosom buddies, she thought.
Her companions and the crew worked without particular urgency to unload the boat of whatever was deemed necessary, and prepare a camp on the riverbank, which was as flat as a board and barely higher than the water. The sun wasnât going to set for some time yet, and it wasnât as if they could hide their presence.
Ryan and the captain had chosen a decent spot to ground the boat. It was a mostly clear area of dry, firm soil. The radiation in the immediate vicinity wouldnât chill them too quickly, according to Ryanâs coat-lapel rad counter. As for the amount of heavy metalsâbrutally toxicâthey might be taking in, there was no way to tell, which didnât make Mildred any too happy. But what mattered was immediate survival. In the absence of that none of the other stuff would matter anyway.
The one slightly alarming aspect was the presence of a dilapidated railroad bridge barely a quarter mile upstream. The rusty steel structure had fallen into the creek from roughly one-third of the way out from this bank almost to the far side. Likely there was still a rail line, long overgrown by weeds, leading to and from it. The problematic part was, this region was alleged to be crawling with stickies, and that derelict bridge would provide an ace nest for a major stickie colony.
Still, she thought, we take what we can get. As usual.
Ryan was hacking back the long grass and scrub surrounding their landing point with his panga. Jake was helping out with a scythe that they seemed to be carrying to trade at some point. He mowed the stuff down far faster than Ryan, and likely could have done as well by himself. But Ryan clearly felt the need to do something, especially after the enforced helplessness when they were trying to run from a bunch of boats shooting cannon at them.
At least Ryan and Mildred had prevailed on Krysty to take it easy, once they got ashore. She had insisted on carrying her own backpack off the vesselâfortunately all their gear had survived the fires and general smashing. Then she went off to the side and sat down on her jacket, spread out on the dirt. She was acting normally, aside from her not being in the thick of all this activity.
Mildred smirked. Sometimes she got her companions to stop acting as if they were superhuman, and to take some regard for their health. If you didnât take care of yourself some, your performance degraded. There was no way around that. And especially given the way they all lived, that was a fast ride to a hole in the ground, with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Such was life in the Deathlands.
Sadly, the captain would not listen to Mildredâs urging that she rest after her terrible injury and blood loss, though in fairness she wasnât listening to her own people, either. She was wading around in the water with Avery and Nataly, inspecting the pierced hull to see if it could be repaired. Or if it even had the structural integrity left to be worth repairing. After sharing a brief, impassioned hug with her, her husband had retreated below to the engine compartment with J.B. and Ricky, doing something to take care of the engines, which Mildred understood not at all and cared about less.
She decided to watch Trace closely. Strangely, aside from her losing her lower arm, and Edna and Maggie losing their lives, no one was seriously hurt. Pretty much everybody had gotten cut, scraped, bruised and burned. Even Nataly looked as if sheâd just gotten a bad sunburn on the left side of her face, once the grime and gore got washed off. Mildred guessed it hurt like bloody hell, but the first mate was stoic about it.
Well, great.
She heaved herself to her feet. Suzan and Abner MacReedy were carrying a crate of scavvied canned goods out of the hull. They were prime trade goods, too, as whatever the few-spoken Santee termed âtreasureâ presumably was. But if their day-to-day survival depended on consuming themâwell, they were cheap at the price, as long as they werenât spoiled. She reckoned she needed to get back and pitch in.
Weâre all exhausted, she thought. Surely I can take my eyes off Trace and Krysty for a few minutesâ¦
From his perch atop the cabin, which was the most intact roof section of the largely burned-out cabin, Jak yelled out, âCrocs! Lots!â
Ryan knew their scout Jak didnât cry wolf. But what really ripped his attention away from hacking at the weeds surrounding the campâand keeping his eye scanning in all directions inland, mindful of all the reasons he was trying to clear the tall grass and brush awayâwas that Jakâs falcon-scream warning was followed promptly by the cracking, booming blast of his .357 Magnum Colt Python handblaster.
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