she did so, like moving through water. The blaster was a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640. Her blaster. These psychos planned to chill her with her own blaster!
She struggled to move, but it felt like she had been drugged. Her limbs felt so heavy she could barely shift them. And the screaming—the screaming was getting louder. She could hear it, penetrating the very core of her being, like something in her womb, waiting to be born. What was going on? Were there other women like her, trapped, drugged, helpless, waiting for these stupes to hurt them, to chill them? Why else would they be screaming? She needed to get out of there, right now.
She tried clenching the fingers of her right hand, willing the muscles to move, and felt nothing more than a twitch. A twitch and a wealth of pain, as though the muscles of her arm had been dipped in acid, burning through the nerve endings, a ripple of agony. She bit her lip, holding back the scream.
Then a door to her right opened, a brighter light from outside bleeding through for a moment, and another figure was framed in the doorway. She couldn’t make out the backlit features, but the silhouette was plainly that of a woman, short and muscular. She held a large bowl of something, and from the way she carried it, it was likely full of liquid. More of the acid, perhaps, to drench her muscles in, to keep up the agony.
The woman put the bowl down; Krysty heard it being placed on the cabinet beside her ear, heard the liquid sloshing within. And then the woman reappeared in her line of sight, reaching for her face, a rag of cloth in her hand, dripping from a dunking in the bowl. Gaia, no! The woman planned to burn her face with the acid. What kind of monsters…?
In her mind, Krysty begged Gaia to help her, calling on all her strength to try to push herself off the bed, attack the woman with the acid cloth, stop the madness. Stop the bastard madness.
M ILDRED REACHED DOWN, placing the damp cloth on Krysty’s forehead. She’d obtained a bowlful of cold water from Jemmy, wishing she could add the simple, twentieth-century luxury of ice.
Nothing had changed in the three minutes that she’d been gone. J.B. continued stripping and cleaning Krysty’s weapons, greasing each segment from the container of oil he habitually carried in one of his voluminous pockets. That was his way of showing he cared, she knew. No point getting her through this only to have her blaster jam up, he had told her.
Ryan, meanwhile, stood looking out the window, watching as the street filled with people. It was about 8:00 p.m., and they’d been advised that the dogfights would kick off at 8:30 p.m. sharp. It was obviously a big slice of local action. A barker poised at the entrance to the open-topped circular barn at the end of the street was enticing passing trade to place early bets. The bar downstairs had got busier, too.
Stupe really. If they had arrived a couple of hours later than they did, the whole face-off with the sentries could have been avoided. Seemed the ville of Fairburn opened the gates at night.
Mildred stopped woolgathering as she felt something cross her hand where it mopped the cool water across Krysty’s brow. She looked at her hand and saw the streaks of red crisscrossing it—Krysty’s mutie hair was wrapping around Mildred’s hand like a creeping vine, surrounding and trapping it, its silken threads exerting considerable force. “Ryan, look,” Mildred whispered.
Ryan turned, and J.B. was already out of his seat, standing beside Mildred, a protective arm reaching for her.
“What is it?” Ryan asked. “How is she…?”
“I think she’s waking up,” Mildred told them softly, carefully excising her hand from the tangle of hair that had smothered it. “Come on, Krysty,” she said in a louder voice, “wake up now. It’s okay. Time to wake up now. Time to wake up.”
Krysty’s green eyes blazed open, full of fire and pain, and she sat up in the bed in a great spasm of her muscles, choking and coughing all at once. Mildred sat beside her, watching as the statuesque woman coughed and spluttered some more before taking gasping lungfuls of air as though she had nearly drowned. Krysty stayed like that for almost three minutes, doubled over herself, taking great, heaving breaths, unable to speak or to even acknowledge their presence. Finally she looked at Mildred, her face flushed, her shoulders hunched as she tried to breathe.
“Take it slowly, Krysty,” Mildred told her calmly, “there’s no need to rush. We’re safe here. It’s just us.”
Krysty looked around the room, seeing J.B., Ryan, returning to look at Mildred. “Wh-what,” she began, her voice a pained whisper, “what happened to me?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Mildred admitted. “Bad trip through the gateway maybe. You were pretty out of it for a while there.”
Krysty nodded, hugging her knees to her chest. “I thought I was going to be chilled,” she told them, genuine fear crossing her features at the memory of the hallucination.
“No,” Ryan assured her. “No chilling today.”
Krysty nodded slowly, her movements birdlike, twitchy.
“Here,” Mildred said, handing her a glass of water, “you should drink something. It’ll make you feel better.”
Krysty took the glass in both hands and it almost slipped from her grip, but she managed to clench it and raise it to her lips. Mildred, Ryan and J.B. watched as she sipped at the water, tentatively at first, before finally taking a long swallow. She greedily finished the glass, letting out a satisfied exhalation afterward, before handing the empty glass back to Mildred. “So much better,” she told them, a smile forming on her lips.
Grinning, Ryan leaned across and put an arm around Krysty. She returned the gesture, and they sat there, silently hugging for almost a minute while Mildred and J.B. looked uncomfortably away.
Finally, Krysty spoke up, still holding Ryan close to her. “We’re safe here, aren’t we?”
Ryan assured her that they were. “Jak and Doc are just downstairs, keeping an eye on comings and the goings, just to be triple sure.”
Ryan felt Krysty’s head nodding against his shoulder, relieved by his words. Then she spoke again, quietly, her voice so confused she sounded like a little girl. “Then why is everyone screaming?” she asked him.
Chapter Four
Jak and Doc had spent much of the past three hours watching the passing trade at Jemmy’s bar and, despite the small size of Fairburn ville, they had both been surprised at the surge in customers as the day stretched into evening. Doc had made some efforts to talk with the locals, joining in with a couple of hands of dominoes with some of the older men, and losing with good grace.
Jak had silently watched the room while the older man went about his business. The youth could scout for a man across two hundred miles with no more clues than a snapped twig and some churned-up mud once in a while, but he would never be one to put people at their ease. Part of that, Doc reasoned, came down to the lad’s appearance—whip thin, with alabaster skin, a mane of chalk-pale hair and those burning, ruby-red eyes. Doc was no domino expert, but he knew a lot about people. Gleefully losing a little jack to Sunday gamers was a sure way for an old man to ingratiate himself.
Doc had asked his questions in a roundabout way, just another chatty wrinklie passing through the ville. But he’d deftly turned the conversation to the subject of the strange tower outside the ville, and he’d met with what he could only describe as a polite silence. He hadn’t pressed the issue. Instead he’d set about
