wheels like that is going to have one bastard of an armory on board.”
Mildred shook her head. “Yeah, well, there’s too much weirdness there. Thank God he’s headed in the opposite direction.”
“Agree with that,” Krysty added.
Chapter Two
When the sun went down, the companions pitched camp for the night. They had changed their direction, figuring that a ville lay on the line cut through the desert plain by the man on the bike. It was still in line with their original course, and a detour couldn’t hurt if it gave them a chance to collect more supplies. Particularly water. They were on too tight a ration for the heat they had to endure during the day, and it was a primary concern.
Jak was on edge, senses straining for the return of the bike. What if the stranger hadn’t attacked simply because he was on his own? What if he had been on a recce, and was now on his way back with other riders, heavily armed?
Ryan felt much the same, although without the heightened senses to give him warning. He did, however, have something that may have been even better than that: Krysty.
It was obvious from the way that she sat, staring into the fire, that something was bothering her. She was preoccupied. He could tell from the way that her flowing, prehensile hair had flattened itself, curled around her like a shield. Usually, the tresses were wild and free. The opposite could only mean one thing.
“Problem?” he asked her quietly. Jak was himself preoccupied, Doc was sleeping and J.B. and Mildred were some distance off, grabbing themselves a little privacy. None of them had noticed Krysty’s demeanor, and the one-eyed man was unwilling to draw their attention to it unless it became a necessity.
“Mebbe, lover,” she replied in an equally soft tone. “Could be I was just spooked by that rider. Could be that there was just something that seemed odd about him.”
“Man riding by on such a machine that doesn’t try and blast the fuck out of you is weird enough these days,” Ryan said with a small, tight grin.
Krysty gave a short bark of a laugh. “Yeah, true enough. But mebbe there’s just this feeling that he wasn’t as harmless as we thought. I can’t say what. You know what this is like. It’s like there was a scent of danger left, and I can’t get the bastard out of my nose.”
“Usually it’s a good thing that it stays there,” Ryan said, moving closer to her. “I trust that sense of yours. And this time it’s backed up by Jak, and by something in my gut. Couldn’t say what, just that I know the fucker’s there.”
Ryan left her to begin patrolling the camp’s perimeter. He looked at his wrist chron by the light of the fire before moving any farther: an hour remained until his watch was over and he could get some sleep. Time then to wake up Doc. Jak was also supposed to be getting some rest, but the albino couldn’t sleep. Ryan knew him too well to counsel otherwise.
Moving away from the light and warmth of the fire, he shivered as the cold and dank of the darkness draped itself over him. J.B. and Mildred were on the edge of where the light petered out, and he skirted them, unwilling to disturb them. The Armorer and Mildred were on last watch before sunup. They had plenty of time yet.
AS THEY SET OFF next morning, the subject of the motorcycle rider wasn’t mentioned. He was long gone, in the opposite direction to that in which they now traveled, and there was no sign of his return. The only way in which he was relevant to their journey now was in the hope that his path of the day before would lead them to a ville.
It was a hope that was realized within a few hours. Before the sun had risen more than forty-five degrees in the sky, they sighted a distant ville.
They could tell it was only a small ville by the fact that there were only a few columns of smoke rising into the sky.
“Oh, boy, do I have a bad feeling about this,” Mildred remarked heavily.
“Don’t need a doomie sense for that,” Krysty agreed.
It took an hour for the slow, horse-drawn wag to get close enough to the ville to make out anything other than the smoke. It was a journey that seemed as though it would never end, the horses seeming to go slower with every step. The lack of water was beginning to tell: problem was, would there even be anything left in the ville when they got there? Right now, they expected to find nothing more than smoldering ruins.
A smell in the air wafted toward them on the light desert breeze. It was, in part, horribly familiar—the smell of burned, charred and roasting human flesh. There was something else mixed in with it, a sweet smell with a bitter undertone. It was foreign to all but Mildred. She had no firsthand knowledge, but it reminded her of something she had read about when she was a child back in predark days.
Could it be napalm? Surely not. They had never come across much evidence of this surviving skydark, in all the time they had spent crossing the Deathlands. But if not that, then how had anyone come up with a hybrid that was so close?
Ryan stopped the wag. “We go on foot from here,” he said shortly. “Triple red.”
Jak tethered the horses to a fence post on the perimeter of one of the fields, and they began to move in on foot, along the trail that led to the center of the ville.
The smell hung over them like a pallid cloud, heavier than the smoke that rose to the skies, more oppressive. As oppressive as the quiet. The ville was only a small collection of residential dwellings. Some were cobbled together, and some were the remnants of predark adobe houses, patched badly over the years. Perhaps at some time this had been a small mall on the outskirts of a larger town. But it didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was that they were drawing close to the center, and the quiet was replaced by the faint noises of people moving, people talking and people in pain, the small whimpers of those who had no fight left in them, and were hovering close to buying the farm.
The columns of smoke they had seen from a distance were now easily identifiable as coming from a small area in the center. The friends spotted scorch marks on some of the buildings, and debris that suggested some kind of explosion.
More than that, there was an orange tinge that spread over some of the walls and impregnated the dust on the sidewalks and roads that were, in themselves, little more than dirt tracks.
“What is that?” J.B. asked. His tone bespoke an almost professional curiosity. There was little about ordnance that he did not know, yet this was a new one.
“I fear, my dear John Barrymore, that it may be a portent of terrible things,” Doc said with a quiet solemnity.
Ryan stayed them with a raised hand as they drew close to the center of the ville. “Keep it frosty, people. Anyone who can handle a blaster is going to be trigger happy and jumpy as jackshit after what must have happened here.” He signaled for them to take whatever cover was possible as they approached.
So far, they had seen no one. That was strange. First thing anyone with any sense did when under attack was secure defensive positions. Ryan had expected to encounter at least one defensive sec patrol or lone blaster as they advanced. The fact that there had been none did nothing but fuel a dread of what may have happened here. Whatever had attacked this ville, its consequences had to have been severe.
But nothing could prepare them for what they saw as they entered the few streets that constituted the center of the ville.
