didn’t shoot him yourself?”
“When they had me tied up,” Mildred said, “the cannies started talking about their ‘condition.’ They claimed they had medicine for the oozies. They didn’t elaborate on what it was or where it came from. They said it kept them alive, even though they had been in final stage for over a year.”
Ryan turned and addressed the filthy, scarred man tied to the pole. “Is that true?”
The cannie cackled and spit a big crimson gob in the dirt.
“It probably was idle talk,” Mildred said. “Something they made up to mess with my head. Or maybe they came across some carny show snake oil, drank it down and are hoping against hope. On the other hand, it just might be something real. Ryan, I know it’s a hell of a long shot, but I’ve got a short list of options. I’m looking at a triple nasty ride on the last train west. It’s a journey I surely don’t want to make.”
Ryan said nothing. He’d seen a few victims of end-stage oozies in his time. Based on that experience, if he’d been the one infected, he knew he’d have been grasping at straws, too.
“I’ll tell you everything,” the cannie offered, “if you just snip off one of them nice, crispy ears and pass it over to me.”
“Shut up,” Ryan said, “or I’ll saw off your rad-blasted foot and make you eat that, boot and all.”
The one-eyed cannie grinned back, showing off the bloody slivers of his fractured incisors. “You can’t do anything to me that I won’t purely enjoy.”
“You’re wrong there,” Mildred assured him. “If we do absolutely nothing, you’re going to purely hate it, and sooner or later you’ll tell us everything we want to know.”
The cannie spit again.
“You got a name, shitbag?” Ryan said.
“I got two names. My born name and my hunting name.”
“Take it from me,” Ryan said, “your hunting days are done. What name were you born with?”
“Georgie Tibideau Junior,” the cannie said. “From the Siana line of Tibideaus, though if you asked my ma and pa about me, I suppose they would deny I was ever born.”
“You’re a long way from home, cannie,” Mildred said.
“Been walking the Red Road for years.”
“What road?” Ryan asked.
“You never heard of the Highway of Blood? It’s the path all cannies take, the path we make. It stretches from here to there.”
“‘There?’” Cawdor said.
“The homeland.”
“And where might that be?” Ryan asked.
Tibideau squinted his good eye up at Cawdor’s face, then said, “You know, I should get me a patch like that. Got some style. Bet it keeps dirt and crap from falling into the hole, too.” Having delivered a transparent compliment, the cannie tried to reap an undeserved reward. “You know you folks broke in before I could finish my morning snack,” he told them. “Come on, brother, use that big, sharp blade of yours and hack me off a hunk of one them dead ’uns. Don’t let that good meat go to waste.”
It was Ryan’s turn to hawk and spit.
Interrupting the cannie’s calorie intake was the whole idea.
Ryan and Mildred took seats on flat rocks near the fire and propped up their boots, settling in for an extended rest.
At first, Junior Tibideau remained sullenly quiet. Unable to backhand away his nasal excretions, he let them trickle down his unshaved upper lip; when they spilled over onto his mouth, he spit.
Ryan and Mildred didn’t have to discuss the interrogation strategy. They both saw the same weakness in their enemy, and the same way to exploit it. When infected cannies neared death, they reaped so little energy from their food that they had to eat almost non-stop. No matter how much they ate, they were in state of perpetual near-starvation.
Junior Tibideau was a tough nut. He didn’t buckle under the psychological pressure, the anticipation of the terrible agonies to come. It took almost six hours on the post for his hunger pangs to become unen-durable. Mildred and Ryan watched him sweat, squirm, shiver head to foot; they listened as his high-pitched whimpers turned to guttural moans. And when Junior couldn’t stand it anymore, it was like a dam breaking. The cannie started talking, fast and furious, chatter-boxing like a jolt addict coming off a two-week binge.
“Do you really think this is how I dreamed of ending up when I was little?” Junior said. “Tied to a pole in a stinking cave with my shoulder shot and my belly on fire? Mebbe I deserve to die triple hard because of what I’ve done, but I had no choice. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a cannie. I woke up and I already was one. Mebbe you don’t want to believe it, but I’m as much a victim as the stupid bastards I’ve made my meat.”
Although Ryan and Mildred didn’t respond to his plea for sympathy, Junior pressed on. “That very first night, years ago,” he said, “when cannies came through our swamp, they could’ve butchered me on the spot, but they didn’t do me that favor.
“I was night fishing by myself down by the river. I’d just set my snag line when I heard them sneaking through the mangroves along the mud bank. It was too late to get away. I can’t swim a stroke. They had me sandwiched, all of them with blasters and long blades ready. I thought for sure they were going to eat me then and there. But that wasn’t what they had in mind. Turned out that they needed another hunter to fill out their crew. If I’d said no to joining the pack, they would have sundried strips of my flesh on the bushes and turned me into jerky.
“I didn’t taste human being that night, though there was plenty of eating going on. I ran with the pack, hanging back a little and watching what they did. How they hunted the tiny, shit-scrabble farms on the edges of the swamp, how they swept through the ramshackle buildings, chilling as a team. Some cannies ate way more of the bounty than others. They were the sick ones.
“I was back in my bed in my folks’ shanty before sunup, with no one the wiser. It was triple hard getting to sleep. All I could think about was running free and wild. I’d seen a different world through different eyes. I woke up feverish and dripping sweat the next morning. Through the heat of the day my whole body throbbed. It felt like it was going to explode. I just laid there on my straw and panted like a dog. The coolness of evening eased my fever but not the pressure inside me.
“At dark, when the cannies came back for me, I was shivering I was so ready to join the hunt. When they asked about easy pickings close by, I told them about a little dimmie boy I knew who lived with his pa on the other side of the swamp. I told them the dimmie was blond-haired and freckled—a couple weeks later I would’ve just called him a ‘hundred pounder.’ That’s gutted, hanging weight.
“I tricked the dimmie boy into coming out of his shack by standing at his window and calling his name real soft. He knew me from night fishing, so he didn’t suspect anything. I got him over to the edge of the woods and when his head was turned I whacked him on top of the head with a steel hatchet. I split his skull wide open with the first blow, before he could yell for help from his pa who was sitting in the shack, sipping joy juice,
