shall we proceed?”
“Talking with this Barat is a gamble, but we need to find out the cycle on the mat-trans. He might know it. We bluff our way in and bluff our way out and make him think it’s to his advantage to help us.” Ryan gave Doc a measuring look. “You better be at your baronial best.”
Doc gave Ryan a sweeping bow in return and doffed his nonexistent hat. “Baron Theophilus Algernon Tanner, shipwrecked royalty, at your service.”
“You don’t serve, Doc. You give orders.”
“Ah.” Doc snapped his fingers at Ryan imperiously. “You, knave! Attend me.”
“Better.”
They moved down the beach. The smaller island had been a rambling affair of hills and dunes. The land here was more rough-hewn. The beach was a thin strip of sand abutting tall and jagged cliffs. They followed the strand westward for several miles toward the ville. Twice they saw the gray shadows of masted ships in the fog. Buoys clanked to mark the path through the rock-strewed channel as they got close to the wharf. Ryan stopped. Doc started as his companion put a hand to his chest. “What? Is there—”
Ryan put a finger to his lips and then pointed. The black mouth of a cave gaped out of a jumble of rocks at the base of the cliff. Ryan examined the sand. Seaweed and barnacles on the rocks around the cave mouth indicated the water reached right up during high tide, and it had erased any footprints or signs of passage. Ryan stared at the cave and knew without a doubt he was being watched.
Doc shivered and Ryan knew the old man felt it, too. Doc took comfort in Shakespeare. “‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.’”
“Something’s in that cave, all right,” Ryan agreed. “And it’s got bastard bad intentions.”
The click-click-clack of Doc’s ancient single-action blaster seemed very loud even over the boom of the surf. It made a final click as he set the hammer to fire the shotgun barrel. “Hold fire, Doc,” Ryan said. “You shoot, the whole ville will hear it.” Ryan’s eye narrowed. “And whatever’s in there isn’t raising a ruckus.”
“You know?” Doc shivered again. “I almost wish it were.”
Ryan and Doc were both getting the same vibe. They had both been to terrible places where terrible things had happened. There were places in the Deathlands imprinted with the horrors they had witnessed that almost had a palpable aura of their own. Almost a life of their own. The cave was a very bad place, and there was something very bad inside it. That something was watching them now with a very cold will to chill them.
“Shall we double back?” Doc asked quietly. “Perhaps there is another way inland, or perhaps we might find a scaleable spot along the cliffs.”
Ryan felt the chiller in the dark, and he knew it was feeling him, too. He really didn’t want to walk past that cave, but neither did he want to go swimming again. He was reminded of how insistent Ago had been about not coming to the island at night. He thought of Roque and his crew hiding from the sun beneath wide hats, long coats and smoked lenses. “I don’t think it’s coming out.” Ryan shook his head. “I don’t think it can. At least not until nightfall.”
“Then let us proceed as quickly as possible while the day is still ahead of us.” Doc gave the cave another leery look. “One at a time, or together?”
Ryan hefted the Steyr. “I’ll cover you. Don’t shoot unless something actually comes out.”
“Indeed.” Doc drew his sword stick. Interminable moments passed as he crept warily down the little strip of sand. At this bend in the beach there was barely more than a scant ten yards between the cave mouth and the sea. Ryan kept his crosshairs on the cave but whatever lurked within was staying back. Doc almost sagged with relief as he crossed out of the cave’s line of sight. He sheathed his sword and knelt behind a boulder, taking his LeMat in a firm, two-handed hold to cover the cave. “I am ready.”
There was no point in creeping. Both Ryan and the lurker knew the other was there. Ryan strode down the beach as though he owned it, daring the chiller in the dark to do something about it.
“Ryan!” Doc shouted.
The rock was the size of Ryan’s head. It flew out of the cave as if it had been thrown by a catapult. Ryan dived for the sand. The rock ruffled his hair in passing and smashed into the surf with a tremendous splash. The one-eyed tucked into a roll and his hand snaked out to snatch up a rock the size of a hen’s egg. He rose and flung his stone dead center for the cave mouth like he was trying to hit the last train west. He was rewarded by the meaty thud of rock meeting flesh. He’d hoped to be rewarded with a cry of pain or at least an outraged roar. What he felt were eyes burning into his back as he ran out the line of fire. Ryan knew as long as he stayed on this island he had an enemy, and he knew if he was still here by nightfall that the cold-heart lurking in the dark was going to come looking.
Before it was over someone was going to take that train.
“THEY’RE IN THE VENTILATION ducts,” J.B. said.
Krysty looked up. She had been dozing, but as she listened she could hear the muffled thumps and scrapes of stickies squirming their way through the ducts. “How come they didn’t do that before?”
“Dunno,” J.B. said. “Nobody’s been here in a long while. Mebbe this generation never learned.”
Krysty was reminded of the piles of bones, cracked for their marrow and scattered throughout the corridors. “They’re learning now.”
J.B. was reminded of the stickies trying to extrude themselves through the three-inch gap between the steel door and the wall. He glanced at the ventilation grills in the room, which had been punched out from the inside long ago. The redoubt was a predark military facility. It wouldn’t have air ducts a spy or saboteur could crawl through. The openings were mere twelve-by-six-inch rectangles. The redoubts were wonders of engineering, but the twentieth-century architects hadn’t built with assaulting stickies in mind. In his mind’s eye J.B. could imagine the stickies in the ducts, dislocating their bones and pulling themselves along with sluglike muscular contractions anchored by their suction-cupped fingers.
It wasn’t a good image.
Krysty filled her hands with blaster and blade. “What’s the plan, J.B.?”
“Can’t come through the ducts more than one at a time.” J.B. pushed off his scattergun’s safety. “Mebbe we chill the ones in front. Make a pile of them. That’ll confuse them.”
“They’ll figure to just push them forward.”
“Until they do, that’s the plan.” The Armorer nodded. “Go check the door.”
Krysty walked out into the hall. “Gaia!”
A stickie was halfway through the opening. Pushing past the unyielding steel had turned its skull into a stepped-on melon. That didn’t seem to be hindering its progress. The stickie’s flattened chest snapped and crackled and popped back into place as its torso rein-flated. Its hips were posing something of a problem, but the grotesque crunching and grinding noises as it pulled its pelvis against the gap implied it was making progress.
Krysty’s blaster cracked once and chilled it through the skull. The crunching and grinding turned to snapping and
