the tent sections into final position, like the spokes of a wheel, and began snapping them together and folding the double, overlapping seams. From the strain and sweat on their faces, the rolls were very heavy.
In a matter of minutes, the big tent began to take shape on the ground. Easily two hundred feet across, it was striped in gay red and white, and made of some heavily coated fabric.
The cheery music and the festive colors made Ryan’s skin crawl and his trigger finger itch. As did the expressions of delight he saw on the faces of the onlookers.
Like lambs led to slaughter.
Ryan was by no means a do-gooder, and life in Deathlands was survival of the fittest. But some things just had to come to a stop.
A worker with a wheelbarrow passed out tent stakes to men who waited at the perimeter markers with sledgehammers. The thick, cylindrical metal spikes were almost four feet long. The roustabouts grunted and swung in time to the music. The twenty-pound heads of their hammers sent showers of sparks flying as they slammed the spikes deep into the earth. When the broad ring of side stakes was set, ropes were tied, loosely connecting them to the tent’s lower wall. A seventy-five-foot-long steel pole, also made up in shorter sections, was assembled, then eight men crawled inside the flattened bag with it.
At the hairy roustabout’s direction, a heavy rope was attached to the tent’s peak. A dozen workers then yarded it over the top of the tallest wag as the men inside the tent angled up the center pole in a series of steps timed to the music’s beat.
The crowd of bystanders sent up a wild cheer as the pole’s butt slipped into place and the tent was finally raised. Red-and-white pennants on the peak of the roof and around the top of the side wall hung down limply in the still, already scorching air.
“There’s only the one exit,” J.B. said to Ryan. “And no window vents that I can see.”
“It’s like we thought,” the one-eyed man said. “Whatever it is that they’re doing to folks, it all happens inside the tent.”
“And nobody’s getting out,” Krysty added.
“From the looks of the fabric,” Mildred said, “the tent could be a Kevlar weave, or something like it. But with a plasticized coating on the outside. If it is made of Kevlar, even blaster slugs won’t tear it. With those double seams, it’s got to be virtually airtight.”
“A candy-striped, portable death house,” Krysty said softly.
“All the evidence we’ve seen points to an inhalant,” Mildred went on. “They’ve got to be using some kind of poison gas.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to go in there, Dad,” Dean said, his voice tight with concern.
“The boy’s right,” J.B. said. “Once we’re inside that tent, we’re trapped along with everybody else.”
Ryan grimaced. They had gotten themselves in a bind; that was for sure. But it wasn’t unexpected. They had known that once they entered the ville, circumstances would be fluid. That whatever plan they had hatched over the long march might have to be thrown out.
A key part of it already had.
The original idea had been to take out some of the chillers in the night, using their knives to quietly reduce the odds. But once they were on-site in Bullard ville it became clear that plan wouldn’t work. For one thing, the caged sideshow muties acted like an army of watchdogs, alerting the carny folk with squeals and bellows when anyone approached their circled wags. For another, the dispatched roustabouts would have been missed on the work crews that morning. Search parties would have been sent out. Perhaps the shallow graves would have been discovered. Either way, the companions’ hands would have been tipped. Outnumbered as they were, without the element of surprise, they had no chance at all.
Having caught up with the traveling troupe at last, and having gathered a sense of the people involved, Ryan had no doubt that it was the carny doing the mass chilling. The moment he had looked into the Magnificent Crecca’s eyes, all other possibilities vanished.
To loot an entire ville down to the pots, pans and shoelaces called for manpower, which the carny had. To loot an entire ville required heavy-duty transportation for all the stolen goods. The only tracks of sufficient number and size leading from the place had belonged to the carny. To chill that many people at once called for confinement, isolation, no escape.
Which the tent provided.
After they had examined the bodies in the unnamed ville, Mildred had guessed that a poison had been used, but she couldn’t tell what kind or how it had been administered. Though some of the victims had been shot in the head, most had no evidence of wounds. The bullet holes were either mercy shots or the result of a pack of chillers taking random target practice on a pile of corpses. It made sense that the lethal weapon would be a gas, although where it came from and how it was delivered was still a puzzle.
There was, of course, also still the possibility that the carny would just do its show and move on, without chilling anyone. As it had done in Perdition, and elsewhere.
Ryan thought this outcome was unlikely, as did the other companions. Bullard ville was made-to-order for another mass wipeout. It was isolated. It was unknown, except for being an established water stop along a very long, very dry road. If all the residents vanished overnight, the travelers up and down the valley would just conclude that the water supply had finally dried up, forcing folks to abandon their huts and disperse. No one would care one way or the other. No one would look any deeper.
Once more, Ryan took in the excited faces of the crowd. It wasn’t just made up of kids, but people of all ages, and the leaders of the ville, too. Dirt farmers, cooks, housewives and sluts had deserted their work in order to gawk at the wonder of Wolfram’s World Famous Carny. Their rapt expressions said this was the biggest thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
Unless something was done, it was also probably going to be the last thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
“We’ve got to go in,” Ryan told the others. “We’ve got no choice. We’ve got to go in with everyone else, just like nothing’s up. It’s the only way to make sure we get everyone out alive. We’ve got to keep a low profile until the time comes to make our move.”
“If we wait just a tetch too long, Ryan, things could get bastard ugly in a hurry,” the Armorer said.
For a long moment there was silence between them.
The silence indicated a mutual understanding of the situation, and a mutual consent to proceed as exactly as Ryan suggested.
It was only broken when Dean looked around, and said, “Where’s Jak?”
OUT OF THE COMPANIONS’ direct view, around the curve of the sideshow trailers, Jak once again had his head thrust through the bars of the mountain lion’s cage. Once again that great, hot tongue lovingly washed his face and neck.
The pale, ruby-eyed youth had few words to describe even the simplest moments of his violent and tragic life. For Jak, things were good or they were bad. He was happy or he wasn’t. Hungry or not. Loaded or reloading. The complexity of his feelings at that moment was impossible to translate into a neat, black-white duality.
Only the lion understood what he felt.
And that was because he and the
