the old man, it was plain to Ryan that she found it hard to watch and be helpless to slow his further mental and physical disintegration.
The one-eyed man remained cautiously confident that Doc would come out of the tailspin eventually. As he always had before.
As they neared the ville entrance, Ryan saw a little girl in a loose-fitting, faded cotton print dress staring at them from inside the gate. A very pretty little girl with a headband of daisies. Her gaze swept past Ryan to rest upon Dean. The boy sensed he had a rapt audience of one. Though exhausted, he drew himself to his maximum height and flashed a smile at the girl. Ryan was amused to see that his son managed a bit of a manly swagger, with the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power blaster prominently strapped to his hip.
Krysty gave Ryan a nudge. “Like father, like son,” she commented.
A trio of armed men in bill caps stood behind a pile of concrete boulders and rubble that served as both a checkpoint and traffic barrier. Beyond them, Ryan caught his first glimpse of Bullard ville: an oasis of brilliant green that sprouted miraculously from the sunbaked yellow earth. In rows of raised beds, under slanting, corrugated metal roofs, the crop plants grew lush and tall. On the far side of the beds, simmering in the valley heat, predark plastic-and-metal signs on tall poles dangled precariously above a line of low buildings.
“Man, oh, man, could I ever go for a cheese-burger and a strawberry shake,” Mildred said.
Ryan grinned. “We’ll be lucky to get a plate of beans and a swig of green beer.”
“I know, I know. But a girl can still dream, can’t she?”
As they stepped up to the checkpoint, one of the bill caps shouted in an unpleasantly high voice, “And just who might you folks be?” Without giving them time to answer, he asked a second question. “What is your business here?” The two other sentries held sawed-off, 12-gauge, double-barreled shotguns at waist height. The range was such that, by discharging all four stubby barrels at once, they could cut the strangers not so neatly in two.
Ryan showed the guards open hands. “We’re just travelers on the long road north,” he said. “Come to water and rest, and willing to pay for it.”
The head sentry, a very short man with a full brown beard, gave them a hard once-over. He looked especially long at their complement of weapons, appraising them for possible threat and commercial value. When he came to Doc, he couldn’t help but notice the slack rope that connected him around the waist to the man with the smeared eyeglasses.
“What’s with the geezer?” the guard leader chirped. “He sick? He looks sick to me. He better not have the fucking oozies!”
Ryan and the companions knew he was referring to an incurable, mutated brain virus, much feared and believed to be transferred by cannibalism.
“He’s just old,” Krysty said. “Very, very old.”
“Oughta leave him to meet his maker, then.”
“Ain’t his time, yet,” Ryan said, the look on his face telling the guard to mind his own bastard business.
Unable to contain himself any longer, one of the shotgunners excitedly blurted out, “We got a carny come to town.”
“That so?” J.B. said.
The sentries shared wide grins.
“Best rad-blasted carny in all the Deathlands,” the head guard added. “Big show’s tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to stick around, then,” Ryan said. “Something like that you don’t see every day.”
“You’d better believe it,” the shotgunner said. “Gert Wolfram’s carny only plays the most important, big-time villes.”
“You can stow your gear over where the carny is putting up camp,” the head guard said. “As long as you got something to trade, you got the run of Bullard ville. There’s food, water, joy juice and the best damn gaudy house this side of Perdition. When you run out of trade goods, we will escort you out of the berm. We don’t give no charity here. And we don’t take no guff from those who don’t belong.”
With that warning, the guards lowered their scatterguns and allowed the companions to enter Bullard ville.
Once inside, there was no mistaking the proposed campsite. Not with fifteen wags parked in a broad circle on the baked yellow dirt. On the side of the largest wag was a crudely painted sign that read Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. Lots of ville folks were standing around gawking while dozens of carny roustabouts worked to set up camp. The heavy protective tarps were pulled back from the trailered cages so the gawkers could see in. Only from a goodly distance, though. The newcomers appeared to have set up a kind of invisible perimeter that the ville folk weren’t crossing. Mebbe they’d been warned to steer clear? Mebbe they didn’t need to be.
As they approached the mob of spectators, a strange sound split the air. Two very loud tones, a high note sliding to low. Only Mildred made the connection to a foghorn; none of the others had ever heard one. To them it sounded like a baleful howl.
Beside Ryan, Jak cranked his head around and stiffened, as if ten thousand volts had just shot through him. The youth’s reaction surprised the one-eyed man. It was just an animal noise. A very large animal.
Before Ryan could raise a hand to stop him, the albino took off, running at full tilt for the cages. Some of the carny folk saw him coming and tried to block his way with widespread arms, but he feinted, swinging his white head one way, then squirted past them. Staring at his rapidly accelerating back, the empty-handed roustabouts yelled for someone to get him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, “we were supposed to go in nice and quiet, and recce first.”
“Better back his play,” Ryan said, waving the companions after him.
J.B. pulled Doc along like a stubborn calf.
Suddenly the howling got a whole lot louder, and it changed in timbre. Instead of coming from deep in a huge set of lungs, it came from high in the throat.
It went from misery to absolute joy.
Then it stopped altogether.
There was no one left to try to turn back the companions. All the carny folk had rushed over to one of the trailered cages.
And with good reason.
It appeared that the agile intruder was getting eaten alive.
Jak had his head stuck between the bars of the cage, holding on to them with both hands. For a split second, Ryan’s heart dropped in his chest. He thought the young albino was a sure goner, his head half inside the great carnivore’s open maw. But then he saw Jak wasn’t getting chewed.
He was getting licked.
The mutie mountain lion’s tongue slathered his face so hard that even holding on to the bars with all his might, Jak couldn’t keep his boots on the ground.
The great cat made a loud purring sound, like a wag’s big diesel engine fast idling, as it scrubbed the albino’s face and neck with a wide pink tongue that had to be a foot and a half long.
“What
