much, especially with J.B. trundled off to his friends had no idea where, but completely in the power of their captors. Even if they could break out, they weren’t going to do so without the Armorer.
“We don’t want to rush into anything anyway,” Krysty said to him. Ryan jerked slightly. As often the case, the full-bodied redhead seemed to be reading his mind. “We don’t know what’s here.”
“They could have treated us far worse, to be sure,” Doc said, taking a swig from his own canteen and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Patrol leader Tully, now disarmed, stood to one side talking with a man a finger shorter than his own gangly height. The man wore a black vest open over a bare chest deep-tanned as leather, beneath a thick pelt of red-brown hair, black jeans over black boots, a gunbelt with a Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum in good condition at his left hip. He had a long deeply seamed face as tan as his chest, with a well-broken nose. Close-clipped reddish-brown hair was in full retreat from a freckled forehead. Mild-seeming brown eyes looked out from beneath eyebrows like smears of black paint. He wasn’t so much wider than Tully, as he just seemed more solid.
A chiller for true, Ryan thought.
Tully walked over with the black-clad man beside him. “This is Garrison,” he told Ryan. “He’s sec chief for Soulardville.”
Neither party to the introduction offered to shake hands. “Get your people together and follow me,” Garrison said.
His voice was quiet but not soft. Neither his tone nor the sec boss’s posture threatened. Ryan sized the man up as the kind who wouldn’t bother with threats. Seen up close, he looked as unyielding and hard as a cypress knee.
Ryan nodded. No point butting heads when he’d only lose. “Let’s go,” he told the others.
“Where?” Jak asked. He showed no sign of standing.
“Where I take you,” Garrison said. His tone remained matter-of-fact. The look he gave the albino youth was another matter altogether.
One time during his road-dog days with Trader, Ryan had seen an Ozark mule skinner give a chronically balky mule that look. The next time the mule acted up the skinner had shot it dead in its harness with a big old black-powder horse blaster he worse crosswise in his belt.
“Jak,” Krysty called, “come give me a hand with Mildred, please. She’s had a hard time of it.”
Mildred had already reclaimed her composure. She was painfully aware of her relatively coddled and sheltered upbringing. Never mind her father had been murdered by the Klan when she was a child. Compared to people Deathlands born and raised she’d spent her life before her cryogenic suspension on Easy Street. She hated to show weakness to her friends. She frowned and started to say something.
Krysty held up a hand. “Save your breath,” she said. “Let Jak help you.”
The albino teen had got up and hurried to Mildred’s side. Her eyes widened as she realized what the redhead was actually doing. Jak had followed her suggestion without the thought entering his head that she had given him an out from a no-win confrontation with the Soulardville sec boss without loss of face.
The look on the sec boss’s sunburned face never wavered from…composed, Ryan reckoned the word was. But Ryan thought he’d caught just the slightest flicker of recognition in those dark eyes. Garrison looked to be shrewdly perceptive as well as in total command of himself and his surroundings. That made him triple-dangerous.
They set off down the street at an easy walk. A quartet of sec men flanked and followed them. Garrison let Ryan walk shoulder-to-shoulder with him without comment.
And that was the upside of dealing with a man like the sec boss. Ryan knew what he was. He knew at a glance what Ryan was. They understood each other perfectly with no need to jaw.
Houses lined the street, mostly in brown or maroon or yellow-tan brick, neat beneath pitched roofs with scrolled wooden eaves. Raised-bed gardens had replaced long-dead lawns, and interspersed with the houses were garden plots growing a profusion of vegetables and herbs: tomatoes and beans climbing up frames, onions, carrots, lettuce just sprouting. Down one block to the south Ryan caught a glimpse of an orchard of trees just beginning to fruit out. Big trees dropped pools of shadow at irregular intervals on the asphalt.
“My word,” Doc breathed. “It looks as if war has never brushed this place with its wings.”
“Does if you’d seen it before,” Mildred said. “This is Russell Boulevard. Used to be a lot more buildings along here. Those gardens used to be houses.”
“It’s so green,” Krysty said. “It’s like a drink of water after the ruins.”
“Too neat,” Jak said. “Too crowded.”
And in fact a fair number of people went about their business. Some carried crates or big ceramic jugs, or pushed loaded handcarts. Others walked briskly as if to appointments. Children played on stoops. Chickens scratched in front yards and cultivated patches. Pigeons cooed and bubbled from the eaves.
“We been building this place up for a hundred years,” Garrison said with a note of pride in his voice.
“You’ve done well,” Krysty said.
Ryan was reserving judgment. Krysty sometimes teased him he couldn’t sniff a flower without suspecting there was a bee waiting inside to sting his nose. He reckoned that was about right.
He also saw no reason to change.
And speaking of flowers, they were there, too, purple and blue and yellow heads nodding from beds below windows and stout ceramic planters on porches. This place was easily as prosperous as Front Royal, where he’d grown up.
“Barely an hour ago the acid rain was falling fit to bubble the skin straight off a man’s face,” he said. He gestured around with a hard hand. “How’d all this come through looking so pretty?”
“Special-treated tarps and cloths,” Garrison said. “Special frames set out. The trees’re pretty resistant. We usually get plenty of warning when a hellstorm’s brewing.”
“What happens when you don’t?”
Garrison chuckled. “Ever know a man to leave this world alive?”
For a moment Ryan looked at him as they walked. Then he barked a short laugh. “No.”
The street turned to what had been a commercial district. War’s legacy was much more visible here. While many houses had intact windows, the big commercial picture windows had been blown in and were covered with plywood sheets or planking. From neatly lettered signs above the doors Ryan gathered they were now small stores and workshops. He heard the tink-tink of a hammer on metal from one door left open to allow the sultry breeze admittance.
The street widened out. “Lot of buildings here’ve been demolished,” Mildred murmured. “If I remember right, anyway.”
For her, Ryan knew, the memory was just a few years old. But sometimes she still had trouble coping with the brutal contrast between the world she’d gone to sleep in and the nightmare she’d awakened to.
