And neither are you, you old coot. I don’t see any reason to let him get dehydrated, here. Help me hold his head up so we don’t choke him, Krysty.”
With the redhead’s help Mildred trickled a few drops of water into Ricky’s barely open lips. He coughed, spit, shook his head vigorously. His eyes shot open.
“What?” he demanded. He looked wildly up at the others. “What are you all staring at?”
“Seems like it’d be pretty obvious,” J.B. said from the side.
“What? Oh. Sorry.” Ricky sat suddenly upright. “Nuestra Señora, that thing bit me!”
“Yes, it did,” Ryan said. “And you keeled right over like you’d been shot.”
“I—I did? Wait—where are we, anyway? What happened?”
“Someplace safe,” Krysty told him.
“Safe enough,” Ryan said. “For the moment.”
“What did you feel?” Mildred asked.
Ricky asked for more water. Mildred held the canteen up to his lips for a swallow, then let him take hold of it and drink some more.
“Well, it stung like a bast—like fire,” he said when he’d drained half the container. “It kind of gave me a jolt. And I felt like there was something else, like an edge to it, almost. Like when you get stung by an ant, you can tell you’ve been poisoned, if only a little, you know?”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “Go on.”
“Well, my arm started to go numb. And I started feeling really cold. My stomach got woozy, my head started to spin, my vision seemed to get dark around the edges. Then, well, next thing I remember was waking up here on the grass.”
Ryan stood up. “Reckon he’s gonna live?” he asked Mildred.
“Afraid so,” she said.
“The centipede’s venom must produce some kind of soporific effect,” Doc said.
“Like some sort of knockout dose,” Ryan suggested.
“Seems so,” Mildred said. “Pretty fast acting, though.”
“Muties,” Krysty stated simply.
“I guess.”
“How do you feel, kid?” Ryan asked. “You fit to fight?”
“Don’t really know,” Ricky said thoughtfully. Then he grinned at Ryan. “But I bet I can walk and carry my pack. That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t it, Ryan?”
Ryan grinned. “Reckon so.”
He leaned down and, gripping Ricky forearm to forearm, pulled him to his feet.
“And that’s what we need to do,” he said. “Move. For one thing, there’s no way of knowing whether some of those bastard centipedes might’ve missed out on the pork banquet and decided to come looking for us. Plus, while this gives us a nice handy route to try to get clear of this damn mutant thorn tangle, it’s also a natural highway for everything else big and bad.”
“Including our friends from the ville,” J.B. said.
Mildred and Krysty helped Ricky get his pack up and onto his back.
“Speaking of that unfortunate swine,” Doc said, looking speculatively back up the way they’d come, “I cannot help wondering...if the outsized centipedes’ bite produces instant unconsciousness, why did the hog continue to struggle and squeal for so long?”
“Don’t ask me,” Mildred said. “I’m barely a people doctor, in the way I so often need to be. I’m certainly not a bug doctor.”
“Dear lady, while those creatures are unquestionably arthropods, they are, equally unquestionably, not of the class of Arthropoda that constitutes the insects.”
She fixed him with a furious glare. “They have nasty, segmented chitinous bodies, too many legs and they bite,” she said. “They’re bugs.”
“Less talking,” Ryan admonished sternly. “More walking.”
“Yes, sir,” Mildred said.
* * *
“HOWFARDOES this thing go on, anyway?”
At the question, Krysty glanced back over her shoulder at Ricky, who bringing up the rear. He was staring up at the heights above the tangle of miniature canyons by which they made their way through the Wild.
“How would I know?” Ryan said from the lead. “Not like we got any reliable maps of this country.”
“Rumor in the last ville we stopped at before Jak’s adventure says the thicket’s expanding,” Krysty said. “Or trying to. The cook I talked to at the eatery said it keeps running up against the drought and acid-rain-prone belts of the Deathlands. So far, they’re winning. But it’s double big.”
“If we could take the roads we could be clear in a day,” Mildred grumbled. “Two, max.”
“We’d be hanging by the necks in front of Judge Santee’s courthouse before sunset the first day,” J.B. said.
“Aside from that.”
She glanced up again. The thorn vines showed no signs of thinning, either up the walls of the ravine or ahead, as far as the eye could see.
The route they were taking was fast only in comparison to creeping along snaky game trails through the Wild or trying to hack their way through by main force. It wasn’t a practical thing to do for very long, in any event. The ground underfoot was muddy and mucky, and it clutched at Mildred’s boots despite the grass roots holding it more or less together.
“Shit,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
“I know,” Krysty agreed sympathetically.
“I know it’s stupid,” Mildred said, still keeping her voice way down, “but still I can’t help wondering if we’d be having quite this much trouble if, well, you know....”
“How can you say that?” Krysty asked. “You know Ryan does all he can—all anyone can, and then some—to keep us alive!”
“Yeah, I know, Krysty. Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
But I do, she thought, more miserable even than before. I was looking for someone or something to blame for us being in shit this deep. But it’s nobody’s fault. Except the asshole politicians and whitecoats who blew up the world and made this mess.
She heard Krysty sigh gustily.
“I’m sorry, Mildred. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off like that. The fact is, deep down—I wonder too, sometimes. And that’s why I reacted the way I did. Overreacted.”
“We all have our
