Though the gaudy chatter had resumed its normal volume, Ryan could hear Jak growl low in his throat. It wasn’t a gesture of hostility but a sign of his own dissatisfaction with himself.
“Listen, Jak,” Mildred said helpfully. “There’s always someone better than you.”
That got her a red-eyed glare.
“Mildred,” Ryan said dryly, “stop helping.”
The door burst open.
For a moment all that poured inside was darkness and the sound of crickets, audible because the dramatic opening had quieted the small talk again. It wasn’t necessarily in anticipation of an equally dramatic entry; people hereabouts, like most places, were just that starved for something a little different from the day-in, day-out routine.
But they got the drama anyway. A young woman came through the door, half striding, half staggering under a burden of deadweight and fatigue. She carried a body in her arms. It was apparently a child, a girl by the long hair that hung down from the intruder’s right arm, and she was dead, from the lifeless swing and dangle of her small, bare arms.
But the young woman’s head was high, black hair falling in waves around broad shoulders, one bared by her half-torn-open flannel shirt. Her deep blue eyes blazed with rage.
“My baby sister’s dead!” she cried in a vibrant voice. “Blinda’s been murdered, and I saw who done it!”
A number of patrons had jumped to their feet. “Who did it, Wymie?” one asked.
She fixed Ryan with a laser glare. “Those stoneheart outlanders there!”
That silenced the rising murmur as though cutting it off with an ax. Immediately whispers started up again: “Oh, holy shit, her face.”
Ryan saw that it was missing. Something had taken much of the bone from brow to lower jaw along with flesh and skin.
Ryan heard Krysty gasp. Doc made a strangled noise.
“You can’t be talking to us,” Ryan said, as evenly as he could.
“I saw you! You bastards!”
“You didn’t see us,” Mildred said. “We were working at the claim until late. Then we came right here.”
“Tell us exactly what you did see, Wymie,” Conn told her.
The black-haired young woman stooped and eased her burden onto the floorboards. Blood began to trickle outward. Behind her Ryan could see a number of others with anxious, angry faces. Plenty held weapons, from hoes and axes to a muzzle-loader shotgun or two. Slowly, Wymie straightened.
“I looked out the window, soon as—as it happened,” she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair. Bloodred eyes!”
All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.
“Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.
“Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”
“We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”
“You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”
“We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.
He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.
He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.
“It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”
“I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.
“Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we do such a thing?”
“You’re outlanders! From out there!”
Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.
“You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it Deathlands. Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”
“But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And he looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”
“Mebbe used an ax.”
“Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”
“Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”
“‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.
“Mebbe he’s a—a werewolf or somethin’! We all know there’s monsters out there!”
Tarley shook his head. “Wymie, Wymie. Listen to yourself. We can’t go lynchin’ strangers because they might be werewolves. Not without some kinda evidence they are. Or that werewolves exist, even.”
“People say there’s all kind of weird muties, out in the Deathlands,” one of the men standing on the stoop behind Wymie said. “Like little rubber-skinned bastards with suckers for fingertips, can rip the hide clean off you!”
“That part’s real,” Ricky said. “Those are stickies. They’re bad news.”
“I’ve seen stickies,” Tarley stated. “They’re pretty much what you say. But stickies didn’t do this, and I see no reason to believe these folks did, either.”
“You takin’ their part, Tarley Gaines?” Wymie shrieked. “Of outlanders who murder our own?”
“Nobody’s takin’ anybody’s part,” Conn said, his voice level and as unyielding as an anvil. “Not tonight. Not in here. Except the truth’s, mebbe.”
“I know the truth!” the young woman yelled.
“You got precious little to show for it, Wymie.”
“I know what I saw!”
“And
