WEARY WANDERERS

In the war-torn wasteland known as Deathlands, desperation and destruction have replaced dreams and peace. Each day arrives with a new life-threatening challenge for wanderer Ryan Cawdor and his fellow band of survivors…

FEAST OR FAMINE

Bizarre murders are taking place in a fertile farming community, and the locals are quick to point fingers at Ryan and his companions. But they know another culprit is responsible. A colony of mutants has been driven from its underground home, forced to find sustenance in the light of day. And only human flesh will satisfy their hunger. Caught between a rock and a horde of hungry cannibals, Ryan and the companions face an ultimatum—help the cannies reclaim their territory, or risk becoming the next meal. Except something far more sinister—and ravenous—lurks beneath the lush fields…

It was all over but the fleeing

None of the group came close to Ryan’s keenly honed sense of danger, the unconscious ability to flash-sort through even the tiniest fugitive sensory inputs, to identify the pattern that added up to threat.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan saw a skinny old man, standing by the side of the road, leveling a single-action Peacemaker blaster at Ryan’s head.

But just as the one-eyed man’s sense of danger had its limitations, so did his striking-rattler reflexes. He already knew he was nuked, even as his brain sent his body the impulse to dive aside.

The ancient blaster vanished in a giant yellow muzzle-flash, which instantly echoed in a blinding red flash inside Ryan’s skull.

Then blackness. Then nothing.

Forbidden Trespass

James Axler

’Tis not a year or two shows us a man.

They are all but stomachs, and we all but food.

To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,

They belch us.

—William Shakespeare

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from pre-dark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope…

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quotes

The Deathlands Saga

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Copyright

Prologue

“Wymie!”

At the cry from her sister, Wymea Berdone turned away from the big galvanized tub on the crude counter in the kitchen where she was doing the dishes. Hot water splashed from hands and lower arms reddened from heat and the caustic lye soap her family made from hog fat and wood ash.

The ash they got from the wood they cut in the forests around their house in the Pennyrile Hills near the ville of Sinkhole. The hog fat they had to trade for these days, since Wymie’s stepdad, Mord Pascoe, had sold off the last of the pigs to buy hooch at Mathus Conn’s gaudy house and bar. It was only one of the ways life had gotten poorer for them since the tree that fell the wrong way had killed Wymie’s pa.

“Baby, what is it?” she called, grabbing a rag to dry her hands.

“It’s nothin’!” Mord bellowed from his easy chair in the cabin’s main room. “Mind your damn business, bitch.”

“Blinda?” Wymie asked, ignoring him.

Her little sister, ten years old with her dirty blond hair in pigtails and a rag-doll teddy bear clutched to the front of her ragged linen smock, stared at her with wide sapphire-blue eyes. They were the only trait the two shared in common. Otherwise Blinda was slight and Wymea was strapping, though considered comely by most of the menfolk hereabouts—unfortunately including Mord Pascoe. And where Wymie had hair so raven-wing black it was almost blue falling down over the shoulders of her blue plaid flannel man’s shirt, Blinda was fair.

“What happened, honey?”

“It’s him,” her sister said, without even a glance at the man lounging in the chair with his black-furred belly sticking out the bottom of his shirt, which was closed over his chest by the last few buttons holding out against the strain. The chair was a faded green and overstuffed. His own overstuffing had started the chair’s stuffing busting out of seams all over the cushion and back. “He wants me to go outside with him to the woodpile again.”

Wymie felt the lower lids of her eyes pushing up in what she knew was a dangerous look. She directed it toward her stepfather.

“I told you not to try that again,” she said, managing with effort to keep from shouting. She knew what yelling would cost her ma. As it was, Wymie’s defiance would cost the woman at least a couple face punches from those beefy fists.

Through his patchy stubble of black beard, Mord showed a grin that was brown and twisted where it wasn’t gaps.

“You could take her place, y’know.”

“Try to touch me again, I’ll bust your nose like the last time,” Wymie said. “If I catch you grabbin’ at Blinda anymore, you’re lucky if I don’t do no more than bust your damn fingers.”

She glanced meaningfully at the ax propped by the door. It took effort she could ill afford, with all the other burdens she carried. But she kept its heavy blade sharp. Her pa had taught her to care for her tools, before the tree took him. And he knew from painful experience that a dulled ax was more dangerous to its user than what he or she might mean to chop with it.

“Don’t lie,” her mother said, with the flat intonation of someone repeating a chant they’d learned by rote, and long ago forgotten the real meaning of, if they’d ever known it at all. “Lyin’s wicked.”

Wymie turned a frown toward her mother. Despite her resentment, her eyes lost their dangerous pressure and drooped down at the outside edges, weighted down with sadness. She remembered a time when her mother had been tall and straight, pretty, even.

But the past three years, since her husband died, and especially the past two, since she married Mord Pascoe for no reason Wymie nor anyone about Sinkhole could tell, had shrunk her—shriveled her, almost—to a stooped shadow of her former self. Her glossy brown hair had turned drab and mouse-colored. The flesh of her face had drawn back, making her almost look like a mouse; and the cringing attitude she displayed toward her husband did nothing to dispel the resemblance.

Why can’t you stand up for us for once, Ma? Wymie wanted to shout. She wouldn’t, though. She knew the answer. If she stood up to Mord Pascoe, he’d beat her down. He might not be willing to lift a finger to help out around the homestead, or even keep the family alive, but he’d heave his bulk out of that chair and raise both hands to hit a woman.

He knew better than to do it with Wymie around. But he also knew—

“Nuke it all, a man’s got needs,” he whined, giving the lie to her mother’s naming Wymie’s words a lie. “If his wife can’t handle them all, then his daughters should. It’s the patriarchal way of things.”

A narrow, sly look appeared in his small gray eyes. “And you can’t watch over your ma and sis all the time,” he said. “Can you?”

She growled.

Ignoring her, now that he’d reasserted his power in the family, he pushed himself up with a great groan of effort. The fumes that belched from his mouth when he did carried clear to Wymie ten feet away. It smelled worse than his pits and feet and crotch did. “Now, enough of this crap. I’m the man in the house and you got to obey. C’mere, you little bitch. Now.”

“Now, Blinda,” her mother said. “Obey your daddy. You got to do it. It’s that patriarch way, like he says.”

“No,” Wymie said firmly.

As Mord lumbered toward the cowering girl on short, fat-quivering legs, Blinda shot a frightened look at her big sister. Wymie nodded.

Blinda darted away, ducking under a clumsy swipe of Mord’s pallid paws. She ran to the open window and leaned on the sill, sticking her face out to breathe in the cool spring-night breeze and watch the early fireflies dance. Her grimy toy bear dangled over the cracked wooden sill.

Mord made to follow, but Wymie put herself between them, her bare, reddened forearms, still steaming from the dishwater, crossed beneath her breasts. She knew that emphasized their heft, but the gesture also helped get her message across. She didn’t want to raise a hand against the man unless she had to.

As he said, she couldn’t be there to watch over her ma all the time.

But she was here now.

“Not another step,” she declared.

“I’m a man,” he repeated. It was one of his favorite things to say. It was almost like he thought someone might disagree, or forget it if he didn’t repeat it often enough. “I’m stronger’n you, little slut. I could knock you out of the way.”

“You could try.”

He tried an engaging grin on her. It seemed to work on her ma, but it turned Wymie’s stomach. In her eyes it was nothing but a snaggletoothed leer.

“You could take her place,” he said. “Help take the edge off for your poor daddy, the way a dutiful daughter should.”

“It’s not gonna happen.”

His eyes flashed and his heavy black brows jutted low and outward above them.

“Why do you act so high and mighty?” he bellowed. The stink of his breath rocked her back on her heels and made her eyes water, but she stood her ground. “I know what a slut you are. Givin’ that sweet thang up for every boy in the county, from Maccum Corners clear to the holler!”

“That’s a lie and you know it,” she said. “No boy would dare touch me with anything they wanted to keep.” Again she looked meaningfully at the ax.

Wish I’d gone ahead and struck his filthy hand off when he grabbed me through my skirt that time, she thought. But she had mashed his ugly tuber of a nose for him, as she’d reminded him before.

In return he’d knocked her sprawling with a backhand and blackened her eye. But that victory was short-lived. She bounced back up right away, and that time she held her ax in both hands. Ready to cut.

“C’mon,” he pleaded. “Let me get a little sugar, can’t you?”

“Wymie,” her mother called from behind him. “You don’t be sassing your pa, now. He’s right. You got to do what he says. We all do.”

“Oh, Ma,” Wymie cried, shaking her head and squinting her eyes to try to hold in the hot tears that filled them. “Can’t you show some spine sometime?”

But she knew the answer. She doesn’t dare, she thought. Because I can’t protect her. I’m not good enough. Not strong enough. It’s all my fault…

She shook her head again, once, fiercely. She wouldn’t walk down that trail again. Not where it led her.

It had only been the once. But no amount of washing, mebbe not even a dose of straight-up lye, would ever cleanse her of the foul feeling that he had left her with.

“Blinda,” she called, “come with me. Let’s go for a nice walk in the woods, honey. Get some clean air in our noses for a change.”

She turned away from her stepfather. She was afraid he’d rabbit-punch her, but she had to take that risk. She doubted he had the sack to try, anyway. He knew what she’d do to him if he tried a trick like that and failed.

Blinda was slumped over the sill. The dirty soles of her bare feet showed, the toes bowed together against the floor.

“Blinda? Wake up, honey. I know you ain’t been sleeping good, but we got to go.”

She reached out to take her sister’s thin shoulder. She shook the girl gently.

The ragged bear slid from her fingers to the floor. Blinda slid back to follow it.

Horror struck through Wymie like lightning.

Her beloved baby sister no longer had a face. There was only a bloody red gap where her face should have been.

Chapter One

“Wait,” Ricky Morales said. “What was that?”

“Probably your imagination,” Mildred Wyeth responded. She had stripped off her shirt to work in the humid heat of the hollow in her scavvied sports bra and khaki cargo pants. She straightened from sorting a pile of mostly unidentifiable scavvied tech, mostly metal parts and components J. B. Dix identified as electronics, and drew the back of her hand across her high, dark-skinned forehead. “Heat’s making you see things.”

But Ryan Cawdor was standing and staring intently at the spot in the brush above the excavation the kid had snapped his head around to look at.

“No,” he said. “I think I saw something, too.”

He had his palm resting on the grip of the SIG Sauer P226 blaster in its holster. He’d left his longblaster, a Steyr Scout Tactical, in the shade of a rickety lean-to.

He glanced at Jak Lauren, who stood on top of a heap of dirt, rocks, chunks of concrete, and bits and pieces of cloth, plastic and other debris that somehow hadn’t degraded into the dense clay soil in the hundred or so years since skydark. The slender, slight young man shrugged. Despite the sticky mugginess he insisted on wearing his camouflage jacket, to which he’d sewn jagged shards of glass and metal fragments to discourage an in-fighting opponent from grabbing him. His adversary would get a further surprise if he grabbed the young man by the collar. Hidden razor blades would cause severe injury. Jak was swiveling his head, long white hair swinging above his shoulders, white-skinned brow furrowed over ruby eyes.

He sensed Ryan’s attention and looked toward him. “Check out?” he asked.

“No,” Ryan said. “If there’s something out there, it knows the area better than we do.”

Jak let his thin lips quirk contemptuously. “Could beat.”

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “Mebbe not.”

The white-haired youth frowned. Though a product of the Gulf Coast bayou country—even hotter and double-steamier than this—he was proud of his wilderness skills. Indeed, his skills at stealth and tracking in any environment—even urban ones, as alien to his upbringing as the dimpled face of the moon. And for a fact, he was good. Those skills had kept Ryan and the rest of his companions alive on many occasions.

“The pallid shadows again?” Doc asked. Doc was a tall, gaunt man with haunted blue eyes and rich silvery hair. Though he appeared to be in his late sixties, he was, in fact, in terms of years lived, in his thirties. Looked at in a different way, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was almost two and a half centuries old. The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the late 1800s to the twentieth century. When he proved to be a very difficult subject, they threw him into the future, to Deathlands, a prematurely aged husk.

That he had survived was a testament to his intrinsic toughness and drive to live. “Not sure,” Ricky said, shaking his head. The kid had been with them for a while now, tramping the miles and enduring countless hardships with the rest of the companions. He was currently on watch, squatting at the edge of the sinkhole that had claimed some kind of small but well-equipped predark office building. He had his DeLisle carbine across his knees.

“Can find out,” Jak said stubbornly. He hated to stay still for long, especially doing hard physical labor. He felt as if he should constantly be prowling whatever surroundings his companions happened to find themselves in, keeping watch, keeping them safe. And it chafed his spirit to be forced to do so while there seemed to be enemies about.

“Why don’t we wait to see if they are a threat to us, Jak?” said Krysty Wroth, emerging from the large irregular hole in the rubble that led to the intact, buried sections of the small predark complex.

As she straightened, Ryan watched her appreciatively. Like Mildred, she had stripped off the man’s shirt she wore in favor of her halter top. Also like Mildred, she had substantial need of the support it gave. Ryan never tired of watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she straightened. She took a handkerchief from her pants pocket and wiped her forehead. Her glorious red mane of hair was tied back in a green-and-white bandanna. Its strands stirred slightly, restless, despite the lack of so much as a sigh of wind here in this pit in the heavily wooded Pennyrile Hills. Each individual hair was a living thing, capable of motion—and of feeling, which made the occasions she found it necessary to trim it something of an ordeal.

She wasn’t just the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen, she was his life-mate. Jak looked at her.

“Want make sure don’t,” he said. The young man tended to expend words, especially things like pronouns and articles, as if they were drops of his own blood. The others had enough experience of interpreting his eccentrically clipped speech they could make out what he meant. Usually.

She smiled her dazzling smile. “They haven’t tried anything so far,” she pointed out. “But why don’t you take over for Ricky on watch?”

Jak liked that suggestion. He nodded and scrambled up the treacherous, sliding slope as if he were half mountain goat, half wraith. Ricky was appreciative of the offer and picked his way cautiously back down to join the others beside the hole and their growing pile of the day’s bounty.

Ricky was something of an apprentice to J.B., having learned weapons-making skills from his uncle Benito back home on Monster Island, and sharing with the man a special love for booby traps.

The Armorer was bent over the crate with a salvaged chunk of orange Formica on it, where their best swag of the day was piled. He had his battered fedora pushed to the back of his head and was scrutinizing the loot. “Mebbe what you’re seeing is what the folks hereabouts call coamers,” he said, picking up a piece of circuit board and holding it up to the dying sun’s light.

“Grave robbers?” Ricky asked a little breathlessly, as he came up to join his mentor. “Could they be what’s out there?”

“No one has seen them,” Doc said. “They might indeed be our pale ghosts.”

Ricky swallowed.

* * *

THE PENNYRILE HILLS were a fertile and somewhat secluded region of what had long ago been western Kentucky. The area was an irregular patch of rolling, thickly wooded country, dotted with sinkholes and crisscrossed by streams, roughly forty miles long by twenty across at the widest, set in the midst of a larger stretch of arid limestone plain—a large green oasis amid desolation. Some freak of weather patterns provided it abundant rainfall, and protection from the acid rains that periodically scoured the rest of the surrounding karst country.

Therefore the people of the Pennyrile led a relatively isolated existence, and mostly seemed to like it that way. There were a few small villes, of the sort that boasted a mayor instead of a baron. Most of them were scattered in clans and remote cottages and camps, where they lived by subsistence farming, hunting, fishing, trapping, and cutting firewood and lumber. They generated sufficient surplus, on their own hook and through traders and travelers from outlands who found their way into the area, to make it worth the companions’ while to sell the booty they took from the predark trove they had literally stumbled into—thanks to Ricky not always watching where he put his feet—rather than packing the richest haul on their backs and taking it somewhere else.

Ryan was glad the sunken facility had turned up in a sparsely populated area of the Pennyrile. It made sense, of course; if more people lived nearby, odds were that somebody would’ve found and plundered it decades earlier. But also the locals, while prosperous enough not to be desperate as a usual thing, yet not prosperous enough to attract coldhearts or conquerors, tended to be clannish, insular, and to view outlanders with extreme suspicion.

Still, mutual advantage was a universal language, even though it was one a surprising number of denizens of the postnuke world chose to remain deaf to, for reasons Ryan had long since given up trying to puzzle out. Whatever their misgivings or prejudices toward the tall, one-eyed man and his companions, they were glad enough to trade for the treasures the outlanders dug from the earth.

Conn, the proprietor of a gaudy house outside the ville of Sinkhole, was actually welcoming to outlanders, possibly as a concomitant of his occupation. In particular, Ryan thought, he provided a reasonably safe and clean environment in which to do business and even spend some proceeds of the interactions.

Ryan heaved a deep sigh. He was bone-tired from the day’s exertion in the heat and humidity. The sweat ran freely from his shaggy black hair down his face, stinging his good eye—his right one—and tickling when it insinuated its way under the black patch that covered where the other had been.

Sometimes he had to remind himself that if he was this beat, the others had to be dragging themselves along by nothing more than sheer determination.

He walked over to the plunder table, stooped, picked up a clay jug and took a long drink. Then he poured water over his forehead and face. That was one good thing about this area: water was easy to come by. It was another minor wonder the sunken facility hadn’t flooded to inaccessibility.

Doc said something about the sandstone cap underlying the soil keeping the water out here, even though the moisture had infiltrated somewhere nearby and scooped a gap in the soft underlying limestone bedrock. That was what led to the sinkhole opening up and eating the small but well-equipped field office complex, although Ryan suspected it had gotten more than a little help from the unnatural wave of monster earthquakes generated by the nukecaust.

“Right, people,” he called. “Let’s start powering down for the day.”

“What have we got here, J.B.?” he asked his friend as he approached their plunder pile.

“Mostly junk like busted old office machinery,” the Armorer said. He held up a stapler whose metal parts were almost as red as its hard-plastic shell from rust. “But now that we got down to where their workshop was, we stand to start really finding some prime scavvy.”

“Weapons, maybe?” asked Ricky, dark eyes gleaming.

“More ammo, anyway,” J.B. said.

They’d found substantial stores of ammunition in a weapons locker in what seemed to be the main office area. As far as they could tell, the structure had been built as a command center for some kind of mining operation nearby, whose nature they hadn’t managed to discover, and all traces of which appeared to have been obliterated by earth upheavals and more than a hundred years of weather.

They couldn’t use the cans of 5.56 mm bullets, since they lacked blasters that fired them. But there was a cache of 9 mm, 12-gauge, .45 ACP and 7.62 mm ammo that took care of replenishing their stocks for most of the armament they carried.

They found no .38 Special cartridges for the Czech ZKR 551 target revolver Mildred insisted on toting, even though that caliber was relatively common, nor anything for Doc’s enormous LeMat. “If we find blasters, will we trade them?” Ricky asked.

J.B. grunted. “Locals favor black-powder blasters,” he said, “mostly single-shot break-action shotguns or even muzzle-loaders. I kind of like the edge our firepower gives us over their smoke-poles, myself.”

Ryan nodded.

“They’re not that friendly,” he agreed. “Anyway, if we find modern blasters, they’ll be well worth humping out of here when we shake the limestone dust of this place off our boot heels.”

“Not soon, I hope,” Krysty said. “The work here’s hard, but at least we have a sheltered spot to live while we’re doing it.”

“Think this would be a good place to put down roots, Krysty?” Mildred asked in a bantering tone.

The taller woman shrugged. “It’s always been my dream,” she said, a faraway look in her emerald-green eyes. “To find someplace we can make a life.”

“Node’ll play out soon enough,” Ryan told her. “And I don’t see us as dirt farmers, anyway.”

To his surprise he saw sadness in her face. “Sorry, lover,” he said. “I know that’s a sore spot for you. Reckon I shouldn’t go poking it.”

Mildred made an apologetic noise in her throat. “Yeah. My bad. I shouldn’t tease you about it, Krysty.”

She shook her head, making the beaded plaits in her hair clack together.

“The fact is,” she said, “we could all use a break.”

“What do you think this is, Millie?” J.B. asked.

She scowled but, for once, couldn’t find an appropriate comeback.

“What about our mysterious friends up there?” Ricky asked, uneasily waving a hand.

“They’re probably just figments of our overworked imaginations.”

She stopped speaking abruptly, gazing upward, her eyes growing wide.

Something grazed Ryan’s cheek on the blind side.

* * *

“GET DOWN!” KRYSTY heard Ryan shout. She wheeled to see him following his own command, diving to the rubble-choked slope with his SIG Sauer in hand.

“Oh my God, I see them too!” she heard Mildred yell.

That was more than enough for Krysty. She whipped out her Glock 18C with the efficiency of frequent habit and threw herself down, as well. She was glad for the halter top confining her breasts offering at least some protection from the corner of a chunk of concrete that dug into her left one.

The bushes surrounding the pit were thrashing. Rocks and sticks were flying from them, thrown by unseen hands at the group. Unfortunately, despite the trees shielding them from casual discovery, the excavation was approximately the worst possible tactical situation to put themselves into. Everybody who knew where they were and wished them harm had the high ground.

Grinning, Jak reached into his jacket. His right hand came out wrapped inside the knuckle-duster hilt of a trench knife. The left whipped one of his butterfly knives open in a blur of precision. He started to move toward the attackers. “Jak, no!” Mildred yelled. “They look too much like you! We might shoot you by mistake!”

The young man froze. Right then Krysty caught a flash of a face peering at her from a gap in the screen of underbrush. To her shock it looked like the bleached-bone white of Jak’s face, and the eyes staring at her from beneath matted white locks were the same blood color as their friend’s. But Jak, despite the prejudice he frequently encountered—and tended to dispute loudly and forcefully—was no mutie himself, but an albino, subject to a genetic condition that predated the skydark by many generations.

The face Krysty saw, staring at her, was not right, somehow. The nose and jaw seemed pushed too far forward. It was a mostly human visage, but not entirely.

Then it was gone, and she saw other pallid bodies flitting out of clear view behind where it had been.

“What do we do?” J.B. called as a foot-long branch with green leaves still on it bounced harmlessly off his fedora.

A fist-sized stone bounced past Krysty’s right cheek. “Blast them!” Ryan shouted.

The head-splitting roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python was the first response to Ryan’s command. As a storm of blasterfire roared around her, the prone Krysty raised her Glock, but she had little to aim at. Doc’s “pallid shadows” continued to live up to their name, flitting just outside of clear sight behind the brush or among the boles of the trees around the sinkhole. Especially not knowing whether or when they might face a concerted rush by their unknown foes, she was happy to take single shots as a hint of target revealed itself.

A scream rang out from above to Krysty’s right, long, shuddering and unnervingly humanlike. It startled her, but it was no big surprise: plenty of muties were human, for all practical purposes, their “taint” notwithstanding. Some of them were indistinguishable from norms.

Like Krysty, whose mutant traits—with the exception of her sentient red hair—were hidden. As quickly as it began, the barrage of thrown debris stopped. The flitting ghosts vanished. Or at least Krysty abruptly lost all sight of them, even the furtive glimpses she’d been getting since the attack began.

“Cease fire!” Ryan roared. “That means you, Ricky. Don’t waste ammo.”

“Sorry, Ryan.”

“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan called.

“I’m fine, lover,” Krysty said, catching his eye and throwing a wink. The others affirmed they hadn’t received so much as a bruise from the pelting.

“So what just happened?” Mildred asked.

Krysty glanced at Ryan. Her lover didn’t suffer fools gladly, or at all, and was sometimes inclined to be curt with Mildred when either her sharp tongue or her archaic sentimental notions got on his nerves. And on the surface, the question seemed pretty obtuse.

Seemed. But Krysty found herself unsure, as well. Had they staved off a more serious assault? Had they overreacted? She wasn’t too concerned over the latter possibility—if you played pranks on a heavily armed party out in the wilderness, you had no gripe coming if you suddenly acquired a few more holes in your hide.

Ryan shook his head. “No bastard clue,” he said. “Everybody try to find a position with halfway-decent cover and stay tight with eyes skinned. We don’t know if and when they might be back.”

He didn’t say “with reinforcements,” but Krysty heard the words loud and clear anyway. She knew the others did, too. They’d worked together as a team for a long time and had been in so many similar situations that the words were a given.

* * *

BUT NO FURTHER attack came. When half an hour had gone by according to J.B.’s wrist chron, Ryan cautiously called for everyone to stand down. Leaving the rest to keep watch, he went out with Jak to look for signs of the flitting ghosts.

They found some broken branches, and blood spattered on leaves and the grass where the scream had come from. Reassuringly, it was red. What was less reassuring was the fact that not even Jak’s keen eyes and tracking skills were able to find any usable trails away from the sinkhole. “Right,” Ryan said, coming back to the lip of the sinkhole. The sun started to sink behind the western trees. “We still don’t know who they were, what they were, or where they went. But they seem to be gone now. So let’s pack up some medium-value scavvy and hump it into Sinkhole.”

“How do we know the creatures won’t spy on us as we do?” Doc asked.

“We don’t, Doc,” Ryan replied. “But I don’t propose to live out the rest of my days according to what I’m afraid these things we couldn’t even get a clear look at might do.”

* * *

LIGHT LIKE THE dancing orange flames of hell threw the shadow of Wymea Berdone, and the limp and lifeless figure she carried in her arms, all distorted onto the bare and beaten ground before her.

Behind her, the only home she knew burned with a bellow like a gigantic, raving beast.

Aside from a butcher knife from the kitchen, its blade reduced to little more than a finger-width by repeated honings, she was unarmed. She had been forced to leave even her father’s treasured ax behind in the blazing house, with the chills of her mother and stepfather.

If the bastard cowards who murdered my baby sister come for me, she thought, so much the worse for them!

The rickety roar gave way with a great rumbling and cracking and a redoubling of the intensity of the glare. Without a backward glance, Wymie turned onto a path scarcely wider than a deer track, and, barefoot and grieving, began the two-mile walk to Sinkhole, the nearest ville.

Where she meant to find justice. Even if it killed her.

Chapter Two

“Potar Baggart, back off this instant!”

Ryan lifted the beer mug to his lips.

It was the bartender who spoke, sharply yet without obviously raising his voice. The other hubbub in the Stenson’s Creek gaudy, which had risen to a crescendo of happy anticipation when Potar tried to pick a fight with the grubby group of outlanders, abruptly died.

Potar was a big man, with a clenched red fist of a face beneath blond hair that would have been described as “dirty blond” had it been clean, which it wasn’t. The general smell wafting from him suggested to Ryan that neither it nor the rest of him had been clean in a long time. Ryan sipped his beer. It was good; the landlord was proud of his skills as a brewmaster, and so far as the one-eyed man was concerned, he was entitled. Ryan hadn’t risen from the chair where he’d been sitting at a table in the gaudy’s darkest corner with his friends when the lummox Potar came over and started making suggestions of a distinctly unwelcome kind to Krysty. But though the big man didn’t back off at the whip-crack command, Ryan saw the tension go out of him like the hammer of a blaster being returned gently down with a thumb.

So he let his own hand slip from the hilt of the his panga, with which he’d been preparing to gut the huge man like a fish when he made the move he was so clearly working himself up for.

The bartender, a middle-sized, prematurely balding man whose name was Mathus Conn, and who also happened to own and run the gaudy, also seemed to notice the big man’s reaction.

“Now step right back from there, you hear?” he said, his tone softer, but barely. “Now. You don’t want me to reach under the counter.”

Though sitting in a half sprawl in the chair as if solidly at his ease, Ryan watched the man-mountain narrowly through his lone eye. He knew an aggressor usually had to get himself worked up to actually launch an attack. It was just human nature. But he also knew that in some men that could happen with frightening speed.

But apparently he didn’t want to see what the gaudy owner had under the counter. Instead his raised his ham-slab hands placatingly toward the bar as he shuffled away across the dried-grass-covered floor.

“I wonder what he does have under there,” Ricky said beneath his breath.

“Sawed-off double-barrel 10-gauge muzzle-loader,” J.B. said softly, “if I had to guess.”

“Sorry, Mathus,” Potar said. “Just funnin’ a little. You know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“I know no such thing,” Conn stated crisply. “But I do know you. And you know I don’t put up with trouble inside my place. So I reckon it’s time for you to leave.”

The huge man looked around. The gaudy was filled with faces lit yellow by smoky oil lamps. None of them looked sympathetic. Potar turned and strode out, head high, as if leaving was his idea.

“He’s the town bully over to Sinkhole,” Conn told the companions.

“We figured,” Mildred replied.

“I think he just wants acceptance.”

“The kind of big lunk who has no real harm in him, huh?” Mildred said acerbically.

Ryan cocked a disapproving brow at her. The gaudy owner was their main and best customer for their scavvy. He saw no point in letting Mildred sour a perfectly profitable business relationship.

Conn laughed without much real humor. “Oh, there’s plenty harm in him,” he said. “It just happens to stem from him not being able to find a place in the world, is all.”

Ryan looked around at his friends. With his head turned so no one else in the gaudy could see but them, he inflated his cheeks and blew out an exaggerated sigh between pursed lips.

Krysty winked at him.

Stenson’s Creek’s gaudy was much like any other, if cleaner than most. That made it different from the nearby ville of Sinkhole, which was something of a dump. It seemed to be run-down more from a sense of comfortable complacency than from the pervasive despair that defined much of the world outside the Pennyrile district. The gaudy was a sprawling roadhouse in the woods, east of Sinkhole along the creek that provided its name. It was mostly solid postnuke construction, fieldstone and timber. The bar was polished local hardwood. The tables and chairs had a crude look to them, as if they’d been made with little concern for appearance. But they were sturdy. The place didn’t offer much by way of decor, but that wasn’t what Conn was in the business of selling, and his customers didn’t seem to mind.

“Hey, big boy,” a dispirited-looking gaudy slut asked a man at the table nearest Ryan and company, “looking for a good time?”

She wore a ragged skirt, a blouse whose neckline hung almost as low as her breasts did and a sort of scarf around her neck made of interwoven rags. It was apparently meant to suggest a feather boa. What it did suggest was a mutie hybrid of an actual boa constrictor and a weasel with the mange.

The man she was talking to looked cast from a similar mold to the departed Potar, but of a shorter, wider, flabbier model. He had a neck bulged out thicker than his head, into which a succession of chins blended seamlessly as he slurped at the foam on his own beer mug with an intensity single-minded enough to suggest to Ryan that it just about maxed out his capabilities in the mind department. He didn’t so much as flick his vacant brown eyes the slut’s way.

She ran her fingers down the burly shoulder left bare by his grime-, sweat- and man-grease-mottled singlet, and leaned down so far Ryan could see the full pendulousness of her breasts from ten feet away without trying to, much less wanting so. Putting her painted lips close enough to his ear to risk leaving red marks, she purred, “Mebbe you didn’t hear me the first ti—”

He shoved her away, and she went down on her not-so-well-upholstered fanny so hard her tailbone cracked against the floorboards like a knuckle rapping on a table.

Scowling, Conn put down the bottle of shine he held and started around the bar, reaching under the counter as he did so.

The woman jumped to her feet. “What the nuke, you fat slob?”

“Back up off the triggers of them blasters, everybody,” a deep voice boomed from another corner of the room.

It was naturally arresting. Everyone stopped—even Conn himself, whom Ryan had observed in their previous visits was the unquestioned master in his own house.

The speaker wasn’t tall, but he was wide. A black man, the gray in his short, tightly curled hair showed him to be in middle age. And while he had a bit of a gut bulging out onto his thighs as he sat nursing his brew, Ryan suspected there was more muscle than flab. He was surrounded by four men and two women, most of whom showed a family resemblance, though it was far less pronounced than in the three largely chinless, large-foreheaded types who accompanied the meatbag.

“Don’t take it to heart,” he said calmly. “You’re new in these parts and don’t know. Them Sumzes don’t ball nobody more distantly related than first cousin. And Buffort, there, ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”

“It’s a family turdition, Tarley,” said a skinny redheaded Sumz with ears like open wag doors. “Dates back to the dark times. That’s how us Sumzes pulled through.”

Buffort guffawed and pounded a beefy fist on the table. It happened to be the one clenching the handle of his mug. Frothy brown beer slopped forth.

Ryan could smell him and his brothers from twenty feet away. The Sumzes were turpentiners, he knew—they made the stuff from the resin of loblolly pines growing around the valley where they made their home. Its astringent, piney smell overwhelmed even the body reek wafting from the group, and the fresh-sawdust-and-old-vomit stink that even the best-kept-up gaudy sported. It was even noticeable over the odor of the lanterns, which like most of the lamps hereabouts burned a blend of the pine oil with wood alcohol.

“You tell ’em, Yoostas!” the huge fat man crowed in a surprisingly shrill voice. “Family that sleeps together keeps together!”

Everybody laughed. Even the gaudy slut, though she looked as if she wasn’t clear as to the why.

A couple of husky young men, one dark-skinned, one light, had appeared near the scene. They were local youths Conn employed for odd jobs, including bouncing the occasional rowdy patron. They looked now to their boss.

He sighed, but he was already withdrawing his hand from underneath the bar. He used it to smooth back his thinning seal-colored hair instead.

“Right,” he said. “Keep a tighter leash on your boy, there, Yoostas.”

“Aw, c’mon, Conn. There ain’t no harm to him.”

“I know,” Conn said, moving back to his accustomed spot and picking up his bottle again, as if he meant to use it for its original purpose instead of cracking heads. “That’s why y’all are still here.”

He looked at the girl, who was trying to untangle her arms and upper torso from her ratty makeshift boa.

“Go take a break, Annie,” he said. “Catch a breath, pull yourself together.”

“But my take for the evening—”

“I said, take a break. I won’t jam you on the take. Don’t bleed when you’re not cut.”

She bobbed her head and vanished toward the back, where the few cribs were. Like a lot of the more respectable gaudy-house owners, Conn allowed a few women, usually down-on-their-luck locals, to rent time and space to ply their sexual wares rather than keeping them in greater or lesser degrees of slavery, as most did. Ryan had also noted he treated his workers the way he did trading partners: politely, calmly and driving a hard bargain but a fair one.

He didn’t cheat too much, which made him a Deathlands paragon.

Ryan turned his attention back to his friends. He saw them all easing their hands back from their own blasters. Handblasters only; Conn insisted longblasters be checked at the door. That chafed J.B.’s butt a tad, but Ryan went along with it, meaning the Armorer and the others did, too.

Ryan was willing to rely on Conn’s unwavering insistence on keeping an orderly house.

And if that failed, it wasn’t as if Ryan and his friends weren’t packing enough heat to burn a way to the little cabinet by the door where their longblasters were.

“There are worse places,” Mildred said with a shrug.

J.B. showed her a hint of sly grin. “You still got your mind on settling down?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve been in way worse locations, is all I’m saying.”

“Indeed,” Doc said. He was leaning forward, staring down at an angle at the tabletop with an unfocused look in his blue eyes. Ryan couldn’t tell for sure if he was agreeing with Mildred, or with some randomly remembered person from his past, like his long-lost wife, Emily, or even their children, Rachel and Jolyon. The predark whitecoats and their malicious time-trawling had done more than age him prematurely. Sometimes Doc lost touch with the present and wandered off through the fog of his own reminiscences.

The others couldn’t help but fear that sometime he might just wander off inside his own skull and never come back. But he always had, and lately things seemed to be getting consistently better. In any event he always snapped right to when the hammer came down.

Jak was frowning.

“What’s the matter, Jak?” Krysty asked gently.

The albino’s scowl deepened. But he didn’t snap back at her, as he sometimes could with his male companions. He just pressed his scarcely visible white lips together so hard they vanished altogether, and shook his head briskly.

“Don’t gnaw your own guts over not being able to track those stick-throwing white things,” J.B. said. As was his custom, he didn’t raise his voice. If he had something to say, he said it calmly. If he had something to do, he did it without hesitation or qualm. “They know the lay of the land better than even you can, most likely. And they probably have some kind of lairs nearby they can duck into.”

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 mebbe what you saw wasn’t what your mind’s made of it. Fact is, these folks have been right here a good past hour, half an hour spent hagglin’, half an hour eatin’ my venison, stewed greens and beans, and drinkin’ my brew. They came in without a dot of blood on them, wearin’ clothes they’d double clearly worked in all day. And their hair isn’t wet enough to be from anythin’ but sweat, so they didn’t clean themselves up after doing murder. The albino in particular—blood’d show up pretty clear on him.”

Wymie was looking around, but from the slump of her strong shoulders Ryan could see that, while the anger and even hate were still there, still smoldering, sheer exhaustion and emotional reaction had damped her fires. She had nothing left.

Not now, anyway.

“You out there,” Conn called past the suddenly befuddled-looking woman. “Burny Stoops. Walter John. Get in here, pick this poor girl up off my floor and take her to Coffin-Maker Sam, over to the Hole. He’ll see she gets a decent burial.”

“I can’t afford to hire a hole dug for her,” Wymie said, sounding more sullen now than raging. “Much less a box to bury her in.”

“Tell Sam I’ll cover the expenses,” Conn said. “But you got to leave now, Wymie. Find a place to stay. Don’t make any more fuss, now. It won’t do poor Blinda a speck of good.”

“But—”

“We’ll get it sorted out. When the sun comes up, we’ll go take a look at your old place. We need information, and that’s a thing we haven’t got.”

“I know all I need to,” she said, the spark of anger flaring again.

“The rest of us don’t,” the gaudy owner said, with just a bit of edge to his voice. “Mrs. Haymuss!”

After a moment a stout brown-skinned woman emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a much-stained apron and wiping her hands on a rag. She was evidently the cook.

“Take this poor girl and see to her. Get her settled with Widow Oakey. She’s close and likes to take in strays.”

“But, Mr. Conn, the kitchen—”

“Kitchen’s closed,” the gaudy owner said. “Nobody’s got an appetite left now. And if they do, I’m not minded to feed them, right now.”

The woman walked forward, encircled Wymie’s shoulders with a brawny arm and began alternately clucking and cooing at her. Ryan couldn’t make out what she was saying. Or even if it was words.

The black-haired woman made as if to push her off. Then she turned, buried her face at the juncture of Mrs. Haymuss’s neck and beefy shoulders, and began to cry uncontrollably.

The two men Conn had called on came in past the two to gingerly pick up Blinda’s body. Mrs. Haymuss steered Wymie back out into the night. They followed, struggling to carry what a single woman had brought here on her own.

“The rest of you out there,” Conn called, “move along. It isn’t polite to stare.”

Whatever passions Wymie’s trek had excited in the locals who had collected to follow her to the gaudy house, they had vanished, as well. Shuffling their feet, not meeting one another’s gazes directly, they broke up began to go their separate ways.

Conn watched them for a moment. Slowly, those inside the gaudy who had jumped up at the spectacle sat themselves back down.

“I’d wait to make sure they all get headed in the right direction, just in case,” Conn said to Ryan. “Then you might want to clear out of here.”

“Much obliged,” Ryan said.

“Thank you for your help,” Krysty said. “Do you think we did it after all?”

Conn shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. Somebody did this, and that somebody needs to pay. But if I thought it was you, I never would’ve said what I did. Fact is, I don’t see how you could have done it.”

“But that big-titty girl still thinks you done it,” Yoostas Sumz said. “Sure as shit stinks double bad.”

Chapter Three

“What do we do now?” Mildred asked.

The faces gathered around the little campfire mirrored the concern and uncertainty she felt. Except for Ryan’s. He sat off a little apart, knees drawn up, facing off to the side. His chin was down and he was clearly brooding.

Jak was nowhere to be seen. Ryan would have had to physically restrain him to keep him from prowling the perimeter of their camp to scout for signs of watchers or intruders—and look for signs the elusive white shadows had been there. Crickets and tree frogs trilled in the night. A few late fireflies danced.

“Can we stay here?” Ricky asked.

“Don’t see as how we rightly can,” J.B. said. He sat across the fire from Mildred, face turned toward the flames. The yellow underlighting brought out the strong bone structure of his face, and turned his eyeglass lenses into disks of flame.

“The place has gotten too hot for comfort, I reckon. It’s time to shake the dust of it off our heels.”

Mildred pressed her lips into a line. She hated to contradict J.B. She loved him. More, she respected him.

“Let’s not overreact.”

Mildred’s eyes widened in surprise.

She glanced at Krysty. The tall, statuesque redhead sat beside her brooding man. It was she who had spoken out as Mildred opened her mouth. Looking back at J.B., she saw a quick furrow of his brows as he glanced at Krysty.

On him, that was the equivalent of a full-on scowl. He was usually as expressive as a stone statue.

But Krysty said what she wanted, and not just because Ryan was her partner. Everyone could speak his or her mind.

“‘Overreact’?” Mildred repeated.

“We have a good place here,” Krysty said. “A comfortable camp, the cave is good shelter, and we have running water. The dig has a lot more scavvy to be unearthed. You yourself said it looks as if we’re just getting down to the good stuff, J.B.”

“Jack’s worth squat,” J.B. replied, “if you don’t live to spend it. So Trader used to say.”

Mildred frowned. J.B. did not tend toward the dogmatic, but when the quotations from his and Ryan’s old mentor were trotted out, that meant he was settling into his groove of thinking.

“He also used to point out you tend to make jack in direct proportion to the risk you run,” Ryan added without looking around.

“Why, Ryan,” Doc said. “I thought you of all people would urge caution.”

Ryan shrugged. “Looking to look at the whole situation before I make up my mind,” Ryan replied.

“Looks straightforward to me,” J.B. said. “We’ve got two packs of enemies on our tails. That’s beyond bad odds.”

“But, J.B.,” Ricky said, almost desperately. “Think of the stuff that might be down there! The tech—the weapons!”

The Armorer shook his head. He took a half-smoked black cheroot from a pocket of the brown leather jacket he wore, struck a spark from a butane lighter he had found in the last redoubt they’d jumped to and puffed the smoke to life. He cast a swift glance at Mildred.

The woman repressed a grin. His apprentice knew his soft spots, for sure.

His occasional smoking didn’t please her as a twentieth-century physician, even one who preferred research to hands-on doctoring—before she got wakened from her cryosleep into a brutal, desolate world where “healing” was her number one marketable skill, that is. But she’d long since lost the heart to chide him for it, other than a slight frown.

Realistically, she didn’t count on any of them living long enough for cancer to take them. In Deathlands, sudden death wasn’t just a constant possibility. It was an immediate reality.

“Right now,” Ryan said softly, “we’ve got no evidence I can see that anybody’s on our tails. Here, anyway.”

“But those pale shadows know where our dig site is, certainly,” Doc stated.

“Yeah. But they haven’t shown up around here, yet.”

“Yet,” J.B. echoed.

It was Ryan’s turn to shrug.

“We’re not on the last train west yet, either. Even if the locals are after us, too, they don’t know where either place is.”

Ryan had chosen a campsite a mile or so from the sinkhole that had swallowed the predark trove. It was a fine site, as comfortable as it got sleeping rough—and better than a lot of buildings they’d bunked in, Mildred knew all too well. The cave provided shelter from the frequent rains as well as from casual observation. A little stream ran along the base of the sandstone outcrop that formed their current home. And even though it was a pain humping back and forth each day to the excavation, the separation ensured that even if one location was compromised, the other wouldn’t be.

As the fact that the pale shadows had found the dig but not this place—as far as they could tell—attested to. Though with Jak on the job, she wasn’t concerned they might be under covert observation. Just because even he couldn’t track them here on their home range—whatever the hell-on-earth they were—didn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to spot them if they came creeping around here.

But now something was eating at her, too, in spite of the fact that she, like Krysty, badly wanted to stay here as long as possible. Even if this wasn’t going to be a final, permanent safe haven—unless of course they left their bones here in the Pennyrile—they were all riding the ragged edge of exhaustion. Not so much the physical sort, but the kind brought on by constant stress.

The stability they’d enjoyed for the week or so that they’d worked the sinkhole had visibly restored them all, despite the hot and arduous labor every day brought.

“If the locals think we’re murderers,” she pointed out, “how can we stay here? I mean, we need somebody to trade with.”

“We can conceivably work the excavation for a few more days,” Doc said, “until, as Ricky observes, we get to the most valuable relics. At that point we can pick the most portable and valuable items, and then head out of the area. It’s not as if we have not done that a score of times already.”

“But Conn,” Ryan said, “the man we’ve been mostly trading with, seemed triple far from convinced we had anything to do with that girl’s murder.”

“But the girl’s sister was certain we did it,” Krysty added. “And she did manage to convince some of the locals that we were guilty.”

That was another thing about Krysty. She had her druthers, same as everybody—in particular, the longing for stability—but she was wise to the bone, as well. She saw both sides to every coin, and she spoke the truth as she saw it, always.

At least to her friends. She could lie with the best of them to an enemy, as all of them could. And did.

“And Conn poured cold water on that.”

“Not Wymie,” Krysty said.

“No. She’s got her heart set against us. But Conn managed to get some doubts in other people’s minds. I don’t think we got the whole county roused against us.”

“Yet,” J.B. said. It was becoming a theme for the evening. “But she’ll get around to coming and hunting for us, and that’s a triple lock for sure.”

“She in all probability will not come alone,” Doc said. “She showed herself to be quite persuasive, in her vengeful wrath.”

For a moment they sat in silence. A bat fluttered just outside the mouth of their cave, chasing the insects drawn by the firelight. A distant screech-owl trilled mournfully. The night smelled of moist earth and cooling, sun-warmed rock, along with the more acrid smoke of their fire.

“Then we should find evidence to clear ourselves!”

Everybody turned and looked at Ricky. His brown eyes were wide. His round cheeks showed a decidedly red flush on top of their usual olive color.

“S-sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean—”

“Kid,” J.B. said, “haven’t you learned by now, that if we let you run with us, we let you speak your mind?”

“When there’s mind involved,” Mildred said, “and it’s not just a matter of words popping into your head and rolling right out your mouth.” She liked the youth, well enough. He was a solid companion, a surprisingly good fighter and painfully smart. But he was still working on developing any damn sense, in her view.

“Ease off,” Ryan said without heat. “Clearly you got something in mind, Ricky. So let’s hear it.”

“We know we’re not guilty, and it’s a fair bet these albino creatures are what killed Blinda,” Ricky said. “After all, what she described seeing, that made her think of Jak—that looks just like what we saw.”

“What little of them we saw,” J.B. added. “But true enough.”

“So we need to find evidence it was them who did it, and not us! And then this Wymie will shift her hate off us and onto them.”

“People don’t always let go of that kind of anger easy,” Ryan said. “Even when there is evidence. Anyway, what evidence did you have in mind?”

“Well, we chill one, and take in the corpse. That’ll show them. And I bet even Wymie will admit these things are more likely to have murdered her little sister than we are.”

“Right you are, lad!” Doc exclaimed.

“But there’s a problem,” J.B. said. “We know we hit one of the things back at the dig. Chilled one, mebbe. Mebbe even more, but we found nothing but the blood trails.”

Ricky shrugged. “Maybe there’s other evidence we could find.”

“Or mebbe we could do a better job chilling one and keeping hold of it,” Ryan said. “Rather do that than cut stick and run, on balance.”

Krysty smiled. After a beat, Mildred joined her. Her friend knew her man well. You could tell Ryan had just made up his mind—if you knew the signs to look for.

The others knew them, too. “So we do us some hunting, too,” J.B. said. He tipped his fedora back on his head a few degrees. His thin lips quirked slightly at the corners.

That was his equivalent of Ryan’s wolf grin. He loved the prospect of a hunt as much as any of them. As long as there was action to take he was well satisfied, so long as it was meaningful, with a proper chance of payoff.

“The only question is, how?” Doc asked. “If they manage to elude even our master tracker, Jak.”

“Try again.” They heard the albino’s soft voice from right over their heads, perched on a ledge above the cave. “Catch next time.”

“Mebbe,” Ryan said, but he was nodding, acknowledging the possibility. “They’re good. They know the country. But they make mistakes, double sure.”

“And they don’t know Jak,” Mildred said.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Krysty asked. “I mean—what are those things?”

“That one local yokel thought werewolves,” Mildred replied.

“We have seen werewolves,” Doc said. “It is just as well young Ricky didn’t choose to share that fact with that distraught young woman. It might quite have swayed the case against us.”

“He wasn’t with us when we were down in Haven, Doc,” J.B. said gently.

“Ah. So he was not. My apologies. Time…my time is all out of joint, it appears…”

“Still good,” Ryan said. “But I’m not willing to jump that far quite yet. The baron and his lady down there were special cases.”

“Muties?” Ricky suggested.

“Albinos not—” Jak began, with quiet heat.

“We know, Jak,” Ryan said. “Albinos aren’t muties. But we also know some muties are albino.”

“We lack sufficient facts to speculate,” Doc said.

“Speculation doesn’t load many magazines,” Ryan agreed. “What interests me is, you shoot these things, they holler and bleed. Meaning also, you shoot them enough, they die.”

“So you want to stay here, in the Pennyrile,” Krysty said carefully, making sure her wishful thinking wasn’t making her read more into Ryan’s words than he meant to put in them, “and look for evidence even Wymie will have to accept.”

“Go hunting,” J.B. stated.

“Bull’s-eye,” Ryan said. “Fact is, it’s not like there’s anywhere really safe in Deathlands. Shy of the grave.”

“That crazy chick in the gaudy was right about one thing,” Mildred said. “They don’t call these Deathlands for nothing.”

“Got a plan, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“Go scout around. Keep our eyes skinned. We know they hang out around the dig site, so we can inspect the area around it triple close. Better than we did this afternoon. See if we can cut sign on a second pass.”

“And if we don’t?”

Ryan shrugged again. “Widen the search, I reckon. There doesn’t seem much point in continuing with the scavvy operation until we figure out who these hoodoos are and how to keep them off our necks anyway, the way I see it. We can head off the local folks from doing anything rash, so we won’t have to ventilate a power of them.”

“Now?” Mildred asked. She yawned. It wasn’t an attempt to back up her question—not consciously. She was that beat.

It had been a long, hard day before they’d had to face down wild murder accusations and a potential lynch mob.

“Mildred, the way our asses are dragging, we’d be in double-deep shit if we ran into any of the shadowy bastards. If Jak couldn’t follow their tracks in the daylight, we bastard sure aren’t turning up anything now.”

He straightened and stretched.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

Chapter Four

“What a mess,” Mathus Conn said, shaking his head.

The ruins of the Berdone house still smoldered, drooling dirty brown smoke into a mostly cloudless blue morning sky. The sweetish smell of overcooked meat spoiled the freshness of a new day’s air. It even overpowered the stink of still-burning wood.

“You didn’t expect it to be pretty, did you?” his cousin and chief lieutenant, Nancy, said.

He grunted and rubbed his chin. “Just funny how it always turns out worse than you expect.”

“I always hear tell of how your imagination makes things worse than they really are,” Tarley Gaines said. “But then the reality usually sucks harder.”

The three, along with a few of Tarley’s kinfolk and half a dozen or so well-disposed or just curious ville folk from Sinkhole, had trekked out to the Berdone location to see for themselves what could be learned from the site. It was clear that Wymie had been telling the truth.

At least so far as she knew it.

“So who set the house afire, I wonder,” Conn said.

“Don’t see as we’ll ever know for sure,” Nancy replied. “Mebbe the outlanders did it. Mebbe Wymie did it in hopes of trappin’ some of whoever chilled her family inside.”

“Speaking of which,” Tarley said. “Yo, Zedd. Find any chills in there?”

“Two,” came back the voice of one of his nephews from inside the gutted house. Like many established homes in the Pennyrile, the outer walls were stoutly built of fieldstone, not scraped-together scavvy and newly sawn lumber the way villes like Sinkhole tended to be. Wymie’s great-grandfather, a man remembered only as “Ax,” had built the house with the help of his sons, after setting up a successful wood-cutting claim in the area.

And now it’s gone to ruin overnight, Conn thought, shaking his head.

“Reckon we’d best go see for ourselves,” he said.

* * *

“NUKE THAT MATHUS CONN!” Wymie exclaimed, slamming her fist on the breakfast table in the boarding house Widow Oakey ran. The assorted crockery clattered and tinkled. “I can’t believe he stuck up for those outlanders like that!”

“Now, Wymie,” the widow said, tottering in from the kitchen holding a steaming pot of spearmint tea on a battered tray. “You got no call to be pounding around raising a fuss like that.”

Wymie judged the old lady had to have seen her. She was deaf as a rock, unless you hollered in her face. At that there was no telling how much was lip-reading rather than any kind of hearing.

Widow Oakey was a tiny woman, who seemed to consist entirely of a collection of dried hardwood sticks bundled up in what had most likely started its existence as a gingham dress, but now seemed mostly made up of roughly equal amounts of soaked-in seasoned sweat and patches, all topped off by a bun of yellowish white hair. She seemed frail and so bound by arthritis and rheumatism that her joints barely functioned at all. Yet Wymie knew she chipped her own kindling like a pro, and her cooking was better than passable good.

It was her housekeeping that fell by the wayside.

“Why are you wishin’ death and devastation on Conn?” asked Garl, one of her fellow lodgers, from across the table. A few fragments of scrambled egg dribbled from the side of his mouth and cascaded down his several chins toward his belly, which kept him so far back from the table his comically short-seeming arms had trouble reaching his plate. He looked as if he went straight from being a baby to being a vast, gnarled, weathered, grizzly baby, without passing through the intervening stages of childhood and adulthood.

“How dare he stick up for outlanders who chilled my baby sister?” she asked hotly. “Cannie coldhearts. The worst thing! Worse than muties, even! I saw it with my own eyes!”

“Now, are you sayin’ you saw them all in the act of chilling your sister, Wymie?” the other boarder at breakfast asked. “Because that sounds double crowded to me. They’d all be gettin’ in each other’s way. Not to make light of a terrible thing, or nothin’. Still, it don’t seem practical.”

Duggur Doakz was a middle-aged black man with a fringe of gray hair and not a tooth in his head. A gifted silversmith, he could have been a rich man—an important tradesman to some important baron. But that would take him far off beyond Pennyrile, and he hadn’t chosen to leave the place where he was born. He kept his hand in and his body out of the ground by being a tinker and general repairman.

Wymie scowled furiously into her own plate. It was bare except for a few crumbs of biscuit and near-invisible scraps of egg. She had eaten like a ravenous wolf. She had a hearty appetite at the best of times. For some reason the onset of the worst had made her even hungrier.

Or mebbe it’s because I ain’t et since yesterday, she thought.

A cat jumped as if on cue onto Wymie’s shoulder. She started to swat it off, but refrained. She was a guest in the oldie’s house, after all. And her pa had seen her raised right as to politeness to one’s elders. She in turn had passed that on after he died to— Her eyes drowned in hot, stinging tears.

The cat jumped to the floor, then rubbed against her leg and purred.

Wymie didn’t like cats. She couldn’t trust a creature that looked only after its own interests and never after hers. But Widow Oakey’s rickety-seeming predark two-story house was overrun with the wretches. Mebbe a dozen of them.

The whole place reeked of cat piss and shit, which at least kept down the smell of dust and mold. The house was a crazy quilt of scavvy furniture, decorations and irregularly shaped lace doilies apparently made by Widow Oakey herself, without apparent skill, and strewed haphazardly over chairs, tables and bric-a-brac alike to protect them from…something.

“I saw one of them,” she muttered fiercely. “The mutie. I saw the white skin and white hair, plain as day. And the eyes. Those red eyes…”

“Now, now, Wymie,” Duggur said. “Albinos aren’t hardly muties.”

She raised clenched fists. But becoming vaguely aware of Widow Oakey hovering fragilely nearby with her tray trembling precariously in her hands, she refrained from smashing them down on the piss- and grease-stained white damask tablecloth.

Someone knocked on the front door. Widow Oakey set down the tray, spilling about half a cup of tea out the spout of the cracked pot. She tottered off to answer.

Before Wymie could reach for the spoon to ladle out a second helping of eggs, she came back with a trio of locals.

Her cousin Mance Kobelin immediately came to her, spreading his arms. She rose to join in a wordless embrace. She felt the tears run freely down her face, moistening the red plaid flannel of his shirt beneath her cheek.

“We heard what happened, Wymie,” intoned Dorden Fitzyoo, hat in hand, as Mance released her. He had doffed it per Widow Oakey’s stringent house rules, revealing a hair-fringed dome of skull that showed skating highlights in the morning sun as filtered through dusty, fly-crap-stained chintz curtains. “It’s a terrible thing.”

Wymie nodded thanks, unable to speak. Dorden, who made and milled black powder on the far side of Sinkhole, had been a close friend of Wymie’s mother and father. He had been driven somewhat apart from the family after Tyler Berdone’s accident. Like so many others. Wymie still thought of him as a kindly uncle.

He had already sweated through the vest, which didn’t match the suit coat he wore over it, straining to contain his paunch. “What happened to your parents, then, child?” the third visitor said in a cracked and quavering voice. “We heard they’re dead too.”

“They got chilled,” she said.

“Ah. How horrible that you had to witness that.” He shook his wrinkled head, which showed even more bald skin that Dorden’s though, as if to compensate, his hair stuck out in wild white wings to both sides. “Only the good die young.”

So long as you’re talking about Blinda, she thought. I wonder if you’d say that if you knew how often Mord talked about grabbing you some dark night and hanging you over a fire till you spilled the location of that fabled stash of yours.

But Wymie’s stepdad had never acted on his gruesome fantasy, and never would’ve. Though this man’s hands shook like leaves in a brisk breeze most of the time, they steadied right down when he gripped a hammer or other tool. Or a handblaster. He was still the best shot for miles around with his giant old Peacemaker .45 revolver.

Wymie had a hard time believing the stories that oldie Vin Bertolli had been the western Pennyrile’s biggest lady-killer in his prime. But that was decades ago: he had lived in and around Sinkhole for over half a century, since arriving as a young adventurer in his twenties who’d been forced to seek a quiet place to settle by a blaster wound that’d crippled his left hip some.

“The outlanders did it,” Wymie said. “I saw the white face and red eyes of the murdering son of a bitch myself. I could almost reach out and touch him! But that taint Conn sticks up for them!”

“You got to do somethin’ yourself then, Wymie,” Mance suggested. “I’ll help.”

“Obliged,” she said.

The older visitors exchanged uneasy glances.

“Mathus Conn’s a good man,” Vin said. “A good man is hard to find.”

To her surprise, Wymie found the stuffy air inside the boarding house could smell worse than it already did. The oldie ripped a thunderous, bubbling fart. Her knees actually weakened as the smell hit her.

A black-and-white cat rubbed against the wrinklie’s shins, purring loudly. It’s like the little monsters are applauding him for out-stinking them, she thought.

“How can he be good if he shields murderers of little girls?” she demanded.

“I hear tell he wanted evidence that what you saw was really one of them outlanders, Wymie,” Dorden said.

“I saw him with my own eyes!”

“You saw an albino,” Dorden corrected her, “just like Shandy Kraft was. There’s likely one or two more in the world than just that skinny kid with the outlanders.”

“Are you defendin’ them, too? Whose side are you on?”

He raised his hands. “Yours, Wymie. We’re not blood kin, but I allus been close to your family. But Conn’s a good man, like Vin says. Always dealt square with everybody. Dealt square with your ma and your pa, while he was alive.”

He didn’t mentioned Mord Pascoe. He didn’t need to. Wymie’s late stepdad never dealt square with anybody. And once the gaudy owner had caught him trying to cheat him one too many times, he refused to deal with him at all.

“More’n that,” Dorden said, “he protects himself double good. And if anybody pushed Conn too hard without good reason, Tarley Gaines and his clan would step up to back him. And that’s a bunch nobody wants to mess with.”

“If aidin’ and abettin’ little-girl-murderin’ outlanders isn’t good enough reason, I don’t know what is!” Mance declared furiously.

“Words are like birds,” Vin said. “They fly away.”

Everyone stopped and stared at him for a moment. He seemed unfazed.

“Fact is,” Dorden went on deliberately, “more people here around Sinkhole reckon Conn’s got the right of it than you do. No, don’t scowl at me, girl. It’s true.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Vin said. He leaned painfully on his walking stick to pat an orange tabby cat that was rubbing his head on his homemade deerskin moccasins. This entailed ripping another ferocious fart.

Wymie sat back down.

“I don’t care about that!” she stated.

“We all have to live here,” Dorden said gently. “That means continuing to get on with our neighbors, best we can.”

“I’ll leave, then!” she half screamed. “Once I get Blinda avenged.”

Vin straightened creakily. He shook his head. “The impetuosity of youth.”

She glared at him. “What does that even mean?”

He beamed toothlessly at her.

“Never mind,” Dorden said. “But maybe you can set things straight without making enemies here among your home folk.”

Wymie kept her jaw clamped on the bile she wanted to spew on him. She knew he spoke out of genuine friendship. She also, deep down somewhere, knew he was making sound sense.

But she wasn’t in the mood for sense.

“And what if you’re wrong?” Dorden said softly. “You take your vengeance on the wrong people, that leaves the real murderer out there free to murder more. You don’t want that, do you?”

“I know what I saw!”

“You need to help us see, too.”

She frowned so fiercely it almost shut her eyes, and angled her face toward her lap.

“What’d you have in mind, Dorden?” Mance asked.

“Simple,” the older man said. Wymie heard the smile in his voice. “You need to look for evidence to back your claim. You got a power of folks hereabouts willing to help. Everybody wants to see justice done for your family—and the chillin’ stopped. This here’s a peaceful district in a world full of strife and misery. We mean to keep it that way.”

She didn’t miss the warning in his words, but she had to admit he had a point.

Better people help you than stand in your path, she thought.

“And while we’re out lookin’ for evidence to show you’re right,” Mance said, with eagerness growing in his voice as he spoke, “we can also start lookin’ for the outlanders. You gotta find ’em to take care of ’em, right?”

“They been triple good hidin’ their tracks,” Duggur said.

Garl was taking advantage of the conversational distraction to spoon the rest of the scrambled eggs directly from the serving bowl into his mouth. Yellow fragments bounced off his chins and down the massive slope of his belly.

“Nobody knows where their dig is, or their camp, should it be a different spot,” Duggur said.

Wymie sucked down a deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.

“You’re right.” She felt tears drying on her face, leaving salt-sticky tracks down her cheeks. “That’s a double-good thing I can do. And I can do it!”

Her cousin squeezed her shoulder. “I’m with you, Wymie!”

“We’re all with you,” Dorden said, “in findin’ your family’s killers.”

“Wymie, dear,” Widow Oakey called in her cracked voice from the entry to the parlor. Wymie hadn’t been aware she’d left the room. “There’s a crowd outside to see you. I’d let ’em in, but they’d frighten my babies.”

Wymie stood up again, trying not to be too obvious about kicking away a black cat that was slithering up against her leg. She managed to shift it a ways with her boot.

“I’ll come see,” she said, her heart pulsing faster.

“You know, Miz Oakey,” Dorden said, “not to be overly critical, but you need to clean out your cat boxes more often.”

She blinked rheumy brown eyes at him. “Cat boxes?”

* * *

“FOR A LONG time we’ve enjoyed an island of stability in the midst of the chaos of the outside world,” Conn said. “I hope it’s not invadin’ to stay.”

His nephew, Zedd, who had tan, freckled skin and rusty, tightly curled hair, emerged through the door.

“Looks like Layna and Mord, Unk,” he said.

“Ugh,” Nancy said. She turned away. She was hard as nails about most things, but had a squeamish touch. Her cousin and employer, Conn, respected that in her; it made her seem more human.

“How do they look?” Conn asked, despite his cousin’s visible discomfort.

Zedd showed pressed-together teeth. They were white and mostly even. Patriarch Tarley enforced hygiene in his clan with an iron hand, despite his normally easygoing ways. He had a rep for being tough when it counted.

“Like you’d expect,” Nancy said, as if she were gritting her teeth to hold in puke. Evidently she was hoping to stave off further details.

If so, she hoped in vain.

“Not really,” Zedd said. “Chills ain’t burned so much as, well, kinda roasted. And not really all over, you know?”

Conn kept his gaze steady on the young man as his cousin loudly lost her battle against throwing her guts up. “And they don’t look et so much as busted all to nuke. Like they got hacked with an ax. Heads’re both busted wide-open, and don’t look as if their brains swole from the heat and popped through the skulls like taters in the oven.”

“That’s enough details right there, Zedd,” Tarley said.

The young man shrugged.

“I was only tryin’—”

“Ace. Thanks. Enough.”

Nancy straightened, grunting and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The group shifted upwind of the fresh pool of barf in the tramped-earth yard.

“Doesn’t that support Wymie’s claims?” she asked, all business once again. “I mean, would the weird fanged monsters the outlanders claim to’ve seen have done somethin’ like that? Whacked them with an ax?”

Tarley shrugged. “Why not?”

“Truth,” Conn said. “We don’t know what these things’d do. We don’t know if they’re even real. It’s a matter on which I’m far from makin’ up my mind.”

“But what difference does it make, anyway, Mathus?” Nancy asked. “They’re strangers. Outlanders. Why are you botherin’ to stick up for them?”

“Fairness?” Tarley suggested. “Justice?”

Nancy scoffed. “How many magazines do them things load?”

“More than you might think,” Tarley said stolidly.

“A reputation for fairness is part of my stock in trade,” Conn reminded his assistant. “And let’s not forget that dealin’ with these rough-lookin’ outlanders has been highly profitable. We can resell the scavvy we get from them to folks who want it most at considerable markup, and everybody’s happy. Or do you want to go scout out their node and then dig scavvy yourself?”

She shook her head. “I’m not the outdoor type, boss,” she said. “You know that. Had folks out looking, though.”

“No luck, however,” Conn said.

“No. They cover their tracks triple well.” She frowned. “A suspicious mind might judge that as pointin’ to them, too.”

“A suspicious mind judges everythin’ as pointin’ to those it suspects,” Conn pointed out.

“Wymie’s on a rampage,” Tarley said thoughtfully. “She ain’t in a frame of mind to listen to reason. She could cause a power of mischief, it seems to me.”

“Then seriously, boss,” Nancy said. “Why not just throw the strangers to Wymie like a bone to a beggin’ dog? Sure, justice, profit, all those good things. But if it gets her to calm the rad-dust down, mightn’t that work out more profitable in the long run?”

Conn chuckled. His cousin had a way of reminding him exactly why he’d hired her, and without any sign of intent. Just by doing…what he’d hired her to: minding the bottom line.

But this time he still thought she’d made a rare mistake in her tallying.

“She’s already stirred up a mob,” he said. “That kind of thing is like a shaken-up jar full of wasps. It’s hard to put back once you take the lid off.”

“And what if she’s wrong?” Tarley asked. “Then chillin’ the outlanders will leave the real murderers still loose. And murderin’ more, unless I miss my guess.”

“That’s what I fear,” Conn admitted.

He raised his voice and called to the rest of the party, “Any sign of tracks anywhere?”

“Nary a scrap, Mr. Conn,” Edmun replied. “Just the prints Wymie made when she got onto the trail toward town.”

Edmun was an indistinct blond man somewhere in his thirties, bland as tepid water, but with a reputation for steadiness, which made it a matter of curiosity to Conn why he had first taken up Wymie’s cause—when she’d carried her dreadful burden toward Stenson’s Creek—and then promptly fallen away when Conn raised the voice of reason.

Conn didn’t hold that highly by his own powers of persuasion. He was a skilled bargainer, with a lifetime of experience in dealing with everyone from desperate dirt farmers to booze- and crank-fueled coldhearts one twitch away from a chilling frenzy. Yet he’d always found Edmun Cowil and his like the hardest to move, once they got set in a groove.

There was something working here. It tickled the underside of his brain like gaudy-slut fingernails along the underside of his ball sack—though that was a pleasure he had long chosen to deny himself, as it was fundamentally bad business.

But no time for that now.

“Yard’s hard-packed and sun-set hard as brick,” Tarley said, taking a blue handkerchief from a pocket of his overalls and dabbing at his broad mocha forehead, where sweat ran out from beneath the brim of his black hat. Conn wasn’t sure what good the rag would do him at this point. It was long since soaked sopping from earlier duty. But the patriarch seemed to derive some kind of comfort from it.

“Found something, Unk,” Zedd called from in between the charred and mostly roofless stone walls. He appeared in the doorway holding an ax. Its head was covered in smoke and crusted crud. Its haft showed charring on what Conn reckoned had been the uppermost surface as it lay on its side and the house burned down toward it. But it looked as if it’d be serviceable enough, once it got cleaned up.

“Wonder why Wymie would leave her grandpappy’s ax,” Nancy said. “She treasured that dang thing.”

“Even though the haft has been replaced a dozen times and the head twice,” Tarley said with a chuckle for the hoary old joke. Although truth told, it likely had more than a scrap of truth, if it wasn’t the literal thing.

Conn shrugged. “Reckon she had to leave in a hurry, whether the marauders fired the place, or she set it alight to trap them.

“Reckon we’ll never know what really happened here. Oh, well. World’s full of stuff I’ll never know. Best get back to Widow Oakey’s place, now, and see what kind of mischief Wymie’s gettin’ up to in this bright new day.”

* * *

THE “CROWD” WIDOW OAKEY had spoken of turned out to consist of about half a dozen, Sinkhole residents and people from the surrounding countryside. They included a couple who had joined her sorrowful procession the night before, like Walter John and Burny Stoops, who had followed Conn’s orders to carry her sister to the coffin-maker’s place.

With a shock she realized she’d still have to go talk to him, to Sam, about arrangements for Blinda, and her ma, for that matter.

Mord Pascoe could lie out to feed the wolves and coyotes, as far as she was concerned. Unless the bastard had burned too far to carbon for even the likes of them to stomach. She wished he could’ve felt the flames that had consumed most of all she had held dear. But a person in her circumstances had to make do…

She swayed.

“We come to see how you was, Wymie,” Burny said. “And to see what you wanted to do about your, you know. Quest for vengeance.”

She felt her eyes fill with hot tears yet again. But this time, they were tears of gratitude.

She smiled at them.

“Thank you. Thank you all.”

It’s not much, she knew. But it was a start.

She could work with this!

Chapter Five

“Wait,” a voice called from the scrub oak. “Don’t shoot. I’m not one of them.”

Mildred saw Ryan look at Krysty, who shrugged.

The midafternoon mugginess hung heavy in the air of the little glade on the slope a few dozen yards above a gurgling brook. Red oak and hickory branches overhung the clearing, masking most of the direct sunlight. Mildred didn’t want to imagine what the afternoon would feel like without that shade.

“Define ‘them,’” Ryan called back.

“The coamers,” the unseen man said. “The albino grave robbers. The ones you’re looking for.”

“Grave robbers, as young Ricky suggested,” Doc stated. “That adds a new dimension to our present difficulty.”

“Dark night,” J.B. muttered. “It surely does.”

The companions had been traveling single file along a game trail a couple miles southwest of their dig site, with Ryan in the lead and J.B. protecting their rear. They had just begun to fan out on entering the clearing when Jak’s warning birdcall brought them up short. They had immediately crouched or knelt, covering the brush-screen on the far side with their blasters.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “How do you know so much about them?”

“And how do you know what we’re looking for?” Mildred asked.

“I’ve roamed these woods nigh onto thirty years. I seen many a thing come and go, some stranger than most. And I seen the ones the locals call ‘coamers.’ They come and go, too. Currently they seem to be coming.”

J.B. grunted in interest.

“Come out where we can get a better look at you,” Ryan commanded.

“Don’t go shootin’ me, now.”

“If we were going to, we would’ve by now,” J.B. said. “That brush won’t stop many bullets.”

The branches rustled.

What appeared from the vegetation was anything but threatening, at first glance: a man of smallish to middle size, middle-aged to old, walking tentatively on rather bowed legs left bare by ragged and dirty cargo shorts with bulging pockets. A coonskin cap covered the top of his head. Around his shoulders he wore a cape made of shaggy bark that gave the locally abundant shagbark oak its name. Beneath that was a linen shirt. His round face was fringed by a shock of black hair and a beard with brushstrokes of gray in it. His eyes suggested strong Asian ancestry, but his accent, unsurprisingly, was pure western Kentucky.

He had his hands, clothed in shabby fingerless gloves, raised over his head to signal benign intentions, which was good, because he was clearly far from helpless: the butt of a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century replica longblaster stuck up over his right shoulder, supported by a beadwork sling, and he wore both a Bowie knife with worn staghorn grips and a single-action, cap-and-ball revolver on either hip in cross-draw holsters, likewise beaded in colorful geometric patterns.

“Osage Nation work,” Krysty said, nodding at the beaded accessories. “Nice.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a local boy, but I been everywhere. Abe Tomoyama is my name. Abe to my friends, so you can call me that, long as you don’t chill me.”

Ryan raised a hand. “Stand down, everybody,” he said. “Keep eyes skinned to all sides, in case the pale shadows decide to check us out.”

“Don’t worry,” Abe stated, “yet. Them coamers don’t attack when the sun’s high in the sky. They only like to come out when it gets low. Like it’s fixin’ to right directly. Surely you noticed that?”

“Surely we didn’t,” Mildred said sourly.

“It does fit observable facts,” Doc said. “The few we have been able to observe.”

“Reckon we need to talk,” Abe said. “Let’s find us a place to palaver. Say, I’m a feeling mite peckish. What do you say we go to one of my campsites and chow down while we do it.”

“Won’t say no,” Ryan said, but he had a wary furrow to his brow as he said it.

He was wondering what was in it for the strange man they’d run into. And they all had learned a hundred times over, in the Deathlands, if you didn’t know what somebody had coming out of a given interaction, that usually meant it was coming straight out of your hide.

* * *

“FOLKS’RE SCARED, HEREABOUTS,” Abe said. “They don’t rightly know of what—shadows dimly seen at dusk, strange cries in the dark. Rumors of people disappearin’ out in the woods in the dark of the night. But I reckon I do know.”

“Suppose you tell us why you think we’re hunting these coamers of yours?” Ryan asked as he seated himself next to Krysty, where she hunkered down across from a small, nearly invisible dry brush fire from their peculiar host.

“I know hunters when I clap eyes on ’em, I reckon you’ll allow,” Abe said. “But you show no interest in the wildlife, other than to keep eyes skinned for ones as might be dangerous. You’re huntin’ man or mutie, or something close to one or the other.”

Abe’s camp was nestled in a bare-dirt hollow among sandstone boulders at the crest of a low rise, surrounded by brush and stunted trees. Krysty thought it a sweet spot, giving the option of surveilling the surrounding area from a height without spotlighting the fact you were there. It was already cool here, or cool for the Pennyrile, shaded at this spot from the low sun’s slanting rays. The smell of a brace of ruffed grouse roasting on sticks over the little fire was tantalizing.

“So what are these coamers, anyway?” Mildred asked. “Man or mutie?”

“Ghosts,” he said, and laughed at their expressions. “I don’t mean the spirits of chills. I mean they appear and disappear sudden-like, and seem to leave no traces at all, as if they had no more substance than smoke. But they got substance, right enough. They eat, they bleed, they die. And they chill, with their long white claws and those double-big jaws of theirs, more like a dog’s than a person’s.”

“Or a baboon’s,” Mildred suggested.

“That sounds consistent with the description, yes,” Doc agreed. Mildred seemed surprised; usually the two would argue over whether the sun was coming up or going down at high noon on a cloudless day. “I have heard the term ‘dog ape’ in connection with the beasts.”

The hermit shook his head. “Dunno nothin’ about those. But I seen ’em. Just glimpses, mind, over the years. But I seen the bones they’ve cracked in those jaws and the carcasses of beasts they chilled for meat.”

“They known to eat humans?” Ryan asked.

“Other than dead ones,” Mildred added.

Abe shrugged. “Mostly I hear tell of them digging up chills and eatin’ those. Prefer ’em fresh-buried. But they ain’t what you’d call picky.”

He sighed and dropped his gaze to the flames. His hand reached out to turn over first one, then the other plump game-bird carcass on their willow-wand spits. It looked to Krysty as if he did that by pure muscle memory, no conscious thought or intention involved.

“But like I say, there’s…stories,” Abe said. “Tales of folks out wanderin’ the woods at night by they lonesome, who never come back, and are never heard from anymore. The Pennyrile’s a big, wild place, with plenty of dense brush and caves and sinkholes. Lotta ways for a body to go missin’, if you catch my drift.”

“I don’t,” Mildred said. “Does anybody?”

“Ever hear of them attacking a camp or house?” Krysty asked.

“No. But they been getting’ pretty bold this season.”

“Why didn’t the people in Stenson’s Creek gaudy think to blame them first,” Ricky began, “instead of—”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, just emphatically enough to shut off the youth from blurting any more. “Never heard mention of them before now.”

Ricky’s dark eyes got big, and his cheeks flushed. Ryan couldn’t stop him wearing his heart on his sleeve. Fortunately their host seemed too preoccupied to notice.

Ricky’s close friend Jak shot him a wicked grin, half-sympathy, half-derision. Ryan had ordered the albino to sit in with them to learn whatever the woodsman had to impart. Jak had complied unwillingly, since he considered this with reason to be enemy territory, and that it was therefore even more urgent than usual that he be on patrol for danger. But he obeyed Ryan, as he generally did. Krysty suspected Jak understood the wisdom of Ryan’s wishes in this case, unlikely though he was to ever admit it.

“Like I say,” Abe went on, “they come and go. Like, from generation to generation. They seem to resurge every generation or two. Most of the settled folk, in the villes and such, forget about them, or think they’re just made-up stuff. But the oldies, out in the hills—they know. They remember. And this year—well, they seem to be gettin’ more aggressive than ever.”

“What about you?” Krysty asked. “How do you manage to survive?”

Abe grinned with strong, surprisingly white teeth.

“I’m reckoned by some a fair shot with a blaster, hand or long.” He patted the flintlock rifle he’d laid by his side on a coyote-skin cover.

Krysty shot a sidelong look to Mildred. The other woman nodded. She was clearly impressed; good shots rarely claimed to be, in her day or this one.

“You a hunter, too?” J.B. asked.

“Hunter. Trapper. Fisherman. Gatherer. Bit of whatever I need to be. Come from a long line of mountain men and women, I do.”

“‘Mountain men’?” Doc echoed. “You mean, like the solitary fur trappers and traders from earlier in my— That is, back in the early 1800s?”

Not everyone would have got a reference to such ancient history, but Abe brightened right up. He nodded.

“The very ones,” he said. “I’ve spent time in the Rocks myself, and up in the Dark range. Used to get to rendezvous in Taos each spring, like olden times. That’s where I learned my wilderness chops, from my poppa and momma.”

“Reenactors,” Mildred said, with a certain reflex distaste.

Abe looked at her blankly.

“Guess not,” she said sheepishly. “Your ancestors—culturally, at least—they were reenactors. But I reckon you and your people have been the real deal for decades.”

“Mebbe,” Abe said, clearly not getting her meaning.

Mildred’s smooth brown forehead wrinkled. “Also, how do you even know folks hereabouts are scared of these things? I thought you were a hermit.”

He laughed. “Oh, I am, I am. But that doesn’t mean I spend all my time alone in these woods and karst plains. Even a man like me gets tired now and then of listenin’ to nothin’ but the wind and the brook and the hoot-owl cries. Also I got what you might call a bit of a thirst, although I learned to keep a pretty tight rein on it, after some unfortunate happenin’s at Rendezvous a few years back… Anyhoo, I head in every once in a while to Stenson’s Creek gaudy, trade some pelts or gewgaws I make or trade for elsewhere, for the jack to wet my whistle. Was just in last week. I heard the stories then, mostly in whispers.”

He paused to drink out of a canteen that seemed to be a corked clay pot, carried in a pouch filled with damp moss, evidently to keep it cool.

“Also, sometimes I come across isolated camps of woodcutters and hunters or other folk not too unlike myself, or of travelers. I talk to them, just like I’m talkin’ to you. And they tell stories that are even scarier. And sometimes…”

He shook his head.

“I find a site in some double-lonely and isolated spot that’s deserted, and shows signs of a scuffle. Tracks so blurred up even I can’t identify them. Dead remains of a fire that been kicked asunder. Once or twice a spatter of dried blood on the grass or a berry-bush branch. Signs somethin’ bad happened to the former occupant. Mebbe done by a bear or a painter. But mebbe not.”

After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Ryan said, “So you know these woods.”

“They’re my home.”

“You managed to catch any of these coamers? And why ‘coamers,’ anyway?”

“Second question first,” Abe said. “Dunno. People just allus call them that, when they speak of them, which as I think I indicated, is mostly in whispers.

“As for your first question—nope. No luck there, either.”

“Not track?” Jak asked. He seemed to be studying the stocky man intently. The albino tended to be dismissive of everybody else’s talents in the woods, and compared to him, most humans were as clumsy and oblivious as drunken bears. Even Ryan and his strong right hand, J.B., both of whom were adept woodsmen by most mortal standards.

But the younger man’s red eyes were narrowed and thoughtful. Krysty thought to see at least a glimmer of respect for the self-proclaimed mountain man. She wasn’t sure what Jak was basing his judgment on; he put less stock in words than J. B. Dix, and that was saying plenty. But whatever he saw in this man, it looked genuine to him. Or so she sized it up.

“They don’t leave much sign,” Abe said. “Not even scat. And that looks just like a normal person’s, if tendin’ to be runnier than most. I don’t reckon they get much roughage in their diet. But they’re elusive as puffs of wind, and only rarely much easier to see.”

“Ever chill one?” J.B. asked.

“Had to fire ’em up a couple times. Just in the last month. They never plagued me before, other than I suspect them of raidin’ my snares for squirrels and rabbits and the like. Hit a couple, too, judgin’ by the squallin’ I heard and the blood I found on the leaves nearby. But I couldn’t prove it. I never found a carcass. It seems they take their chills with them as well as wounded.”

“To eat later?” Ricky asked in a tone of eager horror.

The mountain man shrugged. “Seems likely.”

“So even you can’t track them, is what you’re saying?” Mildred said.

Krysty felt a moment’s apprehension that her friend’s usual bluntness—or tactlessness, more closely—might annoy their host, which would be a pity just as the grouse were smelling done. But the man just nodded.

“Not far, anyway. After a few steps it’s like they vanish off the face of the Earth.”

Krysty looked around. Her friends seemed as distressed by the revelation as she was.

“How do you reckon they do that?” Ryan asked. “I doubt they fly. Or use magic.”

“Oh, no,” Abe said, grinning. “They go to ground, like foxes.”

“What do you mean?” Mildred asked.

“I mean when they vanish, I usually find some kind of hole in the ground nearby. No more than a coyote burrow would have for an entrance, commonly. But they’re built on the slim side, and don’t seem like they’d need much room to wiggle through.”

Jak frowned at the revelation. Krysty guessed it was because he himself had not yet spotted the fact.

“They have dens?” Ryan asked.

“Mebbe. But remember this district is peppered with sinkholes like a plank shot with buckshot, and honeycombed by caves beneath. They could have a whole underground empire with roads and villes, for all we know.”

That struck Krysty as fanciful. It surprised her in someone as practical and…earthy as Abe seemed to be. All the same, he seemed pretty sharp, and his kind of life would offer plenty of time for flights of fancy.

“Ever checked?” J.B. asked.

“Do I look like I got a death wish, friend? Also, you’ll notice I’m built more for endurance than agility. If I could fit myself down one of them rabbit holes, I shudder to think what might be waitin’ for me on the other side.”

Krysty’s mind filled with a vision of Blinda’s face—or the raw red concavity where it had been—and she shuddered too.

“Anyhoo,” Abe said, reaching for a spit, “looks as if our dinner’s ready to serve. Now—”

His black eyes got wide, seemingly fixed right on Ryan. He slapped leather with his right hand.

At the same time, Ryan, staring right back, went for his own blaster.

As quick as a pair of diamondback rattlers, the two men drew their weapons, pointed them straight at each other and fired.

Chapter Six

“Anything?” Wymie asked.

She stopped to catch her breath and wipe sweat from her brow with a handkerchief. She was used to hard work in the hot sun, but not all this walking up and down hills, bashing brush most of the time.

Her cousin Mance, face streaming sweat from under a bandanna, shook his head. “Not yet, Wymie.”

He sounded worried. She understood. She had started out with nineteen or twenty helpers. The past two days of fruitless searching had whittled them down to a round dozen.

“Should we head back to the Mother Road,” asked Dorden, who to Wymie’s amazement was not one of the ones who had abandoned her, “or keep searching this area?”

She shook her head helplessly. Who knew it would be this complicated, hunting for her sister’s killers?

Because the outlander coldhearts only ever came to Conn’s gaudy house, or rarely to Sinkhole proper by way of it, she reckoned their hideout had to lie somewhere to the west. So they’d started out following the Mother Road, which paralleled Stenson’s Creek away from Sinkhole, to begin her search.

After about six or eight miles, though, the wooded hills gave way to flatter karst country, more given to grass and patches of scrub than pine or hardwood forests. Dorden had suggested it was unlikely the outlanders laired up in such open country, despite the occasional harsh limestone ridge. She’d agreed.

“We’re what,” she said, “mebbe a mile south of the road by now?”

They were following a game trail. It was the best thing she could think of, and not even know-it-all old Dorden had come up with better.

“That’s right,” Mance said.

“And nobody we came across has seen hide nor hair of them,” Lou Eddars said. He was Mance’s friend and their chief tracker. His freckled face streamed with sweat, though nothing it seemed could keep down his frizz of orange curly hair. He had ears that stuck out, big buck teeth and an Adam’s apple that looked like a baseball lodged in his throat. But he was an accomplished hunter who knew the countryside around Sinkhole as well as any.

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