Chapter Fifteen

 

 

 

The time would be about right. Charlie looked to be in his early twenties, and Ryan's memory put the happening about ten or eleven years ago.

 

It had been up near the Darks, near some ragged-ass ville, centered on an old church with a dome of weathered green copper. Name of the place had vanished, but the incident and the stickie brat with curly yellow hair came flooding back from the past.

 

Abe had been involved, tall, skinny Abe, with the lugubrious sense of humor and the drooping mustache, hair that he generally used to wear tied back in a ponytail. He'd done mostly jobs around War Wag One. Started off as helper to Loz and the rest of the cooks, then graduated to rear gunner.

 

And it had been the time of

 

"Gert Wolfram," Charlie, said, face as bleak as iced marble. "And the one called himself the Magus, Warlock, Sorcerer. Names not even worth the trouble of forgetting."

 

Names and men that Ryan himself would never be able to forget.

 

The Magus. That was most common of his three names.

 

Sometime in the past he'd suffered an appalling injury. Half of his face was missing, the spaces filled with aluminum and flesh-colored plastic. His eyes were hidden behind steel shells.

 

His reputation was linked with stickies.

 

He'd go out into the bleak wildernesses where the muties congregated and bring them back alive, then sell them to the traveling freak master, Gert Wolfram, three hundred and fifty pounds of cherubic evil. He was ringmaster in his own macabre circus that toured the filthy frontier villes where the writ of decency never ran.

 

The stickies were an integral part of Wolfram's tented horror show. They'd be prodded into fighting against each other, or against bears or cougars or mangy wolves. Wolfram would also arrange cheap displays of erratic pyrotechnics whose explosions and multicolored flaring fires would drive the drugged stickies into a frenzy.

 

People loved it.

 

Ryan was trying to remember what had happened to the Magus and to Gert Wolfram when Charlie, the stickies' leader, interrupted his train of thought.

 

"You recall me, don't you, Cawdor?"

 

Ryan stood still, left arm lifted across his chest to try to check the bleeding. "Yeah. I recollect the time our paths crossed."

 

"Our pathscrossed." The tall mutie nodded. "Way a blood-eyed norm like you would think about it, Cawdor. Bet you a hatful of jack you don't recollect the butchered innocents."

 

"I remember we came across one of the hunting parties of the Magus. Chilled them. They had a group of" He hesitated.

 

"Stickies is the word you're struggling to avoid, Cawdor."

 

"Yeah. A group of stickies. Trader was ready to set them free."

 

Charlie's narrow smile vanished. "A 'group,' Cawdor! It was a family. You think stickies don't have fucking families!" Controlling his anger, he dropped Krysty a mocking half bow. "Forgive my language, Firehead, but that was a family. It was my whole family. My father, my mother, three older brothers. Two aunts and five uncles. And me. I was nine summers and eight winters old, Cawdor."

 

The valley had been dark, steep-sided. The war wags had camped a half mile away, near a still lake where fish jumped. The heavily armed guards of the Magus lay where they'd been shot, the blood still trickling into the leaf mold.

 

And the stickies huddled together as Abe had struck off their chains.

 

"We'd have let you go," Ryan said.

 

"But you didn't."

 

"No."

 

Charlie looked around at his silent group of followers. "No, they didn't let us go. They chilled everyone. Except for the little yellow-haired boy. They left him there, surrounded by corpses, his leg and arm broken."

 

Ryan bit his lip. He could remember the scene, remember why the massacre had happened. But he figured there wasn't much point in trying to explain to this unusual stickie how it had been. Charlie obviously had his own embittered, impressed memory and nothing would change that.

 

"Why did you and Trader do that, Cawdor?"

 

"One of your women had a knife. Several of you backed her when she cut Abe. Started a chilling fight. We lost two good men there."

 

"And all I lost was twelve of my family. All my family, Cawdor."

 

He remembered the rattle of firearms, the screams and then the silence, broken only by the gasps of the dying and the moans of the wounded.

 

And a little boy crying.

 

"You didn't give us any choice, Charlie. No fire-blasted choice at all."

 

"We'll see. Talk more when we get back to our camp. You say there's nothing over the ridge?" The question was asked with an absence of real interest, as though he were thinking about something else.

 

"Nothing."

 

"Then we'll go. But first we'll check out you don't have any hideaways. If you have, then you're all dead meat. Now and here."

 

Ryan was finding it hard to come to terms with what was going on.

 

Stickies were triple stupes.

 

Everyone knew that.

 

Vengeful and murderous, with about as much sense of organization as a confederation of decapitated roosters.

 

Now this one, Charlie, seemed to be a whole lot brighter than the average citizen of Deathlands, and he ran a tight patrol with a facade of quasilegal organization.

 

It didn't make any sort of sense.

 

 

Ryan started, slowly and reluctantly, to peel off his clothes.

 

"See one of them did you harm, Cawdor." Charlie pointed at the bleeding wound with the stubby muzzle of the Uzi.

 

"Tore some skin. Way stickies do, Charlie. You know that."

 

There was a snarl of anger from two or three of the watchful group, but the tall figure silenced them with a look. "You talk big now, Cawdor. Won't last too long."

 

They'd moved some little distance from the slope that hid the box canyon from view, but Ryan still had a cold dread that Mildred or J.B. would come strolling into view and get blasted into rags of eternity.

 

"Quicker with the stripping. All three of you, quicker."

 

Ryan's eye caught Jak's glance.

 

The albino was stooped, fiddling with the laces of his combat boots. He'd somehow managed to sidle himself over to the edge of the group, only four or five quick steps away from the dark fringe of the surrounding forest.

 

The boy made sure Ryan was watching him, then moved his right thumb a half inch toward the trees and repeated the movement.

 

Ryan nodded his head very slightly.

 

That was all it took.

 

He looked up at Krysty, seeing that she'd also caught the infinitely subtle exchange.

 

She immediately pulled off her shirt, revealing a white cotton bra with half cups that seemed to barely contain her splendid breasts. Her nipples were pressing at the taut material like summer cherries.

 

Ryan knew that there wasn't a hope in hades of all three of them making it. Charlie held the Uzi steady on his own belt buckle. Only one had a chance, and that had to be the local boy.

 

Jak.

 

"All the way," one of the stickies grunted.

 

Krysty reached behind her, making the bra even tighter, then loosened the catch, dropping the wisp of cotton to her feet.

 

She stooped to pull off the dark blue Western boots with the silver falcons and slipped in the dirt. She fell flat on her back, crying out in shock, her firm breasts filling everyone's eyes.

 

Ryan was ready for it, but even he didn't spot the moment that Jak Lauren made his move. One second the slim figure was standing there among them, then he wasn't.

 

But there hadn't seemed to be any intervening stage of movement.

 

Charlie saw it first. He spun and held down the trigger of the machine pistol, the stream of high velocity lead missing Krysty's tumbled figure by eighteen inches.

 

"Get him!"

 

In his patchwork jacket, the slim teenager was mercury in motion, darting between the close-packed trees, disappearing.

 

Ryan stood very still, knowing that the anger of the stickies' leader might easily mean instant, summary execution for Krysty and himself.

 

Four of the patrol lumbered into the shadowed darkness, one firing his musket with a dull, flat sound.

 

"They won't get him, will they?" Charlie reached into his pocket and calmly reloaded the Uzi.

 

"I doubt it."

 

The stickie sniffed. "Well, now he'll go and hunt up some friends and come back here to try to rescue you. We'll be long gone. Shame he did that. Won't make it easier for you two."

 

"That's the way it goes," Krysty said, sitting in the dirt, not making any effort to cover herself.

 

"Tell you the truth, it makes it harder for me. These others" he gestured to the watching circle of stickies, and the shamefaced quartet that was picking its way back through the trees "depend on me beating norms. Proving I'm better. The snowhead fucked that up for me."

 

"I'm real sorry," Ryan said, wondering how far the noise of the shooting would have carried.

 

"Strip off now. Let's have that over. Then we get moving."

 

A moment later Ryan didn't make any resistance to the search for hidden weapons, closing off his surging anger.

 

Krysty also shut down a part of her mind, so that the probing, clawed fingers and the suckered hands were only a dull sensation. The sniggering and the intrusion into the secret places of her body passed.

 

As all things did.