Chapter Twenty

 

 

 

Ryan's wounded left arm was still tender. Krysty peeled off the makeshift bandage, trying to see how it looked in the gloom of the kiva.

 

"Seems to be healing."

 

He flexed his fingers, tightening the muscles of the forearm. "Stiff."

 

She lowered her head, sniffing to try to catch any taint of infection. "I think it's clean, lover." She wrapped the bandage around it again.

 

The small, circular scabs on Krysty's face from Charlie's attention were already almost vanished. She healed faster than anyone Ryan had ever come across.

 

Now there was enough light to see their fellow captives.

 

Abe was the oldest there, looking much as he had when they last saw him. There was a scar the size of a nickel on one side of his neck, and a larger cicatrix on the other side of where the Indian arrow had been pushed all the way through. He still had a droopy mustache and wore his graying hair tied back in a long ponytail.

 

He seemed a little skinnier than Ryan remembered him.

 

"Introduce you to the others," he said, coughing hoarsely.

 

There was Harold. He was chubby, in his late twenties and had a pair of battered spectacles hanging from a cord around his neck. He'd been a traveling seller of candies and had been caught by a patrol of the stickies a week earlier.

 

"Should be some sort of baron's sec men around here to rescue us," he complained.

 

Ryan sighed at the man's stupidity. "No baron," he said. "No sec patrols. No rescue."

 

"Been telling him that for days, but the stupe clings to his fancies," Helga said.

 

"Stupe yourself!"

 

Helga was around forty, with salt-and-pepper hair that was scraped back off her face and tied in a tight knot. She had the freckled, hard complexion of someone who spent most of her life outdoors.

 

She'd run a spread about eighty miles to the west and had actually met Christina and Jak Lauren a couple of times.

 

There were five other prisoners.

 

Danny, who had worked as ramrod on Helga's sheep farm, was in his early thirties, tall and lean. He'd broken his left ankle trying to escape from the stickies' attack, and was suffering constant pain from it.

 

Bob Leonard was a prematurely bald man of twenty-five, who'd been trapping beaver in the high country to the northwest. He'd been attacked by a grizzly when he was fifteen and bore dreadful facial scars, including damage to his mouth that made his speech difficult to understand.

 

His wife, Dorina, looked no more than twelve years old, yet she claimed she'd lost three children to a cholera outbreak up in Silver City. The stickies had already raped her.

 

"Sixty-seven times," she said in her little voice. "I keep score so's I don't forget."

 

Her brother, Red Folsom, was sometimes called Bitter Creek Folsom. He'd been a part of the team of trappers and hunters that had stumbled into a ranging patrol of stickies. He was a bluff, strongly built man with chestnut hair and had a finger missing from his left hand.

 

"Lost it in one of my own beaver traps," he explained with a quiet laugh.

 

The rest of their group had been butchered in the initial attack by the muties.

 

The last of the stickies' prisoners was a traveling preacher, the Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman. He was six feet three inches tall, with white hair that touched his shoulders, and wore a heavy suit of black material.

 

"All a part of the rich and mysterious pattern of the Lord Jesus," he'd said as Abe introduced him to Ryan and Krysty.

 

"How do you figure that?" Ryan asked.

 

"I am a flask being tested in the white heat of the furnace of wickedness. These stickies are my own personal temptation. Find if my faith comes up to the mark."

 

"And does it?"

 

"Of course, Brother Cawdor." Ryan knew from previous experience that one of the sure signs of the religious crazies that festered in parts of Deathlands was that they always called you "Brother."

 

"And I shall meet their every challenge," he added.

 

"They're going to kill you, Reverend," Krysty said. "Chill us all."

 

A patronizing smile touched the tall man's face. "You will fall, Sister Krysty, but on the third day I shall rise again and I will sit upon the right hand of the Lord of Hosts."

 

"Wish I could be there to see it, Reverend," Ryan replied.

 

 

 

AROUND THEM they could hear the familiar sounds of a large camp waking up.

 

Ryan sat close to Krysty, his feet sticking out toward the center of the cramped kiva. If Charlie collected any more prisoners it would be unbearably crowded.

 

He looked around at their eight fellow captives, trying to weigh them up, ready for the moment when concerted action might save some of their lives. He had no idea of how, when or where that moment might come. Or whether it would come at all.

 

But he had to be ready.

 

In case.

 

Abe would do real well. Couldn't look for anyone much better to stand at your shoulder when the full-metal jackets started flying.

 

There were two or three other good possibilities for when the shit hit the fan.

 

Bitter Creek Folsom was a man who seemed like he could look after himself in any tight corner. Same with his younger colleague, Bob Leonard, though the man's problems with speech could prove difficult.

 

If it wasn't for his broken ankle, Danny would also have taken right and center in any combat line. But he could barely stand.

 

The preacher didn't figure in Ryan's plan. He'd never met one worth a flying fart when steel flashed and blood spurted.

 

Little Dorina Leonard looked like a spitball could put her on her back, but Ryan reserved judgment on her. He had vivid memories of small-boned women with killer's eyes.

 

Helga had the up-and-walking-good look of a woman used to handling trouble in any size or shape, a useful person if you wanted a horse gelded or a baby birthed or a renegade gut shot.

 

Then there was Harold Lord from Castle Rock, way out east, a soft boy who looked like he'd mess himself if anyone raised a blaster anywhere near him.

 

J.B. used to say that you could pick out the fighters, give them marks from twenty and add them up. Then you had an idea of how you might line up against the opposition.

 

On that basis Ryan would give himself nineteen and Krysty eighteen. Abe was at least a sixteen. Red Folsom and his partner would rate about thirteens each. Give Helga the same. Joe-Bob Jarman didn't get to first base to score. Danny might have been a twelve, but his ankle dropped him to a fat zero. Dorina could score anywhere between a one and a ten. Call her a five. No way of guesstimating that. Ryan generously gave Harold a two.

 

"What are you doing, lover?"

 

"Trying to work out what our combat total would be."

 

"J.B.'s magic formula?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"What do we add up to?"

 

"I'm trying to work that out."

 

"Didn't J.B. say that if you divided the total by the number of people in your group, it had to average at least ten?"

 

"Yeah. At least! To have any chance."

 

"Ten of us. Got to reach a total of one hundred, then."

 

Ryan was never that great at mental arithmetic, and his lips moved silently as he battled with the simple addition.

 

"You say we needed a hundred?" he asked quietly.

 

"Right."

 

"Fireblast! We got ninety-nine."

 

One thing he hadn't bothered to take into account was that none of them had a weapon of any sort.

 

Charlie's forces numbered several times theirs, and they were all armed.

 

They could hear the patter of bare feet above them. Ryan grinned at Krysty, his teeth white in the gloomy half-light.

 

"Never cared about numbers, myself," he said.

 

The voice of the stickie guard was loud and harsh. "Get out, norm scum!"

 

Krysty squeezed Ryan's hand. "Nor me, lover. Nor me."