Chapter Twenty-One

 

 

 

"Looks like a fish trying to ride a bicycle," Mildred commented, heeling her mount alongside Krysty.

 

"More like a goat astride an alligator," the flame-haired woman suggested.

 

"Oh, yes," Doc snorted. "Merriment and whatnot! You cackling harpies! You two would have been most admirably sitted to suit I mean suited to sit, knitting beneath the shadow of Madame La Guillotine, and jeering at the tumble of every aristocratic pate that rolled into the blood-sodden straw."

 

"Temper, temper, Doc," Mildred warned, wagging a reproving finger at the red-faced old man, perched uncomfortably on the back of Judas.

 

"I confess most freely that I had no idea what temper meant until I attempted to ride this misbegotten son of a sea cook. My dear and saintly mother once hired an Irish cook. Flaming red hair, begging your pardon, Krysty, my dear. No connection, I am most certain." The mule stopped suddenly, nearly tipping Doc over its head. He responded by giving it a clout around the side of the jaw with a clenched fist, and it immediately resumed its halting gait forward.

 

"You have a wonderful way with animals," Sleeps In Day said solemnly.

 

"Runs in the blood," Doc replied.

 

"How about this Irish cook?" Mildred asked.

 

"What's 'Irish' mean?" Dean asked.

 

"It would take me far too long to answer that," Doc said. "But I tell you she had What was her name? Mary? Marie? That was the name of the latest flame."

 

"What are you talking about, Doc?" Krysty asked. "Try and stick to the point, will you?"

 

"Mary, it was. Hair like Anyway. She had the most ferocious temper I ever knew. I would only have been about nine or ten, and I took pleasure in teasing the poor woman. I knew her rages and that gave a spice of true terror to the teasing. But she taught me a lesson one day. Sadly my mother dismissed her on the spot, but I still remember it."

 

"What did you do, Doc?" Mildred swatted midges away from her face. After reaching the edge of the storm, the dark clouds had raced ahead of them, leaving a sultry, leaden calm. A heavy sky lowered upon the sixteen riders.

 

Nearly three hours had slipped by since the sudden attack from the mutie cougar, and they were moving along, southward, still following the blurred tracks of the two wags.

 

"A simple matter of changing over the sugar and the salt as Mary was preparing the luncheon. The potatoes and the stew were peculiarly sweet while the lemon mousseher pride and joywas oddly bitter." Doc lifted a hand to his mouth, but failed to smother a mean little snigger.

 

"That's really shitty, Doc." Mildred eased herself in the saddle. "Be glad when we can finally rest some," she said. "Anyway, what did this redheaded cook do to punish you? Hope that it was nothing trivial."

 

"The woman came from a long line of powerful giants," Doc replied. "She took advantage of my relative weakness to strip me of my knickerbockers and my drawers."

 

"What?" Dean said.

 

"Took off his pants," explained J.B., who had fallen back to hear the story.

 

"Then what?" Krysty asked.

 

"Covered my the all of in molasses."

 

Everyone laughed at the expression of remembered distaste on the old man's wrinkled face.

 

"All over your cock and balls?"

 

"Yes, my dear young Dean. Precisely as you so explicitly put it. And, indeed, all over my rectal orifice. That was not so uncomfortable in itself, but the removal was To recall it still brings tears to my eyes."

 

"And your mother fired her?" Mildred tutted. "Shame on her and shame on you. Still"

 

"Still, what, madam?"

 

"Explains a lot about you Doc."

 

He would have pursued the matter further, but Judas chose that moment to sit down like a ton of bricks, making the old man slide backward over his rump, finishing in the mud.

 

"Sure right." Ryan grinned at Sleeps In Day. "Doc has a wonderful way with animals. Or do they have a wonderful way with him?"

 

 

 

MAN SEES BEHIND SUN, the youngest of the Native Americans, spotted a steep-sided, narrow arroyo a couple of hundred of yards ahead of them, not far from the crest of one of the rolling, sagebrush-covered hills. He called their attention and led them quickly to it.

 

"Why we going there, dad?" Dean asked, as they walked their mounts in a long line, with the first spots of rain already beginning to patter heavily around them.

 

"In a chem storm, the higher you are and the more exposed you are, the more dangerous it is."

 

"I know that. But we're going up the slope."

 

"Navaho says we can get inside that arroyo. Protect us from chem lightning."

 

"What about a flash flood? Always thought you should never shelter in a small valley in a storm."

 

Ryan nodded. "True again, Dean. That's why we go up so's we can go down. No risk of getting trapped in a flash flood if you're close to the top of a rise."

 

And so it proved.

 

 

 

RYAN SAT HUNCHED OVER, his back against the steep slope of the arroyo, his mind numbed by the ceaseless pounding of the rain on the top of his head and nape. It was as bad as anything he could remember.

 

Trader had once said that the only thing rain did to a healthy man or woman was make them wet.

 

But Ryan could recall a near tragedy when Trader's saying had been proved false.

 

There had been an engineer on War Wag Two. His name was Lek, a fat guy with only one eyebrow and a silver streak through his dark hair, the result of a knife scar in a pesthole on an island near Ell Ay. He'd always been unbalanced, and the Trader had warned him a couple of times about his behavior.

 

One day in the Apps, they'd been camped in the middle of a torrential downpour. The rain slanted against the sec-steel roofs and walls of the two ponderous wags, making conversation almost impossible.

 

There'd been an argumentRyan couldn't remember the details. In the close confines of the war wags, it was all too easy to have a major row about a minor disagreement.

 

Lek had freaked out. Ryan had always been suspicious that the engineer was secretly into jolt. But Trader was strict on drug users and abusers. At least Lek had been clever enough not to get caught.

 

Now he started screaming about being locked in. Going "clostro" was what it was called.

 

The man had darted to one of the side doors and started to open the sec bolts. Trader had given the order to leave him be, not wanting to risk a fight inside the wag.

 

Ryan could still remember the way the noise of the storm grew suddenly much louder as the vanadium-steel door swung open, hastily pulled shut by someone.

 

"Okie," he remembered. The water was streaming between his boots, tinted a grayish brown by the dirt it was washing away from the top of the arroyo.

 

Everyone had crowded to the ob ports along the side of the war wag, and a voice had come crackling over the intercom, warning that someone was out in the rain. Nobody answered the voice.

 

Ryan closed his eye, recalling what he'd seen through that smeared armaglass.

 

Lek stood with his arms straight down at his sides, hanging limp, as if someone had simultaneously dislocated both of his shoulders. His legs were apart, as if he were braced against the enormous weight of water tumbling onto him. His shaved head was bowed, his uniform instantly soaked through.

 

Trader used the external mike. "Come in and stop fucking around," he boomed.

 

Lek seemed to ignore the voice. Then he turned slowly toward the wag, his face splitting into a madman's smile, very gentle and very homicidal.

 

Ryan remembered Trader's immediate order to seal the wag and not allow the deranged man back inside.

 

The silver streak in the mat of sodden hair glistened like a mag flare, and the streaming face shone like a polished melon as Lek slowly lifted his head to stare directly upward, opening his mouth wide.

 

Hunaker had been pressed against Ryan, squinting through the same circular window.

 

"Fuckhead's goin' to drown himself," she hissed. "Shit for brains!"

 

Hun wasn't that often wrong.

 

Lek was almost invisible, the tumbling shroud of rain masking his outline, so that he looked like a vaguely humanoid statue, veiled in solid water.

 

Ryan rubbed at the condensation that misted the window, trying to see more clearly what was happening.

 

Lek seemed almost to be melting, sinking to his knees, his mouth open, filling with the solid rain, his staring eyes pits of frothing liquid.

 

"Want me to go out and bring him in, Trader?" Ryan called. "I could deck him first."

 

"No." The single flat syllable was unarguable.

 

"Down," Hunaker whispered, her breath warm against the side of Ryan's stubbled cheek.

 

The madman had slithered onto his back, chest heaving, hands now lifted toward the merciless heavens. But he had still made no attempt to save himself by turning onto his stomach, keeping his face out of the downpour.

 

Hunched down in the arroyo, Ryan was breathing slowly through his half-open mouth, trying to avoid sucking in water from the storm. Lightning had rocked the ground, striking less than a hundred yards away, outside the walls of the gully. The bitter stench of the chem storm flooded his nostrils and the thunder pounded at his brain.

 

It addled his mind, making it difficult to remember what he'd been remembering.

 

Lek.

 

Down and dying and drowning.

 

As the rain tumbled into Lek's open mouth, flooding his nostrils, the man had suddenly begun to thrash around, as though he'd realized too late what was happening to him, sensing his own dreadful, choking doom.

 

The New Mexico rain now felt as though it were gathering momentum and power. It bounced back off the ground, filling the air with a fine spray of tiny droplets. For a moment there was a scintilla of panic, fluttering at the back of Ryan's mind, the fear that he would no longer be able to breathe properly without inhaling the invasive liquid into his strained lungs.

 

And end like Lek.

 

"Going into spasm," someone had said near the navigation deck of the war wag.

 

The man was thrashing from side to side, his fingers knotting above his head, though he was still making no obvious effort to try to keep the torrent from pouring into his nose and mouth. His chest was heaving as he coughed and retched, yellowish water bubbling from between his gaping jaws.

 

Suddenly Lek's back arched and stiffened, so that the only points of contact between his body and the streaming earth were his heels and the crown of his head. A moment later everything relaxed as all the cords were cut.

 

"Heart failure." The voice from the starboard machine-gun port was J.B.'s.

 

Ryan could still recall the way the raindrops bounced off the blind, staring eyes.

 

He also remembered that Trader had refused to have the body buried, regarding it as a total waste of time and energy.

 

 

 

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when one of the Navaho glimpsed the two small wags, cresting a rise about three miles ahead of them. The pursuers were closing in.