Chapter Six

The midafternoon sun was still blisteringly hot when Ryan and the companions escorted Uda and the girls into the outskirts of Perdition. Built on a high, treeless knoll, the ville had an unobstructed view of incoming trouble, from across the riverbed or across the plain from the range of peaks to the west.
Uda knew right where she wanted to go. She selected one of the nearly identical, narrow dirt lanes that ran through the jumble of lean-tos at the base of the hill, and, with her children in tow, started on up. Similar shanties, roofed with car hoods and doors, spilled down the flanks of the knoll, along with drifting piles of the inhabitants' refuse.
The entourage drew curious looks from rag-clad, low Perdition dwellers, but no one said anything to them, and no one stared at them for long.
At the top of the knoll, double-wide trailers sat in a circle. According to a huge, electric-powered sign that had been dark for more than a century, they were part of a pre-Apocalypse commercial enterprise called O-Ke Bonanza Manufactured Home and RV Center. The trailers at the hill's summit and the lean-tos at the bottom were separated by a ring of junked and decaying motor homes, all of which had been turned into multifamily apartments. Uda had no trouble finding the one she was looking for, a Winnebago Brave sitting on its rusted brake drums. She knocked on the door and a woman who looked like her twin, only older, appeared at the cracked window.
After a tearful reunion with her sister, Uda said goodbye to each of the companions. "We won't ever forget any of you," she promised.
"Stay safe," Ryan told her as Krysty and Mildred took turns hugging the two little girls.
After Mildred released the older one from the embrace, the girl walked over to Ryan, her back straight, her head held high, eyes shining. She reached up and placed a tiny, perfect Deathlands daisy onto his open palm. Staring up at him, she carefully closed his powerful fingers over it. Ryan basked in the intensity of her gaze, as hard and bright as a diamond. He felt a passing curiosity about who had fathered this child. What coldheart had crept into Uda's bed while poor Benjy toiled in his rock garden? he wanted to ask, but didn't. Better by far to savor such a mystery than to unravel it.
The one-eyed man knelt and lightly touched the girl's cheek. Putting his mouth close to her ear, he whispered softly so no one else could hear, "Consider the bastards chilled."
Straightening, Ryan signaled for his friends to follow him, then continued the short climb to the top of the hill, heading for the circled trailers and the ville's most well-appointed gaudy. The double-wide gaudy in question was painted bright pink, as were the rocks that lined the dirt walk leading up to its doorway.
It wasn't much cooler inside the trailer. A handful of sluts sprawled on a long, broken-down sofa in the foyer, which reeked of once-cheap, now-expensive perfume. The working girls didn't bother to get up as the potential clients filed past, they just flopped open their gauzy robes to show all.
"Hot pipe!" Dean chirped.
"By the three Kennedys!" Doc Tanner swore, averting Dean's gaze by spinning the boy by the shoulder. "In all my years, I have never seen such a row of tangle-matted medusas. If they are the blooming roses of this ville, then I know why the diabolical dung heap is called Perdition."
"Gee, they didn't look half-bad to J.B.," Mildred teased.
The Armorer muttered something under his breath, then spit on the floor.
The gaudy's bartender took one look at the people walking toward him and quickly dipped his hands under the makeshift bar.
"There's no need for that," Ryan assured him, holding both empty palms up for him to see. "We're not here for trouble."
The bartender brought his hands out from under the bar. He held a cut-down 12-gauge. "What can I get you, then?" he said.
"Information." When the man frowned, Ryan added, "We'll pay for it, of course."
"What sort of information might that be?"
"We're looking to catch up with some people who passed through here earlier today. One guy in particular you mebbe remember. He was tall, gray-bearded, carrying a fine bolt-action longblaster."
"These friends of yours?"
"No."
"I seen them. What're you paying?"
"Show him," Ryan said to J.B.
The Armorer stepped forward and rapidly pumped the M-4000's slide, ejecting two red-cased, live 12-gauge shells onto the bar. The barman eagerly scooped them up and stuffed them into his pants pocket.
"Let's hear it," Ryan said.
"The graybeard you're looking for, along with three others, two men and a skinhead witch, left here mebbe twenty minutes ago after talking to a scrounger name of Grub Hinton. Took Grub with them when they went."
"He go along willingly?"
"Looked mighty happy to me."
"Know what they talked about?"
"Had to be discussing Moonboy ville. It's the only thing people been talking about around here since last night. According to this scrounger, some kind of strange things went on there yesterday noon. He claims some muties popped out of nowhere with tricky, silenced blasters and cut just about everybody in half."
"Sounds real unlikely," Krysty said.
"Think your pals had a raid in mind," the barman went on. "They wanted to get their hands on the extra-special chilling gear."
"They're not our pals," Krysty told him. "They're cannies."
"I guessed that something wasn't right with those bastards," the barman said. "Goddamn coffin breath on the gray-bearded one practically knocked me down."
"They've been working the riverbed," Ryan told him, "nabbing the folks trying to cross over from Brigham ville."
The barman narrowed his eyes and said, "You know, I would've chilled them myself if I'd known what they were"
"Yeah, sure you would," J.B. said dubiously.
"Tell us which way they went," Ryan said.
"Cost you more shells."
Ryan nodded to J.B., but instead of cycling out more live rounds from the tubular magazine, the Armorer swiveled on the bartender and aimed the wide gun barrel at his throat. With his index finger resting lightly on the trigger, J.B. cautioned the man, "Next one you collect is going to hurt some."
"Okay, okay, forget it," the barman said, carefully putting his weapon on the bar top, then raising his hands in surrender. "No rad-blasted harm in trying, is there?"
Doc used the tip of his walking stick like a prod, thrusting across the bar and jabbing the man in the shoulder. "You would be well advised to reveal without further delay all that you are privy to, or make no mistake, you will suffer the consequences."
"The lot of them went due south," the bartender stated hurriedly, "along the main road out of the ville. It leads straight to what's left of old Highway 15. Once they get there, they've got to double back north on the highway for about a mile to get to Moonboy."
"Is there a faster way to get there?" Ryan asked.
"Sure, if you don't mind jumping some rock."
"We don't mind."
"Go south toward the ridge, turn right and follow the base of the ridgeline for five, mebbe six miles. You can't miss Moonboy."
"How's that?"
"It's the only thing left standing for as far as you can see."

THE RIGHT REVEREND Gore caressed the edge of his skinner knife with precise, circular motions of the whetstone. The back of the wide, crescent-shaped blade was deeply notched a half inch from its tip, and the notch formed a razor-sharp guthook that could zip open a body cavity faster than a man could hawk a spit. Gore put the ball of his thumb against the bright new edge, testing it. Plenty good enough, he decided.
"Why are you doing this to me?" Grub bawled at him.
Gore looked up from the boulder on which he sat. Across the small clearing, the naked slag-heap scrounger was strung up by his wrists in the branches of a dead willow. His ankles were likewise tied with leather thongs and his legs pulled out straight and spread-eagled.
"I gave you everything you wanted!" Grub cried.
"Not quite," Gore replied, getting slowly to his feet.
"I don't want no cut of the profit," Grub swore to the four coldhearts who held him prisoner. Giggly Jane was using a yard-long willow branch to test the cutting power of her own blade. It was a predark, made-in-the-U.S.A. treasure a titanium-nitride black, Edge Tactical One-Hander.
"Don't need none of her, neither," Grub added bitterly. "Just let me loose from up here. I won't tell nobody about Moonboy and spoil your raid."
"You already told half of Perdition about Moon-boy," Gore reminded him. "It's time to face facts, little man. You were never gonna get a piece of the job's profit, nor of our funky little gal Jane, neither. And we're not gonna let you go. We're taking you with us, in a manner of speaking."
Gore shivered, despite the day's oppressive heat. He could no longer ignore the gnawing ache in the pit of his stomach; he had to do something about it. No matter how much he ate, Gore was hungry all the time now. Trouble was, he couldn't keep his meat down, he was always chucking it back up. And the weight was dropping off him so fast the others had started giving him sidelong, measuring looks. His ringers trembled violently on the stag-horn grip of the skinning knife, and for a second it damn near slipped away from him. Gore knew he had the oozies, and that he was on the steep downhill slide. Every time he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his duster, he expected to see the first smear of gray pus that signaled the beginning of the end.
When the leader of a cannie pack faltered, the pack picked his bones.
Gleefully.
There was no telling when he'd caught the sickness. Sometimes it took half a lifetime for the death signs to appear. For all he knew, it could have come from his first bite of manflesh, and that was better than a quarter century ago. Some claimed that cannibalism was an acquired taste, but as soon as Gore got that first lick, he was hooked solid. A young sprout back then, he'd joined up with a band of cannies that was passing through his ditchwater ville one summer night, picking off stragglers and half-wits. He loved the cannie life right off, too. It was like being a wolf cub. Hunting and chilling and eating.
Ultimate freedom, every minute of every day. But it wasn't some hog-slop, romantic philosophy that held him captive; it was the flavor.
The fresher, the better.
At that very moment Gore was thinking about liver. Bloody, still-warm liver. It made his mouth water.
"You're taking me with you?" Grub said hopefully. "Then you're not gonna chill me!"
The triple-stupe bastard still hadn't figured it out.
Giggly Jane playfully poked at his protruding white potbelly with the sharpened point of the willow stick.
"Oh, we're gonna chill you, all right," Gore said. He moved closer with his knife held waist-high and poised to strike. ''But first we're gonna gut you, from goobers to windpipe. After you bleed out, we're gonna quarter-saw your pasty carcass and pack it along with us."
Grub's eyes bulged in horror.
Gore grinned at him. "What, you never heard of 'trail mix'?"