Baptism of Rage (16 page)

Several pieces of old furniture had been used to barricade the windows, including an old sideboard and a cabinet, both of them piled with candles, books and firewood. One window had been left free, although it was boarded with thick slabs of wood up to two-thirds of its height. The top third remained unblocked, however, and the sliver of moon could be seen through the dirt-streaked glass.

Krysty watched as Ryan walked back around the bed, staring at it, his mouth a grim line in his face. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

“That mebbe they had the kid here,” Ryan replied. “Made it here.”

“What had happened to it, Ryan?” Krysty asked gently.

Ryan looked up, his single eye locking with Krysty’s, a haunted expression on his face. “I think they probably starved it, mebbe they’d just forgotten about it.”

Krysty gasped. “Who would ‘just forget’ about their own child? Their own flesh and blood?”

“Mebbe they had to forget,” Ryan suggested. “You see the way this house is, the way they protected themselves. This isn’t a ville with walls to protect its people,
it’s a single house in the middle of a war zone. Mebbe they were locked in for a while. Mebbe they had to decide who was going to eat.”

“And a newborn child…” Krysty began, then stopped herself.

They remained in the room, in silence, for a minute or more, and when the candle in Ryan’s hand burned down, he placed its flame against a candle that sat on a tray beside the bed, the fire starting anew.

Finally, Krysty spoke once more, her voice low, concerned. “I know you think about Dean,” she told Ryan. Dean was Ryan’s son, spirited away from his side by a once-upon-a-time lover, Dean’s mother.

Ryan nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “every day. Sometimes I think I hear him, but it’s something else.”

Standing before Ryan, Krysty placed her arms around him, pulling herself close. “If we had a child,” she asked, “would it be like this? Would we have to decide if it was worth feeding?”

“Never,” Ryan assured her, his arm reaching around to stroke her back. “They were psychopaths, Krysty. Brother and sister, hooped up on insanity. Not parents.”

Krysty was shaking in Ryan’s arms. “Life was good in Harmony. The Deathlands makes terrible people of everyone,” she said sadly.

“Only if they let it,” Ryan told her. “Only if they let it.”

T
O HIS OWN EARS
, J.B.’s footsteps seemed loud in the stillness of the basement, as he and Jak walked within the cone of light cast by the lighter in his hand. There were other noises, true, the little scritching of insects
scuttling across the stones, burying themselves from the light, a dripping of water from somewhere, other low noises that would normally fade into insignificance. In the near-total darkness, these noises seemed loud, seemed ominous.

The basement was a cavernous space excavated from right under the house, mimicking its proportions almost exactly in what initially appeared to be one large, low-ceilinged room. The room was full of junk, stacks of wood and paper, several buckets of steeping mushrooms, stacked tins of food dating back to before the nukecaust, raided from who knew where. A large, coal-fired boiler occupied a position roughly below the kitchen.

They were looking around in an ever-widening circle when Jak hissed to get J.B.’s attention. Even in the darkness beyond the illumination of his lighter, J.B. could see Jak’s ghost-white arm pointing to the far side of the cellar. The Armorer stepped closer, brushing past a tottering stack of old magazines that reached higher than his belt buckle.

There were three rooms over there, he saw now, small, cell-like spaces used for storage. They were on the side of the cave-in and the ceiling bowed above them where the house had crumbled in on itself. Together, J.B. and Jak made their way to that first door. Holding the flickering flame of the lighter high, J.B. peered through a small, square window at roughly head height on the door. The window was obscured by a simple grille covering, screwed to the outside. Inside, as he had surmised, was a small square storage room, not much bigger than a coffin, reminding J.B. of a prisoner’s cell. It was empty.

The Armorer moved across to the next cell and, warily, peered through the grille in the window. There was a body in there, lying on the floor in a crumpled fetal position.

O
N THE LANDING
, the fourth door opened onto a small cupboard containing a water tank. When Ryan tapped his SIG-Sauer against the tank, a hollow metallic clang echoed back. “Empty,” he muttered, closing the door and making his way to the final door in the corridor.

The last door opened onto a midsize bedroom that had been converted for storage. It contained ammunition for several different gauges of shotguns and handguns, along with a selection of blades arrayed in glass-fronted cabinets along the wall. Shelves lined the room, and almost fifty glass jars had been arrayed on them, each containing something sealed inside. Some contained preserves and jam, others bullets, nails and screws. One held what appeared to be a set of human teeth.

Krysty shrugged, replacing the jar of teeth on the shelf. “Collector types, I guess,” she said.

“Not anymore,” Ryan growled, exiting the room and pulling the door closed behind him. “J.B. might want to take a look-see, once it gets light.”

J.B.’
S HEART JUMPED
when he saw the body, thudding beneath his rib cage, making him totter two pigeon steps backward before he even knew what he was doing, the lighter extinguishing in his hand. Standing to the side of the closed door, Jak raised his blaster and watched in the darkness.

“Okey?” the albino youth whispered.

J.B. had recovered himself and flicked at the warm ignition wheel of the lighter until the spark caught and a new flame appeared. “Someone’s in there,” he said, his voice low. “Mebbe asleep.”

Without a word, Jak turned and peered into the cell window, standing on tiptoes to see inside. He assessed the contents of the claustrophobic room. “Dead,” he concluded after a short while. There was no malice or judgment in the way he said it; it was simply a conclusion he had reached.

J.B. shook his head. “What the hell were these people doing?” he muttered, stepping forward and steeling himself to look in the third cell.

The third cell had a small, grilled window like the other two, and J.B. put his face up close to peer inside, the lighter held near to the opening. In the flickering firelight, he saw another figure, hunched in on itself where it had slumped on the floor. It looked human, about the size of a well-proportioned man.

And then it moved.

Moving in darkness, the thing in the cell powered forward, slamming a driving hand against the grille that J.B. was peering through. The grille shook in its frame, ringing with a metallic clang as the prisoner’s arm crashed against it with bone-jarring force.

J.B. skipped back, moving away from the cell door, the flame swaying as the lighter shook in his hand. He stood there, Jak beside him in the insubstantial pool of light, as the occupant of the cell crashed against the door a second time, the knocking sounds that much louder in the closeness of the low-ceilinged basement.

In the flickering light, J.B. saw Jak look at him, a querulous expression on his chalk-white face.

“I don’t know,” J.B. answered. “Only got a glimpse before it moved.”

With a firm nod of his head, Jak stalked forward, holding his blaster ready at his side, making his way to the cell door on silent tread. The thing inside, man or critter, continued pounding on the locked door, worrying at the handle, shoving bodily against the solid slab of wood.

At just five foot six, Jak had to stand on tiptoe to get a proper look through the window grille. J.B. stood beside the door, holding the flame for Jak to see better.

Inside the tiny cell, Jak saw the figure retreating from the door, head low, snuffling and grunting in a series of
sharp, angry bursts. In the semidarkness, it looked to be a human male, stripped of clothing and very muscular. Jak’s ruby eyes watched, emotionless, as the thing rushed at the door once more, spitting and cursing as it slammed it with a powerful shoulder, pumped its fists against the solid hunk of wood that barred its way.

Jak could smell it now, so close to him on the other side of the barricade. It stank of sweat and bodily waste, but there was something else beneath those scents, something familiar to Jak. “Scalie,” he uttered, his lips pulling back in a snarl.

“You sure?” J.B. inquired.

Jak stepped away from the cell and raised his Colt Python blaster at the grilled window. His eyes flicked back and forth as he watched the shadow moving against the grille. Then, without a word, Jak pulled the trigger of his blaster, driving a single bullet through the small window, the flash of gunpowder illuminating the basement for a single, spectacular instant.

There was a thump as the bullet hit flesh, then the creature within the cell shrieked in pain, followed a second later by a crash as it fell to the floor.

J.B. stood before the window, holding the flame of his lighter at the grille and peering inside. The occupant was lying on the dirty floor of the cell now, its head dark with oozing blood, a pool of scarlet forming beneath it. It lay motionless, either dead or dying, and now that it was still J.B. could see the protrusions of callused skin all over its flesh, evidence of its mutie nature.

“That was one way of dealing with it,” J.B. said gruffly. “I wonder what the family here were doing with it.”

“Torment pet,” Jak said, and his voice carried an edge. “No more.”

When J.B. turned, he saw that Jak had walked away from the cell and, having placed his blaster beside him on a stack of old
Time
magazines, was sorting through the tins of food that had been piled in one corner of the basement. He had done the right thing, J.B. knew. The scalie had been held and most likely tortured by Mitch and Annie, the way a child will pull the wings off a fly, the legs off spiders. They couldn’t let the mutie free without endangering themselves or the people they had been tasked to protect. Killing it, swiftly and without malice, was the most humane thing to do. A mercy killing, nothing more.

J.B. pushed the thoughts from his mind and made his way to where Jak was working. “What are we eating?” he asked, picking up a tin and peering at the water-stained label. It was old U.S. Army, with a use-by date that seemed meaningless. Didn’t matter much, as long as it was food.

I
N THE MAIN ROOM
of the house, where Paul tended the fire, the majority of the travelers slept. Mildred was there, too, curled up inside her blanket, exhaustion making her head heavy. Doc rested with his back against a wall, his sword stick still clutched loosely in his hands as he dozed.

Mildred was thinking about the promise of Babyville, those late-night thoughts that wend their ways into half-awake dreams. She had realized that the attraction wasn’t really youth at all. Well, perhaps in Doc’s case, with his messed-up relationship to the aging process. But for most of them, it wasn’t really youth. Being young was
a state of mind. You couldn’t really become younger. But physically, the opportunity to become stronger, to become fitter—that was something that Mildred understood. She had been a doctor, back before the nukecaust. Perhaps she still was, it was hard to tell when she had so little access to medicines, to facilities where she might truly heal people. Her whole life had been turned into an urgent rush, just field medicine, quick, patch-up repairs. Nothing in this environment was ever about building for the future, it was simply holding things together for the present, making them last another hour, another day.

In her early days as a resident doctor, Mildred had been touched by the cases she treated, especially the children and the elderly. For some reason, there was something about those two groups that made her feel somehow she had to do more. The “adults,” the people like her, they would recover somehow anyway, right? But the elderly always seemed to have so much to give, and the kids hadn’t even started to give yet.

There had been a patient, a man called Lester, who had been thirty-four and single, and he had been dying of cancer. Somehow, Mildred couldn’t say quite why, he had seemed unreal to her.

His sallow face came back to her as she lay there in the darkness of the dilapidated living room, the bitter smell of his breath as he spoke, that faraway look he had in his eyes, as if he knew it was going to happen any day now.

As she lay there, thinking of Les, a man who would never see his thirty-fifth birthday, Mildred wondered if they all had that look that he had. Were they all just staving off the inevitable, trying to keep the game going until Death played his winning hand?

There was a sudden bark, loud and close, and Mildred snapped fully awake, her hand automatically reaching for the ZKR 551 under the bag she had used as a pillow. She sat up, looking around the vast room.

Baby Holly started snuffling as Mildred searched the room, and then burst into tears, bawling in loud, unforgiving screams at being woken.

The barking noise came again, and Mildred saw the figure across the far side of the room, sat doubled over, coughing into his hand. It was Charles Torino, hacking up whatever junk had settled into his besieged lungs.

Pushing herself up, Mildred walked across the room to where Charles sat, spluttering into his hand. She crouched beside him, bringing herself to his level, as the other occupants in the room rolled over, groping for sleep once more.

“Do you need anything?” Mildred asked.

Charles coughed, the noises throaty and strained, until he finally managed to snatch a breath. Mildred saw the way the man shook in the firelight, his shoulders bouncing up and down as he tried to stifle the next cough. Finally he cleared his throat, wiping at his mouth with a sour expression.

“Sweetheart,” Torino said, his voice a hoarse whisper, “I need to not be in this body. That’s what I really need.”

“I’m a healer,” Mildred told him. “I might have something in my bag to make you sleep easier.”

“That’s real kind of you,” Charles said gratefully.

“Krysty’s good with plants,” Mildred added. “I’ll see if she can brew you up a herbal tea or something like that tomorrow. It might at least ease the pain in your throat.”

“Ye—” Torino began, then he stopped as his coughing started up again. There were grumbles from all around as he continued to hack gunk from his lungs in abrupt, pained barks. Once the fit has passed, he reached a hand to Mildred, waved and nodded. He didn’t want to speak again for fear of starting up the coughing all over again.

Mildred nodded back in understanding. “Maybe we could find somewhere else for you to bed down for tonight?” she suggested and Charles agreed.

Mildred went back to her bedroll and rucksack, pulling them from the floor, as Charles did the same. Lighting a candle from the fire, the pair of them left the main room together.

Outside, in the hallway, Mildred saw the two figures guarding the main door—Jak and J.B. “Did you find anything interesting downstairs?” she asked.

J.B. nodded, the candle’s glow playing on the lenses of his spectacles. “Some food, some trouble. Nothing we couldn’t deal with.”

Beside Mildred, Charles began to cough into his hand, trying his best to stifle the noise he made.

“The whole place is protected like a fort,” J.B. said. “Suggests this isn’t a great place to be living.”

Mildred agreed, concern in her voice. “Any idea what those things were we saw out by the road?”

J.B. declined to mention the two—one living and one dead—that he and Jak had found in the basement cells. “Some strain of scalie,” he said. “Nocturnal or just antisocial. Mebbe something else.”

“You mean, something other than scalies?”

“Muties,” J.B. said with a shrug. “All I know is we don’t want to hang around these parts too long.”

Charles spoke in a hoarse voice, his coughing fit having ended. “Agreed,” he said.

N
OISES FROM OUTSIDE
drew Krysty to the window of the master bedroom. She peered through the section that hadn’t been boarded over as Ryan snored on the worn, four-poster. Outside, she could see figures rushing about in the darkness, racing between the trees, illuminated now and then by the moonlight like old-time celebrities in the flashbulb glare of the paparazzi. The figures looked human, erect on two legs, running this way and that in search of prey. Nocturnal scalies, J.B. had called them. Another messed-up branch of the DNA tree that had started with man.

Feeling the cool air play on her naked skin, Krysty reached across to a stool by the window where she had left her fur coat. She took the shaggy coat, wrapping it over her shoulders, pulling it close, then turned back to the window as she heard the whooping and shouting of the monsters outside.

As Krysty watched, one of the scalies out in the far field stopped and, placing his hand to his mouth, hollered to his comrades, howling like a wild animal. Two lumbering scalies appeared from the shadows, then more, until a party of eight surrounded the shouting scalie, looking to it for instructions. The leader, the one who had begun the ululating call, pointed to something that Krysty couldn’t see, a clump of bushes obscured by the shadows. They ran forward, spreading wide as they swarmed on the bushes.

Something ran from the darkness then, a mysterious shape, just a blocky square on short, stubby legs. It rushed at one of the scalies, charging the man-thing
and knocking him off his feet. The scalie was tossed in the air and, as he fell to the ground, another boxy little shape came rushing out of its hiding place, following after the first.

Krysty watched, intrigued, as the scalies leaped at the second creature, while several of them chased after the first as it made its way across the field and toward the house. She could see it better now, illuminated by the sliver of moonlight that cast its pallid glow over the bleak terrain. It was a boar, with dark, coarse hair on its pudgy body and two tusks glinting with the moonlight.

“What are you watching?” Ryan asked, his voice coming from just behind her.

Krysty turned and saw her lover standing by her shoulder, naked. The strip of moonlight through the windowpane played off Ryan’s taut muscles, and Krysty reached her hand forward, running it over his broad chest. “Monsters on the loose,” she told him, “raising hell out there in the fields.”

“Night things,” Ryan said, his voice low. “Let them chill each other.”

Krysty leaned her head back until it rested against Ryan’s chest, and she felt his hot breath in her hair, the solidness of his body like a mighty oak tree as she leaned against it. “Will we be okay?” she asked. “Do you think?”

Ryan reached around and held Krysty close, kissing her high on the cheek. “Come back to bed,” he whispered in her ear. “We can worry about all that tomorrow.” With that, Ryan walked back to the bed, his large body moving with the grace and fluidity of a jungle cat as Krysty watched in the semidarkness.

Krysty shrugged the fur coat from her shoulders, tossing it aside as she climbed onto the bed beside Ryan, sinking against him, feeling the warmth of his body as he pulled her close.

D
AISY AND
C
ROXTON HAD
returned to the main room of the house, and they lay down in a corner with Alec. Daisy and Alec shared a single blanket, conserving their body heat.

Awake, Daisy spoke in a whisper so quiet, it was if she was hardly speaking at all. “What if they turn on us?” she asked.

“They won’t,” Alec assured her. “I gave the full speech, word for word, to the old man—Tanner—just like you taught us. He’ll keep them in check, make sure we get back to Babyville.”

Daisy pulled the blanket about her. “I don’t trust blastersmiths,” she said. “What if they turn on us?”

Croxton shook, struggling to stifle his laughter lest it wake the other occupants of the room. Finally, his whispered voice came to Daisy’s ears in the darkness. “Well, wouldn’t that be something,” he said.

W
ITH DAWN CAME RELIEF
; the relief of surviving another night in hell.

In the master bedroom of the old farmhouse, Ryan stood by the window, scanning the field that backed onto the property. He had been mildly surprised to find that, in the daylight, the walls of the room were decorated with bright and cheery wallpaper that showed tiny flower petals arrayed in sun-faded shades of blue and pink and green. There was movement out there, through the window. A half-dozen birds with black feathers
circled in the sky before they swooped down, landing in the branches of two anemic trees that lined the field. There was something down there, Ryan saw, but he was too far to make it out. A dark lump of something that lay unmoving in the center of the field.