Baptism of Rage (17 page)

“Morning, lover,” Krysty said, pushing herself up in the bed. Ryan looked across to her and saw her face drop in mock disappointment. “Oh, you’re already dressed.”

Ryan knew that she didn’t mean anything by it. “Let’s just get moving,” he confirmed. “Get out of this freak show and on the road again.”

He watched then as Krysty stood, the supple curves of her flesh shining in the rays of the early-morning sun that lit the room. He smiled, marveling at her glorious beauty.

“I think we should do something before we leave,” Krysty said as she put her legs in the pants of the black jeans she wore. “The thing we spoke about last night,” she reminded him.

Ryan agreed. “I’ll go,” he said, plucking up the bedside candle and making his way from the room, lighting it as he went ahead in the dim, old house.

T
HE OTHERS HAD
awakened and were busy filing back through the garden and into their battered wags. J.B. had wrenched off the quick-fix barricade he had nailed to the front door, and he and Doc had checked the immediate area to ensure that it was safe before they let the people under their protection emerge. In the morning light, the man traps in the garden were easy to spot—the traumas of the preceding night seemed a hundred years distant, nothing more than a bad dream half remembered. As
Mildred and Jak led the way, blasters ready just in case, they saw a writhing form had been caught by one of the man traps. It was a mutie boar, roughly two feet in length—just a piglet—and it squealed shrilly as the people approached. Jak stopped to look at it, as Mildred kept everyone else moving.

While the travelers shuffled past, Jak went down on his haunches to get a closer look at the creature in the trap. It was an ugly thing, porcine but with a covering of matted hair the deepest shade of brown, a squashed, lopsided face and two sharp, dirty tusks that curved from lower jaw to high above its head like a devil’s horns. Its eyes glistened wetly, two dark pools of mystery that watched the albino youth with inscrutability. A cloud of tiny insects buzzed around the piglet’s leg where the trap had cut into its flesh. Its breathing was loud and came faster and faster as Jak tentatively reached out with his free hand until, as he appeared close enough to touch the beast, it began squealing once more. The loudness of its cries scared the scavenger birds from the trees, and they took flight in a flock, swirling through the sky before alighting on a group of alders a little farther from the farmhouse.

Emotionless, J.B.’s voice intruded on Jak’s thoughts as he studied the hog. “Move yourself, Jak. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

Looking over his shoulder, Jak addressed the Armorer. “Hurt,” he said, meaning the animal in the trap.

“Not our problem,” the Armorer said. “Chill it and you just waste good ammunition.”

Jak glanced back at the piglike, mutie creature, thoughts whirring through his head.

J.B. turned back to the house, making his way along the overgrown path toward the mined porch. As he reached the booby-trapped steps, he called back to Jak. “You coming?”

In a move so swift it was just a blur, something flashed in Jak’s hand and the struggling beast suddenly slumped to the ground. As J.B. watched, a thin stream of red formed on the monster’s neckline where Jak had cut its throat with his knife.

“Mebbe we can eat,” Jak explained, pushing himself from the ground and following J.B. back to the house.

E
LSEWHERE
, M
ILDRED WAS
encouraging everyone to the wags. There would need to be a redistribution of personnel in the wags, of course, now that Croxton’s was nothing more than a burnt-out husk, but the travelers were amiable, enjoying a rare camaraderie in their shared quest. Ryan would take Mitch’s converted harvester, but the beast of a machine accommodated only two people, including the driver, in its high seats, and wasn’t practical for transporting more than that long-term. “It’ll do for me and Croxton,” Ryan had said. “We’ll lead the way and the rest of the convoy can follow.” Croxton had agreed.

As the travelers busied themselves, loading their possessions—and the useful things that the house had turned up—into the wags, Ryan and Krysty took the time to dig a hole in the backyard. The earth was muddy here, and the topmost layer had been hardened with ice where the morning dew had turned to frost. As Ryan worked at the ground with a small, handheld spade he had found in a kitchen cupboard, Doc emerged from the back door that led into the kitchen of the farmhouse. He
had been helping J.B. ransack the property for the last of the food and ammo supplies, and had noticed them working in the yard.

“Everything is loaded up,” Doc explained from the doorway to the house.

Krysty’s head turned to look at Doc, and Ryan glanced up from his work, holding his hand up in the universal sign to yield. “Be with you in a few minutes, Doc,” he said. “Just got to finish up here.”

Doc stepped through the kitchen door and strode across the icy, muddy ground. “Might I inquire as to what it is that trammels you?” he asked.

Krysty turned then, and Doc saw that she held a tiny figure wrapped in a blanket. It appeared to be a child, a baby, and Doc suddenly felt that plummeting feeling in his stomach.

“We found her upstairs,” Ryan explained as he continued digging the shallow grave in the soil. “Seems wrong, somehow, to just leave her for the birds to peck at.”

Doc bowed his head respectfully, and stood in silence as they finished their funereal task. Loading a wag by the edge of the yard, Croxton spied the group and stood unnoticed, watching silently as they buried the child’s body.

Once Ryan was done, Krysty laid the baby out in the soil as black feathered birds circled above, cawing back and forth in their ugly, discordant voices. As Ryan picked up the spade to begin piling soil on the child, Doc stopped him. Ryan and Krysty watched, and then the old man spoke the Lord’s Prayer in his bold, stentorian voice and all three of them bowed their heads over the tiny
grave. Once Doc had finished, Ryan set about burying the baby girl, aware that the corpse would likely be dug up again by wild animals in a matter of hours.

It didn’t matter; they had done what they could.

W
HEN THEY JOINED
their companions, out by the wags at the side of the house, Krysty, Ryan and Doc found them eating. In the morning light, J.B. and Jak had raided the tinned supplies in the basement and were sharing cans with everyone in the group.

J.B. turned at their approach and handed an open tin to Krysty. The circular can was about an inch and a half deep and it sat snugly in the palm of her hand. “Have some breakfast ’fore we hit the road, why don’t you?” J.B. suggested.

“Why, thank you,” Krysty said, taking the proffered can. She looked at the contents, sniffing at it warily. The can contained a powder that J.B. had added boiled water to, creating a brown sludge. With no label on the can and its scent an indefinable mixture of chemicals, the contents could have been some kind of gravy, but may just as likely have been chocolate sauce. Krysty dipped her finger in the gunk and tasted it, before smiling. “Tastes good,” she announced.

Beside Krysty, Doc and Ryan were tucking into their own cans, neither of them saying very much.

Twenty minutes later they were on the move.

The five wags rolled over the shockscape, passing dead trees in their fields of dust, lumbering past forgotten spots on the map that had once been thriving communities before the nukes had fallen.

The old farmer and leader of the refugees, Jeremiah Croxton, was riding shotgun as Ryan drove the converted harvester that he had acquired from Mitch and Annie.

“I figure we’re about a day away from Baby,” Croxton said as they pulled away from the road sign that welcomed visitors to Tazewell. The scalies were nowhere to be seen, presumably they had gone back to whatever passed for a nest during the daytime. Ryan turned the wheels hard, guiding the peculiar wag off the road and over a flat expanse of field. Croxton looked at him. “Probably quicker by road, Ryan,” he said, smirking.

Ryan shook his head. “Krysty told me all about those tenacious muties you bumped into on the road,” he said. “I don’t want to run into them again. No point tempting fate.”

Croxton shrugged. “Can’t say I blame you.”

Maude White’s canvas-covered tractor wag trundled along at the rear of the group, carrying Vincent and J.B. as before. They had been joined by another passenger,
the seemingly young girl Daisy. Daisy seemed restless, and she kept pulling the heavy curtain back and peering down the way they had just come.

“You expecting someone, Daisy?” J.B. asked when he saw her peer out for a fourth time.

She turned back and graced him with her warm, friendly smile. “I fucking hope not, mister,” she said. “What were those things we saw anyway? Back in that Tassel place.”

“I don’t know what they were.”

“They seemed pretty pissed,” Daisy drawled, shrugging.

J.B. agreed. “People out here, outside of the villes, can be kind of territorial sometimes,” he explained.

Sitting close to the front flap of the tentlike wag, Vincent White shook his balding head. “Those things weren’t people, friend.”

“Mebbe they were once,” J.B. told them both, “a long time ago. Now they’re just territorial bastards with too much rad-blasted shit in their heads.”

“Nothing like that in Babyville,” Daisy said. “Wouldn’t get past the gate.”

“Have you seen them before?” Vincent asked Dix thoughtfully.

“I’ve seen similar things,” J.B. assured him. “Muties of every stripe, things that you think might almost be human apart from one difference. Some of them are smart and some of them are triple stupe, but they all follow one basic rule—they protect themselves against outsiders.”

“We all do that, Mr. Dix,” Vincent remarked, turning back to watch the path ahead as his wife urged more power from the wag’s chugging engine.

“I guess we do, at that,” J.B. muttered.

O
THER THAN THE
occasional refueling stop, the wags didn’t pull to a halt until midafternoon. The winter sun was a distant white ball, low on the horizon. They had joined onto something called Route 25, whose occasional, surviving signs promised it would lead them to Newport, Morristown and Knoxville. Newport and Morristown had both turned out to be bombed-out wreckage. They hadn’t got as far as Knoxville.

But in the midafternoon, they hit a snag. Ryan pulled the wide wag he drove to a shuddering halt, letting the engine tick over as he stared at what lay ahead. Where once there had been road, now there was just a huge crater, over a half-mile wide and hundreds of feet deep.

Croxton looked behind them, watching the other wags dutifully pull to a halt. “What we going to do?” the old farmer asked, assessing the crater ahead of them.

In his seat, Ryan was checking his lapel Geiger counter. The area was hot. “We need to turn around,” he decided, “and find another route. I’m not going in there.”

“The sides aren’t that steep,” Croxton argued. “The wags can make it. Mebbe not this heap of crap, but the others can. We’ll double-up some.”

Ryan looked at him, his blue eye holding Croxton’s gaze. “No, we won’t,” he said. “Some kind of missile hit that place, and whatever it was the residual radiation is still off the scale. We need to back up.”

As Ryan began turning the wag, lurching toward the side of the crumbling Route 25, Croxton waved to the following wag train, indicating that they were to follow.

“You know,” Croxton said as the harvester bumped over the wreckage of the blacktop and onto the dusty plains that surrounded the crater, “I would have just driven in if you hadn’t been here.”

“Whatever Baby is offering,” Ryan told him, his eye locked on the uneven ground ahead, “you wouldn’t have survived two weeks after being in that heat. I don’t even like being this close.”

Croxton shrugged, dismissing Ryan’s concerns. “Radiation is everywhere,” he said.

“So are bullets,” Ryan told him, “but I don’t intend to stop long enough to catch one.”

They continued trudging, bumping and crashing over the mess of wasteland that had once been lush fields and proud towns, feeling the wintry chill as the sun sank lower to the horizon.

D
OC GAZED OUT
of the windows of Charles’s horse-drawn wag while Mildred sat in the back, squeezed between newcomer Alec and Mary and her baby. Alec’s head kept lolling back until he finally drifted off to sleep; the night in Tazewell had been exhausting for him, and his time in Mitch’s farmhouse had been restless, his sleep patchy. Alec gave a funny little snort-gurgle as the wag skipped over a bump in the field, and Mary and Mildred stifled laughter, looking at each other like guilty schoolchildren.

“Wish I could sleep like that,” Mary said, keeping her voice low.

Mildred looked at the baby in Mary’s arms. “At least Holly seems to be sleeping through it all,” she said.

“Yeah,” Mary agreed dispiritedly. “She’s a well-behaved girl. Guess I should be thankful for that.”

“Why are you here?” Mildred asked, admiring the baby in the woman’s arms. It was a question that had been on her mind for a while, but she surprised herself with the way she just blurted it out.

“What?” Mary asked. “You mean, where’s the daddy or why am I running away?”

“I didn’t realize you were running away,” Mildred said, her eyes meeting Mary’s. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

In response, Mary smiled. “That’s okay, Mildred. I don’t mind. You’ve been good to me, and you have a right to ask.”

“It’s just that, you seem so young,” Mildred began, “to be looking for this promised fountain of eternal youth, I mean.”

“I’m thirty-eight,” Mary told her. “Be thirty-nine soon, once spring rolls around.”

After a moment’s thought, Mary continued. “You see Alec there?” she asked, indicating the blond-haired young man with the bow. “I’d just had Holly when Alec came to our farmhouse out near ’Tucky border. I mean, she was just two weeks old. And my old man, Joe, he was so mad with her. I thought he was going to kill me and her both. We already had two lovely children, you see, and there was no room in his heart for Holly.”

“Raising a child is hard work,” Mildred said gently.

“Holly isn’t his,” Mary said. “She’s mine, that’s true, but… Well, he had an accident and so she ain’t his. I tried to tell him about the man. I’d been at the nearest ville, an awful place—more blasters than brains inside those walls, I swear. I’d been there to trade some carrots and beets, try to get some better seeds, because the
farm was doing well by then. And this man, he’d said he wasn’t interested in carrots, he wanted something else.”

Mary’s words trailed off and Mildred looked at the baby in her arms once again. “And you…?” Mildred encouraged.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Mary said firmly. “I love my Joe. Wouldn’t do nothing like that. But this man, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Holly’s a rape-child, Mildred. That’s what she is.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mildred said, her words barely a whisper.

“I don’t mind,” Mary said. “I love her and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? But this pool, this magical pool in Babyville… I figure that can fix us, restore us to what we was. Repair me. So Joe can love me again. Love us both.”

The wag hopped over another lump in the track, and Holly woke with a start, her blue eyes popping open. A moment later she began to wail, and Mary soothed her, cooing words of consolation.

The noise of the baby woke Alec then, and he groaned and swore as he looked around him. “Can you mebbe shut your brat up?” he asked, glaring at Mary, rubbing his hand over his tired face.

The wags trundled on.

T
WO HOURS LATER
, as they drove along another road, just a dirt track between the fallen ruins of civilization, Croxton told Ryan to turn off.

“You know where we are?” Ryan asked.

Croxton laughed. “I got me a fair idea,” he said, pointing. “Look.”

Ryan looked where the man pointed, and saw people bent over, working in a field. They were planting crops in long rows, a half-dozen people working the field together. As Ryan looked around, he saw that other fields showed evidence of farming, and each one a handful of people—young and fit, some just children—worked at sowing and plowing and picking. One field had been left fallow, just the churned-up soil showing in the afternoon sun. Several youngsters were playing in the field, throwing a ball to one another.

“Promised land, you reckon?” Croxton asked, unable to keep the joy from his tone.

“We’ll see,” Ryan replied, urging the shuddering wag along the dirt track, trundling over a small rise.

As they came over the rise, Croxton leaned forward in his seat, studying something in the far distance. Noticing, Ryan looked up from the road and off to the horizon. There, looming low on the skyline, were irregular, dark shapes, angling toward the cloudy, silver sky. It looked like the fingers of a dead man, reaching from the grave, grasping at the sky above.

“We’re here,” Croxton said, the hint of pride in his voice. “That there is Baby.”

Struggling with the wheel as the old harvester bumped over the pockmarked ground, Ryan glanced at the old farmer sitting beside him. “You’re sure?” he asked, turning his attention back to the dark shapes on the horizon.

“Oh, this is it all right,” Croxton assured him. “Looks just like what Daisy described.”

Ryan studied the structures of the ville as they drew closer, the other wags following in their wake. There was a wall, he saw now, a wide concrete structure almost ten
feet in height. Its surface was smooth, reflecting the glint of the dwindling sun’s rays, and it looked substantial. There was a gate, Ryan saw, a towering hunk of wood strengthened by metal, that had been set in place in the structure of the wall. The gate looked incongruous, out of place in the smooth lines of the wall.

Beyond the wall, towering above it, Ryan could see buildings now, the sunlight turning them into dark, brutal lines snatching at the sky. These were the dead man’s fingers he had seen when they had first bumped over the incline and spied the ville. Three in all, they looked firm, solid.

Ryan was surprised. This didn’t look like a ville, not the kind he had imagined at least. He had expected some broken-down settlement of splintering shacks and rusting wags. Instead, here was a ville from another era. It looked like something from the old days, before skydark—a city. Nothing about it was temporary; it had been planned and constructed with thought, with one eye on the future.

As Ryan led the convoy of wags toward the new ville called Baby, he wondered if what he was looking at was the future of humanity. Was this the kind of place that would finally replace the Deathlands? A place where people would be safe from the horrors of the outside world?

Unconsciously, Ryan worked the accelerator, urging more power from the beast of a wag, jolting over the rough ground toward the gates of Baby.