Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (17 page)

“Is that something else Trader said?” Mildred asked.

“Sun Tzu,” Doc said.
“The Art of War.”

“But the Trader liked to quote it,” Ryan said, allowing himself a faint smile. “Don’t let J.B. snow you.”

“What now, lover?” Krysty asked.

“Get these fire-blasted chills cleared out of here before they start to stink, but pick out the best-looking one, so to speak, to take into Sinkhole as proof of who’s behind the attack on those people.”

“Shall we carry it to Mr. Conn’s gaudy tonight?” Doc asked. He was already sounding vague. Like all of them, he felt a deep letdown in the aftermath of a hard fight. It made him more likely than usual to lose focus and wander off among his memories.

Ryan looked up at the sky again. As if on cue, a single raindrop hit him in the patch that covered the emptiness where his left eye had been and exploded.

“Storm’s coming,” he said. “Sooner rather than later. We’d best fort ourselves up here, underground, and wait for morning. We don’t want to risk hitting the trail in the dark, anyway, in case the coamers decide to come back for a rematch.”

“It’s not going to matter anyway,” Ricky said cheerfully.
“Even that crazy
chica
will have to admit we’re innocent of killing her sister now!”

* * *

“T
HIS IS BAD
, W
YMIE
,” Mance said. “Triple bad.”

The black-haired young woman could only nod. Nausea and rage warred in her belly.

Triple bad
didn’t begin to do it justice. Not all the lives in the world could ever mean as much to her as her murdered baby sister, and she had never had much use for the Sumz family and their frankly degenerate ways.

But if the slaughter of the unknown couple back at their camp had been an outrage, this was beyond a nightmare.

She was grateful that the curdled-milk dawn light seeping through and spilling over the pines to the east turned all the blood and gore and ripped-out organs to shades of gray. Even by lamplight, the blood of her mother and stepdad splashed all around the inside of their well-built house of stone had been bright, so shockingly bright red…

Morse Hoskin was a neighbor of the Sumz clan, who’d made the trip to their homestead in the predawn hours. Just what errand took him there at such an hour he’d been remarkably evasive about. Wymie suspected it was to visit one of the notoriously loose Sumz womenfolk. For a passel of proud and deliberate inbreds, some of them sure liked to spread it around.

What he had seen there had sent him skittering for Wymie’s posse as fast as his spindly shanks could carry him. Mance had awakened her in her makeshift tent to bring her the dreadful news.

But nothing could have prepared her for the impact of the sight. Or the smells. It was like the aftermath of
an explosion in a slaughterhouse. Or an outhouse. Not even the pervasive stink of the turpentine distillery could mask the reek of death.

Even the structures had suffered in the attack. The big house had its roof caved in, with busted beam-ends sticking out at crazy angles. A couple of their shanty-style outbuildings had been largely knocked in on themselves.

Wymie couldn’t tell if that was because of the battle, or the outlanders’ sheer joy in destruction for its own sake. She wouldn’t put anything past Blinda’s murderers.

Dorden approached, looking even graver than usual.

“A terrible thing,” he said. “So much devastation. The whole clan appears to have been wiped out—at least two dozen souls.”

He stopped and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. It was already a muggy day, and the air was still in the hollow were the Sumzes had built their home.

“Hard to believe the outlanders could have done all this,” he said.

“They must’ve had help,” Wymie said. Her anger was bubbling. “Some traitors from among us.”

“Like Conn?” Mance asked.

She shook her head in irritation. “He’s just a feeb,” she said. “I don’t see him as a traitor. We’ll find out who is, though, and root out that corruption.”

She frowned. “I wonder what happened to Lem and Gator and the help they were supposed to bring back. It’d come in handy right about now.”

Somebody made a crack about trying to recruit the gaudy sluts at Stenson’s Creek. Wymie glared at them.

Then someone called her name.

It was Angus Chen. “Come look at this,” he said. He looked as if he were about to puke.

Wymie followed the carpenter, picking her way over and around debris she didn’t want to look at too closely or think about at all. Up ahead, a couple of her followers were staring down at the ground.

At first she wondered why the cannie outlanders would leave a string of sausages lying out in the yard with just the end chewed off. Mebbe they got full? They’d done a power of eating, from the evidence of gnawed-up limbs and chewed-off faces, which lent credence to her theory they now had helpers.

Then she realized she wasn’t looking at sausages. She was looking at guts. Human guts.

They had been pulled out like thread off a spool, and left to lie in their own blood splashes in the dirt. It made her own innards roil to think about what that had to have felt like.

The trail led into a wood shed that had half fallen in on itself. Moaning came from the darkness within.

“Somebody’s alive in there,” Edmun said. “Poor bastard.”

From inside the shed came the strained voice of ace tracker Lou Eddars. “It’s Buffort! He’s goin’ fast.”

Resolution didn’t settle her queasy stomach, but it kept it and the remnants of whatever congealed and half-heated leftovers she had gulped down for breakfast where they belonged. She scrambled bent over into the opening, and winced as she felt a link of intestine squelch beneath her boot.

She didn’t even know if a person’s guts could feel anything, once they got yanked out of the body. But the man they belonged to was clearly past caring. Even in the gray dawn light filtering in through the doorway,
Buffort Sumz’s face was bloodless, and knotted with suffering she couldn’t begin to imagine.

His right eye dangled on its stem clear down his slab of a cheek. The skin was drenched in half-dried blood and fresh tears.

“What happened here, Buffort?” she asked. She realized what a triple-stupe question that was even as it was leaving her lips, so she hurried on. “Who did this to you?”

“They come—through the roof,” he groaned. “Tore poor little Eddie apart like an ol’ chicken.”

“Who did?”

“Yoostas fought ’em. Fought ’em hard. But they got him. I tried to fight, but they—hurt me.”

She knelt on top of the split hardwood chunks, barely noticing how they gouged her knees through her jeans. She cradled his huge blood- and tearstained face in her hands.

“Buffort, who? Who hurt you?”

“White,” he groaned. “White face, white hair. Red…eyes!”

He sat up, causing unpleasant squelching sounds to come from his big ripped-open belly. He screamed, his breath stinking in Wymie’s face. Then his good eye rolled up in his head and she felt him die.

She let him go and jumped up, banging her head on the caved-in roof as he flopped back like a dead fish.

Without even knowing how she found herself in the yard outside, hands on knees, panting for breath like a hound that had just helped tree a ’coon. Even the smells of turpentine, outhouses whose contents had long since got the better of the lime poured into them, and the guts
and gore splashed everywhere smelled pure and fresh after what was inside.

“Wymie?” Mance asked. “Are you all right?”

“That’s a stupe question, son.” It was Dorden. She made herself straighten as the portly man approached.

“This is terrible,” he said. “We have to do somethin’ now.”

“Now we got ’em,” she said, her triumph rising above even nausea and anger. She looked around at Angus, Lou, Mance and the half-dozen others who had crowded around the shed entrance when she went inside. “You all heard him—he saw the albino!”

They exchanged uneasy glances. Then Mance piped up, “You betcha, Wymie! We heard, all right.”

She gazed around at the rest of her posse, who had given up whatever they were doing to converge on her outside the shed of death.

“Time to end this,” she said. “Mebbe the Sumzes wasn’t the most popular folks in the Pennyrile, but they didn’t deserve this.”

“Wymie?”

It was Burny’s voice, even more tentative than usual, from the back of the crowd. He had a wild-eyed girl with him, gawky and just a few years younger than Wymie herself. Wymie knew her. Her name was Aggie Coal. Her people lived north of here, right on the Mother Road that ran through the region from east to west.

“Aggie says she may know where the outlanders are,” Burny said. “At least in a general sort of way.”

Chapter Fourteen

“On three,” Ryan said. “One, two—three!”

He and J.B. straightened simultaneously. The rope harness they’d rigged around their shoulders cut into Ryan’s.

In between the cannie lay, wrapped in a blanket too old and smelly for even them to continue to use any longer. Plus it was starting to be more hole than cloth. Wrapped around the chill a couple times, though, it would be strong enough to hold.

It wasn’t that long a trip to Stenson’s Creek, anyway, and they could use the Mother Road most of the way.

“Ready, partner?” Ryan asked. He and the Armorer had decided that, as first and second in command, they should lead by being first to tote the dead cannie, which was in pretty good shape, considering, having been taken out by two rounds from Ryan’s 9 mm blaster right through the breastbone and the cold, black heart beneath. They might not even need to hand off the macabre burden, although neither of them would hesitate to do so if he felt the need. Being tough was one thing; tiring themselves out enough to slow their reflexes if it came to a fight was begging to join the supposed “coamer” in death.

J.B. nodded. Jak did too. He turned and started up the loose-dirt slope of the cave-in.

“Does Jak even need to scout ahead?” Mildred asked. “The cannies don’t do much by daylight, and if any of that crazy chick’s mob of peasants with pitchforks find us, the dude there should show them we’re not who they’re looking for.”

“How were you planning on stopping him, Mildred?” J.B. asked mildly.

“Cannies didn’t attack us outright, either,” Ryan said, grunting as he adjusted his grip on the load. It wasn’t heavy—the cannies weren’t big, though they were wiry. “Until they did. When did we start taking our safety for granted, Mildred?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Truth to tell, I did, last night. I reckoned they’d only do the usual, snipe at us with rocks and sticks, and mebbe give us a chance to chill one and claim the body. And so when they hit us for real they near as rad death overran us. If it wasn’t for Jak making a big show of attacking them from behind, we’d be on the last train west right now. Or inside their bellies, more like.”

Krysty placed a hand on his arm. “That’s in the past, lover,” she said. “We need to do what we always do—walk on.”

“Literally,” he said with a grin. “Right. Time to shake the dust of this place off our heels and go clear our names!”

* * *

“I
T WAS LAST NIGHT
, ’long about sunset,” Aggie Coal said. She had a mop of tangled brown hair that currently had a bunch of grass and leaves stuck in it from sneaking through the brambles. “Just as it started to come down dark for real. Donny saw a light, off to east of us. Pa came out and we heard blasterfire.”

Wymie had led the group a couple hundred yards up the road that led from the Sumz location to join with the Mother Road, a mile or so away. The girl had been visibly upset by being surrounded by all that blood and death, and Wymie made a mental note to yell at Burny later for bringing her smack into the middle of it. Wymie wasn’t double comfortable in that mess, either, truth to tell.

“Did you go and investigate, child?” Dorden asked gently.

Aggie shook her head vigorously. “No, sir! We been seein’…things in the twilight. Flittin’ about the house and spookin’ the animals and all. Sometimes the dogs been barkin’ and the horses get to neighin’ and tossin’ their heads in the black of night, same as they did earlier when were seein’ the shadows move about. Weren’t nobody going out by night without more reason than curiosity.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Vin said, and cackled as if that were the funniest thing ever.

Wymie tamped down her flash of irritation hard. She had a feeling in her gut they were going to be sorely needing the oldie’s talents with a handblaster, and sooner rather than later. She could almost taste how close they were to
real
action—and vengeance.

“So you don’t know for sure what happened?” Wymie asked.

“No, ma’am. But we reckoned ’twarn’t none of it good.”

“You really think it was the outlanders?” Dorden asked Wymie.

“Who else could it be? You saw how many blasters they were flashin’ around Conn’s.”

“No sign of any blasters used at the Sumz place,” Angus said. “Except one or two by the Sumzes themselves.
And one of those had the barrel blown up and peeled back like a steel flower.”

“Are you sure, Wymie?” Mance asked. “I mean, from what we found at the Sumz main house, the outlanders hit ’em ’round about suppertime. Could they also have been in a firefight a couple miles to the northeast and then got here while the Sumzes were still eatin’?”

“Whose side are you on, Mance Kobelin?” Wymie flared, letting him have the full burst of her sense of righteous betrayal.

“Them Sumzes could do a power of eatin’,” Angus said. “Might have been about it awhile.”

“See?” she said.

Mance went pale. He dropped his eyes from hers.

“What do you want to do, Wymie?” Dorden asked with gentle firmness.

“Go find them,” she said with venomous conviction. “Find them and chill them.”

“How’re we gonna do that, Wymie?” Angus asked.

“Search the woods and the hills!” she yelled. “Didn’t you just listen? We know where they are!”

“We couldn’t make out for sure,” Aggie said. Then she sidled behind Mance as if afraid of Wymie’s reaction.