Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (4 page)

A couple of husky young men, one dark-skinned, one light, had appeared near the scene. They were local youths Conn employed for odd jobs, including bouncing the occasional rowdy patron. They looked now to their boss.

He sighed, but he was already withdrawing his hand from underneath the bar. He used it to smooth back his thinning seal-colored hair instead.

“Right,” he said. “Keep a tighter leash on your boy, there, Yoostas.”

“Aw, c’mon, Conn. There ain’t no harm to him.”

“I know,” Conn said, moving back to his accustomed spot and picking up his bottle again, as if he meant to use it for its original purpose instead of cracking heads. “That’s why y’all are still here.”

He looked at the girl, who was trying to untangle her arms and upper torso from her ratty makeshift boa.

“Go take a break, Annie,” he said. “Catch a breath, pull yourself together.”

“But my take for the evening—”

“I said, take a break. I won’t jam you on the take. Don’t bleed when you’re not cut.”

She bobbed her head and vanished toward the back, where the few cribs were. Like a lot of the more respectable gaudy-house owners, Conn allowed a few women, usually down-on-their-luck locals, to rent time and space
to ply their sexual wares rather than keeping them in greater or lesser degrees of slavery, as most did. Ryan had also noted he treated his workers the way he did trading partners: politely, calmly and driving a hard bargain but a fair one.

He didn’t cheat too much, which made him a Deathlands paragon.

Ryan turned his attention back to his friends. He saw them all easing their hands back from their own blasters. Handblasters only; Conn insisted longblasters be checked at the door. That chafed J.B.’s butt a tad, but Ryan went along with it, meaning the Armorer and the others did, too.

Ryan was willing to rely on Conn’s unwavering insistence on keeping an orderly house.

And if that failed, it wasn’t as if Ryan and his friends weren’t packing enough heat to burn a way to the little cabinet by the door where their longblasters were.

“There are worse places,” Mildred said with a shrug.

J.B. showed her a hint of sly grin. “You still got your mind on settling down?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve been in way worse locations, is all I’m saying.”

“Indeed,” Doc said. He was leaning forward, staring down at an angle at the tabletop with an unfocused look in his blue eyes. Ryan couldn’t tell for sure if he was agreeing with Mildred, or with some randomly remembered person from his past, like his long-lost wife, Emily, or even their children, Rachel and Jolyon. The predark whitecoats and their malicious time-trawling had done more than age him prematurely. Sometimes Doc lost touch with the present and wandered off through the fog of his own reminiscences.

The others couldn’t help but fear that sometime he might just wander off inside his own skull and never come back. But he always had, and lately things seemed to be getting consistently better. In any event he always snapped right to when the hammer came down.

Jak was frowning.

“What’s the matter, Jak?” Krysty asked gently.

The albino’s scowl deepened. But he didn’t snap back at her, as he sometimes could with his male companions. He just pressed his scarcely visible white lips together so hard they vanished altogether, and shook his head briskly.

“Don’t gnaw your own guts over not being able to track those stick-throwing white things,” J.B. said. As was his custom, he didn’t raise his voice. If he had something to say, he said it calmly. If he had something to do, he did it without hesitation or qualm. “They know the lay of the land better than even you can, most likely. And they probably have some kind of lairs nearby they can duck into.”

Though the gaudy chatter had resumed its normal volume, Ryan could hear Jak growl low in his throat. It wasn’t a gesture of hostility but a sign of his own dissatisfaction with himself.

“Listen, Jak,” Mildred said helpfully. “There’s always someone better than you.”

That got her a red-eyed glare.

“Mildred,” Ryan said dryly, “stop helping.”

The door burst open.

For a moment all that poured inside was darkness and the sound of crickets, audible because the dramatic opening had quieted the small talk again. It wasn’t necessarily in anticipation of an equally dramatic entry; people hereabouts,
like most places, were just that starved for something a little different from the day-in, day-out routine.

But they got the drama anyway. A young woman came through the door, half striding, half staggering under a burden of deadweight and fatigue. She carried a body in her arms. It was apparently a child, a girl by the long hair that hung down from the intruder’s right arm, and she was dead, from the lifeless swing and dangle of her small, bare arms.

But the young woman’s head was high, black hair falling in waves around broad shoulders, one bared by her half-torn-open flannel shirt. Her deep blue eyes blazed with rage.

“My baby sister’s dead!” she cried in a vibrant voice. “Blinda’s been murdered, and I saw who done it!”

A number of patrons had jumped to their feet. “Who did it, Wymie?” one asked.

She fixed Ryan with a laser glare. “Those stoneheart outlanders there!”

That silenced the rising murmur as though cutting it off with an ax. Immediately whispers started up again: “Oh, holy shit, her face.”

Ryan saw that it was missing. Something had taken much of the bone from brow to lower jaw along with flesh and skin.

Ryan heard Krysty gasp. Doc made a strangled noise.

“You can’t be talking to us,” Ryan said, as evenly as he could.

“I saw you! You
bastards
!”

“You didn’t see us,” Mildred said. “We were working at the claim until late. Then we came right here.”

“Tell us exactly what you did see, Wymie,” Conn told her.

The black-haired young woman stooped and eased her burden onto the floorboards. Blood began to trickle outward. Behind her Ryan could see a number of others with anxious, angry faces. Plenty held weapons, from hoes and axes to a muzzle-loader shotgun or two. Slowly, Wymie straightened.

“I looked out the window, soon as—as it happened,” she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair.
Bloodred eyes!
”

All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.

“Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.

“Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”

“We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”

“You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”

“We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.

He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.

He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.

“It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”

“I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.

“Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we
do
such a thing?”

“You’re outlanders! From out
there
!”

Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.

“You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it
Deathlands
. Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”

“But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And
he
looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”

“Mebbe used an ax.”

“Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”

“Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”

“‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.

“Mebbe he’s a—a werewolf or somethin’! We all know there’s monsters out there!”

Tarley shook his head. “Wymie, Wymie. Listen to yourself. We can’t go lynchin’ strangers because they might be werewolves. Not without some kinda evidence they are. Or that werewolves exist, even.”

“People say there’s all kind of weird muties, out in the Deathlands,” one of the men standing on the stoop behind
Wymie said. “Like little rubber-skinned bastards with suckers for fingertips, can rip the hide clean off you!”

“That part’s real,” Ricky said. “Those are stickies. They’re bad news.”

“I’ve seen stickies,” Tarley stated. “They’re pretty much what you say. But stickies didn’t do this, and I see no reason to believe these folks did, either.”

“You takin’ their part, Tarley Gaines?” Wymie shrieked. “Of outlanders who murder our own?”

“Nobody’s takin’ anybody’s part,” Conn said, his voice level and as unyielding as an anvil. “Not tonight. Not in here. Except the truth’s, mebbe.”

“I know the truth!” the young woman yelled.

“You got precious little to show for it, Wymie.”

“I know what I saw!”

“And mebbe what you saw wasn’t what your mind’s made of it. Fact is, these folks have been right here a good past hour, half an hour spent hagglin’, half an hour eatin’ my venison, stewed greens and beans, and drinkin’ my brew. They came in without a dot of blood on them, wearin’ clothes they’d double clearly worked in all day. And their hair isn’t wet enough to be from anythin’ but sweat, so they didn’t clean themselves up after doing murder. The albino in particular—blood’d show up pretty clear on him.”

Wymie was looking around, but from the slump of her strong shoulders Ryan could see that, while the anger and even hate were still there, still smoldering, sheer exhaustion and emotional reaction had damped her fires. She had nothing left.

Not now, anyway.

“You out there,” Conn called past the suddenly befuddled-looking woman. “Burny Stoops. Walter John.
Get in here, pick this poor girl up off my floor and take her to Coffin-Maker Sam, over to the Hole. He’ll see she gets a decent burial.”

“I can’t afford to hire a hole dug for her,” Wymie said, sounding more sullen now than raging. “Much less a box to bury her in.”

“Tell Sam I’ll cover the expenses,” Conn said. “But you got to leave now, Wymie. Find a place to stay. Don’t make any more fuss, now. It won’t do poor Blinda a speck of good.”

“But—”

“We’ll get it sorted out. When the sun comes up, we’ll go take a look at your old place. We need information, and that’s a thing we haven’t got.”

“I know all I need to,” she said, the spark of anger flaring again.

“The rest of us don’t,” the gaudy owner said, with just a bit of edge to his voice. “Mrs. Haymuss!”

After a moment a stout brown-skinned woman emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a much-stained apron and wiping her hands on a rag. She was evidently the cook.

“Take this poor girl and see to her. Get her settled with Widow Oakey. She’s close and likes to take in strays.”

“But, Mr. Conn, the kitchen—”

“Kitchen’s closed,” the gaudy owner said. “Nobody’s got an appetite left now. And if they do, I’m not minded to feed them, right now.”

The woman walked forward, encircled Wymie’s shoulders with a brawny arm and began alternately clucking and cooing at her. Ryan couldn’t make out what she was saying. Or even if it was words.

The black-haired woman made as if to push her off.
Then she turned, buried her face at the juncture of Mrs. Haymuss’s neck and beefy shoulders, and began to cry uncontrollably.

The two men Conn had called on came in past the two to gingerly pick up Blinda’s body. Mrs. Haymuss steered Wymie back out into the night. They followed, struggling to carry what a single woman had brought here on her own.

“The rest of you out there,” Conn called, “move along. It isn’t polite to stare.”

Whatever passions Wymie’s trek had excited in the locals who had collected to follow her to the gaudy house, they had vanished, as well. Shuffling their feet, not meeting one another’s gazes directly, they broke up began to go their separate ways.

Conn watched them for a moment. Slowly, those inside the gaudy who had jumped up at the spectacle sat themselves back down.

“I’d wait to make sure they all get headed in the right direction, just in case,” Conn said to Ryan. “Then you might want to clear out of here.”

“Much obliged,” Ryan said.

“Thank you for your help,” Krysty said. “Do you think we did it after all?”

Conn shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. Somebody did this, and that somebody needs to pay. But if I thought it was you, I never would’ve said what I did. Fact is, I don’t see how you could have done it.”

“But that big-titty girl still thinks you done it,” Yoostas Sumz said. “Sure as shit stinks double bad.”

Chapter Three

“What do we do now?” Mildred asked.

The faces gathered around the little campfire mirrored the concern and uncertainty she felt. Except for Ryan’s. He sat off a little apart, knees drawn up, facing off to the side. His chin was down and he was clearly brooding.

Jak was nowhere to be seen. Ryan would have had to physically restrain him to keep him from prowling the perimeter of their camp to scout for signs of watchers or intruders—and look for signs the elusive white shadows had been there. Crickets and tree frogs trilled in the night. A few late fireflies danced.