Baptism of Rage (14 page)

The child was dead but there was something moving in the cot. A small creature, two or three inches in all, at first Ryan took it to be a field mouse feeding on the dead babe’s flesh. As he pulled the flame closer, the creature’s head twitched, and Ryan saw then that it was a bird, a tiny finch or a sparrow with feathers the color of mud, its dark, alien eyes glistening like water in the light of the flame.
The bird watched Ryan for a moment as he stood still, its head twitching this way and that, sharp beak closed around a string of the baby’s flesh, like a worm.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Ryan placed the blaster on the crossbar of the cot, letting it rest there so that he could free up his hand. The bird’s head twitched, blurring with motion as anxiousness rose in its breast. Even in the flickering light of the flame, Ryan could see its tiny heart thumping against the wall of its chest, drumming so fast that he couldn’t keep count of the beats.

Then, Krysty’s voice came from the door, a low whisper. “Ryan? You okay?” She had followed him, worried for his safety.

In silence, Ryan held up his now-empty hand, instructing her to stay where she was, straddling the doorway. Then he brought his hand down again until it hovered just above the lip of the cot.

Suddenly, Ryan’s hand darted forward, and Krysty saw something fluttering about within the illuminated circle of the cot. There was a chirrup as the bird jumped aside and took flight, wings flapping as it tried to escape the barred walls of the crib.

“Fireblast!” Ryan cursed as his fingers closed around empty air, the bird fluttering past his shoulder and up to the ceiling. Ryan swung the flaming candle around, keeping track of the little bird.

“What is it?” Krysty asked, and then she saw. “A bird?”

“Carnivorous or hungry,” Ryan said, walking to stand beneath the fluttering bird as its wings brushed repeatedly against the ceiling. “Doesn’t matter much which.”

The bird flew this way and that as Ryan and Krysty watched. Ryan stood very still and let the bird expend its
energy until it flew back toward the cot, alighting on the crossbar beside Ryan’s discarded blaster. Then, Ryan’s hand snapped out and grabbed the bird. It chirruped excitedly for a moment, and then Ryan had crushed it, feeling its tiny bones snap in his hand.

“Was that necessary?” Krysty asked, an edge of irritation to her voice.

Ryan held her gaze with his single eye. “Don’t look in the cot,” was all he said, tossing the bird’s carcass aside. Then he picked up his blaster and urged her from the room, pulling the door closed behind him.

Outside on the landing, Krysty looked at Ryan, a frown creasing her brow. “A baby?” she asked.

“Not anymore,” Ryan told her, striding warily across the corridor toward the other closed door.

Krysty raised her Smith & Wesson, covering her partner once more.

T
HE OTHERS SAT THERE
, in the wreckage of the old house, listening to the wind rushing through the eaves. Across the room, Mildred was helping Paul Witterson build a fire in the old fireplace, snapping off pieces from the pile of dilapidated furniture and thick branches that had been gathered by Annie and Mitch and stored here. In the flickering flames, the walls were a mottled charcoal-black. The room was large, running the full length of the house across one side, and several of the party of travelers had already bedded down here with blankets brought from the wags. While Ryan, Krysty, Jak and J.B. were checking the house, securing the boarded windows with the help of Croxton and the old-young Daisy, Doc had remained here with Mildred—safety in numbers.

The occupants of the room were mostly silent, just a few hushed snippets of conversation coming from across the way as Patrick and his wife, Sara, discussed the day’s events with their son, Neil. Neil was raising concerns about the health of the horses, especially his favorite, Charlotte, and their conversation had an irritated, familial buzz. There was a howling from outside, the noise of the building winds as they raced across the moonlit fields. And then, another noise, too; the noise of howling from a human throat; cursing and howling and screaming, the sound of an enraged mob venting its anger. It was the scalies, of course. They had followed Ryan’s band here, or perhaps they simply patrolled the area every night, looking for stragglers to do who knew what to.

Doc shivered. Despite the rising heat of the fire, he felt the cold hands of the grave running along his spine. After a moment, he stood and walked past the fire, past Mildred and Paul, until he was at the windows at the front of the house. He stood there, examining the window frames that had been reinforced with metal, dull crisscross lines riveted to the sides, and, between the metal, heavy wooden boards, oak and ash and beech, stippled here and there with the trace of woodworm.

Doc reached forward and ran his hand across the boarded window, putting pressure there as he tried to force the thing open to see what it could take. It seemed solid enough. There was a draft, a needle-thin breeze that whistled through the tiny gap where two boards met, blowing against Doc’s tired face like a fan. He ran his index finger along the line, feeling the freezing cold
bite of the air, stopping as he reached the hardened putty mixture that had been used by the previous owners to presumably block the draft.

From outside, seemingly just beyond the window, the sounds of movement, of running feet and snarled cries, came.

“You okay?” The voice came from over Doc’s shoulder, low and quiet.

Doc turned to see Mildred peering up at him quizzically, her face a picture of concern.

“Mildred,” he said, hearing his own voice so loud in the quiet room. “It is nothing, just an old fool worrying about sleeping in a draft.”

Mildred’s expression didn’t change. She turned to the boarded window, as though looking through the glass pane that had once been there, and waited a moment, listening. “They sound close,” she said finally. “The scalies.”

“At play in the fields of the Lord,” Doc said with apparent good humor he evidently didn’t feel.

Mildred reached her hand across, touching Doc gently on the upper arm, reassuring him. “I’d guess that the people who lived here,” she said, “did so for a long time. It may look like a flea pit but this place is sturdy enough. They reinforced it all over.”

“What about the wags?” Doc inquired. “What if they touch them? Burn them or break them apart?”

“What if, what if,” Mildred said dismissively. “We’ll deal with it, is ‘what if.’”

Doc nodded sagely to himself, turning the thoughts over in his head. It wasn’t the wags that he was thinking
about, he knew; not really. Mildred turned, indicating the fire and Doc nodded once again. “You must forgive my restlessness,” Doc said.

Mildred nodded, flashing him her broad smile. “Of course,” she assured him.

Doc stood there for a few minutes, listening to the wind howling by, the abating sounds of scalies or maybe just wild animals, his eyes glued to the flickering shadows playing across the wooden boards over the windows. After a while, Doc became aware that someone else had walked across the room to stand beside him. Doc turned and saw Alec, the young man who had been in Croxton’s original party with Daisy. Alec offered a thin smile as their eyes met. He was perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, still more a lad in Doc’s eyes than a man. Thin, but wiry, with strong, weather-beaten hands poking from the ragged sleeves of the dark jacket he wore, the fingers jutting from the ends of his woollen gloves. In the half-light from the fire, Doc saw that Alec had pale blue eyes and light hair of a blond so pale as to appear silver. He had ruddy cheeks, too, the color showing there in his otherwise pale skin, just a hint of beard on his chin. His coloring was the same as Daisy, the young-again girl who had first convinced Doc to go on this strange quest.
Perhaps he’s her son,
Doc pondered, before he remembered something that old man Croxton had said—that Alec was a miracle, just like the girl.

“Alec, isn’t it?” Doc began, endeavoring to be sociable.

“Yeah.” The young man nodded, his eyes fixed on Doc’s.

After a few moments, Doc turned away and gestured to the boarded windows. “Do you think that they will hold?” he asked, really just to make conversation.

Alec frowned, then shrugged, dismissing the query.

They stood there once more in companionable silence, watching the flickering shadows on the boarded-up windows, feeling the drafts as they penetrated the tiniest gaps in the wood and metal shield.

Finally, Alec spoke again, his words interrupting Doc’s thoughts. “You ever think about superpowers, Mr. Tanner?” he asked.

Doc turned to peer at the young man, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “I cannot say as I have,” Doc admitted.

“That’s what it’s like,” Alec told him, his voice low. “Being reborn like this.”

“You were regenerated,” Doc asked, “like Daisy?”

Alec nodded. “I was dipped in the waters by the spring out there in Babyville and I was reborn like you see me,” he said. “Fifty years just fell from me, like it was nothing. Like dieting the years away.”

“Incredible,” Doc breathed. “Absolutely incredible.”

“You say that,” Alec said, “because you don’t gone seen it yet. It’s a miracle. And now everything is different. Everything.”

With a few words, Doc led the young man out of the room and, so as not to wake the others, they continued the conversation in the hallway beyond the main lounge. In the light coming from the flickering fireplace in the room beyond, Doc saw now that the hallway was wide with peeling scars of wallpaper.

“Would you explain it to me,” Doc requested, “this process? How it feels.”

Alec nodded, his expression serious. “You get old,” he said, “and you forget. That’s the way I understand it, Mr. Tanner.”

“My friends call me Doc,” he told the young man, genuine affection in his voice.

“Doc then,” Alec continued. “When you get old it’s like something in you slows down and you don’t even notice. Your eyesight—that’s the one everyone always notices. That and hearing. They fade, like they have someplace better to go. Oh, you’ll deny it at first, pretend it’s just the same as it always was. ‘Mebbe I couldn’t read from this distance, right across the room,’ you say, ‘maybe faces were always kind of blurry and indistink-looking.’” The old-and-young-again man had said it like that instead of indistinct, but Doc didn’t correct him now; he just waited for the old-and-young-again man to continue. “Or you miss words,” Alec said, “like when your good miss calls you for grub and you don’t hear her—you have a miss, Doc?”

Doc shook his head. “Not here,” he said. “I did—once.” He was thinking of Emily, of course, but, just for a second, another face flashed before him—flawless, inquisitive features framed by a swathe of blond hair. It was Lori Quint, he thought, but then he realized it wasn’t. Somehow, in his imagining, Lori had become someone else: the girl, Daisy. Unconsciously, Doc shivered, recalling the strange dream he had had on the road, wondering at his fascination.

“She’ll say something over dinner,” Alec was saying, “and you’ll miss it and you’ll ask her to repeat it. Mebbe you wasn’t listening properly, right? That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

Doc laughed knowingly before he encouraged the man to continue.

“You seem like a smart fella, Doc Tanner,” Alec explained, “so you don’t need me telling you that that ain’t how listening works. Nobody ever missed nothing because they wasn’t switching their ears on in time. You get old and these things stop working right, and mebbe you kid yourself they did like this always, or you forget enough that you think they did. But they didn’t.

“That’s what it is, Doc—being old.”

Doc was captivated, and Alec could see that now in the old man’s expression.

“You forget,” Alec said quietly, “until it comes back. I dipped in that spring, out west in Babyville, day after day. And I wanted to disbelieve, Doc, just like you do, I think. But it worked, man, it worked. Look at me.”

Doc looked at the man as though with fresh eyes, trying to imagine the changes that had been made to his body. He seemed young, strong. And yet, his words were the words of an old man, an old man who had shaken off the regrets of age like a dog shaking off raindrops from a storm.

“I was old,” Alec told him. “Seventy-one. Couldn’t always sleep a whole night, sometimes not even an hour. Needing to piss, to stretch out the cramps in my arms and legs, or just to lie there and feel all the aches that my muscles surely held in place. Wore eyeglasses, too, like your friend Mr. Dix. Didn’t do much after a while, needed to get them changed I guess, but I never did.
You get old and you start to think it don’t matter no more. You’ll do it tomorrow or the day after. Or you’ll be dead mebbe, the way things are, and then it won’t matter anyhow.”

“Life can be hard,” Doc agreed, sensing the familiarity in this old-young man’s burden.

“Used to run in the fields as kids,” Alec continued. “Me and Daisy and some others. Don’t know what happened to them. Mostly they died, I guess. But me and Daisy, we grew old and cantankerous and I guess we bickered enough to keep each other from just up and dying like most old folks.”

“You’re related?” Doc asked.

“Brother and sister,” Alec said. “She used to be older than me, can you believe that? Now look at her. She’s like some kid. Hurts the brain thinking like that.”

“It surely does,” Doc agreed, trying to fathom how their relationship had to have changed.

“We went to Baby because we had heard the stories. It wasn’t far from the ville we come from, just a day’s trek on foot,” Alec explained. “Gave the people there their toll, their fee. You know about the fee?”

Doc shook his head. “Mr. Croxton said that it was high, everything a person owned. But that maybe, as sec men…”

Alec brushed a hand through his blond hair, shaking his head. “Yeah, sure,” he said, “that could work. I mean, I couldn’t say for certain.”

Doc watched as the apparently old man stood there, peering up the wrecked staircase, glancing at the boarded-up front door. “Was it worth it?” he asked finally, already feeling the flush of embarrassment at asking such a foolish question.