Baptism of Rage (21 page)

While the first two people bravely dipped into the clear waters of the inlet, Eddie pointed to the youngsters who had vacated the pool when they had arrived. “Look at them,” he said. “They are the proof that our friendship never leaves you. Our friendship never dies.”

Unbuttoning his shirt and stepping out of his pants, Doc Tanner made his way toward the bubbling pool. “Well, in for a penny…” he said as stepped into the water.

There were bushes and trees around the banks of the stream that Jak used for cover as he made his way along its length, following the departing cart. Where the companions had turned right toward the fabled pool, the cart veered to the left and trundled along a tree-lined pathway that led to more fields.

Although the buildings of the ville were concentrated in a small area, the walls of the ville hemmed in quite a large tract of land, much of it unused.

Occasionally, Jak saw what he took to be a sec man patrolling the banks of the stream, and he obscured his face, looking away or ducking behind the cover of bushes with seeming casualness so as not to be questioned.

When he reached the far wall, Jak was surprised to find how poorly guarded the stream itself was. The people of Baby had constructed high security walls to shut them off from the outlands beyond, but the necessity of the stream had meant that they had left a whole section of wall open. The gap in the wall reached two feet aboveground and was a little wider than the stream itself, perhaps twelve feet across. The low opening had a gauzelike grate over it, with steel bars reaching into the water itself, but, under the surface, their wavering lengths only reached down another foot or so, not all the way to the streambed. If required, Jak thought, he could swim underneath those spikes to freedom.

As well, there were no sec men way out here; it was clear that the villefolk assumed the walls protection enough. Short of driving a flaming wag into them, Jak figured that was a safe assumption.

D
OC CAME FROM ANOTHER ERA,
a time when nudity was taboo, and for all the sights, both terrible and wondrous, that he had seen in the Deathlands, he had never really sloughed that old morality. Now, however, as he disrobed before this group of friends and strangers and tentatively dipped his right foot into the bubbling water of the pool, he left his old embarrassment behind. Even to Doc himself, his foot looked pale, a sunless, tanless white with thick blue veins visible just under the skin. As he watched his foot enter the water, he wondered why anyone would ever wish to look at his ancient body with anything other than contempt. His
prematurely
ancient body, he reminded himself; the very thing, the very curse, that had led him to Babyville and its promise of renewed vitality. He looked up then, a crooked smile on his old, lined face, and saw that his presumption had been right—the other people in the group ignored him, ignored the “show” he was putting on. They were far too busy removing their own clothes, or staring at the mysterious contents of the bubbling pool.

The five youths who had been in the pool when they got here—Paul’s “angels”—were leaving, making their way back to the bridge, wearing the loose clothing that they had left beside the pool, the blankets wrapped over their shoulders. The women used towels to dry their hair as they walked.

The water of the pool was wondrously clear and it appeared to be clean, despite the sulfurous reek that
it gave off. Trails of bubbles scurried to the surface, obese, see-through globes bigger than a man’s hand, with smaller circles foaming around them. To Doc’s surprise, the water itself was warm. Not hot, certainly not of a temperature that his dear Emily would have run for a bath, back when he had been with her in Nebraska, but warm nonetheless. Something below the surface was heating it, in some unspecified way; perhaps the thing that bubbled from under the rocks. Doc peered at the water, looking through the darkness of his own shadow on the surface, trying to discern whatever was underneath, down by those rocks. Magic, perhaps?

The water seemed to call to him then, drawing him toward its rippling surface, and Doc dipped lower, feeling it wash around his legs, and then begin to lap at his body. He sank into the bubbling pool, feeling the water both support his weight and also add that familiar heaviness to his movements. It felt wonderful, a giant’s hand wrapping around him, comforting his aching, weary, ancient body. Drifting there in the bubbling water, as it held him, supported him, clamored around him and kissed at his skin, he felt the ache of the journey begin to dissipate. And more; he felt the ache of his life’s journey dissipating, too, and without realizing it, he expelled a long, deep breath, as though he was utterly satiated.

The limbs of a tree hung over the far end of the pool, rufous leaves falling from its branches every now and then, wending their way on the breeze to carpet the ground around its trunk. Some of the leaves, Doc saw, fell into the water, and some floated away while others sank to the bottom to join the bubbling rocks.

Beside Doc, two other old-timers were in the pool, a man and a woman, smiling tentatively as they felt
the water wash over their naked bodies. The man was so emaciated as to appear to be nothing more than a skeleton with skin draped over it like pink silk. Doc watched them for a moment, feeling the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. They looked relieved, happy. Like him, they had traveled miles to get here, probably handed over everything that they owned to try this miraculous gift. Now, the old couple were waist-deep in water, their ruddy, pink skin so wrinkled and fragile, bruised and scarred. They stood close, gently splashing the water up their bodies, watching it wash back to the pool in clear rivulets. As the water washed over them, the old man and woman gazed at each other, and Doc saw a look pass between them, something he recognized but thought he had forgotten—love. They were happy here, probably as happy as they had ever been.

Next to the bathing couple, Jeremiah Croxton was swimming away across where the inlet was at its widest, just nine feet in all, his patchy white beard dangling in the water. Croxton looked to the others who remained on the shore. “Come on,” he told them. “It feels fantastic.”

Standing along the shoreline, other members of the crowd were discarding their clothes as Michelle and Eddie egged them on. Even Mary Foster, the woman in her thirties who had traveled in Charles Torino’s wag, now pulled off her skirt and grimy blouse with her free hand, revealing the bandage along her shoulder and neck where the mutie wolf had wounded her, eyeing the pool with delight. She passed her baby to Krysty with a grateful smile. “Please hold on to her,” she requested. “I just want to see what it feels like.”

Krysty and Mildred watched as Mary sat on the side of the pool and lowered herself in, both feet at once. She smiled as she felt it, giving out a barklike laugh. “It’s warm,” she said as tears welled in her eyes. “It’s…beautiful.”

Carefully stepping along the shingle at the bottom of the inlet, Doc worked his way to the center of the pool. The bubbles were more profuse there, blurting from below the surface in a continuous flurry of activity, and he presumed that this had something to do with the rejuvenation process. The bubbles were, after all, the only thing Doc could see that made the pool any different from the rush of the stream. The pool wasn’t very deep, and it was hardly big enough to swim, but it had enough room to splash about in, and to cover a full-grown man if he bent his knees a little.

At the center, the smell of sulfur was more intense, making Doc wince a little as he adjusted to it. The bubbles filtered up to the surface all about him. He felt them pressing against his body, clinging to it and walking their way up his planes and curves in their slow, insistent march to the surface. Doc swept his arms around him, twirling in place, brushing at the bubbles and making them pop, and he smiled. Whatever it was, it felt good running up his body. Finally, something good in a world of bad.

Doc glanced to the shore for a moment, barely aware that his companions were still waiting up there. Others were disrobing, lowering themselves into the pool; already there were ten people in there, feeling the rejuvenating power of the stream.

Taking a deep breath, Doc closed his eyes. Then, in an instant, he had bent his knees and submerged himself entirely, dropping under the surface, feeling the water
wash over his head. Warm, yet it felt cool against the skin there, cool and refreshing. With eyes still closed, Doc felt the water press against his skin, sealing him inside its grip like a mother’s womb, making him feel safe. The bubbles tickled as they ran past him, worked up his body and beyond, up to the surface.

This is it,
he thought.
My baptism. A baptism of wonder.

Standing at the edge of the pool, Ryan made his way across to where Krysty was rocking baby Holly in her arms. “Are you going in?” he inquired.

Krysty cooed at the baby for a moment before she answered him. “What do you think?” she said. “We’ve come all this way, and Daisy sure seemed healthy enough, right?”

Ryan tapped a fingernail against his lapel pin rad counter. “Radiation’s at normal,” he said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Beside Krysty, Mildred looked at Ryan, concern furrowing her coffee-colored brow. “Radiation isn’t the only thing that can hurt you,” she said, drawing on her medical knowledge. “You could easily catch something from the water. Ringworm, say. Or you could just slip on a rock. Hey, it happens.”

Krysty glared at Mildred. “I thought you wanted to try this,” she chastised, though her concern was friendly, her anger just show.

Mildred looked at the pool where a dozen people now bobbed. “Aw, heck—I wish they’d installed changing rooms,” she admitted.

W
ITH THE WALL
on his left-hand side, and scrubland on his right, Jak ran the length of the ville’s boundary
wall, parallel with the dirt track that he had seen the cart following. The sun was higher now, and cover was becoming harder to find.

As he got closer to the curving corner of the ville wall, Jak slowed, glancing this way and that, searching for a hiding place. He was surprised to find that the wall here was unfinished, running only a few feet high. Presumably, most visitors never got this far. Why should they?

Moving out of the shadow cast by the wall, Jak ran across the scrubland and into the nearest field. Root vegetables grew in the field, their bushy clumps of leaves running in jumbled rows across the soil. To his right, Jak could see the dirt path, and up ahead he spotted the cart of blankets that had been hauled by the mule. The cart was stopped at the next field, and Jak could see several figures working there, digging at the land. As Jak got closer, he realized that the cart stood in a fallow field of dirt.

Jak paused, dropping to the ground and watching the proceedings in the fallow field from behind the masking leaves of the crops.

S
TANDING AMID THE
thinning crowd, J.B.’s eyes glazed over as he half watched the oldsters stripping down and getting into the pool. To J.B., they looked like flies rushing to a day-old corpse.

Doc had been one of the first to go in, J.B. saw, brave or stupe or whatever you call that combination of the two that leads to discovery or death. Curious, perhaps.

Behind his wire-framed spectacles, J.B.’s eyes flicked to Eddie and Michelle, their tour guides. The pair was smiling and laughing, encouraging the old folks to dip
in the pool. Beside them, Charles Torino had removed his shirt to reveal a tattooed eagle that swooped across the entirety of his back. The locals were all very willing to share, now that they had got their cut of their visitors’ loot, J.B. realized. Willing to share this miracle that the girl had attributed to God.

J.B. didn’t have much time for that talk, any mystical mumbo jumbo he had encountered had generally served only to obscure the facts. But what were the facts here? What was the pool? How did it work? How
could
it work?

The Armorer felt his legs aching from the long journey in the back of the wag, and his throat felt dry. And he hated to say it, even in his own mind, but he was feeling old. His muscles that never got enough rest, the dull ache across his shoulders from the weight of his jacket and its hidden cache of weapons and ammo, his eyes. Yes, that was the real issue, wasn’t it? His eyes felt dry and exhausted, and took longer and longer to adjust each time he removed his eyeglasses to sleep. Age was catching up with J.B., no matter how much he ignored it.

No matter how much you tried to avoid it,
J.B. thought,
age did frightful things to a man.
Every person on the planet was dying from that slow disease called mortality.

But the pool…?

J
AK COULD SEE THREE
youngsters working the soil of the fallow field, the oldest no more than fifteen, and each of them looked exhausted and malnourished. A fourth figure, the one who had led the cart, was a tall man in his twenties, strong muscles bulging along his upper
arms. He was talking to the children, barking instructions at them, removing things from the cart, the items themselves obscured by it.

Jak watched for a long while, keeping himself hidden in the shadows until the youngsters finished digging or sowing whatever it had been that they were working at, and the man indicated the back of the cart. Two of the children jumped on the back with their shovels, while the third followed but left his shovel on the ground. The man pointed at the dropped tool, grabbed the girl and threw her to the ground. The girl was forced to pick up the shovel as the man led mule and cart away, back to the dirt road that led to the ville gate. Shovel in hand, the girl ran to catch up with the cart.

After that, there was no further activity in the fallow field. People were working in the other fields, youngsters mostly, like the ones Jak had witnessed, teens and kids. Jak waited patiently, and slowly the winter sun passed its zenith and began its slow death in the west.

W
ITH A LITTLE GENTLE
coaxing and teasing, Ryan and Krysty had done a pretty good job of talking each other into trying the pool. Krysty stripped off and got in quickly, sinking down so that only her head was above the bubbling surface, her prehensile hair floating on the surface around her, a bright red cloud in the shimmering silver of the pool.

“Come on, lover,” she called encouragingly as Ryan discarded his own clothes, revealing a strong body, pitted with scars and scratches, old wounds from other days.