James Axler (4 page)

Out there, over the ridge of the wall, he could make out the tower in the dwindling sunlight.

Ryan spoke up, addressing Mildred. “Sentry Tom might yet decide he owes me a gutful of buckshot, Mildred.”

Mildred started to reply, then checked herself. They were all tense, worried about their colleague. The best thing she could do would be to give Krysty a thorough checkup, see if she could pinpoint what had laid the normally healthy woman low. Mildred picked up her backpack, then searched through the contents of her med kit for a pocket thermometer and her otoscope.

J.B. looked across, an apology tightly held behind his eyes. “You need help?” he asked.

Mildred shook her head. “Maybe get her boots off, try to make her comfortable.” J.B. and Ryan knelt at the end of the bed and stripped off Krysty’s boots.

IT WAS THE SCREAMING that finally woke Krysty.

Her eyes opened as tiny slits, and she warily scanned her surroundings. It was a well-honed survival instinct—she couldn’t remember what had happened or where she had fallen asleep.

She was in a simple room, the planks that formed its walls visible in the flickering candlelight, never having been painted or even varnished. She could see two figures across the room. One was a huge bear of a man, his back to her, rippling muscles well-defined where his vest top left his arms bare. He was looking out the window of the room at the night sky, stargazing.

The other man was sitting at the end of the bed, stripping and oiling a revolver. Krysty shifted her head slightly, trying not to attract her captors’ attention. Her head felt muzzy as she did so, like moving through water. The blaster was a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640. Her blaster. These psychos planned to chill her with her own blaster!

She struggled to move, but it felt like she had been drugged. Her limbs felt so heavy she could barely shift them. And the screaming—the screaming was getting louder. She could hear it, penetrating the very core of her being, like something in her womb, waiting to be born. What was going on? Were there other women like her, trapped, drugged, helpless, waiting for these stupes to hurt them, to chill them? Why else would they be screaming? She needed to get out of there, right now.

She tried clenching the fingers of her right hand, willing the muscles to move, and felt nothing more than a twitch. A twitch and a wealth of pain, as though the muscles of her arm had been dipped in acid, burning through the nerve endings, a ripple of agony. She bit her lip, holding back the scream.

Then a door to her right opened, a brighter light from outside bleeding through for a moment, and another figure was framed in the doorway. She couldn’t make out the backlit features, but the silhouette was plainly that of a woman, short and muscular. She held a large bowl of something, and from the way she carried it, it was likely full of liquid. More of the acid, perhaps, to drench her muscles in, to keep up the agony.

The woman put the bowl down; Krysty heard it being placed on the cabinet beside her ear, heard the liquid sloshing within. And then the woman reappeared in her line of sight, reaching for her face, a rag of cloth in her hand, dripping from a dunking in the bowl. Gaia, no!

The woman planned to burn her face with the acid.

What kind of monsters…?

In her mind, Krysty begged Gaia to help her, calling on all her strength to try to push herself off the bed, attack the woman with the acid cloth, stop the madness.

Stop the bastard madness.

MILDRED REACHED DOWN, placing the damp cloth on Krysty’s forehead. She’d obtained a bowlful of cold water from Jemmy, wishing she could add the simple, twentieth-century luxury of ice.

Nothing had changed in the three minutes that she’d been gone. J.B. continued stripping and cleaning Krysty’s weapons, greasing each segment from the container of oil he habitually carried in one of his voluminous pockets. That was his way of showing he cared, she knew. No point getting her through this only to have her blaster jam up, he had told her.

Ryan, meanwhile, stood looking out the window, watching as the street filled with people. It was about 8:00 p.m., and they’d been advised that the dogfights would kick off at 8:30 p.m. sharp. It was obviously a big slice of local action. A barker poised at the entrance to the open-topped circular barn at the end of the street was enticing passing trade to place early bets. The bar downstairs had got busier, too.

Stupe really. If they had arrived a couple of hours later than they did, the whole face-off with the sentries could have been avoided. Seemed the ville of Fairburn opened the gates at night.

Mildred stopped woolgathering as she felt something cross her hand where it mopped the cool water across Krysty’s brow. She looked at her hand and saw the streaks of red crisscrossing it—Krysty’s mutie hair was wrapping around Mildred’s hand like a creeping vine, surrounding and trapping it, its silken threads exerting considerable force. “Ryan, look,” Mildred whispered.

Ryan turned, and J.B. was already out of his seat, standing beside Mildred, a protective arm reaching for her.

“What is it?” Ryan asked. “How is she…?”

“I think she’s waking up,” Mildred told them softly, carefully excising her hand from the tangle of hair that had smothered it. “Come on, Krysty,” she said in a louder voice, “wake up now. It’s okay. Time to wake up now. Time to wake up.”

Krysty’s green eyes blazed open, full of fire and pain, and she sat up in the bed in a great spasm of her muscles, choking and coughing all at once. Mildred sat beside her, watching as the statuesque woman coughed and spluttered some more before taking gasping lungfuls of air as though she had nearly drowned. Krysty stayed like that for almost three minutes, doubled over herself, taking great, heaving breaths, unable to speak or to even acknowledge their presence. Finally she looked at Mildred, her face flushed, her shoulders hunched as she tried to breathe.

“Take it slowly, Krysty,” Mildred told her calmly, “there’s no need to rush. We’re safe here. It’s just us.”

Krysty looked around the room, seeing J.B., Ryan, returning to look at Mildred. “Wh-what,” she began, her voice a pained whisper, “what happened to me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Mildred admitted. “Bad trip through the gateway maybe. You were pretty out of it for a while there.”

Krysty nodded, hugging her knees to her chest. “I thought I was going to be chilled,” she told them, genuine fear crossing her features at the memory of the hallucination.

“No,” Ryan assured her. “No chilling today.”

Krysty nodded slowly, her movements birdlike, twitchy.

“Here,” Mildred said, handing her a glass of water, “you should drink something. It’ll make you feel better.”

Krysty took the glass in both hands and it almost slipped from her grip, but she managed to clench it and raise it to her lips. Mildred, Ryan and J.B. watched as she sipped at the water, tentatively at first, before finally taking a long swallow. She greedily finished the glass, letting out a satisfied exhalation afterward, before handing the empty glass back to Mildred. “So much better,” she told them, a smile forming on her lips.

Grinning, Ryan leaned across and put an arm around Krysty. She returned the gesture, and they sat there, silently hugging for almost a minute while Mildred and J.B. looked uncomfortably away.

Finally, Krysty spoke up, still holding Ryan close to her. “We’re safe here, aren’t we?”

Ryan assured her that they were. “Jak and Doc are just downstairs, keeping an eye on comings and the goings, just to be triple sure.”

Ryan felt Krysty’s head nodding against his shoulder, relieved by his words. Then she spoke again, quietly, her voice so confused she sounded like a little girl. “Then why is everyone screaming?” she asked him.

Jak and Doc had spent much of the past three hours watching the passing trade at Jemmy’s bar and, despite the small size of Fairburn ville, they had both been surprised at the surge in customers as the day stretched into evening. Doc had made some efforts to talk with the locals, joining in with a couple of hands of dominoes with some of the older men, and losing with good grace.

Jak had silently watched the room while the older man went about his business. The youth could scout for a man across two hundred miles with no more clues than a snapped twig and some churned-up mud once in a while, but he would never be one to put people at their ease. Part of that, Doc reasoned, came down to the lad’s appearance—whip thin, with alabaster skin, a mane of chalk-pale hair and those burning, ruby-red eyes. Doc was no domino expert, but he knew a lot about people.

Gleefully losing a little jack to Sunday gamers was a sure way for an old man to ingratiate himself.

Doc had asked his questions in a roundabout way, just another chatty wrinklie passing through the ville. But he’d deftly turned the conversation to the subject of the strange tower outside the ville, and he’d met with what he could only describe as a polite silence. He hadn’t pressed the issue. Instead he’d set about buying drinks for his new friends and losing a couple more rounds of dominoes.

Jak had watched the whole performance with amusement. When Doc finally returned to his table, loudly be-moaning that the domino game was getting too rich for his blood, he and the teen had ordered a plate of food and discussed Doc’s conclusions while they waited for news on Krysty’s condition.

“The truth of it is,” Doc began, “I do not think anyone hereabouts actually knows what the dickens that towering doohickey is for.”

IN THE UPSTAIRS ROOMS, Mildred and J.B. were looking at each other while Ryan gently eased Krysty away from him so that he could see her face.

“What did you say?” Ryan asked as though he disbelieved his own ears.

“I just want to know why everyone is screaming,”

Krysty said quietly.

Mildred spoke up, her question holding no challenge, no judgment. “Who’s screaming, Krysty? Are we screaming?”

“No.” Krysty breathed the word, shaking her head.

“Not you. Out there. Outside. Can’t you… Can’t you hear them? The screams?”

J.B. addressed the room. “Krysty’s always had real sensitive hearing,” he stated. But Krysty was shaking her head, her vibrant hair falling over her eyes.

“What, Krysty?” Mildred asked. “What is it?”

“It’s not far away,” Krysty told them, unconsciously biting at her bottom lip, tugging a piece of skin away.

“It’s right here, all around us. You must be able…you must be able to hear it. Tell me you can hear it. Tell me.”

No one answered, and the room remained in silence for a long moment, the only sounds coming from revelers downstairs. Krysty’s breathing was hard, ragged, and it was clear that she was trying to hold back her frustrated anger.

Finally, Mildred reached across for her, and Ryan moved out of the way, stepping from the bed. “You’re okay,” Mildred assured Krysty. “It’s nothing, I’m sure.

It’s nothing, Krysty, I promise you.”

Quietly, J.B. led Ryan into the adjoining room and pushed the door between them closed. “This ain’t nothing,” the Armorer told Ryan flatly in the darkness.

Ryan half nodded, half shook his head, the leather patch over his left eye catching the moonlight from the window. “What do we do now, old friend?” he asked quietly.

“She’s not one of us and no more crazy right now than that old coot downstairs,” J.B. said, the trace of a smile on his lips. “We’ve carried Doc when he’s been ranting and raving and vision questing all over time and space. You know we have. We’ll take care of Krysty.”

J.B. turned to the window of the darkened room, looking out at the street. There was a party atmosphere out there now, maybe fifty or sixty people milling around. Street vendors had appeared, selling roasted nuts from open barrels of fire, hunks of meat on sticks.

Ryan joined J.B. at the window, taking in the scene.

“Quite the party ville we’ve found ourselves in,” he said, not especially addressing the comment to the Armorer.

J.B. nodded. “I wonder how much of it is connected with that, ” he said, and his index finger tapped at the glass, pointing to the towering scaffold in the distance.

Ryan turned to look at him, concern furrowing his brow. “You think that tower thing could be connected to Krysty?”

“It’s all connected, Ryan,” J.B. assured him, as he continued to point at the unmoving tower outside the ville walls. “You just gotta connect enough of the dots.”

DOC, RYAN AND J.B. jostled through the crowds as they made their way along Fairburn’s main street. Night had long since fallen, and with it the temperature, turning their sweaty afternoon trek into a distant memory.

Though the sky was dark, the street was well-lit by oil lamps and naked flames atop haphazard lampposts.

More than seventy people milled around, and tense excitement was in the air as they waited for the dogfights to begin. People were still arriving, out-of-towners on horses that they weaved through the crowd toward a corral set up at the end of the dusty street.

“You know,” Doc pronounced as the companions joined the forming line outside the large, circular shack at the end of the street, “I am starting to conclude that this is not such a bad place.” Ryan and J.B. looked at him quizzically, until he continued. “The people seem friendly and well-nourished, they have food and they’re making a go of entertaining folk, too. Mayhap a nice place to settle, build a shack.” He shrugged.

Ryan’s expression remained stern. “And the price is Krysty?”

Doc sighed. “She’s getting better, Ryan. She’s going to be fine, I’m sure.”

Ryan nodded.

J.B. spoke up as the line finally started to shuffle through the entrance to the circular barn. “Just keep alert, see what you can find out about the thing out there,” he reminded them, referring to the towering scaffold.

The group had had a hasty meeting after Krysty had woken. They had been in Fairburn for three hours, and the purpose of the tower had nagged at J.B. the whole time, rattling in the back of his brain like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Doc’s findings, or lack thereof, had only served to worsen that feeling in the Armorer.