Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (11 page)

Tarley shook his head and set down his mug with a deliberate thump.

“You need to back off the trigger of that blaster
straightaway, Wymea Berdone,” he said. He rose, and his junior clansfolk rose with him. “We’re headed back to Gaines Hill, and there I reckon we’ll stay until this fuss blows over. As a man who means you nothin’ but goodwill, I tell you steer clear of there, or you’ll find out just what it means to step to the Gaines clan.”

He tossed a handful of jack on the table.

“Obliged to you, Mathus,” he said. “Best take care.”

Conn nodded. “I always do.”

The three left.

Wymie turned a glare on Conn that, if he judged the intent right, should have reduced him instantly to a pile of smoldering ash.

“What about you?”

Conn flicked his gaze aside at Nancy. His cousin was frowning at him. He suspected she was back to her position of go along to get along, despite her earlier common-sense-based outburst.

He reckoned life had been too easy too long there in the western Pennyrile, but he meant to hold on to what he could. He sighed.

“I’m not against you, Wymie,” Conn said evenly, “however you may think. But I mean to see the peace kept. Bring me evidence—actual evidence, not just rock-throwin’ phantoms that don’t sound like anything at all, much less these outlanders you’re so stuck on—and I’ll do everything in my power to back you. Short of that, I have my responsibilities.”

She glared at him even hotter, if that was possible. Chad and Tony had come out of their dorm rooms to take up their duties for the evening, and now stood quietly with burly arms crossed over broad chests. Wymie’s
posse stood behind her—outside the baleful sweep of her vision—shifting uncomfortably and passing around uncertain glances.

But in the end it seemed Tarley Gaines’s quiet yet deadly-confident defiance had shaken her out of the mood for more threats.

“Could be you’ll live to regret your choice, Mathus Conn,” she said, her voice lethal-low as a copperhead sliding through autumn leaves.

“Could be,” he agreed. “It wouldn’t be the first time, and it likely won’t be the last.”

Wymie spun and walked toward the door. She didn’t even seem to acknowledge the ragtag mob of a dozen or so followers who had trailed her inside. Wordlessly, they made way for her. Then, shuffling their feet without a backward glance at Conn or his people, they went out into the early night as well.

Nancy blew out a long breath.

“You may have stepped in it this time, Math.”

“Mebbe so. But this time my gut agrees with my brain.”

“These’re your neighbors,” Nancy said. “Our neighbors. Your customers. And people hereabouts are scared. Somethin’ was spookin’ them even before what happened to Wymie’s poor sister. Somethin’ needs to be done.”

He allowed a hint of his irritation to show on his face.

“I’d expect you of all people to know, Nance,” he said, “that somethin’ done for the primary reason that ‘somethin’’ has to be, is only going to help by accident, and is more likely to do harm than good.”

“Is doin’ nothin’ helpin’?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “At least, helping more than joining a random lynch mob.

“That’s like an old-time nuke. Once you let the mushroom cloud loose, it’s triple hard to stuff it back in its shiny metal shell. And you never really know in advance which way the fallout will blow.”

Chapter Eight

“Found somethin’,” Lou said. Wymie thought he looked a bit green.

“What?” she said, starting forward.

He held up a hand. “Wait, Wymie. Uh, mebbe not you?”

She scowled at him, as much out of puzzlement as annoyance.

Dorden pushed past her in the grassy clearing, in a hollow that led down to karst flats. “Let me check it out,” he said. “You just bide here a moment.”

She didn’t care for taking orders, least of all at the head of her own search party. But Vin Bertolli followed the stocky gunpowder-maker, looking unaccustomedly grim. Mance laid a hand on her shoulder, briefly, and followed.

She stood waiting. There was no overhead cover between her and the afternoon sun. She wished she had a hat. Flies buzzed lazily around. A sluggish breeze stirred the grass around the ankles of her jeans.

Her posse murmured uneasily to themselves, fondling their weapons and eyeing the trees around them. They didn’t seem to include her—seemed at pains not to, which was fine by her. Even Wymie’s helpers, it seemed, had a tendency to dilute her purpose.

She would not permit that.
Could
not. Vengeance for
Blinda wasn’t just her mission. It was now her life, and she had consecrated herself to that vengeance in blood.

She realized a pair of turkey vultures were circling in a cloudless sky. Not quite overhead, but orbiting a point that looked mebbe fifty yards farther down the gentle slope, possibly out on the flats themselves.

Wish I had a wep, she thought. For the first time since her crusade began. Once she’d left her daddy’s ax behind in the burning inferno of the home she’d been born into and grown up in, that had seemed superfluous. Her fury and hatred seemed weps themselves, and the group she had gathered around her—currently swollen to nineteen or twenty, seemingly by news of her group’s latest encounter and her subsequent confrontation with Conn and Gaines—sufficient to make her passions real.

But now she felt helpless.

And even with so many followers, she didn’t feel secure, waiting on the unknown but indubitably horrible like this and all. Mebbe I should get me a shotgun, she thought.

A few of her party drifted down the trail to disappear into head-high grass, spring green already starting to yellow as the heat turned into summer, where Dorden, Mance and the others had gone before. She made a growling sound deep in her throat and wiped sweat from her eyes. She was getting impatient.

Mance and Dorden came tramping back. Mance’s face was as green as Lou’s had been. The older man had a thunderous expression.

“I reckon you best come with us after all,” Dorden said gruffly. “It’s against my better judgment, frankly. But Mance here and the others insist you need to see.”

She nodded and followed as they turned about and walked back.

Sure enough, the track led into tall grass sprouting on the flat land itself. She was warned by a sudden thickening in the buzz around her, and what she first thought were bees buzzing before her eyes. Then she realized they were bluebottle flies, fat and gleaming with carapaces like blue metal.

Then the smell hit her. She knew the smell of death; you didn’t come up a country girl as she had, even in the peaceful backwater of the Pennyrile hill district, without getting to know that on an intimate basis. So she also knew too well how fast meat turned to reeking carrion in the humid heat of late spring. It was a constant problem in staying fed, how fast game spoiled.

But this death stink had an added edge of sweetness. She hadn’t smelled it before, and somehow it made her guts turn over the way no half-rotted deer or rabbit carcass ever had.

Between that odd, never-known but familiar smell and the way the men in her party were acting, she knew roughly what she’d see before she stepped out into a wide spot in what had turned into a game trail through the grass and found herself confronting horror.

She almost stumbled on the first chill. It lay on its belly as if crawling toward the trail, right arm outstretched as if to plead for help. The bearded face, untouched except for smeared-on mud apparently from a brief midnight shower, was upturned. The gaping mouth and eyes showed unspeakable horror, agony and what Wymie had a crawling sensation was
disbelief
.

The back of the man’s plain linen shirt had been torn
open. So had his back, so that blood soaked the fabric so completely its original color was impossible to guess at. Ribs had apparently been wrenched from his torso from behind, and half-chewed chunks of organ were scattered around the body, masked by writhing skins of flies.

The body ended at about the waist. A tail of two or three vertebrae, blood-dyed crimson, stuck out. A single purple-gray strand of intestine trailed over the ground for eight feet, to connect to the hips and what remained of the legs. The severed legs were, horrifically, front-upward. The canvas trousers had been clawed open, and the muscles torn to shreds and ripped out in chunks, presumably mouthfuls, exposing still red bone.

“Got another one over here,” called Burny, who along with most of the rest of the search party had followed Wymie forward. “It was a woman. I…think.”

“The two of them had a campfire here,” Dorden called. Various items—torn-up bedrolls, a cast-iron cooking pot—lay strewed about. Whether by the brutal slaughter or from vandalism Wymie couldn’t tell. “If there
were
just two of them.”

He looked meaningfully at Lou. The scout-tracker shrugged.

“It’s hard to say,” he admitted. “There’s mostly grass underfoot, springy enough not to take good tracks. And the bare dirt’s been scuffed over by a power of feet. Some of ’em bare, that’s as much as I can tell.”

“It happened last night, to judge by the…state of decay,” Dorden said.

Wymie nodded. Had the chills been there longer, the rotting process would have progressed further than it had.

So, last night, she thought. While I was urging Conn to act, and while he and that fat ass Tarley Gaines were refusing to face the truth that was as plain as the noses on their triple-stupe faces! A fuse lit inside her, and it was a fast one.

Mance gently took her arm. “You sure you’re up to this, Wymie?”

She shook him off. “They’re not my people,” she said.

And then the fuse burned down. Rage blazed out of her, as hot as a fired kiln.

“Nuke take them!” she screamed.

Everybody jumped, weapons raised.

“The cannies?” Mance asked. “The—the outlanders, I mean?”

“Conn and his nuke-sucking wafflers! While they shilly-shallied around, those outland coldhearts were doing this. Eatin’ people!”

“Any idea who the chills were?” Angus asked.

Lou shook his head. “Man don’t look familiar. The woman—well, her own kin’d likely not recognize her.”

“So were they outlanders, too?”

“They were innocent victims!” Wymie shouted. Why couldn’t anybody see the plain truth? It made her want to explode.

“Sure, Wymie, sure,” Mance said. “So, what do you want us to do?”

“Best bury these poor devils,” Dorden said. “Don’t want
other
animals buildin’ up a taste for human flesh.”

“We need to do whatever it takes to track these coldhearts down,” she said icily. It wasn’t that the fury was gone, exactly. It was more like it was suddenly channeled. “We need the manpower to do it with.”

She looked around her search party. Her eye lit on Lem Sharkey, one of the new recruits to her searchers. He was skinny, restless, shorter than she was, with a stand-up shock of sandy hair and a bony face that was always clenched like a fist ready to hit. He had a reputation as a hothead, and was always ready for action. Especially when he had his younger brother, Ike, or one of his bigger cronies to back his play. Just the sort Wymie needed to rouse more of the local folk off their complacent fannies.

“Lem, take Ike and Gator with you and back to Sinkhole,” she said, naming one of those cronies, Gator Malloan, who had come along with him on the search party. “Round us up some more warm bodies to hunt down these nuke-suckers. We can’t let this happen again!”

“What about Conn?” Burny asked. “He won’t like it one bit.”

She felt her lips peel back from her teeth.

“Remind him what I said—that if he ain’t with us, he’s against us,” she said. “Let him know double hard!”

* * *

“T
HIS ISN
’
T WORKING
,” J.B. said. “It’s not getting us anything but blisters on our feet, and worn to a nub.”

Though the pale green sky still held light, the sun had set. The gloom already filled the spaces between the trees, so thick even J.B., not given to poetical flights, would swear he could almost touch it. But it should have been prime time for the task at hand.

Which was hunting cannie. They hadn’t had a scrap of success since Jak had turned up the bolt-hole the day before.

Around them early crickets sawed away at the thick, dark air. They were in a patch of forest where the canopy
of leaves was evidently thick enough to discourage much undergrowth from filling in the gaps between tree boles. Now it was only letting in the odd spike or sprinkle of the light from the full moon overhead.

“You’re right,” Ryan said.

He stood thirty feet ahead of J.B., holding his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster angled muzzle-down in front of his hips. By habit on entering the relatively open area, they had spread into a loose V formation, with Ryan taking point, Krysty and Mildred on either side behind him, Doc and Ricky after them, and J.B. pulling drag. Ryan whistled softly.

After a moment Jak seemed to materialize out of the leaf and acorn duff almost at Ryan’s right shoulder. Not even Ricky, whose eyes if not double strong were definitely skilled at watching, spotted him approach.

“Been following,” Jak said. “Not now.”

“Thought not,” Ryan replied. “Crickets don’t chirp when they’re around.”

“Why have they not attacked us?” Doc asked. “Abe Tomoyama told us that they launch serious attacks only after sundown.”

“Why did they only make a serious play on us when we were at the dig site, anyway?” Ricky asked. He swatted at the back of his neck where a mosquito had likely targeted him for dinner. “That’s what I want to know.”

“What’s the point of even talking about it?” Mildred asked.

“They’re cannibals. If they’re the people who killed that angry girl’s sister. I know it wasn’t us who bit her freaking face off, so the weird baboon-snouted white humanoid things seem like the best suspects.”

“Which means they’re bat-shit crazy. So why even try to figure out what makes them do what they do? Or don’t do? What is even the point?”

“Wait,” Krysty said, her brow furrowed in thought. “I think he’s got something.”