LITMIR.BIZ

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He shook his head. “This, dear friends, is an abomination.”

      “We saved your rad-blasted bacon last night!” J.B. hollered at the belligerents. “Wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be one of you ungrateful bastards left!”

      The truth silenced the mob for a moment.

      “Too many good folks have died here, already,” Ryan told them. “Don’t make us add to it.”

      “We don’t want you here no more,” an oldie brandishing a pickax informed him.

      The ville folk shouted in agreement, spreading out and blocking the gate with their bodies and grave-digging tools.

      “Don’t matter what you did or didn’t do for us last night,” said the haggard woman. “We can’t trust you today. Take your pet cannie and make tracks out of here. That’s all the thanks you’re going to get.”

      One of the children picked up a stone and chucked it at them. Another did the same. Soon the companions were being pelted with showers of rocks, large and small.

      “Nukin’ hell!” J.B. growled, touching off another clattering air burst, emptying the weapon’s 30-round magazine. The stone throwers scattered for cover. J.B. tossed the AKS aside as the companions rapidly backed out of range. There was no pursuit, no longblaster fire from the berm. The ville folk were content to see them gone.

      “We have been cast out, like lepers,” Doc said.

      “Like what?” J.B. said.

      “The accursed, the afflicted, the unclean.”

      “The misunderstood,” Mildred added.

      J.B. scowled at what were to him unintelligible predark references. He turned on Ryan, scowl intact. “We want an explanation,” he said.

      Mildred provided it. In clipped, emotionless terms, she described exactly what had been done to her.

      The companions stood stunned as their battlemate read out her own death sentence.

      Then J.B. swung his 12-gauge pump to hip height and advanced on the prisoner with murder in his eye.

      Mildred blocked his path, pushing the wide barrel aside.

      “Don’t,” she said.

      “Couldn’t we catch it, too,” Krysty blurted, “just from being around him?”

      She didn’t add, “And around you.”

      She didn’t have to.

      The companions were incensed, sickened, grief-stricken, but deep down Mildred knew what they were thinking.

      That death walked among them.

      Horrible, lingering death.

      “If you could catch it that way,” Mildred said, “you’ve already got it, Krysty. We were all in the cave, in the confined space, all breathing the same contaminated air.”

      “Why haven’t you chilled that unspeakable degenerate?” Doc demanded.

      “Because there might be a cure, Doc,” Ryan replied. “And he’s the only one who knows where to find it.”

      Mildred recounted the story to the companions. She told them about the supposed existence of the freezie Patient Zero, the putative first victim and the first survivor of the oozies. She told them about the supposed ability of La Golondrina’s blood to prolong the lives of the terminally afflicted. She didn’t have to explain the double downside of cannie longevity and the resulting spread of infection.

      Because she owed nothing less than the whole truth to her friends, she also told them about the possibility that the disease and the cannie lifestyle were linked.

      “Turn cannie on us?” Jak said in disbelief.

      “Not if the medicine really exists,” Ryan countered at once.

      “If it does exist and we can find it before the infection takes hold of me,” Mildred added, “I may have a chance. It’s my only chance.”

      “Where is this Patient Zero?” Krysty said.

      “Louisiana,” Ryan answered. “In what our prisoner, there, calls the cannie homeland.”

      After a moment of shocked silence, the albino teen snarled a blistering curse. “Know people there,” he growled, advancing on Junior. “Left friends. Cannies take over?”

      The companions had recently left Jak’s birthplace after taking down an evil baron. How quickly things changed.

      “How the fuck do I know?” Junior replied in defiance.

      “Only way to find out for sure is to go back, Jak,” Mildred said, putting her hand on his slim shoulder.

      “Correct me if I’m wrong, my dear Ryan,” Doc said as he leaned heavily on his walking stick, “but are you and Mildred proposing that to save her we six enter the belly of this slouching beast, that we steal its greatest treasure, this life-giving serum, and to fore-stall any repetition of the threat we currently face, that we hunt down and chill the cannibals’ queen?”

      “Nothing less,” the one-eyed man said. “Any objections?”

      Though on its face the task seemed impossible there was none.

      One by one, the companions turned toward Mildred and nodded their assent. They had long ago thrown their lots together, to do or die. They valued the lives of their comrades more than their own. A pact signed in sweat and blood. A pact of selflessness and sacrifice that served the survival of all.

      “Looks like we’re gonna have to backtrack to the Hells Canyon redoubt for another mat-trans jump,” J.B. said.

      The return trip was a four-day hike. But it was more than just a hard, uphill trek. Their descent along predark Highway 84 had been perilous, to say the least. Cannie snipers had taken potshots at them from the ridgetops all during the day; after dark, the flesheaters had come out in force. In beating back the cannies their third night on the road, the companions had nearly run out of ammo. If they hadn’t reached the ville berm by nightfall on the fourth day, they never would have survived.

      “We’ve got no choice,” Ryan said. “Walking to Louisiana isn’t an option. Check your ammo and food.”

      “We’re full up in that department,” J.B. told him. He, Krysty, Doc and Jak had spent their morning searching the ville’s rutted lanes, scavenging appropriate caliber centerfire cartridges from the dead, norm and cannie; and gathering unspoiled eats. Their pockets and packs bulged with the booty.

      “Then let’s get a move on,” Cawdor said. “We’ve already lost most of the day. We’ve got to find cover we can defend before sundown.”

      With Jak in the lead, the companions and their bound captive turned their backs on the ruined ville and headed north, along the newly christened stretch of the Red Road, the Highway of Blood.

      Chapter Five

      A rifle slug whined a foot over Ryan’s head, slamming with explosive force into the underside of an uptilted slab of road bed. The one-eyed man instinctively averted his face as he ran on; flying shards of concrete stung the back of his head and smacked his shoulder.

      Then came the gun crack.

      From the time delay, the cannie shooters were five hundred or more yards away. They were firing from well-concealed, hardsite positions on the slopes above the highway. The snipers had the kill zone zeroed in, but because of the distances involved they couldn’t predict exactly where their targets were going to be when the bullets landed downrange.

      The companions were doing their best to complicate the problem. They zigged and zagged along the rutted wag tracks on the shoulder of the ruined highway. Their advantage was in speed and in erratic movement, in being someplace else when

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