LITMIR.BIZ

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breaking up. Ryan blinked his good eye at the sight. As hot as it was, without clouds to filter the sun the day would only get hotter. And J.B. wasn’t getting any lighter.

      “How are you holding up?” he asked the others.

      “Don’t worry about us,” Krysty said. “We’ll do what we have to do.”

      He ginned at her. “Like always.”

      “Not much farther to go, anyway,” Tully said. “We’ll see about getting you some wheels for your friend when we reach the gates. We got people who can tend to him. Ace healer name of Strode.”

      Lonny muttered something about mollycoddling no-account outlanders. His leader ignored him. Though Tully acted like a good guy—and Ryan knew too well it could all be an act—and seemed to have his shit pretty much in one sock as a leader, he also seemed to allow the bulky brown-haired man an unusual amount of slack. There had to be some link here Ryan didn’t see.

      No way to scope it now, nor to know if the fact, if fact it was, had any use to him and his friends in their current predicament. Ryan filed it away and let it go.

      Ryan saw Mildred’s shoulders and upper back tense. She was a physician, a fully qualified preskydark doctor who tended to think not too much of what passed for doctors these days. Truth be told, she had met several healers whom she had to admit were truly gifted.

      But whether it was more prudence than the freezie woman usually showed, or simple fatigue, she didn’t make a point of the fact she could tend to J.B. as well as any and better than most. Besides which, if Soulard were the relatively large and prosperous ville a twelve-man patrol wearing reasonably clean outfits suggested, they probably had medical facilities better than the Deathlands standard.

      Tully led them down the center of the wide street. His troops stayed crisply alert. Here, anyway, they seemed to be more worried about jump-out-from-cover attacks than coming under long-range aimed fire. More and more of the structures they passed were intact, which shortened potential fields of fire and favored blitz-style ambush.

      “Wonder why these littler buildings held up so much better than the skyscrapers,” Mildred said. Ryan was mildly surprised she had breath to talk.

      It was more of a surprise when Doc answered; even after all their association Ryan had a tendency to underestimate his physical hardiness.

      “Smaller surface areas,” he said. “Being more compact, they proved more resistant to the blasts. The bigger buildings provided greater surfaces for the shock waves to push against.”

      As they marched through the ruins between increasingly intact-appearing structures, in the growing sunlight Ryan realized the black kid, McCoy, was no longer with them. None of the others looked concerned—about the youth’s absence, anyway. Even here in what they evidently considered potentially hostile ground nobody seemed to assume he’d been snatched by someone. Or even wandered away into danger.

      So Tully sent him ahead to spread the word they were coming, Ryan thought. He’d probably use some secret bolthole. Mebbe even one only a kid knew about, or could even get through. The patrol leader had to have spoken quietly to the kid when Ryan wasn’t looking, or even flashed him an arranged signal. Or, hell, for all he knew it was standard operating procedure.

      They were working in a dangerous information vacuum here. The bitch was, even though their escorts were proving neither hostile nor closemouthed—except mebbe the lout, Lonny—they didn’t seem inclined to small talk right now. Ryan wasn’t about to distract them, if they thought there was something here to look out for.

      And anyway, he wasn’t sure himself where Mildred and Doc found the energy for chitchat. He sure didn’t have much to spare, right now.

      “Biggest danger here is stickies,” Randall said. “They infest the flooded warehouses and like to hunt up here from time to time. Plus sometimes scavvies think they can snag an easy score this close to a ville.”

      “There’s also people from Breweryville,” said Dowd, the haunted-looking dude who couldn’t sleep. “They might attack us if they come upon us.”

      “Oh, crap,” Randall said. “They can be dicks. But they’re not coldhearts.”

      “Brother Joseph says they lack a true sense of community.”

      “Look alive, guys,” Tully said hastily. “We don’t want to get too caught up talking and wind up crawling with stickies.”

      That drove a shudder through everybody, companions and captors alike. There were numerous varieties of the needle-toothed mutants with the sucker pads on their hands and feet that could strip skin from meat and meat from bone. Most of them shared a love for human flesh, cruelty and fire, not necessarily in that order. Despite their pyrophilia they often colonized near bodies of water, and seemed to take to the water well.

      Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the patrol leader had once again steered talk clear of the subject of Brother Joseph. Whomever he may be.

      They came to a corner where a wire fence stretched down the street ahead of them and down the street west, backed by dense thorny hedges and topped with coils of razor wire that gleamed in the sun despite being pitted and stained by the acid rains.

      “Soulardville,” Tully said with evident pride.

      “Didn’t that used to be the farmers’ market?” Mildred asked. “Those long shedlike roofs inside the perimeter?”

      “Uh-huh,” the patrol leader said, nodding his ginger head. “It’s a farming-and-gardening center now. Our market’s more centrally located.”

      “What’d you say your ville’s name was again?” Ryan asked.

      “Soulard,” Tully said.

      Doc perked up. “‘Soulard,’” he said. “Why, bless my soul, but unless I misremember, that means ‘drunkard’ in French.”

      Tully shrugged. “Mebbe so, some time past. Sure not now.”

      “Bro Joe don’t allow drunkenness,” Dowd said gloomily. Perhaps he felt he’d sleep better for a good load on.

      “Bro Joe?” Ryan asked.

      “It’s still the baron who rules in Soulardville!” Lonny bellowed. Ryan thought he was going way too red for Dowd’s remark. Lonny turned an angry glare on Doc.

      “What d’you mean by that, anyway, oldie?” he yelled.

      “Back off the trigger there, fella,” Ryan said.

      “Why, nothing, my boy,” Doc said. Though his forehead shone with sweat, he didn’t seem to be flagging under his burden. “Nothing at all. Just passing the time of this lovely day.”

      Lonny gave him a narrow, suspicious glare. “You okay there, old-timer?” Tully asked. “You want mebbe to get the white-haired kid to swap with you?”

      “Not at all, young man, thank you kindly. I have resources unlooked-for.”

      They continued south along the fence. Ryan watched his people closely. There was nothing they could do for J.B. right now but shade his face with his hat, which they had. He was concerned about how the other three were holding up. Krysty’s sentient hair hung limp over her shoulders, a sure sign fatigue was getting the better of her. Mildred would, from time to time, start to slump, then straighten. Usually at such times she glanced back at the unconscious Armorer suspended among them. It was as if she renewed her strength, or at least resolve, by reminding herself J.B.’s health and very survival lay very much in question, and depended on her ability to keep on keeping on.

      Ryan also monitored Jak. The teen was volatile and obviously smoldering at the fact they’d been taken captive. He wasn’t tracking too closely that their captors could’ve treated them far worse. In fact, under the circumstances, they could hardly have treated them better. Of course that could change at any instant; Ryan knew that as well as Jak did.

      He just didn’t

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