Ice and Fire

Chapter Eighteen

It was a cold evening in Snakefish.

Only Doc and Lori had eaten in the dining room of their boarding house. The others had taken their suppers upstairs on trays, all sharing the room where Rick lay in a frightening, almost catatonic trance. He still held the Edgar Allan Poe book. Ryan had tried once to remove it from his hands, but the freezie had wailed like a lost soul and tried to bite him on the wrist.

There had been little time for Ryan to debrief J.B. and Jak. Rufus Brennan had been the soul of kindness and discretion, helping Krysty and Ryan to carry the weeping man across to the Rentaroom, bustling him up the stairs before too many prying eyes could see him.

There was a log fire laid in the grate, and the Armorer had used a pyrotab to get it blazing, filling the curtained room with bright, crackling heat.

Despite that, Rick didn't seem able to stop himself from shivering. His fingers opened and closed and his teeth chattered together. They'd decided to leave on his newly purchased clothes, piling on a couple of blankets for good measure. Doc had asked Ruby Rainer to send up an enamel pot of hot, sweetened tea, explaining that their friend had suffered something of a shock and needed to be kept warm.

The woman had been eager to help, offering her prayers and wondering whether the accident might prevent poor Mr. Ginsberg from joining everyone at the service the next day.

After she'd been ushered from the room, Ryan turned to J.B. "Find anything out?"

"Sure. Friendly folk. Talk to you about everything. Just as long as it's the weather or are we comfortable with Ma Rainer here. Soon as you ask them anything about how the ville's run and how the gas is produced and processed and traded..."

"And mouths clam like snap trap," Jak concluded, locking his fingers to demonstrate what he meant.

"See the plant?"

"Sure, Ryan. No guards. Drillings are all to the east and north. Brought in tank wags. Pumped and then purified. Stored in all kinds of barrels and tanks. Kind of careless. So much gas there that a single burner gren would set half the country on fire."

"Saw bikers again. Zombie and others," Jak said. "Said could ride with 'em. Mebbe after snake service tomorrow. Seem okay."

Ryan glanced at the Armorer, seeking confirmation of the young boy's judgment of the Last Heroes. But J.B. pursed his lips and said nothing — which was as good as saying everything.

At that moment their attention was taken by Rick.

The freezie had begun to talk in a quiet, confidential sort of way, but in a voice quite unlike his natural tones. It was a thin, piping little voice, like a young child's. And there was even the hint of a childish lisp to it.

"I'm eleven years old in three weeks. My full name is Richard Neal Ginsberg and I was born March 22, 1970. I live in New York City, which is in New York State, which is the best of all the United States of America, the land of the free."

There was a peculiarly monotonous quality to the speech, as though Rick had learned it by heart and was pattering through it.

"I have a pet turtle who's real old and lives all the time with his head buried in the mud of his tank, and his name's Tricky Dicky. I guess he's real boring. My Dad's name is Jack Ginsberg, and he worked as an accountant in a big office on Sixth Avenue. Mom's name is Naomi and she doesn't do any work. She's like a housewife."

"Little prick," Krysty whispered. "I read about that sort of male attitude. Doesn't do any work!"

"I play softball and I watch football and I like the New York Giants best of all. When I grow up I'm going to be a quarterback and pitch for the Yankees and maybe also work as an accountant. I haven't decided yet but I'm real good at math."

Doc and Lori came into the room, closing the door behind them. They stood at the foot of the bed, listening to the ramblings of the freezie.

"Looks fucking stupe," Lori said. "Look at his eyes all staring."

"I fear our newly thawed comrade has regressed to his childhood," Doc observed sadly. "It was always something of a gamble. I had been delighted with how well he had coped with his blind leap into our future. But now I see how fragile his hold on our reality is."

"Reality sandwiches," Rick said, a tremulous sickly smile clutching at the corners of his bloodless lips. The fingers of his left hand played with the frayed edge of the gray blankets while his right hand kept its deathly grip on the leather-bound volume of Poe.

"What if I deck him, Doc?" J.B. asked. "Short right cross to the point of the jaw. Could snap him out of it?"

"Could snap him further into it," Ryan said dryly. "How about if we get some sleepers from the woman? Feed him some of those and mebbe he'll be fine when he comes around?"

Rick seemed able to hear what was being said and somehow translate it into fragments from his past. "Round and round the little wheel goes and where it stops nobody knows. Not me and not my mom or my dad. Nor my beloved grandmother, Agnes Laczinczca. She's a wise woman. Witch of the west. She lives somewhere over a rainbow in Kansas, bloody Kansas." A cunning smile flitted across his face. "Shouldn't say that. Bloody. Get my mouth washed with soap and water. Bloody bastard. Fuck and prick." He giggled.

"Got do something, Ryan," Jak said. "Crazy as sun-blind gator."

"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "Sure. Do something. Anyone got any ideas?"

"Rambo. Bimbo." Rick sniggered. "Dumbo Crambo. Wilco. Dildo."

"I could... I've never really tried to do it for anything like this, but Mother Sonja taught me ways of using the force of the Earth Mother for healing. Setting a mind to peace. I could try."

"Try it, lover," Ryan said, kissing Krysty on the cheek.

"Rest of you go out. Got to have privacy and quiet for this."

Doc nodded. "It could work. In my day I was known as something of an apostle of alternative medicine."

"Out, Doc," J.B. said, leading the way. "I'll give you a game of Kiowa if we can get a deck of cards."

The others followed, with Ryan bringing up the rear. Rick was still chattering away to himself on the bed.

"The premature burial. That was always my fear. My terror. To slip into a coma and yet not be dead. Folks not realizing that I still lived. Breathing slow, but living." The voice had changed, had lost the infantile flatness. Now it held more of Richard Ginsberg's normal tones. But it was oddly without inflection, as if the words were strung together by a computer, with no sense of emotion at all.

"I'll go, lover," Ryan whispered. "Next door. You want any help, just bang once on the wall and I'll be in here."

"Sure. Could take some time."

The freezie's words danced over and around them, plaited with an old, sad madness.

"The box closing. Eyes shut but still seeing. The softness of the silken shroud embracing the cold skin. The lid lowering. A loose thread of cotton trailing against the corner of your mouth. Tickling you, for all eternity. A spider, buried with you, seeking somewhere to spin its web and lay its eggs." A shudder racked the man's body. "In your ear, burrowing inward. Gestation. Birth. A thousand tiny spiders, eating inward. Into your living brain. Living and feeling but paralyzed and helpless."

The door shut behind Ryan, and Krysty sat on the bed, reaching to hold Rick's palsied left hand in both of hers. "Be all right," she said. "Quiet and easy, brother. You got so much pain inside you, Rick. Gotta let it out of you."

"Locked in the box. One time around then they put the lid down on you. John said that. John Stewart. Said that. He didn't know what it was like. My body trapped me. Locking and tensing and falling and the tiredness. Bells of hell, the tiredness. I wanted to rest and get away. That's why I agreed to let them do it to me. Knew it wouldn't work. Didn't care. The gateways being used for war. Instant soldiers here and there. Oh, fuck! I hated that. Lock the lid down on the box. Goodbye to pain forever. Then they woke me up. Woke me healed and new. Not now. Not ever. Nevermore. Nevermore."

Krysty systematically began to clear her mind, using the techniques that her mother had taught her, long ago in the ville of Harmony.

When Krysty was under great stress she was able to harness the Earth power, giving herself a cataclysmic strength for a few moments. But using it drained her for hours after. This was different — the healing way had nothing to do with dissolution.

She focused on a sky of untouched blue, a river foaming over silver rocks, imagining the water washing away all pain and anguish. She gripped Rick's hand more tightly.

"I hear the slamming of the lid. My heart beating, louder. How can they not hear it? My nails break against the implacable dark wood. Blood warm down over my palms, my wrists. Muscles straining, helplessly and utterly without hope. Oh, the tigers that come in the dead of night! Help me, help me. The sibyl said she wished only to die."

Ginsberg was talking more and more slowly. Krysty was weeping, not aware of her own grief, tuning in to his bone-cold sorrow, trying to tap it and divert it. She looked for sparks of light within the bleak world that might illuminate and carry hope.

"Come out of it, Richard," she said, lips barely moving.

"Trapped in my crippled body in a twisted, demented time," he moaned, fingers tightening on her hand.

"No." She drew on some lines that her mother had made her learn. "There is a wind on the heath, my brother. Life is very sweet. Who would wish to die?"

"Everyone I loved is dust," he said quietly, the words hardly disturbing the warm air in the small room.

"We all will be, Rick. One day. You and me and Ryan and everyone. Today's baby is tomorrow's dust. Live while you can, Rick. Live and live and live."

His eyes had been staring at the roughly plastered ceiling. As Krysty looked at the freezie, his face grew calmer. His gaze dropped, settling on her face. His breathing steadied, and there was something like the frail ghost of a normal, sane smile.

"Krysty Wroth, I believe?"

"Richard Neal Ginsberg, isn't it?"

"Guess it is."

"Good to have you back," she said, feeling the strain of drawing the demons from the helpless man's soul.

"Didn't much care for the places I've been. Too damned dark."

"It's dark out, Rick."

"Light in here. Light and warm, Krysty. I feel real tired."

"Yeah. Me too."

Ryan had been sitting with the others, relaxing, half-asleep.

After an hour had slipped by he sighed and stood, stretching, feeling the muscles around his ribs tightening as he moved. "Just going to take a look," he said.

As he stepped into the corridor he nearly jumped out of his skin. His fist clenched and he began a lethal, crushing blow to the bridge of the nose, checking his punch in time, inches short of the sharp, quill-like nose of Ruby Rainer.

"Shedskin!" she exclaimed, stumbling back, hands waving at the air. "You were going to hit me, Mr. Cawdor!"

"No, ma'am," he replied. "If I'd been going to hit you, then I'd have done it. Not a good idea to creep up on a person like that, Mrs. Rainer. Could lead to a nasty accident."

She recovered a little, brushing at her print apron, running a finger along the top of the bannister rail, checking it for dust. "That girl, Rosemary! She never cleans up... But that wasn't what I came up to see about."

"And what was that?"

"Is Mr. Ginsberg recovered? I hope he'll be at the seven o'clock service on the morrow. It would be sucha disappointment if he missed it."

"Just going to check. I hope we'll all be there."

He watched her go slowly down the stairs before he eased open the door and peeked in. Rick Ginsberg lay fast asleep on his bed, breathing peacefully. Krysty slept at his side, holding his hand.

Ryan smiled and very quietly closed the bedroom door.