Ice and Fire

Chapter Twenty-Three

J.B. had begged some clean, dry rags from Ruby Rainer, explaining that he wanted to do some cleaning. She'd also supplied him with a white enamel bowl that was half-filled with steaming water. He'd carefully drawn the curtains shut across his second-floor back room, sliding the bolt in the center of the heavy oak door.

The Armorer always made it a policy to try to fieldstrip and clean all of his weapons at least once a day. In the Deathlands that wasn't always possible. But here in Snakefish he had everything that he needed to perform the task.

He was whistling quietly to himself as he began — an old hymn tune that dated right back to the shadowed days of his childhood. "The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended." If asked, J.B. probably wouldn't even have realized he was whistling any time at all.

This evening he decided to check out the contents of his voluminous pockets: the plas-ex, detonators and wires; the sextant and the garotte; and the grens — the scarlet-and-blue implode and the slightly smaller frag-gren with the flip-top firing.

He fisted the Tekna knife, feeling the dark metal hilt with the holes cut for lightness and grip, admiring the honed steel blade with the jagged sawing part, nearest the grip. J.B. held the blade to the lamp, turning it to catch the reflection, rubbing with one of the pieces of cotton waste to remove a barely visible smear.

As he concentrated harder, the whistling ceased and the room was quiet. He caught the noise of one of the Last Heroes thundering past the Rentaroom, but he ignored it.

Once the knife was cleansed, and a fine film of oil applied to it from a small screw-top container in one of his pockets, J.B. began to work on his blasters.

Time slipped by. Outside his room the sun dipped below the horizon and the streetlights came on. With a sigh the small man stood, stretching his arms above his head. He moved aside the corner of the flowered curtain and watched his two friends, close together, strolling through the dusk.

The ritual went on.

All the parts clicked, one from another, and were laid on the bed, on the cloths, in their ordered positions. Springs, catches and gleaming muzzles. J.B. started to whistle once again. Happiness wasn't a concept that preyed much on the mind of John Barrymore Dix from Cripple Creek, but if he'd thought about it, times like this would have been equated with happiness.

His strong, capable fingers rubbed, oiled and cleaned, sliding the various machined parts of the Heckler & Koch MP-7 SD-8 together. It was warm in the room, and the steam from the bowl of water began to condense on his spectacles, fogging them. J.B. took the glasses off and began to wipe at them with a corner of one of Mrs. Rainer's old bed sheets.

The knock on the door of his room was soft and hesitant.

J.B. didn't reply. He drew the knife and stuck it into his belt. Hefting the automatic rifle from the bed, he moved, light-footed, to flatten himself against the wall by the door.

The knock was repeated.

He still kept silent.

"John? John Dix? You in there? It's me. It's Carla."

His expression unchanged, almost, the Armorer threw the blaster on the bed and slid back the bolt on the door.

"Come in."

"You're a careful man, John Dix," she said as she walked across the threshold. He closed the door behind her and locked it again.

"I try to be."

"And you succeed. I saw Ryan and Krysty out walking a few minutes ago."

"Yeah."

There was an awkward silence.

The room wasn't large — around ten feet by ten feet. A small pie-crust table with a broken leg was at the head of the bed; a bureau with three drawers stood alongside the window, next to another small chest with a water jug and bowl on top of it. The carpet was faded and worn near the door. The only attempt at any kind of decoration was an attractive watercolor painting on the side wall, showing some trees and an expanse of grass.

There was also an armchair in a patched, loose cover. J.B.'s jacket was flung over the back of the chair; his stripped handblaster covered the bedspread.

He looked at the woman. Carla was dressed much as she'd been at the morning service in the snake temple: polished boots, trim skirt, crisp white blouse fastened at the neck with a sapphire clip. A jacket of dark brown corduroy had been draped over her shoulders against the night air.

"Well," she said, trying to defuse the sudden tension that she felt between them. "Looks like you're busy."

"Busy?"

"The blaster." She gestured toward the bed.

"Oh, yeah. Cleaning it... them. Cleaning them while I got the chance."

He was aware that Carla was still standing uncomfortably by the locked door, her arms folded defensively across her chest.

"You want to sit down? I mean, I'll clear off some space for you. The chair or the bed? Which would you?.."

"Sure. Bed'd be fine, John. Can I give you a hand to move anything?"

"No!" he answered sharply. "Sorry, Carla. Just that I don't like..."

"Anyone to touch your blasters," she finished, smiling at him. "I should have guessed, John. You go ahead."

His hands were almost a blur of movement as he reassembled the Steyr pistol, slotting the parts together in a series of soft, greased clicks, whipping away the stained rags with the flourish of a magician performing his greatest trick.

"There," he said, patting the bed. "Sit down, Carla. Can I ask Mrs. Rainer to bring you up anything?"

She sat down primly, crossing her legs with a whisper of rustling sound. "Thanks, John. If Ruby brought me anything it'd probably be cyanide."

J.B. laughed and sat down at the far end of the bed, licking his lips and blinking behind his glasses. It seemed odd to him how the room had become so very much smaller in the past few minutes, and how the bowl of hot water had made the bedroom feel uncomfortably humid. He ran his finger around the inside of his shirt collar.

"Want me to open a window, Carla?" he asked. "Seems kind of stuffy."

"That would be nice, John."

He stood and slipped the catch across, levering the top half of the casement upward a few inches, which brought a breath of cool evening air into the room. Before he could turn around, J.B. felt the woman's hand touch his shoulder, her breath against his neck. Suddenly she was in his arms, and the soft caress of her lips was against his. After a split second's shock, he found himself responding to her warmth.

A moment later she broke away from him, carefully adjusting the curtains across the window. "Don't want the whole ville to see us, do we, John?"

"Guess not," he replied hoarsely.

Her hand still rested on his shoulder, fingers teasing at the short hairs curling onto his neck. She was smiling into his eyes. "I really wouldn't want you thinking I did this all the time, John," she whispered.

"Me neither."

"Truth is, I haven't actually done this, anything like this, for a very long time."

"Me neither, Carla."

"Would you like to... you know, John?"

J.B. kissed her on the mouth. "Yeah, Carla. I would."

Doc had been dozing, fully clothed, his battered knee boots standing crookedly by the side of the bed. He'd been dreaming, but he couldn't remember what about. There had been a horse and a river, flowing fast and clean over white stones. He thought that his long-dead wife, Emily, had been in the dream, but he couldn't be certain. All he knew was that he'd been crying in his sleep.

He couldn't be certain, either, what it was that had woken him. A door closing or a shutter banging loose?

"What was it, Lori?" he whispered into the darkness of the room. Ruby Rainer had given them two single beds, pushed side by side.

There was no answer. He sat up, grunting at stiffness in the small of his back. Peering across, he saw that the other bed was empty.

"Lori?" Where in thunderation had the girl gone off to?

With a weary groan Doc swung his legs over the edge of the bed and tugged on his boots. He glanced at the small silver chron on his left wrist and saw that it was just past ten o'clock. Through the window he could see that the main street of the ville was quiet and deserted.

Not quite deserted.

A tall figure was striding along on the far side of the road, in a general direction of the Motes' temple. The ghostly illumination of the streetlights danced off the long blond hair. In his imagination Doc could almost hear the tinkling sound of Lori's spurs.

Doc was about to leave the room when an afterthought struck him. He went back and buckled on the heavy Le Mat pistol and picked up his swordstick. He made his way quietly down the stairs, through the sleeping building and out onto the porch that ran the length of the frontage. An elderly swing-seat creaked as the night wind moved it gently to and fro. Doc stood a moment, wrinkling his nostrils at the pungent odor of gasoline that permeated the ville.

Lori had vanished and the old man set off after her, keeping to the shadows. Doc found it difficult to maintain a grip on his memory and his sanity. Walking through the slumbering ville brought back a tumbling flood of images from his long-gone past. Most of the buildings on that end of Main Street dated from the late 1890s, the period during which he had last seen his wife and his two young children. Before the white-coated, faceless men and women of Project Cerberus had trawled him into the future.

With a great effort of will he succeeded in suppressing the memories, concentrating instead on trying to work out where Lori would have gone. Since she knew nobody in Snakefish, it seemed logical that she had walked out into the night.

But why?

Doc very nearly went on by the temple, heading into the wilderness of desert beyond. But a flicker of pale light caught his eye, somewhere around the back of the building — a narrow vertical strip of gold, as though a door had been left open.

Looking around him cautiously, praying that his knee joints wouldn't creak, Doc made his way around the path at the side. Very slowly and carefully he eased his way inside, catching the odd smell of stale sweat and makeup, which dredged up memories of the vaudeville theaters of New York, back when... Once again a black curtain descended, cutting off the trickling memories.

He could hear voices talking quietly and a sudden giggle.

"Lori," he said.

On an impulse he drew the Le Mat from its ornate Mexican holster, thumbing back the hammer on the antique piece as he walked past a table and some shelves. The voices came louder. Another muffled, sniggering laugh made him grip the butt of the pistol more tightly.

Doc could see them now, together near the front row of pews. There was a sailing moon outside, and it cast enough light in through the windows of the reptilian temple for the old man to be able to see them quite clearly.

"I am most dreadfully sorry to interrupt," he called, marveling inwardly at how calm he'd kept his voice. "But I don't think Lori should be out this late on her own."

"What the skin-shedding fuck is that?" The male voice was high and reedy. His blond curls glinted in the moonlight. Doc could see a black Stetson near the altar.

"It's Doc Tanner. And you are Joshua Mote. Do your parents know that you profane the tabernacle with your lusts?"

Lori broke away, nervously smoothing down the front of her coveralls. "Hi, Doc," she greeted. "Josh said to come see this place at night and I thought it be no harms."

"I should kill you! You interfering old fuck-pig!" Joshua Mote shouted, facing Doc across the aisle.

"If you attempt to draw out whatever blaster you have concealed about your person, I shall pull this trigger and blow a hole in you big enough to drive a horse and buggy through."

Mote let his hands drop to his side. "Sure. This time you get your way, Doc. But there's things happening in this ville soon and you'll be on the wrong scaling side of 'em."

"Very possibly. Come on, Lori, my dear. Time to go home."

The girl didn't argue at all. She took Doc's arm and walked quietly with him back to their hotel. Neither said a word.

Just after sunup everyone was awakened by the throbbing roar of the powerful engines of the two-wheel wags. All eight of the Last Heroes rode past in formation, heading down Main Street toward the Motes' temple. Zombie, at the head, shouted something to Ruby Rainer, who was busily sweeping dust off the front porch, but Ryan couldn't hear what was said.

"Going down to find out," he said tersely to Krysty, pulling on his pants and knotting the laces of his combat boots.

The landlady was in the lobby, adjusting a scarf around her throat. She turned as she heard Ryan's feet on the stairs.

"Oh, Mr. Cawdor!" she exclaimed. "Such dreadful, dreadful news!"

Ryan felt the short hairs at the nape prickle in anticipation. Keeping his voice calm, he asked, "What? What's the news?"