Neutron Solstice

Chapter Fifteen

Ryan's suspicion that others had been in the Holiday Inn within the past few months were reinforced when it became apparent that the slogan painter had been at work. The white letters were dry, but from their condition it was obvious they hadn't been there long.

They were on a wall that ran from the back of the restaurant toward the abandoned swimming pool, with its crust of dried leaves and moss.

The message was simple.

"COME HERE AND YOU DIE."

Ryan picked the best place he could find from which to mount a defense. It had once been a games room with all manner of vids and pinball machines decorated by archaic and oddly beautiful artwork and names like Red-zapper and Wackamole. There was also the yawning maw of a cracked, dust-filled Jacuzzi.

The room had only two doors, one of which had strips of reinforced steel across it, and could be locked and bolted. J.B. studied it, puzzled about the necessity for that kind of security in a games room. He liked the fact that since the room overlooked a deep waterway, there was no way an attacker could sneak through a window. From the swirling disturbances in the gray water, it looked like it was well-stocked with piranhas.

Ryan organized the group into pairs for guard duty, and with help from J.B. and Krysty, arranged a rotation of shifts. They decided that since they could easily lock one of the doors to the games room, only the other one had to be guarded. After some consideration, Ryan said, "We need another guard farther down the corridor that leads to that place where we first came in. What's it called? The..." He glanced surreptitiously at Doc.

The old man responded as Ryan hoped he would. He was evidently recovering from his earlier gloom.

"The lobby, Mr. Cawdor."

"Thanks. We'll split up like this." He stopped. "Doc, I don't want any shit from you. I know you want to be with Lori. But we've got only three trained guns now Ч me, J.B. and Finn here. So, Doc, you go with Finn; Lori with J.B.; and Krysty with me."

"All right," was all the old man said, removing his dented stovepipe hat and dropping Ryan a low courtly bow.

During their first break from guard duty, Ryan and Krysty found themselves a room down the corridor from the games area, one with no heaps of bones in it. Tugging back the covers on the king-size bed, they cosily snuggled into it. Wary of intrusions or disturbances, they removed only a minimum of clothing.

Ryan had deliberately split the bottoms of his dark gray pants so that he could pull them off over his high combat boots. He kept on the brown shirt, still stained with mud and with Henn's blood. The G-12 went on the floor beside the bed, the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm pistol beneath one of the two pillows.

Krysty kicked off the magnificent cowboy boots she'd found in the cold redoubt only days back. The chiseled silver points of the toes gleamed in the pale moonlight that filtered through the rotting drapes; the moon also brought the silver spread-wing falcons on the sides to a cold sheen. Krysty rolled down, the khaki coveralls, sliding her thin panties to her knees.

Entwined, they abandoned themselves to their passion. She sighed once as he entered her, her eyes wide open, looking directly into his face. In the moonglow the hooked nose and narrow cheeks made him look almost like some ferocious bird of prey, hovering above her, about to tend her. It was an exciting thought.

They were awakened during, the night by a brief, vicious thunderstorm. Only Doc Tanner slept through it. He lay on his back on the floor of the games room, his mouth hanging open, snoring stentoriously, almost drowning out the howling wind, and the pounding rain.

All of them were awake, up, and dressed by six in the morning.

"What the fuck is there to eat?" asked Finnegan. "Not more of that doomie shit! I look at it in the fucking bowl, and I can't recall if'n I'm just going to eat it, or if I've already eaten it and barfed it back up."

"I farted all night," said Lori, smiling in her simple way.

"Ryan, me and the girls'll go explore some of the houses we passed. Didn't seem too badly damaged or nothing. Got to be tins and bottles. Anything's better than this stuff."

Seeing that both Lori and Krysty were willing, Ryan nodded his approval. "Sure. Take care. Watch out for any gangs and the baron's sec men. He sounds a mean mother." Ryan consulted the chron on his left wrist. "It's nearly six and a half. Leave at seven. Be back by... by eleven. If you run into trouble, fire three spaced shots, and we'll come running."

Just before seven, Ryan found Krysty in the suite where they'd made love the night before. She was pulling the sheets across the rumpled bed.

"Fireblast it, lover! No one's going to complain that we've messed up their room!"

Krysty smiled, shaking her head to tumble the unique hair out of her eyes. "Guess not, Ryan. But Mother Sonja brought her daughter up proper."

Slumping into a well-padded armchair, he watched her gracefully move and his eye was caught by something white beneath the bed. He knelt down, peering at it, giving a sudden, barking laugh. "What is it?"

At his beckoning finger, she joined him on the floor; saw what made him laugh, and laughed also. It was a neat square card, the printing hardly faded in a hundred years.

It read: "Yes. We have even dusted under here."

After Finn and the girls left on their foraging expedition, the others passed the time in their own ways.

Doc browsed among the postcards in the dusty lobby. Picking up one from a pile of leaflets, he took it to Ryan.

"Attractions in West Lowellton and nearby Lafayette," he said. "What a center of activity this must have been before it became a gigantic catafalque."

"What's that?" asked J.B. "Sounds like some old siege weapon."

"A building to house the dead, Mr. Dix. Like this entire continent. Oh, but if I had known then what I know now."

"What's that, Doc?" asked Ryan, sensing a chance to uncover whatever bizarre truth lay behind the man called Doctor Theophilus Tanner.

"Ah, no." Doc wagged his finger. "One day, perhaps, my dear young man. But not now."

"When? You know my past, Doc. How 'bout yours? Come on. It can't be that mysterious."

Doc fumbled with the lion's head atop his ebony sword stick and coughed. "If I were to tell you, Ryan, then I vow you would not believe it."

"I would, Doc. Come on. Now's a good time. Just you, me and J.B. here."

"I'm sorry. We must fight on the darkling plain, swept with confused alarms,' Ryan."

"How's that?"

"A great singer once sang that we must keep our dreams as clean as silver, for this may be the last hurrah. Oh, had he but known the truth of that, so few years later."

"Doc," said Ryan. "Tell us."

The old man ran a hand through his long gray hair, flipped through the leaflet in his hand, then blandly changed the subject of their conversation.

"I see we are but six miles from Interstate 10. Nine miles from the Evangeline Race Track. Once I visited the Kentucky Derby. Such a day, Ryan."

J.B. shook his head and walked away, checking the perimeter of the Holiday Inn. Ryan knew that Doc wouldn't open up until he was good and ready, or until some freak of chance broke the crystal goblet of his secret.

"A mere thirty miles from Longfellow's Evangeline Oak. That would be a national treasure to behold. Probably there are few such left in the Deathlands." Ryan couldn't be bothered to ask what this oak tree was, guessing that any explanation would only increase his confusion.

"Does that say anything about where you can find food hereabouts?"

"No. It tells us that this establishment had kennels, but that dogs were not allowed in the 136 rooms. Also that we are but fifteen miles from the campus of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Their library would be a trove of interest, Ryan. It is probably intact, if vandals have not destroyed it."

"You can't eat fucking books, Doc."

"There is a witty response to that rational observation, Mr. Cawdor, but it escapes me for the moment."

He opened his hand, allowing the booklet to flutter to the carpet like the last dead leaf from an irradiated tree.

The morning passed.

Doc went and curled up in a corner, sleeping like a child.

J.B. vanished for an hour and returned to tell Ryan that he thought it might be possible to start an emergency electrical generator. "Better than the hand-torches. Shall I try?"

"Why not?"

Ryan wandered, the deserted corridors, encountering the occasional skeleton, and tried to fathom what it must have been like back before the nuke winter.

In the corner of the motel where the fallen tree had hit, termites had tunneled in, undermining the foundations and making one entire wing dangerous; there were huge cracks in the walls and ceilings. Ryan gazed out through the glass, which had been dulled over, the hundred years of the scouring action of the wind. He looked across the oily waters that snaked around the building to the towering live oaks that, obscured, the nearby road.

The sky was clouding over again. From old books Ryan had learned that in olden times the weather was often the same for days on end. Bright and sunny through the summers, clear and crisply cold through the winter. That was hard to imagine. Ever since his youth at his father's ville of Front Royal back in Virginia, he'd known the weather only to change rapidly, within hours, perhaps a dozen times in a single day. A sunny sky would be soon overtaken with chem clouds, and violent storms would soon erupt, quickly flooding rivers and canals. In parts of the Deathlands, the winds and acid rain could strip the skin from a person in minutes. There might be snow in July in what had been called Arizona, and blistering heat around the sculpted peak of Mount Washton, in the far north, on a January morning.

Here, deep in the South, humidity and a clinging, sweating heat seemed the order on most days. Fortunately, it was cooler inside the motel. Looking out the window, Ryan saw huge insects, wings iridescent, dart over the warm streams. Far to the north, there was the familiar jagged lace of purple lightning. The rumble of thunder never reached him.

Realizing that the double-paned windows might also prevent him from hearing warning shots from Krysty and the others, he moved quickly to the main entrance, pushed open the stiff glass doors and emerged into the warm damp morning. Immediately he heard the harsh sound of swampwag engines. It came from the suburb of West Lowellton, not too far away, where his three companions had gone scavenging.

He spun on his heel, sprinted into the echoing lobby and shouted for J.B. and Doc. Returning to the arched entrance, he flattened himself against the red brick wall.

"What is it? Shots?"

"No. Listen."

"Wags. Those swamp buggies. Real close. Half mile, mebbe less."

Doc Tanner approached briskly, his cane clicking on the stone floor. His Le Mat pistol was tucked into his belt in a piratical manner, and his hat was at a rakish angle.

"I fear I slumbered, and... I can hear engines. It sounds like those..."

"Swampwags, Doc. Yeah."

"Go or stay?" snapped the Armorer tersely.

"Stay," was Ryan's immediate response. "It figures they're mebbe searching for us. With six of us running round, they double their chances of getting us."

"And halves the odds," said J.B.

"Yeah, it does. But we stay."

"Should we not be looking for a defensive position?" asked Doc. "In the event of their coming here?"

It was a difficult decision. Judging by the noise of the engines, there were at least a half dozen of the floundering buggies in the vicinity. That could mean thirty or forty men, maybe more. It didn't much matter if they were Cajuns or the baron's sec guards. A firefight out in the open would have only one ending. But if they waited in the motel, they could cause untold havoc among any attackers, perhaps stand a better chance.

Overlaying the rumbling of the swampwags was the noise of gunfire. It sounded like thin material ripping as the high velocity bullets exploded in short bursts. J.B. looked at Ryan.

"If they got 'em cold, they're chilled by now. If not, they'll make it out of there. Best we can do is wait and see."

"That's how I see it, too."

Doc Tanner pounded the stone wall. "Those young girls! Stouthearted Finnegan! By the three Kennedys, gentlemen! Can we stand here and allow them to be slaughtered?"

"Yeah, Doc, we can," replied J.B.

"Yeah, Doc, we can," repeated Ryan. "We go after them, and we're there with too little, too fucking late. Don't think I don't care about Lori or that fat tub of guts Finnegan. And you know how much I care 'bout Krysty Wroth. But in this life there's only one real certainty. Fuck up and you lose."

"But they may have died."

"We all do, Doc," said J.B. quietly.

Gunfire crackled for about two and a half minutes. Then came the unmistakable sharp cracks of a couple of stun grens, then more gunfire for around a half minute.

Then just the swampwags throaty roar and the shouting of a confusion of orders.

"Best find a place where we can blast 'em if'n they come this way," suggested Ryan.

"You think they might have been... killed, Ryan? Or taken?"

"Yeah. Mebbe they'll take what they got and pull out. Mebbe not. All we can do is listen and wait. If they aren't here in an hour, then I guess it means they're not coming. Not yet, anyway."

Ryan chose the kennels. Partly outside, they were connected to the motel and also gave them access to some low scrub that concealed a dry river bed stretching southwest. The three of them went there, waiting and listening, their blasters cocked and ready.

There was no further shooting, and the shouting faded. Soon the buggies could be heard drifting away, seemingly toward the main part of the swamps.

Within half an hour, the natural sounds of insects and the wind in the live oaks had resumed. The clouds that had threatened rain earlier in the morning had broken up, leaving only a veil of high thin mist that filtered the sun into an orange blur.

"Ryan? Let's go see what happened."

"Wait, Doc. Keep quiet and wait. Don't move or speak till I say so."

Time crawled by. Ryan tried to keep his mind off Krysty Wroth. Her face, voice, body. The only woman who'd ever meant more than a fleeting fuck to him. Common sense told him that along with Lori and Finn, she had probably been chilled. The sec men of the baron, with their superior firepower, had sent them all to buy the farm.

Unless...

"Unless he wanted prisoners," he muttered to himself, hardly aware he'd spoken at all.

It was a hope. Best he'd got.

It was seven minutes past noon, by his wrist-chron. At twelve he and the others had decided to go and find out what had gone down on the edges of West Lowellton. And to bury their dead.

If Krysty, Lori and Finn had been taken, it wasn't going to do them any good to rush in like a blinded steer charging into the shambles.

It was still seven minutes off noon, by his wrist-chron, when he caught the whisper of stealthy movement somewhere behind them, inside the motel.

He shrank back into the narrow stone kennel, fingering the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. The noise sounded like the plastic end of a blind-pull, tapping on glass in the wind. But the wind had fallen, and the air was still.

The tapping came again. Three, spaced out, then two, closer together. Then more tapping, repeating the same pattern.

"It's Finn," Ryan whispered, warning Doc and the Armorer. "Cover me, J.B., while I make a run for the door. Then Doc, then you."

In thirty seconds they were all safe inside the motel, the security door locked behind them, the steel bolt thrown across it.

"Finn!" called Ryan. "Finnegan, we're here."

They heard footsteps, dragging a little, moving slowly toward them along the corridor, from the direction of the games room and the main entrance.

"That you, Finn?" There was a note of tension in Ryan's voice. "Speak up."

"It's me." The words sounded as if they'd been uttered by someone who had witnessed an unspeakable horror. At Ryan's side, Doc shuddered convulsively. "Yeah, it's me. Only me."

Finnegan was one of the toughest of all of the Trader's longtime blasters. He'd been in more firefights than he'd spent night in beds. He drained most of a quart of Jim Beam, spitting on the floor, wiping the back of a bloodstained hand across his mouth.

"Now?" asked Ryan.

"Sure. Heard 'em coming. Krysty heard 'em first. But there was a lot of the fuckers. Ten or more of those fat-tired mothers. Looked like someone seen us. Told the baron. Sent out the sec men. We holed up in a square of houses. Pretty little places, I guess. If you like fucking pretty. Lot of bones round there. We'd got us some tins and packets of freeze-dries. Real nice. Shrimps and sauce and all."

He took another swig from the bottle. Doc looked as though he was going to interrupt him, then changed his mind and reached out for the bottle to take a pull on it himself. He passed it on to Ryan, who shook his head, and J.B. took a single mouthful, rinsed it around and spat it out.

"I took the front, Krysty on the flank. Put little Lori safe as I could round the back." He glanced at Doc. "Best as I fucking could."

"How many men? What blasters they carry?"

Finn sighed, looking at J.B. through narrowed eyes. It was obvious he was ragged, near exhaustion. "Some of the swampwags were bigger. I guess mebbe fifty or more of the fuckers. Most got old M-16s. Carbines. Some got Browning pistols. Nothing big. Two of the buggies had gren launchers. They were good. Smart fucker in a white suit giving the orders. Had a couple of shots at him. Made him duck. Got mud an' shit all over him."

"Go on," said Ryan.

"Not much to tell. Too many of 'em. Figure I chilled seven or eight. Not great at street firefighting. Kept moving. They made a rush, got between me and the girls. No way I could get back. No way."

"No way, Jose," muttered Doc mysteriously.

"Dead or taken?" That was the big question. Would there be burying and revenge, or rescue?

"I figure taken. You hear a couple of stun grens go off?"

"Yeah," said Ryan.

"That was it. I went in the front and out the side of a house, doubled back to kill whatever moved. Fucking weird. Put out a triple burst from the old H&K here." He patted the silenced gray submachine gun on his lap. "All hit him in the throat. Fucking head fell right off. Never seen that before. Clean as a big axe. Rolled round my fucking feet and fucking near tripped me over. That was when I heard the stuns. Ran up into the loft of an old frame house. Looked down. They were loading the girls into one of the wags. I had a go, but it wasn't no good. Near got caught. I tried."

"Sure. Never thought any different, Finn. You couldn't save 'em, then no man could."

Finn nodded, taking another long, bubbling draw at the bottle, draining it dry, then let it drop from his hand with a dull clunk.

The room was silent. Ryan wondered when the sec men might be back, guessing that they'd be reporting to the sinister Baron Tourment with their prizes. They'd interrogate Krysty and Lori to find out all they could about how many there were, about arms, strength. And if the girls didn't cooperate, they'd use stronger measures.

"Time's wasting," said Ryan. "They'll guess we might come in after them. Be ready."

Never for a moment did Ryan, J.B. or Doc consider just walking away. It would have been easy to head for the gateway and shut the door. Move somewhere else. And with the unreliability and random quality of the mat-trans systems, there was no way they'd ever come back to Louisiana. It wasn't like it used to be with the Trader.

Back then, with a small army traveling together, if you got left, then you got left. It was the survival of the mostest that counted. That was the rule, and every man and woman with the warwags knew that. You lived and you died by those rules.

Now there were just the six of them, moving together through an alien land where hostility was the norm and friendship was suspect. That meant you went out on the edge for one of the others.

One of the codes was a man didn't just close his eyes and ride around.

The three men looked at each other in the dusty, dimly lit room, each absorbed with his own private thoughts.

The stranger's voice, coming out of the darkness by the door, made them all jump.

"You 'gainst Baron?"

Ryan answered. "Well, we ain't fucking for him."

"Then we ought talk."

In the dim light, the newcomer's white hair flared like a vivid magnesium torch.