Neutron Solstice

Chapter Seven

"If they was going to fucking butcher us, then they'd have fucking done it by now!"

"Finn makes sense, Ryan," said J.B. "Why bring us here?"

Ryan Cawdor shook his head. "Damned if I know. I just know that something here doesn't set right."

"I feel that, too," added Krysty. "There's a scent... a taste... I don't know."

"It seems to me, if I may venture my humble opinion, that we are better off here than out in that wilderness of mud and water, being pursued by the living dead."

"Lori says Doc speaks good."

Ryan shrugged. "Sure, no wonder. They promised to feed us in a few minutes, didn't they? Just make sure everyone keeps on their guard. And make sure that we eat different things. In case they've put sleepers in it."

He walked to the side of the hut, feeling the narrow planks bend under his weight; he looked out through the slatted blind, past the mesh of the mosquito netting and across the square of the small ville, down toward the swollen river.

There were about thirty small wooden houses in the ville of Moudongue, set in a rough rectangle along the river. Two or three swampwags were tied to the posts of a wharf.

The old man, who'd told them his name was Ti Jean, entered, followed by three young, slatternly women in dirty dresses of plain cotton. They carried dishes made of turned wood, with some battered metal forks and spoons.

"You are hungry. We feed you," he pronounced. "Later, you join us for dancing. We sing old songs. 'Jole Blon. Hippy Ti Yo. Marnou Blues.' Dance to the... how do you say... accordion. A good time. It's Mardy, and we all love every man."

"Will you stay and eat with us?" asked Ryan, hoping to find out something about the area.

"No. I regret not. But eat and drink. The beer is good. The wine..." he shrugged expressively "...not so good. The crawfish and red snapper are fresh as tomorrow's sunrise. Gumbo and collard greens. Rice in plenty. Eat well, mes amis. Later we talk."

The dishes steamed enticingly. Following Ryan's orders, they tried to eat different things, but it wasn't easy. Everything looked and tasted delicious. Finnegan, in particular, managed to tuck into sizable portions of almost every sumptuous course.

Ryan sampled the crab meat chowder and some trout cooked with spiced rice. The beer was flat and thin to his palate. But he was surprised to find such good eating, in such a wretchedly poor hamlet. He said as much to the Armorer.

"It's Mardy. Fat Tuesday. These aren't like them swampies. These are them Cajuns that Doc spoke of."

As they were wiping up the last smears of juice with fresh-baked cornbread, Ti Jean reappeared, smiling like an indulgent father to see how well they'd eaten.

He had obviously been drinking; the sour smell of home-brewed beer hung on his breath. The French accent was more noticeable than before, but he was still in a high good humor.

"Well eaten, mes copains," he slurred. "Now you may join us for our feasting of Mardy. Older even than the sky-bombs that changed the world. You said there had been trouble with the muties of deep-swamp. They will not come here."

While some of the women tidied the hut, clearing away dishes and beakers, Ti Jean told them a little about where they'd landed up.

"Lafayette's not far off. West Lowellton is closest suburb. There is fighting there."

"Fighting?" asked Ryan. "Between whom?"

"The baron and the renegades."

"What baron? Local lord of the ville?"

"No, Mr. Cawdor. More. Much more. Baron Tourment controls this whole... what is the word? Region? Oui, this region is his. We are his. Even the muties. We call them les morts-vivants."

"The living dead," said Doc Tanner quietly.

"We can control them. Use them as slaves. But they are dangerous. Not to be trusted. They live in hovels deep within the bayous. The lost ones. We guard against them. Now and then they take babies."

"To ransom? For money? They ask you for jack for the babies?" asked Finnegan.

УNon, non," Ti Jean replied, laughing. "They take the little ones to eat."

Ryan was interested in knowing more about the renegades. From his experience, any man who stood against a local baron was likely to be a better man than those who lived on their knees in virtual serfdom.

Ryan felt that Ti Jean was not being entirely open. To look at, he was the most hearty, trustworthy old-timer in many a country mile.

But Ryan intuitively felt that it would be better not to turn your back on Ti Jean.

His unhappiness was compounded by not being able to understand what the villagers of Moudongue were saying to each other.

Doc whispered that he could speak a little French, but the people hereabouts spoke a bastardized patois that he suspected was Creole French.

On the surface, all was well.

There was a long room at the far end of the hamlet where everyone had assembled, and were drinking, dancing and bellowing out incomprehensible lyrics at the top of their lungs. Ryan made sure that everyone in his group carried their blasters, but he was reassured to find that the men of the small ville had no guns, though everyone wore a long thin-bladed knife at the hip. The building shook to its rafters from the heavy stamping that passed for dancing in the bayous, to the accompaniment of a fiddle and an accordion; the latter was played by an immense fat man, his shirt sodden with sweat, toothless mouth open, revealing a tongue that was bizarrely forked.

"The Two-step de Bayou Teche" was followed by a driving song with a heavy beat, called "Un Autre Soir d'Ennui." Gradually the members of Ryan's group split apart as they entered into the spirit of the dance. Doc swung Lori away, his legs kicking sideways, knees cracking audibly, whooping his pleasure, the girl smiling like a pretty doll in his arms.

Finn was eyeing a skinny girl who looked to be around thirteen. She sashayed up to him and whispered something into his ear.

"Can I dance, Ryan?" he asked.

"Stick to dancing, Finn. Don't leave this room, or I'll slit your fat windpipe."

"Sure thing." The fat man grinned and went wheeling away after the sprite in her torn dress.

J.B. leaned against the bar, rubbing a pattern in the spilled beer with his forefinger. A huge woman, fully six and a half feet tall and weighing around 350 pounds, came over and tapped him on the shoulder.

"Dansez, mon petit?" she asked.

"What did?.." began the Armorer, but not even waiting for an answer, she jerked him forward, pressing his face into her rolling breasts, nearly knocking his hat off and sweeping him onto the crowded dance floor.

"Want to dance, lover?" asked Krysty.

"Better offer than J.B. got," he replied.

"Want it more formal?"

"Yeah," he said with a grin. The beer was loosening him up, and the food had been as good as any he'd eaten in... in a long time and a lot of miles.

"Sure." She composed herself, brushing back an errant strand of the fiery hair from her cheek. "Miss Krysty Wroth of the sanctuary of Harmony requests the pleasure of the next dance with Mr. Ryan Cawdor of... of where?"

The answer came in a crackling high-pitched giggle, from someone behind her.

"From the ville of Front Royal in the great state of Virginia, run by Baron Cawdor."

The blood drained from Ryan's face at the sudden voice.

Once, years back, a whore in a gaudy house somewhere near Denver had kicked him in the groin in an attempt to rob him. He'd broken her arm to teach her a lesson, but the shocking pain remained a powerful memory. It had felt like the breath had been sucked clean out of his body.

The feeling now was similar.

"What'd you say?" asked Krysty, turning on her heels.

"He's the youngest runt of Baron Cawdor. Richest and most powerful man east of OlТ Miss."

The speaker looked to be around three hundred years old, but was probably somewhere between sixty and ninety, with a filthy fringe of hair around a peeling scalp. He was not much over five feet tall, with a drooping shoulder that made him look like a hunchback. He was dressed in a variety of rags, held together with mud and spittle.

His eyes were bright as stars.

Ryan gaped at the hideous apparition. There was something vaguely familiar about the old, old man, but he, couldn't set his mind to it.

"You don't know me, Ryan Cawdor, do yer?"

The noise of the music and bellowed singing was so loud that nobody apart from Krysty and Ryan had heard the dotard's chattering, or shown the least interest. Instead they concentrated on having a good time.

Finn whirled past, hugging the young girl. On the far side of the hut J.B. was still almost suffocating in the embrace of the giantess. It might have been a trick of the flickering oil lamps, but Ryan could have sworn at that moment that the Armorer's feet were a good eighteen inches clear of the planking.

But all of that blurred compared to this totally unexpected confrontation. The Trader had known a little about Ryan's background. About the lost eye. About the emotional scars.

But even the Trader had only known the small glimpses of the past that Ryan allowed him.

Now this...

For a moment of scorching rage, Ryan was tempted to reach out and snap the scrawny neck of the diminutive old man to still his babble forever. But that would bring everyone in Moudongue down on them.

Oddly, it never occurred to him that the stranger might be chattering lies, might just have a snippet of useless information that meant anything or nothing. Somehow Ryan knew that this was the revelation that he'd feared for many long years.

"I think I know you. What's your name?"

The face contorted into an expression of vulpine cunning. The old man wiped a gnarled hand over the stub-bled cheeks.

"Like to know, wouldn't yer, Squire Cawdor?"

Ryan eased aside the shirt, showing the butt of the SIG-Sauer pistol. "Name?" he hissed.

"Ryan? What does..." began Krysty, recoiling as he turned to look at her, the one eye glowing with a manic light.

"Let it lay, woman," he snarled.

"I don't rightly recall what my true name is," muttered the old man, licking his lips and speaking so softly that Ryan had to lean close to catch the words. He winced at the stale alcohol on the breath.

"What do they call you?"

"Pecker."

"Pecker?"

"Yeah."

A vacuous smile slithered across the wrinkled cheeks. The old man touched his stomach with his right hand, smoothing the torn shirt. He moved his hand lower, fondling himself, demonstrating how he'd earned his nickname.

"You know Ryan?" asked Krysty.

"Sure. Knowed him. Years, back. He knowed me then. Don't know old Pecker now, do yer?"

The man put his head to one side like a bird sizing up a juicy morsel of food. Then Ryan remembered him Ч remembered his real name.

"Bochco. Harry Bodice. You were my... the dog-handler at the ville."

"Harry Bochco." The man tried the name out for size, running it around his mouth, repeating it and finally shaking his head in bewilderment. "Sometimes past I don't recall. You say it, then it was so. But I recall you."

"Then tell it," said Ryan wearily.

Against the noisy maelstrom of the Cajun dance, unheard by anyone else, the old man told it.