Red Equinox

Chapter Eighteen

Rick had recovered a little after a decent night's sleep. The twitching of the muscles in his arms and legs had eased, but he still complained of a pins-and-needles sensation in his fingers and toes. And as they ate sparingly of their shrinking food supplies, he was clearly having problems swallowing. Twice he gagged on the strips of dried meat, reaching for the canteen to wash the blockage out. He managed a weak smile.

"Sorry, guys. One of the problems with ALS is that it eventually hits all of your muscles. That includes the ones that do the swallowing for you." His voice was croaking, the words slightly slurred and stretched. Rick was also conscious of that. "Speaking gets tougher, too. Once I'm warmed up I shouldn't be so bad."

It would take some time for any of them to become warm. During the night the temperature had dropped sharply, and there was ice on the insides of the few unbroken windows in the house where they'd slept.

When Ryan looked out across the bleak suburbs of Moscow he saw a dusting of snow coating the surrounding roofs and chimneys. A small lake set among trees on the far side of the road was covered by a gray sheet of ice.

While Krysty and Rick sat talking quietly together, Ryan climbed up to the elegant staircase to the top floor of the house and found a small room that faced northeast. The door stuck and he had to set his shoulder to it. The lock snapped as it opened inward.

The corpse that lay on the narrow single bed had almost certainly been there for a hundred years. Untouched and undisturbed, the dry air within the room slowly turned the remains into a leathery, mummified length of brown sinews and pale bone.

Ryan wasn't particularly surprised or even particularly interested. There were millions of houses throughout Deathlands that had remained virtually undamaged by the nukings. The Russians had also been well supplied with neutron-type missiles, which slew the living, but left all structures standing. In his life Ryan had seen uncountable corpses like the one on the bed.

The room contained little: a table in one corner, with a wad of folded paper supporting a broken leg; a few dust-dry Russian paperback books that crumbled in Ryan's fingers when he tried to open them; a vase holding some fragile dried flowers; a wardrobe, door ajar, revealing the ragged remains of the dead person's clothes; and two pairs of boots on the floor. Ryan picked one up, trying to guess whether the corpse had been male or female, but the boots were of an indeterminate middle size. A single golden ring glistened in the gristly remains of the right ear, and a cheap metal digital watch circled the left wrist. The person had been wearing blue jeans and a shirt of some sort.

The skin had dried over the bones, tight, like stretched leather, and the skull lolled to the right, toward the door as if the body waited patiently for a visitor who was a little late.

On the floor on the far side of the bed was a white enamel bowl, stained and crusted, black around its bottom. Again, it was something Ryan Cawdor had seen many times before: a victim of neutron bombing, dying, guts torn, brain reeling, had crawled back to its lair to die. Retching, the victim had brought up blood and dark bile. He had been unable to eat, teeth loosened in bleeding gums; his sight had dimmed and his skin had erupted. The bodily functions all failed.

The empty round bottle of dark green glass clutched in the skeletal fingers and the water glass on the bedside table told their own story of a last and merciful release from the endless suffering.

Ryan looked out the window.

The ground sloped toward what Rick had said was the Moscow River. It marked the inner ring of the old city. Beyond that he could see a haze of smoke, and a variety of buildings looming through it. Ryan tried to open the window, managing only a couple of inches. But the fresh air cleared away the musty smell of old, dry death and replaced it with the scent of hundreds of wood fires as the citizens of the ville fought the last desperate troops of General Winter.

They left the security of the house and began to move slowly through the streets, making sure they were well wrapped in their furs. Everyone else out and about that morning was dressed the same.

Ryan's biggest worry was trying to figure out where they might find the tools they needed.

He'd warned Rick that if the right opportunity came along, the freezie would have to risk his fragile Russian and ask some questions.

By a stroke of good luck, their opportunity did come along in the shape of a stout, middle-aged woman pushing a squeaking baby carriage with odd-sized wheels. As she walked toward the three friends one of the wheels simply rolled off and the carriage lurched to one side, nearly tipping the red-faced infant onto the sidewalk.

Ryan snatched the wheel as it bowled past him, stepping in quickly and smiling reassuringly at the woman. He prayed to himself that Rick was in at his heels to pick up any linguistic fastballs. Ryan saw immediately that a split pin hadn't been inserted properly and it took only a few seconds to carry out the simple repair.

The woman said something to him, but he didn't look up from the job, whistling tunelessly to himself. He heard Rick's voice speaking slow, halting Russian.

Ryan straightened, steadying himself on the freezie's shoulder. "Ask where we can find tools," he hissed.

"Have done," was the reply. "Now shut the fuck up, Ryan."

Ryan did what the man said and stood patiently with Krysty, trying to prevent the woman from seeing his face too clearly without appearing to be actually hiding it.

Eventually, with much nodding and smiling, the woman went on her way, the infant in the carriage gazing solemnly at the three strangers. As soon as she was out of earshot, Ryan and Krysty began to pump the freezie.

"Well?"

"Yeah. Good."

"What'd she say?"

"How the weather had taken a turn for the much colder."

Krysty tapped him warningly on the cheek with her finger. "Come on, Rick. You know what we want to hear."

But he was determined to relish his moment. "She said what pretty hair you had, Krysty. Said she hadn't seen a color like that since..." He broke off when he saw the light of anger beginning to flare in Ryan's eye. "All right, all right. But she was amazed at your stopping to help her with that broken wheel. I said we were strangers on a visit to the great city of Moscow that our fathers and our fathers' fathers had told us so much about. That kind of stuff."

"Good," Ryan said.

"She started off on a long spiel about how in the old days, before what she called the long grayness, Moscow had been the center of the world. Mentioned Yanks and nukes. At least I think that was what she was saying, but she had a heavy accent and I didn't get all of the words. Seems the middle was wasted. Totally. Just rubble. She said rats lived there, but I think she meant something more than rats. And she bitched about gangs of kids running around for the Party and killing anyone they didn't like the look of."

"Yeah," Krysty said quietly.

"I kind of got the feeling that there's sec men all around, the nearer you get to the middle. She used a phrase that means something like thick as blowflies on horse shit. Then I said that the ville I came from needed some good tools, and I asked where we should go."

"And?.. Come on, Rick. She could whisp on us to the next sec man she sees. We gotta get moving away from here."

"Sure, sure. Don't get ink on your ceedee, Ryan. Just take it easy. She says there are places only a quarter mile or so from here. As far as I could understand she says there are places you can kind of hire tools, and one or two where you can buy them. But she said that the price was..." He stopped and rubbed his forehead. "She used some expression that meant, like the sun and the stars came cheaper than some of the prices they charged for these tools."

"Gaia! We already had trouble once over being jack-short," said Krysty. "Looks like we need to get us some rubles."

Ryan shook his head. "Difficult, lover. Way Rick tells it, we'll need some heavy jack. Have to thieve it. Dangerous. Might as well steal the tools. Mebbe less risk."

"Still could use some cash," Rick said. "Buy food and stuff."

Ryan nodded. "Yeah, makes sense. Find someone to roll for small change."

Rick grinned. "That's an expression I haven't heard in an age, Ryan. Small change. That current Deathlands slang?"

"No. Got it from an old song somebody on War Wag One used to sing. Song about someone called Small Change getting himself rained on with his own .38. I always liked it. Remembered the words. Found out they meant a handful of low-jack."

Krysty looked up and down the quiet side street. "Got a feeling, guys. Time to move on from here."

Around the next corner they walked straight into a large sec patrol, stopping everyone who tried to pass.

The woman with the baby carriage reported the three strangers as soon as she was able to find a public phone that hadn't malfunctioned. Fortunately for Ryan, Krysty and Rick, that took her nearly an hour. Then the baby was bawling so loudly that she had to stop and feed it before making the call to the headquarters of Internal Security.

By the time the message had filtered on through the various levels of bureaucratic incompetence and reached Major-Commissar Gregori Zimyanin on his crackling pocket radio, the three strangers were long gone and it was near evening.

Zimyanin wasn't pleased.

Ryan and Krysty played mute, shuffling their boots in the slush and mud, gazing vacantly around. Both had their trigger fingers locked in place on their blasters under the furs.

Even without Rick's whispered, worried translation, it was fairly obvious what was going on.

There had been no warning, just a line of men in dark maroon uniforms, some with rifles slung over their shoulders, blocking off the street. For a razored microsecond Ryan considered their chances of turning and making a break for it. His mind told him that he and Krysty could almost certainly have made it, with the maze of derelict buildings and overgrown gardens. In the same instant he knew that it would mean abandoning Rick to definite arrest.

"Cool. If we have to chill them, then we take out as many as we can," he had time to hiss to the other two.

But he quickly saw why they'd been stopped, why everyone out walking that morning along that particular street was being stopped. The melting snow had flooded storm culverts, and a wide drainage ditch had overflowed, leaving a spreading pool of filthy, freezing water seeping over the road. With the exception of the very elderly or young children, everyone was directed to a flat-topped wag piled high with shovels, picks and forks.

Nobody tried to resist the armed militia. They simply took the tools that they were given and plodded into the water, above the knees, and shoveled the icy sludge from the ditch. The three friends joined them.

"This is fucking crazy," Rick muttered. "This wasn't what I was supposed to do — ending my days in a shit-filled river in Moscow! Listen, Ryan. I tell you I can't do this. You and Krysty leave me. Go for it and have a dry martini in Harry's Bar up on Fourth Avenue."

"Keep your mouth shut and stay on the far side of me. Go through the motions of digging, and I'll try and cover for you. But don't try to talk, Rick."

Fortunately for all of them the work took only a few minutes.

A ragged cheer went up as a skinny young woman heaved out a length of wire netting, tangled with weeds and torn plastic. Immediately there was a bubbling surge of water, and everyone scrambled hastily out of the ditch. Krysty grabbed Rick's arm and hauled him with her, slipping in the stinking mud and nearly falling. Once the blockage was cleared, the water drained away quickly, seeping off the road. Everyone shuffled to the wag and returned their shovels, nodding solemnly to one another. The sec men were smiling, one of them kissing the skinny woman on both cheeks and slapping her on the shoulders. A sour-faced young officer beckoned her over and counted out a number of silver and copper coins into her hand. The rest of the crowd looked enviously at her reward.

She set off alone, down a winding side street. Ryan beckoned to the other two. "There goes our jack. Come on."

The russian woman never knew what hit her. Krysty walked quickly past, overtaking her, then turned suddenly with a bright and friendly smile. The girl returned her smile, head slightly to one side as she waited to see what Krysty wanted.

Moving soft as a midnight shadow, Ryan glanced around once, making sure the road was deserted. He stepped in and hit her a clubbing blow with the edge of his clenched fist, just beneath the left ear. He caught her as she dropped like a rock to the uneven sidewalk.

"Jesus, Ryan!" Rick protested. "You really have to?.."

"Yes, friend," Ryan snarled, suddenly angered. "Yeah, I did have to."

"She'll be fine in a few minutes," Krysty said reassuringly. "Ache in the head and empty in the pockets. Better than being dead."

Rick didn't reply. He hobbled down the street, leaning on his bamboo cane, not looking back at the other two.

"It's like being with a dumb kid," Ryan muttered. "A big dumb kid."

Zimyanin returned to his office and worked late that afternoon. Reports of street muggings rarely came to his desk, since they were a matter for Highway Incidents. But an alert officer had seen Zimyanin's circulated memo and had phoned in the report.

"How pleasant to again make your acquaintance," the pockmarked man said, tugging absently at his drooping mustache. He shook his head as he returned The English Tongue for the Benefit of the Russian Gentleman Abroadto his drawer.

The assailants were "a mean-looking man, with only one eye, a tall, attractive woman with very red hair and a shambling, crippled man wearing thick eyeglasses." They were the same people he was seeking. Now they were closer to the sensitive center of the ville.