Playfair's Axiom

“No,” Ryan said. “We don’t. C’mon, people, let’s get him up. We got places to go and people to meet.”

Chapter Six

They continued south onto what looked like a largely intact highway that Mildred, who had spent some time in predark St. Louis, identified as Interstate 55, to make their way through a complicated tangle of broken concrete and twisted rail iron, fanged by nasty bent spikes of rust-red rebar. Evidently it was a collapsed bridge. A railroad-highway combo, by the looks.

No sooner were they past the collapsed ruins than Tully led the party down the brushy bank to the surface street that ran alongside the old highway. They jumped a little stream in the ditch at the bottom. Because there was just no way four people could cross it carrying the unconscious Armorer, and because the locals seemed uninclined to wade this soon after an acid downpour, Ryan draped J.B.’s limp form over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Everybody else hopped easily across. Burdened as he was Ryan didn’t quite make it cleanly. The dirt gave way under his left foot. It slipped and went into the water to the ankle. Though he jumped clear as if J.B. suddenly weighed no more than dandelion fluff, Ryan felt a sting from the diluted acid in the little stream.

Krysty and Doc relieved Ryan of his burden. Tully tossed him a water bottle. “Best rinse that off before we go on,” he said. “Just in case.”

Ryan cocked a brow over his good eye. “Don’t sweat it,” Tully said. “We’re not far from the ville. If we’re not inside the perimeter inside half an hour, I likely won’t be needing the water anyhow.”

Ryan splashed water over his ankle and boot. It probably didn’t do much good. It made him feel better, though. He tossed the bottle back to the patrol leader, who caught it with a grin.

“Why not use highway?” Jak asked as they started moving west between a stand of woods along the partially elevated, partially fallen-in right of way.

“Too exposed,” Tully said. “Sometimes we get snipers in the rubble.”

“And there’s stickies, in those drowned warehouses and factories other side of the Interstate,” another man said.

“Highway does get used by people passing through, Randall,” Tully said. “Long-range traders and such.”

“Things travel that road no human should meet or get to know anything about,” a black-haired man with drawn gray-stubbled cheeks said.

“That’s only by night,” Tully said. “Anyway it’s all superstition. Probably.”

“I hear the screams, Tully. Can’t hardly sleep none, sometimes.”

“That’s just stickies roasting rivermen or scavvies they caught,” Randall said.

The companions found themselves toting the unconscious J.B. along a wide street. The rain, having seemingly washed away the remnants of the toxic rain, had stopped quickly. The air smelled fresh. Overhead the clouds had taken on the colors of an old bruise, gray and green and brown, an improvement over the tortured, boiling orange of not so many minutes before.

They passed beneath standing bridges where a railroad line swung in from the northwest to join a highway that crossed their route. A little farther south the highway they paralleled swung off west. Walking under an intact under-pass, their captors went on triple alert. The guy who didn’t sleep so well jumped when a pigeon boomed out from high up the embankment near the overhead and flapped out into the milky sunlight. His buddies laughed at him.

When the group emerged, the clouds were breaking up. Ryan blinked his good eye at the sight. As hot as it was, without clouds to filter the sun the day would only get hotter. And J.B. wasn’t getting any lighter.

“How are you holding up?” he asked the others.

“Don’t worry about us,” Krysty said. “We’ll do what we have to do.”

He ginned at her. “Like always.”

“Not much farther to go, anyway,” Tully said. “We’ll see about getting you some wheels for your friend when we reach the gates. We got people who can tend to him. Ace healer name of Strode.”

Lonny muttered something about mollycoddling no-account outlanders. His leader ignored him. Though Tully acted like a good guy—and Ryan knew too well it could all be an act—and seemed to have his shit pretty much in one sock as a leader, he also seemed to allow the bulky brown-haired man an unusual amount of slack. There had to be some link here Ryan didn’t see.

No way to scope it now, nor to know if the fact, if fact it was, had any use to him and his friends in their current predicament. Ryan filed it away and let it go.

Ryan saw Mildred’s shoulders and upper back tense. She was a physician, a fully qualified preskydark doctor who tended to think not too much of what passed for doctors these days. Truth be told, she had met several healers whom she had to admit were truly gifted.

But whether it was more prudence than the freezie woman usually showed, or simple fatigue, she didn’t make a point of the fact she could tend to J.B. as well as any and better than most. Besides which, if Soulard were the relatively large and prosperous ville a twelve-man patrol wearing reasonably clean outfits suggested, they probably had medical facilities better than the Deathlands standard.

Tully led them down the center of the wide street. His troops stayed crisply alert. Here, anyway, they seemed to be more worried about jump-out-from-cover attacks than coming under long-range aimed fire. More and more of the structures they passed were intact, which shortened potential fields of fire and favored blitz-style ambush.

“Wonder why these littler buildings held up so much better than the skyscrapers,” Mildred said. Ryan was mildly surprised she had breath to talk.

It was more of a surprise when Doc answered; even after all their association Ryan had a tendency to underestimate his physical hardiness.

“Smaller surface areas,” he said. “Being more compact, they proved more resistant to the blasts. The bigger buildings provided greater surfaces for the shock waves to push against.”

As they marched through the ruins between increasingly intact-appearing structures, in the growing sunlight Ryan realized the black kid, McCoy, was no longer with them. None of the others looked concerned—about the youth’s absence, anyway. Even here in what they evidently considered potentially hostile ground nobody seemed to assume he’d been snatched by someone. Or even wandered away into danger.

So Tully sent him ahead to spread the word they were coming, Ryan thought. He’d probably use some secret bolthole. Mebbe even one only a kid knew about, or could even get through. The patrol leader had to have spoken quietly to the kid when Ryan wasn’t looking, or even flashed him an arranged signal. Or, hell, for all he knew it was standard operating procedure.

They were working in a dangerous information vacuum here. The bitch was, even though their escorts were proving neither hostile nor closemouthed—except mebbe the lout, Lonny—they didn’t seem inclined to small talk right now. Ryan wasn’t about to distract them, if they thought there was something here to look out for.

And anyway, he wasn’t sure himself where Mildred and Doc found the energy for chitchat. He sure didn’t have much to spare, right now.

“Biggest danger here is stickies,” Randall said. “They infest the flooded warehouses and like to hunt up here from time to time. Plus sometimes scavvies think they can snag an easy score this close to a ville.”

“There’s also people from Breweryville,” said Dowd, the haunted-looking dude who couldn’t sleep. “They might attack us if they come upon us.”

“Oh, crap,” Randall said. “They can be dicks. But they’re not coldhearts.”

“Brother Joseph says they lack a true sense of community.”

“Look alive, guys,” Tully said hastily. “We don’t want to get too caught up talking and wind up crawling with stickies.”

That drove a shudder through everybody, companions and captors alike. There were numerous varieties of the needle-toothed mutants with the sucker pads on their hands and feet that could strip skin from meat and meat from bone. Most of them shared a love for human flesh, cruelty and fire, not necessarily in that order. Despite their pyrophilia they often colonized near bodies of water, and seemed to take to the water well.

Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the patrol leader had once again steered talk clear of the subject of Brother Joseph. Whomever he may be.

They came to a corner where a wire fence stretched down the street ahead of them and down the street west, backed by dense thorny hedges and topped with coils of razor wire that gleamed in the sun despite being pitted and stained by the acid rains.

“Soulardville,” Tully said with evident pride.

“Didn’t that used to be the farmers’ market?” Mildred asked. “Those long shedlike roofs inside the perimeter?”

“Uh-huh,” the patrol leader said, nodding his ginger head. “It’s a farming-and-gardening center now. Our market’s more centrally located.”

“What’d you say your ville’s name was again?” Ryan asked.

“Soulard,” Tully said.

Doc perked up. “‘Soulard,’” he said. “Why, bless my soul, but unless I misremember, that means ‘drunkard’ in French.”

Tully shrugged. “Mebbe so, some time past. Sure not now.”