Forbidden Trespass

His nephew, Zedd, who had tan, freckled skin and rusty, tightly curled hair, emerged through the door.

“Looks like Layna and Mord, Unk,” he said.

“Ugh,” Nancy said. She turned away. She was hard as nails about most things, but had a squeamish touch. Her cousin and employer, Conn, respected that in her; it made her seem more human.

“How do they look?” Conn asked, despite his cousin’s visible discomfort.

Zedd showed pressed-together teeth. They were white and mostly even. Patriarch Tarley enforced hygiene in his clan with an iron hand, despite his normally easygoing ways. He had a rep for being tough when it counted.

“Like you’d expect,” Nancy said, as if she were gritting her teeth to hold in puke. Evidently she was hoping to stave off further details.

If so, she hoped in vain.

“Not really,” Zedd said. “Chills ain’t burned so much as, well, kinda roasted. And not really all over, you know?”

Conn kept his gaze steady on the young man as his cousin loudly lost her battle against throwing her guts up. “And they don’t look et so much as busted all to nuke. Like they got hacked with an ax. Heads’re both busted wide-open, and don’t look as if their brains swole from the heat and popped through the skulls like taters in the oven.”

“That’s enough details right there, Zedd,” Tarley said.

The young man shrugged.

“I was only tryin’—”

“Ace. Thanks. Enough.”

Nancy straightened, grunting and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The group shifted upwind of the fresh pool of barf in the tramped-earth yard.

“Doesn’t that support Wymie’s claims?” she asked, all business once again. “I mean, would the weird fanged monsters the outlanders claim to’ve seen have done somethin’ like that? Whacked them with an ax?”

Tarley shrugged. “Why not?”

“Truth,” Conn said. “We don’t know what these things’d do. We don’t know if they’re even real. It’s a matter on which I’m far from makin’ up my mind.”

“But what difference does it make, anyway, Mathus?” Nancy asked. “They’re strangers. Outlanders. Why are you botherin’ to stick up for them?”

“Fairness?” Tarley suggested. “Justice?”

Nancy scoffed. “How many magazines do them things load?”

“More than you might think,” Tarley said stolidly.

“A reputation for fairness is part of my stock in trade,” Conn reminded his assistant. “And let’s not forget that dealin’ with these rough-lookin’ outlanders has been highly profitable. We can resell the scavvy we get from them to folks who want it most at considerable markup, and everybody’s happy. Or do you want to go scout out their node and then dig scavvy yourself?”

She shook her head. “I’m not the outdoor type, boss,” she said. “You know that. Had folks out looking, though.”

“No luck, however,” Conn said.

“No. They cover their tracks triple well.” She frowned. “A suspicious mind might judge that as pointin’ to them, too.”

“A suspicious mind judges everythin’ as pointin’ to those it suspects,” Conn pointed out.

“Wymie’s on a rampage,” Tarley said thoughtfully. “She ain’t in a frame of mind to listen to reason. She could cause a power of mischief, it seems to me.”

“Then seriously, boss,” Nancy said. “Why not just throw the strangers to Wymie like a bone to a beggin’ dog? Sure, justice, profit, all those good things. But if it gets her to calm the rad-dust down, mightn’t that work out more profitable in the long run?”

Conn chuckled. His cousin had a way of reminding him exactly why he’d hired her, and without any sign of intent. Just by doing…what he’d hired her to: minding the bottom line.

But this time he still thought she’d made a rare mistake in her tallying.

“She’s already stirred up a mob,” he said. “That kind of thing is like a shaken-up jar full of wasps. It’s hard to put back once you take the lid off.”

“And what if she’s wrong?” Tarley asked. “Then chillin’ the outlanders will leave the real murderers still loose. And murderin’ more, unless I miss my guess.”

“That’s what I fear,” Conn admitted.

He raised his voice and called to the rest of the party, “Any sign of tracks anywhere?”

“Nary a scrap, Mr. Conn,” Edmun replied. “Just the prints Wymie made when she got onto the trail toward town.”

Edmun was an indistinct blond man somewhere in his thirties, bland as tepid water, but with a reputation for steadiness, which made it a matter of curiosity to Conn why he had first taken up Wymie’s cause—when she’d carried her dreadful burden toward Stenson’s Creek—and then promptly fallen away when Conn raised the voice of reason.

Conn didn’t hold that highly by his own powers of persuasion. He was a skilled bargainer, with a lifetime of experience in dealing with everyone from desperate dirt farmers to booze- and crank-fueled coldhearts one twitch away from a chilling frenzy. Yet he’d always found Edmun Cowil and his like the hardest to move, once they got set in a groove.

There was something working here. It tickled the underside of his brain like gaudy-slut fingernails along the underside of his ball sack—though that was a pleasure he had long chosen to deny himself, as it was fundamentally bad business.

But no time for that now.

“Yard’s hard-packed and sun-set hard as brick,” Tarley said, taking a blue handkerchief from a pocket of his overalls and dabbing at his broad mocha forehead, where sweat ran out from beneath the brim of his black hat. Conn wasn’t sure what good the rag would do him at this point. It was long since soaked sopping from earlier duty. But the patriarch seemed to derive some kind of comfort from it.

“Found something, Unk,” Zedd called from in between the charred and mostly roofless stone walls. He appeared in the doorway holding an ax. Its head was covered in smoke and crusted crud. Its haft showed charring on what Conn reckoned had been the uppermost surface as it lay on its side and the house burned down toward it. But it looked as if it’d be serviceable enough, once it got cleaned up.

“Wonder why Wymie would leave her grandpappy’s ax,” Nancy said. “She treasured that dang thing.”

“Even though the haft has been replaced a dozen times and the head twice,” Tarley said with a chuckle for the hoary old joke. Although truth told, it likely had more than a scrap of truth, if it wasn’t the literal thing.

Conn shrugged. “Reckon she had to leave in a hurry, whether the marauders fired the place, or she set it alight to trap them.

“Reckon we’ll never know what really happened here. Oh, well. World’s full of stuff I’ll never know. Best get back to Widow Oakey’s place, now, and see what kind of mischief Wymie’s gettin’ up to in this bright new day.”

* * *

THE “CROWD” WIDOW OAKEY had spoken of turned out to consist of about half a dozen, Sinkhole residents and people from the surrounding countryside. They included a couple who had joined her sorrowful procession the night before, like Walter John and Burny Stoops, who had followed Conn’s orders to carry her sister to the coffin-maker’s place.

With a shock she realized she’d still have to go talk to him, to Sam, about arrangements for Blinda, and her ma, for that matter.

Mord Pascoe could lie out to feed the wolves and coyotes, as far as she was concerned. Unless the bastard had burned too far to carbon for even the likes of them to stomach. She wished he could’ve felt the flames that had consumed most of all she had held dear. But a person in her circumstances had to make do…

She swayed.