Devil's Vortex

“Compared to what?”

Mildred laughed, but then she realized the girl had spoken in her usual flat-serious tone. Maybe she hadn’t intended a joke. Maybe she was asking seriously.

Mildred felt guilty.

“Know where those stickies came from?” J.B. called to her from the tail end of their procession.

“No. I heard rumors about them around the farm. Stories about people disappearing—travelers, folks out working alone late at night or hunting. Even once or twice about them attacking a few isolated places north of there. Everybody’s scared of them—”

“Highly sensible,” Doc said from his own position behind Ricky and Ryan in front of the girl. As usual Jak was scouting the terrain ahead.

“But nobody took them none too serious as a threat to them, you know?”

“I wonder why they chose to attack when they did,” Doc asked, “and in such force?”

“Who knows why stickies do what they do?” Mildred queried.

“Nevertheless,” he said, unfazed, “it might benefit the chances of our own survival if we could obtain some insight into the workings of their minds. Dark and twisted though they are.”

“I agree with you, Doc,” Ryan said. He was carrying his Steyr Scout cradled in arms crossed across his chest. “Knowing how your enemy thinks can be half the battle or more.”

“I wish I could help you.” Mariah almost mumbled the words. She seemed to be, on the one hand, desperate to justify her accompanying the others in any way she could and, on the other, terrified by Ryan.

“Don’t mind our esteemed leader, Mr. Gruff,” Mildred told the girl. “He’s always that way before he gets his morning coffee.”

That got Mildred a glance and a perplexed look over Mariah’s shoulder, which turned to a look of near panic when the others burst out laughing. Even Ryan mustered a brief chuckle.

“When’s the last time we had real coffee, do you reckon, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

Ryan rubbed his chin.

“A few weeks for sure, the time we traded a homie blaster for a dozen old MRE packs.”

“She did report stickie attacks coming out of somewhere north of where we found her,” J.B. said. “Reckon that’s a good clue.”

“Of somewhere to stay away from,” Mildred said.

“That’s the truth,” Krysty stated.

“So you’re sure you got no idea why they attacked the Baylah farm?” Ryan asked. “Or why they wound up leaving you alone?”

“No, sir,” Mariah said.

He sighed, looking skeptical.

“If that man we shot went berserk with his ax and chilled all the stickies,” Krysty said, “that would explain why Mariah was left unharmed.”

Ryan frowned but said nothing. He grunted and turned away.

For her part, Mildred was far from sure that one man with an ax, no matter how strong and crazy he might be, could do the kind of damage and sheer amount of it they’d seen.

But she was in no mood to gratify Ryan by feeding his paranoia just now. She focused on putting one boot in front of the other.

Chapter Five (#ulink_33676147-88e2-5efb-ad5e-53431f4dcd07)

Hamarsville was a curious sight: a log palisade made out of straight, peeled tree trunks, sticking up out of a meadow nestled among pine-wooded heights on the northeast fringes of the Black Hills. The most prominent features inside the expansive wall, visible to Ryan from the brush on a ridgetop to the south and east from which the companions were scoping the ville, included a watchtower, a lot of bark-shingled roofs and prominent clouds of white steam and darker smoke arising from various chimneys.

What they were making in that stockade was apparent by a light westerly undulating breeze over the low mountain range.

“Turpentiners,” Mildred said from Ryan’s side, sniffing at the air.

“That’s right,” Mariah stated. She sounded almost eager, which even Ryan acknowledged was more emotion than she’d showed over the three days since they’d picked her up at the massacre site. “Mostly distill pine oil. Old Paw Baylah said they been at it a couple generations.”

“It is a sizable settlement,” Doc observed. “And just from what these old eyes can observe at this remove, a relatively prosperous one.”

“Yeah,” J.B. said, pushing his fedora back on his head. He was hunkered down to Ryan’s right. “Looks like it must run two hundred people. Mebbe more.”

Ryan raised his recently acquired World War II–era field glasses to his eye. It was something of an affectation for him to carry them, big and rather bulky as they were, and built specifically for the one thing he didn’t have—binocular vision—but they had triple-good optics. Besides, using the low-powered Leopold sight on his Scout longblaster to scope a place out was considered a mighty unfriendly act.

Although they were well concealed up here in the scrub—and Ryan had known better than to let sunlight reflect off the object lens of a scope to heliograph his position to potential enemies since he was a sprat—he avoided doing it on principle when there was reason to suspect the people under observation weren’t hostile.

Ryan heard a rustling sound from his left as he focused the binocs. It was Jak. The fact Ryan or any of them had heard the albino meant he had deliberately made the noise so as not to startle his friends when they were already on yellow alert, which they customarily were this close to a settlement.

“Wag coming,” the scout announced softly. “Ox-drawn. Driver and lever-gun guard.”

It was a long speech for the slight young man and one that came perilously close to delivering a second full sentence on top of his opening statement. But it was all potentially important information.

“Ace,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”

He didn’t need to be told that Jak assessed the approaching wag as posing little threat any more than he had to be told that Jak, having delivered his information, had faded instantly back into the wilds around them. Had he detected even a whiff of danger he would have said that straight off. Ryan had spent years in the employ of the enigmatic man known as the Trader, in whose company he had met J.B. He knew full well that the last thing a pair of wag drivers would be doing would be looking to start trouble. Their livelihoods—and lives—depended on avoiding as much of that commodity as they could.

The road ran to their right, along the stream that passed directly through the ville and out under the log-fort walls. The wag in question not being visible yet, Ryan went ahead and took a leisurely look over the ville.

It confirmed Doc’s and J.B.’s assessments, as well as his own: a big place, with sturdy defenses and well-built structures. It was the kind of place to attract plenty of unfriendly attention. And because it had clearly been there a spell, just the way Mariah had said, the inhabitants knew how to repel unwanted attention. When he raised his glasses to the watchtower, he saw a sentry, clearly female despite the shade the roof gave from the afternoon sun, leveling a scoped longblaster and pointing it at the approaching wag. The wagoneers likely recognized that having a bead drawn on them was just a necessary precaution.

The vehicle appeared, rolling in ruts worn in the hard earth by years of previous traffic. With less interest in commerce than he had in the back side of the moon, Jak had neglected to mention whether it was laden or not. But in fact it carried a load of crates and bags woven of some rough fabric, likely hemp, the sorts of things traders might be expected to carry.

The gate, which was also constructed of peeled logs like the surrounding walls, was drawn to the right to open the way for the wag. It rolled inside the stockade without apparent challenge or formality.

“How do they take to strangers showing up on their doorstep?” Ryan asked Mariah as he handed the binocs to J.B.

“It happens all the time,” the girl said. “Don’t cause them any fuss at all. They take in a lot of jack through their gaudy, which Baron Hamar owns, and the boarding house, which is run by his sister, Agnes.”

“What happens if their visitors misbehave?” Ryan asked.

“They usually leave their chills strung up outside the walls,” Mariah said without inflection. “As a warning to others. Till they start to smell bad anyway. Leastways, that’s what Chad Baylah said. He was the youngest, a few years older than me, and not much given to fibbing, for fear of his maw.”

J.B. halted in the act of raising the binocs to his face. He looked at Ryan, who shrugged.