Читать книгу Arcadian's Asylum - James Axler - Страница 11

As they fell in with the black-clad sec men, Ryan’s group had a lot to ponder. It had been couched in terms that were reasonable, but they all knew that resistance would have been met with a firefight. Arcadian wanted them, for reasons as yet unknown. If he wanted them to work for him willingly, he was showing a real lack of understanding. His behavior had done nothing less than to put them on triple red, with the utmost suspicion. If he wanted to just use them, regardless of whether or not they wished to acquiesce, then he was cutting them too much slack.

For, as they were escorted on foot through the outlying districts of the ville, there was much to observe and absorb for possible future use.

The sec team that escorted them was very careful about its chosen route. Instead of traveling in what seemed a direct route to the center of the ville, they took what appeared to be meaningless detours. Straight roads would be ignored in favor of sudden sharp turns to the left or right. Obviously, that was to keep them within a sector they had already seen, and not cross some kind of line. For there wasn’t a single one of them who had any doubt that Arcady was a ville of sharply differing sectors.

The Arcady they had seen when with Trader Toms was one of wealth and freedom. The center sections of the ville were filled with trade stores, craftsmen and bars providing brew and gaudys. The relative financial well-being of a ville could always be determined by the number and quality of those. The people they had met had been free to go about their business unimpeded. The sec had been present, but not overbearing—they had only stepped in when trouble flared because of arguments caused by brew or jack. The buildings had been old, for the most part obviously built by the founders of the ville or adapted from the main street and surrounding area of the old predark town that they had chosen to use as their shell, but there had been evidence of ongoing maintenance and new building that gave work to the people of the ville, and were again proof of its growing affluence.

None of which tallied with the run-down shanty ville full of tumbledown shacks that looked like their dwellers paid them no heed. For most of their winding trek through the outer reaches of the ville, this was all they had seen. Row upon row of virtually derelict shacks, but none that were empty. All showed signs of habitation, and by people very like those they had seen on their entry to the ville.

As they passed through the phalanx of sec men, they could see blank, drooling faces staring out at them. The people were fat, dirty, and even before you could see them the smell of their unwashed bodies assailed the senses. Some of them—the braver specimens—came outside their huts or stood in the doorways, watching or, if they felt particularly courageous, shouting at the newcomers in slurred, brain-numbed voices that were sometimes difficult to understand.

And yet these were people with running water and sanitation. Even the most advanced of villes that the companions had seen on their many journeys across the ravaged lands of the post-nukecaust America had been hard-pushed to have a sanitation and water system that came anywhere near aping that of the days before skydark. There had been some rich or advanced villes that had reconstructed pumping stations, and used old pipes to try to reconstruct that aspect of predark life. But never anything that had seemed to be as good as the systems they were familiar with from the many redoubts they had used during their journeys.