Читать книгу Playfair's Axiom - James Axler - Страница 12

They traveled south. Tully led them out of the ruined building into the street, which was relatively unobstructed there. They made for the shelter of an intact section of overpass. It should protect them from the acid rain, if the wind didn’t blow too hard.

The Armorer was a small man and not carrying any excess flesh. He was all bone and wiry muscle. Ryan was surprised by how heavy his friend actually was.

Their captors had shouldered the companions’ packs. Ryan guessed that had more to do with preventing them from whipping out any nasty hidden surprises than a desire to lighten the loads of four people carrying their wounded friend.

He felt impacts on the back of his shirt and head. He heard a frying-egg sound and smelled a nasty stench like burning hair as the concentrated acid in the rain dissolved its proteins.

J.B.’s head hung between Ryan and Krysty. He moaned as an acid drop hit his cheek, clinging and burning like napalm.

“Run!” Ryan shouted. He didn’t care what their captors had to say about it. If they decided their prisoners were making a break for it and chilled them, it was an easier death than acid.

But the dozen or so locals were concentrating on not getting dissolved themselves. Those who could held bits of clothing over their heads for cover, or yanked their shirts over their heads. The angry welts some of them sported on their backs showed they’d made this particular unpleasant choice before.

The four friends carrying J.B. were already straining. But as the rain began to sting like wasps they accelerated anyway. They were used to walking and even running long distances. But each of them, Ryan realized, had been holding back out of concern for jostling J.B.

Now that was forgotten. As always, the demands of survival overrode everything else. They ran flat out, and the rain hissed in the white-gray dust that lay on the frost-heaved asphalt beneath their feet.

Toughened as they were, their chests were working like bellows when the section of highway a hundred feet over their heads cut off the rain as if flipping a switch.

They staggered a few paces and then laid J.B. beside a thick concrete support pillar as near the middle of the span as possible. Then they collapsed around him, gasping like so many beached Sippi giant catfish.

Around them their captors took up a defensive perimeter. Some splashed water from canteens on their comrades to wash away acid. The rain pattered hard on the blacktop around them and the overhead pass. It raised a stinging stink that made Ryan’s eye water.

A couple of blocks north the wounded scavvies who’d been left behind by their bugging-out pals were screaming. It was surprisingly loud at this distance. Or maybe, not so surprising.

Ryan tuned it out. He’d heard people dying in unspeakable agony before. It wasn’t as if he liked those bastards melting alive out there.

Mildred was on her knees cradling J.B.’s head on her thigh. She was still a pro; though she stroked his wispy brown hair tenderly she didn’t waste breath begging him to speak to her.

“How’s he look?” Ryan asked, taking a pull from the canteen at his waist.

She shook her head. “Not good,” she said. “But if he’s got internal bleeding he’s not showing any sign it’s gotten worse from being jogged around like a bag of mail.”

“Not bubbling out nose or mouth,” said Jak, who squatted nearby, panting like the bipedal white wolf he resembled. “Good sign.”

The skin went tight at the corners of Mildred’s eyes and mouth. Then she forced herself to relax. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”

“So who are you?” Ryan said as the tall patrol leader approached. It suddenly struck him: what he’d taken for unhealthy pallor was clean skin. These folk were well-scrubbed by usual ville standards, even after however many hours on patrol.

“Aren’t you getting things backward?” Tully said. “We got the blasters. Who the hell are you?”

Ryan shook his head. “Just folks passing through,” he said with unfeigned weariness. “My name’s Ryan. The woman here’s Krysty. The other’s our healer, Mildred. The sawed-off runt she’s tending to’s named J.B. Old guy’s Doc and the teenager’s Jak.”

“Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your service,” Doc said. He managed to make his introduction sound grand despite the fact he was sitting on his bony old ass on an ancient weed-cracked highway. He gestured with his ebony walking stick. Ryan was startled to see their captors had allowed him to keep it, apparently presuming he needed it to walk. None of them seemed to have noticed the fact he’d stuck it through his belt to help carry J.B.

So we’re not completely disarmed after all, Ryan thought with a slight smile. Not as if it does us any damn good. The fact that only a few of the patrol carried modern blasters didn’t fool him. A black-powder blaster would chill a person dead as any machine gun. And so would a crossbow bolt.

“Where’d you come from?” the tall ginger-haired man asked, putting his back to a support pillar and sliding to sit. “’Cross the river?”

Ryan shook his head. “North,” he said. It was true, as far as it went. That was the easiest lie—true but for the bits it left out.

Tully raised a brow. “That’s a triple-hard road, friend,” he said. “Leads right through cannies and coldhearts swarming like angry wasps.”

“We noticed,” Mildred said.

“Now would you mind telling us who you are?” Ryan said.

“Shouldn’t we make ’em stop talking, Tully?” a black kid with a single-shot black-powder longblaster asked. He looked to be no more than twelve and his eyes were saucer-large with excitement.

“Why’d we want to do a thing like that, McCoy?” the leader asked laconically.

“Well. Um.” Evidently McCoy hadn’t thought that far ahead. But he was game, and resourceful. “Mebbe they’ll plot their escape.”

“Why, then, you’ll just shoot them dead with that big scary blaster of yours, won’t you, McCoy?” Tully said. “Speaking of which, you did remember to reload that smokepole, right?”

The youngster puffed himself up. “O’ course! What do you think I am?”

“A greenie on your first patrol outside the wire,” Tully said. “You put a fresh cap on, too?”

“Well, don’t be a—Oh. Um, wait.” He fumbled at a pouch at his waist. “Wait one.”

Turning his head so the kid wouldn’t see him smile, the patrol leader turned back to Ryan. “To answer your question, we come from a ville called Soulard. A mile or so south of here, along the old highway. Peaceful place.”

“Why did you kidnap us, then?” Krysty asked.

He smiled. “Looks to me like we rescued you.”

“Looks to me like you captured us,” Ryan said. “Saving us for the stewpot?”

“What, you think we’re fuckin’ cannies?” shouted the man who’d mishandled Ryan’s longblaster earlier. He wore a T-shirt with even the brief arms torn off to reveal bulky biceps and triceps. Though he looked barely in his twenties, he was a big old slab of beef, with a blunt face fronted by a mashed tuber of a nose and a couple of brown eyes narrowed with angry suspicion. The sides and back of his head were shaved up to a clump of brown hair that stirred in the acid-tangy breeze.

“Ease off, Lonny,” the ginger-haired man said coolly. “They got a right to be a bit testy. I would be, in their circumstances.”

“But they run with a mutie!” He waved a hamhock of a hand toward Jak. “Look at him, white as clean snow and rat-red eyes!”

“I’m no mutie!” Jak shouted, spittle flying from his pale lips.

“He’s an albino,” Ryan said. “It’s a natural condition, if a rare one. He’s no mutie.”

“Bullshit,” Lonny said. Jak’s red eyes flamed. He looked likely to spring for Lonny’s throat, despite the huge disparity in size.

“Lonny!” The patrol leader didn’t stir, but his voice cracked like a whip. “Back off. We need to talk to these people. Brother Joseph will figure out what to do with them.”

Lonny spit in the pale grass that grew in the shade of the overpass. “Brother Joseph.”

“Enough, Lonny. We don’t need to be airing our dirty laundry in front of strangers, either.”

But Jak’s hot blood was up. “How we know they not cannies?”

“Lord, lad,” Doc murmured. “Let it go.”

“Look at them,” Mildred said. “Ever see cannies look that healthy?”

Jak frowned. His white teeth made paler dimples in his lower lip. “No,” he admitted after a moment.

“Me neither, now that she mentions it,” Ryan said. “All right. Truce. We might as well go along with these people, even laying aside they got the drop on us. We already know this ain’t a healthy vicinity to wander at random.”

“No kidding,” McCoy said. “You’re triple-lucky you didn’t stir up a pocket of serious rad-death emitters. That’s worse than getting eaten by cannies, any day! The baron, he—”

“McCoy,” Tully said sharply, but nowhere near as sharply as he’d spoken to the beefy Lonny. The black kid shut his mouth and swallowed hard. Tully looked back to Ryan.

“Let’s just say you seem a bit too dangerous to allow to wander around freely kicking over hornets’ nests. We have to live here.”

“What if we tell you we don’t mean you any harm or trouble?”

“I’d say evidence suggests otherwise. Least so far as trouble’s concerned. And I can tell you plain, you’ll have every chance to state your case once we get back safe to our ville. Which is far from certain yet, so less talking, please. None of us wants to draw more hassles.”

“People want avoid trouble bad,” Jak grumbled, indicating their captors with a nod of his head.

“If we tried a little harder to skip trouble,” Krysty said, “we might be a whole lot happier.”

“Only a droolie looks for more trouble than looks for him,” Ryan replied.

“What does that make us?” Mildred asked.

“People a triple load of trouble looks for. Now shut it.”

Mildred looked miffed, but she pressed her lips tight.

Tully slapped his hands on his lean thighs and stood. “That’s clean rain falling now,” he said. “We can move.”

Ryan’s nose had already told him that the lethal acid downpour had halted. The sound of drops falling on the asphalt-covered overpass and the cracked pavement beyond its shelter didn’t change.

“Are you quite certain about that, young man?” Doc asked. “A return of the acid precipitation could quite spoil one’s day, were one caught in the open.”

Tully frowned at him a moment as if sorting out his words. Ryan got the impression the lanky man was no stupe. He just wasn’t used to hearing that sort of talk.

Well, in the Deathlands, nobody was. It had taken Ryan some time to get used to Doc, too. And that was just in his lucid moments.

“That’s how it goes here,” Tully said. “Fresh rain always follows the acid. Dilutes it and washes it away. That’s one reason the settled villes survive.”

Ryan looked at Krysty. She had her limited doomie moments, but more important, she was better attuned to the natural elements than anybody Ryan had met. Whether it was her link to the Earth Mother, Gaia, or just a natural ability, he couldn’t say.

She nodded. “I feel he’s right.” Then she flashed him that smile of hers that always made him realize how lucky he was. Even in situations as tight as this one.

“Best pick up your pal,” Tully said. “We don’t have to run anymore. But it’s not healthy to hang around out here.”

“Mildred?” Ryan said.

The physician was already kneeling over J.B. He was unconscious. Sweat sheened his forehead, more than what was due to the humidity.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like we’ve got much choice, do we?”

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