idea what happened to the muties?” J.B. asked.
“Why?” Mariah sounded confused. “What did? I wondered if something scared them off.”
“Something chilled them,” Ryan said. “More than that—it was like they all got blown up or chopped to pieces.”
“Never seen anything like it,” J.B. added.
“And from this outlandish collection of humankind,” Doc remarked, “that is a remarkable statement indeed.”
Mariah continued to shake her head in what Krysty took for incomprehension.
“We found a man with an ax outside,” Mildred said. “We, uh, chilled him. We had to. He thought we were stickies and came rushing at us. We found stickie blood on his ax and stickie wounds on his body after we took him down.”
“That’d be Elias,” Mariah said. “He always did have a temper on him.”
“Enough to chill an entire pack of stickies?” Mildred asked. “Enough to wipe out the whole rest of the farm?”
Mariah just shook her head. “He was big and strong. And you know how men can get when the anger comes upon them.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
Jak called softly from the doorway, “All chills inside. Wind dying.” No one had heard him approach. His friend Ricky started at his sudden speech, banging his head on the top of the door frame.
Ryan had been hunkered down beside Mariah, his weapons sheathed or slung, hands on the thighs of his sun-faded jeans. Now he nodded decisively and stood.
“Right,” he said. “Well, thank you kindly. That’s all we needed to know. We’ll be leaving you to it, now.”
“Ryan, we can’t just leave her,” Krysty protested.
He looked at Krysty in what seemed genuine consternation.
“It’s time to go,” he aid. “Shake the dust of this place off our boot heels.”
“But what’ll happen to her?”
“She’ll find her way. Or she won’t. She made it this far, anyhow, and that’s a thing. It’s not our problem what happens to her now, though. One way or another.”
As Krysty scowled at him, the girl abruptly launched herself at her. Blasters whipped up, but instead of attacking her, Mariah was suddenly clinging to her and sobbing. Krysty judged herself lucky she’d been on her knees; otherwise the girl, slight as she was, might’ve bowled her over backward.
“Krysty’s right,” Mildred announced as the redhead began to stroke Mariah’s head and murmur soothingly to her. “We can’t just leave her out in the middle of this god-awful wasteland.”
“But she’s been living here just fine all along,” J.B. said.
“When she had a family and a working farm around her,” Mildred shot back. “What is wrong with you, John? Where’s your compassion?”
He blinked at her through the round lenses of his specs. “Compassion?” He sounded as if the word was unfamiliar to him.
“There’s food,” the girl said, still sobbing and her face pressed sideways to Krysty’s neck. “Supplies. Powder and shot.”
“Jak,” Ryan called out. “You still out there?”
“Yeah?”
“How trashed is the place?”
“Chills everywhere,” the albino said in his customary clipped and often cryptic speech. “Chill parts, too.”
“They get around to pissing down the well?” J.B. asked. “Or tossing any chills down it for poison?”
“No,” Jak said.
“So the mutant blackguards got no chance to indulge in an orgy of wanton stickies vandalism,” Doc said.
“Before Elias put the chop on ’em,” J.B. added.
“Sounds like,” Ryan said. “Thanks. We’ll make sure to leave plenty for you. And now—”
Krysty put her arms around the girl’s thin, shaking shoulders. She was actively shivering now, not just to the timing of her sobs.
“Ryan, no,” she said.
“You know as well as I do we can’t go picking up every stray we stumble across,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
With a final sniffle, Mariah stopped weeping, or at least stopped weeping as vigorously. The trembling subsided, too, but did not stop.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Ryan looked blank. “You mean stumbling around in the storm?” Mildred supplied helpfully.
Mariah nodded.
“Let’s say we’re new in the district,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said—grudgingly, because information was a trade good itself. But clearly he saw nothing to be lost by imparting a few morsels to the foundling.
“You looking for work?” Mariah asked.
“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. We could use a gig.”
Their supplies had gotten low. The stocks of food and such the girl had mentioned—and fresh water from the well—would tide them over for a spell. But they were always looking for ways to sustain themselves, and mebbe get ahead, even, for the lean times that inevitably followed.
“I know a place,” Mariah said. “A ville nearby. The baron’s always looking for help, and he ain’t triple bad, as barons go.”
“We don’t hire on as mercies,” Ryan said.
“No. Not that.” Mariah paused. “I—I can take you there.”
Ryan sighed. “We’re outvoted, J.B.,” he said. “Even if it’s just Mildred and Krysty against the rest of us.”
“I don’t mind her coming along,” Ricky said.
“Put a sock in it,” Ryan replied without heat.
“I have no objection to it,” Doc put in. “Perhaps performing the occasional humane gesture might remind us of our own humanity.”
“I don’t see how that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. “But you can come with us as far as this ville.”
Mariah let go of Krysty to spring for Ryan. She caught him around the waist in a powerful hug and pressed her cheek against his breastbone.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. “You can come as long as you don’t hug me anymore, understand?”
“Please,” the painfully gaunt blonde woman said, falling to her knees on the short, winter-scorched Badlands grass before two glowing avatars. “I did what you told me. Now let me have my daughter back. I beg you!”
“What wretches these people are,” Dr. Oates said to Dr. Sandler over the suppressed channel. “Hardly worth the trouble to rule.”
He might have reminded his colleague that they could just as well speak aloud in this vile, cowering being’s presence for all the difference it would make. But he did not. Habit was key to discipline, in communications as in every area of life. Discipline was a goal in itself.
Especially when one’s collective goal was full-spectrum dominance over this entire timeline.
By the same mode he told her, “They can be shaped into useful vessels, into which to pour our leadership and enlightened thinking.”