she stood her ground. “I know what a slut you are. Givin’ that sweet thang up for every boy in the county, from Maccum Corners clear to the holler!”
“That’s a lie and you know it,” she said. “No boy would dare touch me with anything they wanted to keep.” Again she looked meaningfully at the ax.
Wish I’d gone ahead and struck his filthy hand off when he grabbed me through my skirt that time, she thought. But she had mashed his ugly tuber of a nose for him, as she’d reminded him before.
In return he’d knocked her sprawling with a backhand and blackened her eye. But that victory was short-lived. She bounced back up right away, and that time she held her ax in both hands. Ready to cut.
“C’mon,” he pleaded. “Let me get a little sugar, can’t you?”
“Wymie,” her mother called from behind him. “You don’t be sassing your pa, now. He’s right. You got to do what he says. We all do.”
“Oh, Ma,” Wymie cried, shaking her head and squinting her eyes to try to hold in the hot tears that filled them. “Can’t you show some spine sometime?”
But she knew the answer. She doesn’t dare, she thought. Because I can’t protect her. I’m not good enough. Not strong enough. It’s all my fault…
She shook her head again, once, fiercely. She wouldn’t walk down that trail again. Not where it led her.
It had only been the once. But no amount of washing, mebbe not even a dose of straight-up lye, would ever cleanse her of the foul feeling that he had left her with.
“Blinda,” she called, “come with me. Let’s go for a nice walk in the woods, honey. Get some clean air in our noses for a change.”
She turned away from her stepfather. She was afraid he’d rabbit-punch her, but she had to take that risk. She doubted he had the sack to try, anyway. He knew what she’d do to him if he tried a trick like that and failed.
Blinda was slumped over the sill. The dirty soles of her bare feet showed, the toes bowed together against the floor.
“Blinda? Wake up, honey. I know you ain’t been sleeping good, but we got to go.”
She reached out to take her sister’s thin shoulder. She shook the girl gently.
The ragged bear slid from her fingers to the floor. Blinda slid back to follow it.
Horror struck through Wymie like lightning.
Her beloved baby sister no longer had a face. There was only a bloody red gap where her face should have been.
“Wait,” Ricky Morales said. “What was that?”
“Probably your imagination,” Mildred Wyeth responded. She had stripped off her shirt to work in the humid heat of the hollow in her scavvied sports bra and khaki cargo pants. She straightened from sorting a pile of mostly unidentifiable scavvied tech, mostly metal parts and components J. B. Dix identified as electronics, and drew the back of her hand across her high, dark-skinned forehead. “Heat’s making you see things.”
But Ryan Cawdor was standing and staring intently at the spot in the brush above the excavation the kid had snapped his head around to look at.
“No,” he said. “I think I saw something, too.”
He had his palm resting on the grip of the SIG Sauer P226 blaster in its holster. He’d left his longblaster, a Steyr Scout Tactical, in the shade of a rickety lean-to.
He glanced at Jak Lauren, who stood on top of a heap of dirt, rocks, chunks of concrete, and bits and pieces of cloth, plastic and other debris that somehow hadn’t degraded into the dense clay soil in the hundred or so years since skydark. The slender, slight young man shrugged. Despite the sticky mugginess he insisted on wearing his camouflage jacket, to which he’d sewn jagged shards of glass and metal fragments to discourage an in-fighting opponent from grabbing him. His adversary would get a further surprise if he grabbed the young man by the collar. Hidden razor blades would cause severe injury. Jak was swiveling his head, long white hair swinging above his shoulders, white-skinned brow furrowed over ruby eyes.
He sensed Ryan’s attention and looked toward him. “Check out?” he asked.
“No,” Ryan said. “If there’s something out there, it knows the area better than we do.”
Jak let his thin lips quirk contemptuously. “Could beat.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “Mebbe not.”
The white-haired youth frowned. Though a product of the Gulf Coast bayou country—even hotter and double-steamier than this—he was proud of his wilderness skills. Indeed, his skills at stealth and tracking in any environment—even urban ones, as alien to his upbringing as the dimpled face of the moon. And for a fact, he was good. Those skills had kept Ryan and the rest of his companions alive on many occasions.
“The pallid shadows again?” Doc asked. Doc was a tall, gaunt man with haunted blue eyes and rich silvery hair. Though he appeared to be in his late sixties, he was, in fact, in terms of years lived, in his thirties. Looked at in a different way, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was almost two and a half centuries old. The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the late 1800s to the twentieth century. When he proved to be a very difficult subject, they threw him into the future, to Deathlands, a prematurely aged husk.
That he had survived was a testament to his intrinsic toughness and drive to live. “Not sure,” Ricky said, shaking his head. The kid had been with them for a while now, tramping the miles and enduring countless hardships with the rest of the companions. He was currently on watch, squatting at the edge of the sinkhole that had claimed some kind of small but well-equipped predark office building. He had his DeLisle carbine across his knees.
“Can find out,” Jak said stubbornly. He hated to stay still for long, especially doing hard physical labor. He felt as if he should constantly be prowling whatever surroundings his companions happened to find themselves in, keeping watch, keeping them safe. And it chafed his spirit to be forced to do so while there seemed to be enemies about.
“Why don’t we wait to see if they are a threat to us, Jak?” said Krysty Wroth, emerging from the large irregular hole in the rubble that led to the intact, buried sections of the small predark complex.
As she straightened, Ryan watched her appreciatively. Like Mildred, she had stripped off the man’s shirt she wore in favor of her halter top. Also like Mildred, she had substantial need of the support it gave. Ryan never tired of watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she straightened. She took a handkerchief from her pants pocket and wiped her forehead. Her glorious red mane of hair was tied back in a green-and-white bandanna. Its strands stirred slightly, restless, despite the lack of so much as a sigh of wind here in this pit in the heavily wooded Pennyrile Hills. Each individual hair was a living thing, capable of motion—and of feeling, which made the occasions she found it necessary to trim it something of an ordeal.
She wasn’t just the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen, she was his life-mate. Jak looked at her.
“Want make sure don’t,” he said. The young man tended to expend words, especially things like pronouns and articles, as if they were drops of his own blood. The others had enough experience of interpreting his eccentrically clipped speech they could make out what he meant. Usually.
She smiled her dazzling smile. “They haven’t tried anything so far,” she pointed out. “But why don’t you take over for Ricky on watch?”
Jak liked that suggestion. He nodded and scrambled up the treacherous, sliding slope as if he were half mountain goat, half wraith. Ricky was appreciative of the offer and picked his way cautiously back down to join the others beside the hole and their growing pile of