“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.”
Chapter Six
They continued south onto what looked like a largely intact highway that Mildred, who had spent some time in predark St. Louis, identified as Interstate 55, to make their way through a complicated tangle of broken concrete and twisted rail iron, fanged by nasty bent spikes of rust-red rebar. Evidently it was a collapsed bridge. A railroad-highway combo, by the looks.
No sooner were they past the collapsed ruins than Tully led the party down the brushy bank to the surface street that ran alongside the old highway. They jumped a little stream in the ditch at the bottom. Because there was just no way four people could cross it carrying the unconscious Armorer, and because the locals seemed uninclined to wade this soon after an acid downpour, Ryan draped J.B.’s limp form over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
Everybody else hopped easily across. Burdened as he was Ryan didn’t quite make it cleanly. The dirt gave way under his left foot. It slipped and went into the water to the ankle. Though he jumped clear as if J.B. suddenly weighed no more than dandelion fluff, Ryan felt a sting from the diluted acid in the little stream.
Krysty and Doc relieved Ryan of his burden. Tully tossed him a water bottle. “Best rinse that off before we go on,” he said. “Just in case.”
Ryan cocked a brow over his good eye. “Don’t sweat it,” Tully said. “We’re not far from the ville. If we’re not inside the perimeter inside half an hour, I likely won’t be needing the water anyhow.”
Ryan splashed water over his ankle and boot. It probably didn’t do much good. It made him feel better, though. He tossed the bottle back to the patrol leader, who caught it with a grin.
“Why not use highway?” Jak asked as they started moving west between a stand of woods along the partially elevated, partially fallen-in right of way.
“Too exposed,” Tully said. “Sometimes we get snipers in the rubble.”
“And there’s stickies, in those drowned warehouses and factories other side of the Interstate,” another man said.
“Highway does get used by people passing through, Randall,” Tully said. “Long-range traders and such.”
“Things travel that road no human should meet or get to know anything about,” a black-haired man with drawn gray-stubbled cheeks said.
“That’s only by night,” Tully said. “Anyway it’s all superstition. Probably.”
“I hear the screams, Tully. Can’t hardly sleep none, sometimes.”
“That’s just stickies roasting rivermen or scavvies they caught,” Randall said.
The companions found themselves toting the unconscious J.B. along a wide street. The rain, having seemingly washed away the remnants of the toxic rain, had stopped quickly. The air smelled fresh. Overhead the clouds had taken on the colors of an old bruise, gray and green and brown, an improvement over the tortured, boiling orange of not so many minutes before.
They passed beneath standing bridges where a railroad line swung in from the northwest to join a highway that crossed their route. A little farther south the highway they paralleled swung off west. Walking under an intact under-pass, their captors went on triple alert. The guy who didn’t