“They were infected brains, Ryan,” Mildred said. “Terminal stage oozies. Three of them ganged up after they had me tied to the post. They made me swallow a plateful. Afterward I vomited up as much as I could, but chances are I’m infected.”
Ryan reached out to comfort her, but she backed away.
“I don’t know how long it’ll take for the oozies to manifest,” she told him. “I don’t know what will happen when the infection starts to spread through my brain.”
“You didn’t have to keep this from the others.”
“Yes, I did,” she insisted. “We’ve been together too long. Covered too much ground, been through too much hell. I trust every one of them with my life, Ryan, but not with my death. I’m afraid they might wait to do what needs to be done, out of friendship or love or misplaced sympathy. I won’t risk that. I don’t know how long I can fight off the disease. I may not know I’ve lost the battle until it’s too late for me to do anything about it. What I’m saying is, I may be too weak or too crazy to eat my own gun. Ryan, I want you to promise me you’ll do the job when the time comes. Without hesitation or mercy. Will you do that for me?”
It wasn’t a deed Ryan wanted on his conscience, it made his head reel to even contemplate it, but he couldn’t refuse her. He concealed his reaction behind a mask of stone, looked her straight in the eye and said, “You got it, Mildred.”
“And there’s something else. It’s the reason I stopped Doc from chilling that one.”
“I wondered why you stepped in like that,” Ryan said. “After what the bastard did to you, why you didn’t shoot him yourself?”
“When they had me tied up,” Mildred said, “the cannies started talking about their ‘condition.’ They claimed they had medicine for the oozies. They didn’t elaborate on what it was or where it came from. They said it kept them alive, even though they had been in final stage for over a year.”
Ryan turned and addressed the filthy, scarred man tied to the pole. “Is that true?”
The cannie cackled and spit a big crimson gob in the dirt.
“It probably was idle talk,” Mildred said. “Something they made up to mess with my head. Or maybe they came across some carny show snake oil, drank it down and are hoping against hope. On the other hand, it just might be something real. Ryan, I know it’s a hell of a long shot, but I’ve got a short list of options. I’m looking at a triple nasty ride on the last train west. It’s a journey I surely don’t want to make.”
Ryan said nothing. He’d seen a few victims of end-stage oozies in his time. Based on that experience, if he’d been the one infected, he knew he’d have been grasping at straws, too.
“I’ll tell you everything,” the cannie offered, “if you just snip off one of them nice, crispy ears and pass it over to me.”
“Shut up,” Ryan said, “or I’ll saw off your rad-blasted foot and make you eat that, boot and all.”
The one-eyed cannie grinned back, showing off the bloody slivers of his fractured incisors. “You can’t do anything to me that I won’t purely enjoy.”
“You’re wrong there,” Mildred assured him. “If we do absolutely nothing, you’re going to purely hate it, and sooner or later you’ll tell us everything we want to know.”
The cannie spit again.
“You got a name, shitbag?” Ryan said.
“I got two names. My born name and my hunting name.”
“Take it from me,” Ryan said, “your hunting days are done. What name were you born with?”
“Georgie Tibideau Junior,” the cannie said. “From the Siana line of Tibideaus, though if you asked my ma and pa about me, I suppose they would deny I was ever born.”
“You’re a long way from home, cannie,” Mildred said.
“Been walking the Red Road for years.”
“What road?” Ryan asked.
“You never heard of the Highway of Blood? It’s the path all cannies take, the path we make. It stretches from here to there.”
“‘There?’” Cawdor said.
“The homeland.”
“And where might that be?” Ryan asked.
Tibideau squinted his good eye up at Cawdor’s face, then said, “You know, I should get me a patch like that. Got some style. Bet it keeps dirt and crap from falling into the hole, too.” Having delivered a transparent compliment, the cannie tried to reap an undeserved reward. “You know you folks broke in before I could finish my morning snack,” he told them. “Come on, brother, use that big, sharp blade of yours and hack me off a hunk of one them dead ’uns. Don’t let that good meat go to waste.”
It was Ryan’s turn to hawk and spit.
Interrupting the cannie’s calorie intake was the whole idea.
Ryan and Mildred took seats on flat rocks near the fire and propped up their boots, settling in for an extended rest.
At first, Junior Tibideau remained sullenly quiet. Unable to backhand away his nasal excretions, he let them trickle down his unshaved upper lip; when they spilled over onto his mouth, he spit.
Ryan and Mildred didn’t have to discuss the interrogation strategy. They both saw the same weakness in their enemy, and the same way to exploit it. When infected cannies neared death, they reaped so little energy from their food that they had to eat almost non-stop. No matter how much they ate, they were in state of perpetual near-starvation.
Junior Tibideau was a tough nut. He didn’t buckle under the psychological pressure, the anticipation of the terrible agonies to come. It took almost six hours on the post for his hunger pangs to become unen-durable. Mildred and Ryan watched him sweat, squirm, shiver head to foot; they listened as his high-pitched whimpers turned to guttural moans. And when Junior couldn’t stand it anymore, it was like a dam breaking. The cannie started talking, fast and furious, chatter-boxing like a jolt addict coming off a two-week binge.
“Do you really think this is how I dreamed of ending up when I was little?” Junior said. “Tied to a pole in a stinking cave with my shoulder shot and my belly on fire? Mebbe I deserve to die triple hard because of what I’ve done, but I had no choice. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a cannie. I woke up and I already was one. Mebbe you don’t want to believe it, but I’m as much a victim as the stupid bastards I’ve made my meat.”
Although Ryan and Mildred didn’t respond to his plea for sympathy, Junior pressed on. “That very first night, years ago,” he said, “when cannies came through our swamp, they could’ve butchered me on the spot, but they didn’t do me that favor.
“I was night fishing by myself down by the river. I’d just set my snag line when I heard them sneaking through the mangroves along the mud bank. It was too late to get away. I can’t swim a stroke. They had me sandwiched, all of them with blasters and long blades ready. I thought for sure they were going to eat me then and there. But that wasn’t what they had in mind. Turned out that they needed another hunter to fill out their crew. If I’d said no to joining the pack, they would have sundried strips of my flesh on the bushes and turned me into jerky.
“I didn’t taste human being that night, though there was plenty of eating going on. I ran with the pack, hanging back a little and watching what they did. How they hunted the tiny, shit-scrabble farms on the edges of the swamp, how they swept through the ramshackle buildings, chilling as a team. Some cannies ate way more of the bounty than others. They were the sick ones.
“I