Ryan turned his attention back to his friends. He saw them all easing their hands back from their own blasters. Handblasters only; Conn insisted longblasters be checked at the door. That chafed J.B.’s butt a tad, but Ryan went along with it, meaning the Armorer and the others did, too.
Ryan was willing to rely on Conn’s unwavering insistence on keeping an orderly house.
And if that failed, it wasn’t as if Ryan and his friends weren’t packing enough heat to burn a way to the little cabinet by the door where their longblasters were.
“There are worse places,” Mildred said with a shrug.
J.B. showed her a hint of sly grin. “You still got your mind on settling down?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve been in way worse locations, is all I’m saying.”
“Indeed,” Doc said. He was leaning forward, staring down at an angle at the tabletop with an unfocused look in his blue eyes. Ryan couldn’t tell for sure if he was agreeing with Mildred, or with some randomly remembered person from his past, like his long-lost wife, Emily, or even their children, Rachel and Jolyon. The predark whitecoats and their malicious time-trawling had done more than age him prematurely. Sometimes Doc lost touch with the present and wandered off through the fog of his own reminiscences.
The others couldn’t help but fear that sometime he might just wander off inside his own skull and never come back. But he always had, and lately things seemed to be getting consistently better. In any event he always snapped right to when the hammer came down.
Jak was frowning.
“What’s the matter, Jak?” Krysty asked gently.
The albino’s scowl deepened. But he didn’t snap back at her, as he sometimes could with his male companions. He just pressed his scarcely visible white lips together so hard they vanished altogether, and shook his head briskly.
“Don’t gnaw your own guts over not being able to track those stick-throwing white things,” J.B. said. As was his custom, he didn’t raise his voice. If he had something to say, he said it calmly. If he had something to do, he did it without hesitation or qualm. “They know the lay of the land better than even you can, most likely. And they probably have some kind of lairs nearby they can duck into.”
Though the gaudy chatter had resumed its normal volume, Ryan could hear Jak growl low in his throat. It wasn’t a gesture of hostility but a sign of his own dissatisfaction with himself.
“Listen, Jak,” Mildred said helpfully. “There’s always someone better than you.”
That got her a red-eyed glare.
“Mildred,” Ryan said dryly, “stop helping.”
The door burst open.
For a moment all that poured inside was darkness and the sound of crickets, audible because the dramatic opening had quieted the small talk again. It wasn’t necessarily in anticipation of an equally dramatic entry; people hereabouts, like most places, were just that starved for something a little different from the day-in, day-out routine.
But they got the drama anyway. A young woman came through the door, half striding, half staggering under a burden of deadweight and fatigue. She carried a body in her arms. It was apparently a child, a girl by the long hair that hung down from the intruder’s right arm, and she was dead, from the lifeless swing and dangle of her small, bare arms.
But the young woman’s head was high, black hair falling in waves around broad shoulders, one bared by her half-torn-open flannel shirt. Her deep blue eyes blazed with rage.
“My baby sister’s dead!” she cried in a vibrant voice. “Blinda’s been murdered, and I saw who done it!”
A number of patrons had jumped to their feet. “Who did it, Wymie?” one asked.
She fixed Ryan with a laser glare. “Those stoneheart outlanders there!”
That silenced the rising murmur as though cutting it off with an ax. Immediately whispers started up again: “Oh, holy shit, her face.”
Ryan saw that it was missing. Something had taken much of the bone from brow to lower jaw along with flesh and skin.
Ryan heard Krysty gasp. Doc made a strangled noise.
“You can’t be talking to us,” Ryan said, as evenly as he could.
“I saw you! You bastards!”
“You didn’t see us,” Mildred said. “We were working at the claim until late. Then we came right here.”
“Tell us exactly what you did see, Wymie,” Conn told her.
The black-haired young woman stooped and eased her burden onto the floorboards. Blood began to trickle outward. Behind her Ryan could see a number of others with anxious, angry faces. Plenty held weapons, from hoes and axes to a muzzle-loader shotgun or two. Slowly, Wymie straightened.
“I looked out the window, soon as—as it happened,” she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair. Bloodred eyes!”
All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.
“Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.
“Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”
“We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”
“You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”
“We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.
He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.
He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.
“It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”
“I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.
“Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we do such a thing?”
“You’re outlanders! From out there!”
Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.
“You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it Deathlands. Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”
“But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And he looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”
“Mebbe used an ax.”
“Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”
“Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”
“‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.