Haven's Blight (25 page)

“For a man as smart as you are about so many things,” Ryan growled, “you can be a real stupe sometimes. Don’t you know anything about women?”

J.B. turned to look into the darkness after Mildred. He took off his hat and scratched the thinning spot on top of his head.

“Guess not, Ryan. What do I do now?”

“Get up and go after her!”

The wiry Armorer scrambled to his feet and trotted after the angry healer. Shaking his head, Ryan turned back to the fire.

“We’re in enemy territory now,” Rameau said. “They should be careful.”

“They’ll be fine,” Ryan said. “They’re all grown up. They can take care of themselves.”

He threw another chunk of driftwood onto the fire. Sparks trailed up toward the stars.

Rameau dropped his pointy-bearded chin to his clavicle. “I hope we can all say that. It is a hard road we walk.” He shook his head. “But we knew that when we set out upon it. If there’s blame, it falls on our own heads.”

“Yeah, well, I wondered why the baron sent two guides with us,” Ryan said. “Reckon I see the sense of it now.”

T
HE
MORNING
DAWNED
bright, but there was a yellow cast to the eastern sky and dark blue clouds piled up away off to the southeast.

“Storm buildin’ out over Gulf,” Bluebottle said.

They ate a breakfast of cold frog legs and fish they’d roasted the night before. Rameau’s right arm wasn’t working well, and Mildred tied it up in a sling for him. Given how Ryan’s face still felt it was a wonder he was functioning even today. The pain of the sting hadn’t kept him from sleeping soundly. Hardly anything ever did. But this day he felt as if somebody had split his cheek open with Bluebottle’s
casse-tête
and poured salt in.

Mildred had rubbed more aloe juice onto the wound, which helped. The bone still throbbed with every beat of his heart.

Mildred was moving around quite happily this morning. It had been more effort than usual for the companions to ignore the sounds she and J.B. made reconciling after their spat.

The previous evening they had drawn the flatboats onto the low shore and done the best they could to get the grass to stand back up where they had dragged them, to make it less obvious they were there. The grass was green, water-fat and resilient, which helped. Ryan didn’t think it’d fool anybody raised in these bayous for more than the time it took a cartridge to light off when you dropped the hammer, but all they could do was the best they could.

He shouldered his pack and his rifle and stood. The others did the same. Without making an issue of it, the much bigger Bluebottle helped haul Rameau to his feet. The man looked past Ryan. His anthracite eyes went wide.

A pair of beings, as much like barrels as men, with exaggerated broad features, hair like steel wool and skins the color of chalk, stood between the party and their boats. One carried a spear with a leaf-shaped steel head, the other a chunk of hardwood that looked as if it might have started out as an oar and become a bladed club. They wore necklaces of gator teeth and fingerbones. The one with the spear has a shiny brass ring through his wide, flat nose.

Quickly, Ryan looked left and right.

Swampies rose out of the grass on every side.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Surrounded,” Jak said.

“You monsters!” Cole shrieked. “You chilled Cody! Die!”

He ripped his big-bladed knife from the beaded buckskin sheath at his belt and threw himself toward the nearest muties, the ones blocking the way to the boats. So fast did the boy move in his tearful vengeance frenzy that Ryan, for all his steel-trap reflexes, couldn’t move fast enough to stop him.

The swampie he attacked was a head shorter than the boy’s five-six. But like all his mutant brothers—at least in this part of the bayou—he was wide and massively muscled beneath layers of fat. His yellow eyes went wide as the boy lunged for him, raising the knife high over his white-blond-haired head to stab.

One-handed, the mutie rammed his spear forward. Ryan heard a wet sound and a soft grunt escaped the boy’s mouth, cutting short another cry for bloody vengeance.

Then the spear tip poked right out the back of the blue plaid shirt the youth was wearing.

Cole sucked in a long, shuddering breath, then he began to scream in the terrible agony of a gut wound.

Behind him Ryan sensed blasters come up, heard safeties click off, flint cocked back from frizzen and hammer raised from capped steel nipple. The swampies, who surrounded the small party completely, aimed spears, clubs and crossbows.

There were at least twenty of the short, squat muties ranged around the humans. And swampies were tough to kill. Supposedly they had double sets of all their internal organs. Beyond that, their thick rolls of fat over muscle provided a decent natural armor. The companions had encountered many different types of swampies during their travels, and they all shared a variation of that trait.

“Stop!” Ryan said, stepping forward and holding out his empty hands to the sides. He didn’t shout. He just pitched his voice to carry, and gave it an edge like a trumpet blast.

Under the circumstances, shouting could act like spraying gasoline on a bonfire. Using his best voice of command froze everybody in place. At least for a moment.

Given the numbers and the way the swampies had them dead to rights, it could have been oldies and kids surrounding Ryan and his companions, and it still would turn to massacre if blood ever broke.

Cole kept screaming. The swampie yanked the spear out. The boy fell to the blood-stained grass, folded himself into a knot of agony and began to writhe and howl.

“We mean no harm here!” Ryan said. “We come to see Papa Dough.
I
came to see Papa Dough. I need to ask his help.”

That
caused a deep bass murmur among the swampies.

“If you come in peace to my father,” said a voice deep and resonant as a bull fiddle, “why does the young’un attack us?”

Ryan turned. A young-looking swampie with a frizz of black hair and beard had stepped forward behind him and to the left. He was no taller than five feet but even wider than his fellows, shoulder and gut. Flesh beads of ritual scarification around his slightly protuberant but clear green eyes indicated high rank. He wore a crimson-dyed leather loincloth and carried an elaborately carved but altogether lethal-looking war club.

“I am Jon Dough,” the young swampie said. He carried himself with dignity beyond his years, and his speech and manner suggested a level of intelligence Ryan didn’t usually associate with the muties. Like many of the folk Ryan had encountered here, he spoke with a strong Cajun accent. “I speak for my father.”

“The boy’s best friend was killed yesterday by a blow dart from an ambush,” Ryan said. Cole’s cries had subsided to desperate groans and mewling. “He blamed you swampies. Grief and vengeance hunger made him crazy.”

“It was our people who shot his friend,” the swampie acknowledged. “Your kind haven’t earned welcome here in our lands.”

Ryan shook his head. “My friends and I have nothing to do with your disputes with Haven. I come here in sore need. My woman lies poisoned and helpless back in the ville. A wise woman told me my only hope to save her was held by Papa Dough. I come here to ask his help.”

“What do you offer?”

“That’s between me and him.”

“You are brave, if not very smart.”

“I’m sorry,” Bluebottle said under his breath. “I never had a clue these cannies was sneaking up on us.”

“Cannies?” Jon Dough said. He was quickly going hotter than nuke-red. “You lie. You kill us, tear up our crops, burn our huts. Why do you insult us, too?”

“But—”

“Shut up!” Ryan snapped. “Everybody, back away from the trigger.”

“They killed my boy,” Rameau said mournfully.

“He rushed them. He couldn’t expect different. And he sure as nuke-shit didn’t pause to think about how he was putting the rest of us right on the chopping block of an old fashioned hog-butchering, now, did he? Anyway, that bullet’s left the blaster. We need to talk!”

“If you mean us no ill will,” Jon Dough said, “you surely will not object if we kill the two who invade from Haven with swampie blood staining their hands?”

“I do object, Jon Dough. They’re my people. I stand and fall with them.”

Jon Dough shrugged. “Then why shouldn’t we just chill you all?”

“If I may interject here, Monsieur Dough,” Doc said, “you obviously had compelling reason not to chill us out of hand. Clearly you could have. You surrounded us with such craft that not even the animal-keen senses of young Jak Lauren detected your presence.”

“Mebbe we wanted to hear what the hell made you think you could just waltz into our land,” the swampie boss said. “Or mebbe we just wanted to fuck with you, eh?”

“Hear me,” Ryan said. “This business is between me and your father. We’re in your power here. We pose no threat to him, any more than we do you.”

The young swampie looked mulish. Clearly he felt Ryan was somehow challenging his own authority.

“Let’s cut straight to the point,” Ryan declared. “If I have to eat a big, steaming pile of Papa Dough’s own shit to save my woman, that’s what I’ll do.”

He ignored the multiple gasp from his friends behind him. “You would so debase yourself over this woman?” Jon Dough asked in surprise.

“I’d never let myself fail Krysty through weakness of my own. Even squeamishness. Nor out of pride. If that makes me less a man, so be it.”

Jon Dough pursed his huge, pale lips.

“And anyway,” Ryan said, “if your father wants to, he can always chill us.”

“Way to argue our case, Ryan,” Mildred muttered.

But Jon Dough nodded his head. “I’m not big on sentiment where you mannies are concerned, but you impress me, stilt man. You got big brass ones, if nothing else. So I’ll take you to my father, and he’ll decide your fate.
Bon.
It’ll be entertaining, if nothing else.”

Ryan nodded at the writhing Haven boy, who’d begun to gobble half-intelligible pleas for his mother. “What about him?”

“Have you the healing lore to cure him?” Jon Dough asked.

“Not a chance,” Mildred said. “Not without major antibiotics and quick surgery in a sterile environment. None of which I happen to have packed in my ruck. You?”

Jon Dough shook his head. “Even if we would, there’s nothing we could do to save him with such a wound. Nor even the blind woman who sent you here.”

“You know of Sweet Julie?” Doc asked.

“The very animals of the forest know her.”

Ryan looked over his shoulder to Rameau. “He’s your man,” Ryan said. “What’s your call?”

Rameau moistened his lips with a bloodless tongue. “Mercy,” he croaked.

“Oh, God.” Mildred sighed. She knew what “mercy” meant in the Deathlands.

The swampie who stood beside the one who’d speared Cole stepped forward. He raised his club. When he brought it down the youth’s tow-haired head came apart like a melon struck with an ax.

“Make the mannies ready,” Jon Dough commanded. “We march.”

The party was quickly relieved of its gear and weapons. Not gently, but without any overt cruelty. To Ryan the process suggested plucking a chicken, which he found both reassuring and somewhat unnerving.

They were blindfolded with items of their own clothing. “Don’t try to work them off,” Jon Dough said as Ryan’s good eye was covered. “If they so much as slip without you warning us, we chill you on the spot.”

F
OR
ONCE
Mildred’s relatively short legs proved no handicap on a forced march. She towered over their captors, and their leg-to-height ratio made her look like a giraffe. The swampies set a steady pace, but even for her it was no more than that at which she might’ve walked to the library in med school.

Of course, that didn’t account for the humid heat or the marshy spots that tried to suck the boots clean off her feet, nor the obstructions that crossed their path, humped roots or fallen logs. The swampies warned of obstacles in their deep voices. Evidently the idea of tormenting their captives by watching them trip and fall or slam their shins held little appeal to them. Or they were merely so practical they didn’t want to waste marching time on frivolous diversions.

The prisoners’ hands weren’t bound, which let them scramble more easily over the larger blockages. They weren’t allowed to carry their packs. The swampies were sturdy and as strong as mules, and didn’t seem to mind the added burden. Mildred suspected they didn’t want to risk losing any of the precious booty if a prisoner bolted and was shot down into some gator-infested bayou where even the swampies didn’t dare try to retrieve it.

She became acutely aware of nonvisual sensory inputs. For the most part the sense of feel brought discomfort: humid heat, the sweat that tickled its way into every cranny and fold of her body, the chafing in her hinder parts. As for sound, the swampies discouraged their prisoners from talking, even during rare rest and water breaks. They themselves spoke seldom, in a sort of subterranean mutter. Given the extremely slangy French Creole they normally used, she wouldn’t have been able to follow the conversation if she heard it clearly.

She found herself concentrating on the birdcalls and chirps and trills, which came from all sides from the woods and brush and the egrets and herons wading in the sluggish dark-stained waters. Also she learned to recognize when the swampies guided Doc, who walked immediately in front of her—J.B. came next, a comforting warmth even if she couldn’t physically sense his nearness—over some obstacle lying in the path of what to them had to have been his freakishly long legs. They took great care over what they had to assume was an addled oldie.

It struck her, during a brief halt as the swampies helped their blindfolded captives negotiate a fallen cypress one at a time, that they were being unusually solicitous for the welfare of their enemies. This kid Jon Dough takes his responsibility to deliver us to his Daddy in prime shape pretty seriously, she realized.

That epiphany didn’t comfort her as much as it might’ve. She couldn’t help recalling that in her own time it was customary to nurse the convicted into the best possible health just to execute them.

By where the sunlight stung the skin of her face, she sensed they generally marched northwest as the sun mounted up the sky, rolled over the top and headed down the home stretch to its nightly resting place.

In what she judged midafternoon her blindfold began to slip. A gleam of light invaded the lower half of her right eye. Although even the vagrant and insignificant shine of sunlight, probably still filtered by a layer of cloth, dazzled her dark-accustomed retina, it lifted her spirits.

Briefly. Then she remembered what the swampies had told them about fooling with the blindfolds. Or even if they simply slipped.

She cursed the unknown mutie who had adjusted and retightened the knotted T-shirt at the last drink and pee break—in-and-out water stop, as she’d come to think of them. Swampies were capable of remarkable dexterity with the unwieldy-looking sausage fingers they had, to judge by their handicrafts. Just my luck to draw the one with five thumbs per hand, she thought bitterly.

For a time she marched in a rapidly rising fever of fearful anticipation. The sweat rolling down her face and her sides redoubled in volume and velocity. She grew sick to her stomach.

I’m chilled if I do and chilled if I don’t, she thought. What do I do?

Then it was as if another voice in her mind said, Wait, girlfriend. Remember what they actually told you.

It was
that
voice, the voice in her head that usually assured her that she couldn’t possibly make whatever she was doing anything but a fearful mess. Which made it a triple-pisser that she realized with something of a shock that it was right.

Jon Dough had said if the blinders slipped without the captives warning their captors they’d be killed out of hand. That implied if they
did
warn the swampies they’d be fine. Didn’t it? Didn’t it?

What if they misinterpret the situation? she thought. What if they blame me anyway? What if they lied?

The panic was rising rapidly over her head like floodwaters. She recognized the fact. And one of the first lessons her new, unasked-for life in the Deathlands had taught her was that panic equaled death. Once you let yourself lose presence of mind, you lost your chance at life.