James Axler Deathlands 021 The Twilight Children

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whom were now sitting or lying on the soft grass between the trees, watching
the last moments of the muties'
assault on them.
The nearest stickie swung its crude ax at Jehu, but the agile young man dodged
under it, cutting upward with his own knife. Ryan was on his feet, walking
slowly down the slope, knowing that haste would do nothing to alter the
eventual outcome. He heard the mutie yelp in pain, and saw a dark patch of
blood appear along the side of its ribs.
The second creature grabbed at the diving figure of the young man, and there
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was the loud noise of ripping cloth. But Jehu's momentum carried him through
and past, snatching a moment to try to stab the mutie.
"Stupe and brave," Ryan muttered, pausing in mid-stride, seeing that the
leader of the ville wasn't particularly skilled at knife-fighting.
The Trader used to say that you didn't get to live long in Deathlands if you
didn't have courage.
But you lived even less long if you didn't also have some brains.
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"Brains before balls" had been his shorthand saying, though it had sometimes
annoyed the tough women who rode with him on the war wags.
Jehu had the balls all right, getting up hi a fighter's crouch, facing the two
gibbering stickles.
But his small knife was no weapon against their hatchets.
"Mildred!" Ryan yelled. "Do them."
For someone who had won a silver medal in the free pistol-shooting at the last
ever Olympic Games in Miami in 1996, it was like picking off carp in a
bathtub.
The doctor fired two careful shots, the Smith & Wesson .38s easily finding
their targets.
One stickie hurled his ax spinning high in the air as he went down, with a
bullet through his left eye, the blade sticking among the upper branches of a
Douglas fir. His comrade was hit in the side of the head, just above the right
ear, the big round exiting through his left cheek, an inch below his eye.
After the fiat crack of the revolver, the morning seemed almost silent.
The weeping little ones had fallen away to a quick sobbing. One small boy
moaned in pain and shock, a long strip of skin torn away from ankle to thigh,
blood soaking into the soft carpet of pine needles beneath him. Jehu had
dropped to his knees, his eyes closed, his lips moving.
"Nice shooting, Mildred," J.B. said, his eyes glinting behind his glasses as
he continued to scan the darkness beneath the surrounding trees in case there
were more stickles on the loose.
Ryan continued down the slope to rejoin his friends. Krysty and Doc were
trying to comfort the terrified children. Mildred Wyeth had walked over to
check that all of the muties were dead. Not that Ryan had any doubts on that
score. He knew killing shots when he saw them.
"All done?" he called.
"Yeah." Mildred looked around the clearing. "We going to leave them here? The
kids should be taken back to the ville as soon as possible. There's four of
them dead. The one with the wounded leg needs treatment."
"Jehu?" Ryan had nearly reached the kneeling young man, who seemed to be
oblivious to what had happened around him. "You all right?"
"Blessed Moses forgive us for our sins."
Ryan laid a hand on Jehu's shoulder, shaking him gently. "Come on. It's over."
But the blue eyes stayed closed, the droning voice not ceasing. "Let us
welcome the shadow of death in this dark valley. It is a sign that we have not
worked hard enough and have walked from the path of light into the deep
midnight. Save us, wonderful Moses, from this place of blood."
Ryan shook him much harder. He'd seen plenty of religious crazies throughout
Deathlands and never met one that he'd truly liked.
"Get the fuck up, boy," he said."You're the leader of this place, and you got
some dead children to take home and bury. And there's wounded. Decisions on
the stickies." He hauled Jehu to his feet.
"You saved my life. You, an oldie. An outlander. Saved my hie."
His voice trembled with shock.
"It was Mildred who took out the last two for you."
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"The... the black woman oldie?"
Mildred turned and smiled. "Kind of difficult to come to terms with, is it,
boy? Not just an old
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woman. But an old black woman. Goin' to take some hard thinking on that, isn't
it?"
The children had been herded together, and J.B. had hoisted the injured little
boy onto his back.
In their horror at the stickies, most of the little ones seemed to have
temporarily overcome their revulsion and fear of Doc and were happy to have
him standing close by, guarding them.
The woods were returning quickly to normal. A red-capped jay had perched on a
broken branch near where the mutie's ax had become jammed. Turquoise flies
were gathering to feed on the dark puddles of spilled blood.
Far above them Ryan noticed a jet-black carrion crow, circling slowly, bright
eyes staring down at the prospect of some fine feeding.
MILDRED BANDAGED the boy's leg as soon as they got back, covering it with a
layer of clean linen, having first washed the raw wound with a bowl of the
crystal lake water. As he recovered his nerve, the child became less and less
happy about being tended by an outland stranger. All his young life he'd been
reared on Moses's teaching that old meant bad and evil.
The bodies were taken away into one of the smaller buildings that backed onto
Shamplin Lake, to be mourned by the community. Dorothy appeared out of the
crowd, with Dean and Michael following sheepishly at her side.
"You bring death at your shoulder, outlander," she hissed accusingly. "Isaac's
sweet brother, then
Jimmy and now four of our precious jewels."
"You think we're in league with the bastard stickies? Then you got a sicker
warped mind than I
thought."
"Dad!" Dean was flushed as he stepped forward. "Shouldn't speak to Dorothy
like that."
Ryan's good eye flashed with anger, and he half lifted his fist toward his
son. "You don't ever talk out against me... or any of us. Not in front of
strangers, Dean. Not ever!"
The boy's head dropped, and he shuffled Ms feet. "Sorry, Dad, but..." The
sentence faltered away into stillness.
Jehu was standing at the back of the group and he pushed through to the front.
"Sister Dorothy,"
he said.
"What?"
He put the tips of his fingers together, making a steeple from them. "Moses
would not wish to hear the way you've just been speaking."
"I speak truth. There's been nothing but ill luck and death since they set
foot in our lands."
"They didn't bring the stickies. Ryan and Mildred chilled them and saved our
little ones from much, much worse." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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