Basically, there was no getting out of it. There was maybe one chance in a hundred that I was wrong and the centerpiece of that grisly feast was a woods bison. If I was right, chances were ten to one against me finding anything that would split things wide open. But you can't skimp and take shortcuts. The odds are always against you until you do stumble across that one in ten.
Still, dead people who have been lying around in the woods for days aren't particularly appealing. So I spent a few minutes considering a spider web with dew gems still on it before I put my dogs on the ground and started hoofing it toward a case of upturned stomach.
Five years in the Marines had brought me eyeball to eyeball with old death more times than I cared to remember, and my life since has provided its grisly encounters, but there are some things I can't get used to. Consciousness of my own mortality won't let me.
The conclave of death was being held at the downhill end of an open, grassy area about twenty yards wide and fifty long. Patches of lichened granite peeked out of the soil. I collected a dozen loose chunks of throwing size and cut loose at the wild dogs. They snarled and growled but fled. They have grown very cautious around humans because bounty hunters are after them constantly. Especially farm kids who want to pick up a little change for the fair or whatever.
The buzzards tried to bluff me. I didn't bluff. They got themselves airborne and began turning in patient circles, looking down and thinking, Someday, you too, man. In the pantheon of one of the minor cults of TunFaire, the god of time is a vulture.
Maybe that's why I hate the damned things. Or maybe that's because they've become identified with my military service, when I saw so many circling the fields of futility where young Karentines died for their country.
So there I stood, a great bull ape, master of the land of the dead. Instead of pounding my chest and maybe forcing myself to inhale some tainted air, I moved as upwind as I could and started looking at what I'd come to see.
There wasn't a woods bison in that mess.
I muttered, "I ought to remember Saucer head's tendency to exaggerate."
I counted up enough parts to make at least seven bodies. Four or five he said he'd taken. Even torn apart they remained ogre ugly. They'd been buried shallow beneath loose dirt, leaves, and stones. The lazy way, I might call it, but I look at comrades differently than ogres do. They don't form bonds the way humans do. For them a dead associate is a burden, not an obligation.
No doubt they were in a hurry to quit the area, too.
You do what you have to do. I got in and used a stick to poke around, looking for personals, but it took only a minute to figure out that the living hadn't been in too big a hurry not to loot the dead. Even their boots had been taken. That wasn't the behavior of a band expecting to be in the big money soon. But with ogres you never know. Maybe their mothers had taught them the old saw, "Waste not, want not."
I circled the burial site three times but could find no sign of comings or goings other than by the route I'd followed, and that the second group had taken down from the road. In places the soil was very moist from ground-water seepage. Such places sometimes hold tracks. I started looking those over, trying to cut the trail of a guy on crutches or one who wore his feet backward; something that would stick out if I happened to be hanging around with a bunch of ogres and one of the bad guys showed up. I didn't expect to find anything, but luck doesn't play for the other side all the time. Got to keep looking for that ten to one.
I found the nothing I expected, though not exactly because there was nothing to be found. It was one of those cases of suddenly deciding you ought to be investigating something somewhere else. I heard a stir in the woods behind me. Not much of one. Thinking some of the dogs had gotten brave, I turned with the stick I still carried.
"Holy shit!"
A woolly mammoth stood at the edge of the woods, and from where I was it looked about ninety-three hands high at the shoulder. How the hell it had come up so quietly is beyond me. I didn't ask. When it cocked its head and made a curious grunting noise, I put the heels and toes to work according to the gods' design. The beast threw a trumpet roar after me. Laughing. I paused behind a two-foot-thick oak and gave it a stare. A mammoth. Here. No mammoth had come this close to TunFaire in the past dozen generations. The nearest herds were four hundred miles north of us, up along the borders of thunder-lizard country.
The mammoth ambled out of the woods, laughed at me again, cropped some grass a couple of bales at a time while keeping one eye on me. Finally convinced that I was no fearless mammoth poacher, it eyeballed the vultures, checked the dead ogres, snorted in disgust, and marched off through the woods as quietly as it had come. And last night I'd been unconcerned because no wolf-man had been seen since I was a kid.
Like I said, luck is not always with the bad guys.
It was time to stop tempting it with the one out of ten and hike on back to my rig before the horses got wind of that monster and decided they would feel more comfortable back in the city. Too bad Garrett had to ride shank's mare.
______ XVIII ______
I sat on the buggy seat, beside the crossroads obelisk, and watched a parade of farm families and donkey carts head up the Derry Road. I didn't see them. I was trying to pick between Karl Junior's farm prison and Saucer head's witch. The decision had actually been made. I was putting the thumbscrews on myself trying to figure if I was going to the farm first just to delay the pain skulking around the other place. No matter that I had to head the same direction to reach both and the farm was nearer. You don't alter the past, turn the tide, or change yourself by brooding about your hidden motives. You will surprise yourself every time, anyway. Nobody ever figures out why.
"Hell with it! Get up."
One of the team looked over her shoulder. She had that glint in her eye. The tribe of horses was about to amuse itself at Garrett's expense.
Why do they do this to me? Horses and women. I'll never understand either species.
"Don't even think about it, horse. I have friends in the glue business. Get up."
They got. Unlike women, you can show horses who is boss. The bout with introspection rekindled my desire to lay hands on the people responsible for the human equivalent of sending Amiranda to the glue works. The exit to the farm was up on a ridgeline where the ground was too dry to hold tracks, and hidden by undergrowth. I passed it twice. The third time I got down and led the team, giving the bushes a closer look, and that did the trick. Two young mulberry trees, which grow as fast as weeds, leaned together over the track. Once past them the way was easy to follow, though it hadn't been cleared since Donni's departure. I had to go through a half mile of woods, not a mile. It was dense in there, dark, quiet, and humid. The deerflies and horseflies were out at play, and every few feet I got a faceful of spider silk. I sweated and slapped and muttered and picked ticks off my pants. Why doesn't everybody live in the city?
I ran into a blackberry patch where the berries were fat and sweet, and decided to lunch on the spot. Afterward I felt more disposed toward the country, until the chiggers off the blackberry canes started gnawing. The track through the woods showed evidence of recent use, including that of the passage of at least one heavy vehicle. I had a feeling that, no matter what suspicions haunted me, I wouldn't unearth one bit of physical evidence to impugn Junior's version of what had happened. I kicked up a doe and fawn near the edge of the wood. I watched them bound across what once had constituted considerably more than a one-family subsistence farm, though now the acreage was wild and heavily spotted with wild roses and young cedars. The grass was waist high and some of the weeds were taller. A trampled path led down slope to what had been a substantial house. There were no domestic animals in sight, no dogs barking, no smoke from either chimney, nor any other sign that the place was occupied.