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"Close the door, Doc," Ryan ordered. "And keep watch. If we're lucky, the guards out front won't have heard anything. Too many doors and corridors between us. But listen for 'em." Turning to the women, he asked, "You all right, Lori, Krysty?"

"What the fuck are you outworlders doing? You are all fucking dead meat," Theodore Sissy squeaked, hands frantically trying to shove his fast-softening cock back inside his pants.

"You putrescent scum," Doc Tanner said, thumbing back the hammer of the Le Mat.

"The door, Doc."

Lori rose, her eyes locked on the seated man, her hands hanging loose at her sides, making no effort to cover her nakedness. Krysty shuddered, as if she'd just come from a deep, drugged sleep. She opened her eyes and looked across the room at Ryan, taking in the two blood-sodden corpses of the sec men.

"Hi, lover," she said. "You showed just in time. I was going to try and waste them myself. Just drawing on the power of Gaia."

"Get Lori dressed. Where are your blasters?"

"Under the bed in the corner. The sec men kicked them there out of the way, when the mayor arrived for his fucking sickness boost."

"If I scream, you're all dead. The whole fucking militia'll be here in seconds. There's nowhere to go. Nowhere you can run." The great soft face rippled as Mayor Sissy licked his thick pink lips.

"I'm all right," Lori said, shaking her head. "I'll get dressed. Won't take a moment."

Finnegan leaned on the back of the wheelchair, the warm muzzle of the submachine gun resting casually against Sissy's neck.

Krysty joined Ryan near the door. "The sec goons beat her when she refused to blow him. She gave in. I was going t'be next. He'd decided to get a guard to ass-fuck me while I sucked him. That was when I was going to kill him and try for the other two. The carbine wouldn't have stopped me."

In his wheelchair the diminutive mayor of the ville was wriggling from side to side, looking around at the dead guards. He turned to Ryan Cawdor and asked, "You hope to use me to get you safe away?"

"No."

"You hope I'll spare you?"

"No."

Lori was almost dressed. She pulled her soft leather boots up over her muscular thighs, the spurs jingling with a cold, frosty sound, then stood up from the bed and buckled on the belt and holster for her pearl-handled Walther PPK .22. Brushing her hair away from her face, she moved to stand in front of Sissy.

"Not a lot of time," Ryan said. "Got to pick up the wag. J.B.'ll be wondering where the fuck we are."

"Won't take long, this won't," the girl replied, her voice flat and hard.

Doc stuck his head back into the room. "All quiet out here." Seeing Lori looking at the crippled Sissy, he said, "Let me, honey."

"No," the girl replied.

"Let me go and I'll let you all go free," the mayor pleaded. His face jerked and twitched. He gripped the wheels of the chair, trying to roll away from the icy stare of the tall blond girl. She jammed one foot hard between his legs, making him squeal in pain, her heel holding him still.

"You fuck. You miserable little fuckhead bastard. Making me... Open your mouth, Mayor." Sissy opened his lips as wide as he could, and she drew her pistol, ramming the barrel into his mouth and breaking off one of his front teeth so that blood trickled over his chin and down his elegant suit.

Ryan lurched forward, but Krysty restrained him, shaking her head. "Let her," she said.

"Suck on this, Mayor," Lori said, blowing a kiss to the helpless man. Her own lips peeled back off her strong white teeth in a feral grin as she added, "Suck it good."

The small-caliber pistol jerked in her hand, the noise almost completely muffled in the the man's mouth. Sissy's head snapped back, his whole body convulsing. Lori kicked the chair, sending it spinning into the wall to one side of the window. It tipped over, spilling the dying man on the floor, where he thrashed, arms trembling violently. Blood spilled from his open mouth and his nose. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.

"The fucker ate it good, didn't he?" Lori said, holstering the blaster.

"Sure did," Ryan said. "Now let's get out of here."

* * *

A mile out of town Krysty wanted to stop at another of the population markers. "Want to go and knock one off for the late Mayor Sissy," she said.

"Late and unlamented," Doc Tanner added.

"Best keep moving," Ryan said.

J.B. hugged the wheel of the big Kenworth truck, gunning the motor, pedal to the metal, twin lights blazing a path along the old blacktop. About ten miles out of town they picked up the bedraggled figure of Jak Lauren.

For the rest of the night, the seven drove on, away from Ginnsburg Falls, following the northward trail, tugged on by the radio message.

With its mysterious words of hope.

Of hope?

Chapter Twelve

In the pale light of dawn, they passed a bullet-riddled sign, leaning drunkenly to one side, telling them they were on State Highway 62.

J.B. had found a creased and taped map of the district in the glove compartment of the big truck. He opened it carefully, knowing from previous experience how delicate very old documents could be. The light in the crowded cab was a faint, flickering, uncovered light bulb, and he angled the map beneath it, trying to hold it steady against the lurching of the big vehicle.

"Watch the damned bumps," he snarled at Finnegan, who was at the wheel.

"What the fucking bumps yourself!" The Kenworth hadn't taken kindly to being pushed along at a speed beyond what its age could handle. In the first hour a couple of the forward gears had stopped functioning, and the shift was becoming uncomfortably hot to touch.

"See where we're heading, J.B.?" Ryan Cawdor asked, blinking his good eye at the hills that towered up on either side of the blacktop. "There's a big mountain, called Mazama. Old volcano, with a round lake in its crater."

"Crater Lake," Doc Tanner said, yawning, trying to stretch himself awake and finding that there wasn't enough room for his spindly legs with Lori asleep in his arms.

"Know anything about that?" Ryan asked, hoping that the old man's precarious memory might be triggered off to give them some useful information.

"Some."

"Yeah? Go on."

Doc shook his head, his stringy hair dangling across his shoulders. "Cerberus and the other projects were intensely secret. But there were others. I was not privy to many of them."

Everyone in the party, except the albino boy, was awake. Krysty was puzzled. "What does 'privy' mean, Doc?"

"At one time, dear lady, it had the meaning of a place for one's bowel movements and bladder evacuations."

"What is that?" Lori asked, opening her eyes.

"Means where you piss and shit," Ryan said. "Don't it?"

The old man nodded, the pearly light from the east illuminating his oddly perfect teeth. "But in this case, my dear Ryan, it means there were doors closed to me. I was allowed certain knowledge on a need-to-know basis. I do recall that Crater Lake was... what was it?"

Finn applied the brakes and cursed his way down through the gears, fighting the truck to a slowing halt. "Road's blocked," he said, pulling the hand brake on with a hiss of compressed air.

Ryan ignored him, concentrating on clinging to Doc's elusive memory. "Crater Lake was what?"

"In truth it was. A man might trudge along, noting every passing phenomenon..." He hesitated, savoring the word, rolling it around his mouth as if he were trying to identify an exotic herb on his tongue. "Phenomenon. Truly said, my boy. It was that and more."