Doc managed to move out on his own, clutching his arm where he'd jarred it in the fall. He had to wait until the writhing began to ease, which allowed him to go look for his swordstick. While Jak looked after Lori, calming her, the others went to examine the twitching corpse of the mutie rattler.
Its head was pulped and both eyes were gone. The main fangs had snapped off into short, splintered stumps, from which threads of poison still oozed into the dirt. The remainder of the body was moving slightly as the nerve endings began to close down on any messages.
"What's that on its neck?" J.B. asked, pointing at the silvery collar that Ryan had glimpsed a few speeded seconds earlier.
Krysty leaned over the immense body, avoiding the rattle that still vibrated with no more noise than a child's toy. "It's locked on," she said. "It'll take some cutting to get it off."
"What's the lettering say?" Ryan asked.
"A name. Can't..." The girl wiped blood away. "Yeah. Azrael. And the number twelve. That's all. Gaia! You figure it's someone's pet?"
"Could be." The Armorer turned to Ryan. "Remember that baron up north... one that had an extra pair of residual hands?"
"Yeah. Oh, sure. He had a mutie maggot as his special pet. Slept in a big wooden bed with silk sheets and got fed like a baby."
"It's a nightmare." Rick shook his head. "I know that now. You're all figments of my imagination. Inside the coolant capsule I've gone stark mad. Yeah, as mad as a hatter. Hatters were mad because they used a lot of mercury in the process of making hats. Fumes rotted their brains. Mad hatters. That's me. Rattlers as big as a semi. Maggots as pets. Redheads with pistols. Albino kids with Clint Magnums. One-eyed men and... I can't stop talking. Why's that, Ryan?"
"Because you're in shock, Rick, and you're kind of not used to the Deathlands and its pleasures yet. That'll come."
"Terrific. I can't wait. I'm just not coping... know what I mean? Momma always said I was a born underachiever."
Lori was still shaking. "I'm wanting to fuck out of this," she said, voice shrill and high.
"You're all right now, my delicate little Meissen shepherdess."
"No thanks to you! Nearly killing me with jumping in and shouting at the mutie bastard. Stupid yellow old triple-crazy."
Doc's face fell. "I confess that my efforts were not quite as successful as I had hoped, my dear child, but I truly did my best."
"Not best enough, and I'm not your fucking child! You made me rad-sick!"
Ryan felt the old glow of scarlet anger begin to blaze. Something that he'd learned, painfully, to control over the years. He was aware of the flush of heat that brightened the scar across his face, and his fingers clenched with the surging rage. In some ways it was a pleasant, reassuring feeling that swamped everything else. To slap Lori Quint across her petulant, pretty little face and knock her on her ass in the trampled dirt would be a good thing.
"Good thing," he muttered.
Fortunately at least for Lori Krysty Wroth had been with Ryan long enough to recognize the flaring danger signals.
"No, lover," she said, taking a half step that put her between Ryan and the trembling blond teenager.
"Doc risked..." Ryan began, gritting his teeth so hard that it made his jaw ache.
Krysty held up a hand, facing Lori. "You live around the Deathlands and you get to see a lot of shit behavior. Every now and again you see someone do something really brave. What Doc did to try and save your miserable skin is one of the bravest things I ever saw. A little steel needle against that mutie monster there!"
"Grace under pressure," Rick added, trying to wipe sweat and dirt off the lenses of his glasses.
"I've heard that," J.B. said. "Read it someplace, years ago."
Krysty ignored the interpretations, glowering at Lori. "You hear what I'm saying?"
"Yeah. But it was Ryan and you lot chilled the snake."
"You'd have been dead if Doc hadn't jumped in when he did," Ryan said, finding that the tide of his anger was ebbing slowly away, leaving him feeling irritable and dissatisfied.
"Drop it, my loyal comrades," Doc whispered. "The child's overwrought and doesn't mean what she says. She could do with a rest. We all could."
"Don't want another night out in the open. Not with rattlers as big as war wags sliding around the brush. We gotta push on toward the ville, wherever that is. The smell of gas is stronger, and there was that air wag. We got to be close."
Ryan knew what he'd said was right. J.B. backed him for moving on. But the reality was that Lori and the freezie weren't in good enough shape to keep on trucking through the fading light.
So they compromised. They had seen that the edge of the arid mesquite region was fairly close. It was agreed that they would trek on for that and then find a place to camp, posting guards against the hazards of the night.
Ryan curled up alongside Rick, hoping to find out a little more about what the freezie had done in his highly classified past.
"Wanna talk, Rick?" No answer. "Rick? D'you wanna talk some?"
The faint snoring and the heavy, regular breathing answered the question.
A violent chem storm raged during the night and some chunks of nuke debris came shafting from deep space, the detritus of the abortive Star Wars project of the 1980s that had finally circled back to its home planet, burning up in streaks of brilliant magnesium light.
The wind brought the heavy odor of gasoline from the greener land that lay ahead of them for the next day.
Ryan fell asleep thinking about a ville that owned so much gas. And so much power. It could be one hell of a place.
Chapter Fourteen
Rick Ginsberg dreamed during that second night of his awakening.
During his student days at UCLA, he'd dropped some "farmies," as the new hallucinogenics were known. They took you one step sideways from reality, but you still kept in touch. Unless you got an "oily," as bad trips were called. He couldn't remember why they were known by that name. Something lost in the mists of the past.
Ever since he'd blinked his sticky eyes open in the chemical cold of the cryo center, Rick had felt like he was in the middle of the worst oily that anyone had ever known. His brain simply would not keep still. It had no stability. No sense of what was "then" or "when" or "now." During the brief battle against the huge thrashing snake, it had been like a psycho-dream. The six men and women were now his comrades. Maybe they were his friends. He sure as green earth hadn't ever had any friends like Ryan and the others before, assuming they weren't a figment of his own fervid brain.
That confusion ran through the muddle of his dreams.
A rabbi was talking to him, both of them sitting on bright green transparent chairs that floated in a huge swimming pool, the walls making everything shimmer and echo. The rabbi was fully dressed, but Rick was in a torn suit.
"The question, my son, is this," the rabbi said, smiling with an infinite wisdom. "Are you a man dreaming that you are a butterfly? Or are you a butterfly dreaming that you are a serpent? That is the eternal riddle, wrapped in mystery, shrouded in an enigma. What is the answer, Richard?"
"I am, therefore I stink."
"Wrong. Why do you flagellate me like this? What have I done to deserve it?"
The rabbi segued into his mother, weeping as she leaned on the enormous walnut sideboard that Uncle Maurice had given them.
Rick moaned and rolled over on his back, starting to snore. Ryan reached and nudged him into a half-waking movement, edging him into another dream.
Now he was in a dusty cornfield with his cousin Ruth. But Ruth had a tumbling mane of bright crimson hair, and she was leaning over his naked groin, her lips brushing at his swollen erection. In the background Rick could hear a brass band playing the theme music from Paladin.