They'd all been poor, shoddy events.
This was different.
The air tasted of fear. Followed by Krysty Wroth, the one-eyed man picked his way with exaggerated caution, closing in on the fringe of stunted bushes that hid them from the fire and the people around it.
There were eighteen: fourteen men and four women. All were naked to the waist, and sweat glistened on their bare flesh. What fueled the fire was rough-hewn logs, piled loosely in front of a broken block of concrete around eight feet long and four feet thick.
Spread-eagled on the makeshift altar was a huge boar, its skin pink in the light. A hemp cord was bound tightly around its long muzzle, muffling its shrill cries. It lay on its side, its legs and neck stilled with wire. Leaning against the stone rectangle was a long-hafted logger's axe, its edge glittering orange.
"They going to kill it?"
Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Got to be. I heard of some crazies out west kill like this. Trader said he once seen them slitting the throat of a girl child."
"What did he do?"
"Asked 'em first. They said it wasn't a girl. They said it was a goat. A goat without horns. I never forgot that."
"But what did?.." she began.
"Iced them all."
"How about them?" she asked, pointing through the trees at the group of dancing Cajuns as they circled and shuffled through the trampled mud to the slow beating of the drum.
Ryan patted the butt of the gray Heckler & Koch G-12. "Could freeze the lot of them." He paused. "Mebbe. And mebbe that's not enough."
"There's others back at the ville."
"Sure. Could be other villes close by. No, best get our heels clean of here. Join the rest where we said now we know what's going down."
"You figure we could've been next, Ryan?"
He shook his head. "Mebbe, Krysty. Let's go."
They turned their backs on the fire and the bizarre ceremony in the deeps of Atchafalaya and carefully began to walk toward Moudongue.
They'd gone about a hundred paces when they heard the drumming reach a swift crescendo, then stop. The stillness was eerie. A man, his voice high and cracked, sang out some words in a foreign language. It sounded like "Je suis rouge,Фwhatever that meant.
The words were echoed by the rest of... Ryan almost thought of them as a congregation, like some of the church-belt crazies in Deathlands. There was a moment of awful teetering silence, as if the world around licked its lips in lascivious anticipation.
The faintest whistle of a steel blade sliced the air.
There was a solid, wet thunk.
Both of them heard the stifled squeal of mortal shock from the tethered pig. But they kept their faces turned and continued toward the ville and their friends.
After the exchange of whistled signals, Ryan and Krysty rejoined the others. Doc and Lori were sitting quietly together along the faint trail that they hoped led toward West Lowellton. Finnegan and J.B. stood watching the immensely tall Cajun woman. She leaned against a live oak, with little trace of animation on her heavy, brutish features. She was wearing only a coarse brown blanket across her brawny shoulders.
"They're butchering a pig back, there at the fire," said Ryan.
"A pig?"
"Yeah. Better'n a goat with no horns." Only the Armorer would have understood the allusion; Ryan wrinkled his mouth in distaste.
"We going?"
"Yeah, J.B., I guess so. Why d'you bring the woman with you?"
"He wanted to fucking ice her while we was still fucking fucking," spat Finnegan angrily.
"You said..." J.B. started to protest, looking across the small clearing at Ryan.
УSo why's she here?"
"She knows all 'bout this fucking Baron Tourment," said Finn.
The woman showed little interest in their discussion, busying herself with digging something from her cavernous nostrils, examining it closely, then popping it into her mouth and chewing with stolid relish.
"Mebbe she can show us a way out of here," suggested J.B.
The paths were tortuous in the darkness; Ryan realized that once the Cajuns discovered them gone, they'd be able to move faster and farther. Perhaps the woman couldhelp. "Tell her to show us the fastest way to West Lowellton," Ryan ordered Finnegan. "We going to keep her?"
"Far as it takes."
While they moved, quietly and in single file, through the dank wilderness, Finnegan walked alongside the towering woman, trying to converse with her. Now and again he turned to relay something to Ryan.
"Says it's about two hours. Says there's some pack of killers there. Led by a snow wolf. Don't know what that means. Fucking English isn't so good."
Somewhere deep to the left there was a rippling sound, as if some huge creature had moved gently from land to water. Everyone heard it, and everyone made certain a finger was on a trigger. Doc moved closer to Lori and put his arm across her shoulder.
"She says the buildings are still there from before. She calls it the 'great sleeping.' Says that West Lowellton is 'bout the only place this cocksucking Baron Tourment doesn't run."
"Ask her 'bout him," said Ryan, falling back a little way, gesturing for Krysty to take point so he could listen to what the Cajun had to say.
"Says he runs the dead and alive. Those got the death without ending, she says. Baron got a fortress not far off. Runs the ville's all around. She says he's ten foot tall with a..." He laughed. "With a prick so long he ties it to his knee."
"What sort of power's he got? Sec men?"
Finnegan muttered the question. "Says he don't need that. Got the power. Makes it sound like some kind of wizardry, Ryan. Says he's the walking death himself. Says he can't be killed."
J.B. caught that, bringing up the rear of their small column, and he snorted. "Put him in front of my Steyr blaster and see if he's still walking and talking after six rounds go into him."
The towering woman heard him and giggled. It was a strange, thin, feeble sound, like that made by an ailing child, amazingly out of proportion to her build. Finnegan said something, and she leaned down to listen, one hand resting lightly on his arm. The other hand, Ryan noticed, stayed under the blanket.
"She says the baron would eat a little man like him," Finnegan said, gesturing toward J.B. "And shit him out for the... I think she means the gators." Ryan found it all like a bewildering puzzle. Gradually they were putting together some of the pieces. The whole region looked as though it had been nuked with neutron missiles that devastated people and left buildings intact. There was this mysterious Baron Tourment, who seemed to be a very big fish in a medium-size pond. Maybe used voodoo to keep his people in line. And there was this equally odd resistance group somewhere around West Lowellton, where they were heading. Led by a white wolf.
"A white wolf?" he muttered to himself.
Chapter Eleven
Ryan had truly intended to let the hulking Cajun woman go free.
If he'd felt that she'd been any threat to them, then he'd have given Finn the nod to put a bullet through the base of her skull. He'd have given the word and not had a moment's unease about it. That was the way it was in the Deathlands.
But she wasn't a threat. She'd brought them through the swamps, into the pale glow of dawn, right to the edge of what had to be the suburb of West Lowellton. It didn't matter to them that she would tell Ti Jean and the other Cajuns. It was obvious that they preferred the dark, mazy wilderness to the open spaces of the town. Ryan didn't figure there was any real danger of their being pursued.