The freezie was angrier than any of them had ever seen him. He shook his head so violently that his heavy glasses nearly became dislodged.
"I'm sick, you ice-hearted bastard!" Suddenly he was near to tears. "Christ on a cross! I got this shitty illness and I'm dying and I get fucking frozen. Supposed to be woken up when it's time for the doctors to cure me! And you did it too early."
Krysty tried to calm him. "Rick, it wasn't too early. You know that. The world you knew got blown to hell on January 20, 2001. There won't be a cure. There won't everbe doctors like you knew, hospitals. Nothing like that. Just the Deathlands forever and ever."
"Amen," Doc muttered.
"So, why go on? Why fucking bother, Krysty? Let's just give up now. Right now!"
He was weeping, leaning on his stick, tears streaming down his thin cheeks. Ryan realized how frail and ill he'd become in the past two or three days.
Krysty laid her hands on his shoulders, trying to steady him. "Why? Why don't we all just sit down and give up?"
"Yeah." He wiped his eyes with a clumsy hand. "Yeah. Why go on?"
Outside the sun shone with a hard, facile brilliance, from a faultlessly blue sky. The snow had virtually disappeared, and there had been no sign of the wolf pack.
Krysty's emerald-bright eyes fixed the man with a cold, inexorable stare. Rick actually took a stumbling step away from her flaring anger.
"I can't mend that damaged door. Ryan can't. Nor can J.B. or Jak or Doc. If it doesn't get fixed we stay here, Rick. We stay here and we all get chilled. Sure, we can hold out for a few days. But in the end, though we're good, they'll track us down and chill us. You sit down on your ass and give up and youchill us. Just as surely as if your finger tightens on the trigger of the Kalashnikov."
The sun-splashed room was very quiet. The others were all standing, listening to the argument. No one interrupted.
Rick nodded slowly. "I see that, and I guess I'll do what I can. But after that? Why do you keep trying, Krysty?"
She smiled then, and kissed him gently on the cheek. "Tell you the truth, Rick, I sometimes wonder about that myself."
Something had awakened Zimyanin from a deep sleep. He eased himself away from the hoggish bulk of his wife, wondering if it was the newborn twin baby boys in the apartment immediately above who disturbed his sleep. They bawled endlessly.
But it wasn't that.
Something in his sleep. "The bed was exceedingly comfortable. Thank you for asking," he whispered to himself.
Anya Zimyanin rolled onto her back and farted long and loudly.
He swung his legs out of the bed, wincing as his feet made contact with the cold plas-floor. There was some of the weeks' ration of chay left. If the power was high enough he could boil a pot of water and make himself a cup of tea. The idea appealed to Zimyanin. But he still couldn't quite remember what it was that had woken him in the first place.
The cramped kitchen seemed smaller than usual. Dirty dishes and cutlery remained piled on the counter by the sink. It hadn't been a bad meal. Anya had bought some smoked sprats for the appetizer, serving them with buckwheat pancakes.
Zimyanin knew the old conventions about meals and made sure they were observed whenever possible. He insisted that Anya prepare pervoe blyudoand vtoroe blyudofish for the first main dish then meat for the second main dish.
Minced pike was followed by some indeterminate meat that his wife had sworn was mutton. Unless they were putting horseshoes on sheep, he'd permitted himself to disagree with her. Out east he'd eaten enough horse meat to be sure. A young recruit had once asked him why he hadn't called his horse by any name. He'd replied that he wouldn't give a name to something he'd probably end up having to eat.
For dessert they had consumed a store-bought cake, sticky with honey and raisins. Anya had gotten up from the table and kissed him drunkenly, her mouth oozing sweetness. Someone had given her a bottle of heavy Moldavian red wine, and it had gone to her head.
Zimyanin slept naked and he looked down at his body with a shudder of revulsion. The mute evidence of their loveless coupling was matted in the wiry nest of dark curling hairs that covered his groin. While the kettle simmered he walked quietly through to the tiny bathroom and washed himself.
The overhead light was flickering and dim. Power often fell away during the night. He glanced at his face in the mirror, seeing how the erratic shadows gave the illusion that his mouth and nose had merged into a single dark cavern.
"Ah," he muttered.
That brought back the dream that had jerked him from sleep.
Aliev had been in it. He and Zimyanin had been walking through the grim wastes of the Kamchatka Peninsula, hunting the Narodniki, following their trail of bestial violence and murder.
The weather had been appalling. A chem storm had howled in from the distant purpled mountains, driving acid rain across the barren land, rad-high enough to strip a man's flesh from his bones if he couldn't find cover fast enough.
The sky seemed full of trails from old chunks of nuke waste as missiles burned down through the atmosphere. They'd passed three men on horseback, all of them so wrapped in heavy furs that their faces were obscured. Zimyanin had shouted to them to beware of the lethal weather, but they'd taken no notice. They'd ridden slowly on into the eye of the storm as though they were deaf. Aliev had snuffled and grunted at his side, pointing toward a ruined building that seemed to stand on the edge of the world.
The hurricane screamed at their heels as they closed in on the old house. But the door was locked and coated with a glittering layer of titanium steel. A tiny ob-slit was cut into its center.
Zimyanin pounded on the door with the butt of his Makarov, the noise ringing like a fist beating on a shield of bronze. But nobody came. Aliev had fallen whimpering to his knees, arms locking around the legs of his superior. To try to free himself from the grip of the tracker, Zimyanin reached down and pulled at his head. But hanks of coarse hair came away in his hand, and strips of flesh peeled whitely away from the wretch's face. Bone showed through, and Zimyanin saw to his horror and disgust that it was carved in tiny, delicate figurines of copulating men, women and animals.
He knocked again on the door and heard footsteps above the screeching of the chem storm, combat boots that marched slow and steady. A bolt grated and the ob-slit moved back on its hinges.
Part of a face appeared and studied the major-commissar for a long, long moment. Then the panel slid back again and Zimyanin could hear the steps receding.
As he sat at the table in the kitchen, Zimyanin remembered the bowel-tearing feeling of helpless horror as the lethal storm had enveloped him.
Though he'd been able to see only a small part of the man's face behind the bolted door, he'd felt that he somehow recognized him. Now, all the major-commissar could recall was that the man had been scarred. And had one eye.
Ryan, Krysty and Rick were making slow progress. Even with his walking stick the freezie needed to stop every half mile or so to sit down and recover, his head sunken on his chest, his breath rasping with a shuddering force. His lips turned a frightening shade of pale cyanotic blue.
"Time was I could hike the glacier with the best of 'em," he said. "Now I'm limp as overcooked pasta. That's what my grandmother used to say. This is crazy, Ryan. By the time we get to anywhere we can find some tools, I'll be bloody dead."
"If there hadn't been an armed sec patrol we could have risked the first plan. But without someone who can speak a little to any Russkies we meet, we'll be deader'n these coats."
"Sure, sure." Wearily he climbed to his feet again, sighing heavily. "At least most of the snow's gone today."
The weather was beautiful. The temperature was cool enough to need the coats, but not so cold that it gnawed at exposed skin. The stream chattered to itself as it tumbled over the boulders in its scoured bed.