"How's the kid going to?.. Oh, I see." Krysty also turned away from the window, not wanting to see the macabre ending to the minidrama.
Ryan continued to watch, seeing no good reason not to.
The girl had pulled a length of narrow whipcord from inside the leg of her bottle-green panties. It had a thicker, softer piece of rope knotted to each end to make the grip that much easier.
With an experienced hand she adjusted a loop around the victim's neck, settling herself more comfortably on his chest. She then glanced around to make certain her cohorts were ready.
With a whoop of delight she began to heave on the ends of her garrote, tightening it. She leaned back to apply more pressure, so that the waxed cord vanished into the scrawny flesh, biting deeper, drawing blood that ran dark onto the sidewalk. From his viewpoint high above, Ryan could see how fiercely the crippled man struggled for the last choking breaths of life. But the gang of street brats were too many and too strong.
The girl was good at it, and Ryan wondered idly just how many times she'd performed this obscene ritual of public execution. As the ending came near she braced herself by pushing her booted feet against the side of her victim's throat, sawing at the strangling cord to make it cut deeper.
There was a convulsive jerking from the man that the children found hard to contain. Then a gout of blood erupted as the whipcord sliced through the artery close to the ear.
With a shriek of satisfaction the girl stood up, uncoiling the murderous length of thin rope and tucking it back into her panties. She stood astride the corpse and leaned over to spit delicately into the open, boggling eyes. It was obviously some sort of a ritual with the gang, as they all followed her example before filing off down the tree-lined street, just like any other bunch of kids.
"Why that way?" Krysty asked.
"Cheaper than a speeding bullet," Rick replied, then retreated to a corner of the room where he was quietly sick.
"Welcome to Moscow," Ryan said quietly.
Chapter Sixteen
"Zup,"Rick repeated, making appropriate gestures. He mimed a pain in his jaw, then clamped an imaginary pair of pincers on the recalcitrant tooth. He heaved it free, managing a broad smile to indicate his relief from pain.
The Russian stared blankly at him from behind a positive forest of gingery facial hair.
Ryan watched the pantomime with mixed feelings. Almost immediately after seeing the butchering of the cripple, for God only knew what malefaction, the pain from his damaged back tooth flared up alarmingly. Ryan Cawdor was a man of extreme physical courage who had endured more suffering in his life than most people could begin to imagine. But he gasped at the shock from the exposed nerve. It was like having someone probing into the marrow of his jawbone with a white-hot steel needle. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he pressed his fist against the side of his jaw.
"Mother Sonja used to say that a distillation of the oil of cloves was an aid to that sort of tooth pain," Krysty said.
"Got any?"
"Course not!"
"Then keep your rad-blasted stupe mouth shut, will you?"
She stared hard at him. "There're times I make allowances for you behaving like a hamstrung pig, lover. Luckily for you, this happens to be one of those times."
Now they were wandering around a big street market, only a mile or so farther into the ravaged suburbs of the huge ville. They'd crossed over the remains of a massive freeway, several lanes in either direction. A collapsed overpass had been partially cleared away and there were two lanes working. Ryan and Krysty had stopped and stared in amazement. Neither of them had ever seen such an amazing volume of gas-powered transport, buzzing and roaring past them: heavy wags, painted in a dull olive-green and a number of autowags; two-wheelers by the dozen. And at least two vehicles out of every three sported the silver circle that they recognized as being the insignia of "the Party."
The market wasn't very difficult from innumerable similar ones that Ryan had seen all over the scattered villes of the Deathlands. Trestles made from old doors, propped up by makeshift hunks of hacked wood, sold everything under the sun.
"Everything except weapons," Ryan observed.
Though some cautious barons controlled how blasters and blades were peddled in their villes, most markets in the Deathlands would have several stalls selling arms: longbows, crossbows, lethal catties made from steel and plaited cords of elastic, hunting spears, knives long and short. And blasters Colts, Smith & Wessons, Mausers, Webleys, Lugers, Winchesters, Deringers and Derringers, Adams and Rugers, flintlocks and percussion cap blasters, muskets, rifles and carbines. Automatics and semiautomatics, single action and double action. Grens and launchers.
But in the Nikulino street market there wasn't even a blunt knife on offer. Ryan also noticed that nobody appeared to be carrying any kind of weapon, at least not openly, except for the parading sec men and women, all of whom carried either pistols or rifles Stechkins, Tokarevs and Makarovs. But, most commonly, the old versions of the Kalashnikov rifle.
The market offered everything else.
Food was scarce and, compared to some of the other items, expensive. Potatoes were plentiful, but the stalls peddling carrots, turnips and small amounts of hothouse fruits and tomatoes were sparse and the produce was costly. There was plenty of meat, with old women sitting behind their displays, rhythmically fanning away the hordes of buzzing blowflies. Mutton and horsemeat were most common, as was a surprising quantity of good fresh fish.
A few stalls sold prenuke memorabilia, like books and small household items. But the prices posted seemed ludicrously high compared with other things, and there seemed to be few takers.
One ramshackle table held only an array of false teeth, gleamingly pink and white and infinitely macabre. Another stall sold false teeth made from metal and wood, which seemed to cause Ryan's pain to surge again.
Clothes were sold in the largest number of stalls in the market, most of them crudely made and based on furs. One old woman had some finely worked hand-embroidered kerchiefs for sale, but nobody was buying. The stall next door was piled with secondhand rubber boots, and fifteen or twenty people were jostling to purchase them.
One section of the market was set aside for various crafts. A slim boy with only one leg pumped at a foot-operated drill and offered extremely fine engravings on glass of birds and butterflies. Another boy was selling tiny creatures of folded, colored card, attracting a good crowd to admire his skill. A chubby woman standing next to Ryan said something, gesturing to the boy's creations. Hoping he was right, Ryan muttered "Da" and smiled. She smiled back, so he figured he'd guessed right.
Some of the craftsmen had signs hung up to advertise their particular skills. It was Krysty who spotted the enormous golden tooth, carved from a single piece of wood, indicating the dentist.
It was only when Rick was deep in the miasma of trying to explain Ryan's condition that they realized they were attracting a crowd.
"Zup!" shouted the freezie, sweating with the tension. He looked worriedly at Ryan.
Since the pain from his ravaged tooth had miraculously vanished, it seemed a good moment to make their excuses and leave. But the kopeck had finally dropped and the open-air dentist grinned broadly. He pushed Ryan into a battered iron chair.
As the man smiled through the forest of ginger hair, Ryan was alarmed to see that he was totally toothless. Not a jagged stump remained anywhere.
He beckoned Rick to him, hissing in his ear, "Tell the triple... tell him I want only onetooth out and I'll point at it."
The freezie stumbled through an explanation, which seemed to amuse both the dentist and the growing crowd of watchers. Ryan was becoming less and less comfortable at being the center of attraction, but Krysty reassured him.