The empty round bottle of dark green glass clutched in the skeletal fingers and the water glass on the bedside table told their own story of a last and merciful release from the endless suffering.
Ryan looked out the window.
The ground sloped toward what Rick had said was the Moscow River. It marked the inner ring of the old city. Beyond that he could see a haze of smoke, and a variety of buildings looming through it. Ryan tried to open the window, managing only a couple of inches. But the fresh air cleared away the musty smell of old, dry death and replaced it with the scent of hundreds of wood fires as the citizens of the ville fought the last desperate troops of General Winter.
They left the security of the house and began to move slowly through the streets, making sure they were well wrapped in their furs. Everyone else out and about that morning was dressed the same.
Ryan's biggest worry was trying to figure out where they might find the tools they needed.
He'd warned Rick that if the right opportunity came along, the freezie would have to risk his fragile Russian and ask some questions.
By a stroke of good luck, their opportunity did come along in the shape of a stout, middle-aged woman pushing a squeaking baby carriage with odd-sized wheels. As she walked toward the three friends one of the wheels simply rolled off and the carriage lurched to one side, nearly tipping the red-faced infant onto the sidewalk.
Ryan snatched the wheel as it bowled past him, stepping in quickly and smiling reassuringly at the woman. He prayed to himself that Rick was in at his heels to pick up any linguistic fastballs. Ryan saw immediately that a split pin hadn't been inserted properly and it took only a few seconds to carry out the simple repair.
The woman said something to him, but he didn't look up from the job, whistling tunelessly to himself. He heard Rick's voice speaking slow, halting Russian.
Ryan straightened, steadying himself on the freezie's shoulder. "Ask where we can find tools," he hissed.
"Have done," was the reply. "Now shut the fuck up, Ryan."
Ryan did what the man said and stood patiently with Krysty, trying to prevent the woman from seeing his face too clearly without appearing to be actually hiding it.
Eventually, with much nodding and smiling, the woman went on her way, the infant in the carriage gazing solemnly at the three strangers. As soon as she was out of earshot, Ryan and Krysty began to pump the freezie.
"Well?"
"Yeah. Good."
"What'd she say?"
"How the weather had taken a turn for the much colder."
Krysty tapped him warningly on the cheek with her finger. "Come on, Rick. You know what we want to hear."
But he was determined to relish his moment. "She said what pretty hair you had, Krysty. Said she hadn't seen a color like that since..." He broke off when he saw the light of anger beginning to flare in Ryan's eye. "All right, all right. But she was amazed at your stopping to help her with that broken wheel. I said we were strangers on a visit to the great city of Moscow that our fathers and our fathers' fathers had told us so much about. That kind of stuff."
"Good," Ryan said.
"She started off on a long spiel about how in the old days, before what she called the long grayness, Moscow had been the center of the world. Mentioned Yanks and nukes. At least I think that was what she was saying, but she had a heavy accent and I didn't get all of the words. Seems the middle was wasted. Totally. Just rubble. She said rats lived there, but I think she meant something more than rats. And she bitched about gangs of kids running around for the Party and killing anyone they didn't like the look of."
"Yeah," Krysty said quietly.
"I kind of got the feeling that there's sec men all around, the nearer you get to the middle. She used a phrase that means something like thick as blowflies on horse shit. Then I said that the ville I came from needed some good tools, and I asked where we should go."
"And?.. Come on, Rick. She could whisp on us to the next sec man she sees. We gotta get moving away from here."
"Sure, sure. Don't get ink on your ceedee, Ryan. Just take it easy. She says there are places only a quarter mile or so from here. As far as I could understand she says there are places you can kind of hire tools, and one or two where you can buy them. But she said that the price was..." He stopped and rubbed his forehead. "She used some expression that meant, like the sun and the stars came cheaper than some of the prices they charged for these tools."
"Gaia! We already had trouble once over being jack-short," said Krysty. "Looks like we need to get us some rubles."
Ryan shook his head. "Difficult, lover. Way Rick tells it, we'll need some heavy jack. Have to thieve it. Dangerous. Might as well steal the tools. Mebbe less risk."
"Still could use some cash," Rick said. "Buy food and stuff."
Ryan nodded. "Yeah, makes sense. Find someone to roll for small change."
Rick grinned. "That's an expression I haven't heard in an age, Ryan. Small change. That current Deathlands slang?"
"No. Got it from an old song somebody on War Wag One used to sing. Song about someone called Small Change getting himself rained on with his own .38. I always liked it. Remembered the words. Found out they meant a handful of low-jack."
Krysty looked up and down the quiet side street. "Got a feeling, guys. Time to move on from here."
Around the next corner they walked straight into a large sec patrol, stopping everyone who tried to pass.
The woman with the baby carriage reported the three strangers as soon as she was able to find a public phone that hadn't malfunctioned. Fortunately for Ryan, Krysty and Rick, that took her nearly an hour. Then the baby was bawling so loudly that she had to stop and feed it before making the call to the headquarters of Internal Security.
By the time the message had filtered on through the various levels of bureaucratic incompetence and reached Major-Commissar Gregori Zimyanin on his crackling pocket radio, the three strangers were long gone and it was near evening.
Zimyanin wasn't pleased.
Ryan and Krysty played mute, shuffling their boots in the slush and mud, gazing vacantly around. Both had their trigger fingers locked in place on their blasters under the furs.
Even without Rick's whispered, worried translation, it was fairly obvious what was going on.
There had been no warning, just a line of men in dark maroon uniforms, some with rifles slung over their shoulders, blocking off the street. For a razored microsecond Ryan considered their chances of turning and making a break for it. His mind told him that he and Krysty could almost certainly have made it, with the maze of derelict buildings and overgrown gardens. In the same instant he knew that it would mean abandoning Rick to definite arrest.
"Cool. If we have to chill them, then we take out as many as we can," he had time to hiss to the other two.
But he quickly saw why they'd been stopped, why everyone out walking that morning along that particular street was being stopped. The melting snow had flooded storm culverts, and a wide drainage ditch had overflowed, leaving a spreading pool of filthy, freezing water seeping over the road. With the exception of the very elderly or young children, everyone was directed to a flat-topped wag piled high with shovels, picks and forks.
Nobody tried to resist the armed militia. They simply took the tools that they were given and plodded into the water, above the knees, and shoveled the icy sludge from the ditch. The three friends joined them.
"This is fucking crazy," Rick muttered. "This wasn't what I was supposed to do — ending my days in a shit-filled river in Moscow! Listen, Ryan. I tell you I can't do this. You and Krysty leave me. Go for it and have a dry martini in Harry's Bar up on Fourth Avenue."