The Holiday Inn stood on a slight mound in the center of a maze of small waterways. Some had silted up; some had dried to lush valleys of moss; some still flowed with gurgling muddy water. The motel itself was a sprawling single-story structure, originally painted white and built with central pillars and columns in the American Colonial style. On its western flank a tall sycamore had died and fallen, breaking three windows. The flowering shrubs that once bad been carefully tended now ran wild, with azaleas and bougainvillea rampant, clear across the circular drive and parking spaces, flooding into the railed swimming pool with its turquoise slide. The permanently green Astroturf was covered with lichen.
The six of them stood and stared. Finn spat onto the dusty road, then started and peered down by his boots. 'Fucking tracks, Ryan.'
Ryan mentally cursed himself for being so careless. He'd been so interested in seeing this motel, preserved like a fly trapped forever in yellow amber, that he'd been ignoring basic safety. Like keeping his eyes open.
Finnegan was correct. The thick dust on the blacktop was overlaid with the familiar tracks of the swampwags. He knelt down to run his fingers lightly over the marks, then stood and scrutinized them from a different angle. He walked a few paces toward the imposing bulk of the motel, looking back at the tracks.
'They all turned here, J.B.,' he said. 'They come this far, then they go right around and head back toward the main part of the ville.'
'Yeah. I read it that way.'
'Mebbe this Holiday Inn place marks the edge of Baron Tourment's secure territory.'
Ryan looked at Krysty. 'Could be, lover. This gang runs part of West Lowellton. This baron maybe hasn't enough sec men to come clear out the nest of rats.' That made sense.
They could imagine no other reason why the tire tracks should stop so abruptly about a hundred paces before the tangled skein of waterways and narrow bridges that circled the building.
From the south came the sullen rumbling of thunder. A deep purple cloud moved menacingly along the southern fringe of the sky, its upper edge touched with vermilion.
'Nuke storm on the way,' said Finn.
'No,' said Doc.
'What?'
'Not a nuke storm. I spent a summer here, way back in... my mind sort of trembles when I try and recall dates and places. I spent a vacation with Emily... Was that her name? Emily?'
Only once since Ryan Cawdor had met Doc Tanner had the old man mentioned Emily. It was just another ill-shaped piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the man's mysterious past.
'Go on, Doc,' urged Lori. 'Please.'
'It was out near Baton Rouge. Rained, so we got busted flat, roads turned to rivers. Dark at noon, so's you couldn't see a hand before your face. Lord, but that was a time. Emily cried on my shoulder, and she lost her kerchief that day. Lace-trimmed. Sky like this. But there was a pool of clear gold light, straight over our heads Ч we saw it. Looking up, like a road to the throne of the Lord Himself. Emily wasn't much on religion.... She... seen an eagle in that light.'
The voice was fading, as it often, did during Doc's recollections. This one had gone on longer than most. Ryan prompted him gently.
'And the sky was like that? Purple and red at the edges?'
'All around. This eagle. Emily... was it with her? Or later, after I'd... they trawled and... I recall a line or two of verse by...' The brow furrowed with the effort of concentration. 'By Oliver Makin. 'The bird that flies above the clouds knows only the sun, and his storms are sun-storms'. Yes, that was it, I believe. I always thought that a pretty conceit. I'm sorry, I fail to remember why...'
Lori squeezed his hand. Ryan was struck by the way Doc Tanner mixed moments of the highest intelligence with long hours of near senile meanderings.
'So, it's not a fucking nuke storm,' said Finn. 'Least that's good news. But it still looks like the skies are going to fucking piss all over us.'
'Best get inside the building,' said Ryan. 'I'll go first. J.B.?'
'Yeah?'
'Bring up...'
'The rear. I got it, Ryan.'
The relics of several automobiles were parked in the overgrown lot at the side of the building. Over the main doorway there was a kind of archway. Beyond it was a pair of double doors, one with the glass cracked clean across from corner to corner. Ryan, the G-12 at the ready, stepped lightly toward the entrance, sniffing the air like a prowling panther. The green scent of the luxurious vegetation filled his nostrils.
'Should we go in, Ryan?' asked Finnegan.
'Fireblast! Why not?'
The door was stiff, creaking on dry hinges. Ryan kicked away a pile of desiccated leaves heaped in the entrance; they rustled loudly. With the sun behind them, the group filed through the door one by one into the cool dark vestibule; the air felt almost clammy on the skin. Last to enter, J.B. pulled the door shut.
'Shall I stay here and cover our asses?'
'No. If'n there's hunters after us, this place is too big to cover until we've checked it out. Safer to keep together.'
The Armorer nodded.
'Be quicker if we split up,' suggested Finn. 'Mebbe me, J.B., Doc 'n' Lori could go one way, you 'n' Krysty go the other, and meet up back here in the... what the fuck is this big room?'
'Called the lobby, my dear Mr. Finnegan,' replied Doc Tanner. 'By the three Kennedys! This place brings back such a flood of memories.'
'Tell us 'bout them, Doc,' said Ryan, but the old man was already going on ahead, pushing through a second set of glass doors, with ornate brass handles shaped like the heads of twining alligators.
The rest of the group followed him into the cavernous lobby. It was a place of deep and swimming shadows, with large chairs and sofas set about circular tables. The walls had paintings of the bayous, streaked with dark and light greens. To one side was a long desk marked Registration; across the lobby two passages led off to the left and to the right. The one on the left carried a sign in a sinuous gold script: Cajuns' Bar & Atchafalaya Dining.
Ryan inhaled deeply, tasting the old, old dust, stale and flat. He closed his eyes and licked his dry lips, savoring the feeling of being inside a creature dead a hundred years. It was a feeling he had known before, when he and the Trader had first discovered the sealed entrances to a redoubt, locked away since before the big winter. But this was different. This was not an arid military storehouse but something that had lived and bustled with activity.
'Okay, Finn. Krysty and me'll go left. Rest of you go right. Meet back here in...' he glanced down at his chron, '...in 'bout an hour. Watch your triggers. Don't want to chill each other.'
Their boot heels muffled by the thick pile carpets, four of them went cautiously off, vanishing around a corner. Ryan turned and grinned wolfishly at Krysty, noticing that her long scarlet hair was shimmering and moving gently on its own, though there was no draft to stir it.
'Hear anything? Feel anything?' he asked.
'Just a lot of love for you,' she whispered, her voice almost vanishing before it reached him.
'Nothing living?'
She shook her head slowly. 'Smell reminds me of how Mother Sonja used to take out our winter clothes, back in Harmony. She'd open up the closets that had been shut tight all summer, and the smell... it was kind of like this. Dry and musty.'
Ryan walked to the long desk. There was a notice neatly printed on a board. 'Jerry Suster call home soonest.' Under it, hastily chalked, was the single word: 'No-show.'
The place showed every sign of a rapid and disorganized withdrawal, with clipboards, pens, cards and small change scattered everywhere. At the far end of the desk Krysty found a round metal drum, with a printed label behind clear plastic. 'How far to your next Holiday Inn destination? Allow us to make your reservation.'
'See how far we come from Alaska,' said Ryan.
