nearly six and a half. Leave at seven. Be back by... by eleven. If you run into trouble, fire three spaced shots, and we'll come running.'
Just before seven, Ryan found Krysty in the suite where they'd made love the night before. She was pulling the sheets across the rumpled bed.
'Fireblast it, lover! No one's going to complain that we've messed up their room!'
Krysty smiled, shaking her head to tumble the unique hair out of her eyes. 'Guess not, Ryan. But Mother Sonja brought her daughter up proper.'
Slumping into a well-padded armchair, he watched her gracefully move and his eye was caught by something white beneath the bed. He knelt down, peering at it, giving a sudden, barking laugh. 'What is it?'
At his beckoning finger, she joined him on the floor; saw what made him laugh, and laughed also. It was a neat square card, the printing hardly faded in a hundred years.
It read: 'Yes. We have even dusted under here.'
After Finn and the girls left on their foraging expedition, the others passed the time in their own ways.
Doc browsed among the postcards in the dusty lobby. Picking up one from a pile of leaflets, he took it to Ryan.
'Attractions in West Lowellton and nearby Lafayette,' he said. 'What a center of activity this must have been before it became a gigantic catafalque.'
'What's that?' asked J.B. 'Sounds like some old siege weapon.'
'A building to house the dead, Mr. Dix. Like this entire continent. Oh, but if I had known then what I know now.'
'What's that, Doc?' asked Ryan, sensing a chance to uncover whatever bizarre truth lay behind the man called Doctor Theophilus Tanner.
'Ah, no.' Doc wagged his finger. 'One day, perhaps, my dear young man. But not now.'
'When? You know my past, Doc. How 'bout yours? Come on. It can't be that mysterious.'
Doc fumbled with the lion's head atop his ebony sword stick and coughed. 'If I were to tell you, Ryan, then I vow you would not believe it.'
'I would, Doc. Come on. Now's a good time. Just you, me and J.B. here.'
'I'm sorry. We must fight on the darkling plain, swept with confused alarms,' Ryan.'
'How's that?'
'A great singer once sang that we must keep our dreams as clean as silver, for this may be the last hurrah. Oh, had he but known the truth of that, so few years later.'
'Doc,' said Ryan. 'Tell us.'
The old man ran a hand through his long gray hair, flipped through the leaflet in his hand, then blandly changed the subject of their conversation.
'I see we are but six miles from Interstate 10. Nine miles from the Evangeline Race Track. Once I visited the Kentucky Derby. Such a day, Ryan.'
J.B. shook his head and walked away, checking the perimeter of the Holiday Inn. Ryan knew that Doc wouldn't open up until he was good and ready, or until some freak of chance broke the crystal goblet of his secret.
'A mere thirty miles from Longfellow's Evangeline Oak. That would be a national treasure to behold. Probably there are few such left in the Deathlands.' Ryan couldn't be bothered to ask what this oak tree was, guessing that any explanation would only increase his confusion.
'Does that say anything about where you can find food hereabouts?'
'No. It tells us that this establishment had kennels, but that dogs were not allowed in the 136 rooms. Also that we are but fifteen miles from the campus of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Their library would be a trove of interest, Ryan. It is probably intact, if vandals have not destroyed it.'
'You can't eat fucking books, Doc.'
'There is a witty response to that rational observation, Mr. Cawdor, but it escapes me for the moment.'
He opened his hand, allowing the booklet to flutter to the carpet like the last dead leaf from an irradiated tree.
The morning passed.
Doc went and curled up in a corner, sleeping like a child.
J.B. vanished for an hour and returned to tell Ryan that he thought it might be possible to start an emergency electrical generator. 'Better than the hand-torches. Shall I try?'
'Why not?'
Ryan wandered, the deserted corridors, encountering the occasional skeleton, and tried to fathom what it must have been like back before the nuke winter.
In the corner of the motel where the fallen tree had hit, termites had tunneled in, undermining the foundations and making one entire wing dangerous; there were huge cracks in the walls and ceilings. Ryan gazed out through the glass, which had been dulled over, the hundred years of the scouring action of the wind. He looked across the oily waters that snaked around the building to the towering live oaks that, obscured, the nearby road.
The sky was clouding over again. From old books Ryan had learned that in olden times the weather was often the same for days on end. Bright and sunny through the summers, clear and crisply cold through the winter. That was hard to imagine. Ever since his youth at his father's ville of Front Royal back in Virginia, he'd known the weather only to change rapidly, within hours, perhaps a dozen times in a single day. A sunny sky would be soon overtaken with chem clouds, and violent storms would soon erupt, quickly flooding rivers and canals. In parts of the Deathlands, the winds and acid rain could strip the skin from a person in minutes. There might be snow in July in what had been called Arizona, and blistering heat around the sculpted peak of Mount Washton, in the far north, on a January morning.
Here, deep in the South, humidity and a clinging, sweating heat seemed the order on most days. Fortunately, it was cooler inside the motel. Looking out the window, Ryan saw huge insects, wings iridescent, dart over the warm streams. Far to the north, there was the familiar jagged lace of purple lightning. The rumble of thunder never reached him.
Realizing that the double-paned windows might also prevent him from hearing warning shots from Krysty and the others, he moved quickly to the main entrance, pushed open the stiff glass doors and emerged into the warm damp morning. Immediately he heard the harsh sound of swampwag engines. It came from the suburb of West Lowellton, not too far away, where his three companions had gone scavenging.
He spun on his heel, sprinted into the echoing lobby and shouted for J.B. and Doc. Returning to the arched entrance, he flattened himself against the red brick wall.
'What is it? Shots?'
'No. Listen.'
'Wags. Those swamp buggies. Real close. Half mile, mebbe less.'
Doc Tanner approached briskly, his cane clicking on the stone floor. His Le Mat pistol was tucked into his belt in a piratical manner, and his hat was at a rakish angle.
'I fear I slumbered, and... I can hear engines. It sounds like those...'
'Swampwags, Doc. Yeah.'
'Go or stay?' snapped the Armorer tersely.
'Stay,' was Ryan's immediate response. 'It figures they're mebbe searching for us. With six of us running round, they double their chances of getting us.'
'And halves the odds,' said J.B.
'Yeah, it does. But we stay.'
'Should we not be looking for a defensive position?' asked Doc. 'In the event of their coming here?'
It was a difficult decision. Judging by the noise of the engines, there were at least a half dozen of the floundering buggies in the vicinity. That could mean thirty or forty men, maybe more. It didn't much matter if they
