Ryan looked around, his jaw sagging, his single eye dazzled wherever he stared.
'Blessed Judas Iscariot,' he heard Doc whisper. 'We've chron-jumped.'
But the words meant nothing to Ryan, and he forgot them in the bewildering sights all about them.
'I'll fuck a dead stickie,' said Hunaker in amazement.
'The Keeper will allow you to reconnoiter the parameters of the redoubt once you have eaten.'
'This must take an army,' said Hennings.
The old man cackled. 'You think so, black man?'
'We told you our names,' said Ryan. 'How 'bout yours?'
'This my wife, Rachel,' said the old man, pointing to the old woman, who curtsied. 'And this is my other wife, Lori. She don't say much. Bein' a dummy, that's why.'
'And where are the others?' asked Krysty.
'Others? Ain't none. We're everybody.' He and the old woman giggled.
'Then, where's... who?..' Ryan was lost for words.
The old man had a coughing fit, and it was some seconds before he could speak clearly. He wiped some drooling spittle from his beard. 'Me? I'm Quint the Keeper, young man. The Keeper of the redoubt, and my word is law, and the law is death.'
Chapter Four
The blind, mewing creature tied naked to the bed bore little resemblance to a human being.
Once it had been a farmer named Ivan Ivanovich. It had struggled broken-nailed for a pitiful existence in cruel fields of poisonous soil. It had been married to a wife who had died of a bleeding illness eight years back, leaving three squabbling children. Two of them were mutants, with grotesque facial disfigurements. One had a third, soft pineal eye, exposed and raw, weeping constantly in the center of his forehead.
Now there was only darkness.
Not the comfortable darkness of a cold night, with an iron stove glowing with heat and he and his family huddled together under blankets all in one huge bed.
'Not day... not night,' he mumbled through his broken teeth. But Ivan Ivanovich couldn't hear his own words, because a sharp file had been thrust into his ears, bursting the delicate eardrums.
There had been no warning. Just the shaggy men, with some devilish women among them, looming out of the driven snow and the fading light. All with guns slung across their shoulders — real guns, not the battered muskets and old bolt-action rifles that the folk of Ozhbarchik could muster.
This band of guerrillas had visited them before. That time the butchers had stolen food and killed a villager who tried to resist them. This time, it seemed, the murderers were bent on killing all the villagers.
Most of the thirty-seven men of Ozhbarchik had fallen in a bloody hail of lead, massacred by the laughing strangers. The nineteen women and three surviving children were seized and held in several of the scattered huts. The cows were each shot with a single bullet through the skull. Ivan's two chickens were chased and caught with much merriment, decapitated, then thrown into a cauldron simmering over an open fire.
Ivan Ivanovich had been the chieftain of Ozhbarchik. His ownership of the pair of fowl had conferred that dubious honor on him. Now he was paying a monstrous price for that honor.
Before his eardrums were pierced, Ivan Ivanovich had heard the leader of the band, named Uchitel, ordering his followers to take what they wanted, roast the animals, eat their fill. He had warned his people to watch for concealed weapons. 'A man may dine, yet feel his tripes spilled in his lap,' he'd shouted.
There had been screaming; high, thin sounds, as the raiders took their pleasure with the women of the village; Ivan's sister had been taken in front of his eyes by three men at once, with others jostling in a queue behind, their breeches unlaced, and erect, hugely swollen penises thrusting ready.
He'd watched a man fail in his efforts to sodomize a woman then take out his anger by slitting her throat from ear to ear, cursing the dying woman as her blood fountained across his boots.
A huge woman with coarse skin had punched Ivan to the floor, holding him there with a muddied boot, while two other women cut away his clothes with their narrow-bladed knives. They had not been gentle, and his skin was streaming from a dozen shallow slashes from their weapons. They had mocked him as they took and bound him to the rude frame of his own bed, hands and feet pulled painfully apart in a great X. Blood trickled from beneath his broken nails from the tightness of the rawhide cords that bit into the skin at ankle and wrist.
He'd been conscious of the horrors all about him. One of his children had been butchered for refusing to use his tender mouth to pleasure a skinny killer. He'd smelled the scent of a huge fire outside and knew that some of the huts were being used for fuel to roast the slaughtered cattle. Gradually the screaming had died down. None of them had come to hurt him.
Not then. Not at first.
After an hour or so, the leader came to the bed and stared down at him. He wore a long coat made from the skin of a white bear, trimmed with soft sable. His eyes were a curious golden color, his mouth warm and friendly. Around his temples was a band of silver, a ruby at its center.
'This stinking hovel makes me want to vomit, old man. My good brothers and sisters may become sickened from being here. But we shall not stay long.'
And he smiled down at Ivan Ivanovich. That was before the pain and the blackness, when Ivan still had a name and knew who he was.
The brutish woman came then, when everyone else was outside. The others called her Bizabraznia, the ugly one. Through the open door Ivan saw the bright flames as they danced and flared, caught the rich taste of the cooking meat, heard the devilish laughter. By then he supposed that everyone in the village was dead.
Bizabraznia, grimacing and farting, lowered her bulk to the side of the bed. He could smell her sour breath, the taint of kvass. The raiders had quickly found the kegs of the sour beer.
'The men enjoy their fucking, little grandfather,' she said, reaching out with her broad hand and touching him beneath the chin. He tried to pull away, but the cords held him helpless. She smiled at his efforts, chided him.
Her fingers ran through his straggly beard and the gray hair matted with sweat on his chest. Lower and lower she touched him, bringing her face nearer to his. The little eyes, buried in fat like a suckling pig's, came nearer. Her lips opened and she kissed him, the stubble on her cheeks and chin scraping against his flesh.
For a second, he tried again to resist her foulness, but she gripped his shrunken penis, whispering, 'Kiss me sweet, brother, else I'll tug this off your belly easy as wringing a chick's neck. Real sweet kiss, like you and your good wife relish.'
Her lips pressed to his, and he fought to respond, closing his eyes against the vileness. Her hand caressed him, rousing him. Her mouth tasted of the stolen food that once belonged to the good people of Ozhbarchik.
She reclined, releasing him, fumbling with her leather breeches, dropping them over her pallid, wrinkled thighs. Bizabraznia belched, putting a hand to her mouth in mock politeness.
'
'The only food is cabbage soup and gruel.' Somehow the child's verse was a foul obscenity on her chapped lips, and he nearly threw up. Again he restrained himself, knowing that this monstrous harridan would kill him if he didn't please her.
The woman heaved herself up and squatted over his thighs, grinning, trying to bring him to erection. 'Not much for you, is there? Not in the way of a man, eh? There's a good... Something's stirring, I swear. Not much of a fucking worm, but better than... ah.'
The ultimate nightmare was that she succeeded. Despite everything that had passed, Ivan Ivanovich became more roused than he had for many impotent years. He thrust up against her, grinding his hips against her muscular buttocks. She reached a gasping climax, accompanied by the cheers of the dozen or so bandits that had come in from the bitterly cold night to watch the show.
Bizabraznia heaved herself off him, depriving him of the small pleasure of his own orgasm, sitting down again with a disgusting sucking sound.
'Please...' he said.
