James Axler - Palaces Of Light

“Doc, if they were unendurable, you would have bought the farm, and I wouldn’t have to listen to your interminable complaints,” Mildred countered in a voice that was as dry as Doc’s. Albeit that she had preserved hers by holding her peace for what seemed to be far too many miles while the old man moaned and droned on, his voice like the drip of water wearing away at her patience. At that, the fact that it made her think of water at a time when they were preserving theirs and putting aside thoughts of slaking their ravaging thirst was something that only served to increase her irritation.

“All I am trying to point out is that the baron may be rewarding us well for our endeavors if we achieve our goal, but he has not exactly given us the tools with which to finish the job.” He paused for a moment, his head cocked in thought, much to Mildred’s relief. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last, and before she had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief he had started again, albeit on a different tack.

“Strange, but by the Three Kennedys, that phrase strikes a resonant chord deep within the caverns of remembrance! Perhaps it was something that one of the three blessed ones themselves uttered at some point. Or some such personage, one who shared an exalted position similar to that—”

He was cut short with a sudden action. Mildred, realizing that his sudden ramblings, now that they had veered from the simple grumblings of before, presaged a descent into the kind of temporary madness that blighted his life—and therefore by extension hers and those of her fellow travelers—turned and slapped him across the face. Hard. She was about five yards from him, just in front, and so to achieve this action she had to spin and then take a step back that added to the momentum of her swinging arm. She caught the old man with a full and open palm.

In the quiet of the arid and deserted plain, with no sound from the others beyond the muffled padding of boots on hard-packed sand, the blow sounded large and shocking. Doc’s head snapped on his neck, his eyes wide with shock and his jowls shaken by the impact of the blow. It resounded so loud in their collective silence that the others stopped to turn and face Doc and Mildred.

For a moment Doc stared blankly into Mildred’s face. From his expression she couldn’t tell if he would cry, yell, hit her or pass out.

He did none of those things. Instead, a slow grin spread across his face as he held a hand up to his stinging cheek.

“Madam,” he said slowly, “there must be other, and perhaps better ways in which to bring a man back from the brink of the abyss. But I would doubt if there are any that would have such an immediate effect. Do you know, for a moment there I could hear myself and found it quite hard to credit the things that were coming from my mouth. It is very hard to describe, as though one is separated from oneself and observing from a distance. To be back in a place where the mind and body occupy the same place is a pleasure. Even if—” he added, looking around “—it is such a place as this.”

The others had stopped to watch, taken aback by the sudden explosion of violence in Mildred’s behavior. Doc’s mumbling moan had become little more than a background sound to them, marking and punctuating each footfall. In truth, each of them was finding the going tough, and to waste time on the disjointed grumbling of the old man was more effort than they felt they could spare.

Now, almost forced into a halt by the turn of events, it became obvious that they had become mechanical in their actions, and for the first time in several hours under the baking skies they stopped to look at one another.

“He’s right about the wag, though,” Krysty said in a voice ravaged by the climate and by the lack of water. “At least we could have made some kind of shelter for the worst of the day.”

Ryan shook his head slowly. To speak was a great effort, so he used his words sparingly. “Can’t get too close. They’re on foot. Too much risk of them seeing dust clouds if we used wheels.”

Jak sniffed. “Get too far, lose touch.”

J.B. cast a long glance into the far distance. Toward the horizon, it seemed as though the vista in front of them was devoid of life. Only toward the edge of land and sky, where the two met in an indistinct haze, was there anything that could in any way be construed as signs of life. Even then, the specks that moved in the sealike mirage of wavering light might have been nothing more than phantoms of imagination. Following the Armorer’s gaze, Ryan could barely focus his only functioning orb on them. If he was honest, he knew they were real only because he had been tailing them for so long, and in an area about thirty miles back where there had been some jagged outcrops that jutted savagely from the earth to provide some kind of cover, he had been able to get close enough to take stock of the enemy.

“Should have taken them then,” J.B. murmured, as though able to read the one-eyed man’s mind.

Ryan allowed a grin to crack the previously grim set of his jaw. J. B. Dix had traveled with him for so long that each man knew the other’s way of thinking.

“You know why we couldn’t do that,” he said simply, for the Armorer, as he was also known, was only too well aware.

“Yeah. Can’t lose the captives. Can’t return without them. And if we don’t, then there’s no point in us having come this far.”

Ryan shrugged. There was nothing more to say. With a gesture, he indicated that they should start to move forward. Wearily, and with a resignation born of knowing that objective could only be achieved with further suffering, they began to move in a straggling line once more.

Ryan and Krysty were at the front, almost side by side. Jak came in their wake, with J.B. behind him. Mildred hung back a little, partly because she wanted to avoid the choking and irritating dust that they raised with their heels, and partly because she felt beholden to keep an eye on Doc. The old man—in some ways, and yet not others, as he was centuries old in conception yet had lived a span not much longer than any of them—was lagging behind. The ravages of his past experience made it hard for him sometimes to keep up in extreme conditions, his body having suffered at the hands of too many to sustain the levels of stamina sometimes needed. His tenacity, however, and sheer determination could sometimes equalize him with his peers.

As they made their weary way in the wake of the party they trailed, Ryan played over the options in his mind.

They had to have been crazy to take this one on. Sure, they needed the jack and the supplies that this would bring, but at what cost? It irritated him when they were reduced to hiring out their services like the mercies of the days before skydark. The highest bidder got the service, and screw what the mission may be. There were certain things that they wouldn’t do. Honor might have been a word that had lost all meaning postnukecaust, but Ryan still had to be able to look at himself in a mirror and be satisfied with what he saw. In their own ways, all of them had codes that they lived by. And those codes were basically the same. It was one of the things that bound them together.

This job was different from most others they’d taken on. The way the baron told it, some coldhearts had taken all the children in the ville. Why was a mystery; how was an even bigger one. Despite his best efforts, Ryan had been unable to understand what had occurred. All he knew was that the baron was willing to pay them a lot of jack to rescue the ville’s children.

While it was true that a ville was lost without kids—without the next generation a ville could do nothing but wither and buy the farm, at the mercy of an aging population and an outside world that grew progressively younger and stronger—still it was more than just altruism that had driven the baron’s desperate bargaining. The fact that one of the kids taken was his own had a greater bearing on his willingness to give ground than perhaps his people would have liked, had they been privy to the negotiations.