"Not a lot of time," Ryan said. "Got to pick up the wag. J.B.'ll be wondering where the fuck we are."

"Won't take long, this won't," the girl replied, her voice flat and hard.

Doc stuck his head back into the room. "All quiet out here." Seeing Lori looking at the crippled Sissy, he said, "Let me, honey."

"No," the girl replied.

"Let me go and I'll let you all go free," the mayor pleaded. His face jerked and twitched. He gripped the wheels of the chair, trying to roll away from the icy stare of the tall blond girl. She jammed one foot hard between his legs, making him squeal in pain, her heel holding him still.

"You fuck. You miserable little fuckhead bastard. Making me... Open your mouth, Mayor." Sissy opened his lips as wide as he could, and she drew her pistol, ramming the barrel into his mouth and breaking off one of his front teeth so that blood trickled over his chin and down his elegant suit.

Ryan lurched forward, but Krysty restrained him, shaking her head. "Let her," she said.

"Suck on this, Mayor," Lori said, blowing a kiss to the helpless man. Her own lips peeled back off her strong white teeth in a feral grin as she added, "Suck it good."

The small-caliber pistol jerked in her hand, the noise almost completely muffled in the the man's mouth. Sissy's head snapped back, his whole body convulsing. Lori kicked the chair, sending it spinning into the wall to one side of the window. It tipped over, spilling the dying man on the floor, where he thrashed, arms trembling violently. Blood spilled from his open mouth and his nose. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.

"The fucker ate it good, didn't he?" Lori said, holstering the blaster.

"Sure did," Ryan said. "Now let's get out of here."

A mile out of town Krysty wanted to stop at another of the population markers. "Want to go and knock one off for the late Mayor Sissy," she said.

"Late and unlamented," Doc Tanner added.

"Best keep moving," Ryan said.

J.B. hugged the wheel of the big Kenworth truck, gunning the motor, pedal to the metal, twin lights blazing a path along the old blacktop. About ten miles out of town they picked up the bedraggled figure of Jak Lauren.

For the rest of the night, the seven drove on, away from Ginnsburg Falls, following the northward trail, tugged on by the radio message.

With its mysterious words of hope.

Of hope?

Chapter Twelve

In the pale light of dawn, they passed a bullet-riddled sign, leaning drunkenly to one side, telling them they were on State Highway 62.

J.B. had found a creased and taped map of the district in the glove compartment of the big truck. He opened it carefully, knowing from previous experience how delicate very old documents could be. The light in the crowded cab was a faint, flickering, uncovered light bulb, and he angled the map beneath it, trying to hold it steady against the lurching of the big vehicle.

"Watch the damned bumps," he snarled at Finnegan, who was at the wheel.

"What the fucking bumps yourself!" The Kenworth hadn't taken kindly to being pushed along at a speed beyond what its age could handle. In the first hour a couple of the forward gears had stopped functioning, and the shift was becoming uncomfortably hot to touch.

"See where we're heading, J.B.?" Ryan Cawdor asked, blinking his good eye at the hills that towered up on either side of the blacktop. "There's a big mountain, called Mazama. Old volcano, with a round lake in its crater."

"Crater Lake," Doc Tanner said, yawning, trying to stretch himself awake and finding that there wasn't enough room for his spindly legs with Lori asleep in his arms.

"Know anything about that?" Ryan asked, hoping that the old man's precarious memory might be triggered off to give them some useful information.

"Some."

"Yeah? Go on."

Doc shook his head, his stringy hair dangling across his shoulders. "Cerberus and the other projects were intensely secret. But there were others. I was not privy to many of them."

Everyone in the party, except the albino boy, was awake. Krysty was puzzled. "What does 'privy' mean, Doc?"

"At one time, dear lady, it had the meaning of a place for one's bowel movements and bladder evacuations."

"What is that?" Lori asked, opening her eyes.

"Means where you piss and shit," Ryan said. "Don't it?"

The old man nodded, the pearly light from the east illuminating his oddly perfect teeth. "But in this case, my dear Ryan, it means there were doors closed to me. I was allowed certain knowledge on a need-to-know basis. I do recall that Crater Lake was... what was it?"

Finn applied the brakes and cursed his way down through the gears, fighting the truck to a slowing halt. "Road's blocked," he said, pulling the hand brake on with a hiss of compressed air.

Ryan ignored him, concentrating on clinging to Doc's elusive memory. "Crater Lake was what?"

"In truth it was. A man might trudge along, noting every passing phenomenon..." He hesitated, savoring the word, rolling it around his mouth as if he were trying to identify an exotic herb on his tongue. "Phenomenon. Truly said, my boy. It was that and more."

It was too late.

The frail highways that linked brain and memory had fallen asunder again. Gradually, Ryan thought, Doctor Theophilus Tanner was returning to some kind of normal.

"Is someone going to get off their ass and move that fucking pile of wood?" Finn said, winding down the window of the truck and spitting out into the freezing morning. Though the engine was beat-up, at least the heater worked. Outside, the temperature was way down past freezing. Ryan almost expected to hear Finnegan's spittle turn to ice in the air and tinkle on the road.

Ryan peered through the windshield. Ahead he could see the blacktop rolling higher between the banks of dark conifers. Above them, to the left, there'd been an earth-slide, bringing down a jumble of debris, including the snapped branches and fallen trunks of pines. By the look of it, the blockage had been there for a while, confirming their suspicion that the good folk of Ginnsburg Falls didn't travel north very often.

The driving easterly wind blew a flurry of snow against the glass, blinding him for a moment. As it cleared, Ryan thought he spotted movement among the stunted young trees at the side of the highway. But when he stared, there was nothing to see.

"Come on," he said. "Let the kid sleep. Rest of you out and start shifting that mess."

He was glad they'd all equipped themselves with warm coats. The gale was like a whetted knife, making his eye water, the ice particles it carried ripping at the tender flesh of his cheeks. He huddled into the collar of his trusty suede coat, happy to have a moment to admire Krysty's looks. Her fiery hair whisked about her shoulders as she stood tall in her knee-length black fur, its hue so dark it seemed almost blue in the strengthening light.

There was a dusting of snow on the road, and it swirled around his boots. The truck stood tall, its crimson flanks streaked with mud. The long exhaust had retained its original chrome and now reflected the pink glow of the distant sun. Ryan looked at the hubcaps and saw the stunted, distorted image of himself and the others. Then the memory of the flicker of movement in the scrub gave him pause.

"J.B., watch our backs."

"You smell muties, Ryan?"

"No. Thought I saw something out there."

The Armorer nodded. Ryan didn't need to explain any more than that. In the Deathlands, if you thought you saw something, then that was enough. The man who waited to be sure he'd seen something would eventually end up feeding the maggots.

It was even colder here than it had been up in the far north, in the part of the land once known as Alaska. Here it was a bitter, dry cold, a chill so intense that Ryan felt the hairs beginning to freeze in his nostrils. His skin felt a size too small, and if he opened his mouth it made the gaps in his teeth sing with the icy shock.