"Did your friend say he was eleven years old in 1981?"

"No," Ryan said. "He didn't. And if you started talking around about how he did, then it might not be a great idea. Man could get himself hurt with bad hearing. You understand me, Rufus?"

"You can put the blaster back, Mr. Cawdor. I understand you. But if anyone else around the ville misheard when your friend was born it might be harmful. Doyouunderstand me?"

For a moment Ryan considered icing the store owner. Questions about Rick would lead to questions about the rest of them. Where have you come from? Where exactly did you leave your wag? How did you get here?

Not the kind of questions that outlanders welcomed in a small ville, however friendly some of its inhabitants might be.

He looked at Brennan for a dozen heartbeats. "Yeah. I understand. Guess we might both take some real good care."

Krysty tugged at the sleeve of his jacket. "Ryan! Look!"

Rick Ginsberg, the dusty, leatherbound book open in his hands, had sat down on the floor. His eyes were wide and staring, and gobbets of tears coursed down his cheeks. Ryan could see he had been looking at an illustration of a large black bird. Rick's lips were moving and he kept repeating the same word.

"Nevermore," he said. "Nevermore. Nevermore."

Chapter Eighteen

It was a cold evening in Snakefish.

Only Doc and Lori had eaten in the dining room of their boarding house. The others had taken their suppers upstairs on trays, all sharing the room where Rick lay in a frightening, almost catatonic trance. He still held the Edgar Allan Poe book. Ryan had tried once to remove it from his hands, but the freezie had wailed like a lost soul and tried to bite him on the wrist.

There had been little time for Ryan to debrief J.B. and Jak. Rufus Brennan had been the soul of kindness and discretion, helping Krysty and Ryan to carry the weeping man across to the Rentaroom, bustling him up the stairs before too many prying eyes could see him.

There was a log fire laid in the grate, and the Armorer had used a pyrotab to get it blazing, filling the curtained room with bright, crackling heat.

Despite that, Rick didn't seem able to stop himself from shivering. His fingers opened and closed and his teeth chattered together. They'd decided to leave on his newly purchased clothes, piling on a couple of blankets for good measure. Doc had asked Ruby Rainer to send up an enamel pot of hot, sweetened tea, explaining that their friend had suffered something of a shock and needed to be kept warm.

The woman had been eager to help, offering her prayers and wondering whether the accident might prevent poor Mr. Ginsberg from joining everyone at the service the next day.

After she'd been ushered from the room, Ryan turned to J.B. "Find anything out?"

"Sure. Friendly folk. Talk to you about everything. Just as long as it's the weather or are we comfortable with Ma Rainer here. Soon as you ask them anything about how the ville's run and how the gas is produced and processed and traded..."

"And mouths clam like snap trap," Jak concluded, locking his fingers to demonstrate what he meant.

"See the plant?"

"Sure, Ryan. No guards. Drillings are all to the east and north. Brought in tank wags. Pumped and then purified. Stored in all kinds of barrels and tanks. Kind of careless. So much gas there that a single burner gren would set half the country on fire."

"Saw bikers again. Zombie and others," Jak said. "Said could ride with 'em. Mebbe after snake service tomorrow. Seem okay."

Ryan glanced at the Armorer, seeking confirmation of the young boy's judgment of the Last Heroes. But J.B. pursed his lips and said nothing — which was as good as saying everything.

At that moment their attention was taken by Rick.

The freezie had begun to talk in a quiet, confidential sort of way, but in a voice quite unlike his natural tones. It was a thin, piping little voice, like a young child's. And there was even the hint of a childish lisp to it.

"I'm eleven years old in three weeks. My full name is Richard Neal Ginsberg and I was born March 22, 1970. I live in New York City, which is in New York State, which is the best of all the United States of America, the land of the free."

There was a peculiarly monotonous quality to the speech, as though Rick had learned it by heart and was pattering through it.

"I have a pet turtle who's real old and lives all the time with his head buried in the mud of his tank, and his name's Tricky Dicky. I guess he's real boring. My Dad's name is Jack Ginsberg, and he worked as an accountant in a big office on Sixth Avenue. Mom's name is Naomi and she doesn't do any work. She's like a housewife."

"Little prick," Krysty whispered. "I read about that sort of male attitude. Doesn't do any work!"

"I play softball and I watch football and I like the New York Giants best of all. When I grow up I'm going to be a quarterback and pitch for the Yankees and maybe also work as an accountant. I haven't decided yet but I'm real good at math."

Doc and Lori came into the room, closing the door behind them. They stood at the foot of the bed, listening to the ramblings of the freezie.

"Looks fucking stupe," Lori said. "Look at his eyes all staring."

"I fear our newly thawed comrade has regressed to his childhood," Doc observed sadly. "It was always something of a gamble. I had been delighted with how well he had coped with his blind leap into our future. But now I see how fragile his hold on our reality is."

"Reality sandwiches," Rick said, a tremulous sickly smile clutching at the corners of his bloodless lips. The fingers of his left hand played with the frayed edge of the gray blankets while his right hand kept its deathly grip on the leather-bound volume of Poe.

"What if I deck him, Doc?" J.B. asked. "Short right cross to the point of the jaw. Could snap him out of it?"

"Could snap him further into it," Ryan said dryly. "How about if we get some sleepers from the woman? Feed him some of those and mebbe he'll be fine when he comes around?"

Rick seemed able to hear what was being said and somehow translate it into fragments from his past. "Round and round the little wheel goes and where it stops nobody knows. Not me and not my mom or my dad. Nor my beloved grandmother, Agnes Laczinczca. She's a wise woman. Witch of the west. She lives somewhere over a rainbow in Kansas, bloody Kansas." A cunning smile flitted across his face. "Shouldn't say that. Bloody. Get my mouth washed with soap and water. Bloody bastard. Fuck and prick." He giggled.

"Got do something, Ryan," Jak said. "Crazy as sun-blind gator."

"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "Sure. Do something. Anyone got any ideas?"

"Rambo. Bimbo." Rick sniggered. "Dumbo Crambo. Wilco. Dildo."

"I could... I've never really tried to do it for anything like this, but Mother Sonja taught me ways of using the force of the Earth Mother for healing. Setting a mind to peace. I could try."

"Try it, lover," Ryan said, kissing Krysty on the cheek.

"Rest of you go out. Got to have privacy and quiet for this."

Doc nodded. "It could work. In my day I was known as something of an apostle of alternative medicine."

"Out, Doc," J.B. said, leading the way. "I'll give you a game of Kiowa if we can get a deck of cards."

The others followed, with Ryan bringing up the rear. Rick was still chattering away to himself on the bed.

"The premature burial. That was always my fear. My terror. To slip into a coma and yet not be dead. Folks not realizing that I still lived. Breathing slow, but living." The voice had changed, had lost the infantile flatness. Now it held more of Richard Ginsberg's normal tones. But it was oddly without inflection, as if the words were strung together by a computer, with no sense of emotion at all.