Alpha Wave

Chapter Three

A huge chandelier hung from the ceiling of Jemmy’s by a thick, golden chain, its crystal droplets casting a flotilla of sunlight specks across the walls of the room where they rippled and bounced as if living things. The impressive chandelier was utterly incongruous, at odds with the simple, rustic design of the barnlike barroom.

Crude tables and chairs were scattered around the room, some simply upended wooden crates, seats ripped from old automobiles. A few men sat around, playing with stacks of dominoes or just jawing and drinking, mostly armed with remade revolvers, a couple of shotguns resting on the tables. Two women were propped at the bar, heavily made-up over expressions of utter disinterest. The wide room smelled of rotgut.

Doc and J.B. helped Krysty to the bar, which Ryan was leaning over, looking into the back room, trying to locate whoever was serving.

The two women propping up the bar looked at Ryan, then the older one—all of nineteen, perhaps—turned her head and shouted toward the back, her husky voice crackling like fire. “Jem, you got some new customers.”

A moment later a woman came out of the back room, taking in the companions in a quick sweep of her hazel eyes before turning a bright, flawless smile on Ryan. She was dressed in a man’s shirt, too large for her, with sleeves rolled up past her elbows, her dark hair tied back. Ryan guessed that she was in her early thirties, skin tanned and hands calloused from a tough, outdoor life. She tossed aside the towel she had been wiping her hands with and asked what she could do for everyone.

“We’re looking to stop over in your fine ville,” Ryan told her. “Could do with rooms if you have them.”

“Here for the dogs?” the woman asked conversationally.

Ryan nodded. Behind him, J.B. had stepped away from the bar and was looking around the room, scanning for possible exits. Through the kitchen area behind the bar—where the woman had appeared from—he could see an open door leading to the backyard, the ground nothing more than sand. There was a well out there, really just a hole in the ground with a roped bucket beside it, framed by the open door. Off to the right of the bar, wooden stairs at the back of the room led up, and a second-floor balcony surrounded the room on three sides, with several doors leading off—most likely the lodging rooms for the establishment, transaction rooms for the two gaudy sluts working the bar. A door beneath the staircase proclaimed that it led to toilet facilities, though J.B. guessed it was probably nothing more than a fenced-in part of the backyard.

“You know how long you’re here for?” Jemmy asked Ryan as he placed a few rounds of spare ammo on the bar. The ammo was useless to the companions, none of it fitting their blasters, but spare ammo served as the gold standard for the Deathlands.

Ryan looked around the room as though surveying the whole ville. “Nice place,” he said. “Who knows? Mebbe a few nights. That be a problem for you?”

Jemmy was examining one of the bullets, turning it slowly in her hand to check for cracks or signs of tampering. “These new or reloads?” she asked him.

Ryan smiled, nodding. “Military issue,” he assured her. “Predark.”

“Two rooms, three nights,” Jemmy told him, looking at the others. “After that, you come find me and we renegotiate. You’ll have to share beds, ’cause that’s all the rooms I got just now.”

Ryan dipped his head. “We are much obliged.”

Jemmy instructed one of the gaudies to watch the bar as she stepped from behind it and led Ryan and his companions to their rooms. Ryan took Krysty in his arms—armpits and knees—lifting her weight with ease as he followed the landlady up the creaking, wood staircase.

Jemmy’s glance drifted to Krysty’s Western boots with their elaborate Falcon wing designs up the sides, the silver toe caps smothered with dusty sand from the trek across the wastelands. “I like your friend’s boots,” she told Ryan as she led the way up the stairs. “If she’s got no more use for them, I might be able to find you rooms for a whole month by way of trade.”

Mildred held the woman’s gaze for a second. “She’s just tired,” she told her firmly, then immediately regretted snapping, fearing it might make the woman suspicious.

J.B. nodded to Doc, gesturing to the open front door, before following Ryan and Mildred.

Taking his cue, Doc held out a hand to Jak at the bottom of the stairs. “What say you and I get us some refreshment, lad?” he announced in a loud voice.

The trace of a smile crossed the albino youth’s pale lips. “Been long walk,” he said, nodding, then placed his back to the bar and watched the door while the teenage gaudy slut poured them two mugs of some locally brewed beer.

Doc was aware that the younger woman at the bar was watching him as he found a .22 round in his pocket for payment. “I trust this should be more than enough for our beverage, good lady, and I expect some local jack in compensation, as well.” She checked the ammo suspiciously, then handed him several coins. Beneath the heavy makeup, he would guess she was no more than seventeen.

“You like what you see?” she asked, puffing out her chest and tilting her head to offer a well-practiced, coquettish smile, her long brown hair falling across her face and bare shoulders.

Doc nodded, sipping at the brew. “I like the chandelier. It’s a nice touch.”

The gaudy’s expression dropped for a moment, as though unsure whether this old fool had understood her question.

Inwardly, Doc chuckled. It was desperately sad to see a girl this young forced into prostitution, and a part of him wished that things were different. But there was nothing he could do here; this was her life and the chances were slim to none that she would ever know any better.

“My friends call me Doc,” he told her after a moment. “What’s your name?”

“They call me Lois L’amore,” she said, smiling. “That means ‘love,’ if you didn’t know,” she added.

Doc scratched his chin, as though deep in thought. “I did not know that,” he told her. “How very unusual.”

“Can I show you how I came by such an unusual name?” she asked him.

Doc looked her up and down, pity in his eyes. “Why don’t we just leave that to my imagination?” he suggested before turning away. He heard the girl huff a sigh through clenched teeth.

Sniggering at the performance, Jak led Doc to an empty table set against one of the wooden walls from which they could watch the main door, the bar and the entrance beneath the stairwell.

J EMMY CLOSED THE DOOR to the upstairs room and left the companions alone. The bedsprings groaned as Ryan carefully placed Krysty on the rusting double bed, and Mildred sat beside her, placing a hand on the sleeping woman’s forehead.

There were two doors in the room, one of which led to the second room that they had rented while the other led into a corridor that, in turn, led back to the balcony above the barroom.

J.B. poked his head through the door to the adjoining room, briefly giving it a once-over. It was much the same as the room where Mildred tended Krysty—a double bed, door to the corridor, a small basin sink that could be filled from the well as required, and a large window of sand-streaked glass. In the same spot over Krysty’s bed there was an old road map showing the streets of Fargo, North Dakota, heavy white lines running on verticals and horizontals where the map had once been folded for ease of reference.

J.B. walked to the far door, turned the key in the lock then tested it, pulling and turning the handle three times before returning to Ryan and Mildred. The frame shook and spewed sawdust with each pull on the handle. “These locks won’t hold,” he warned them. “If a gnat gets caught short, it could piss both doors open.”

Mildred querulously looked up from the bed. “Are we expecting visitors?”

“Whether we expect them or not, won’t make much difference if they come,” J.B. insisted.

Mildred shook her head. “You’re being paranoid. No one’s looking for us out here.”

“Paranoid’s last to die,” he reminded her, looking through the window across the main street of Fairburn. Out there, over the ridge of the wall, he could make out the tower in the dwindling sunlight.

Ryan spoke up, addressing Mildred. “Sentry Tom might yet decide he owes me a gutful of buckshot, Mildred.”

Mildred started to reply, then checked herself. They were all tense, worried about their colleague. The best thing she could do would be to give Krysty a thorough checkup, see if she could pinpoint what had laid the normally healthy woman low. Mildred picked up her backpack, then searched through the contents of her med kit for a pocket thermometer and her otoscope.

J.B. looked across, an apology tightly held behind his eyes. “You need help?” he asked.

Mildred shook her head. “Maybe get her boots off, try to make her comfortable.” J.B. and Ryan knelt at the end of the bed and stripped off Krysty’s boots.

I T WAS THE SCREAMING that finally woke Krysty.

Her eyes opened as tiny slits, and she warily scanned her surroundings. It was a well-honed survival instinct—she couldn’t remember what had happened or where she had fallen asleep.

She was in a simple room, the planks that formed its walls visible in the flickering candlelight, never having been painted or even varnished. She could see two figures across the room. One was a huge bear of a man, his back to her, rippling muscles well-defined where his vest top left his arms bare. He was looking out the window of the room at the night sky, stargazing.

The other man was sitting at the end of the bed, stripping and oiling a revolver. Krysty shifted her head slightly, trying not to attract her captors’ attention. Her head felt muzzy as she did so, like moving through water. The blaster was a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640. Her blaster. These psychos planned to chill her with her own blaster!

She struggled to move, but it felt like she had been drugged. Her limbs felt so heavy she could barely shift them. And the screaming—the screaming was getting louder. She could hear it, penetrating the very core of her being, like something in her womb, waiting to be born. What was going on? Were there other women like her, trapped, drugged, helpless, waiting for these stupes to hurt them, to chill them? Why else would they be screaming? She needed to get out of there, right now.

She tried clenching the fingers of her right hand, willing the muscles to move, and felt nothing more than a twitch. A twitch and a wealth of pain, as though the muscles of her arm had been dipped in acid, burning through the nerve endings, a ripple of agony. She bit her lip, holding back the scream.

Then a door to her right opened, a brighter light from outside bleeding through for a moment, and another figure was framed in the doorway. She couldn’t make out the backlit features, but the silhouette was plainly that of a woman, short and muscular. She held a large bowl of something, and from the way she carried it, it was likely full of liquid. More of the acid, perhaps, to drench her muscles in, to keep up the agony.

The woman put the bowl down; Krysty heard it being placed on the cabinet beside her ear, heard the liquid sloshing within. And then the woman reappeared in her line of sight, reaching for her face, a rag of cloth in her hand, dripping from a dunking in the bowl. Gaia, no! The woman planned to burn her face with the acid. What kind of monsters…?

In her mind, Krysty begged Gaia to help her, calling on all her strength to try to push herself off the bed, attack the woman with the acid cloth, stop the madness. Stop the bastard madness.

M ILDRED REACHED DOWN, placing the damp cloth on Krysty’s forehead. She’d obtained a bowlful of cold water from Jemmy, wishing she could add the simple, twentieth-century luxury of ice.

Nothing had changed in the three minutes that she’d been gone. J.B. continued stripping and cleaning Krysty’s weapons, greasing each segment from the container of oil he habitually carried in one of his voluminous pockets. That was his way of showing he cared, she knew. No point getting her through this only to have her blaster jam up, he had told her.

Ryan, meanwhile, stood looking out the window, watching as the street filled with people. It was about 8:00 p.m., and they’d been advised that the dogfights would kick off at 8:30 p.m. sharp. It was obviously a big slice of local action. A barker poised at the entrance to the open-topped circular barn at the end of the street was enticing passing trade to place early bets. The bar downstairs had got busier, too.

Stupe really. If they had arrived a couple of hours later than they did, the whole face-off with the sentries could have been avoided. Seemed the ville of Fairburn opened the gates at night.

Mildred stopped woolgathering as she felt something cross her hand where it mopped the cool water across Krysty’s brow. She looked at her hand and saw the streaks of red crisscrossing it—Krysty’s mutie hair was wrapping around Mildred’s hand like a creeping vine, surrounding and trapping it, its silken threads exerting considerable force. “Ryan, look,” Mildred whispered.

Ryan turned, and J.B. was already out of his seat, standing beside Mildred, a protective arm reaching for her.

“What is it?” Ryan asked. “How is she…?”

“I think she’s waking up,” Mildred told them softly, carefully excising her hand from the tangle of hair that had smothered it. “Come on, Krysty,” she said in a louder voice, “wake up now. It’s okay. Time to wake up now. Time to wake up.”

Krysty’s green eyes blazed open, full of fire and pain, and she sat up in the bed in a great spasm of her muscles, choking and coughing all at once. Mildred sat beside her, watching as the statuesque woman coughed and spluttered some more before taking gasping lungfuls of air as though she had nearly drowned. Krysty stayed like that for almost three minutes, doubled over herself, taking great, heaving breaths, unable to speak or to even acknowledge their presence. Finally she looked at Mildred, her face flushed, her shoulders hunched as she tried to breathe.

“Take it slowly, Krysty,” Mildred told her calmly, “there’s no need to rush. We’re safe here. It’s just us.”

Krysty looked around the room, seeing J.B., Ryan, returning to look at Mildred. “Wh-what,” she began, her voice a pained whisper, “what happened to me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Mildred admitted. “Bad trip through the gateway maybe. You were pretty out of it for a while there.”

Krysty nodded, hugging her knees to her chest. “I thought I was going to be chilled,” she told them, genuine fear crossing her features at the memory of the hallucination.

“No,” Ryan assured her. “No chilling today.”

Krysty nodded slowly, her movements birdlike, twitchy.

“Here,” Mildred said, handing her a glass of water, “you should drink something. It’ll make you feel better.”

Krysty took the glass in both hands and it almost slipped from her grip, but she managed to clench it and raise it to her lips. Mildred, Ryan and J.B. watched as she sipped at the water, tentatively at first, before finally taking a long swallow. She greedily finished the glass, letting out a satisfied exhalation afterward, before handing the empty glass back to Mildred. “So much better,” she told them, a smile forming on her lips.