Forbidden Trespass

“How dare he stick up for outlanders who chilled my baby sister?” she asked hotly. “Cannie coldhearts. The worst thing! Worse than muties, even! I saw it with my own eyes!”

“Now, are you sayin’ you saw them all in the act of chilling your sister, Wymie?” the other boarder at breakfast asked. “Because that sounds double crowded to me. They’d all be gettin’ in each other’s way. Not to make light of a terrible thing, or nothin’. Still, it don’t seem practical.”

Duggur Doakz was a middle-aged black man with a fringe of gray hair and not a tooth in his head. A gifted silversmith, he could have been a rich man—an important tradesman to some important baron. But that would take him far off beyond Pennyrile, and he hadn’t chosen to leave the place where he was born. He kept his hand in and his body out of the ground by being a tinker and general repairman.

Wymie scowled furiously into her own plate. It was bare except for a few crumbs of biscuit and near-invisible scraps of egg. She had eaten like a ravenous wolf. She had a hearty appetite at the best of times. For some reason the onset of the worst had made her even hungrier.

Or mebbe it’s because I ain’t et since yesterday, she thought.

A cat jumped as if on cue onto Wymie’s shoulder. She started to swat it off, but refrained. She was a guest in the oldie’s house, after all. And her pa had seen her raised right as to politeness to one’s elders. She in turn had passed that on after he died to— Her eyes drowned in hot, stinging tears.

The cat jumped to the floor, then rubbed against her leg and purred.

Wymie didn’t like cats. She couldn’t trust a creature that looked only after its own interests and never after hers. But Widow Oakey’s rickety-seeming predark two-story house was overrun with the wretches. Mebbe a dozen of them.

The whole place reeked of cat piss and shit, which at least kept down the smell of dust and mold. The house was a crazy quilt of scavvy furniture, decorations and irregularly shaped lace doilies apparently made by Widow Oakey herself, without apparent skill, and strewed haphazardly over chairs, tables and bric-a-brac alike to protect them from…something.

“I saw one of them,” she muttered fiercely. “The mutie. I saw the white skin and white hair, plain as day. And the eyes. Those red eyes…”

“Now, now, Wymie,” Duggur said. “Albinos aren’t hardly muties.”

She raised clenched fists. But becoming vaguely aware of Widow Oakey hovering fragilely nearby with her tray trembling precariously in her hands, she refrained from smashing them down on the piss- and grease-stained white damask tablecloth.

Someone knocked on the front door. Widow Oakey set down the tray, spilling about half a cup of tea out the spout of the cracked pot. She tottered off to answer.

Before Wymie could reach for the spoon to ladle out a second helping of eggs, she came back with a trio of locals.

Her cousin Mance Kobelin immediately came to her, spreading his arms. She rose to join in a wordless embrace. She felt the tears run freely down her face, moistening the red plaid flannel of his shirt beneath her cheek.

“We heard what happened, Wymie,” intoned Dorden Fitzyoo, hat in hand, as Mance released her. He had doffed it per Widow Oakey’s stringent house rules, revealing a hair-fringed dome of skull that showed skating highlights in the morning sun as filtered through dusty, fly-crap-stained chintz curtains. “It’s a terrible thing.”

Wymie nodded thanks, unable to speak. Dorden, who made and milled black powder on the far side of Sinkhole, had been a close friend of Wymie’s mother and father. He had been driven somewhat apart from the family after Tyler Berdone’s accident. Like so many others. Wymie still thought of him as a kindly uncle.

He had already sweated through the vest, which didn’t match the suit coat he wore over it, straining to contain his paunch. “What happened to your parents, then, child?” the third visitor said in a cracked and quavering voice. “We heard they’re dead too.”

“They got chilled,” she said.

“Ah. How horrible that you had to witness that.” He shook his wrinkled head, which showed even more bald skin that Dorden’s though, as if to compensate, his hair stuck out in wild white wings to both sides. “Only the good die young.”

So long as you’re talking about Blinda, she thought. I wonder if you’d say that if you knew how often Mord talked about grabbing you some dark night and hanging you over a fire till you spilled the location of that fabled stash of yours.

But Wymie’s stepdad had never acted on his gruesome fantasy, and never would’ve. Though this man’s hands shook like leaves in a brisk breeze most of the time, they steadied right down when he gripped a hammer or other tool. Or a handblaster. He was still the best shot for miles around with his giant old Peacemaker .45 revolver.

Wymie had a hard time believing the stories that oldie Vin Bertolli had been the western Pennyrile’s biggest lady-killer in his prime. But that was decades ago: he had lived in and around Sinkhole for over half a century, since arriving as a young adventurer in his twenties who’d been forced to seek a quiet place to settle by a blaster wound that’d crippled his left hip some.

“The outlanders did it,” Wymie said. “I saw the white face and red eyes of the murdering son of a bitch myself. I could almost reach out and touch him! But that taint Conn sticks up for them!”

“You got to do somethin’ yourself then, Wymie,” Mance suggested. “I’ll help.”

“Obliged,” she said.

The older visitors exchanged uneasy glances.

“Mathus Conn’s a good man,” Vin said. “A good man is hard to find.”

To her surprise, Wymie found the stuffy air inside the boarding house could smell worse than it already did. The oldie ripped a thunderous, bubbling fart. Her knees actually weakened as the smell hit her.

A black-and-white cat rubbed against the wrinklie’s shins, purring loudly. It’s like the little monsters are applauding him for out-stinking them, she thought.

“How can he be good if he shields murderers of little girls?” she demanded.

“I hear tell he wanted evidence that what you saw was really one of them outlanders, Wymie,” Dorden said.

“I saw him with my own eyes!”

“You saw an albino,” Dorden corrected her, “just like Shandy Kraft was. There’s likely one or two more in the world than just that skinny kid with the outlanders.”

“Are you defendin’ them, too? Whose side are you on?”

He raised his hands. “Yours, Wymie. We’re not blood kin, but I allus been close to your family. But Conn’s a good man, like Vin says. Always dealt square with everybody. Dealt square with your ma and your pa, while he was alive.”

He didn’t mentioned Mord Pascoe. He didn’t need to. Wymie’s late stepdad never dealt square with anybody. And once the gaudy owner had caught him trying to cheat him one too many times, he refused to deal with him at all.

“More’n that,” Dorden said, “he protects himself double good. And if anybody pushed Conn too hard without good reason, Tarley Gaines and his clan would step up to back him. And that’s a bunch nobody wants to mess with.”

“If aidin’ and abettin’ little-girl-murderin’ outlanders isn’t good enough reason, I don’t know what is!” Mance declared furiously.

“Words are like birds,” Vin said. “They fly away.”

Everyone stopped and stared at him for a moment. He seemed unfazed.

“Fact is,” Dorden went on deliberately, “more people here around Sinkhole reckon Conn’s got the right of it than you do. No, don’t scowl at me, girl. It’s true.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Vin said. He leaned painfully on his walking stick to pat an orange tabby cat that was rubbing his head on his homemade deerskin moccasins. This entailed ripping another ferocious fart.

Wymie sat back down.

“I don’t care about that!” she stated.

“We all have to live here,” Dorden said gently. “That means continuing to get on with our neighbors, best we can.”

“I’ll leave, then!” she half screamed. “Once I get Blinda avenged.”

Vin straightened creakily. He shook his head. “The impetuosity of youth.”

She glared at him. “What does that even mean?”

He beamed toothlessly at her.

“Never mind,” Dorden said. “But maybe you can set things straight without making enemies here among your home folk.”

Wymie kept her jaw clamped on the bile she wanted to spew on him. She knew he spoke out of genuine friendship. She also, deep down somewhere, knew he was making sound sense.

But she wasn’t in the mood for sense.

“And what if you’re wrong?” Dorden said softly. “You take your vengeance on the wrong people, that leaves the real murderer out there free to murder more. You don’t want that, do you?”

“I know what I saw!”

“You need to help us see, too.”

She frowned so fiercely it almost shut her eyes, and angled her face toward her lap.

“What’d you have in mind, Dorden?” Mance asked.

“Simple,” the older man said. Wymie heard the smile in his voice. “You need to look for evidence to back your claim. You got a power of folks hereabouts willing to help. Everybody wants to see justice done for your family—and the chillin’ stopped. This here’s a peaceful district in a world full of strife and misery. We mean to keep it that way.”

She didn’t miss the warning in his words, but she had to admit he had a point.

Better people help you than stand in your path, she thought.

“And while we’re out lookin’ for evidence to show you’re right,” Mance said, with eagerness growing in his voice as he spoke, “we can also start lookin’ for the outlanders. You gotta find ’em to take care of ’em, right?”

“They been triple good hidin’ their tracks,” Duggur said.

Garl was taking advantage of the conversational distraction to spoon the rest of the scrambled eggs directly from the serving bowl into his mouth. Yellow fragments bounced off his chins and down the massive slope of his belly.

“Nobody knows where their dig is, or their camp, should it be a different spot,” Duggur said.

Wymie sucked down a deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.

“You’re right.” She felt tears drying on her face, leaving salt-sticky tracks down her cheeks. “That’s a double-good thing I can do. And I can do it!”

Her cousin squeezed her shoulder. “I’m with you, Wymie!”

“We’re all with you,” Dorden said, “in findin’ your family’s killers.”

“Wymie, dear,” Widow Oakey called in her cracked voice from the entry to the parlor. Wymie hadn’t been aware she’d left the room. “There’s a crowd outside to see you. I’d let ’em in, but they’d frighten my babies.”

Wymie stood up again, trying not to be too obvious about kicking away a black cat that was slithering up against her leg. She managed to shift it a ways with her boot.

“I’ll come see,” she said, her heart pulsing faster.

“You know, Miz Oakey,” Dorden said, “not to be overly critical, but you need to clean out your cat boxes more often.”

She blinked rheumy brown eyes at him. “Cat boxes?”

* * *

“FOR A LONG time we’ve enjoyed an island of stability in the midst of the chaos of the outside world,” Conn said. “I hope it’s not invadin’ to stay.”

His nephew, Zedd, who had tan, freckled skin and rusty, tightly curled hair, emerged through the door.

“Looks like Layna and Mord, Unk,” he said.

“Ugh,” Nancy said. She turned away. She was hard as nails about most things, but had a squeamish touch. Her cousin and employer, Conn, respected that in her; it made her seem more human.

“How do they look?” Conn asked, despite his cousin’s visible discomfort.

Zedd showed pressed-together teeth. They were white and mostly even. Patriarch Tarley enforced hygiene in his clan with an iron hand, despite his normally easygoing ways. He had a rep for being tough when it counted.

“Like you’d expect,” Nancy said, as if she were gritting her teeth to hold in puke. Evidently she was hoping to stave off further details.

If so, she hoped in vain.

“Not really,” Zedd said. “Chills ain’t burned so much as, well, kinda roasted. And not really all over, you know?”

Conn kept his gaze steady on the young man as his cousin loudly lost her battle against throwing her guts up. “And they don’t look et so much as busted all to nuke. Like they got hacked with an ax. Heads’re both busted wide-open, and don’t look as if their brains swole from the heat and popped through the skulls like taters in the oven.”

“That’s enough details right there, Zedd,” Tarley said.

The young man shrugged.

“I was only tryin’—”

“Ace. Thanks. Enough.”

Nancy straightened, grunting and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The group shifted upwind of the fresh pool of barf in the tramped-earth yard.

“Doesn’t that support Wymie’s claims?” she asked, all business once again. “I mean, would the weird fanged monsters the outlanders claim to’ve seen have done somethin’ like that? Whacked them with an ax?”

Tarley shrugged. “Why not?”

“Truth,” Conn said. “We don’t know what these things’d do. We don’t know if they’re even real. It’s a matter on which I’m far from makin’ up my mind.”

“But what difference does it make, anyway, Mathus?” Nancy asked. “They’re strangers. Outlanders. Why are you botherin’ to stick up for them?”

“Fairness?” Tarley suggested. “Justice?”

Nancy scoffed. “How many magazines do them things load?”

“More than you might think,” Tarley said stolidly.

“A reputation for fairness is part of my stock in trade,” Conn reminded his assistant. “And let’s not forget that dealin’ with these rough-lookin’ outlanders has been highly profitable. We can resell the scavvy we get from them to folks who want it most at considerable markup, and everybody’s happy. Or do you want to go scout out their node and then dig scavvy yourself?”

She shook her head. “I’m not the outdoor type, boss,” she said. “You know that. Had folks out looking, though.”

“No luck, however,” Conn said.

“No. They cover their tracks triple well.” She frowned. “A suspicious mind might judge that as pointin’ to them, too.”

“A suspicious mind judges everythin’ as pointin’ to those it suspects,” Conn pointed out.

“Wymie’s on a rampage,” Tarley said thoughtfully. “She ain’t in a frame of mind to listen to reason. She could cause a power of mischief, it seems to me.”

“Then seriously, boss,” Nancy said. “Why not just throw the strangers to Wymie like a bone to a beggin’ dog? Sure, justice, profit, all those good things. But if it gets her to calm the rad-dust down, mightn’t that work out more profitable in the long run?”

Conn chuckled. His cousin had a way of reminding him exactly why he’d hired her, and without any sign of intent. Just by doing…what he’d hired her to: minding the bottom line.

But this time he still thought she’d made a rare mistake in her tallying.

“She’s already stirred up a mob,” he said. “That kind of thing is like a shaken-up jar full of wasps. It’s hard to put back once you take the lid off.”

“And what if she’s wrong?” Tarley asked. “Then chillin’ the outlanders will leave the real murderers still loose. And murderin’ more, unless I miss my guess.”

“That’s what I fear,” Conn admitted.

He raised his voice and called to the rest of the party, “Any sign of tracks anywhere?”

“Nary a scrap, Mr. Conn,” Edmun replied. “Just the prints Wymie made when she got onto the trail toward town.”

Edmun was an indistinct blond man somewhere in his thirties, bland as tepid water, but with a reputation for steadiness, which made it a matter of curiosity to Conn why he had first taken up Wymie’s cause—when she’d carried her dreadful burden toward Stenson’s Creek—and then promptly fallen away when Conn raised the voice of reason.

Conn didn’t hold that highly by his own powers of persuasion. He was a skilled bargainer, with a lifetime of experience in dealing with everyone from desperate dirt farmers to booze- and crank-fueled coldhearts one twitch away from a chilling frenzy. Yet he’d always found Edmun Cowil and his like the hardest to move, once they got set in a groove.

There was something working here. It tickled the underside of his brain like gaudy-slut fingernails along the underside of his ball sack—though that was a pleasure he had long chosen to deny himself, as it was fundamentally bad business.

But no time for that now.

“Yard’s hard-packed and sun-set hard as brick,” Tarley said, taking a blue handkerchief from a pocket of his overalls and dabbing at his broad mocha forehead, where sweat ran out from beneath the brim of his black hat. Conn wasn’t sure what good the rag would do him at this point. It was long since soaked sopping from earlier duty. But the patriarch seemed to derive some kind of comfort from it.

“Found something, Unk,” Zedd called from in between the charred and mostly roofless stone walls. He appeared in the doorway holding an ax. Its head was covered in smoke and crusted crud. Its haft showed charring on what Conn reckoned had been the uppermost surface as it lay on its side and the house burned down toward it. But it looked as if it’d be serviceable enough, once it got cleaned up.

“Wonder why Wymie would leave her grandpappy’s ax,” Nancy said. “She treasured that dang thing.”

“Even though the haft has been replaced a dozen times and the head twice,” Tarley said with a chuckle for the hoary old joke. Although truth told, it likely had more than a scrap of truth, if it wasn’t the literal thing.

Conn shrugged. “Reckon she had to leave in a hurry, whether the marauders fired the place, or she set it alight to trap them.

“Reckon we’ll never know what really happened here. Oh, well. World’s full of stuff I’ll never know. Best get back to Widow Oakey’s place, now, and see what kind of mischief Wymie’s gettin’ up to in this bright new day.”

* * *

THE “CROWD” WIDOW OAKEY had spoken of turned out to consist of about half a dozen, Sinkhole residents and people from the surrounding countryside. They included a couple who had joined her sorrowful procession the night before, like Walter John and Burny Stoops, who had followed Conn’s orders to carry her sister to the coffin-maker’s place.

With a shock she realized she’d still have to go talk to him, to Sam, about arrangements for Blinda, and her ma, for that matter.

Mord Pascoe could lie out to feed the wolves and coyotes, as far as she was concerned. Unless the bastard had burned too far to carbon for even the likes of them to stomach. She wished he could’ve felt the flames that had consumed most of all she had held dear. But a person in her circumstances had to make do…

She swayed.

“We come to see how you was, Wymie,” Burny said. “And to see what you wanted to do about your, you know. Quest for vengeance.”

She felt her eyes fill with hot tears yet again. But this time, they were tears of gratitude.

She smiled at them.

“Thank you. Thank you all.”

It’s not much, she knew. But it was a start.

She could work with this!

Chapter Five

“Wait,” a voice called from the scrub oak. “Don’t shoot. I’m not one of them.”

Mildred saw Ryan look at Krysty, who shrugged.

The midafternoon mugginess hung heavy in the air of the little glade on the slope a few dozen yards above a gurgling brook. Red oak and hickory branches overhung the clearing, masking most of the direct sunlight. Mildred didn’t want to imagine what the afternoon would feel like without that shade.

“Define ‘them,’” Ryan called back.

“The coamers,” the unseen man said. “The albino grave robbers. The ones you’re looking for.”

“Grave robbers, as young Ricky suggested,” Doc stated. “That adds a new dimension to our present difficulty.”

“Dark night,” J.B. muttered. “It surely does.”

The companions had been traveling single file along a game trail a couple miles southwest of their dig site, with Ryan in the lead and J.B. protecting their rear. They had just begun to fan out on entering the clearing when Jak’s warning birdcall brought them up short. They had immediately crouched or knelt, covering the brush-screen on the far side with their blasters.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “How do you know so much about them?”

“And how do you know what we’re looking for?” Mildred asked.

“I’ve roamed these woods nigh onto thirty years. I seen many a thing come and go, some stranger than most. And I seen the ones the locals call ‘coamers.’ They come and go, too. Currently they seem to be coming.”

J.B. grunted in interest.

“Come out where we can get a better look at you,” Ryan commanded.

“Don’t go shootin’ me, now.”

“If we were going to, we would’ve by now,” J.B. said. “That brush won’t stop many bullets.”

The branches rustled.

What appeared from the vegetation was anything but threatening, at first glance: a man of smallish to middle size, middle-aged to old, walking tentatively on rather bowed legs left bare by ragged and dirty cargo shorts with bulging pockets. A coonskin cap covered the top of his head. Around his shoulders he wore a cape made of shaggy bark that gave the locally abundant shagbark oak its name. Beneath that was a linen shirt. His round face was fringed by a shock of black hair and a beard with brushstrokes of gray in it. His eyes suggested strong Asian ancestry, but his accent, unsurprisingly, was pure western Kentucky.

He had his hands, clothed in shabby fingerless gloves, raised over his head to signal benign intentions, which was good, because he was clearly far from helpless: the butt of a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century replica longblaster stuck up over his right shoulder, supported by a beadwork sling, and he wore both a Bowie knife with worn staghorn grips and a single-action, cap-and-ball revolver on either hip in cross-draw holsters, likewise beaded in colorful geometric patterns.

“Osage Nation work,” Krysty said, nodding at the beaded accessories. “Nice.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a local boy, but I been everywhere. Abe Tomoyama is my name. Abe to my friends, so you can call me that, long as you don’t chill me.”

Ryan raised a hand. “Stand down, everybody,” he said. “Keep eyes skinned to all sides, in case the pale shadows decide to check us out.”

“Don’t worry,” Abe stated, “yet. Them coamers don’t attack when the sun’s high in the sky. They only like to come out when it gets low. Like it’s fixin’ to right directly. Surely you noticed that?”

“Surely we didn’t,” Mildred said sourly.

“It does fit observable facts,” Doc said. “The few we have been able to observe.”

“Reckon we need to talk,” Abe said. “Let’s find us a place to palaver. Say, I’m a feeling mite peckish. What do you say we go to one of my campsites and chow down while we do it.”

“Won’t say no,” Ryan said, but he had a wary furrow to his brow as he said it.

He was wondering what was in it for the strange man they’d run into. And they all had learned a hundred times over, in the Deathlands, if you didn’t know what somebody had coming out of a given interaction, that usually meant it was coming straight out of your hide.

* * *

“FOLKS’RE SCARED, HEREABOUTS,” Abe said. “They don’t rightly know of what—shadows dimly seen at dusk, strange cries in the dark. Rumors of people disappearin’ out in the woods in the dark of the night. But I reckon I do know.”

“Suppose you tell us why you think we’re hunting these coamers of yours?” Ryan asked as he seated himself next to Krysty, where she hunkered down across from a small, nearly invisible dry brush fire from their peculiar host.

“I know hunters when I clap eyes on ’em, I reckon you’ll allow,” Abe said. “But you show no interest in the wildlife, other than to keep eyes skinned for ones as might be dangerous. You’re huntin’ man or mutie, or something close to one or the other.”