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"You still didn't tell me what this crap is." Ryan held up the bowl
threateningly, as if he might throw it at them. He smiled grimly as they all
winced away from the threat.
"Beans," said a runty leather-faced man with a dropped shoulder.
"Always beans, stranger," a second man added.
"Fried beans. Boiled beans. Beans over easy. Beans well done. Beans medium
rare."
"Forgot something," another of the watchful sec men put in.
"What's that?"
"You forgot the fucking beans."
For a moment the hostility seemed to have been forgotten, but the corporal
restored it, shouting at the laughing troopers.
"Stop the flap-trapping! Grindly, General wants him chained. Neck collar, and
link it to that wall ring."
At least Ryan was able to sit down. His feet and hands were left free, but the
heavy iron collar bit into the skin of his throat. After the sec men had left
him,
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Dland6a
Ryan tugged a few times at the chain, testing its strength, realizing that it
was utterly immovable.
The bunch of keys dangled on the hook across the room, taunting him with their
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nearness.
The beans tasted terrible, and the water was brack-ish, but he finished it
all, knowing the value of keep-ing his strength up.
The chain was cinched too short for him to be able to stretch out and sleep on
the pile of straw in any kind of comfort, but he found a position where he
could doze.
Normally Ryan Cawdor managed to sleep without any dreams that he could
remember, but that night in Fort Security was different. Twice he woke
sweating, jerked from sleep by horrific nightmares.
In the first he was sitting by a deep, still pool of wa-ter that was similar
to the lake that backed up Drowned Squaw Canyon. The sky was a velvet pur-ple
with soundless slashes of pink and silver chem-lightning torn across it.
Tall saguaro lined the edge of the pool, their long spines decorated with the
corpses of little reptiles and birds. Somewhere in the distance Ryan could
hear mocking laughter that went on and on.
Krysty Wroth was swimming in the pool, naked, floating on her back a few yards
out from where he sat. In the dream Ryan stood up, and he saw that the water
was clear as any crystal. He could see his lover as she swam, deep down, over
the sandy floor of the lake. And he could also see the fish that were moving
toward her.
Thin as sword blades, with shimmering iridescent scales that gleamed
turquoise, blue and green, they swam with a peculiar, undulating movement,
more like snakes than fish. Their mouths were long, lips peeled back off
triple rows of saw-
edged teeth. The biggest of the fish was about four feet in length.
Ryan waved and yelled, but his mouth felt as if it were filled with cotton.
Krysty
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Dland6a still twined and waved to him, oblivious to the menace that was
approaching her.
He was about to plunge into the pool when he stopped and touched the surface
with his hand. It was as hard as glass, and hot. So hot that the skin on his
fingers puckered and blistered.
The creatures closed on Krysty, and Ryan saw blood clouding the water. But she
continued to swim and frolic under the lake, still smiling up at him as the
saurian fishes tore great strips and chunks of living flesh from her body.
That was the first time during the long, restless night that Ryan Cawdor woke
to a deep, guttural cry in the jail cell, realizing that the noise was torn
from his own throat.
His second dream was different.
He was driving, peering through the ob-slit at the front of a heavily armored
war wag, lumbering along endless roads that stretched out ahead of him. The
barren and gray landscape totally lacked features.
Nobody else was in the vehicle with him. Every now and again, Ryan saw someone
standing at the side of the highway, patiently waiting. The face and the body
were shrouded in a dusty brown sacking robe that hung loosely about the
figure. None of them made a move as he drove past, and they were utterly
unrecog-nizable.
And yet he seemed to know them.
Out of the side viewers Ryan would occasionally glimpse something moving,
always on the periphery of his vision. It seemed to be a loping animal that
ran, sometimes on its hind legs and sometimes on all fours. It was a dull
brown, blending into the flat landscape. In the dreariness it was
inexpressibly menacing.
There was a rectangular wire grille in front of the steering wheel on the war
wag and at intervals a tinny voice came out of the speaker.
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Dland6a
"Without a judge there is no jury," it said.
"All play and no work makes Ryan a dead jerk."
"No man for debt shall go to jail."
"You are born into a grave."
Ryan tried to ignore the voice, fighting to control the wag on a road that was
becoming more and more uneven. The figures came closer and more frequently,
and the animal vanished from the horizon.
Past a dip in the highway, a single figure stood di-rectly in front of him,
only fifty yards or so from the fender of the war wag. Ryan jammed on the
brakes, yet nothing happened.
The veiled person held up a hand, the cloth reveal-ing sere skin, the nails on
the bent fingers cracked like horn. Ryan realized that he knew this hidden
person.
The war wag drove remorselessly onward. The brakes had failed.
At the last second, before the crushing impact, the figure lifted its other
hand and began to strip the veil off its face.
Once more Ryan yelled out in his sleep and ripped himself awake, shivering in
the cell, his mind blanked of what the face had been beneath the rotting
mate-rial of the shroud.
JAK WONDERED WHETHER the bandages around his broken ribs had somehow become
much tighter. It was odd that he was finding it so difficult to draw a clear
breath.
Steps Lightly Moon had led him away from the wickiup of the other Anglos, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]