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Ryan pulled the door closed again. "I know what you mean."
"Then you look around and there's always the same sensation. Dust and echoes
and shadows. It brings a lump to my throat. You kind of glimpse people's hopes
and ambitions, and you know they've all been dead. So long dead."
"Want to go out in the sun again?"
Krysty managed a smile. "No. Ghosts don't hurt you. Let's look on."
Saucy Lita. Ryan figured there was probably some kind of joke in the name, but
he couldn't get it. He tried saying it several times, but it still didn't
sound like anything he'd heard. Again, the lock was broken and he pushed the
door open and walked inside, Krysty at his heels.
A printed notice on a curling card said "Over 16s Only. IDs May Be Requested.
Another large one had fallen faceup on the floor Warning. This Shop Contains
Items Of An Adult Nature. If You Are Easily Offended, GET LOST!
Krysty stooped and picked up a piece of delicate rag off a broken table,
holding it up against herself. It was made from black silk with some rotting
ribbons and artificial lace. It looked as if it had once had elastic around
the waist but that was long gone. There was about enough material to cover a
man's hand.
"That what I think?" Ryan asked.
"Depends on what you think, lover." She grinned. "But I've only ever seen
anything like this on that blue porno."
"Shame they've rotted. I'd have given good jack to see you in something like
that."
"Look at this kid's doll," he went on, picking up the figure of an old man
with white hair and beard, carrying a price sticker of $35.95 that read
Naughty Uncle
Fred The Flasher.
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"What's a flasher?" Krysty asked, reaching for the unbuttoned overcoat on the
doll and pulling it open. She immediately gave a shout of laughter at what was
revealed. "Oh! So, that's what a flasher is!"
Most of the stock of the small, cramped store had vanished or rotted away over
the past hundred years, but there were still a few remnants that gave Ryan and
Krysty a better than good idea of what kind of place it had been.
"I just don't see how many people in a one-street ville like this, in the
wastes of old Texas, would have bought anything like this," Ryan said, showing
Krysty a massive artificial penis in purple plastic. It was at least fifteen
inches from base to tip.
"Not getting jealous, are we, lover?" Krysty grinned.
A wooden torso modelled a white cotton T-shirt with the same slogan repeated
hundreds of times, all over it-Tiny Tits. Tiny Tits. Another of the faded
notes read
We Have The Tiny Tits T-shirt In All Sizes Up To 50 Inches.
Ryan read it and smiled at Krysty's expression of disapproval. "Not getting
jealous, are we, lover?" he asked.
"Salvation was sure big on muffler shops," Mildred said when they'd regrouped.
"We saw five of them, with two launderettes."
"Only one of them fluff and fold," Doc added, wiping sweat from his forehead
with his swallow's-eye kerchief.
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"We checked a few houses. They've all been cleared out of anything worth
taking." J.B. looked around the ville. "Funny though. Jak here spotted it. I
hadn't noticed."
"What?" Ryan asked.
The teenager hesitated. "Not certain."
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The Armorer grinned. "Sure he's sure. Tell 'em, Jak."
"Houses stripped recently."
"Recently?" Ryan glanced at the others. "Anyone else spot this?"
Krysty answered, "Now you mention it, yeah. Think about it, lover. Some of
those places had the feel that they'd been untouched for a hundred years.
Sure, there was some old damage. But a lot of it somehow felt& felt like it
had been done yesterday."
"Fucking right!" the boy exclaimed, eyes glistening like a striking cobra.
"Yesterday! Not enough dust around things broke."
Ryan sighed. "Sure. I saw it, too. But I didn't somehow register what it
meant.
Fireblast! Stupid of me. Getting old."
J.B. shook his head. "We're all getting old, Ryan. Been riding too many roads
for too many years. The kid was& Sorry, Jak. Didn't mean anything by that.
Just that you're young and you got young eyes. You see better and think
sharper. You should get out of all this before you finish up like the rest of
us. Seriously."
It was an unusually long speech for the normally taciturn Armorer.
The albino teenager nodded slowly. "Know that's true, J.B., and been thinking
same thing. One day. Yeah, one fucking day."
There was a long silence among the group of friends.
They discussed whether it was worth bringing in a working party to go through
the town more carefully, to see if there was anything tucked away in any of
the houses that might be of some value. But they all eventually agreed that it
was unlikely.
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J.B. summed it up. "Seems that the ville's been turned over in the past few
weeks.
Could be the people who were running that loco wag. Either way, there's
nothing here for the settlers."
Ryan agreed. "We'll go back and tell Major Ward and the smiling Elder Vare.
Still be a good place to camp. There's that small creek for water and plenty
of wood for fires."
"Good place for us to leave from?" Krysty suggested.
Ryan nodded. "Been reading my mind, lover."
Doc coughed. "Me and the lady found a poster tacked up inside a window. I
confess it was more than a little faded, but still legible. Was it not,
Mildred?
Legible?"
"Course it was legible, you daft old goat! How the hell would we have known
what it said if we couldn't read it?"
Doc shrugged, grinning in embarrassment.
"What did this notice say?" Ryan asked.
Doc answered. "It announced a grand reopening. Dated November of the year of
Our Blessed Lord, 2000 annu domini. The Salvation to Silver Lode Railroad
spur.
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Closed these one hundred and twenty years."
Mildred took over the account. "And the restoration of the engine house."
"Then let's go down and take us a look at this engine house," Ryan suggested.
"Must be that group of buildings to the west where the rails end," J.B.
guessed.
That was where they found the first of the corpses.
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Chapter Sixteen
"THE GOOD FOLK of Salvation," Ryan said quietly.
"Guess so," J.B. replied. "There were two or three of the old houses that
looked like someone had been living in them. I figured it was probably pack
rats, wanderers from the outlands. Could be they really lived in the ville."
The engine house stood alone. A cobbled yard was located at one end, with a
huge turntable, carrying the rails where the loco wags could be turned around.
There were a number of outbuildings, mostly in good shape. From the remnants
of weathered signs it looked as though the idea had been to deck them out as
ticket offices and museums of the old railroad. But sky-dark had obviously
overtaken the project, and most of them contained very little.
Very little except for the corpses.
The longest dead was dried out and leathery, giving an approximate date of a
month or so ago. The most recent was still covered in blowflies, the stench
enough to make Doc gag. Death had been within forty-eight hours or so, not
long before the locomotive had pulled out of Salvation's depot.
None of the townsfolk looked as if they'd been given an easy passing.
Something about the mangled bodies tugged at Ryan's memory. Deathlands wasn't
a kindly place, filled with warmhearted, rosy-cheeked folk. But it normally
wasn't a place of ice-heart brutality.
This wasn't a simple outburst of pesthole butchery, no bullets-in-the-neck
execution.
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