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twisted toward the boatman. The legs flew in quick answer.
"About ninety feet, give or take two or three," Bob replied.
"Your pole isn't that long," Albert argued.
"A gentleman doesn't talk about the length of another gentleman's pole." Bob
the boatman drew himself up to his full, tall, thin height and wrapped his
robes more tightly around him as if incensed.
"You can't have been touching bottom all the way to pole us out here."
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Deathlands 42 - Way of the Wolf
Bob drew the pole up, displaying the cracked but polished collection of
shinbones that made it up. "Albert, haven't you ever noticed that no matter
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how tall or short a man is, his legs always touch the ground? The pole, just
because it is a pole, has not lost that ability."
To Albert that made no sense. Without warning, nausea seized him again,
feeling like it had back in the elevator in the redoubt. He dropped his .38s
and fell to his knees, retching as he clung to the side of the boat.
The water roiled in front of him, tossing the gobby chunks he'd just spit up
back into the boat and over him. When they landed, they started running
around, forming tails and legs.
"She's coming!" Bob cried in his thin, dry voice. "The lady of the lake is
coming!"
"This is a river," Albert argued, "not a lake." Somehow it seemed important to
point that out. "Shouldn't she be called the lady of the river?"
Before Bob could answer, a typhoon suddenly took shape beside the boat,
erupting from the water. Gory parts of corpses and whole bodies twisted up in
a column of water that shot over twenty feet into the air. A woman formed of
the water, as black as ebony and smooth as marble. Her eyes were green rot
scraped from a mildewed coffin, and her teeth as hard and thick as tombstones.
Still, she was beautiful when she smiled.
She reached for Albert, lifting him gently from the boat. At first her watery
grip felt soothing and warm, like a bed in the middle of winter.
Then the flesh began to melt from his bones as the acid ate into him.
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Deathlands 42 - Way of the Wolf
Chapter Twenty
"You've gone far from your roots, Krysty. Far, far away. You may never become
at home again. Just a rolling stone, and rolling stones gather no moss. No
more gathering ye rosebuds as ye may."
Krysty Wroth walked through the garden and felt sick to her stomach.
Everywhere she walked, all the green and growing things died. She halted and
looked back along the path of destruction she had made through the garden.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
The voice belonged to a female, but that was all she was certain about. And
the words were hauntingly familiar.
Ryan and the others walked ahead of her, easily within hailing distance, but
Krysty chose not to call out to them. They walked in formation, the way Ryan
would have ordered them to, but no way would she have been walking drag at his
request. Not unless Ryan or J.B. was severely wounded. They all appeared
healthy. Where they walked, the grass didn't die beneath their feet.
A wild rose vine brushed against the back of her hand. Immediately, as if in
fright, the vine recoiled like a child shrinking from a nighttime monster.
"Gaia," Krysty said, turning her face up to the rad-blasted orange sky, "help
me to understand."
"Gaia no longer hears you," the voice continued in a childish taunt. "You are
only fallow ground as far as the Earth Mother is concerned. You have no
future, Krysty, and now you have no past. You have only today, and that is but
fleeting hours."
Krysty cried, feeling the tears course down her face. She called out to Ryan,
but
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Deathlands 42 - Way of the Wolf evidently he didn't hear her. She was torn,
unwilling to continue across the beautiful garden and leave only blighted ruin
in her wake.
The companions drew even farther away from her, not even bothering to turn to
look in her direction to make sure that she was there. Ryan always made sure
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when they were on patrol that two others watched over one, and the one was
responsible for looking over two others. It was a network that had saved their
small party a number of times in the past.
"Ryan!"
Even Krysty didn't hear her own voice this time, though she knew for a fact
that she had screamed her lover's name. Frightened now, she ran across the
garden, taking huge bounding leaps so she wouldn't trample as much of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]