Chapter Four

      Naked to the waist except for her Army-issue bra, Mildred squatted beside the creek, sloshing her T-shirt in a shallow pool. She washed off the crusted vomit and gore, then wrung it out and pulled it back on, still wet and clinging. No way she could wash the smell from the inside of her nose. The cannie cave’s greasy pall of melted fat and burned flesh clung to her skin and hair, as well. Inside and out, she felt soiled, contaminated.

      She inventoried her physical state with as much professional detachment as she could manage. In the wake of the forced feeding and projectile vomiting, her stomach ached like she’d swallowed, then expelled, a five-pound cannonball. There was no evidence of fever, though. According to Junior Tibideau, he had come down with symptoms overnight, after his first contact with the Siana pack. No flesh-eating on his part.

      “Woke up cannie.”

      An unlikely outcome, Mildred knew.

      If oozie virus was inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it would take several days, perhaps even a week or two, to build up to the point where increased production of white blood cells would cause his body temperature to rise to the fever point. She also knew that brain lesions and radical changes in behavior didn’t happen suddenly in the absence of violent head trauma. Mildred concluded that Junior was flat-out lying, trying to deflect the blame for his vile actions, which were more voluntary than he wanted to let on; this in order to minimize or eliminate punishment. The wretched, weak-willed bastard didn’t want to admit that he had been so easily seduced by the cannie lifestyle.

      Junior had proved himself a liar, so how could she believe him about the existence of the oozie medicine?

      He wasn’t the only source of that information. The cannie with the caved-in head had bragged about it before Junior had dosed her, while they were still in complete control of the situation. So it couldn’t have been a lie calculated to keep the miserable bastards alive, or to make her a compliant member of the pack by dangling survival under her nose.

      Before they left the cave, Mildred and Ryan had decided that she would have the only close contact with Junior. They couldn’t be sure how contagious the infection was; and she was already exposed to the max. Mildred checked his shoulder and found a superficial flesh wound, which she cleaned, but didn’t bother to stitch.

      Then at blasterpoint they turned him loose for a couple of minutes on the dead ’uns.

      It was triple hard to watch him go at it. He fed like a ravening animal on his own, downed packmate. Mildred couldn’t help but think she might be looking at her own future, and even more horrifying, the future of her companions. She had driven Junior off the charred corpse with a sharp blow of her pistol butt on the top of his head and a single, barked command. “Enough!”

      She picked up her gunbelt and rose, still dripping, from the creekside.

      Thirty feet upslope, Ryan guarded the cannie with his SIG-Sauer. Junior’s wrists were tied behind him. A thick, four-foot length of tree limb was thrust between his back and crooks of his arms. This served to keep the prisoner bent slightly at the waist, off balance; he couldn’t run five steps without falling on his face. Which made him much easier to handle. They didn’t have to keep him on a short leash.

      Under a clear blue midday sky they continued across the Grand Ronde valley. In the distance, the ville’s dirt-and-log berm was still burning, sending up clouds of brown smoke and soot. As they neared the encampment’s perimeter, they could hear sounds of weeping, coughing and the intermittent crunch of shovels gouging the stony earth. When the blinding smoke shifted, it revealed a line of women, children and oldies digging a long communal grave in the hard-pan.

      On the other side of the trench, more than twenty bodies were lined up on the ground, shoulder to shoulder. Young, old, male, female. Hacked. Shot. Incinerated. They had manned the barricades and defended the rutted lanes with their lives. Some had died trying to escape the cannie wolf packs. Mildred knew there were many more ville folk missing. On their descent of the valley, she and Ryan had come across numerous sets of tracks in the sand, twin, parallel tracks made by bootheels, the last impressions of unconscious victims as they were dragged away.

      Downwind of the diggers, a wide, shallow pit belched low flame and coils of black smoke. Doused with gasoline, the heaped cannie dead were burning like garbage on a midden.

      Mildred visualized ten thousand such narrow Pyrrhic victories. Adding up to an unwinable war against an implacable, ever-growing foe. After the long, valiant struggle up from the radioactive ash heap of Armageddon, it was the end of humanity’s hope. With considerable effort, she drove the awful images from her mind.

      “Stop right there!” someone shouted from behind the berm. “Stop or we’ll fire!”

      Blaster barrels poked over the berm’s ridge, and here and there through crude firing ports. Every sight was trained on them.

      “Who you got there?”

      Even at a distance Junior Tibideau’s identity was obvious from his filth, his disfigurement and his overwhelming carrion stench.

      “That’s a cannie!” one of the grave-digging women cried, pointing at him with her shovel. “They caught a cannie!”

      “Chill the bastard!” another woman shouted.

      “Pulp his fucking head!” shrieked an oldie.

      The column of gravediggers surged forward, waving shovels, clubs and pickaxes.

      Mildred and Ryan drew their blasters but held fire. They had no cover. Shooting the diggers would only bring a withering response from the blasters along the berm.

      For a second it looked as if they were going to be overrun and surrounded, perhaps summarily clubbed down by the mob. Then blasterfire chattered, freezing the crowd’s advance. The ville folk craned their necks to locate the source of the shooting.

      J.B. stepped out of the berm gate with a smoking AKS aimed in the air. Mildred figured he had picked up the assault rifle from a dead attacker or defender. Jak, Krysty and Doc followed him with their blasters out and ready. They quickly formed ranks around Mildred, Ryan and Junior. Shoving, kicking, threatening, they made the diggers retreat toward the gate.

      The companions regarded the trussed-up cannie with surprise and displeasure.

      “What in dark night are you doing, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

      “Why he not dead?” Jak demanded, aiming his .357 revolver at Junior’s heart.

      The mob cheered his question.

      “Hang him high,” someone in the rear of the throng shouted.

      “Skin him first,” a haggard, blood-stained woman countered.

      Junior grinned nervously from around Ryan’s back.

      “Let us have him,” the woman said. “Let us punish him, and no harm will come to any of you.”

      “Can’t do that,” Ryan told her. “We need him alive for the time being. He’s ours. We’re not going to give him up.”

      “Then you’re going to die, too, cannie lover.”

      “Mebbe they’ve all gone cannie?” someone cried. “Chill ’em all!”

      The