Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass by James Axler Read Free Book Online Page A

passable good.
    It was her housekeeping that fell by the wayside.
    “Why are you wishin’ death and devastation on Conn?” asked Garl, one of her fellow lodgers, from across the table. A few fragments of scrambled egg dribbled from the side of his mouth and cascaded down his several chins toward his belly, which kept him so far back from the table his comically short-seeming arms had trouble reaching his plate. He looked as if he went straight from being a baby to being a vast, gnarled, weathered, grizzly baby, without passing through the intervening stages of childhood and adulthood.
    “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 awareof 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