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dunking his head four times into the water, the pain in his skull had abated
enough for him to talk.
"Where's Joe?"
"Outside. He has our horses ready. Do you want breakfast?"
The very thought of the green-black tea, cheese and fatty, blistered bacon
made him want to heave. He swallowed the column of burning bile working its
way up his throat and shook his head, but not too vigorously.
Joe was waiting for them at the corner of the hostel, holding the lead ropes
of seven horses and two mules. The mules had supplies packed onto their backs.
Everyone was pleased with Joe's ability to judge horseflesh, except for Doc.
He had expressly asked for a small animal so he would have less distance to
fall when he was inevitably thrown, and Joe had chosen a dun-colored mustang.
Doc walked around the animal, studying its legs and withers. It was a little
bigger in the chest than Joe's pinto, and it gazed at him with an alert
suspicion in its brown eyes. He took the reins from Joe and put one foot in
the stirrup. The pony immediately shied, and he went down in the street.
"The reincarnation of Judas," he said tonelessly, referring to the tricky,
recalcitrant, skew-
backed mule that had served as his transportation at Jak's ranch in New
Mexico.
With the help of J.B. and Joe, Doc managed to corner the little animal against
the side of the hostel, and he climbed aboard the saddle. Everyone laughed at
the ludicrous picture he made. He squatted on the pony's back, feet in the
stirrups, his knees sticking outward like a grasshopper's.
"Just like Judas," Mildred said with a laugh.
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Doc patted the mustang's neck and said, "Then that is what I shall christen
him, Judas
Redux."
At a walk the mounted party made for the pass. Though there were people up and
about in Amicus, none spoke to them or bade them goodbye. Not even Mose Autry
turned out to wish them good luck.
Ryan wasn't surprised. The Amicans were probably just as relieved to see them
go as the
Red Cadre.
They rode single file through the gorge, which had been cleared enough to make
navigating it an extremely tight squeeze. They rode past the abandoned wind
wags, or what was left of them. Vengeful Amicans had dismantled them piece by
piece. Only the skeletal, wheelless frameworks lay on the plain. By the time
they reached the open prairie, the sun had risen above the horizon, drenching
the landscape with a yellow-red glow.
The seven people, their horses and two mules walked across the open grasslands
of the
Washakie Basin. Shallow coulees broke up the monotonous flatness of the plain,
and here and there were cottonwood groves. They kept on a straight course for
the Wind River
Mountain Range far in the distance, so far in fact, it seemed they couldn't
possibly reach them in three years, much less three days.
The stretch between the basin and the mountains was probably one of the
least-known regions of Deathlands. Even before the nukecaust it hadn't been
heavily populated. Even
Trader and his old partner, Marsh Folsom, who had boasted a vast library of
maps and predark aerial surveys, knew little about the area.
They rode through the morning, speaking very little. Joe was a cooperative, if
somewhat taciturn, traveling companion. Doc complained about the low comfort
level of his saddle, but not vociferously enough to get on anyone's nerves.
At midmorning they saw the black shapes of vultures wheeling and circling
ahead of them. Their route brought them within a few hundred feet of one of
the Red Cadre's wind wags. It hadn't been touched, but bodies were strewed
over the ground. The air buzzed with flies, and several vultures feasted on
the banquet of rotting flesh, blood and excrement.
The body of a pirate dangled from the main mast of the wag, lashed upside down
by the ankles. His cranium had been exposed by a scalping knife, revealing
blue-white bone
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Dlands 37- Demons of Eden with a few clinging strips of red tissue.
The stench made Ryan's mouth fill with sour saliva, and he cast a questioning
look at Joe.
The Lakota shrugged and said, "I mentioned the stragglers had been dealt with,
didn't I?"
At noon they stopped to eat, but rather than building a fire, they ate beef
jerky, washing it down with swigs of water from their canteens. After an hour
they got under way again, this time walking to spare the horses. The company
was in a better mood, and Ryan was almost completely recovered from his
hangover. Joe didn't speak of their destination or what they might find when
they reached it.
Gradually the plains gave way to hilly terrain. Toward midafternoon, as they
were climbing the slope of a rock-strewed bluff, Ryan felt the earth
trembling, every so slightly, beneath his boots. At the same time, he detected
a musky, wooly odor in the air.
The others became aware of the faint ground quake and smell at the same time.
"Come on," Joe said, quickening his pace as he urged his pinto up the face of
the slope.
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The seven people assembled on the crest of the ridge and looked across the
plains below.
On the opposite side of a fast-running ribbon of water, a heavy plume of dust
shook with a sound like a continuous rumble of distant thunder. Beneath the
dust cloud, a sea of brown, moving bodies blotted out the prairie floor. It
was a large herd of buffalo moving across the plains like a rolling,
never-ending wave. The ground shivered under the impact of at least two
thousand hooves.
"Ever hunted buffalo, Ochinee?" Joe asked with a smile.
"No, but they've hunted me," he replied. He glanced over at J.B., and both of
them smiled at the memory of the time they'd been caught in a stampede of
mutie buffalo in Colorado.
These animals, however, didn't appear to be of the genetically altered
variety. They were still very big, however.
Joe explained how buffalo had been hunted by his people several hundred years
before.
"The soldier band went first, riding twenty abreast, and anyone who dared to
go ahead of them would be knocked off his horse. After them came the hunters,
riding five abreast.
The butchers came up in the rear. The hunters would circle around the herd and
the cry went up '
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