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jumped and rolled, and water flowed up the hill and down the hill. Lakes turned dry and
mountains sprung up. Now the Big White runs clear through to the Sippi."
"There a ville down there?" Ryan asked. "Generally is where big rivers meet."
"Yeah. Riverboat crossing there. Fancy ville. Get fucked every which way but clean.
Gamblin' and whorin' and a contract killer for a handful of small jack. Place is called
Twin Forks." He cackled and rubbed at his permanently sore eyes. "'Course, the trash
calls it 'Twin Fucks.'"
Ryan stretched. "Reckon that's where I'll make for. Soon as I got a mite more strength
back."
Paddy stood up from his chair, shaking his head in a nervous tic that got worse when he'd
been drinking. "You ain't fit to shovel goose shit out the pen, Ryan."
The one-eyed man laughed. "Can't stay here forever. Got friends I should be going after.
Be worried sick about me. Likely think I've gone west on that last train."
Over the week since he'd finally recovered full consciousness, Ryan had come to be
oddly fond of his rescuer. Paddy Maxwell was physically filthy, foul-mouthed, violent,
short-tempered, racist, murderous, parblind, most parts drunk.
And cripplingly lonely.
He hawked a sort of living from fishing and some trapping, trading for liquor and for
other supplies with infrequent passengers down the Big White.
After three days Ryan was able to stand unaided and was beginning to think about
moving on as soon as he could. Paddy had been vehemently opposed to that, arguing,
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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon
shouting and spitting to try to stop him. He'd even threatened Ryan with a smoothbore
musket, forcing him to lift the little man by the throat and pin him to the wall of his hut
with one hand. He held the SIG-Sauer in his other hand, pressing the four-and-a-half-inch
barrel into Paddy's throat until the cartilage creaked and his red eyes watered with
impotent terror.
Now it was eight days, and Ryan reckoned that he'd probably recovered about seventy
percent of his strength.
And Paddy was drinking himself into a despondent stupor at the thought of being left
alone once more.
"We could go a make of it here, Ryan," he insisted, tangling his words. "Could clean the
place up. Mebbe build another cabin. Take in travelers. Get a coupla women to cook and
whore."
Ryan shook his head. "Said the answer was no, Paddy."
After another deep slug at the jar of liquor, Paddy changed tack again. "Mebbe I'll come
to Twin Forks with you, Ryan. Hold your fuckin' hand, like."
Ryan shrugged. "Hell, why not?"
"When you goin'? Next week? Week after that?"
"Sooner." Ryan got up off the porch and stared toward the setting sun. "Day after
tomorrow. Start at dawn. Welcome to come along."
"Really?" A note of total disbelief was in his quavering voice. "Why the fuck's that?"
"Why what?"
"Why you want a wore-out old shitter like me along with you, Ryan?"
"You saved my life, Paddy. Not for you, I'd have drowned or just rotted away out on that
very mud bank. I owe you that. So come along to the ville."
The little man clicked his heels together. "Never been to Twin Forks, 'cept on my own.
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Be a real fuckin' treat, Ryan. Yeah, it will that."
KRYSTY WAS ALSO WATCHING the sunset, sitting out on the balcony of her
bedroom of the Grits and Greetings boardinghouse, a once-white frame house that now
squatted drunkenly close to the edge of the junction of the Big White and the mighty
Sippi. The landlady had told them when they booked the rooms that it had been the flood
of 1989 that had washed away some of the underpinnings and made the whole place lean
like a Saturday-night drunk on a friend's shoulder.
The house dated back to predark times, when Twin Forks had been a small, nameless
settlement, twenty miles or more from the Sippi. Then the earth had moved, and now it
was perched right on the edge of the great waterway. In another year or so, the way it
looked, it would be floating off toward Norleans.
They'd been in Twin Forks for four days.
The trip down, searching the banks of the Big White for some trace of Ryan or his
corpse, had taken a total of four days, and ended in utter failure.
But Krysty insisted that her lover still lived, that she had felt a message from him over a
week ago, felt him respond to her sending out the Gaia-powered words.
The rest of the party was more than happy to humor her by staying in the sprawling ville,
questioning travelers, particularly those who came in from the east. Since the big river
wound away north and south, this was the principal direction of trade. Not many had
come from the hinterland of old Tennessee. But none had any news of a one-eyed man,
alive or dead.
To pay for the three rooms that they'd booked, J.B. and Jak had taken on part-time jobs as
sec bouncers at one of the biggest of several saloons and gaudies. The Montana Queen
was run by a tough, silver-haired woman named Dolores Stanwyck. She had hired J.B. on
the strength of his superior armory of the Uzi and the flechette-firing scattergun.
She had been less easily convinced about taking on young Jak Lauren.
"Might frighten away clients, lovely lad. You look like a cheesy fart'll blow you off the
boardwalk." She laughed throatily. "Wouldn't want to be responsible for you getting
trodden into the street, kid."
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"Don't call me 'kid,' please," Jak said quietly as he looked around the ornate, gold-painted
interior of the building. It was only a little after nine in the morning when they called, and
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