Playfair's Axiom. James Axler

called, “come give me a hand with Mildred, please. She’s had a hard time of it.”

      Mildred had already reclaimed her composure. She was painfully aware of her relatively coddled and sheltered upbringing. Never mind her father had been murdered by the Klan when she was a child. Compared to people Deathlands born and raised she’d spent her life before her cryogenic suspension on Easy Street. She hated to show weakness to her friends. She frowned and started to say something.

      Krysty held up a hand. “Save your breath,” she said. “Let Jak help you.”

      The albino teen had got up and hurried to Mildred’s side. Her eyes widened as she realized what the redhead was actually doing. Jak had followed her suggestion without the thought entering his head that she had given him an out from a no-win confrontation with the Soulardville sec boss without loss of face.

      The look on the sec boss’s sunburned face never wavered from…composed, Ryan reckoned the word was. But Ryan thought he’d caught just the slightest flicker of recognition in those dark eyes. Garrison looked to be shrewdly perceptive as well as in total command of himself and his surroundings. That made him triple-dangerous.

      They set off down the street at an easy walk. A quartet of sec men flanked and followed them. Garrison let Ryan walk shoulder-to-shoulder with him without comment.

      And that was the upside of dealing with a man like the sec boss. Ryan knew what he was. He knew at a glance what Ryan was. They understood each other perfectly with no need to jaw.

      Houses lined the street, mostly in brown or maroon or yellow-tan brick, neat beneath pitched roofs with scrolled wooden eaves. Raised-bed gardens had replaced long-dead lawns, and interspersed with the houses were garden plots growing a profusion of vegetables and herbs: tomatoes and beans climbing up frames, onions, carrots, lettuce just sprouting. Down one block to the south Ryan caught a glimpse of an orchard of trees just beginning to fruit out. Big trees dropped pools of shadow at irregular intervals on the asphalt.

      “My word,” Doc breathed. “It looks as if war has never brushed this place with its wings.”

      “Does if you’d seen it before,” Mildred said. “This is Russell Boulevard. Used to be a lot more buildings along here. Those gardens used to be houses.”

      “It’s so green,” Krysty said. “It’s like a drink of water after the ruins.”

      “Too neat,” Jak said. “Too crowded.”

      And in fact a fair number of people went about their business. Some carried crates or big ceramic jugs, or pushed loaded handcarts. Others walked briskly as if to appointments. Children played on stoops. Chickens scratched in front yards and cultivated patches. Pigeons cooed and bubbled from the eaves.

      “We been building this place up for a hundred years,” Garrison said with a note of pride in his voice.

      “You’ve done well,” Krysty said.

      Ryan was reserving judgment. Krysty sometimes teased him he couldn’t sniff a flower without suspecting there was a bee waiting inside to sting his nose. He reckoned that was about right.

      He also saw no reason to change.

      And speaking of flowers, they were there, too, purple and blue and yellow heads nodding from beds below windows and stout ceramic planters on porches. This place was easily as prosperous as Front Royal, where he’d grown up.

      “Barely an hour ago the acid rain was falling fit to bubble the skin straight off a man’s face,” he said. He gestured around with a hard hand. “How’d all this come through looking so pretty?”

      “Special-treated tarps and cloths,” Garrison said. “Special frames set out. The trees’re pretty resistant. We usually get plenty of warning when a hellstorm’s brewing.”

      “What happens when you don’t?”

      Garrison chuckled. “Ever know a man to leave this world alive?”

      For a moment Ryan looked at him as they walked. Then he barked a short laugh. “No.”

      The street turned to what had been a commercial district. War’s legacy was much more visible here. While many houses had intact windows, the big commercial picture windows had been blown in and were covered with plywood sheets or planking. From neatly lettered signs above the doors Ryan gathered they were now small stores and workshops. He heard the tink-tink of a hammer on metal from one door left open to allow the sultry breeze admittance.

      The street widened out. “Lot of buildings here’ve been demolished,” Mildred murmured. “If I remember right, anyway.”

      For her, Ryan knew, the memory was just a few years old. But sometimes she still had trouble coping with the brutal contrast between the world she’d gone to sleep in and the nightmare she’d awakened to.

      Whatever had been before there was a wide square here now. Ryan saw that the extant pavement had been eked out with paths of crushed gravel, and mosaics of jagged, salvaged concrete slabs. It was handsome work, he had to admit.

      In the center of the plaza stood a low platform made of one big concrete slab laid with little regard for leveling: no finesse. It looked quite brutal by contrast to the almost unnatural primness of what they’d seen of the rest of the ville. A weather-stained tarp covered the slanted upper surface.

      Garrison said nothing about the slab. Ryan didn’t ask for an explanation. It didn’t seem to bear on their continued survival one way or another.

      Beyond it stood a sprawling two-story-tall block of pink brick, with a gabled slate roof and a brick chimney. It had a gaudily painted wooden entryway stuck onto the front, obviously a postdark addition. The garish gold and purple paint clashed with the ville’s overall reserve as harshly as the strange slab dais in the middle of the town square.

      “Baron’s palace,” Garrison said.

      “Never would have guessed,” Ryan commented.

      Garrison led them down a side street to a gray brick house just behind the “palace.” It was unremarkable except for black iron bars on the windows. Garrison unlocked an iron-and-mesh sec door and opened it. The barred door had a steel flap in the bottom section. A closed wooden door was inside.

      “In here,” he said.

      “How long?” Ryan asked.

      “Till you’re sent for.”

      Ryan turned the knob. The inner door was one of the old flimsy predark plywood-sandwich variety that kept the wind and some of the cold out but a sturdy child could put her fist through. Of course with the outer door that didn’t much matter.

      Inside was gloomy, musty and hot. Dust motes floated in the light through the open door. Some lumpy-looking pallets had been tossed around the wooden floor.

      “How about food and water?” he asked Garrison. “We haven’t eaten all day.”

      “You’ll be provided for,” Garrison said.

      Ryan went in, followed by the others. “You got the run of the place,” Garrison said, closing and locking the outer door. “You might want to open the windows. Get some air.”

      “Yeah,” Ryan said.

      “What now?” Mildred asked when the sec boss went away.

      “The usual. Scope out the house. See if there’s any way out.”

      “Think there will be?” Krysty asked.

      “Hell no. But we take nothing for granted.”

      They searched the house, quickly but cautiously. They weren’t going to take for granted there weren’t hidden dangers, either. Given the sort of things that wandered around a ruined city there might even be unpleasant surprises their hosts knew nothing about.

      But the place was as empty as an old skull.

      As they finished their quick but