“Wasn’t Icarus the one who fell?”
“Yes,” said Looks Away, “charming thought, isn’t it?”
They remounted. Beyond the far side of the bridge was a small town, though to Grey’s eyes it looked more like a ghost town. A cluster of dreary buildings huddled together under an unrelenting sun. Everything looked faded and sunbaked.
“That’s Paradise Falls?” he asked.
“Such as it is.”
“Swell.”
They crossed the Icarus Bridge very slowly and carefully. The boards creaked and the ropes protested, but it proved to be more solid than it looked. Even so, Grey was greatly relieved when they reached the far side.
“And we didn’t plunge to our deaths,” murmured Looks Away.
“Oh… shut up,” grumbled Grey.
The road into town was littered with lizard droppings and the bones of small birds. They passed under a sign very much like the one they’d encountered in the ghost town in Nevada. The difference here is that the paintwork looked like it had been done with some sense of style. A little artistry, no less. But it was faded now and there were cracks in the wood and there had been no attempt to freshen the sign. Grey looked up at it.
PARADISE FALLS
Beyond the sign were a few dozen buildings along one main street and on a few, smaller side lanes. Smoke curling upward from a handful of chimneys. Bored-looking horses hung their heads over hitching posts. Withered old men and women sat on porch rockers. A few grubby children played listlessly, tossing a wooden ball through a barrel hoop. They missed more often than made the shot, but their bland expression didn’t change much no matter how the game turned out.
“Paradise Falls?” Grey mused quietly.
“I know,” said Looks Away. “The running joke is that Paradise Fell.”
“Not a very funny joke.”
“No, it isn’t.” Perched on the corner of the sign was a bird that Grey at first thought was a buzzard, but as they passed he did a double take and gaped at it. The creature had wings and feathers, but beyond that it bore little resemblance to any bird Grey had ever seen. Not outside of a nightmare at least. The body was bare in patches and instead of the pale flesh of a normal bird, this thing had the mottled and knobbly hide of something more akin to a reptile. The wings were leathery and dark, and there were claws at the end of each that gripped the sign as surely as did its taloned feet. The creature’s beak was long and tapered, and it cocked its head to stare at the two horsemen with a black and bottomless eye.
“Christ,” whispered Grey, “what the hell is that thing?”
Looks Away followed his gaze and shuddered. “Be damned if I know,” he said. “The locals claim that after the quake great flocks of them flew out of caverns that had previously been trapped in the hearts of mountains.”
“It looks like it flew up from hell itself.”
“Yes,” agreed the Sioux. Grey hadn’t meant it as a joke, and Looks Away did not appear to take it as such. They kept a wary eye on the bird as they passed beneath. The sun was in the east and it threw the misshapen bird’s shadow across their path. Both horses, unguided, stepped nervously around that shadow.
That made the flesh on the back of Grey’s neck prickle.
The Sioux nodded to the people who had come to windows or porch rails to look at them. “They’re simple people, but good ones.”
The remark surprised Grey. “You care?”
Looks Away shrugged. “I do. I’ve lived among them for months and I know most of them. Granted, few make rewarding conversational partners, but they are honest folk who have had a run of bad luck that was both unearned and unlooked for.”
“The quake?”
“That was the start of the bad luck, but it didn’t end there. When the land fell into the sea it changed the course of the water. That road we took had been a strong freshwater stream. Pure snowmelt from the mountains. The Paradise River, and it ran to the edge of a drop. That waterfall is what gave the town its name. There used to be thousands of square miles of arable land. Now there are rocks, scorpions, and ugly mesas where nothing grows that you’d care to eat.”
“How the hell do they survive?”
The Sioux gave him a rueful smile. “Who says they’re surviving, old chap?”
Grey opened his mouth to reply, but a scream suddenly tore through the air.
A woman’s scream.
And almost immediately it was punctuated by the hollow crack of a gunshot.
Chapter Twenty-Two
They wheeled in their saddles and looked off down a side street. There, at the very end of town, were several figures engaged in a furious struggle by an old stone well.
“Shite!” cried Looks Away as he instantly spurred his horse into a full gallop.
Grey hesitated for a heartbeat longer. This was not his town and not his fight.
Except…
The fight looked too uneven for his tastes. A tall, thin stick-figure of a wildly bearded Mexican man in a monk’s brown robe, and a woman with curly blond hair were struggling with six hard-looking men.
“Well… balls,” he growled, and kicked Picky into a run. Even his horse seemed outraged and barreled down the street at incredible speed.
Grey watched in astonishment as Looks Away vaulted from his saddle and flung himself at one of the biggest of the six men. They crashed against the side of the well, spun and fell out of sight. In almost the same moment, one of the men — presumably the one who’d fired the gun — slashed the monk across the face with the pistol. Another man had the woman in a fierce bear hug and held her, kicking and screaming, off the ground. The other men were closing in on her, laughing and pawing at her.
As Picky devoured the distance between Grey and the fight, the woman lashed out with a foot and caught one of the men on the point of the chin. He backpedaled and hit one of his companions. They both staggered. Then she used the same foot to kick backward and upward. The man holding her let loose with a high whistling shriek and hunched forward, his thighs slapping together about a tenth of a second too late.
Then Grey was among them.
He used Picky’s muscular shoulder to crash into the back of the sixth man and the force of that impact picked him off the ground and flung him into the side of the well. He bent double and very nearly went in, saving himself at the last second by clawing at the stone lip.
Grey leaped from the saddle, grabbed the hair of the shrieking man holding the woman, and jerked him backward with such force that the man was bent nearly in half the wrong way. His hands snapped open, sending the woman staggering forward. Grey snapped the handful of hair like a whip and the man flopped onto the ground. He immediately tried to sit up and got as far as the short, hard kick Grey fired at his face. The man flopped back, bleeding and unconscious.
Pain exploded in Grey’s kidney and he reeled, but he turned as he did so, crouching and bringing up his arms to block a second punch. It was the bruiser who’d pistol-whipped the monk. He’d rammed the barrel of his Colt into Grey’s back and was raising the gun now to point it at the intruder’s face.
Grey rushed him low and hard, ducking beneath the gun arm and hooking a muscular arm around the man’s waist. He drove forward, plucking the man off the ground and running him three steps into the rocky well. The man let out a huge “Oooomph!”
Grey let him sag down and spun just in time to see the first man the woman had kicked snake an arm around her throat. He had lost his pistol after the kick, but he plucked a skinning knife from a belt sheath and touched the edge of the blade to her cheek.