Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass Read Online Free PDF

she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair. Bloodred eyes! ”
    All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.
    “Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.
    “Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”
    “We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”
    “You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”
    “We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.
    He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.
    He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.
    “It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”
    “I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.
    “Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we do such a thing?”
    “You’re outlanders! From out there !”
    Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.
    “You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it Deathlands . Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”
    “But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And he looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”
    “Mebbe used an ax.”
    “Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”
    “Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”
    “‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.
    “Mebbe he’s a—a werewolf or somethin’! We all know there’s monsters out there!”
    Tarley shook his head. “Wymie, Wymie. Listen to yourself. We can’t go lynchin’ strangers because they might be werewolves. Not without some kinda evidence they are. Or that werewolves exist, even.”
    “People say there’s all kind of weird muties, out in the Deathlands,” one of the men standing on the stoop behindWymie said. “Like little rubber-skinned bastards with suckers for fingertips, can rip the hide clean off you!”
    “That part’s real,” Ricky said. “Those are stickies. They’re bad news.”
    “I’ve seen stickies,” Tarley stated. “They’re pretty much what you say. But stickies didn’t do this, and I see no reason to believe these folks did, either.”
    “You takin’ their part, Tarley Gaines?” Wymie shrieked. “Of outlanders who murder our own?”
    “Nobody’s takin’ anybody’s part,” Conn said, his voice level and as unyielding as an anvil. “Not tonight. Not in here. Except the truth’s, mebbe.”
    “I know the truth!” the young woman yelled.
    “You got precious little to show for it, Wymie.”
    “I know what I saw!”
    “And mebbe what you saw wasn’t what your mind’s made of it. Fact is, these folks have been right here a good past hour, half an hour spent hagglin’, half an hour eatin’ my venison, stewed greens and beans, and drinkin’ my brew. They came in without a dot of blood on them, wearin’ clothes they’d double